Executive Director David Jordan sat down with “Fringe God” TJ Dawe for a short interview about his work. They began to talk about Totem Figures and how this concept had started.
D: Let’s start with Totem Figures and where your fascination for Totem Figures began.
TJ: The concept or the podcast?
D: The concept, yeah.
TJ: That actually came during a mushroom trip, believe it or not. One of the most powerful ones I’ve ever had. Me and two friends were at my family’s cabin, which is I think the best possibly the only environment to do mushrooms. I wouldn’t do it in an amusement park; I wouldn’t do it in a concert. Do them in nature and not to have fun but to have a spiritual experience. We had all turned 30 recently and one of the guys just found out he was going to be a father which he wasn’t ready for, that’s Greg Landucci actually, and we came up with the idea of doing Dish Pig on that weekend. So part of the point of that trip was introducing an idea that I kind of have been playing for a little while (to Greg)…because I had noticed that part of being 30 is that I’d been an adult for roughly 10 years so I could look at my own tastes…who are the musicians whose music continues to speak to me, who are the writers whose books I’ve liked for a long period of time, and what are the patterns of that, and what do those patterns say about me. So as I was describing this to Greg, it kind of occurred to me that you can do that with anyone, and it wouldn’t have to be writers, it wouldn’t have to be musicians; it could be favorite athletes, it could be a family member, it could be a character from a folk tale, it could be anything. But if it continues to speak to you for a long time that says something about who you are.
D: So did you start out with the idea that it would be interesting to talk about other people’s totem figures just as much as your own?
TJ: It was a way to get to know someone. Because I also found that if someone is really into a musician that I’m not for instance, and they know I’m not into that musician, and they play me a song they’ve selected, and explain why that person is better than I think they are, then it’s much more likely that I’ll then grow to appreciate that artist rather than if I just stumble on them on my own. Because this person loves Bruce Springsteen, and they know far more about him than I do. I know the same things about Bruce Springsteen as most people. Which is just pretty general, but somebody who knows a lot can illuminate that person. And that just doesn’t tell me something about Bruce Springsteen that tells something about the person that loves Bruce Springsteen.
D: Which ultimately is much more interesting, because you’ll never get to know Bruce Springsteen.
TJ: Right, but I will get to know that person more through that interest.
D: Yeah, it is such a wonderful idea.
TJ: Now, get this: around the same time one of the friends that was on that same mushroom trip got me into the Enneagram which is one of the things I talk about in Lucky 9; and I have since got into it a lot. I read books; I got an audio book by Helen Palmer who’s one of the big gurus of the Enneagram. And she talked about type 5, which isn’t my main type but I have a lot of 5 in me, and talks about how fives love systems of information. They love finding significant information about people, it says that they need to know things about that person, they sometimes refer to these as “Totems” (he laughs) those were her words! I burst out laughing when I heard that.
D: Yeah, I have noticed you ask people a lot of questions, just naturally. And it’s very fascinating because you get people opening up right away. Have you always done that? Even before Totem Figures started? Or was that a change for you that started with Totem Figures?
TJ: I think it was starting to happen gradually. I don’t think I’ve been that way 100 percent of my life, but it was definitely starting…Totem Figures really kicked it into high gear because after the show when I’d be around a Fringe Festival and I toured 9 festivals with that show, you meet people on the street, you meet them on the sidewalk, you meet them at restaurants, at other shows, at bars and then you often go into the standard kind of conversation where someone comes up and says: “Hey I say your show, I thought it was really great”, and I’ve had that conversation enough times that its become really boring. I mean it’s still really nice to hear, but I’ve heard it before. And here’s somebody who has listen to me talk about this for 90 minutes and I can say: “Do you have any idea who your totem figures are?” And then suddenly the conversation involves telling me a lot of things that I don’t know. I’m talking about this person so I’m most likely to remember them from that point on because then I remember that Gandhi means a lot to them, that Johnny Mitchell means a lot to them or Billie Holiday, or somebody like that. And I don’t know much about Gandhi, or Joni Mitchell or Billie Holliday, and suddenly they are telling me that. So then if I did wanted to explore Joni Mitchell’s body of work I would have this person’s recommendation of what’s the best album to start with, the best song to start with, what’s the best fact about her as an artist that I should really focus my lens on.
D: After having had this conversation so many times, does it tell you anything in particular about our modern relationship with heroes?
TJ: Yeah, a lot. Basically what I got out of Totem Figures was realizing that anyone that speaks to you strongly, that’s akin to somebody following a religious tradition, gravitates to any figure or even any given story of religion. Like the thing about Christianity and of course, Jesus and God are the big guys but if you are going to read the gospel there’s all kind of different stories about Jesus. There’s all kind of different things that are attributed to him, so which one of those stands out? People can interpret Christianity in a kinds of different ways, and then there’s all the saints, there’s all the different mystics and thinkers, there’s all the different old testament prophets; and then in Greek mythology, Roman mythology and any other kind of mythology there were multiple Gods and Goddesses. So which one speaks to a give person? That’s not that different from our system today. With their hundreds or dozens of rock stars, you are not going to be into them all, it just there’s no time. Same with writers; same with comic book characters. Comic book characters are very close parallels to ancient gods, they represent very fundamental ideals, they have supernatural powers, they come into your life when you’re a kid, which for me was the same age where I came into religion…and the Bible that I read as a kid was a comic book! It was pictures of the Bible, and some of the characters, like Samson, had supernatural strength…unless you cut his hair, a lot like Superman. And Joshua blasted the walls of Jericho… by playing a trumpet. So the parallels extend quite directly, I found. Elvis Costello may not have the cultural significance as Jesus but within in a given person’s life he might. It could be anyone who speaks to someone profoundly that has mythic resonance for that person and that becomes a sign for that person of what it means, what their ideals are as a human, what they aspire to – What does it mean to be a human being and what the potentials are of what that person did and therefore what they can do.
D: Thanks so much for the chat TJ. Looking forward to seeing the show on Saturday and seeing you with Gabor. You must be really looking forward to interviewing him again.
TJ: Here’s a tip Gabor Maté gave me for that CITR interview. He said he’s going to save it for the stage, but he said that because of my show he started watching “The Wire”, he’s almost at the end of the second season and something has happened because of it, and that’s all he’ll tell me. I also asked him if he research his Enneagram type and he said he had 2 books on it already, but he hadn’t read them. He was briefly interested in looking into it after my show but then he kind of thought: “what do I do with that?” But he said he would look into it, so that we can talk about it onstage.
