Some folks from Tampa grow up to be a lot of things, some of them grow up to start podcasts about terrible books, lampooning them with a brilliant sense of humor and never taking themselves too seriously. And for those of us who are inclined to read "good" things, these gentle souls are your bodyguards of taste, taking a cerebral bullet for all of us. That's what I Don't Even Own a Television does, for your listening pleasure. IDEOATV is comprised of hosts J.W. Friedman and Chris Collision, your brave guides to the world of terrible literature.
For all those of you who aren't caught up with fan letters and some of the deepest lore behind our intrepid podcasters, this interview should get you caught up and ready to jump in.
BR: What was the genesis for IDEOATV? What made you decide to start the podcast?
JW Friedman: I felt like there were a thousand podcasts out there about watching movies that aren't good, and try to be funny about them. But at the time I didn't hear anyone talking about books in a voice that I found interesting...as far as people joking around there were sparse pickings. It was a chance to fill a niche and make jingles and goof around. I would say the main thing was definitely that I just enjoyed reading silly and bad stuff.
Now Chris, when did you come on board full time?
Chris Collision: As a listener, I was there since day one, which I take pride in, at one point I knew Jay was looking for guests so I shot him an email and we did an episode. It went well, we had a good time we hit it off, and I think that was around episode 20, and I think I came on board officially at around episode 28. So yeah, quite a few later. But he hasn't managed to kick me off an episode since!
Now JW, you have a history with Florida. Specifically the other "bay area" — tell me about your time growing up in Florida.
JW: I was born in Cape Canaveral. And I grew up in the Satellite Beach area, and I ended up moving to Bradenton during my teen years. And that's where I got into playing with bands and the punk scene. And I was up in the Ybor area playing and going to shows. Like when Blue Chair and The Ritz were still around. I ended up moving to Orlando before moving here. But my formative teenage years were spent in Tampa being a weird punk rock kid.
You were, of course, involved with music and it shows in the podcast with the jingles, what was the music scene like in Tampa during that time?
JW: Death metal. Chuck from Death had passed away relatively recently, so Death was huge. I was more into the hardcore scene, so the big bands at the time were Assuck, Scrog, it was a very metal, metal time for Tampa for sure. I remember the Brass Mug well, I saw Nasty Savage there and the lead singer wrestled a TV set on stage!
Chris, did you ever visit Florida?
CC: I have not yet. It's been on the list for a long time. But every time I moved I moved north and west, only really broke that streak with the last move when I came down to Oakland from Portland, it was either that or Alaska of course.
JW, in an alternate reality where you still live in Tampa Bay Jay, what would the podcast be like now?
JW: It would probably be about metal, to be honest! Because I would have hung out with the same people and kept on doing the same things because I had a really good thing going. Probably pretty similar, though. A lot of it is just who I am and I've been a reader since I was very young and I've always been interested in broadcasting. It would have happened no matter what.
Chris, it would be unfair to leave you out, tell us about your time growing up, what had the biggest influence on you?
CC: Good question! I sort of did 10 to 12 years in a couple different spots, born in Kansas...did twelve years in and around Denver, Colorado, and a couple more in Portland and around eight in Oakland. All of those had big influences on me. I became a legal adult in Denver! So Denver was a big influence in how isolated it is, if you look at a map it's eight hours in any direction to a city of comparable size...What that really means is that no band ever plays Denver! It's kind of a weird isolated little place and introduced me to the concept of the big local band, which I found actually exists everywhere.
Do you guys have any warm up routines for your podcasting? You know, gargling honey or flexing a copy of Atlas Shrugged over your knee?
JW: It's sad to admit but this is true. We usually stand outside on the porch while I smoke a cigarette and Collision puts up with that. We try to hash out what we're gonna talk about, and I usually make it through a beer before we start.
CC: I think it's a tiny bit more organized than that but that's really the gist of it. There's still rituals.
JW: We try to know what the thrust of the conversation is gonna be...both of us show up with a ton of notes!
CC: J.W. lives at the top of a hill, so I listen to some bad power metal as I make the climb and that kind of fires me up for the show.
You guys gave birth to one of my favorite phrases "weed dads" and "weed sons" where did you guys pick up/develop the phrase?
JW: Where did that start? I think I just said it once and kind of stuck with it. It's kind of an archetype and I'll admit to having a weird, unhealthy interest in it. I had a whole musical project about "cool dads". So it's a composite character in my mind of various friend's fathers growing up, you know the type, the "it's OK if you want to have some beers with your friends at the house at least you won't get in trouble! Hey, son you ever smoked weed?" I feel like that may be a Florida-ish experience in it of itself! It's the kind of flip flop wearing dad you know? Listens to Jimmy Buffet a lot.
