Iggy Pop Conducts a Tour of New York’s Lower East Side, Circa 1993

in Film, Life, Music | June 21st, 2013

I moved to New York City in 2000, and to the Low­er East Side in 2002. To my dis­may, the grit­ty down­town New York I’d loved from afar since childhood—represented by films like The War­riors, bands like Son­ic Youth, and graf­fi­ti artists like Zephyr—was near­ly at an end. CBGB’s was stag­ger­ing toward its final years; local venue Brown­ies, right across the street, closed dur­ing my tenure, then re-opened as anoth­er bar, the live bands replaced by a juke­box; the few remain­ing artists from the old days holed up in their apart­ments, surly and for­got­ten; and rumors of Whole Foods and glass & steel con­dos proved true in the com­ing years. It was sad.

But oh, to be there in the 80s and ear­ly 90s, when flow­ers of dirty punk art grew from the nee­dle-strewn Tomp­kins Square Park and the decay­ing squat­ters par­adis­es along Avenue A. Of course I’m roman­ti­ciz­ing a time of high crime, pover­ty, and low expec­ta­tions, a time many native New York­ers do not remem­ber fond­ly (then again, it seems, just as many do). There are many, many doc­u­ments of the old East Vil­lage mean streets—too many to prop­er­ly list in this short post. But I can imag­ine no bet­ter tour guide to pre-mil­len­ni­al NYC than Iggy Pop.

In the short film above, watch him show Dutch film­mak­er Bram van Splun­teren around Alpha­bet City. Grant­ed this is 1993. Things weren’t near­ly as hairy as they were a few years pri­or (a fact Iggy points out right away), but it’s still a world away from the Low­er East Side of today. Pop traipses through the neigh­bor­hood, point­ing out favorite land­marks and pieces of graf­fi­ti. No stranger to urban decay, the Detroit native seems right at home. This being New York, Pop can stroll around with­out being molest­ed (or most­ly even rec­og­nized). All in all it’s a pret­ty leisure­ly tour of the 90s Low­er East Side on a bright and sun­ny day with the guy who more-or-less invent­ed punk. What more could you want?

via Coudal.com

Relat­ed Con­tent:

From The Stooges to Iggy Pop: 1986 Doc­u­men­tary Charts the Rise of Punk’s God­fa­ther

Jim Pow­er, aka “the Mosa­ic Man,” Adorns the Lamp­posts of New York City’s East Vil­lage

Nico Sings “Chelsea Girls” in the Famous Chelsea Hotel

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Introducing Wireless Philosophy: An Open Access Philosophy Project Created by Yale and MIT

in Philosophy | June 18th, 2013

“Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy,” or Wiphi, is an online project of “open access phi­los­o­phy” co-cre­at­ed by Yale and MIT that aims to make fun­da­men­tal philo­soph­i­cal con­cepts acces­si­ble by “mak­ing videos that are freely avail­able in a form that is enter­tain­ing” to peo­ple “with no back­ground in the sub­ject.” To accom­plish this goal, they have con­tract­ed with an impres­sive range of pro­fes­sors of phi­los­o­phy from pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ties across the coun­try. Wiphi is still very much a work-in-progress, but they cur­rent­ly fea­ture some inter­est­ing intro­duc­tions to clas­si­cal philo­soph­i­cal issues. Cur­rent­ly, the site divides into sev­er­al basic cat­e­gories like “Crit­i­cal Think­ing,” “Epis­te­mol­o­gy,” “Meta­physics,” “Ethics,” and “Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy.” Much of these are still unfin­ished, but the few videos on the site, such as those relat­ed to the prob­lem of free will and the exis­tence of God, pro­vide view­ers with much to chew on.

In the video above, MIT phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Richard Holton explains the basics of the prob­lem of free will. He divides this into two dis­tinct prob­lems: the meta­phys­i­cal and the epis­te­mo­log­i­cal. The first prob­lem states that if the laws of nature are deter­min­is­tic, every­thing that will hap­pen is fixed, and there is in fact no free choice (no mat­ter how we feel about it). Holton choos­es to focus on the sec­ond prob­lem, the prob­lem of fore­knowl­edge. Put sim­ply, if things are deter­mined, then if we know all of the con­di­tions of real­i­ty, and have ade­quate resources, we should be able to pre­dict every­thing that is going to hap­pen.

