S3E1: Joshua Baumgarten

Episode Transcript:

Evy: Everybody, welcome to Word Up podcast. I'm Evy.

Bill: And my name is Bill Scurry.

Evy: We don't have surnames.

Bill: All right, take it again.

Joshua: Should I try this? Hello, folks, welcome to Word Up podcast. My name is Joshua Baumgarten, sitting in for Evy and just Bill. We welcome you to season number three where we're going to discuss a lot of different things and one of them happened to be poetry.

Ennio: This episode was produced and sound designed by Burgundy Sound Studio. Burgundy Sound Studio, sound better.

Evy: Hello and welcome to Word Up podcast. I'm Evy.

Bill: And I'm Bill.

Evy: And I'm super excited to kick off the season three with you, Bill.

Bill: I'm very excited to be here, Evy. I think we're going to have a great adventure and it all starts now.

Evy: Yeah, super exciting.

Bill: I love the fact that you do the branding and it looks so great and I feel like I'm really on the ground floor of this exciting launch for Season 3.

Evy: Super exciting and we are here with Episode 1 with one and only man who goes by many names, but we know him as Joshua Baumgarten.

Bill: That is his name, yes.

Joshua: Yay. It's nice to be here, Episode 1, Season 3. Was I also on Episode 1 of Season 1?

Evy: Yes, you were.

Joshua: Wow. This is an honor.

Bill: Wow.

Evy: This is the revisiting the new you.

Bill: It's already your reboot, right? It's like Star Trek 2009 up in this piece.

Joshua: It's like, "Let's catch up and see how life has fucked you over."

Bill: You've also been recast with a younger actor.

Evy: So, how have you been? How has been life past few years?

Joshua: Life, yeah, pretty fine, go with it. Or as I like to say nowadays, COVID the flow.

Bill: What? That's great man. Tough room.

Joshua: I said the other night I said to somebody, "Ah, go with the flow," and then the person overheard me and he goes, "Did you just say 'COVID the flow'?" I go, "Yes, I did. Copyright." Boom. And the money just started pouring in.

Evy: Oh.

Joshua: Yeah. It's like there's somebody in China making tee-shirts right now for me.

Bill: CafePress or one of those small sites.

Joshua: Yeah. Great, knock on wood, healthy, sane, fit, healthy family, you know. Yeah, it's great.

Evy: And I hear you closed your store?

Joshua: I did. I closed in this past January. I sort of got out right under the wire. It had nothing to do with COVID or anything like that, just had to do with I was done, had reached sort of apex of my time there. I felt like I was just kind of passing the days by, which was not a bad place to pass the days by. We were in combination with the guys from The Mad Daddies, the barbershop and my days turned into just watching these, you know, white guys with beards overly concerned about their beards and their hairstyles and had some great conversations back and forth and stuff. But at the same point I was like, "You know what? Talk something else. I'm done here." Which was fine because there were points where I thought I'd be doing that the rest of my life, sitting in my own shop but that wasn't necessary.

Evy: And did someone else or something else caught your attention?

Joshua: No, life, you know. My wife and I, Maura and I, when we started the shop I always had this idea, yeah, okay, after five years if we don't make any money from it we've got to recess. So after five years came, weren't making any money from it then I sort of stretched it into seven and a half years because the shop became like this sort of place where people just gravitated to, like the freaks, geeks and weirdos of Haarlem and throughout Holland would search me out, search the place out, so it became a little bit of a hub sort of. I like to call it an "unsafe safe place," you know. And I met tons of great people via my sort of these, shitty term, network grew exponentially by having that place for that time being and, yeah, I look back on it with great fond memories of time well-spent and time well-squandered while there. And I thought, "Ah, it's time to figure something else out." So now I wash dishes and make Toasties in a Toy Story Café.

Bill: It sounds like opening a shop like that, considering that seems like a real thumbprint for you, doing a bookstore with the art component to it and the pictures that I saw online looked like it was very idiosyncratic. It looks like that would allow you kind of a key to unlock Haarlem a little bit, as much as for transplants, ex-pats like us, learning a language is one thing but just because you can speak some of the language doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to let you in the culture. So it looks like you might have had another entry into meeting new people and sort of learning unspoken ways of communicating, kind of sinking in a little bit more.

Joshua: Yeah, I mean, ever since...I've lived here for 20 years and ever since I started visiting, which was a few years before that, I was lucky I met Haarlemers, like core kind of artistic weirdo Haarlemers, so I was very quickly sort of ingratiated into "the scene." So I always felt really part of the city and then by becoming busier and busier with people and doing things, more and more part of the city and then the shop was finally this sort of like, boom, if you don't know me, now you do and come let's hang out, let's have a talk.

