Jiggle It A Little It'll Open - A Podcast

16/06/2023

Ira S. Murfin's 'An Interview' returns to the Rhino Fest in Chicago tomorrow, Saturday June 17th at 3pm.

A double Bill with a Play produced by Timothy Rey and an ongoing interview series by Ira S. Murfin.

02/06/2023

If you like Jiggle It A Little It'll Open, and you happen to be in Chicago, you might like JIALIO co-host Ira S. Murfin's performance project 'An Interview' tomorrow, Sat. June 3rd at 3pm as part of Rhino Fest.

The Monologue Play is an ongoing series of pieces that use found language and creative non-fiction to create short monologues that examine the issues of race, religion, s*x, identity, politics...and the American Myth. Producer: Timothy David Rey Director: J'Sun Howard Actors: Joy Young, Catrina Ev

19/05/2023

Surprise! The 19th episode of Jiggle It A Little It'll Open has arrived almost a week early!

A second surprise: following up on our first guest in a long while, we unexpectedly welcome another guest, who offers a window onto a particular moment in young adulthood when the world seems suddenly to open up and the young person feels compelled to capture what they are experiencing as it happens.

Episode 19: Once Removed
Following a thread about falling into things, Jiggle It a Little It’ll Open welcomes a surprise third guest, who also happens to be the grandson of the podcast’s first guest, and Aaron's first cousin once removed.
Jesse Schumann stops by the virtual podcast studio with a tale to tell about the last six weeks. Since taking a temporary break from college for some self-discovery and recalibration, Jesse has practiced mindful self-compassion on a Canadian meditation retreat, launched a rap career in collaboration with his Venezualen barber in Argentina, and started gathering material for a novel about his grandfather and himself covering, in part, these last six weeks.
Additional topics along the “corridors of self-revelation” include the role of mushrooms in the development of human consciousness, pop songs named after famous people, the family trees of Jewish Mormons, and perceptions of the most intimate of human interactions in popular culture.

Following a thread about falling into things, Jiggle It a Little It’ll Open welcomes a surprise third guest, who also happens to be the grandson of the podcast’s first guest, and Aaron's first cousin once removed.Jesse Schumann stops by the virtu...

11/05/2023

Jiggle It A Little It'll Open has found its way back to hosting a guest - Melissa Lorraine of Chicago's Theatre Y, talking about her company's new home and new direction.

Find out more at www.theatre-y.com

Episode 18: Theatre Why?
For only the second time in its short history, Jiggle It A Little It’ll Open welcomes a guest. Melissa Lorraine, Artistic Director of Chicago’s Theatre Y, discusses her company’s journey from its founding as a venue for the work of Romanian playwright András Visky to its recent move from the neighborhood of Lincoln Square, where it was one of over 250 theatre companies dotting Chicago’s North Side, to North Lawndale on the city’s West Side. Melissa talks about what it means for a historically white arts organization to move to a predominantly black, under-resourced neighborhood with the aim of driving revitalization without triggering gentrification, and the inevitable mistakes they are making along the way. She shares their experiences creating youth programming for the first time, learning to listen to her critics in new ways, and addressing needs beyond a theatre company’s usual purview, such as providing much-needed public space during the day and piloting a geothermal home heating project to reduce utility costs and help keep their neighbors in their homes. Plus, as befits a tale with this many twists and turns, there will also be a labyrinth.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1400386/12823190

For only the second time in its short history, Jiggle It A Little It’ll Open welcomes a guest. Melissa Lorraine, Artistic Director of Chicago’s Theatre Y, discusses her company’s journey from its founding as a venue for the work of Romanian playwr...

27/04/2023

Your all-access pass to Jiggle It A Little It'll Open's latest episode has been issued.

Episode 17: Unmarked Doors
The world is full of unmarked doors that some people know how to find and how to get through, and some people - by design or otherwise - do not. Aaron and Ira are thinking about ways that controlled access can both exclude and protect. When we offer each other access, what are we offering? And what are we giving up? Nascent online communities, clandestine cocktail bars, and city neighborhoods all maintain barriers to entry of one sort or another, until they don’t. And we can rarely control what happens then. But, as always, it seems to matter who gets and grants access, and who benefits from denying or providing it. Just remember, if you miss the Mega Mall, you can always hit the small Target.

The world is full of unmarked doors that some people know how to find and how to get through, and some people - by design or otherwise - do not. Aaron and Ira are thinking about ways that controlled access can both exclude and protect. When we off...

13/04/2023

Immerse yourself in the latest episode of Jiggle It a Little It'll Open. Once you acclimate to the temperature, you'll never want to get out.

