Show Overview
Punk Professor. Space pirate. Design rebel. Author of many books on design. Noah Scalin is not your ordinary guy ~ he might not even sleep! He teaches design at the Virginia Commonwealth University, runs a socially conscious design firm called Another Limited Rebellion, and used kickstarter to fund his book Skull-a-Day that you’ll want to hear all about. We had so much to talk about that this show is just part one of a two part interview.
Noah’s work can be seen in many publications including USA Today, Wired and The New York Times. His art has been exhibited at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, the Museum of Death in Hollywood, The International Museum of Surgical Sciences in Chicago, and the Museum of World Culture in Gothenberg, Sweden. He gets around. Noah has written a series of books on creativity, made skulls with Martha Stewart on her TV show, and even found time to meet me in his Richmond studio. We had so much to talk about that this show is just part one of a two part interview.
In this episode you’ll learn about:
- Chop Suey Books in Richmond, Virginia
- Picasso
- The Grateful Dead
- The Dao
- Images of the Capuchin Crypt
- Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic
- Crash, the film
Be sure to hear Part Two of my interview with Noah!
Books by Brant
Most Recent
For Christmas 2018, my brother, a pilot with American Airlines, gave me a gift that became the experience of a lifetime: 12 months of free travel anywhere American Airlines flies.
Thus began a year long journey that took me from the rocky coasts of Portugal, to the hot sands of Morocco, to the mangrove swamps of Panama, with many places beyond and between. In cheap hostels and the backwaters of the nomadic milieu, I discovered a treasure chest of colorful and fascinating people. I tell their stories and a bit of my own.
The trip became as much a spiritual and emotional journey inward as it was a literal outward one, and found me in a place those of you who are in the second half of life are likely to recognize.
With references to the philosophies of Carl Gustav Jung, Jesus, Bob Dylan, and the Buddha, Blue Skyways is an international romp by a man in his 60’s with not much more than a pack on his back, and still much to learn.
A suspense/thriller novel!
When a psychology doctoral student Brian Drecker uses advanced software to analyze dreams from around the world, he discovers odd patterns that cannot be explained. Where one person's dream ends, another's begins. Unique objects appear again and again...even though the dreamers are complete strangers.
Drecker discovers the patterns form a map pointing to an ancient, lost object. Soon after, he is mysteriously murdered, leading his deadbeat brother and estranged wife on an international race to find the treasure, and the murderer. Along the way, the troubled couple are opposed by dark forces of the religious underworld, who launch a global pandemic to ensure the map of dream's secret remains lost forever.
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I Am a Racist
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
I often hear nowadays, people being accused.
“He’s a racist.”
“She’s a racist.”
“Trump’s a racist.”
“So and so’s a racist.”
What I have yet to hear is: “I am a racist.”
So let me be the first.
I am a racist.
Yes.
I see the ugly thing, creeping around my soul like a roach in the kitchen. I squash it, but sometime later, there it is again.
I know there is a nest somewhere, eggs hatching, a source deep within me, hidden away where it’s easy to deny. There is where I'll find the library of my false beliefs, the lies I tell myself over and over, so often they become grooves cut into my gray matter, like fissures in rock where the water runs down, cutting deeper and deeper, until fissures become swales, and swales become canyons.
When did the first racist raindrop fall? I don’t know. As a child, for sure. How many drops of poison does it take to pollute the vessel of pure water of which we are born? When, exactly, does a person become a racist, and who gets to decide?
I don’t know, but then, neither does anyone else.
I don’t believe in permanence. That’s one thing the Buddhists have taught me.
Everything changes.
We can become aware of that library of false beliefs, that nest of nasties that colors our perception of things, often for the worse. Awareness alone brings change. We can cut new grooves. My challenge as a human being is not to deny that I am a racist, for that would be as foolish as denying I have cancer when I really do. My challenge is, rather, to stop the cancer from metastasizing and poisoning the whole man.
I doubt I will ever fully eradicate my racism. Unfortunately, I suspect some vestige of it will always be with me. But what I can do, and what I do do, is expose myself to experiences that lessen my racism, those being travel, kind and honest conversation, and breaking bread with “the others” whenever I can. These experiences, like wind and rain, smooth rock and, over time, lay low even the highest mountains.
So when I hear the angry crowd shouting, "He’s a racist,” I want to ask:
“Who among you is not a racist? Stand up then and take a bow...for you are surely a god.”
I moved to Substack!
Hi there. If you've read this far, then you enjoy, or are at least intrigued by, my ideas. If you want to learn more, jump over to my new website on Substack, where I continue to write about travel, the second half of life, and other mad musings.
