Into the COLAverse – Episode 19: Randy Lewis

[00:00:00] Frederick: Welcome to Into the Culver, a podcast that takes us on the unique journeys of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Join me your host, Frederick Luis Salma, as we learn of the many ways that our faculty and their cutting edge work is transforming the world today. Man, it’s my like, huge honor to be here with Randy Lewis, professor and chair American Studies at UT Austin.

[00:00:30] Frederick: Welcome Randy.

[00:00:32] Randy: Thank you for having me. This is an honor.

[00:00:34] Frederick: So, oh man, you have like, well first of all you are UT Austin, like deep, deep, deep, right. Um, but before we get into that, I wanted to ask you like, you know, how. From what I can tell you, this grew up in New Jersey. Is that right? Did I get that right?

[00:00:56] Frederick: Yeah. So how, from, so I know you got roots in East Texas, you’ve got Anglo Irish immigrant background, you’ve got, you know, you can go way back to the thir 1830s with family, um, in East Texas. But how did you, first of all New Jersey get back to Texas? And secondly, like how did it lead you into degrees in first?

[00:01:24] Frederick: You know, classics and history to American Studies. And then finally to like the cool work that you’re doing today across Native American studies, film studies, anthropology, media studies, cultural history, American studies.

[00:01:38] Randy: Well, thank you for the question. I mean, I, um, I came from a family where there were new academics.

[00:01:45] Randy: No one had been to college. I didn’t know anyone who had been to college other than my school teachers. So it was a very blue collar family, both in East Texas where my mom’s from at the end of a dirt road. Way, way, way behind the, uh, pine curtain, as they say in um, Santa Augustine County. And on my dad’s side, I mean comically, it’s like, it is like a sitcom from the seventies cuz it’s like this split family.

[00:02:12] Randy: My dad’s the Brooklyn guy who says Dems and Dos and . So I’m the product of these very different parents and. And going between these two locations was really the kind of first American studies project I had, which was just trying to understand, you know, different ways of, of being in these different regions.

[00:02:31] Randy: And the fact that my mom inherited a little bit of land from her dad, who was a logger. In East Texas and on that land there was a little mobile home that in 1985, allowed me to go from, from Catholic school of New Jersey to in-state tuition in here in Austin. So it was a miracle that, you know, back in the day when you could live in Hyde Park for $200 a month, and it was kind of slacker Austin bubbling up into its, you know, prime days in the late eighties and early nineties.

[00:03:04] Randy: And the tuition bill would come and it would be $280. And so it was a great time to come to UT and experiment, and that’s how I find myself taking classes, um, in the American Studies Department from, from some really incredible people. I graduated in three years in undergrad. I wasn’t a great student. I was a little bit bored, but when I got into grad school, um, it was almost like an extension of the undergrad work I shouldn’t have been paying attention to.

[00:03:32] Randy: But American Studies grad school was so fascinating, you know, it was like, uh, you know, we’re reading Louis Armstrong’s, um, memoir and, and. That was my way into understanding New Orleans, you know, when I was 22 and starting grad school. Stuff like that was way more interesting to me than what I had been doing as an undergrad.

[00:03:51] Randy: And I just sort of, I can’t say I flourished originally, you know, but I definitely was excited by it. Mm-hmm. ,

[00:03:59] Frederick: you also somewhere along the way picked up and played the mandolin, piano, accordion, and guitar.

[00:04:10] Randy: Yeah, I play like eight instruments and that’s been a . You know, I, I feel like, um, It’s taken a long time for me to figure out how to be my full self within academia.

[00:04:21] Randy: Um, and early on I think I was trying to conform to what I imagined the professor Kingsfield paper chase model of traditional academia was. But I’ve figured out that really what makes me, um, different and hopefully valuable within this, this, this strange landscape of higher ed is the fact that I have. A kind of, um, a foot in the art world, a foot in video production, or two feet in video production lately.

