The SFFaudio Podcast #476 – Jesse, Paul, Marissa, and Evan Lampe talk about Sales Pitch by Philip K. Dick

Talked about on today’s show:
Future Science Fiction, June 1954, the notes that PKD wrote, The Collected Stories Of Philip K. Dick, in the late ’70s, The Exegesis, remembering vs. projecting, his revised ending, he doesn’t understand the mindset he was in when he wrote it, really sensitive, obsessed with tiny little details, his wives and wive characters, what this story is really about, why he doesn’t like the ending, the adaptations, the radio drama, the Electric Dreams adaptation, loose, they’re trying to figure it out, messing up, suddenly the UK doesn’t know how to do science fiction at all, plots vs. scenes, not well thought through, as it was unfolding, doing so much, no through-line, unified thought, why is it called Crazy Diamond?, Jesse doesn’t listen to music, noticing music, colonized by music, chamber music was important to PKD, little details, the name of the boat, John Dee vs. John D., John Dowland, one of two pseudonyms PKD, sixteenth century lute music, Jack Dowland, Jacks and Jills, androids and gynoids, their replicants, what’s wrong with androids?, throwaway technology, what is this story about?, by attacking it from the outside we can work our way in, homages or in-jokes or fanservice, a FASRAD mention, I had a dream, dreams have their opposite meaning?, no coda, thematic overlap, Easter eggs and thematic episodes, entropy, the shoreline, artificial world, a construct, The Truman Show, hoping for a reveal, holding the record, the world is sterile and fake, diners and McDonald’s, fake but they know it is, no growing your own food, understanding this episode, why is their a pig lady?, to make it quirky, just a pig-lady to talk to, the ending is terrible, interesting but they don’t really understand what they’ve got, action movies, ways of adapting these things, callbacks and nods to other shows, 1950s stories, straight up adaptations, Double Indemnity, James M. Cain, let’s do a gender swap with the ending, the girls are teamed up against the guy, it doesn’t make any sense, all the IVF treatments, as a whole it is a failure, useful for analyzing the story, a lead in, escape, El Dorado, Cockaigne, Ultima Thule, 2050 is a nightmare but 1950 is perfect, Time Out Of Joint, near and dear to Dick’s heart, something static that has to be escaped from, the frontier, The Man Who Japed, Solar Lottery, political dystopia, Vulcan’s Hammer, Doctor Futurity, stagnation, on the right page, the third choice is suicide, relentless advertising, a fourth choice, none of this, the way our ancestors lived, no stove, the proper choice, imposing our intellect, the proper choice is to buy the FASRAD, the FASRAD would liberate her, Evan’s podcast: American Writers (One Hundred Pages at a Time), interpretation based on life experience and life goals, Rorschach, Evan’s plan is to buy land in Wisconsin, homesteading, a Pink Floyd song, rubbing his record, no attribution on the label, all very interesting, musical flatulence, erotic loveplay, personalized google ads, does this happen to you?, gastric processes, bully crossed nag,

“Men!” an unctuous voice thundered on all sides of him. “Banish internally-caused obnoxious odors forever. Removal by modern painless methods of the gastrointestinal tract and substitution system will relieve you of the most acute cause of social rejection.” The visual image locked; a vast nude girl, blonde hair disarranged, blue eyes half shut, lips parted, head tilted back in sleep-drugged ecstasy. The features ballooned as the lips approached his own. Abruptly the orgiastic expression on the girl’s face vanished. Disgust and revulsion swept across, and then the image faded out.

