anagnorisis, peripateia, and lamb testicles

The Entertainment Gathering 2008
Monterey, CA
Dec 12th, 2008 (20 min. 35 sec.)

^ Drawing on his experiences picking up roadkill, feeding swine, and castrating a lamb with his teeth, Mike Rowe, host of Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs, discusses how modern American culture belittles necessary labor.

Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe is old school hot & hunky, with a hot & hunky voice. You know, that kind of man many women - and many of us gay guys - swoon over by default, the kind of man many straight men would consider a man's man, someone to buddy with and have a few brews with. The catch (well, he is a catch, but I digress...no, I don't, really) is he's also a damn good sport and has an amazing sense of humour belying his intelligence. If that doesn't make you look up to heaven and beam while your knees weaken, I dunno what will.

Furthermore he holds a profound admiration towards manual labour and the humble folk doing that labour. These are the invisible human beings who make it possible for us martini sipping cosmopolites, jetsetting tycoons, credit card whoring mall shoppers, gadget worshiping geeks, tax cut preaching Republicans, tree hugging liberals, and otherwise squeamish processed weaklings of humanity to live a reasonably comfortable life. We enjoy the sausages, we just don't wanna see how they're made.

Mike has not only seen how the sausages were made, he has helped out with the process, hands on. Like in the title of this post. It was painful for him (though the lamb never seemed to make a scene of it). But it was also epiphanous. Many, many of us Americans have lost touch with the salty, earthy, and ultimately grounding physicality of our lives. It shows in how we live, how we consume, how we socialize, how we view and formulate opinions, how we experience, and how we vote.

"We have been bred to consume, not to create." - Jennifer Connelly, actress

Maybe it really is time we put sweat into it or at least had a humbling glimpse into how this sausage of a country we call home is being made, everyday (no, I don't mean manually washing the dishes). Only then can we re-discover it and admire the hard work and craft put into it, humble us a bit, while maybe even putting a little hair on our chest and a little muscle on our arm.

And looking at Mike Rowe, with his "aw, shucks" earthy, sexy, funny, grounded, manual labouring charm on his show and, I trust, in person, I'd say that wouldn't be so bad, now would it?

noah murdered the dinosaurs!

^ Noah was a Darwin hating bastard according to Dan Piraro. The full length version is on FORA.tv, Dan Piraro: Bizarro Buccaneers.

Dan Piraro is hot. That is, if you're into geeky artsy guys who have a twisted sense of humour, can laugh first at themselves before laughing at the rest of us, possess a talent for caricaturing human nature, and a rare knack for capturing the current social, cultural, and political zeitgeist in a single hand drawn image.

Like Gary Larson of The Far Side cartoon fame, Piraro loves to explore, and exploit, the absurd and even embarrassing side of us, the most idiosyncratic of all species on this great rock. That exploration is, more often than not, dark and disturbing in what it reveals about us - the sheer stupidities, fallacies, contradictions, and inconsistencies we exhibit. But whereas Larson's views have a more universal panorama, Piraro excels at capturing specific moments in time and place of mental, emotional, political, and ethical calibrations and magnifies them, throws them back at us, sometimes with captions and sometimes without.

His cartoons are sophisticated, even witty enough, to merit appearances in The New Yorker, one of my most beloved publications. But it seems that that great magazine may not think so, or at least I don't remember seeing Piraro's cartoons there (a search on the magazine's site turned up nothing). Maybe it's because alongside his wit there's also outspoken political soapboxing on certain issues. He is, after all, a card carrying vegan and passionate animal rights activist, and The New Yorker may not prefer to go that far left.


On viewing and digesting Piraro's art we laugh, maybe to the point where our sides hurt and tears form in our eyes, or as I did, have trouble falling asleep from laughing because I made the mistake of watching the above video so late into the night. But where does that laughter come from, you have to ask. Is it just out of the sheer hilarity that the cartoons depict? Or is it ultimately out of nervousness, a very necessary release from otherwise unbearable realizations about ourselves, our nature, our motives?

In the end, humour is humour no matter what. And yet the jokes are always at the expense of someone, yes? We're like a dog chasing its own tail. We are the butt of our own jokes as Piraro points out again and again. But in the moment we're too busy to be aware of it. Too busy laughing our asses off.

Related:

Bizarro.com | Dan Piraro's official site (warning: turn your volume down first!)