Holton leaves aside enor­mous­ly com­pli­cat­ed devel­op­ments in physics and opts to illus­trate the prob­lem with what he calls “a sim­ple device.” In his illus­tra­tion, one must pre­dict whether a light­bulb will turn on by turn­ing on anoth­er light­bulb, part of a sys­tem he calls a “frus­tra­tor.” In this sce­nario, even if we have all the knowl­edge and resources to make per­fect­ly accu­rate pre­dic­tions, the prob­lem of “frustrators”—or faulty observers and feed­back loops—complicates the sit­u­a­tion irrev­o­ca­bly

In the video above, Pro­fes­sor Tim­o­thy Yen­ter describes the Cos­mo­log­i­cal argu­ment for the exis­tence of God, clas­si­cal­ly attrib­uted to Aris­to­tle, elab­o­rat­ed by Islam­ic philoso­phers and Thomas Aquinas, and tak­en up in the Enlight­en­ment by Leib­niz as the prin­ci­ple of suf­fi­cient rea­son. One of that argument’s premis­es, that the cos­mos (every­thing that exists) must have a cause, assumes that the causal cir­cum­stances we observe with­in the sys­tem, the uni­verse as a whole, must also apply out­side of it. Pro­fes­sor Yen­ter describes this above in terms of the “fal­la­cy of com­po­si­tion,” which occurs when one assumes that the whole has the same prop­er­ties as its parts. (Such as argu­ing that since all of your body’s atoms are invis­i­ble to the naked eye, your whole body is invis­i­ble. Try head­ing to work naked tomor­row to test this out.)

This brings us to the prob­lem of infi­nite regress. In the sec­ond part of his intro­duc­tion to the Cos­mo­log­i­cal Argument—in which he dis­cuss­es the so-called Modal Argument—Professor Yen­ter explains the key prin­ci­ple of Ex nihi­lo nihil fit, or “out of noth­ing, noth­ing comes.” This seems like a bedrock meta­phys­i­cal prin­ci­ple, such that few ques­tion it, and it intro­duces a key dis­tinc­tion between nec­es­sary things—which must exist—and con­tin­gent things, which could be oth­er­wise. The most impor­tant premise in the Modal Argu­ment is that every con­tin­gent thing must be caused by some­thing else. If all caus­es are con­tin­gent (which they seem to us to be) they must pro­ceed from a nec­es­sary, self-exis­tent thing. Whether that thing has all or any of the prop­er­ties clas­si­cal­ly ascribed to the the­is­tic God is anoth­er ques­tion all togeth­er, but Aquinas and the clas­si­cal Islam­ic philoso­phers cer­tain­ly thought so.

While there may be no philo­soph­i­cal nut­crack­er large enough to crack these prob­lems, they remain per­pet­u­al­ly inter­est­ing for many philoso­phers and sci­en­tists, and under­stand­ing the basic issues at stake is fun­da­men­tal to any study of phi­los­o­phy. In that sense, Wiphi pro­vides a nec­es­sary ser­vice to those just begin­ning to wade out into the sea of The Big Ques­tions.

 Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

Lawrence Krauss Explains How You Get ‘A Uni­verse From Noth­ing’

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Lec­tures Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

What Happens on the Internet in 60 Seconds

in Technology, Web/Tech | June 12th, 2013

Chances are in the past week you’ve read some argu­ment about how the inter­net has destroyed the mid­dle class, democ­ra­cy, cul­ture, etc, or a rebut­tal of one of the above. I can’t add much to these debates. They some­times sound like argu­ments over whether tele­pho­ny is a boon or a curse. These technologies—as long as the grid’s up and running—we shall always have with us.

Soci­o­log­i­cal spec­u­la­tion notwith­stand­ing, the expo­nen­tial­ly increas­ing com­put­ing pow­er that push­es our online inter­ac­tions to ever-dizzy­ing speeds is sure­ly some­thing to pause and mar­vel at, if not to fear. The short video above from Buz­zfeed takes us on a wild ride through the mil­lions of trans­ac­tions that occur online in a sin­gle minute. Here we learn that in six­ty-sec­onds, there will be 2,000,000 Google search­es, 27,800 uploads to Insta­gram, 278,000 Tweets, 1,875,000 Face­book likes, a “low esti­mate” of 200,000 peo­ple stream­ing porn….