[00:04:48] Randy: And, and then as a musician. So the music that I’ve played going back almost 40 years now, I mean a lot of the music now ends up in soundtracks in the documentaries that I do, um, that are an extension of my American Studies work. Mm-hmm.

[00:05:07] Frederick: so, W I mean, American studies obviously for you was a good fit because of its allow, you know, the freedom of interdisciplinary learning and also teaching.

[00:05:20] Frederick: Um, is there a way that you see your own kind of intervention already into a space that’s very interdisciplinary? I mean, in other words, like, It’s, I feel like you’ve also expanded the discipline itself.

[00:05:39] Randy: I think, yeah, definitely trying to and trying to create space for more experimentation. Um, and just sort of nibbling away at the edges.

[00:05:49] Randy: Um, where I think the most interesting things are happening in, I do respect the kind of core traditional form of academic work, but sometimes for me, and maybe it’s cuz my background, you know, traditional academic events and conferences can feel like I’m at like a, a, a convention for the, like State Farm insurance or something.

[00:06:10] Randy: There’s a kind of real corporate dryness to it. Um, and I just feel like what are the ways that I can pivot those kinds of, uh, those forms of knowledge and take them to broader publics or put them in other forms that are not traditional forms. And so that’s where, you know, the videos and the other public facing work I’m from.

[00:06:34] Frederick: Mm-hmm. , Randy, just for some of us that might not be familiar, Um, I don’t know. The shorter, longer history of American Studies is, uh, kind of off the cuff. Could you give us, could you give us the elevator version of, you know, American Studies?

[00:06:54] Randy: Yeah, that’s my pleasure. You know, cuz I’m chair now and I’ve been chair for what, five over the last six years I think.

[00:07:01] Randy: Um, and, and this department at the University of Texas is one of the, the great. You know, truly like venerable departments in the Field of America studies, which doesn’t exist at every university. And so I do find myself, you know, needing to explain it to folks. There are also incoming students who don’t have it in their high school, but then take classes with some of my colleagues and say, this is totally fascinating.

[00:07:26] Randy: So it emerges. Well, it’s coming up on a century, you know, uh, ago it emerges in the 1930s as a new way of, of thinking about what, what could be salvaged in, uh, from what, what was happening during the depression in terms of understanding America as it seemed to be collapsing in the 1930s. And then it. It takes on different forms and it becomes in the late 20th century of a home for ethnic studies.

[00:07:57] Randy: That’s very important, um, and, and queer studies in the 21st century. And it’s continued to evolve as a place where we do this kind of. Connection between different bodies of knowledge and that used to make us quite, uh, special , well, not as much anymore because as you know, in English departments and other departments that kind of introduced my work is really pretty common now.

[00:08:22] Randy: So, um, we found ourselves almost in a kind of intellectual mainstream in that regard. So that’s part of why I keep pushing towards more experimental forms of work. I’m like, well, what can we offer that is different? Um, how can we connect with, you know, the art world to the, the world of cinema and take scholarship into new places?

[00:08:45] Frederick: Mm-hmm. is American. American must be more broadly conceived too today, right? As maybe the Americas, uh, CA Canada, the global south. I don’t know.

[00:09:01] Randy: Yes, most, most definitely. Because I think originally it would’ve been a very narrow United States and vision of this kind of project and, and a kind of cultural rehabilitation.

[00:09:15] Randy: And even in the Cold War there were some moments of like, you know, very nationalistic versions of American studies. Although I think the main root of it was always, You know, like thoughtfully critical. Um, but yes, nowadays it’s definitely a very transnational endeavor that that is pretty capacious in how it thinks about, you know, America and Kothi marks

[00:09:38] Frederick: in your first, uh, in your latest book, cuz you’ve actually, you’ve written many, uh, and published many, um, under surveillance 2017 with University of Texas Press.