And it was great. You know, the people that didn't know me got to know me, find out about it or they found out about the shop. People could, you know, find stuff there and it was always great. Young people would come in and be on the cusp of yearning for something different and they would come in and you could...like I remember this one young girl. She was like maybe 17 at that point, named Loki, and she had like one of those kind of canvas bags on it. And she had on it this black and white photo of Bukowski, that famous one of him in the kitchen with a cigarette and the hooker or whatever, the girlfriend, you know, looking both really fucked up and I was like, "Cool bag with Bukowski on it," and she was like, "Who?" And I'm like, "Oh, the bag, the guy, that's Charles Bukowski, the poet." And she's like, "Oh, I just thought it was a cool bag."

And then that led into discussing with her who Bukowski was and what he did and how he lived and all that stuff and then giving her some names of recommendations for books and she went home and she looked it up. And then she would come back often and we became friendly and she started doing performance art, spoken word, called "Nachlicht Spouse" for a number of years. And she went off to Arnam to go to art school and stuff. So it was like for that to have played a tiny part in someone's, you know, cultural upbringing, whatever you want to call it, that happened a number of times and I loved that aspect because I was at that age, I wish I knew somebody who would of sort of turned me on to something.

Bill: A docent, a cultural docent.

Joshua: Yeah, and when I went to college, like we talked earlier, upstate New York, I was writing at that point and I was like really...and I had, I think I was about 20, 21 and I discovered Bukowski via I think a Chili Peppers song where they rhymed Bukowski with "forgot my house key," you know, and then I saw a book in...I happened to actually be in City Lights bookstore on a road trip with some friends who were a bit older than I was and because I knew about the Beats but I didn't really know about the Beats. But I knew about City Lights. I was like, "We have to go there." And then I saw "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" sitting on the shelf and I saw the name and I was like, "Oh, that's who they're talking about."

And then, you know, then I started going to Nelson's book store. It was on Central Avenue in Albany, New York and the guy had...an old guy, really nice guy, and he had this huge Bukowski collection, Beats and Burroughs and stuff, but he had a personal correspondence with John Martin from Black Sparrow Press and he sold all these first editions and rare copies and small little booklets that they gave out or sent out on the holidays and stuff like that. So I started spending all the money my parents would give me for food and shit on books and go home and just read the Bukowski and kind of absorbed it and, you know, that whole thing of kind of walking in another man's shoes to, you know, absorbing your artistic inspiration in pursuit of your own voice, so to speak. Yeah, and that led me into some trouble.

But I remember the teachers I had at school, I took like...I had a psychology major and an English minor because the English minor you didn't have to do, like, crazy papers. I hate the long form. So I took these writing poetry courses and I was writing pretty heavy Bukowski-inspired stuff like that. And I always was passing things out and the other students were not there where I was, and the teacher was like, "What? You can’t pass this. You can't do this. You can't say this. You can't pass this out." Or, other teacher I would ask, "Can you read my stuff? Do you know about who these people are?" And they'd be like, "No, we don't know. We never heard of them." And I'd be like, "What the fuck? Where am I?" But I believed that this was in the late '80s, early '90...

Bill: They had already made the movies about him, you know? It had already been adapted. It wasn't like he was an unknown quantity.

Joshua: "Barfly." I don't know it had been made by then.

Bill: '87.

Joshua: Really?

Bill: Yeah.

Joshua: It was '87? It just seemed like I was in college at the tail-end of the old school and the new school, the transition to computers and all that sort of stuff and information hadn't happened yet. But that made everything underground. I had to search it out. I had to go find this stuff. You know, you heard something in a song, you had to go to the library to look it up or at a bookstore or find the right people who knew about it. Now, of course, you're in the shop and be like, "Oh, you ever hear of Charles Bukowski?" "Oh, let's go to YouTube." Google. And I think that it's a shame because that search aspect for young people is sort of gone.

Bill: Do you remember about seven years or so ago Patton Oswalt, back in the States, he wrote a piece for "Wired" magazine about exactly that phenomenon? Patton Oswalt grew up outside of D.C. in like Arlington suburbs in Virginia or something like that. And he was coming with this romantic tale where he was talking about the hunt for Bad Brains albums when you couldn't easily find things like that.

Joshua: Boom.

Bill: And it was a little bit of the old man thing where he was sitting there saying, "You kids have no idea what it is to have everything ever made just on fingertips here for you." He says, "There's something about the hunt of trying to find individual issues of 'Watchmen' comic books and trying to find Bad Brain albums and stuff like that."

Joshua: Oh, I scoured the village from top to bottom, east to west side looking for a copy of "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle" video from The Sex Pistols when I was 17. I was like, I had to see this. I had the poster and I was like, "I have to find this," and it was just like from one cult video store to the next. "No, we don't have it. We don't have it." And now I think I have three copies of it on VHS and DVD. I've got the record. I've got the cassette tape. I have two posters of it. It's like...