What is the most money you guys have ever had to spend to review a book for the show?
JW: HAHA! Collision, you take this one.
CC: Well that would be fifty big banging dollars for Sass Girls X. Which is something our guest K. Thor Jensen brought to our attention...it was a self-published book, which is not what we would usually do but its super rare and people gotta know about it because no one would otherwise. The second most expensive might have been DooM, just because the book was super cheap, but we needed it right then because we were lagging. So we did the thing where we paid a penny for the book and paid $29.00 for shipping.
JW: And had to meet at a bar to hand off a copy of the novelization of the video game DooM.
CC: So if you see shady men engaging in weird transactions in a bar, it might not be drugs, it might be some of the worst books ever written!
Have there been any books you absolutely refused to cover, asides from self-published material? Why?
JW: Specifically I could think of a few but just in general... and not to sound pompous here, we generally try to avoid things that don't need two straight guys making fun of them on the internet, if that makes sense. Stuff people have suggested like 50 Shades of Gray. Our opinions on that are completely irrelevant...we try to not be jerk guys on the internet talking about stuff that's outside our realm of existence. Stuff that's specifically Young Adult, like "oh wow this isn't sophisticated." Of course not, it's Young Adult.
CC: Uh yeah just a much more shallow thing to add nothing above 400 pages thanks...hate to be that guy but I'm a slow-ass reader!
JW: What was the book that broke us in that? It might have been before you were on the show but I ended up reading a six hundred page book and I was just like, this is too much work!
Have you ever had any interactions with the authors of the books you've covered ?
JW: I've been blocked preemptively on Twitter. I know Ernest Cline blocked me, somehow he must have gotten wind about the show, I don't know.
CC: I saw an ad pop up for one of the Pines books by Blake Crouch, and I was mean to the ad for it, and Blake Crouch fired back at me!
JW: What's weird is they are two of the most successful authors we've discussed on the show!
Do you ever take a look at any of your reviews for the show on iTunes? If so, what are your thoughts? Do you feel any of the lower ratings could actually be some of the authors/fans of said authors?
JW: I will admit that I have a terminally thin skin when it comes to reading reviews which is probably a common theme among people who do criticism ironically. So Collision looks at those because I had read one where the person said I had an annoying laugh and it upset me for two days!
CC: Yeah the only stuff that I see is just the stuff that comes in.
JW: Yeah, fuck the haters ya know?
CC: I don't want to hijack this but there is a tendency in the world right now to respond to a thing you like as if a personal attack has been made. And some of the books we have taken on are particularly prone to that I think.
JW: Yeah that's a really good point...Ernest Cline is a good example of that...you can't appreciate things anymore you have to identify with it, it's frustrating.
What are your thoughts on Patreon? How has it influenced your capabilities as podcasters?
JW: It's been great so far, the service itself, I'm kind of ambivalent about as I don't know if there's other services for it, but that kind of patronage based crowdfunding is awesome. The amount of support we've gotten in such a short amount of time has floored me...it's helping us a lot for sure because before that our only real potential for income was taking ads.
CC: I think it's great because we come at things with a desire to support the people making stuff we like. And over the last 10 years or so that's gotten hard because as podcasters we're not making physical artifacts...Patreon has made it really easy.
JW:It's comparable to Bandcamp for musicians... and the ongoing donorship feels pretty neat, it's like NPR's pledge drive and hopefully our audience feels a larger part of it.
Are there any podcasts that had an influence significant or otherwise on the pacing, style, or design of IDEOATV?
JW: For sure The Flop House one of the seminal bad movie podcasts on the internet. Just a group of funny guys with distinctive personalities who are whip smart and really knowledgeable about what they talk about.
CC: Yeah that was a big influence, obviously Mystery Science Theater 3000. I'm kind of a The Best Show With Tom Scharpling obsessive. That's been a huge influence on me just in terms of how long they're willing to go for a payoff.
JW: I would also say too, and this applies to me more than Collision, but anyone in this day and age who does a podcast and doesn't say Marc Maron is lying. His show was accessible and it gave you the same vibe of hearing a cool punk record. You felt like you could do your own podcast.
Let's talk music, JW who is primarily responsible for the interlude jingles during IDEOATV? How were they written or conceived?
