I Don't Even Own A Television

In the second leg of our ICP saga, our grease-painted patron points us past the platinum peaks and into the valleys of his following, less successful, records, and walks up to the precipice of admitting "I started smoking weed and found god" but in the end sticks with "we had this all planned out from the beginning and never changed anything about ourselves." Along the way, he describes both putting on weight and losing weight in the most off-putting ways possible, has a few extremely boring feuds with nü-metal musicians and burns some bridges in pro wrestling, and describes it all in the vaguest ways possible. Then the book just sort of ... stops, and we're all very relieved and grateful. MASSIVE THANKS TO our truly wonderful pals Bill (@sundownmotel) Hanstock and Lemon of the F Plus Podcast for running in, guesting hard, and bringing the ICP heat! Note from J. W.: Sorry this is late. Editing this episode almost drove me, quite literally, to a nervous breakdown. I'm going through some other shit right now,

It had to happen, and it had to happen in exactly this way: I Don't Even Own a Television meets the juggalos, as we sit down with with a clown and read Violent J.'s Behind the Paint. Be forewarned, this one goes places we rarely go; and be advised, this is our first ever two-part episode! Here in part one, IDEOTV prepares an ICP primer. We enjoy endure wallow in the band's early days, ranging all the way from suburban Detroit to slightly different parts of suburban Detroit, described with all the deft language you'd expect (or maybe demand) from the "musicians" responsible for "songs" like "I Stuck Her with My Wang" and "Beverly Kills 50187". Grab a well-chilled two-liter bottle of store-brand soda and prepare to return to a time when you still thought flipping somebody off counted as a revolutionary act.  Recommendations: "Heads and Straights" by Lucy Wadham "Occultation" by Laird Barron Music: "Here Come the Gravediggaz" by Gravediggaz "Malpractice" by Redman "Tru Master" by Pete Rock w/ Inspectah

You're guaranteed to get a kick out of retired pro football placekicker Jason Elam (and his ghostwriter special writing pal Steve Yohn)'s taut Riley Covington thriller Monday Night Jihad! Well, unless things like grade-7 sexuality and Steve-Bannon-grade Islamophobia somehow impede your enjoyment of pulp literature. Anyway, come with us and meet the team that stands between us and those who would ruin our football games! No, not medical professionals: the terrible terrorists who lurk among us ... on our football teams. This will make some kind of sense eventually. We hope. Recommendations: 1Q84, Haruki Murakami Remains of the Day, Christa Wolf Music: "Madden 2002 Theme" by Pharoahe Monch "Official" by Pharoahe Monch "Lyricists Lounge Freestyle" by Pharoahe Monch

Bit of a change of format this time around, as we bring you our second live event, and our first Bad Book Party! From audience-provided oddities to the long-awaited appearance of probably the most-requested book in the show's history, this is an action- and guest-packed hour or two you won't want to miss. Thanks to everybody who came out, thanks to Casey for helping us surge past a few technical difficulties, thanks to Andrew at Green Apple Books on the Park for getting the event ball rolling, thanks to Green Apple Books on the Park for being gracious, flexible hosts (with super-shouts to Colin), and thanks to all our amazing guests: Eugenia from the Muni Diaries Lauren and Niko from Sunday School Dropouts Lauren Parker Lemon from the F Plus Recommendations: We recommend that you come to our next live show! Music: Various production cues from "Ren & Stimpy"

Prepare to grapple with the gods* as we're joined by comics writer and major dude Christopher (@xtop) Sebela to discuss the sleaziest rock bio we have ever seen, the legendary No One Here Gets Out Alive, by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman. From dong-flashing to Dazig, this conversation has it all! *Second-division** **At best Whether you think Jim Morrison was a modern-day Dionysus or just the original fat man in the bathtub (with the blues), this is a show you're guaranteed to enjoy! (NOTE: guarantee not valid if you think Jim Morrison was good or important.) Also! Mark your calendars, because I Don't Even Own a Television and friends are throwing a Bad Book Party at Green Apple Books on the Park in San Francisco! This free event will be at 7:30, Saturday, February 11, 2017, and it's going to be more fun than not going to it, that's for sure. Come out! Join us! EVERYONE will MAKE IT OUT ... ALIVE!   Recommendations: Dave Davies, Kink, An Autobiography Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff Steve Jackson's Sorcery! Cha

