Episode 2 • September 06, 2019 • 01:05:38
Sep 06 2019 | 01:05:38
"Every calamity is to be overcome by endurance." -Virgil "Endurance is more important than truth..." -Charles Bukowski Ben Bennett (c.1984) is a unique, virtuosic free improvising percussionist who rose to international prominence and notoriety in 2014. After creating a series of live-streamed internet videos, in which he sat cross-legged and gazed into a camera all while maintaining a ceaseless grin upon his face for four hour durations, Ben joined the ranks of weird YouTube celebritydom. In 2017, after creating 300 episodes of "Sitting and Smiling," he inexplicably began a new series entitled "Walking and Talking," in which he walks and talks (often self-reflexively) on camera, typically also for four hours at a time. Ben is the son of American experimental text, sound, and visual poet John M. Bennett and brother of composer/performer John Also Bennett. Additionally, he is also a highly skilled urban forager, survivalist, and as we discover towards the conclusion of this episode, something of a freestyle rapper. Join us for this episode of THE EXILE HOUR in which we engage Ben in a fast & furious dialogue about the nature of post-human consciousness, endurance art, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, conspiracy theories, and suicidal selfie sticks.
Jim Goad: The Iron Marshmallow
Jim Goad (c. 1961) is an American author, publisher, social critic, country crooner, pioneering "wigger", ex-convict, brain tumor survivor, iconoclast, and cultural provocateur. He is perhaps best known for *ANSWER Me!* magazine, which he co-authored, edited, and published with his late wife Debbie Goad between 1991 and 1994. Scandals surrounding the magazine included a line being quoted from the second issue by a man who shot at the White House in 1994, a triple suicide, a potential influence on the suicide of Kurt Cobain, and an obscenity trial over the fourth and final issue in Washington State (the state ultimately lost). Goad has authored nine books including The *Redneck Manifesto*. His latest, *The Bomb Inside My Brain*, features a collection of four dozen essays about "brain surgery, heartache, broken friendship, family alienation, drugs, religion, PTSD, and fatherhood." He has also written two weekly columns for *Taki's Magazine* for the past nine years, and hosts a weekly podcast entitled *Jim Goad's Group Hug*. Goad has described himself as being "Misunderstood in ways you would never understand." Join us for this episode of THE EXILE HOUR as we fraternally bond with our featured guest over our mutual indifference towards fraternal bonding, non-ironic reverence for Vanilla Ice, the discovery of our shared Chinese Zodiac animal (the "cock"), Philadelphia Tidewater (read: "tide-WOODer") accents, and ultimately seek to discover if he might also be understood in ways that he would never understand. ...