[00:09:51] Frederick: You at once look at, you know, surveillance technology and address, you know, all of the kind of weariness or weirdness around that. All of our skepticism. Um, as a kind of panopticon, I know you bring in Jeremy Bentham and his concepts there, but you also surprisingly kind of ask us to think of it from a different side of the table or a different angle, and you have the phn, opticon, uh, et cetera.

[00:10:25] Frederick: Can you talk a little bit about that? This was published in 2017, so clearly like the research done for that, you know, came earlier than that. Are you still thinking of surveillance in the same ways?

[00:10:39] Randy: Yeah, thank you. That’s a great question. The fan Opticon was a coinage of mine that is trying, well, trying to describe the ways in which that old model of, you know, Orwell, Benham, Fuko of this very gray, grim landscape of constant surveillance.

[00:11:00] Randy: Um, it’s definitely a real thing and that’s definitely a big part of what’s happening and, and in this country or in places like China with the social credit scores, et cetera. But I was trying to point to another side of it, which is a kind of seduction into the surveillance economy that. Happens through fun and entertainment and the pleasure of playing with apps that let us surveil things.

[00:11:25] Randy: Um, the pleasure of watching YouTube videos of dash cam footage, uh, of car crashes and stuff from Russia, um, which is a, was just a big subgenre on YouTube that the pH opticon men is a way in which we’re kind. Um, we let our guard down a little bit and get brought into this, this surveillance process in a way that seems harmless.

[00:11:49] Randy: Um, and so it was just another way of trying to think about how we’re sucked into this thing that, um, you know, scholars really think now this surveillance. Economy or, or what one calls surveillance. Capitalism is like the big, um, financial and cultural driving force in this century that everything else has been exploited, harvested, monetized, you know, from the trees to the fisheries, to the coal mines.

[00:12:18] Randy: And the thing that’s left is our interiority, you know, like. Behavior, what patterns, what desires, what buying patterns ultimately, or what risks I pose to the state or not. Um, that’s where the ultimate value in the decades ahead lies in the, the answer. The second part of your question, I mean, in the last couple years since the book came out, I just, I do feel a kind of despair about how.

[00:12:49] Randy: The surveillance systems just increase and expand and get better and more subtle, and it becomes more and more difficult to find a place that is outside of their purview. And, you know, so is one of the, the CEO O of Sun, um, or, or one of the big tech companies in 2001 said, privacy is dead. Get over it. And I just think we’ve gone, gone pretty far down that road without fully realizing it.

[00:13:18] Randy: And that’s what worries me, .

[00:13:21] Frederick: Yeah. I mean, on a, I remember on a really basic level, I remember a long ti, you know, a while back, um, and in places like Mexico City and in the United States, of course, where you would have these. Gated communities for me, that was really, I, I didn’t understand them. You know, of course growing up in rural Northern California where most of us were pretty poor.

[00:13:50] Frederick: Um, and then driving into, you know, later on, um, in college learning about these gated communities where you had cameras that were, um, directed out to see who, who was coming up to the gates. Um, but then, uh, for the first time thinking that who is the actual kind of prisoner here? , you know, um, and, uh, I don’t know, right?

[00:14:19] Frederick: I mean, of course we’ve come a long way since then, but it seems like you know, these people that. Were obviously feeling threatened by the world and needed to see everything that was kind of coming to their walls. And then you start thinking about, well, gosh, like yeah, who is in fact imprisoned in this kind of situation?

[00:14:41] Frederick: Um, now I have no idea With all of the data collecting, I mean the selfie recognitions, the all whatever, all that stuff.

[00:14:51] Randy: I hear you. And that’s like, I think the way you put that, that kind of, um, like. Common sense assessment of like, who is this for? Why are we doing this? I think ultimately those are the only questions I’m ever really asking in my work.

[00:15:05] Randy: It’s just they’re basic questions about like, is this good for society? Who is this benefiting? Um, what kind of hidden harms are in these systems or in these, these environments, and. And what possibilities for OPE and, um, you know, maximizing liberty going ahead for everyone exist. So,

[00:15:29] Frederick: Yeah, absolutely. Let me ask you while we’re on that topic, and then I want to get us back to your really important work, uh, scholarly work on making or helping make visible an indigenous film industry and archive.

