[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the 80s. I am Meg.

[00:18] Jessica: And I'm Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City,

[00:26] Meg: where we still live and where we podcast about New York city in the 80s. I do. Ripped from the headlines.

[00:32] Jessica: I do. Pop culture.

[00:34] Meg: We got so much listener feedback this week.

[00:39] Jessica: Whenever you say feedback, I'm like, is it good or is it bad?

[00:44] Meg: It was engaged. Okay, first of all, lots of pro union emails. People love their unions.

[00:51] Jessica: Okay.

[00:52] Meg: Which is great to know.

[00:54] Jessica: Fascinating.

[00:55] Meg: Power to the people. Did you know that Oliver north and Fawn hall are officially dating?

[01:03] Jessica: What?

[01:04] Meg: Yeah.

[01:05] Jessica: That's so very weird.

[01:07] Meg: Is it?

[01:08] Jessica: As of when? Recently?

[01:10] Meg: Well, there have been rumors for decades, but they recently made it official.

[01:17] Jessica: Have they both been married all this time to other people?

[01:21] Meg: I don't know.

[01:22] Jessica: All right, well, the dating life of the Iran Contra lunatics. How perfect and timely to bring back Iran excitement.

[01:33] Meg: That's my point. Fascinating. Anywho, guess what?

[01:37] Jessica: What?

[01:38] Meg: My mother remembered more details of my mother and my father's escapade at 54. Studio 54.

[01:45] Jessica: Fascinating. Do tell.

[01:47] Meg: And I even spoke to my father about it today, and he.

[01:51] Jessica: You did not.

[01:52] Meg: Backed up all of her facts. It was Steve Rubell's birthday, and according to Daddy, he actually tricked Mommy into going to Studio 54. He said they were going to go to a movie, but he said, you have to wear the magenta boa. And so she was like, all right, I'll wear a magenta boa to the movies. And then they went to Studio 54, and Steve Rubell himself plucked her out of the crowd because she did look fabulous. And they were in there for Steve Rubell's birthday. What the heck?

[02:24] Jessica: I can only imagine that it was debaucherous.

[02:29] Meg: Well, my father danced with Rollerina.

[02:31] Jessica: No.

[02:32] Meg: Which he said was so much fun. And my mother said was not so much fun because she wasn't dancing. She was watching my father dance with Rollerina.

[02:43] Jessica: Okay, fair, fair.

[02:46] Meg: And she said that when she went into the bathrooms, she did not feel welcomed.

[02:52] Jessica: Had she gone into a bathroom that was exclusively a gay sex bathroom at that moment?

[02:59] Meg: I didn't get that vibe. I think the other women, she just didn't feel comfy, cozy. It wasn't like, hey, are we having so much fun at Studio 54? Because, you know, you look at all those pictures and everyone's just like, woo. On the dance floor. But apparently there were also some assholes.

[03:17] Jessica: Well, hanging out with a bunch of coked up Hangers on. Not surprised. But I'm sorry that your. Your mom didn't have the time of her life.

[03:30] Meg: But you did want more details. So there are more details.

[03:33] Jessica: I love it. I'm so glad. That's amazing.

[03:36] Meg: I also heard from dear Michael Hicks.

[03:39] Jessica: Oh, dear Michael Hicks. What does he have to say?

[03:43] Meg: Michael sent this via our website.

[03:46] Jessica: Interesting.

[03:47] Meg: Instead of just texting me, he wrote. First off, I wanted to let you know about a very exciting unknown actor named Jason Alexander. No, he was in the original Broadway cast of Merrily. Look him up. But in all seriousness.

[04:05] Jessica: But he. He wasn't in the. Oh, no, he was. He had a little. He had a. Yes, yes, he was. Yes, he was. Michael. I'm sorry. You're right.

[04:13] Meg: And then he goes on. But in all seriousness, a dear friend of mine was in the original cast and there's a documentary about it by Lonnie Price which is worth watching. It's called Best Worst Thing that Ever should have Happened. I've actually heard of this and it came out in 2016. So if we ever want to do a follow up on Merrily We Roll Along.

[04:36] Jessica: There it is.

[04:36] Meg: There it is. We watched the documentary and before I even got this from Michael, I found this quote from Harold Prince, Hal Prince, who directed it. And I thought this was worth sharing.

[04:49] Jessica: Okay.

[04:51] Meg: The idea is to work and to experiment. Some things will be creatively successful, some things will succeed at the box office, and some things will only. Which is the biggest. Only teach you things that see the future, and they're probably as valuable as any of your successes.

