On this special episode, Dan speaks to participants at the 2023 SWPACA (Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference) in Albuquerque, NM. In just twenty-three and a half minutes you’ll hear about the Roswell event, making art on scratchboard, the interesting cultural history of the pink flamingo lawn ornament, decolonizing flavors, coffee, and so much more. Special thanks to Ralph Sanders, Claire Spaulding, and David Tortolini for stopping to talk with me, and to the conference organizers. Read and download the full transcript of this episode at the bottom of this post.
People and Texts Mentioned in the Episode
- Society of Illustrators
- Roswell Crash
- Scratch Board
- War of the World by H.G. Wells
- Pilgrim’s Progress by Ralph Sanders
- Nope (movie)
- Star Wars (franchise)
- Pink Flamingos (movie)
- Pink Flamingos (lawn ornament)
- Don Featherstone (artist)
- John Waters
- Divine
- Crimson Wings (documentary)
- Phoenix (bird)
- Alex Calder
- The Wonder Year (tv show 1988)
- SCA (Specialty Coffee Association)
“The Roswell event grounds [my illustrations] in an historical fact, in a place and a time, […] H.G Wells established the War of the Worlds, and that was kind of the first invasion of […] flying saucers or Mars taking over the earth. And, the Roswell event is created as a specific event and a real act [and] that sort of changes the whole context, not just the fantasy of it, that it actually happened, I think.”
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-Ralph Sanders
“The pink flamingo, that hot pink moment. It has become part of just our visual landscape within [Americana].”
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-Claire Spaulding
“I started thinking about why do we mow the lawns? Like what is so important about them? And started investigating that for my thesis topic instead, which immediately leads to pink flamingos as a lawn ornament because lawns as we know them now, this monoculture grass landscape within suburbia was invented in the 1920s when grass seed was developed in order to persist no matter where in the US it was. And in fact, that the Pentagon rests on a site that the agriculture department developed golf course turf years ago is one of my favorite tidbits to share with folks.”
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-Claire Spaulding
“When you say a coffee tastes like lemon, it’s always gonna be the lemon from the Western. viewpoint, it’s not gonna be lemon from like Argentina or lemon from like, Italy or even like Rwanda. It’s always gonna be a lemon based on the Western [flavor index].”
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-David Tortolini
“My hypothesis [on how to decolonize coffee flavors] right now is that when we are working with coffee and we’re trying to decolonize it, [we can] us[e] indicators that are actually more easily identifiable.”
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-David Tortolini
This episode was recorded on February 24th & 25th 2023. The theme song is “4 am” by Makaih Beats. You can follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher, join the newsletter for a bunch of extras (a Note From Dan, episode-specific writing prompts, and book recommendations, & follow us on Twitter @WritingRemixPod & Instagram @WritingRemixPod.
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