[00:15:47] Frederick: Um, but before we turn to that, While we’re sort of in the deep despair of, you know, today, , um, Austin, you know, and I know that this is an important part of, um, you know, the end of Austin very important project that you created with your graduate students. And there’s a, there’s one of the video essays where you talk about Lone star la right.

[00:16:12] Frederick: Austin becoming that, but there’s also an essay by Rodrigo Sal, Lido Mo, who talks about homeless. So I, I’m, I’m not, I don’t, I’m not trying to put you in the position of like, City planner or you know, politician on here, but just as a kind of a humanist and someone who lives in Austin, like, what are we, how, how should we think our way through this?

[00:16:42] Frederick: And is there some, a path, an easier path to think our way through this?

[00:16:49] Randy: Yeah, the, the questions about Austin really fascinate me and, um, haunt me. Um, my parents met here in 1962 and then coincidentally ended up buying a house that’s about six blocks where they from, where they got married, , the, the loops that we go in without even realizing it.

[00:17:07] Randy: I think I’m living this very self-directed different life, but I’m just back to where my parents started . So on. Um, You know, they wanted to raise me here because they felt like it was a really ideal city in the sixties and it just, it didn’t happen. And I ended up being raised on the east coast. Um, and then I got back here as soon as I could when I was 18.

[00:17:27] Randy: And Austin in the eighties was amazing in a lot of ways because of the low cost with the high creativity created largely by the university. And a lot of people just wanted to hang around here. And, um, so it just made it feel like there was this like little renaissance of. Culture, uh, subcultures, punk rock, you know, cinema, Richard Linkletter and people like that.

[00:17:54] Randy: Now, Austin has become this like glitzy telos at that, you know, more real estate value has been added here than any other city. More population growth here than any other American city, um, in the last 10 years. And it’s just, um, it’s become, I think we’ve reached a kind of jumping the shark moment, unfortunately, where the golden, you know, rhetoric, the hype around Austin peaked sometime just before the pandemic and then I don’t know what’s, what’s happened.

[00:18:27] Randy: But we’ve gotten a few articles, including a very high profile one in the New Yorker by Lawrence Bright two weeks ago that, you know, suggests that Austin’s really kind. You know, run into some sort of wall of rapid growth and identity loss and loss of diversity in important ways. Um, so it’s something I’m thinking about a lot.

[00:18:53] Randy: The America Studies program, uh, now, or department, I should say now also administers the Urban Studies major, which is a hundred plus. Majors, I teach courses on cities. The End of Austin Project has always been asking questions about what’s the city becoming the project. I just started with, um, my colleague in anthropology, Craig Campbell is called, um, the Giga Cities Collective.

[00:19:17] Randy: And we’re a small group of scholars looking at Tesla, Elon Musk. I mean, the fact that the richest person in the world was here, uh, creating this factory that. Unbelievable scale. Um, Producing, you know, sort of like we’re, we’re at the center of this new tech economy in a lot of ways, but what does it mean for Austin and how will it change us?

[00:19:40] Randy: I mean, those are the questions that are animating the Tesla project for me. So in the next year or two, hopefully we’ll have, start to have some answers and we’re doing comparative work in Berlin and hopefully Monterey, Mexico with the Gigafactory that’s gonna emerge there. So we can figure out, you know, how, how these.

[00:19:59] Randy: What are, what are Gigas cities and what does it mean that Austin’s becoming this musk? , um, dominated Giga city. So I’m thinking about this stuff all the time and often in really emotional ways too. Like the, I I try not to fall into the nostalgia. Um, that is easy to feel about, you know, whatever you experienced when you were 22

[00:20:22] Randy: But I do miss that side of Austin when you could drive down to burn Springs and park up close and walk right in pretty much any day of the year without the traffic, without the kind of, um, You know, overcrowding that we now experience in this city. So we do feel like we’re losing our unique identity and that we’re becoming no different than any the other Sunbelt cities and that we’re taking on a lot of the personality of places like la uh, in some quarters.