Years ago, at a cheap theater, a bunch of us went to see the inexplicable remake of H.G. Wells' classic, The Time Machine. About an hour in, my pal leaned over to me and stage whispered, "I wish I had a time machine!" and I missed about the next 10 minutes of the movie because I was crying / wheezing out of laughing so hard. Anyway, if you had a time machine, you'd probably want to use it to go back and prevent Michael Crichton's Timeline from existing, because hoo boy is this one a by-the-numbers cash-grab. Most of the clunkiest dialogue we've ever read, a plot that more or less forgets to happen, and more authorial lectures about the badness and madness of academia than you'd expect—or want to sit through. Anyway, please join us for a trip through Michael Crichton's One Single Idea, in this little medieval-flavored mashup of Jurassic Park and WestWord, a striking dish we're calling ... Timeline. Also! Mark your calendars, because I Don't Even Own a Television and friends are throwing a Bad Book Party at Gr

With a kind of ... lugubrious inexorability, rough-hewn, thick-thewed hosts J. W. Friedman and C. Collision thrust themselves into the rugged world of John Norman's Gor, where the tawdry pages of Outlaw of Gor await us and our stern attentions. A true legend in the universe of bad books, the Gor series avidly answers the question "what if Edgar Rice Burroughs but with the racist bullshit cranked to eleven and a huge amount of really badly handled bondage and domination fantasies interspersed with heavy, heavy quantities of bad philosophy?" It's basically the perfect book for us, is what we're saying. If only it weren't so plotless and dull... Also! We would like to announce our next live show! We're hosting a Bad Book Party at San Francisco's Green Apple Books on the Park, Saturday, February 11, at 7:30 p.m. It's totally free, is gonna have a bunch of rad guests (Niko from Sunday School Dropouts, Lauren Parker, Lemon from The F Plus -- and that's just the ones we're announcing now!), and is going to be the m

Our holiday tradition rolls on as we encounter yet another massive science-fiction hit, as we, with help of shadow producer Casey Occhialini get all up on Orson Scott Card's Hugo and Nebula winner Ender's Game. Ender's Game is about a young boy and a sociopath — but I repeat myself — who fears his brother, is in love with his sister, and enjoys provoking young boys into confronting him and then murdering them. Also he enjoys video games! Which turns out to be important and good, because playing video games is just like leading people into battle. Which he also does. Anyway, we enjoy the fast fun and frantic action of this inexplicably well-regarded tale of children screaming fart-related insults at each other while occasionally pausing to wonder "Wait. What the hell is going on here?" and trying hard to avoid wading (too) deep into the world of Ender's Game's politics. Anyway, change into your sleep uniform and join us in the Battle Room, where the answer to everything is to remember, because reasons, "The e

Your dynamic duo, J. W. Friedman and Chris Collision, take on the terrible twosome of Scott Cawthorn and Kira Breed-Wrisley in Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes. You'll need to hop into the Mystery Machine and load up on Scooby Snacks to solve the mystery of what the hell is going on in this novel of PG-13 horror, non-existent intrigue, and multiple trips to a diner to hang out. But what Cawthorn and Breed-Wrisley don't understand is that ... we're not locked in a pizza place / arcade featuring terrifying animatronic beasts with iron grins and red (red, not silver) eyes ... the terrifying animatronic beasts with iron grins and red (red, not silver) eyes ... are locked in here with US. (SPOILER: what's going on in this novel of PG-13 horror, non-existent intrigue, and multiple trips to the diner to hang out is, mostly, a thesaurus-humping answer to the eternal question: "What if Frankenstein, but stupid?"...) Also! We announce the winners of the NaNoWriMo Bad Writing Contest! We reference interviews! W

Ah, the rhythmic clickety-clack of rail travel, the chuggety comforts of trains, the suburban father's hobby! At least that's what we assumed we were going to experience when we took on the recent publishing sensation, Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train. However, what we discovered was a real Rashomon, a real jigsaw puzzle of multiple perspectives and realities, a real, real set of girls, but gone, daddy, real, real gone. Okay, that wasn't true. This was NOT a book about ladies who ought to be described with any hipster talk; that was a misleading lie and we apologize. Anyway, this semi-successful account of man's inhumanity to women and the toxic effects thereof turns out to be good fodder for us to get off track, even if the book is freighted with stuff that got us steamed (as though it had been engineered for us). We conducted ourselves well, we think, and were stoked to take on this boiler. Grab your tickets, keep an eye on your luggage, and enjoy the ride. (Honestly, that's good advice for life, not j

We asked for it and you gave it to us, one fairly brutal paragraph at a time, and now here it is: your friends J. and Clsn reading more than 30 (!) entries for our First Ever National Novel Writing Month contest! No notes could do this one justice, so just slip into your favorite podcast-listening mask and don't forget that you've got that bowl of soup in the microwave, because it is time to hear what the minds of the IDEOTVPOD Community can come up with when asked to write bad paragraphs. This time, we're all winners!