[05:10] Jessica: Point taken.

[05:11] Meg: Good.

[05:12] Jessica: All right, here it is.

[05:23] Meg: So today we are going to discuss a novel called the CBGB Conspiracy by Gabriel Rotello, which actually takes place in 1977. But I think it's a really interesting tale that kind of sets up so many of the things that we talk about.

[05:46] Jessica: Yes. And in fact, there are many segments that each one of us have done that start in 77 and then go forward. So that's true.

[05:56] Meg: It was. It reminded me, just to begin with, it reminded me of what a critical year that year was.

[06:04] Jessica: That year. I think there are more documentaries and more film like narrative features. That's the word I'm looking for features

[06:14] Meg: about that year because we're talking about the Blackout. We're talking about the Son of Sam. There are lots of historical things.

[06:20] Jessica: Birth of Punk. I mean, there's even. There's even the movie about CBGB with Alan Rick, the phenomenal Alan Rickman as Hilly Crystal. So, yeah, it's a time period that was the year of Gerald Ford telling New York to go screw itself. And it's a year that you can't help but be drawn to because it was the bottoming out of the city. So it's. The drama is undeniable. And there's no part of the city or the denizens of New York who weren't affected by what was going on.

[07:00] Meg: So, yeah, I thought we could maybe start with a quote right on. This comes from towards the end of the book, but this isn't a spoiler of any kind because we should say it's a murder mystery.

[07:14] Jessica: Right. So it's a little difficult to talk about because we don't want to get.

[07:20] Meg: But we'll talk about the themes of it and some of the early events of it. But this, this quote actually comes towards the end. There aren't any spoilers in it, but to me, I was like, oh, that's such a good encapsulation of kind of the vibe of the book. And tell me if you agree.

[07:38] Jessica: Okay.

[07:39] Meg: Despite Julie's best efforts to keep the discussion on track, Toy Boy was quickly forgotten. In a lively back and forth about the mayoral election, the Tina mondetti exhibit at MoMA, and Burrow's latest thoughts about nuclear war. It all ended up with surrealist snatches of Irish poetry and Lou Reed singing his latest ditty, something about Waltzing Matilda dying of a heroin overdose, which struck several attendees as a tad insensitive. Another task force meeting down the downtown drain.

[08:17] Jessica: Yes, and it's. It's actually a good segue to something that I was thinking about regarding this book. So as I was reading it, I took much longer to read it than I thought I would because I kept not really fact checking it, but looking up every single reference and what it reminded me of in a weird way. Did you read the Alienist when it came out? Caleb Carr's book.

[08:45] Meg: That's a great comparison.

[08:47] Jessica: And it reminded me of that. For anyone who hasn't read the Alienist, it takes place in the. I can't remember if it's like 1800, very, very 1890s or 19 aughts. Although it's a murder mystery and, you know, there's like the burgeoning field of psychiatry and all of that's in it. The book really took you on a meticulously researched tour of New York City at the time, and people were so swept up in it when the book came out that there were tours of downtown New York where you could see every single building that the characters went to. So this book, one of the things that I really enjoyed about it is that it had that same quality. Now, because you and I know the city so well, I didn't have to look up the locations. Like, I knew immediately what all the buildings were.

[09:44] Meg: Exactly. I could imagine the corner he was

[09:45] Jessica: talking about, and it was the combination. But with this book, it's the combination of the locations and the people, because the book is absolutely littered with real

[09:59] Meg: people, historical people of that neighborhood of that time that anyone would recognize. William Burroughs, Hilly Crystal, the other Beat, Basquiat.

[10:13] Jessica: Yes. All of the factory people. Holly Woodlawn is in there a lot. And. And on and on. And. And, like, all the guys from television, like the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Debbie Harry, they're just like, the whole scene is there. But there were also names that I'd never heard before. And, you know, in looking them up, I had the most fun being like, oh, they were there. So then they knew this person, and then they knew this person. So if you want to. With. This is sort of two books in one. There's a murder mystery, and then there is. Welcome to New York, 1977. You can read it simply as a tourist.

[10:49] Meg: Sure.

[10:50] Jessica: And enjoy it on that level. And, you know, if you wanted to, you could give yourself a tour of the Bowery and the Lower east side in Alphabet City.