[00:20:49] Randy: And, and that’s fine for some folks, but that’s not why I came here, and it won’t keep me here if it keeps going like that.

[00:20:57] Frederick: And of course, you know, one of the co kind of the collateral damage in all of this is the homeless population, the impossibility for people to afford, you know, for affordable housing.

[00:21:09] Frederick: Is there, in your, in your work, I know that you did some work with Oslo, um, as a kind of urban studies project, and it sounds like you’re developing a comparative giga city project. Um, are, are you seeing. Other cities outside of the United States that have solutions that are, you know, things that we need to be paying attention to.

[00:21:35] Randy: I haven’t, I haven’t addressed, I’m, I’m writing a book now called Buer Land that has an essay about Austin and, and homelessness, uh, because it’s a really thorny issue here, and it was a thorny issue when I got here in 1985, and it feels like. We’ve never addressed it appropriately. Um, I took a kind of oblique look at it in a film that I just finished.

[00:22:00] Randy: It’s a short documentary called Psychedelic Cities, which may not sound like it’s about homelessness, but it’s a comparison of Vancouver and the legalization of psilocybin there. So they have dispensaries where people can get magic mushrooms and the keta. Clinics in Austin and Ketamine, and these are both used for therapeutic but also potentially recreational psychedelic experiences.

[00:22:26] Randy: And when I was researching it in Vancouver last summer, and that’s an amazing city. You’re walking around, you think this is the most perfect city you’ve ever been to. And then you fall into this center of it, uh, Hastings, um, street, and there’s this. Like a homeless city based on fentanyl and um, heroin addiction.

[00:22:46] Randy: That is beyond anything that I’ve ever seen. And, and it’s un unbelievable, but it’s a lot because it’s the one place in Canada where you can survive a winter in an urban environment. So a lot of people come from other cities and then they just live on these sidewalks in this, this like very mad max kind of world.

[00:23:06] Randy: Is incredibly difficult to survive. And despite, you know, Vancouver having somewhat better weather, um, than the rest of Canada. So I was trying to figure out what’s the relationship between this like psychedelic economy and that’s emerging there and this homeless addiction world. And it turns out there is a relationship, which is that the psychedelics as therapeutics and, and ut has an institute for psychedelic research now in the Dell Medical School.

[00:23:35] Randy: Can treat trauma addiction, um, you know, P T S D, depression, anxiety, and, you know, prohibition has kept us in the United States from figuring out the full therapeutic potential of psychedelics for 50 years since the Nixon administration, um, ban even research on this stuff. And, It may be that there is, maybe that’s like taking a step further back.

[00:24:01] Randy: You know, it’s like, rather, of course it’s important to give people housing, but it’s also important to treat the roots of this kind of displacement that are psychological in nature and help people heal. And that’s I think, one of the most hopeful things in the landscape right now is this emerging psychedelic renaissance.

[00:24:20] Randy: And it does have its wrinkles. It’s not all perfect, but it seems like one area. You know, Austin has a lot to learn actually, because we are still criminalizing, um, uh, psilocybin, which is the psychedelic component of magic. Mushrooms. At the same time, incoherently, I think we have these legal ketamine clinics.

[00:24:44] Randy: It’s like these, the experience is the same virtually, and yet one. Gonna put somebody in prison and the other is a lucrative business that you can run or your, or Blue Forest insurance covers the, the sessions. So it’s very paradoxical how Texas and Austin treat drugs, um, and drug policy. And I think there’s a lot of change that can happen there.

[00:25:11] Randy: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:13] Frederick: in your work generally, Randy, you seek to. Seek a cultural democratizing, um, of. You know, especially in and around, you know, film, documentary, um, cultural production that has historically been kept out or gatekeepers have kept from getting that, the kind of visibility or limelight that we would hope for.