The time has come, and it won't stand still: after a couple years, we finally go for the big money, put Rush into the limelight, and turn the camera eye to Clockwork Angels by Neil Peart and Kevin J. Anderson. Our first novelization of a concept album -- yes, you read that right -- this fly by night book-like object had us losing it. (Literarily, it's not exactly a high water mark. In fact, each time, it required substantial freewill to turn the page. Even if you're in the mood for something like this book, most of this book isn't working, man. If only we'd had some distant early warning that would have prevented us from making memories about this stupid thing.) Our grand designs to leverage our lifetimes of Rush fandom (one of many of our open secrets) to go on a witch hunt at Rush's expense end up revealing many lessons, and some tears. Anyway, please enjoy this podcast that we made for you, no strings attached: it's something for nothing. Also please enjoy the two thousand, one hundred twelve hidden Rush

This Halloween, put down your flying broom and pick up the pieces -- Piece by Piece, by Tori Amos and Ann K. Powers! With special guest and Tori Amos expert Lauren Parker, J. and Clsn take a magic carpet ride through a wonderful patchwork tapestry cauldron, bubbling with diversity, myths, magic, big business, the sacred feminine, Robert Plant, the circus, hair metal, football (which is what they call soccer in England, it turns out), and a whole heaping pile of goddesses. Not your usual rock book, and definitely not the book version of a making-of DVD extra for a long-forgotten album, except exactly, precisely that, Piece by Piece just might rock you -- to sleep! Come: tune your piano; tend your moistest garden; and tour the seething volcano of Piece by Piece with us.   Recommendations: Love Is a Mixtape, Rob Sheffield Emma Ruth Rundle, Marked for Death Violet is the Color of Your Energy, Nadia Bulkin Music: "My Piano Horror", a Youtube Video of a Piano Recital "Lush Life" by Stan Getz (with elements

Stowing away in your earbuds, gnawing at your stores, and leaping from your dark corners at your tender ears, it's James Herbert's The Rats! A verminous return to the kind of bad book that's always the best: the kind where, every couple pages, somebody nearly has sex and absolutely gets eaten by giant rats. If you ever wanted a book about mutant rats invading the slums of London, then The Rats is for you — and if you didn't, what are you doing listening to IDEOTVPOD, anyway? It's time. Grab your flashlight, pull on your heaviest gloves, and come with J. and Clsn on an exploration of two hundred of the rat-infestedest pages anyone has ever seen. It's time for ... The Rats.     Recommendations: Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods Music: "Rats in the Cellar" by Aerosmith "Rats" by Clutch "Hot Rails to Hell" by Blue Oyster Cult "Rat Bait" by The Swimming Pool Q's

As voted on by our supporters on the IDEOTVPOD Patreon, this episode we're strapping on our pads and skating around the tough issues posed by Forever Pucked, by Helena Hunting. Ice-cool customer Rachel Millman fleshes out our team as she and J. and Collision try to score on this ribald tale of work, marriage, family, violence, hockey, and raunch. A lot of raunch. More raunch than we've ever confronted (or, in some cases, enjoyed) before. Yes, this is a novel of romance — hockey romance — with a comedic bent. So, as the nights grow longer harder and the days trend colder, it's time for us all to cozy up to our best, longest, largest hockey sticks and start slapping ... shots. Extra thanks to great friend of the show A. A. Freeman for bringing this raucous ride to our attention, and it's probably worth noting that this particular episode brings more than a soupçon of naughty from the first second, so, uh ... headphones? Headphones. Recommendations: Slap Shot Atlanta The Goon Music: "You Sexy Thing" by