Bill: Next to the "Star Wars Holiday Special" and Roger Corman's "Fantastic Four" movie from '94.

Joshua: Yeah. And I love going onto YouTube to look up weird shit, you know. It's just kind of, from the past, things that, you know, I was kind of thinking about this old Marty Feldman film, "In God We Trust." I don't know if you remember that.

Bill: Not that film, no. I love Marty Feldman. He's great.

Joshua: I was like, "Ah." I remember because we were talking about police captain before. My father used to take me to all these films, you know, in the '80s because my mother didn't want to go a lot of the times. So I remember, you know, the "Police Academy" and "In God We Trust," "Red Dawn," you know, and "Creep Show," "Stripes," you know, all these classic films that would probably never be allowed to be made nowadays because they would just...Yeah, the '80s were a different time period, you know. I'm glad I grew up in a period where, okay, maybe some of it by certain standards was sexist, possibly racist, not real, but it gave me the opportunity to make that judgment for myself.

Like I have this book called...it's a guy named Larry Wilde back, I don't know, maybe '70s, '80s, he had this whole string of books like "The Official Jewish Joke Book," "The Official Polish Joke Book," "The Official Black Joke Book," "The Official Mexican Joke Book," and it was just a joke book about that ethnic group and I have the compilation. My father used to have all these books and then somehow we also had the compilation.

Evy: Wow.

Joshua: And I had this on the shelf in the shop and I remember these students came in one summer and they were American students and they were like, you know, I don't know, 18, 19, 20 whatever, and it was like a few girls, a few guys and they're all a little bit different, you know, in their backgrounds. And they were looking around the shop and then they had it on a shelf behind where I stood my desk with the cash register. And they were standing in front of me and I was like, "Can I help you?" and they're like, "Yeah, we'd like to see a book." And behind me I had all my books, like the ones I just like to keep behind me, and that one was on the top of the shelf and I'm like, "Yeah, sure, which book do you want to see?" Like, "That one," and they pointed directly to that book and I'm like, "That one? Yeah, sure. Okay."

So I took it down, I'm like, "Look, it's not for sale but," you know, I started explaining to them what it was. And I said, "Yeah, look, you can flip through it and make fun of any ethnic culture you want. It's great fun." And their facial expression just sank and they all turned a sort of shade of gray and I was like...it's different now. And I understand that too, you know, and they way they're being raised. And it's not like I need to go out of my way to make fun of anybody for any reason but I can dig a fucking funny joke regardless of who it's about. You told a good Jewish joke before and I thought, "Great." I can recognize it.

Yeah, it's a new culture, a new world they live in but that whole thing going back to searching out things, to finding out, making up your own mind about things, allowing something to piss you off or upset you or twist you a little bit or make you laugh, you know, I miss that. You know, people are also a little bit overly sensitive to things nowadays and that falls into social media and how everyone reacts. "Oh my god, he said this," or, "She said that." You're like, "And? And?" It does not affect me on my daily basis. You know, I still have to pee six times a night or I still have to do my work. I don't care if someone says something a bit off-color or a bit racist or a bit rude. If that's how they live their life and they are into politics or they have control over other people, yes, then we've got to get to the bottom of it. But if it's a comedian or it's a film or if it's a musician and they steppin' out and make a statement or just saying something strange, groovy. I want to hear it and then I'll make my own judgment because I'm a big person. I have a brain. I can decide if, "Eh, I don't really dig what they had to say about it."

Bill: So your anecdote about the shop brings up an interesting point for me. I'm really curious about, as an ex-pat, as somebody who's set up an arts org, for lack of a better term, how did your art sort of synthesize in a foreign country? I know you've been here for 20 years now and you've sort of acclimated. You already, you know, got your legs underneath you. But setting up something, you know, you're talking about bringing in and you already have a well-defined voice and a personality. You're talking about interacting with a lot of people who are younger, people from other cultures, other countries, whether they speak the same language or different languages, how did you sort of assimilate art-wise? I mean, has this place paid off to you and have you sort of paid out to it?

Joshua: Yeah, the shop in itself was sort of an extension of what The Irrational Library, as three words or two words put together is. You know, The Irrational Library was something when...I told this story maybe on the last podcast or the last episode. It came out of my roommate and I, Ross, when we, after college he went out West and I ended up following him a little bit later and we lived together while we were in LA for a few years. We also jokingly name our apartments and, like, one, it was a studio apartment where I lived in this walk-in closet more or less and there was a curtain separating it where he would be intimate during the night and I would get up to go to the bathroom and be like, "Oh, excuse me. Sorry. Oh, okay, right on." So that was "The Den of Sin."