[11:02] Meg: And just to talk about the structure of this novel, it's historical fiction. And there are a bunch of people hanging out, mostly at CBGB's, but in different places in that neighborhood. And one of them dies, and it looks like it's accidental, but his friends think it was murder, murder most foul. And because of the times when, you know, there weren't as many police on the street because the city was bankrupt, all of that, they're not really going to work really hard to solve a crime that looks like it wasn't even a crime.

[11:45] Jessica: Well, you know, what it reminded me of is the many stories that you have told on this podcast, Mega, where a woman's death is not paid attention to and her friends solve it. Like, oh, God, Durst's wife, you know, that. That kind of thing. So, just to add to what you said, everyone is very young. They're all in their early twenties for the most part, except for people like William S. Burroughs, who, of course, they're talking about as though he's, like, old as the hills and he's 65. And I'm like, that sounds relatively young to me. They're all very young, and some of them are Privileged. And some of them are not. And for reasons that we talk about on this podcast frequently, they're all in New York downtown, because they're drawn to this wild west of art.

[12:40] Meg: Okay, I'm so glad you said wild west, because I was thinking, it's like, if a murder happens in the Wild west, there's no law and order, really.

[12:50] Jessica: Right.

[12:51] Meg: And so how is it gonna get solved? Well, it's gonna get solved by the neighbors and the denizens rather than the authority figures.

[13:02] Jessica: Indeed. And so all of these young people are drawn to the downtown scene. There's. And it touches. It's not just music, it touches its music, but it's also fashion and art and literature and feminist politics and everything really, that we talk about. It coalesces into this novel. And what happens, as you say, is there's a character, and of course, the author sets up this character to be beyond sympathetic. Like, you couldn't love the. This person more.

[13:38] Meg: Like, which one are you talking about? Finn, The.

[13:40] Jessica: The. The murder victim.

[13:42] Meg: Oh, okay.

[13:43] Jessica: Lucien. And he's. He's beautiful, and he's young, and he's kind, and he's. He's a character who's constructed so that there's no way as a reader for you to say, oh, but what did he do? Like, it takes that off the table almost completely, except for a little bit. And this is the other thing that we talk about on this podcast, is he's fascinated by drug culture. And so that fascination is sort of what gets him to bump up against some of the negative things that then.

[14:19] Meg: And the drug culture we're talking about in 1977 in this book is heroin. We're not talking about crack. This is pre crack. It is pre aids. It's pre. A lot of stuff that really defined the 80s, so it feels almost like a prequel to our podcast, to be honest.

[14:38] Jessica: Honest, yes. They talk about smoking weed, and the heroin stuff is still associated with the beat generation and jazz.

[14:53] Meg: Right.

[14:54] Jessica: And so that's another thing that's interesting, because when we think about heroin, when we talk about Heroin in the 80s, it's already morphed into something where there's no way to mythologize it. Like, it's past that. It's epidemic.

[15:08] Meg: Yes. It's 20 years before rent, right? Yep. And by the time we get to rent, I'm talking about the musical Rent, which takes place in the same neighborhood. By the time we get to Rent, the people who are doing heroin are ruining their lives, and they're getting AIDS from dirty needles and it's disastrous. But in 1977, it's somehow making a connection between the beat poets of the 50s and 60s because it opened their minds, and it made them create all this incredible poetry, that somehow that generation of artists are seen as sort of spiritual parents of the punks.

[16:00] Jessica: Very, very, very much so. So, yeah, so he is this angelic character.

[16:07] Meg: Lucienne is.

[16:08] Jessica: Lucienne is murdered, and the characters who swarm around him. Finn is sort of Steven Sprouse. Like, he's kind of modeled on Steven Sprouse.

[16:21] Meg: Exactly. And actually, I looked it up, and, okay, so Gabriel Rotello, who wrote this historical novel, knew so many of these people. And I listened to an interview that he gave where he talks about how he couldn't possibly have written a memoir because it was just too, too painful, but he felt like doing something in fiction somehow. He could tell that story without breaking his heart. But he was very close with Steven Sprouse, and he makes that reference and says that Finn was based on him.

[17:01] Jessica: Interesting. Well, and I also, because I always do this, it's the same thing that gives me the compulsion to sit through the credits of every movie. I always read the acknowledgments, and what was very charming is that almost every character, even, you know, characters where you would not think there's anyone to base them on, they're entirely fictional. No, no, there's. There's somebody, and that's with every novel, but people don't normally acknowledge. Oh, okay. So there are these two little old ladies who lived in my building, and I can't remember their names, but here they are, and they're major characters in this book.

