Who Are These People?

Corn Mo

If you haven’t started your own podcast as an excuse for calling old friends for a conversation, you really should.

It was nice calling my friend Jon Cunningham, also known as Corn Mo.

Corn Mo is the kind of guy that can walk into a room full of strangers with an accordion, a cymbal and drumstick stuck to his shoe, and win over even the most cynical audiences.

Broadway World called him, “Charming troubadour and raconteur Corn Mo ," and praise his, “patented combination of original songs, quirky, off-kilter anecdotes, and charisma,” and The Sydney Morning Herald described his songs as, “absurd, but his voice (as well as his piano and accordion playing) is so great it's a pleasure to listen to – even when you're not sure where the laughs are supposed to be.”

So anyhow, I gave Jon a call. I have to warn you, it was a bit awkward at first. I’ve cut out a lot of the pregnant pauses. I was a bit run-down, and I was calling Jon pretty early his time.  We both felt we proved we are just boring guys. We pretty much fell into the same conversation we would have had as roommates twenty odd years ago. (But we enjoyed it)

Before I jump into the conversation, I did just want to talk about Corn Mo’s music. He’s written and recorded a lot over the years, but I’m still impacted the most by some of the songs he was performing way back when I met him

Here’s just a bit from “Junior High”

And this from “The Day Jason Klein cried”

Follow Corn Mo on Twitter

Follow Corn Mo on Instagram

Corn Mo and Mauve Oed, 1995 at Good/Bad Art Collective -video

Ivan Rana

Ivan Rana is a true dreamer.  But he doesn’t just dream, he really hustles to get things done.

I met him him when I was a producer and editor at Zee TV, the Indian Television network that’s on satellite in the US.  I was the first non-Asian hired at the North American headquarters which happened to be in Arlington Texas.

Ivan was also a producer and editor but he was actually from India. We worked closely together for years.  We were essentially a two-man team for about two years.

We’ve both come a long way since then.  As you’ll hear, Ivan has had a lot of success with his creative endeavors, but there are still things he wants to do, and he’s still hustling.

Ivan at one of the epic ZEE parties

 

Handsome Ivan and the water bottles from colonel Bindra

Rory Scholl

See if you can hear the envy in my voice when I talk to Rory Scholl about his bohemian lifestyle.  Rory is a comedian, a writer and actor in New York.  He actually has so many different gigs, we only scratched the surface in this conversation. Way back when I was making student films, I would rope Rory in as talent, because he’s talented, and as you’ll hear, he’s pretty much game for anything, whether that’s playing an airline seat, or trying to make Lenny Bruce kid-friendly.  Heeeeere’s Rory.

Rory in Four Grey Sleepers circa 1989 or 1990?

Rory in "Scary Life Size Monster Ghost!"



A young Rory Scholl and an even younger Mark Cuban

Rory as the American Airlines mascot

Link to Geek Club Books, autism storytelling article: James Rebhorn and a Tale of Two Friendships

Follow Rory on Twitter 

Norm Bowman
When I graduated high school in 1988, my idea of college was equal parts Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds and The Sure Thing.  So if you were going to cast the part of my freshman roommate, you couldn’t have found a better person that Norm Bowman.  He had it all, a spray-painted Dodge Dart, an anti-establishment attitude, and best of all, he was old enough to buy booze.  It’s not surprising he was kind of the nucleus of my circle of friends.  These days he’s still anti-establishment but a bit mellowed, with lovely family in the Dallas suburbs. He has a lot to say. We cover the similarities between coffee and condoms, his atheism, his signature style of photographing himself on abandoned furniture, and more.


The many moods of Norm

Follow Norm on twitter @AnyBowman

"Dumpster Comfort" the photo blog I wrote on "Norming."

https://zeitgeistripoff.blogspot.sg/2016/01/dumpster-comfort-is-where-my-friend.html

 

 

Chris Flemmons. Photo by Peter Salisbury

I met Chris Flemmons while I was living in the college town of Denton, Texas. He’s a talented singer and songwriter. He has a band called the Baptist Generals. He’s also a filmmaker. He was Director of Photography on a short film I made called “Kung Fu Teenage Bigfoot” the trailer…and he also did the voice over.

I’ve always liked Chris’ demeanor. During this conversation, he mentions he sometimes feels like a crotchety old man, but the thing is, he had that vibe even in his twenties…he wears it well, it suits him. Anyhow, I always get a lot from his point of view. I hope you do too.

So there's this guy named Lee Weaver who has decided to run for governor in Texas. And he's just a normal guy, not a polished politician, and he this to say about his candidacy, "Turns out nothing clears your head quite like transplanting an enormously complicated idea from the safety and privacy of your own mind into the unforgiving wild west of the public square."
That quote hit home with me, because it's a big part of why I wanted to start this podcast. I wanted to take the running dialog inside my head and speak it out loud, because it does take a different shape as soon as you do. You realize that some things that bounce around in your own mind sound so easily, sound ridiculous when you try to speak it.

Which brings me to Tony Nash. Tony and I are friends, kind of at the professional level. I knew who he was because he is a frequent guest on Bloomberg, CNBC, BBC etc., here in Asia. He's an economist and has his own company. Then it so happened that I started working at a company in a small office and Tony rented the room down the hall. So I saw him on a somewhat daily basis for about a year.  So obviously we got to know each other pretty well. And Tony, as you’ll hear in this conversation, has some different political views than I do.  He’s a Republican and, well, you’ll hear him describe it himself.  But first and foremost he’s a very nice and friendly guy.

Even though I met him and got to know him in Singapore, he’s also from North Texas and grew up in the Hurst, Euless, Bedford area…small world.