And then we had a bigger apartment and we had a huge collection of books and music and art and weird comics and films and stuff like that and it was like, we have an irrational library. There doesn't have to be a rhyme or reason why you would appreciate something and you can, you know, appreciate...I always say it's like the connection between, say, Miles Davis, A Tribe Called Quest, Rage Against the Machine. You know, there's a synthesis in my mind between those things and Bad Brains. Put that all in there and that's all the good stuff that makes you inspired and makes you thrive in life. That's Irrational Library because there can be no rhyme or reason for it.

Bill: That's your term? You coined that, "Irrational Library?"

Joshua: That's my swoosh.

Bill: Yeah. No, look, it's hard to find a two-word combination of something people haven't already fatigued to exhaustion.

Joshua: I've been using that since then as...it started as the name of our apartment and then when I was traveling I used to write Ross letters and I would say, "From the desk of the Irrational Library." And then when I moved here it became...and I started working at this place, the Feats of Fabric, which was sort of this cultural underground place. I started doing performance nights and I started calling them "The Irrational Library." Then when I opened the shop I called that "The Irrational Library." Now I have a band, I call that "The Irrational Library." It's my sort of be-all-end-all term.

And the shop was an extension of my brain, all the places that I visited by traveling and collected stuff from and I just put it to the walls. And it was like, this is The Irrational Library. It's like a piecemeal of just inspiration and from all different nooks and crannies, let's put it in, get it together. It makes me happy. Hopefully it makes someone else happy. And, yeah, it just sort of...

And being there and when people came in, hosting them, "Welcome," come on in, you know, or seeing people looking through the big window in the front and you would see all this weird shit in the window and people standing there, like, "What is this place?" Looking in and, "I don't get it," you know? And I would walk outside and go, "Hello. Come on inside. It's a lot more interesting inside than outside." And they'd be like, "Oh, well, we don't know." And I'd be like, "It's okay. Come in." And some would walk away and some would come in and some would be in and out in a minute. Some would spend three hours. You'd be like, "Oh, that person's still back there." And they would come in, I would offer them coffee or tea or a beer and they'd be like, "What? What are you talking about?" I'm like, "No, come on, if you're going to hang out, you need to drink something. Relax. It's okay."

Bill: But I've been in a lot of art spaces that look really anodyne. Some of them do not look like you're walking into somebody's head.

Joshua: Anodyne?

Bill: Anodyne, yes. Sort of blank, beige, expressionless. You know what I mean? There's a lot of them back home in the States and it's like not all of them look like the way your shop did, which quite literally, it's your brain turning into the...it's the convolution of your brain going inside out and it's like walk into what my subconscious is telling me all the time. You guys get to share that too.

Joshua: Yeah, more or less that's what it was. It was just sort of let's like come together and possibly find something that gravitates to you. And I used to write poems and just put them on the wall or put them on the front window or in the bathroom. I wanted it to be...it just became this sort of like you came into something, you know, and I wanted people to feel good about their experience that they were...from the hustle and bustle of all the other shops and everything, fine, get what you need, wherever you've got to go. But when you come here, it's going to be a different experience. And if you bought something, great. If you didn't, it's okay. If you left a little money, a donation for the beer, great. If you didn't, eh, I honestly didn't care. I just wanted people to feel like they had spent some time during their day somewhere.

And, yeah, that's what it was and it really, you know, a lot of times I had kids bringing their parents, you know. And their parents then kind of pulled me aside and thanking me for, like, sort of being this sort of uncle, guardian, whatever person who, you know, introduced something to their kid or helped turn a corner for the kid or we did internships all the time, you know, a kid from a different...from Fry School or whatever school. And depending on the kid, their interests, you know, what they got from the shop. But I always put them to work. I said, "You know, okay, Whiz, possibly nothing to do for a few hours so make a poster." "What am I supposed to make?" "I don't know. You tell me."

Bill: "You do it."

Joshua: "Take a look around the shop and take what you see and put that on a poster and we're putting that poster on the door. We're going to make photocopies of that poster and you're going to go around and flyer for me. You play an instrument?" "Yeah." "How many songs do you know?" "Two." "Great. In two weeks at the end of your internship, you're doing it in store." "What do you mean?" "I mean you're going to play those two songs and you're going to invite your friends and family to come check that out. You're going to perform in front of an audience for the first time." "Oh."

It was so cool just to be able to see young people kind of like challenge them for a moment in time. And, you know, unfortunately my own son has...he fucking couldn't give a shit about all this.

Bill: What, is he a CPA or something?

Joshua: He's a great kid. But he just has really no interest in it, you know. He's 18. He's more into computers and gaming. My daughter, Pippi, she grew up there. As a baby we had a box there and I was changing poo diapers when people were coming in. I was like, "Welcome. Excuse me. Yeah, that's shit on my hand but just make yourself at home." So she's now very like vivacious and she's comfortable around people and she always wanted to put on a show. So, you know, yeah, the shop was a grand time. But, yeah, when the whole Corona shit happened I was so glad that I didn't have that extra stress to worry about.