[17:40] Meg: And we should also say another beautiful thing about Lucien, our victim, is that he was best friends with the little old Italian ladies who had at some point, been connected to the mob, as little old Italian ladies sometimes are. And he made great friends with them, and then they took him under their wing. And so that, of course, also makes him just lovely.

[18:05] Jessica: Yeah, there's just nothing about him that's not adorable.

[18:09] Meg: Except for the whole thing, like, I really want to do heroin. Because you're like, I don't know. That's a great idea, but it's so childish.

[18:16] Jessica: That's what's so funny about it, is that you're just kind of like, oh. Oh. You're just so. Like, there's an innocence. And.

[18:22] Meg: And the reason he wanted to do it was to affect his art. He wanted to do better art, more interesting art. He wanted to expand his mind, which, again, feels so innocent.

[18:34] Jessica: Exactly. And the other thing that I liked about the creation of that character is that he obviously represents all of the talented kids who fucked themselves up on drugs because he's a multidisciplinary artist. He's a writer, he's a musician, he's a painter. Like, he's. He's gorgeous. So he's modeling for his friend. So he's sort of this amalgam, in a way. And his girlfriend Julie is a rich girl, a London rich girl, but who has affected the punk look. And she's, you know, thrown herself.

[19:15] Meg: She's kind of slumming it. Yeah, she lives uptown on 63rd. Yeah, crazy apartment uptown. Her last name everybody recognizes as a family that has a lot of money and industry. And she comes downtown slumming it because these are the people she wants to actually hang around with, because she is a gallery girl.

[19:40] Jessica: She's working for gallery.

[19:42] Meg: She's working for Andrew Crispo.

[19:45] Jessica: When I read that, I was like, oh, my God, is he the one? It was a great nod. So when that. That came up, I was just like, ew, my God, where's that going to go? Going back to what I said earlier about, you know, how Durst's wife's friends were the ones who tried to find her. It's the woman, it's Julie, who, when Lucien is found dead, is the first one to say, I'm gonna solve this mystery. And what I liked about it also is that, you know, this is a male writer. The characters are predominantly male, but he very clearly worked very hard to make sure that Julie was not two dimensional. She's a real character. She's a real person. She's backstory, big backstory. And frequently that doesn't happen and something

[20:34] Meg: interesting happens to her at the end. Her entire reason for being raison d' etre isn't to solve the murder of Lucienne. She actually has another thing that happens in her life that is character building.

[20:54] Jessica: Very much so. And it's terrible because all of this. So many events in this book are so intertwined that this is sort of where I hear both of us being extraordinarily careful. Like, don't pull that thread on the sweater, because it will all come tumbling down. What did you like about it? What other things did you really like about the book?

[21:14] Meg: Well, I wanted to talk about how cool it was that Gabriel knew these people. And you can tell that because picking up on what you were talking about before, all the voices are so distinct, and that's because they are based on actual people. All who had really distinctive ways of communicating.

[21:35] Jessica: Yeah, you can hear them. They're all very vivid characters. Even characters that just pop up briefly or that are, you know, sort of bystanders throughout the book.

[21:49] Meg: I love the distinction that he very clearly, cleverly made between disco and punk. Because 1977, also a huge year for Studio 54. And some people were running uptown and, you know, dancing their lives away to what some would call escapist music, just having a frigging blast. And other people were downtown. And it was a different way of expressing themselves. It was sort of the musical version of the poetry that had come out of that neighborhood in the previous decades. So putting that. Those words to music, how does that work? You end up with something that's punk. Also. Many different ways to be a punk, right? You've got like the Ramones versus the Talking Heads versus Patti Smith, Blondie, all. All that music sounds different.

[22:54] Jessica: The detective at one point is like, he. He is in CBGB and he hears Blondie warming up and he's like. And he says, that's more pop than punk. And I was like, okay. Because he was a jazz enthusiast, so at least we give him credit for having a good ear. But. But these characters are all sort of commenting on the culture and what people might have been debating at the time.

[23:20] Meg: And what made CBGB's so seminal was that Hilly Crystal said no covers, right? It's gotta be original music, right? So good, bad and ugly. At least it's original. So then you got a bunch of people listening to each other, being influenced by each other.

[23:40] Jessica: It was a closed loop, really. They created a little microco where they were all just brewing whatever next to each other, around each other, and it really was its own thing. And I loved, by the way, I have to say, I even looked this up. The author got the breed of Hilly Crystal's dog. Right?