Actu­al­ly, it does start to seem like all this online activ­i­ty is pret­ty nar­row­ly focused, or maybe that’s a lim­i­ta­tion of the sur­vey. Anoth­er video from 2011 (below) and info­graph­ics here and here offer some com­par­a­tive ana­lyt­ics.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Three Uni­ver­si­ty Projects Use Twit­ter to Under­stand Hap­pi­ness, Hate and Oth­er Emo­tions in Amer­i­ca

How Brew­ster Kahle and the Inter­net Archive Will Pre­serve the Infi­nite Infor­ma­tion on the Web

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Buzz Aldrin and Thomas Dolby Geek Out and Sing “She Blinded Me With Science”

in Comedy, Music, Science | June 6th, 2013

Buzz Aldrin is maybe the coolest ex-astro­naut alive, with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of Sto­ry Mus­grave. Both of these guys are forg­ing ahead with life at the age when less­er humans pack it in. At 77, Mus­grave has a five-year-old son and plans to go back into space soon (as a tourist); 83-year-old Aldrin is devel­op­ing a new sci-fi series based on his 1996 nov­el Encounter with Tiber. Cool, right? Just maybe don’t ask Buzz to dance to ‘80s syn­th­pop. He does have a great sense of humor, though.

Watch Aldrin duet with Thomas Dol­by on “She Blind­ed Me With Sci­ence” above. Buzz gets to shout “Sci­ence!” and bop back and forth like your grand­fa­ther rock­ing out at your wed­ding recep­tion. It’s cute. The per­for­mance hap­pened dur­ing a day­long Smith­son­ian con­fer­ence called “The Future is Here.” Aldrin was one of the four­teen fea­tured speak­ers who deliv­ered “nar­ra­tive talks that focused on both great tri­umphs and future inno­va­tions in sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy.”

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Moon Dis­as­ter That Wasn’t: Nixon’s Speech In Case Apol­lo 11 Failed to Return

Live: Watch NASA’s Cov­er­age of Aster­oid As It Buzzes By Earth

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Watch Sir Edmund Hillary Describe His Everest Ascent, on the 60th Anniversary of His Climb

in History | May 29th, 2013

Six­ty years ago today, New Zealand explor­er Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sher­pa guide Ten­z­ing Nor­gay became the first climbers to ever reach the sum­mit of Mount Ever­est. This feat may not seem so sig­nif­i­cant now, when upwards of 150 peo­ple may reach the top of the 29,000-foot moun­tain on the best climb­ing day. In fact the sum­mit has become so over­crowd­ed that offi­cials are even debat­ing installing a lad­der for descents (to the hor­ror of seri­ous moun­taineers). But in 1953, Hillary and Norgay’s ascent was a pret­ty big deal, you might say. In the video above, excerpt­ed from Hillary’s appear­ance on the edu­ca­tion­al pro­gram Omnibus, watch the famous explor­er non­cha­lant­ly tell the sto­ry of his and Norgay’s con­quer­ing of Ever­est.

And if you’re in a mood to do some vir­tu­al explor­ing your­self, from the com­fort of your own home, you can look around the Ever­est sum­mit cour­tesy of Google Earth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Climb Three of the World’s High­est Peaks on Google Street View

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Three University Projects Use Twitter to Understand Happiness, Hate and Other Emotions in America

in Current Affairs, Life, Twitter | May 22nd, 2013

It turns out that the fleet­ing pro­nounce­ments we post on Twit­ter are cat­nip for aca­d­e­mics and oth­ers eager to find the elu­sive pulse of Amer­i­can soci­ety. Since Twit­ter launched in 2006, researchers have been hard at work fig­ur­ing out how to turn those 140-char­ac­ter mus­ings into tea leaves with some­thing mean­ing­ful to say about us all.

Here come three new projects that claim to pro­vide a win­dow into the Amer­i­can soul through Twit­ter. Whether they suc­ceed or not, well, that’s still unclear. (And, by the way, you can start fol­low­ing Open Cul­ture on Twit­ter here.)