JW: That's pretty much me. I've been in bands my whole life with fair to middling success, but the closest thing to a popular band I was in was in Orlando, and I've always been interested in commercial jingles, which is a weird world that's impossible to find a job in, so when I started the show I knew this was an opportunity where I could do that for myself. Every one of those jingles comes from the concept of "we have a segment, we need a theme" and I just come up with some genre pastiche that goes with it. What goes into making your podcast? How do you decide what book to read and how do you schedule it?
CC: I have one thing that works and I've fooled around with a couple of things that don't, and what works is a big-ass spreadsheet and as people recommend things, whether it be through email or Twitter, I'll put them all in the spreadsheet. We talk about guests we've had before or would like to have, and then it's a juggling act. We don't want to do the same type of book too many times in a row. Because you know Jay and I could bang out a shitty rock memoir every two weeks.
JW: Yeah, if we weren't paying attention to that we would spend all of our time doing nothing about wrestler biographies and rock memoirs! It's easy to fall into repetition.
What is the definitive factor in what makes a book "bad"? Does the narrative get to you first, or the prose?
CC: I will say that a lot of people definitely think of this as a bad prose fiction podcast, which is just a whole bunch of assumptions that I don't think are true; a book doesn't have to have bad prose to be bad. The stuff that drives me the most nuts are the kind of books where only one person exists in the book, and it's a thinly-veiled version of the author if that makes sense. Even worse the kind of wish fulfillment that's kind of a sick will to power, those are the ones that creep me out the most and drive me up a wall.
JW: Yeah I kind of agree, bad prose I kind of find charming, I think that's one of the reasons why I started the podcast, because yeah, it makes me giggle out loud at times if a sentence is phrased the right way. What pushes me over the edge is very similar to what Chris described, a very obvious protagonist based on the author, or a single focus book where all other characters are props, and a small threshold for introspective "Jonathan Franzen" styled, self-absorbed "I'm going to tell you about what this character is thinking rather than what they are doing". That passive approach drives me crazy.
Are there any books that have earned the IDEOTV seal of awesomely bad approval?
CC: For me so far it almost has to be Night of the Crabs, I've been ending episodes with 'Ride the Crab" since we did that. It's such a crazy bonkers experience.
JW: I'm gonna second that. Night of the Crabs for sure.
E-readers versus print copies, the eternal debate. Your thoughts?
JW: I love my e-reader for this show because no one knows what I'm reading in public, and that's the long and short of it!
CC: Yeah that's an underrated danger of doing stuff like this in public. I was trying to read a printed out PDF of Money Pizza Respect at a bar, a very crowded bar, and most of that book is pictures, pictures of a mostly naked not particularly attractive man. Yeah, so I like the e-reader for that reason and because I don't have a shitty artifact cluttering my room.
Are there any terrible podcast trends?
JW: Seven minutes of ads at the beginning of a show. I'm not talking about anyone in particular here, I know you gotta pay the bills, but maybe spread that shit out a little bit.
CC: I'm just gonna say it, the trend that bothers me the most is when two people who don't know anything about their subject get together and just sort of shoot the breeze for a really long time with no editing, no discipline, and no apparent topic. It drives me little nuts. Put the work in!
JW: Yeah one thing that bugs me a lot, ever since Worst Idea Of All Time came out, which is an incredible podcast don't get me wrong, which is where they review the same movie every week for a year, and gradually go crazy, but it started a trend where people look at Movie X minute by minute or TV Show X episode by episode, it requires this level of obsession with one particular thing where I can't even listen to it let alone think of making it.
CC: It feels gimmicky.
You guys always have such awesome recommendations at the end of each episode, any current recommendations?
JW: Usually we have time to prepare for this! I know, I'll look at what's on my desk right now. I recommend the music of a Polish composer named Andrzej Korzynski. Finders Keepers records have put out a couple different compilations of some of the work he did...he writes some really cool funky stuff that's the middle ground between Ennio Morricone and Galt MacDermot. That's my recommendation!
CC: I'm going to do a similar thing but I'm going to try to keep it to the theme of interviews, and I'm going to recommend two essays that are built around interviews in a really interesting way, from Joan Didion's collection The White Album. Those essays are "Holy Water" and "Many Mansions" which are about the interesting topics of how to move water around California and where Nancy Reagan lived when Ronald Reagan was the governor of California.
Finally, a question about beer. If I ended up in San Francisco and I could only get one beer at one local craft brewery, which one should I get?
CC: This ones all Jay.
JW: Oh man! I'm gonna push it here, but I'm gonna say Russian River Brewery...they make Blind Pig IPA, which you can find at every bar in San Francisco.
CC: Or another good local beer, Tecate!
Go check out IDEOTV for some of the best podcasting around.