[00:25:45] Frederick: And I’m thinking here about your important work, Navajo talking picture, and in 2012, your book, and then also your book in TW 2006 on the Woman and First Nations tribe. You know, director Alani, OBO sa. So yeah, can you. Tell me a little bit about that work and you know, how it fits in with your bigger kind of idea of yourself and your parts engagement and in, and, um, contribution.

[00:26:18] Randy: Yeah, thank you. That’s a, that’s a great question. It takes me back like 15 years or so, almost 20 years now. I’m really interested in the ways that we can use the media landscape that re inhabit to kind of tell more democratic stories, more inclusive stories. Because it’s something growing up in an era in the 1970s where there was three network TV stations and not much else, it just felt like there was an official state where corporate narrative of kind of everything, and it was really hard to find the alternatives back then.

[00:26:53] Randy: It’s easier now, I suppose with the, with the internet. And so I became fascinated when I, I moved to Oklahoma in, um, the late nineties and I was like, wow, Oklahoma. So many native people here. Um, so many tribes, um, tribal governments here, there’s gonna be a really, this is, I’m gonna turn on the TV in Oklahoma.

[00:27:15] Randy: I’m gonna see, uh, native filmmakers and native video left and right. But I didn’t, and I thought, well, where, where is this happening? And so a lot of it was happening in Canada. Where there was a, a more, there were more support for indigenous media. And so I became fascinated with this phenomenon. And I Ali, um, a Swin is the, the kind of, um, she’s kind of an epic figure within Canadian media.

[00:27:43] Randy: She starts in the sixties, um, at the National Film Board. She’s the first native person to work there. And then she makes these films that are profound challenges. Colonialism and makes a documentary about every year, um, on some really important events, especially in the early nineties. And she’s still alive, still still making films in her mid eighties.

[00:28:09] Randy: So that became completely fascinates me, like, how’s that happening in Canada, but not in the us? How can I get into a taxi cab in Montreal and say, I’m study. And somebody would say, I love her work. Uh, just a regular taxi driver. She’s great. And there’s no native filmmaker in, you know, the year 2005 or whatever in the United States with a similar profile.

[00:28:32] Randy: So what does that say about the United States, I thought, and then the follow-up project to that was about Navajo, the way the Navajo is understood in cinema, the way Navajo Nation is presented in the media, but also how Navajo filmmakers and one in part. Wrestle with all this to, to create their own cinema.

[00:28:52] Randy: And so it was the, so these are some of the first books to focus on native filmmakers. And I still edit a series for the University of Nebraska Press on Indigenous Cinema. So it’s important to me cuz it feels like a very. Um, important intervention among these, what these data filmmakers are doing in expanding our understanding of what has happened on this continent.

[00:29:20] Randy: You also

[00:29:21] Frederick: write and teach on pop music.

[00:29:25] Randy: I have about four or five years ago. I wondered if teaching a co on, on, um, like key songs in American cultural history since World War ii. You know, like Jimmy Hendricks, star Spangled Banner. Um, if teaching a course on music would empty out the joy of music for me as a listener, but also producer of, you know, small scale records and, um, many, many songs.

[00:29:55] Randy: And so, and wasn’t the case at all. I really loved. You know, teaching and talking with undergrads about these songs and they know, they know so much. They have, um, a really different relationship to the history of music than. I’m, I’m 56, so somebody, my generation, it was more like you were in a niche, you know, there were the metal kids and they were the punk rap kids and they’re, um, country music over here.

[00:30:24] Randy: And those people didn’t usually have a lot of overlap. Nowadays, I found they have this very synthetic way of moving through YouTube, or the algorithm pushes them. Um, it’s not always the super deep knowledge, and that’s what the course was trying to provide, like why this song matters or why it is the way it is.