Most fever­ish­ly excit­ed about its work are the team behind the Glob­al Twit­ter Heart­beat, which so far focus­es most­ly on the Unit­ed States. With the help of a huge SGI proces­sor to process a live feed of pub­lic social media data, a team of researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois at Urbana-Cham­paign has made a heat map to show how peo­ple react (through Twit­ter) to big events.

They looked at two things: Hur­ri­cane Sandy (top) and the 2012 Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion (above). Using Twitter’s “gar­den hose feed”—a ran­dom sam­pling of 10 per­cent of the rough­ly 500 mil­lion tweets sent every day—researchers col­or-cod­ed tweets red for neg­a­tive tone and blue for pos­i­tive and showed the shift­ing con­cen­tra­tions of Twit­ter activ­i­ty across the coun­try. It looks like a map of a talk­ing weath­er sys­tem as occa­sion­al dia­logue box­es open up to show rep­re­sen­ta­tive tweets. Researcher Kalev Lee­taru argues that track­ing Twit­ter activ­i­ty gives us the poten­tial to track the heart­beat of soci­ety.

Two oth­er projects look in an on-going way at tweet “tone,” or the negativity/positivity of mes­sages. One spin on this research is the Geo­graph­ic Hate Map (sam­ple map above), a project by Dr. Mon­i­ca Stephens of Hum­boldt State Uni­ver­si­ty in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia. To begin their work, Stephens and her team accessed a mas­sive data­base of geo­graph­i­cal­ly tagged tweets sent between June, 2012  and April, 2013.

They used only tweets that con­tained any of ten “hate words.” They read each tweet to be sure the words were used in a neg­a­tive way and built a map based on where the tweets came from. Then they aggre­gat­ed to the coun­ty lev­el and nor­mal­ized for the amount of twit­ter traf­fic in that area so that dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed areas don’t look more racist or homo­pho­bic by default.

Then there’s the glass half full. The Hedo­nome­ter mea­sures hap­pi­ness, or lack there­of, as expressed by tweets, cal­cu­lat­ing aver­ages based on what the researchers call “word shifts” (watch an expla­na­tion above). This research project, put togeth­er by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont Com­plex Sys­tems Cen­ter, uses the same gar­den hose feed as the Glob­al Twit­ter Heart­beat. This project search­es for fre­quent­ly used words to mea­sure how good a day Twit­ter users are hav­ing. Since 2008 the Hedo­nome­ter has kept track of how often words like “hap­py,” “yes,” and “love” pop up in tweets, as opposed to “hate,” “no,” and “unhap­py.” The sad­dest day on Hedo­nome­ter record so far is April 15, 2013, the day bombs explod­ed at the Boston Marathon fin­ish line. Christ­mas Day tends to rank as the hap­pi­est day of the year.

To be sure, any tool that uses tweets for data is mea­sur­ing a very young and spe­cif­ic sub­group of peo­ple. Tweets are not a reli­able mea­sure of any­thing, real­ly, but maybe with some tweak­ing, these research mod­els will come up with some­thing inter­est­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Data Visu­al­iza­tion: How to Tell Com­plex Sto­ries Through Smart Design

Watch a Cool and Creepy Visu­al­iza­tion of U.S. Births & Deaths in Real-Time

An Ani­mat­ed Visu­al­iza­tion of Every Observed Mete­orite That Has Hit Earth Since 861 AD

Kate Rix writes about edu­ca­tion and dig­i­tal media. Fol­low dai­ly ups and downs on Twit­ter @mskaterix.

An Animated Visualization of Every Observed Meteorite That Has Hit Earth Since 861 AD

in Animation, Science | May 9th, 2013

Car­lo Zap­poni, a data visu­al­iza­tion design­er at Nokia, has cre­at­ed a pret­ty splen­did visu­al­iza­tion of the 1,042 mete­orites that humans have wit­nessed hit­ting our plan­et since 861 AD. If you click the image above, you will see the visu­al­iza­tion in full screen mode. And if you then click on var­i­ous points along the time­line, you’ll get essen­tial data (pro­duced by The Mete­orit­i­cal Soci­ety) about each observed mete­or strike. Most are clus­tered in the 19th and 20th cen­turies. The last is the ter­ri­fy­ing rock that blast­ed through Siberia ear­li­er this year.