brutal!, so funny, what is the solution?, to replace your intestines with a plastic chute, the skin salon and the hair salon and the nail salon, less animals, prettier and less farty, what ads are for, having your least used eye replaced with a augmented reality google glass, being replaced by your robot, the real threat to Ed Morris is the robot is going to replace him as the husband and at his job, how did this story come into existence?, door-to-door salesperson, fuck you go away I don’t want to hear it, really good at sales, Immanuel Kant would say, a means to an end, Jesse consistently the worst salesperson, robots that endlessly horribly peruse you, they have no feeling, vacuum sales and repair, door to door vacuum sales, learning to repair vacuum cleaners, you’re going to be amazed, Electrolux, FASRAD-style, this wonderful delightful machine, the Jones’ will be so jealous, the job of a husband, a threat to him as a man, no kids, impotence, the PKD-stand in character, the “mute” button, there’s something fascinatingly interesting about this story, we need these appliances, there are advantages to living in the city, a really horrible house-guest on coke, machines need to shut up, totally relating to this story, DVDs and Blu-Rays, the mandatory FBI warning, the state advertising itself, is their anything you can’t do, I’d be insane to buy you, they follow you around until you die, our life, Twitter isn’t the real world, electricity and central heating isn’t the real world, a certain kind of reality, the real world is inaccessible, the reality of bots, ad blockers, the most insidious ads, comments, favouriting everything, falsely identifying people at bots, bots can’t care, a means to an end, the horrible thing about about robots as sales people, the horrible ending, stuck in that loop, military, a whole different track, tapes, bot-like behavior, you’re the product!, soldier versions, replacing humans (or men) in their places of work, Jesse is worried about his dishwasher taking over the podcast, finding yourself as friendship with a bot, ego growing for years, Blade Runner androids are emotionally stunted, they can care about stuff, a horribly wonderful ending, a horror ending, Ed abandoned his wife, empty an vacant, the horror of the world, night and darkness and cold wind, a good night’s sleep, all day, all night, sheer dress, when you’re far away you can see her shapely form, things are worse when you get up close, translucent up close, farther away it is sheer, when married couples go on dates why do they dress up?, right about the story, the story is all about gender, proving his masculinity to the robot, paying on installments, becoming middle aged, he’s worried about being replaced, automation, the Trump voters, what the market says is productive labour, with [Karl] Marx, a philosopher in the morning a fisherman in the afternoon, what to make of our lives when not tied to the market, a liberatory technology, as a labour historian, 35 years of exhaustion, automation as liberation, undermining this particular story, other robots pause, a good story for looking at our reality today, people will be lining up at the Apple store, the door-to-door sales technique, the product is a good one if you can tone down the mouth, working in a sales room, being unable to defend yourself against a sales-person, falling into traps, learning the skills, a sales person is a person, the L.A. Festival of Books, people on scripts, easily influenced, full of compassion for people, bizarre question, do you like books?, I like to eat animals to punish them, do you know how many fish are in this jar?, the Consumer Electronic Shows, booth babes, reviewing video cards, the mid-America Truck Show, catching a booth babe on her lunch break, they can turn it off (a lot of them), there’s never a point when the FASRAD says “when you buy me I’ll shut up”, commuting is a whole thing, the process of driving down the road, Puttering About In A Small Land, a massive amount of stress, the most fearful driver on the road, very important, how many times coffee and mashed peas, big boobs, advertising, commuting, a device that makes you read your boss’ mind, it’s telepathy, seeing the scene with PKD behind that dashboard, honking horns, 60 million miles a second, The Jetsons, as close to pure comedy, the “Doc Labryinth” stories, The Short Happy Life Of The Brown Oxford, the self-driving car, hypno-motor control, Elon Musk, advertising as a whole, performed a crucial function in democracy, inexpensive or free media, TV and radio advertising, the buyer-seller relationship, ensuring media is distributed to people, BFM radio station ads, enjoyable ads, movie trailers, when the money is going to be expensive, the Superbowl ads, write something that people won’t hate, why isn’t everyone crazy in my particular way, Adbusters magazine, Occupy Wall Street, getting information to people who need it, the Tide ads, don’t eat the Tide Pods, new Coke vs. old Coke, who’s setting the agenda, that is horrible, that’s mind control and it works, we’re poor everyone else is rich, how come your phone is nicer than mine, you cannot understate how powerful advertising is, advertising paid for media that they wouldn’t have access to otherwise, the other stuff subsidized the news, CNN doesn’t seem to have reporters outside of their studios, their product is fear, who can we hate this week?, political parties paying for newspapers, magazines without ads, CBC, BBC, the Age Of Persuasion, Network (1976), The Jimmy Dore Show episode in which Ed Schultz explains how he got fired, the system is all set up, six media companies own everything, adding oxygen to an anaerobic environment, the ad breaks, out of the goodness of their anonymous hearts, they are controlling us, political advertising, doing ads for The SFFaudio Podcast, ads for vodka, ad for gas remedy, ad boob extender, quivering breasts, a comedy piece he also enjoys, your wife is sexually attractive but not so intellectual, Sally swept into the room her breasts quivering with excitement, don’t be a dick, given the world we live in, public funding for media, even PBS and NPR have been captured, as soon as you step out of propaganda you know what not propaganda is, is this really a big deal?, how everybody thinks, so tailored to your inadequacies, Structube, an online furniture company, structural tubing, that is the bots, because they are literally robots, the FASRAD can never quit, generic shitty advertising, tampon ads, Maybelline, Minority Report (2002), Facebook, Pure New Zealand, googling murder weapons and IVF stuff, the 13 twitter trolls that swung the election that the 6 billion in free advertising didn’t do, how robots were going to save the world, the way robots are running our world, not the kind we envision, value of labour, bots are working for corporations and institutions, a Roomba, Roombas going door to door selling their services, Jack London, The Iron Heel, Everhart, you’re just Luddites, private hands own the robots, a type of socialism, the people have to control the robots, 200 years in the future,

