After the Show Conversation with Joey Krikorian

Join us for more conversation with our friend Joey as we get more relaxed and talk about Star Wars, pasta, geology, music, Armenia, and our next episode together and all the things we did not get a chance to talk about (about the root of why things happen the way they do).

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Matt: And just because this could be interesting, but yes, I want to talk about man and his sense of smell, but that's going to be handled in the next show, which is great. I also wanted to talk about, you know, there is a tradition, an Italian tradition as far as like, um, you know, pasta comes from the far east and the Italians have quote-unquote made it their own so that the, and during the Roman empire, they grabbed spices from everywhere they could grab it from the spice road, for instance, I mean, God, that that's a culture addicted to spice, right? Yeah.

Also Joey. I wanted to mention something very interesting. There is a book it's actually two books, the graphic novels it's called "Maus", M A U S

[00:00:43] Joey: a hundred percent.

[00:00:44] Matt: He actually talks about how his father didn't want to tell his stories. And he actually gets an explanation from his father and then his father completely changes his tune, but very, very powerful series of books.

[00:00:57] Joey: I think I want to say something to the first point you've made, which is that I should've said this one thing my Armenian grandfather always did as much as we didn't talk about anything else related to Armenia, anything, anything in the world he would point to and say, Armenians invented that, or that was Armenian pasta, grape leaves.

I don't know any, anything, anywhere. That was his go-to thing. And it's like something, it was just part of my. Childhood hearing. Right? So it never, like, it was always just a thing, you know, it was always just a thing in my life. So, uh, I never really asked any questions or anything, but looking back that was pretty fun and entertaining and pretty much the truth.

You know what I mean? I get it. I get it.

[00:01:46] Matt: And for

[00:01:48] Joey: go ahead, go ahead. If we're continuing down that same line. Okay. Well to "Maus". Yes. And what a great book and what a great like. EV everyone should read it. You know, there were these, I could talk forever about this, but there are these points where like there's stuff that everyone should watch and read.

And some of it's animated, TV shows and people are so turned off by that, but there's stuff in there and there's stuff like graphic novels, like "MAUS",

and there's stuff like "They Called Us Enemy" a graphic memoir by George Takei about spending part of his childhood in an internment camp in the United States. And it's incredibly emotional and it's his story and it's a graphic memoir and it's just like, everyone should read it. And there's people like we're talking about, like, we're talking about people not knowing what the Armenian genocide is.

There's so many people in this country that grow up not being taught about Japanese internment camps and other things like that, that happened in this country. So right along the same line of "Maus" in my mind is this graphic memoir. It's called, uh, by George Takei called and "They Called Us

[00:03:07] Matt: Enemy"

there is a number of them. I mean, in Japan, there's a series called "Barefoot Gen", or gen G E N. The whole thing about it's the story of Hiroshima, Jesus Christ. That's not going to be a good story, right. But it's again, very visceral and powerful graphic novel. And then to tie us back to "Maus" for just a second, there's a, there's a scene in the story where he's walking down the street.

He it's it's and it's during the scary time. And he walks by a guy and the guy says , which means, I guess, in Yiddish. And I've probably just butchered it. Uh, it means what does it mean our tribe or it's w and he said it in. And he like hesitated. Like, do I answer him? Do I not answer him? And that takes us to, again, back to Italy and Rome, uh, during the days when the Christians were persecuted, the way that they would say do exactly that exact same thing as they would, they would draw a fish on the ground and then they'd scratch it out because the fish was the early symbol of Christianity.

[00:04:06] Joey: Interesting. I wonder if there's something. I wonder if there's something similar in Armenia, because there was this, that, you know, Christianity, they were Christians. That's what instigated that conflict, that genocide. So I wonder if there's something similar ...