Episode 19: Hella Visual

Episode 19: Hella Visual

The Bay Area is a place that has consistently, and somewhat quietly, punched above its weight as a center of visual culture. Not just tech aesthetics — but the longer, stranger history of a region that has produced an outsized number of visual thinkers and image-makers without always getting full credit for it. The episode opens with a question that turns out to be genuinely hard to answer: what exactly is Oski? The UC Berkeley bear mascot rewards scrutiny poorly — the closer you look, the less sense he makes. This leads into the odd history of college mascots as a visual genre, a category of design that combines deep institutional seriousness with complete formal absurdity. From there: Coit Tower, which manages to function as both a convincing three-dimensional landmark and an almost impossibly clean two-dimensional graphic — it looks like a logo of itself. The bridges get their full due: the Golden Gate's promiscuous elegance versus the Bay Bridge's beautiful brutality, two completely different visual philosophies sitting within eyeshot of each other across the same water. The theme to Taxi comes up. It belongs. San Francisco's graphic design community gets examined, with particular attention to the remarkable concentration of influential designers in the city's history named Michael. This is a real phenomenon. San Mateo, it turns out, has mighty iconography. Levi's gets a moment for a genuinely clever piece of creative maneuvering around FIFA's notoriously aggressive trademark enforcement. Tom Waits comes up as a man who has spent decades carefully tending his image and gone to considerable lengths to defend it — discussed here with admiration.  Then there's the format problem: how do you talk about fonts on a podcast? Typography is a stubbornly visual subject and audio is a stubbornly non-visual medium, and Greg and Wayne attempt to bridge this gap with varying degrees of success. Billboards follow — the great ones, past and present — operating under conditions of fog and topography that don't apply anywhere else. This episode's Star Wars reference is grounded in the massive container cranes at the Port of Oakland, which famously may or may not have inspired the AT-AT walkers. The 49-Mile Scenic Drive gets examined — specifically how you route 49 miles through a city that is, relative to its own legend, quite small. Greg shouts the phrase RAINBOW TUNNEL with earned enthusiasm. Wayne goes philosophical on the Transamerica Pyramid, which is the correct response. The corpse flower arrives, raising genuine questions about what nature is trying to communicate and whether we should be concerned. Broadway's strip club signs get their moment as vernacular icons of a vanishing San Francisco — and yes, there is a weird death in the history of at least one of them. The old Tower Records on Bay Street is remembered as a defiant LA outpost in enemy territory, a Sunset Strip energy the city didn't ask for and kind of loved anyway. And then the Laserium — lying on your back in a domed room while lasers traced psychedelic patterns across a fake sky and something between Pink Floyd and a dream played through the speakers. It was a lot. It was also exactly right. A quick note: the audio of this episode is not our finest hour. Something happened. Gremlins, atmospheric conditions, the general hostility of technology toward ambition — the cause remains unclear. What is clear is that Wayne performed what can only be described as an act of heroic editing to get this thing into listenable shape, and he deserves acknowledgement for that. You'll notice it's fine. It's legible. It sounds like a podcast. That is entirely because of Wayne.

Episode 18: Hella Fatherly

Episode 18 lands on Father's Day, so Greg and Wayne do what any reasonable sons and fathers would do: they talk about hair for an alarming amount of time. Baldness, combovers, Chris Mullin's flattop, and the Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop all get their due. First haircuts come up too—the trauma, the ritual, the inexplicable lollipop at the end. From there, things open up into the full archaeology of Bay Area fatherhood. Faded memories of Emporium-Capwell’s. Tobacco Pipes that were somehow considered sophisticated and may have permanently altered one host’s lung capacity. Cheap Chablis over ice, which someone's dad thought was classy, and he wasn't entirely wrong. The Scots of Santa Barbara. The cars of James Bond (well, two of ‘em. The best ones.) There are dads who sold medical supplies and somehow made it interesting. Dads who ditched church with a frequency that suggested a private arrangement with God. Old-school salesmen who taught the correct handshake like it was a martial art. Wayne's dad's CD-ROM—singular, mysterious, never fully explained. The particular and inherited tragedy of rooting for the New York Jets. Dads swearing at moments that were either completely inappropriate or absolutely called for. There's also a Pixar side quest to parenting glory, and the complicated, occasionally glorious fruits of coaching a traveling team. Oh, and they forgot to do a Mother's Day episode. Sorry, moms.