The year that I was working there with him, happened to overlap with the 2016 presidential campaign.  You can imagine as Trump was gaining in the polls, Tony was happily ribbing me, “are you ready for Trump as the next president?”  I was amused and bemused and also as the timing would have it, I was at work during normal working hours, when the election was eventually called for Trump.  I think Tony could sense he was the only one in a fairly wide radius who was happy about the result.  I give him credit, he didn’t gloat and I think he knew that myself and others needed some space.  But anyhow, that’s all in the past now…here’s my conversation with Tony Nash.

 

Lisa Rawlinson is making art again after a twenty-year break.  That’s one of the reasons I wanted to catch up with her.  When I met her, she was one of the many talented artists in the Good/Bad Art Collective in Denton, Texas in the 90s.  During the twenty-year break, Lisa did stuff like get married, have kids, get divorced, have a career in publishing, you know, life.

Then a few years ago I noticed that she was sharing a ton of new and interesting artwork on social media and it really struck me that she was another person out there struggling to express herself in this new reality we all share.

I’ve uploaded some of Lisa’s artworks on to this podcast’s facebook page or you can find her work at lisarawnlinsonart.com  (and I'll paste a few below) Whichever way, I suggest you take a look at some of her paintings while you listen to this if you can, I think it will make it more enjoyable.

Note: There's one part where Lisa and I were wondering if gravitational waves could travel faster than the speed of light.  I googled it.  It seems the answer is no, but there are other factors that can cause light to reach us slower than the gravitational waves.

I was really excited to talk to Kristi Williams.  Kristi is super cool and she has a super cool husband and a super cool kid.  I’m friends with her on Facebook, and I feel like I know her, but I really don’t.  Kristi is married to Marc who was friends with my wife, Jen, first.  I know Marc pretty well, but I think I had only spoken to Kristi at her wedding, many years ago.  Until now anyways.

Kristi, or should I say Dr. Williams, is a real-life family demographer, medical sociologist and college professor.   She’s responsible for papers and studies with titles like “Promoting marriage among single mothers: An ineffective weapon in the war on poverty?” and “You Make Me Sick: Marital Quality and Health Over the Life Course.”  I love this kind of stuff and am so impressed by the academics who do it.

She’s also a Senior Scholar at the Council on Contemporary Families, , and Editor of Journal of Marriage and Family.

It was a pleasure to chat with her.

Note: She mentions this book during the conversation:

Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

My friend Larry Rigdon and I go way back.  I’m talking “Wonder Years” back.  We went to the same elementary (primary) school and we were good friends during those formative “Stand By Me” years  from 12 to 16.  In fact, as you’ll hear in this conversation, 16 was kind of a hard cut-off point, because that was the year Larry had to move away from Plano, where we grew up.  He never got to finish high school with our class of friends.  It just so happened that I called Larry when he was feeling nostalgic and had been looking at YouTube videos and Google Maps and stuff of the places he grew up, so that really colors this conversation.

Plano is a suburb of Dallas, Texas.

According to Wikipedia: The city's population was 269,776 at the 2010 census, making it the ninth most populous city in the state of Texas  The city is an affluent hub for many corporate headquarters such,  Dell Services,  Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Ericsson, Frito-Lay, HP Enterprise Services, Huawei, J. C. Penney, Pizza Hut,  Tech Mahindra Americas Inc and Toyota Motor North America, Inc..

In 1983 it was dubbed “The Suicide Capital of America,” as nine suicides among Plano high schoolers drew national attention to the town

There was also an epidemic of heroin abuse among young people in the 1990s.

In his book, “It’s Not About the Bike” Disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, who grew up in Plano, described the city this way:

“It was the quintessential American suburb, with strip malls, perfect grid streets, and faux-antebellum country clubs in between empty brown wasted fields.  It was populated by guys in golf shirts and Sansabelt pants, and women in bright fake gold jewelry, and alienated teenagers. Nothing there was old, nothing real. To me, there was something soul-deadened about the place…”  “It’s home to Plano East High School, one of the largest and most football-crazed high schools in the state…”  “In Plano, Texas, if you weren’t a football player you didn’t exist, and if you weren’t upper middle class, you might as well not exist either.”

I’m not saying Lance’s description is the only way to describe Plano, and we all know he has a rocky relationship with truth, but it gives you a taste.

But it was also just the neighborhoods where Larry and I grew up.

So that’s the background, now on to Larry Rigdon.

Jess Herbst is someone you may have heard about.  Or you may have heard about the “first openly transgender mayor in Texas as well as the first openly transgender elected official in Texas” that’s Jess, and she has been getting a lot of press, especially in her role as an “accidental activist” for LGBTQ rights.

I first met Jess as Jeff Herbst back in the late 90s.  We were professional colleagues.  I was an editor and also in charge of all the video equipment at ZEE TV, the Indian Satellite Network’s US Headquarters in Arlington Texas.  Whenever I had a technical problem I couldn’t solve on my own, I would call Herbst, the smartest, most logical video and software engineer I’ve ever met.  After we did all the troubleshooting, we would invariably end up chatting about who-knows-what for an extra hour or so and became quite friendly.  And since I had a lot of technical problems we met fairly often.

Flash forward about twenty years, and we reconnect on Facebook, and then last year I notice, Jeff has become Jess, and she’s also entered politics.

Kyle Reynolds is one of the nicest people you would ever want to meet.  I met him years ago when he worked at Half Price Books and Records in the Dallas area. He’s always been a musician and creative person.  You may have heard about an event he organized called the Open Carry Guitar Rally, which was a light-hearted response to Texas gun activists.  He also went off and started an online political cartoon called The End Times found at slugnuts.com and more recently launched the Slugnuts Radio Hour Podcast.