All the Spinning Plates

Funny how a project can stretch out for a few years, and then BAM! suddenly it gets real, almost complete.

I’m talking about the idea for a podcast I’ve had rattling in my skull for all this time. I knew I wanted to make one, but what would it actually sound like? What would it be about? That answer, unexamined, persisted for many years, but now that I’m actually acting on it, the answer is being rewritten rapidly.

Let’s go back a week. I got to see one of my favorite Size writers, Taedis, in person a few days ago. They were traveling to Madison, WI, to undertake some very specialized research (and I’ll even call it hard-nosed detective work) in a university collection.

University collections are fantastic, because you have no idea who’s holding what until you have reason to ask. For instance, the University of Minnesota has a tremendous Sherlock Holmes collection, because one of the librarians is a fanatic for this material. They even absorbed another collection! But who would ever guess that?

And as long as Taedis was going to be in my neck of the woods, they asked if I wouldn’t mind helping out with a task. They’d ordered a well-preserved, vintage movie poster on eBay from a seller in my city, so rather than paying to have it shipped across the country, they asked if I wouldn’t mind picking it up and holding onto it until they could drive out and claim it. I thought that sounded like fun, so that’s what we did.

If you look it up, you’ll realize this is the UK title for what was Attack of the Puppet People in the States. Was the title too startling for delicate Englisher audiences? Was it a licensing issue I don’t know the business at all, but dollars to doughnuts, Taedis could explain it.

My wife and I drove out to Art+Architecture, a vintage store that collects and sells rather nicer furnishings and fittings for people looking to restore, say, a vintage Minneapolis guesthouse. The eBay seller had passed away, I believe, but bequeathed his prestigious account to the store so they could continue to successfully sell merchandise on eBay. It happened that they’d acquired a number of preserved vintage movie posters from a collector in western Wisconsin (I always assume someone died when this happens, but they could’ve been released for any reason), Six Inches Tall among them. I showed up with a full explanation as to who the hell I was and who I represented, and I received the poster without undue fuss.

We explored the store a bit more—I love places like this—and picked up some nice-looking jazz 45s and some pulp fiction, and an airline bottle of Get creme de menthe (good luck Googling a brand called “Get”). Mrs. Aborigen noticed some signs of galleries upstairs, and we had to check those out. One looked like it was a reupholsterer or else crafted elaborate textile goods, with spindles and bobbins lining the walls and works in progress all over the tables.

The other place… well, we walked around the studio and in a minute my wife breathed, “Whoa, these are real antiques.” She was impressed with the 17th-century Moroccan trunk covered with checkered mother-of-pearl inlay. We got to examine small 15th-century tapestries, and this female figurine caught my eye.

The proprietor kindly let me set my other shopping loot down on a chair, then explained that she was struggling composing an Instagram update to reflect a collection of silver bowls she’d acquired. I explained that I’m fluent in social media and would love to help, which she seemed pleased to learn. She further related that she was struggling with composing the post (her French accent, I learned, was by way of Belgium), and I let her know that I’m a copyeditor at the university and somewhat handy with words, which moved me further in her favor. Now I have a new friend I can drop in on and visit.

She gave us a personal tour of her studio, explaining the stories behind her collection, how they came into her hands, where they originated from, etc. Briefly she bemoaned the lack of curiosity in the younger generations, people who just poke their heads in the door, do a loop around the floor, and leave without a comment or a question. Very different generation, where everyone’s supposed to keep their heads down and look away when someone they don’t know approaches, and how you can’t assume anything based on the way someone looks or behaves (I expect the aforementioned Sherlock Holmes oeuvre will soon be cancelled). A younger friend informed me “a smile is violence,” in the sense that manners and social agreements are actually patriarchal tools of control, and since then I’ve been checking out of the world and retreating into my own interests, clocking time until the world is rid of me.

Anyway.

So Taedis did drive from Madison, which I call “the Austin of the Northwoods” and which I miss visiting, and we met for ramen at one of the best places in the Twin Cities, Moto-I. They told me and the missus about their research in Madison, which is dead fascinating but not my story to tell. She gifted Taedis with some homemade granola for the trip home, because she makes some fantastic batches, and it was a good time all around.

I might have mentioned that I’m taking a community education course on how to start a podcast, and if I haven’t, I am. There’s one more session left: the first one was about planning your podcast, the second was an introduction to Audacity (sound editing software), and the third was about resources for distribution and hosting. I thought we were supposed to present our podcast trailers at the third session, so right after the first session I spent two hours learning how to make my Temu-acquired condenser microphone sound good, mixed in some music, and spent a couple evenings polishing up a short and long trailer, which the instructor let me present in the third week.

One thing she wanted to impress upon us was that you have to have at least one episode online, in order to get the RSS feed address you need to begin pushing and spreading your work around the podcast networks. But a trailer counts as one episode.

The new podcast is called zHEIGHTgeist, “a short podcast with big ideas about the history, the prejudices, and the passion around Size Fantasy.” (I brand it zHEIGHTgeist, but it’s easier just to write zHeightgeist.)

• The zHeightgeist website is here.
• The trailer is on YouTube and Instagram.
• I didn’t want to return to social media, but there’s no other way to raise awareness of a new podcast, so I started accounts with Twitter and BlueSky.
• I’m also starting my own Mastodon instance, sizeriot.us. I’m still trying to figure out how to run an instance, so right now the only two accounts there are Aborigen and zHeightgeist.
• There’s even a zHeightgeist Discord channel, but I don’t know how to make it invite-only, and I don’t want trolls breaking in and fucking shit up.

That’s a lot of work. At the end of the day my head is buzzing with what I’m learning and new ideas, and it’s difficult to fall asleep right away. But now you know what I’ve been up to, and I’ll try to hold my shit together long enough to see it through to completion.