[00:30:45] Randy: But they, they, um, they have this breadth that’s really impressive sometimes. So I, I, I really enjoyed talking to the students about music. Um, and we would just do one song, each class and just really drill down into the cultural history of that artist, that song, how it. How it reflected certain cultural, um, tensions in a particular moment.

[00:31:13] Frederick: Wow. So one song per class or for the

[00:31:16] Randy: whole course? The song each day. So

[00:31:20] Frederick: yeah. Okay. Can you give me an example of, um, I don’t know, just it may, it may, you know, something that just pops to your, into your brain right now? Of, of, of, um, yeah. How you might teach, you know, a song in, in its context and, you know, history and so

[00:31:38] Randy: on.

[00:31:40] Randy: The, um, The best book in the class a lot of times. Well, I mean, some of the, a lot of times it was the Johnny Cash song where it was a, a blonie song. A Divo song. These are things that open up really well because they are already infused with all kinds of cultural critique. Uh, you know, like Divo is basically an art project about devolution.

[00:31:59] Randy: So Divo was really interesting for me to teach. Sometimes the students were kind of like, what the heck? ? But the book that, um, You know, I’ve talked to Music Scholars and I said, what’s the best book to teach undergrads, uh, on, you know, on American music, popular music? And they’re, they said, it’s this book on Celine Dion.

[00:32:22] Randy: Um, in the 33 third series, it’s a little book. Um, and I’m like, oh no, I can’t stand Celine Dion. But sometimes it’s really healthy to teach these things that you don’t personally sit around listening to. And it turns out that Celine Dion’s like a profoundly misunderstood, um, artist and has had these very political moments and suffered, uh, some weird indignities in the press and.

[00:32:49] Randy: Um, so it’s not about like whether her music is good or bad or whatever. It’s about the ways in which you can understand things about her identity, her class background, which is really important that the book Explicates, but also the really weird phenomenon that come through in popular music that if you’re in the book argues that if you’re in Kingston, Jamaica and you’re in a club at three in the morning and Celine Dion comes on, it’s, you probably should leave because this is like serious.

[00:33:18] Randy: Um, gangster music in Kingston, which it’s not in Las Vegas when your aunt and grandma go to see Cel Lane, Gion Cel Down has enormous fan bases in China, for instance. And I’m just like, I knew none of that when I read this book, and so, I always love these things that seem small, like, oh, Celine Dion, how important can that be?

[00:33:39] Randy: I can see how people could roll their eyes. It’s just a song, it’s just a singers. But then, you know, the thing we’ve learned to do in cultural studies is you look through a, a, a portal that’s a small thing like a song, and you look through and you can see this entire landscape that you wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

[00:33:58] Randy: So that, that book is really. Yeah, really.

[00:34:03] Frederick: Um, now I need to go back cuz I’m kind of on the same side of the table as you with, um, her music. But, um, Okay. As we start to wind this down, I’ve gotta ask you, um, you know, w you wrote about the Dark Night. I teach, you know, I teach race, media, um, you know, comics, all of that good stuff, and what, and the American Empire.

[00:34:33] Frederick: Tell me, what’s the take away from your Dark Night work?

[00:34:40] Randy: That, that, that was a piece I wrote like, I don’t know, like 12 years ago or more now. And it was kind of this, um, argument that the Heath Ledger joker was a kind of, uh, chaos agent that anarchist figure that, which is obvious if you watch the film, but that we really, as the audience, are encouraged to identify with that because we have this kind of, Unstated usually dissatisfaction with the status quo.

[00:35:10] Randy: And so, you know, XJ, I can ask a question like this somewhere where he says, why is it that we always can, in science fiction movies, we can imagine vividly, beautifully the end of our civilization, the destruction of everything, but we can’t imagine incremental steps to make things better. That, that’s a huge question to me and a really, a really profound one.

[00:35:33] Randy: And I’m very, I, I am quite obsessed with these kind of, um, narratives. I did a, a, um, a film called, um, who Killed the World, which is about Mad Max fans and. It was the only, so far, the only have a YouTube channel. It’s the only one that went viral. I woke up one day and it had a hundred thousand views and I couldn’t understand why.

