This Week's Guest: Josef Krebs
What's the project of your life? My guest this week is Josef Krebs, who's done a lot of thinking about the impact he can have on the world, whether through the evangelical church in which he grew up, or the world of theater where he eventually found a more satisfying home. Josef's work has always been about chasing the feeling of ecstasy, not just for himself but for the people around him.
This Week's Recommendation: Katamari Damacy
I'm going to get very "big idea" for a moment here and assert that one of the primary functions of myth is to connect us to the cosmos -- that is, to make sense of the insensible vastness of the universe. But sometimes, the stories we tell make the universe make even less sense, and that's the case with this week's recommendation: the game Katamari Damacy.
The premise of the game is simple enough, and it's kind of Pac Man plus a snowball rolling downhill. You play the Prince of the Cosmos, whose father the king accidentally destroyed all the heavenly bodies. He wants you to go to Earth to collect material to remake the moon and stars. And the way you do this is by rolling a sticky ball around various places -- everything you touch sticks to the ball, and while you start very tiny you eventually roll up enough to gather paperclips, then small toys, then cats and dogs, then people and cars and buildings and trees.
A line often repeated in the game is, "I feel it. I feel the cosmos." An indeed, it's hard not to feel as though everything is connected as you roll it all up, from the tiny bugs at the start to the giant cargo ships at the end. It is deeply satisfying to squish every object in the world together to make new stars. As Carl Sagan said, we're all made of star stuff, and there's a pleasurable democracy in seeing that everything, big and small, can get rolled up into a big sticky ball of celestial light.
Clips of Stuff We Talked About
Music
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/