[24:02] Meg: Nice. I loved that. It seemed like one of the themes was that art flourishes in a non commercial situation. So we've got the art that's being created in the East Village. Comparing that to Andrew Crispo and Julie's situation, that seemed to be point of comparison.

[24:26] Jessica: Yeah. There wasn't a lot of discussion about, you know, uptown versus downtown. There was. There was a little bit just in that one way. And Julie was really the only representation of that. So you're really in this cauldron of downtown ness.

[24:44] Meg: Oh. I would even say it reminded me of how when, you know, we were growing up, it was our perception, of course, that any other neighborhood, even in Manhattan, was Like a different part of the moon. It was so friggin alien and far away. But that I think was actually the fact it wasn't just because we were little girls. I think everybody kind of felt like that. Like the difference between the Bowery and East 61st street was ginormous.

[25:19] Jessica: And why would you be in both? Like there, there would be no, there'd be no reason.

[25:26] Meg: There'd be no reason. And if you are down in the East Village, you know, every corner, every street, every. It is a village.

[25:35] Jessica: Yes. The other thing that I thought he did very well was there were large parts of the city that were completely desolate at night and scary. So like, you know, you walk around the Bowery now and in fact most parts of, of Manhattan they're bustling. There were areas where you simply did not go. So the dis. There's some discussion about soho which we've talked about, you know, with Florent on this podcast. But they talk about there's a loft party that takes place and how lofts wound up getting inhabited. But that you wouldn't know what was going on because soho looked completely deserted and that you had to stand in the street and listen for the thump of music to find a loft party. But that downtown there's a scene where one of the characters is fleeing danger and he's just crossing avenue after avenue and there's no one to be seen. And I remember as a little kid being in my parents car going downtown on the Bowery and going to Luchow's. Right, Going to Luchow's. That's right. And yeah, there was a reason that my mother was like, lock the doors, there's no one here except people who are going to kill you.

[26:57] Meg: Well, for me we moved to New York City in 1976 and so I remember I was talking to my mother about this. I remember the centennial in Austin, Texas. And then all of my earliest memories of New York City are of this exact time period. Which is crazy because it.

[27:26] Jessica: For you to be. To be entering the city at that time. So those are, those are your first memories of New York. There's a distinct line between before, you know, and then after. So that must have been very strange. I remember the bicentennial and the tall ships and all of that stuff. And I actually was going through, you know, the big cabinet in my living room. I was going through the drawers and unearthing a bunch of some card decks as well as the tarot. And in the back of it I'd forgotten I have these coin Proof sets that my grandfather had given me from 1976. So they're the minted coins.

[28:12] Meg: That's huge.

[28:13] Jessica: Silver dollar, a half dollar.

[28:15] Meg: Jessica, those are probably really valuable.

[28:17] Jessica: I don't think they're actually that valuable. I think they did a lot. Lot of. I look it up occasionally. It's not really that.

[28:24] Meg: Well, it's valuable to me.

[28:26] Jessica: Well, I'll show it to you then.

[28:28] Meg: Thank you. I'll post it on the Instagram.

[28:31] Jessica: Yes, but those. That was like basically anything that could be produced that. That shouted bicentennial. It was.

[28:41] Meg: I thought he did such an incredible job of not foreshadowing what happens in the 80s. Yeah, he did such a great job of creating a time capsule that wasn't influenced by the future.

[28:56] Jessica: Actually, I beg to differ. I'm going to say something. I even highlighted them, but I'm not going to be pedantic about it. There are a couple of times where he is talking about what's happening as though it's in the past. And then he goes back into everything is in the present. But the, the perspective changes. And it was jarring, but in a way it sort of proves your point because it only happened like two or three times. And when it did, it was very, very surprising because otherwise you are completely all that's happening is what's happening during that summer.

[29:35] Meg: Yeah, it definitely felt like, to me, time travel. Like a pure time travel. I love the fact that graffiti was used to communicate. So you could spread the word with a piece of graffiti, somebody else would see it and they would know something. It was like a newspaper article or like hobo markings. Yeah, right. I mean, how cool is that?

[30:00] Jessica: I think that the idea of graffiti as art versus graffiti as communication is an interesting distinction because I remember there being graffiti that you could read versus tagging.

[30:17] Meg: Right.