Evy: So what are you busy with now?

Joshua: Yeah. Well, when the Corona stuff happened I was kind of like, "Okay." I was really...I've always...well, not always, but I was always going to the gym. So, gym’s closed, so I started doing a lot of YouTube videos, cardio work, and I was sort of like this idea of, like, all right, you're stuck at home but I'm not going to get stuck. I'm gonna stay fit. I'm gonna get my mind in gear. I'm not gonna get depressed. First two weeks I think I was a bit weirded out. I was like, "I'm not going shopping. I'm not doing this. I'm not doing that." And then finally I was like, "You know what? Let's figure out how we can move with this."

Bill: That's because you watch "Plandemic" and you know the truth now, right?

Joshua: Oh, I saw that come by. I haven't watched that yet.

Bill: No, I didn't watch it either.

Joshua: You know what? We have a vacation house, a cabin in the Betuwe. That's in the middle of the country and it's beautiful, quiet camping and we were going there every weekend to get out of town and picking cherries from the tree in the spring and in the summer there's a lake close by. So we had an escape, which was great to be able to function like that. But I also started running and I started microdosing with psychopsilocybin and that was really cool. And I'm sort of on an off period with that and I'm looking forward to getting back to it. Taking more supplements.

I got into this idea of, like, all right, there's a lot of noise in this world. I'm going to get my brain rounded, sort of smooth out the straight edges and just kind of focus onto where I want to be focused. I'm not going to let all this get too close to me or too inside of me. But I started doing these during this sort of lockdown period, these interviews with people in Haarlem called "Think Inside the Box." So for years we've been told to think outside the box and now there's a little box. We are taped in. We're told where to stand.

Bill: I'm a big fan of the box. It works very well for a linear mind like mine.

Joshua: So I started interviewing people involved in the cultural sector about how everything was happening or affecting them. And that was great because it just got me out and about and hearing people talk and just really simply just put it in an editing thing and didn't really cut anything out. And I made a drawing of the title, like real cheapo because, you know, I just like to do things quick and then get it online. And I did 11 episodes of that and just like with my phone, with a microphone and the camera filming them.

Bill: It's a great resource, right? It's amazing.

Joshua: It was funny because I didn't even see it. People said, "This is a great time capsule for what's happening now." And it was just for me, I felt like I want to let...A lot of people are always asking me to talk. I was like, "I want to ask you to talk now. You tell me." So I didn't say much during the interviews. It was just to let people talk.

Yeah, it was the idea of like, all right, we've got to keep this creative juice going. Let's keep these things going. Let's not worry about getting shut down or locked down or anything.

And we were busy with the band. You know, we recorded the new album right before the shit storm. We had gotten also a big subsidy for this project between the album and this graphic artist named TRIK to do all this sort of what we call the sort of...the album is called "We Are Doomed." It's more lightening than dark. It's what are we doomed for or to? And TRIK does these political-oriented cartoons. Our bass player, Mishel said it great when he said, "What TRIK does visually, I do texturally." So it's a perfect marriage between the two and TRIK and I know each other for a number of years.

So he's now...What we put together was something I termed as "pragmatic propaganda." We wanted to do a propaganda show with all his artwork and our music sort of in contrast to all the propaganda that we're faced with now, be it from the media or all the signs everywhere about the Corona shit and everything. But to give it a little twist, give it a little accent, you know, from a different perspective. So we're busy working on that. We have a number of...the album's supposed to come out in January and we're doing gallery shows because we figure the podiums are all going to be...everything's push, push, push and it's like, really, we get your footing is difficult and we are a band that people claim to respect, but don't seem to want to so eagerly book, which is fine. And now in galleries we have free spaces, you know, and TRIK can throw shit to the walls. We can build a performance, you know, at Pop Podium it's like a fucking one band in, one band out, and now we're going to have an extended few days to do something with. So we can do a concert, we can do a poetry reading. Our sax/guitar player is Dominae so if we want to a Bible reading we might do a Bible reading. We just kind of see what happens when we go into town and start inviting people.

Evy: That's so cool.

Joshua: And make a happening. It's like that old school beat shit, you know, make something happen instead of just people passively coming to watch your show. So hopefully that's going to continue.

Bill: "The Valley of the Dolls" sequel. It's happening and it's freaking me out.

Evy: So on that note, I hear you have something prepared for us. Is it from your new work or...?

Joshua: Yeah. I did some writing. Of course, I'm constantly...well, not constantly depending on what I'm doing but I've got this one piece I wrote recently and it had to do with something that was going on in Haarlem around the new stadsdichter, city poet. I'm not sure if anybody...it made national news, which is really kind of funny. I was asked to be amongst a few other people on a committee to choose the new stadsdichter from Haarlem. In the past it was like a sort of contest or one of the wethouders or something appointed it. So this year they decided we're going to do it differently and change up the rules a bit and we're going to appoint a committee to select one. I couldn't compete for it because I write stuff in English and they're like, "Well, that's one rule we're not changing."