Episode 17: Hella Questions

Greg and Wayne put each other on the hot seat with a Bay Area-adapted version of Stephen Colbert's famous Questionert — and things get weird fast. A regular listener gets lovingly roasted, a hippie named Manny makes an appearance, and the sandwich discourse gets contentious (Greg says something about Philly cheesesteaks that will not go over well with certain people). Wayne recalls a youthful stint in detention, Greg wears a carpet and nearly passes out, and somewhere in there a pony may or may not have been won. There are sharks. There are Africanized bees. A Monty Python figure stands alone.  The guys also tackle the deep questions: Is The Rock actually a good movie? What's the deal with that smell on BART? What 49er was also in Duran Duran? Is Colma the world’s more charming necropolis? They pay tribute to Willie Mays and the strange loneliness of celebrity, Chris Mullin's flattop, the redemptive power of Journey, and the very specific childhood betrayal of discovering that sparkling water from Calistoga is not what you hoped it would be. Plus: Wayne's cousins, Mrs. Doubtfire, Star Wars, 3D movies, Godzilla, and the eternal fog-shrouded pursuit of likes and subscribes. Happy to have you listen! Have fun.

Episode 16: Hella Trivial

It's trivia night at Hella Foggy, and it goes exactly as well as it needs to. Two people wander into a forest of anecdotes and find, against the odds, there is content to be found there. Huzzah! Wayne brings the questions. Greg brings the answers—some of them correct. From this modest premise, Episode 16 expands to encompass Information Theory, Bay Area geology, the actual crookedest street in San Francisco (not Lombard), apple pie with cheddar discourse, a sports legend encounter no one comes out of cleanly, Czech witch-related vocabulary, the full Mrs. Doubtfire extended universe, and a camping trip that is—yes—Bay Area content. Haight Street gets its moment. Xerox PARC gets its moment. A Star Wars reference lands, and is appreciated for exactly what it is. A listener writes in to say the hosts are clever. The hosts dispute this. The hosts may be right. Greg's past romantic partners are mentioned briefly, and with the appropriate level of discretion. There is bickering, mostly about the apple pie with cheddar thing. The bickering is minor, genuine, but it ends with no hard feelings.  Is anything truly trivial? Unclear. But very little here stays small for long. Enjoy the show.

Episode 15: Hella Spooky!

Ghosts! The Bay Area Has Got 'Em! Apparently! It's May. And yet here are Wayne and Greg, elbows-deep in Bay Area ghost lore — which, it turns out, is extensive, varied, and deeply weird. Is this an October episode that got lost? Did it slip through some kind of dimensional rift? The uncanniness is noted. The episode proceeds anyway. The haunted inventory is impressively broad: ghosts in lakes, ghosts in pubs, a ghost cop (constitutionally questionable), ghosts in toy stores, ghosts on the highway, and entire ghost armies of Native Americans. Wayne, heroically, tries to keep the spooky vibes alive. Greg, reliably, is a party-pooper. The ghosts, for their part, remain unimpressed. Other territory covered: sex cults, theoretically haunted Teddy Ruxpins, the Real People vs. That's Incredible! debate no one knew they needed, sports superstitions, witches, rubber chicken sacrifices, dumb ghosts, arguing constitutional issues with a ghost cop, Carol Burnett, a suburban pizza house that was apparently also a brothel, and whispered-about sightings of an earless deer. So very spooky. We hope you enjoy it.