“Trans-Solar Products greets you!” an immense voice boomed in his ear. Morris groaned and hunched down in his seat. He was getting near Terra; the barrage was increasing. “Is your tension-index pushed over the safety-margin by the ordinary frustrations of the day? Then you need an Id-Persona Unit. So small it can be worn behind the ear, close to the frontal lobe –“

is that an ad blocker?, anti-anxiety, cigarettes and coffee, the mood organ from Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, we wouldn’t have a lot of PKD stuff if he wasn’t so stressed out, a science fiction comedy, Ray Nelson’s Eight O’Clock In The Morning, weird stressed out and paranoid, a moral judgement, don’t take the Soma, Bryan Alexander is a jet-setting homesteader, the dream of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is fulfilled with Wikipedia, the novelty hasn’t worn off, Verne Troyer is trending, we are becoming subject to what Google wants us to search for, we’re getting shaped, the anticipating is making things harder, a very good story, the story is very meaty, resonance, the two illustrations by Luton, a giant beckoning woman in space, Blade Runner: 2049, the FASRAD, you’re going to buy me!, this stubborn looking dude, great illustrations, how other people interpret, what they’re seeing in it, was Solar Lottery‘s cover was commissioned then the story was written around it, The Zap Gun, the darkness of the world, fiddling with shoelaces useless, what inspired a scene-let, you’ll feel better after you’ve turned responsibility for me, they took the other ending, Sally becomes Ed, the inversion, they’re muddled, so much in here, I’m sure it will mean something, it fell apart, Annihilation (the movie and the book), the moving tattoo, that movie works because they had a plan, plans are made in the process of editing, a committee, what if there’s a heist!?, the Robin Hood thieves in the forest, why is that there? No reason, what the hell are the QCs, are we all really dumb, going senile, how this world they live in works, why is the food rotting, entropy, Ubik, sometimes a thug or a hood will attack a person at night, The Hood Maker, the twin Beetles, twin broken down trucks, what’s the boss doing, you stopped the crime and then the crime happens?, playing him out?, the editing and the script doesn’t, drugged up by the drugs in the commercials you don’t notice, there’s only one fence in England, do these stories work in England, more French than English, everything’s so fucking small, one foot square garden, they don’t have a living room, there’s a bar in the house, and a den, these stories do not work in U.K., Western and mid-Western America, cedars, the dismal night wind, the radiant lens, Upon The Dull Earth, part of the issue, a cultural mis-translation, too American for a British production, The Impossible Planet, a cup of tea (not a cup of coffee), the most widely used legal brain-stimulant, the smoking rates in Taiwan, cigarette smoking around the world.

Posted by Jesse Willis