What lurks beneath the bottom of the barrel? Well, we checked. Turns out that beneath the barrel's bottom slithers Anthony Zuiker's Level 26: Dark Origins. This episode, we're sneaking into the villain's dungeon, conveniently located in 2009, when it, apparently, seemed like a good idea to let the guy who made up CSI get together with his buddies and make this exceptionally book-like object, supplemented with zero-budget video clips, high-school-notebook-level drawings, and an attitude towards sex and violence best described as HOLY CRAP THIS IS AWFUL WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE. Episode highlights include: A PATENTED DIGRESSION! Clsn failing repeatedly to learn how to pronounce "Zuiker"! A book that includes the description "sick son of a bitch"! Book highlights include: when civilization collapses (next Tuesday), you can probably cook a pigeon over it, if you can catch a pigeon. And start a fire. You know what? Nevermind. Eat a potato instead; much easier to catch than a pigeon. NOTE: this book is trul

As foretold in ancient scrolls, Clsn and J. fulfill the grim prophecies and embark on a quest most dire: get somehow through the dullest book we've seen in ages: Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragons of Autumn Twilight: DragonLance Chronicles Volume One. Like listening to somebody misexplain the plot of a movie you've already seen, while pretending the plot is something they made up, getting through this book is a tall dang order, but we made it. And so will you. Brush up on your magic words and get ready to laugh at a book that purports to Chronicle DragonLances, but that actually contains somewhere south of a half-dozen dragons and literally zero actual lances. Grip tightly your ocarina and prepare to raise your voice in the songs of your people (particularly if your people, like our people, are partial to Pony). The roads are dusty, and your leathern saddle is no doubt cracked, but a few ales and some spicèd potatoes will soon have you ready for adventure with your friends. Our party awaits! Come with

Renowned author Dan Brown's renowned book The Da Vinci Code provides a renowned topic for renowned podcasters J. W. Friedman and Chris Collision, along with renowned guests Lauren O'Neal and Niko (from renowned podcast Sunday School Dropouts. An extremely popular book yields an extremely long episode, with enough jokes to make anyone enough of a believer to found a secret society devoted to hiding the truth about the show ... or maybe to hiding the truth about the show while pointing out that actually all of popular culture is about the show. It's all a little confused. Anyway, if your Grail is L A F F S, then this episode is for you! Note: This is an extra-long episode because J. is not feeling well enough to edit it down to a shorter length. But it's very good and you will enjoy every minute, we promise. Extra credit reading: Geoffrey Pullum's legendary eviscerations of Dan Brown's prose style.     Recommendations: National Treasure Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco Complete Stories, Flannery O'Connor M

Prepare yourselves for true depravity, because this time around, we're taking on Corey Taylor, vocalist of Slipknot and Stone Sour, and his book Seven Deadly Sins. Two men alone could never take on such a large number (to say nothing of the seven newly proposed sins or the main one he admits he forgot to add), so J. and Collision welcome back juicy guest Lemon! We laugh, grimace, yell, and learn as Corey Taylor spools out a deeply failed attempt to be a stand-up comedian (inexplicably in written form) as he attempts to answer the question "What does Corey Taylor think about things" and actually just answers "What would happen if a Hot Topic got hit by magic lightning and turned into a really talkative guy on the bus". Episode highlights include the most successful Plot in 60 Seconds of all time, J. and Collision slowly succumbing to Bud Lite Lime-A-Rita poisoning, and the amazing contortions required to find high points in this book. Episode lowlights include the prose and ideas of Corey Taylor, a man who wo

If you like your sex scenes extremely long and your gunplay extremely every single chapter, then you just may be the target audience for Against the Mafia: The Executioner, Book 1, the legendary piece of action-trash that introduced Mack Bolan to an extremely unsuspecting world. From chapters like "A Master's Stroke" and "God-Damn Iron-Man Bolan" (not kidding) to "The Goof", "Forecast: Warmer Tonight and Tomorrow", and "Execution Hill", J. and Collision dance madly backwards through the raging river of fear that powered the writing of this book, a terrified look at a completely unrecognizable 1969 America, a cringing fantasy of one tall-ass man with lots of long-ass long guns (and knives) standing up for families and righteousness and shooting people who get in your way and banging one whole lot of ladies. New segments! Bizarre word choices! Some of the mannest manning any book ever manned! Philosophy lectures! Incredibly angry diary entires! EXPLOSIONS AND FUCK YOUR HELICOPTERS! If you ever caught yourself