[00:35:57] Randy: And I still don’t know exactly what it, what caused it to take off, but I went to the Mojave Desert to a kind of burning man at that for the Mad Max Faithful where they create out of nothing, a town, uh, totally different than their home in the suburbs of LA or wherever. 5,000 people for four days create this immersive world where you have to be on in character.

[00:36:22] Randy: You have to look like you’re a part of the Mad Max world. And so that was really fascinating to me that I went thinking it would be kind of a harsh world cuz people are carrying fake guns of the gray real. And then I, what I discovered. And this kind of connects to this, what I was saying about the dark night is that people were their most beautiful selves there in the desert pretending to be at the end of the world.

[00:36:46] Randy: That there was something really liberating about imagining completely different and tribal wild way of life that, that these 5,000 people seemed radiant with, like joy about this experience that I. Anticipating when I got there. So the film tries to capture the ways in which this, um, this beautiful world outside, outside in capitalism, really they are.

[00:37:15] Randy: Um, there’s no money that you can use inside the wasteland. You barter for everything and there’s just, you know, there’s so many elements to it that I found really appealing. Um, it’s not a perfect world, but I love the fact that people can imagine something that is radically different and get deeply invested and shake off the, the doldrums of, you know, just wearing the clothes from get out at the mall and getting in your cubicle at work.

[00:37:46] Randy: You know, like a kind of office space existence that we all , we all struggle with, and to imagine this incredibly. Emancipatory zone of, you know, true creativity in community.

[00:37:59] Frederick: So what I’m hearing is that people like Fred Jameson who like Xek talk about our inability to imagine beyond the extrapolation of our contemporary barbarism should actually go to this event.

[00:38:16] Randy: Everyone should go to Wasteland. If you can stand, uh, dust and wind, , .

[00:38:21] Frederick: Um, speaking of end of days, um, and the optimism that that might bring, what, what’s grabbing your attention now? Um, What’s kind of just shaking, something that’s really shaking you up both in your own work. You mentioned bummer land, but um, I know you’re constantly creating, uh, videos.

[00:38:49] Frederick: Um, uh, you know, Creative, non-fiction and so on Your own work and the work of others, what’s today kind of like really grabbing your attention?

[00:39:01] Randy: Well, I mean, my colleague, um, Katie Stewart just retired and, and she wrote this great. Book called The Hundreds with Lauren Berlin, who died last year. And we were in a writing group, both five or six folks during the pandemic.

[00:39:15] Randy: Um, um, Lauren and a and Ansett Caic who really runs it, and a few others at ut. And it was just that kind of attentiveness and creative forms of like academic engagement with the now. Are really fascinating to me, and that’s what I’m trying to do in this book called Bummer Land, which is mostly done, but I’m having a problem, which is that, um, I’m not identifying the ways forward.

[00:39:43] Randy: I’m only identifying the brick walls and I feel, uh, guilty and, um, slightly irresponsible. And that’s, so I’m, I’m trying to rework it to find ways to let in the light. A little bit because it’s too easy to let out a Jeremiah and not offer anything else. And I just, I’m, I’m, so, I’m really struggling with that.

[00:40:05] Randy: But it was a book that I wrote largely during the pandemic when everybody was depressed, we included. So, um, it reflects that. So I’m trying, I’m trying to, um, to, uh, to, yeah. Let in the light. Well, well,

[00:40:20] Frederick: Randy, This has been amazing, and I want to thank you for taking the time to take me and others on this, you know, short journey with you and Yeah.

[00:40:33] Frederick: Um, all of us struggling to f kind of open those doors and windows to let in. The light.

[00:40:40] Randy: Thank you for having me. This is great. Into the Colli verse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts Sound Engineering by the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. You can find into the Colli Verse Podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

[00:41:00] Randy: Thanks for listening and see you next time.