Bill: Fair enough.

Joshua: I was like, "Yeah." And I always came to them with the idea of like, all right, I get your point. Allow me, as a person who's busy with poetry in Haarlem, write as I write and then work with a Dutch poet to translate, because then we offer something to the city that is increasingly inhabited by expats who do not right now speak Dutch but we would love for them to be involved and feel involved with our city. Let's speak to everybody together. "No, [speaking Dutch]." Okay. But it made me think why do I need to want something so bad that I already am. I am already one of Haarlemstads but it's just who I am and how I act or what I do with the city. So to need an official title, I thought, Josh, stop being so silly.

And actually with an official title comes official problems, which is what happened when we chose this young man named Darryl. His last name I'm forgetting, unfortunately. Sorry, Darryl. But he's also a hiphop artist. He goes by the name "Insayno" and Darryl sent in something that was, yeah, a video poem about Haarlem, which was really nice. Some interesting, fun wordplay. A great form letter and a quite extensive resumé in his experiences.

Some people on the committee...like we all went through all the lists of all the different people and we came to a meeting and we had everybody in the top three. And for a number of us, Darryl was on the top of our list, where there were two other gentlemen who were also involved in the hip hop world who were like, "Don't choose Darryl. He's got a big mouth and he's going to cause a lot of problems and he said some shit in the past that people are not going to like." And we being white, liberal, overly-educated people were like, "He's the voice of now. Give him a chance to speak." And we debated and debated and we decided finally it's time for a new voice, not some white, educated, old school person talking about the sparna and the stadhuis all the time.

So anyways, so Darryl was chosen. Goes to the wethouders and goes to the government, goes to the mayor, everybody's cool with Darryl. Darryl meets them all. Everybody digging Darryl. Darryl is appointed stadsdichter and then the next thing you know it's geen stijl, all telegraphed, they're pulling tweets, shit that he had erased off of Twitter from, like, years ago, a YouTube video where he made some bold statements as a young man about the Holocaust and slavery, trying to parallel stuff and, yeah, I'm not going to misquote it because I don't want to do that. And stuff about 9/11 and stuff about the Bataclan. Okay.

These were things that a young man said and he then grew up and decided, "I don't need to associate with those things anymore. I'm going to take them away." But these people found it and then, boom, headlines, panic. More people concerned about poetry in Haarlem than I think ever before. So there's pieces...yeah, again, a little bit about it, why I wrote this, I posted something about it on social media, on Facebook about like twisting...the opening line from "Howl" about, "I've seen the best minds of my generation post something on Facebook and then live to regret ever doing it because it comes back in their face." Something like that, you know. I forget exactly.

And then this poet guy I know from Haarlem, he took that and he, "Josh Baumgarten" and then "taking Ginsburg's words and twisting them," and, "Ginsburg would be rolling over in his grave," and I was like, "Shut the fuck up, you pompous motherfucker. Stop. Stop. You can't do that. You can't claim to say how you would think Allen Ginsburg would feel about something. You just can't do that." So that's what this poem's about.

Evy: Cool. So let's hear it.

Joshua: When you speak of the dead rolling over in their graves, know that you are only using your own words as a shovel to dig your own deeper. I want to think that we ended up here at this crossroads of ideas for some sort of reason. But when I allow myself to accept this, I know in my heart that we, as a community, are lost. GPS cannot guide the spirit and lotus pose is just a more advanced position to sit your judgmental ass in.

The de-evolution of the open mind, the invasion of the body-snatched podcast people cancel culture thought got you hip cats by the throat. The endless dead end online debates keeping score as we degenerate. Is this 280-character stream really the open-minded conversation that your from the toilet bowl tweets claim to want to stimulate? My empathy for all the laptop philosophers who all seem to have something so urgent and unique to say. And like my mother used to say, "You know why opinions are like assholes? Because everybody's got one."

I scratch my beard and wonder if these fuming mad Dutch folks aren't just some downloadable app form of a new model online Enesbe. You see, be it the revisiting of the history of slavery of the Dutch Antilles or the Nazi-led attempt at Jewish genocide, there's currently in 2020 seemingly no longer anywhere for a compassionate human being to reside.

And as we press refresh upon an old catchphrase, like a modern-day Polaroid snapshot selfie of a society smiling slyly into the lens of regret. Like a hashtag shedding light upon that big dotted line connecting social media and that of the Jewish Holocaust, a revamped slogan that makes our arrogance and our ignorance apparent at all costs, never letting us off the hook, reminding us daily that none of us are innocent, that all of us are doomed to one day very soon be reminded of our own sordid past, to no longer be given the chance to grow, to be forced to suffer for our past mistakes and to never, ever forget.