Note: A total of 34,513 mete­orites have hit our plan­et since 2500 BC. But the vast major­i­ty were nev­er observed. They were only lat­er found.

via The Guardian 

Oth­er Great Visu­al­iza­tions:

Per­pet­u­al Ocean: A Van Gogh-Like Visu­al­iza­tion of Our Ocean Cur­rents

Visu­al­iz­ing WiFi Sig­nals with Light

Watch a Cool and Creepy Visu­al­iza­tion of U.S. Births & Deaths in Real-Time

Stephen Hawking’s Uni­verse: A Visu­al­iza­tion of His Lec­tures with Stars & Sound

John Cage Plays Amplified Cacti and Plant Materials with a Feather (1984)

in Music | May 2nd, 2013

On Jan­u­ary 1, 1984, 25 mil­lion view­ers tuned in to watch Good Morn­ing, Mr. Orwell!, a live satel­lite pro­gram cre­at­ed by the Kore­an-born video artist, Nam June Paik. Accord­ing to reports in The New York Times, Paik cre­at­ed the pro­gram with the hope of prov­ing that tele­vi­sion could be “an instru­ment for inter­na­tion­al under­stand­ing rather than an omi­nous means of thought con­trol,” as George Orwell warned in 1984. And Paik made his pitch with the help of names you’ll rec­og­nize from the 1980s cul­tur­al scene (assum­ing your mem­o­ry goes back that far) — Peter Gabriel, Lau­rie Ander­son, George Plimp­ton, Oin­go Boin­go, Philip Glass, the Thomp­son Twins, Mer­ce Cun­ning­ham and Allen Gins­berg.

Above, we’re fea­tur­ing one mem­o­rable per­for­mance from Good Morn­ing, Mr. Orwell!, which aired on PBS sta­tions across the US: the avant-garde com­pos­er John Cage play­ing ampli­fied cac­ti and plant mate­ri­als with noth­ing but a feath­er. Joined on stage by fel­low com­pos­er Take­hisa Kosu­gi, Cage per­forms an impro­vi­sa­tion that could have accom­pa­nied a Mer­ce Cun­ning­ham dance. Mean­while, George Plimp­ton, a founder of The Paris Review and the host of Good Morn­ing, Mr. Orwell!, pro­vides some nar­ra­tion.

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Cage Unbound: A New Dig­i­tal Archive Pre­sent­ed by The New York Pub­lic Library

John Cage Per­forms Water Walk on “I’ve Got a Secret” (1960)

The Con­tro­ver­sial Sounds of Silence: John Cage’s 4’33″ Per­formed by the BBC Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra

Animations Revive Lost Interviews with David Foster Wallace, Jim Morrison & Dave Brubeck

in Animation, Music | April 19th, 2013

David Ger­lach left a com­fort­able job work­ing as a TV pro­duc­er to launch Blank on Blank, a mul­ti­me­dia non­prof­it with a sim­ple mis­sion — to curate jour­nal­ists’ for­got­ten inter­views with cul­tur­al icons, and then bring them back to life again, some­times as ani­mat­ed shorts. You can start enjoy­ing the fruit of Blank on Blank’s labors by watch­ing a series of web ani­ma­tions, recent­ly pro­duced in col­lab­o­ra­tion with PBS Dig­i­tal Stu­dios. Above, we’re start­ing you off with a four-minute ani­ma­tion of David Fos­ter Wal­lace reflect­ing on his ear­ly ten­nis days, the per­ils of per­fec­tion­ism, and his ten­den­cy to be a “gram­mar nazi” when teach­ing col­lege stu­dents — some­thing we’ve cov­ered here before. The inter­view orig­i­nal­ly aired on WNY­C’s Leonard Lopate Show in 1996, and you can lis­ten to the con­ver­sa­tion in its entire­ty here.