[30:18] Jessica: So that. Yes, he does, he does cover that, but just a little bit more about the book and like why it's fun reading and no spoilers. I'm not gonna ruin anything. But just to go back to, well, why read this book? Like, what's going on? So we're talking about, you know, the historical fun of it and the, you know, meticulous New York research or just lived facts. You know, this is a first time novelist and he managed to put together a pretty tight murder mystery, which is not easy. What I think he did very well is he created characters that you cared about or you were invested in enough. They were. Each one of them was interesting and had his or her own quirks that were unique enough that you wanted to know how they were going to navigate the tragedy of the death and figuring out what had happened. And they each had a good motivation for why they would want to find out other than what happened to my friend. Like, everyone has something that touches their lives directly, that gives them a personal motivation, along with making sure that their friend, their friend's story is. Or their friend is vindicated.

[31:41] Meg: I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say this. That a clue to the solution to the mystery. If you are a fan of this podcast, it is a phrase that we use all the time. Do you know what I'm talking about?

[31:58] Jessica: No. Oh, good.

[32:00] Meg: So it's not a spoiler.

[32:02] Jessica: No, I'm lacking. I'm lacking in self awareness. What is it?

[32:05] Meg: My point. Oh, I'm not going to say what it is. Oh, no. Because that would be a spoiler. My point is that if you are a fan of this podcast, I think you're going to be a fan of this book.

[32:17] Jessica: I can't believe I don't know what it is. You must tell me. Now that you told me what it is. The clue to the mystery that we say all the time, it is so completely true. And once you. Once you encounter a few characters whose names are dropped for like a second, you'll be like, oh, yes, that's what it is. Like, it all wraps up in the same way that we are constantly seeing the circle of life, of the rise and fall of everybody in New York.

[33:01] Meg: And doesn't it make you realize that we would have so much in common with Gabriel Rotello and we have to talk to him in person?

[33:08] Jessica: Absolutely. No. He's clearly someone to know and a delight.

[33:12] Meg: Ooh, one other thing. All right. Did you know what an Oregon box was?

[33:17] Jessica: I looked it up.

[33:18] Meg: So did I. I looked it up. So I should tell everybody.

[33:21] Jessica: Fascinated.

[33:22] Meg: So apparently William Burroughs moved back to New York in the late 70s and lived on the Bowery across the street from CBGB's. Did not know that. Obviously, we have to do a story about that now. And he lived in an apartment called the Bunker, and he was obsessed with an or gone orgone bus O r G o N E box. And when you look it up. Would you like to describe it to our listeners? What it looks like?

[33:55] Jessica: Well, I mean, I. It looks like a cab. Like a. A large cabinet that you can then put a chair in and sit in it.

[34:05] Meg: Yes.

[34:06] Jessica: Why? Because. Well, you. You know why. Right. Did you look it up?

[34:10] Meg: Speaks to your spirit, basically.

[34:12] Jessica: Like, it's all about different energies in the earth and auras and energizing yourself. And there's, like, sexual energy that comes from it as well as life force. And the way that it works is that there are all of these different minerals and elements and earth and the stuff that's built into the box. Into, like, the walls of the box. So you're surrounded by it as you then sit in it and close the door of the box on you. It's not unlike. And we're gonna have another callback. This is to Rock's true fairy, okay? And he lived at the top of the Chelsea. Joe Brian, who lived at the top of the Chelsea in the pyramid. And pyramid power, which was a big thing in the 60s and 70s. With this idea that you could be energized by, you know, a shape or a, you know, a. A geode or whatever it is. This, to me, sort of was in the same category, but orgone. The concept of Orgone and an Orgone box, I think, was from, like, the 1910s.

[35:25] Meg: Burrows was into it.

[35:27] Jessica: Burrows, in his way of being obsessed with arcane shit, got obsessed with this. And I think it was like a German philosopher who came up with it first. And he. He was very into it.

[35:39] Meg: And we can visit it.

[35:42] Jessica: We can visit William Burroughs. Orgone box.

[35:44] Meg: Yes. The bunker is still there, preserved.

[35:48] Jessica: My God. That's a field trip.

[35:50] Meg: Yes.

[35:51] Jessica: All right.

[35:52] Meg: Well, then it's been funded by some foundation that it kept the entire thing intact. Did you have any idea. We could visit Burrow's apartment on the Bowery.

[36:02] Jessica: It was not on my list of to dos. But now it has rocketed to the top.

[36:06] Meg: All right. No question about it.

[36:08] Jessica: Let's do it.

[36:08] Meg: All right.

[36:09] Jessica: I.