Bill: Josh, I feel personally called out by that.

Joshua: And poets from Haarlem going online on Twitter and Facebook with these diatribes against him. "He's a bad poet. He shouldn't say this. It's wrong. It's anti-Semetic. It's this and that." And I'm just like, "What the fuck's wrong with all of you? This was a young guy. He made some bold statements, angry young man. And now he's developing and we have the opportunity to help him turn a corner to develop further, and to let people in his social group, his community see that that is possible, that you don't have to stay filled with hatred or, you know, towards something, but to grow."

And the hatred was coming at this guy. And it's funny if you look at his Facebook page about people commenting and the hate, the Facebook page from him was all people with, let's say, more ethnic backgrounding, ach du namen*** and the other shit, all white people. And I was like, "This is so fucking racist. This is so crazy."

Okay, I'm a Jew. Do I appreciate maybe what he's maybe said about the Holocaust? Nah, take it or leave it. I'm from New York. I didn't have people who dies in the Holocaust, okay, so it's maybe not for me to judge but the thing with the Holocaust is that everybody's always saying, "Never forget. Never forget." And then the moment someone brings up slavery, they're always like, "Let's not talk about that. Get over it." There's really something wrong with that, you know? If one is "never forget," the other one also has to be "never forget and let's talk about this shit so it's not a matter of 'never forget' but let's get on." You know? Let's make sure that generations continue to know about these things but aren't anchored in them.

And then I tried to stay out of the conversation on social media because I think that's a cesspool but as I tend to like to react is put it into my words, put it into poetry and then throw a few zingers out at the fucking douchebags out there in the world.

One last thing about this whole situation with the stadsdichter. I think he was announced on a Thursday, I forget, but it was Friday afternoon, it was 1:30 in the afternoon and I was taking a little power nap before I went to pick up my daughter from school and my phone rings, which I hear. I never have the ringer on and I pick it up and I look and I open my eyes and it says "private number" and I'm like, "Click. Yeah, met Josh." And then I heard this sort of click or something and then a recording starts and in a somewhat robotic female voice it says, "You are a disgrace to the Jewish community. You are a disgrace to the Jewish community. You are a disgrace to the Jewish community." Over and over and over. I started laughing. I'm like, "Fuck you." After the fact I thought that I should have said, "Mom, stop it. I'm never going to marry a Jewish girl."

But I was just like I don't know who said that and I'd never heard of the CEDE until I told people about this and I was like, you know what? But if you're the Jewish community out there, I don't want anything to do with you. You're not representative of the Jewish community. You're garbage. You don't attack a fellow Jew like that. You call me on the phone and you ask me, "Hey, what the fuck's going on? Why are you supporting this kid?" And then allow me to tell you why. Because that's how people should act. Be it Jewish or non-Jewish, it doesn't matter. You don't fucking send someone a robocall like that. It's embarrassing if that's coming from a community.

Evy: People have too much time on their hands.

Bill: That's a great robocall though, man. I wish I could receive a call like that some day.

Joshua: I know. I was, like, "Oh, you finally found out exactly who I am. Yes, I am a disgrace to the Jewish community."

Bill: You worked hard to be that way.

Joshua: Look at all my tattoos.

Bill: You can't be buried in consecrated ground. That's not going to happen.

Joshua: Exactly. So, anyway.

Evy: So is this piece part of the album, your new, upcoming album?

Joshua: No, no. There are 13 numbers on that and it's our shortest album. It's 33 minutes. The numbers are a bit more aggressive, faster, more guitar-driven than the previous album. But yeah, it's very...all the text except one song was written last year more or less. And when we made the album and then sort of Corona happened and all the stuff with the social unrest and Black Lives Matter stuff and, you know, all that crazy racist shit going down in America, or, well, around the world. I felt like, yeah, I can't claim to be paranormal or anything crazy like that but I do believe that an artist can tune into the universe and the universe will kind of answer back and then you see what's happened around you. And even though something might be happening today, the rest of the world might not pick up on it until five months later. But as an artist, that's your responsibility to pick up on it ahead of time.

Bill: I really liked "Social Media Circle Jerk," especially the video that they cut together for that. That was just like a fucking hoot, the entire thing.

Joshua: That was so much fun to make.

Bill: Yeah.

Joshua: That was just like me and my film editor guy, this guy Ellard, sitting there one night drinking beer, I go, "Let's find the most stupid people doing the most stupid shit."

Bill: Yeah, I'd seen about half of those but it's like doing Supercut is perfect with, you know, the syncopation of the song, it just nails that message.