Next comes some mem­o­rable moments with Jim Mor­ri­son, the great singer-song­writer, who met with Vil­lage Voice writer Howard Smith back in Novem­ber, 1969. Going into the meet­ing, Smith sensed that things would­n’t be easy. He lat­er recalled, “I had a feel­ing that it was going to be a tough inter­view. I just kin­da had a feel­ing that … it was going to be tricky, and I said .… if things get real­ly dif­fi­cult with him, I’m gonna sug­gest that we arm wres­tle.” As you’ll hear, Smith made his great arm-wrestling escape an inevitabil­i­ty when he nee­dled Mor­ri­son, sug­gest­ing that the singer had put on too much weight. You can see how things played out above, or catch the com­plete inter­view here.

Blank on Blank has pro­duced oth­er ani­mat­ed inter­views with Bono, Lar­ry King, and surfer Kel­ly Slater. But we’re going to wind things down with Dave Brubeck recall­ing how Pres­i­dent Eisen­how­er sent him to East­ern Europe to fight Com­mu­nism with Jazz. Brubeck relat­ed this sto­ry at the Litch­field Jazz Fes­ti­val in 2008.

If you’re look­ing to rum­mage through a big archive of lost inter­views, I’d encour­age you to spend time with the Blank on Blank pod­cast avail­able on iTunes and rss.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Nazis’ 10 Con­trol-Freak Rules for Jazz Per­form­ers: A Strange List from World War II

Pak­istani Musi­cians Play Amaz­ing Ver­sion of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Clas­sic, “Take Five”

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus: How to Teach Seri­ous Lit­er­a­ture with Light­weight Books

An Uplift­ing Musi­cal Sur­prise for Dave Brubeck in Moscow (1997)

The Always-NSFW Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes Catch Up in Jay and Silent Bob Get Old Podcast

in Film, Podcasts | April 15th, 2013

With 1994’s Clerks, Kevin Smith opened up the flood­gates for inde­pen­dent­ly pro­duced, micro-bud­get, dia­logue-inten­sive, curs­ing-inten­sive movies by, for, and about a cer­tain stripe of feck­less Generation‑X twen­tysome­thing. These pic­tures show­cased more aggres­sive­ly foul­mouthed (but, in their way, more ener­getic) ver­sions of the over­grown kids and/or stalled adults whose mean­der­ing lives Richard Lin­klater had dra­ma­tized in Slack­er three years before. (Watch Slack­er online here.) Clerks hit when I had­n’t yet grown out of com­ic book-read­ing pre-ado­les­cence, though I do remem­ber becom­ing aware of Smith’s work from an ad on the back of, yes, a com­ic book. The page adver­tised Mall­rats, Smith’s big-bud­get Clerks fol­lowup; in its cor­ner posed a pair of smirk­ing young long­hairs. “Snootchie bootchies,” read an inex­plic­a­ble voice bub­ble ema­nat­ing from the thin­ner of the two. I had to know: who were those guys? The zeit­geist now rec­og­nizes Jay and Silent Bob, the out­ward­ly dumb but star­tling­ly wise drug deal­ers played by Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith him­self, as hav­ing stolen Clerks’ show. (You can watch one of their fin­er moments in Mall­rats above.)

Smith used the char­ac­ters in Mall­rats as well, and went on to write them into sub­se­quent movies like Chas­ing Amy, Dog­ma, and of course Clerks II and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, their pres­ence uni­fy­ing all these sto­ries into one coher­ent real­i­ty. Cinephiles argue over whether Smith has deliv­ered on his promise as a direc­tor, but some fans think the man has found his true voice as a pod­cast­er. Today, on his own pod­cast net­work, he hosts a stag­ger­ing array of shows, includ­ing SMod­cast, SMoviemak­ers, Hol­ly­wood Bab­ble-On, and Fat Man on Bat­man. Jay and Silent Bob Get Old (Web — iTunes — RSS feed) reunites the 42-year-old Smith and the 38-year-old Mewes for reg­u­lar con­ver­sa­tions about adult­hood, fame, and strug­gles with sobri­ety (in Mewes’ case) and weight (in Smith’s), always fea­tur­ing the most vul­gar jokes imag­in­able. If you haven’t caught up with these guys since the nineties, have a lis­ten to their pod­cast’s so-very-Not-Safe-for-Work first episode above. They’ve even got back into char­ac­ter for Jay and Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Car­toon Movie, which begins its road­show across North Amer­i­ca on April 20.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Free Online: Richard Linklater’s Slack­er, the Clas­sic Gen‑X Indie Film

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.