Joshua: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, we're going to film a new video for the title track "We Are Doomed" in a few weeks, and we have another one. Via TRIK we hooked up with this woman, Karen Gutfreund. I'm pronouncing her last name wrong. But from the States and she curated a book of art that's...again, it's slipping my mind. I'm bad with titles. About anti-Trump art from around the world and it's a thick book. And via TRIK we got in contact with her and she asked us to submit a song for a video teaser. So during the song you hear the opening song, "More of the Obviousless," the first riffs of it, and I was so excited. I was like, "Wow, this is so cool." Then when I heard the sort of teaser, my voice isn't in it. And I was like, "Aww. All right. Oh well."

But Karen actually gave us permission to use all the artwork to make our own video for that song. So we're busy, going to make our own video for that song, using the artwork from the book and at the end having her speak about the book.

Evy: So cool. So the album is called "We Are Doomed."

Joshua: "We Are Doomed."

Evy: And it's coming out January?

Joshua: We're doing the hopefully opening show if everything still goes well in the new Evita. It's a new artist sort of compound in Haarlem. I believe that's June, not July, sorry, January 23rd.

Evy: Right. 2021?

Joshua: Yeah, something around there. And then we have stuff lined up in Kroeniger, Rotterdam, Zwolle and, yeah, just trying to find free spaces where we can get to and other shows in the meantime and we're bringing it out via Concerto records and books. So hopefully they're going to help promote it and of course then we've got this great subsidy from the stimulering funds. There are two different ones. I confuse them. We got some, yeah, pocketful of cash to put together something, to a show around it. Yeah, it's exciting and that took a lot of stress off because we figured, okay, couldn't rehearse, couldn't play, we lost, we missed a number of shows in the spring, two tours or short tours in Germany and one in Scotland. But getting that subsidy was like, okay, there are people out there, they see the potential in what we're doing or what we do together with TRIK and we can work towards that and have a longer term goal than the short term, like, "Oh, we want to play the Paradiso," or, "We need to play here." You know?

Evy: Yeah, well, that's super upsetting. And where people can look you up?

Joshua: Yeah, yeah. The social media stuff, it's all on Facebook and the band's on Facebook and there's an Instagram and I'm not on Twitter because I think that's a fucking cesspool of humanity and the people who created that thing should really take it offline. Society would be better off without Twitter, I believe.

Evy: So we'll share the links in our episode notes.

Joshua: I'm on Facebook. I do my Facebook thing but I really am not...like our booker is always like, "You guys have to have to a better social media presence," and I'm like, I tried for a day and I'm just like, "Yeah, I just don't have it in me." Maybe I'm too old, you know, or not ambitious enough or I don't really care.

Evy: Well, all media doesn't have to be all media, right?

Joshua: No, get engaged by going somewhere and playing for people and then rather talking to people before the show than after, because afterwards I'm exhausted and my voice is scratched. So it's like I really can't talk so well afterwards. I can be a better listener than after but before a show it's more interesting to talk to people. Someone's milling about, you know, but people sort of look at you strange if they know that you're the guy performing, like, "Oh, we can't talk to this guy. He's going to be onstage." I'm like, "So?"

Evy: Okay, so that's the message.

Joshua: I make Toasties and wash dishes for a living. We're all the same. It fucking doesn't matter.

Evy: So just go and talk to Josh before the show.

Joshua: Yeah, why not? Let's shoot the shit. You know?

Bill: Go to his house.

Joshua: Don't ask me about that. Don't ask me about poetry and don't give me your poetry. Somebody gave me one recently. It was very nice but I was like, I think I'm a poet by default because I really had no stamina for the long form of writing. So poetry was always like get in and get out, tie those words together, make a statement, throw some shit against the wall and then go.

Evy: Well, it's harder to write short stuff than longer, right? Like that's what...someone said that.

Joshua: Not for me. Not for me. I mean, everybody deals with their artform in a different way. This is how I do it and, you know, I'm more, you know.

Bill: Well, that is all the time we have. We want to thank our guest this week.

Evy: And thank you, Bill, for being such a great cohost.

Bill: Aw, Evy, thank you too for being such a great cohost. So you guys should subscribe to this show. Wherever you find around all the great podcasts aggregated, you'll find us on Google Play, Apple iTunes, all of the good stuff. And, Evy, tell us about our social media component.

Evy: Yeah, make sure you look us up on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter and don't forget to say "hi." We love it when you say "hi."

Bill: We want to start a conversation about this episode, this topic and this guest.

Evy: Thank you and dooi!

Joshua: Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for listening. My name is Joshua Baumgartner. This has been Evy and Bill sitting here quietly the whole time listening to me ramble on. Ennio's doing the tech. Support Word Up, look it up online. Hopefully they'll be back and Checkpoint Charlie coming soon. Power to the people. Stay sane, COVID, the flu.

Bill: Copyright 2020.


Transcrip by Janice Erlbaum