Episode 16: Immersion Blender
Immersion is all around us, and perhaps it always has been. But we keep discovering it anew every time an experience is unique enough that we notice we are having it. From Greek tragedies and Medieval passion plays to 1960s happenings and environmental theatre to installation art, live action game play, and pricey Instagram-ready themed “experiences,” immersion as aesthetic approach and marketing ploy always offers irresistible novelty amidst the ordinary. Immersive theatre and art over the last few decades in particular has walked a line between deliberate obscurity and globally marketed phenomenon, sometimes, as in the cases of companies like Punchdrunk and Meow Wolf, with little space between. Aaron and Ira discuss the relative value of the hard-to-find experience that rewards pursuit, but of necessity must exclude, and discuss the need for some critical distance, and the impossibility of maintaining that distance while on mushrooms. But is putting it all on Gossip Girl the only democratizing alternative? Some things to consider over a few bites of the World’s Largest Sandwich. ¿Conoces la mayonesa?

Immersion is all around us, and perhaps it always has been. But we keep discovering it anew every time an experience is unique enough that we notice we are having it. From Greek tragedies and Medieval passion plays to 1960s happenings and environm...

30/03/2023

Listen to Jiggle It A Little It'll Open's 15th episode, on process orientation -- we don't necessarily know where we're going, but we hope you'll enjoy getting there as much as we did...

Ep. 15: Better Than Real Theatre
The hour or so spent in this episode on the concept of process orientation both illustrates something about the topic, and demonstrates how slippery it can be. Ever gravitating to theatre no matter what the topic, Aaron and Ira weave a network of connections between resisting perfection, eschewing deliberate meaning, and valuing participation, hoping to find process orientation cocooned someplace within. The clouds start to part a bit around the parallels that become evident between holistic models of verisimilitude and the rejection of authorial intention in favor of pure chance, when viewed through a process lens. Robert DeNiro, psychotherapy, Oklahoma!, Jerzy Grotowski, improv, the Wooster Group, and Sacred Harp singing all put in appearances as your hosts consider what theatre might be good for if not primarily for putting on a show. This is perhaps particularly relevant in light of an insight offered to Aaron by one of his most objectively successful friends just before heading onstage to meet a roomful of screaming fans, that in the third decade of the 21st century “only theatre people like theatre.”

The hour or so spent in this episode on the concept of process orientation both illustrates something about the topic, and demonstrates how slippery it can be. Ever gravitating to theatre no matter what the topic, Aaron and Ira weave a network of ...

23/03/2023

Gentle Jigglers (or should we say Eager Openers? JIALIO-ld Souls?): Thank you for your patience as we mix another episode together and leave it to set for another week. Tune in next Thursday (3/30) for more exciting adventures!

09/03/2023

"Come on, people now / Smile on your brother / Everybody get together / Try to love one another right now" because JIALIO Ep. 14 is out now, and it's all about The Collective...

Ep. 14: Beautiful Cacophony
The idea of the collective suggests a set of possibilities that do not rely upon personal vision or independent will. It can expand upon, enable, and obscure individual contribution – sometimes all at once – and, at its best, it surprises everyone. But the collective also requires a certain level of individual sacrifice to larger organizing principles – be they theatre, yoga, or architecture. It can be easy to confuse the collective impulse with a desire for what may actually be its opposite: absolute individual autonomy. All too often that becomes the only opening that those who value neither need in order to exploit others and do harm. Aaron and Ira begin by thinking about the ephemeral processes of collective theatre-making. They end up discussing two very concrete prototype habitats, each built by an unusually collected group of people in the Arizona desert. One of these projects counterintuitively turns out to also have its roots in collective theatre-making, though it is remembered and evaluated as a scientific laboratory. The other is intentionally and explicitly a laboratory, a specifically urban one, in the form of an incipient model city that may or may not still be in progress.

The idea of the collective suggests a set of possibilities that do not rely upon personal vision or independent will. It can expand upon, enable, and obscure individual contribution – sometimes all at once – and, at its best, it surprises everyone...

23/02/2023

Ambition: we've all got it, but only some of us know what to do with it. Lucky episode 13 of Jiggle It A Little It'll Open is all about that ever-present but elusive desire to do or achieve something, such as getting through a lengthy episode of your favorite Chicago-Paris based podcast.

Episode 13: Ambition, Ambition! Ambition!
Either Aaron and Ira have become mature adults, or they’re rationalizing their own failure, but either way, ambition no longer seems to hold the same power for them that it once did. As Ira puts it, “We do not want to live our lives as sacrifices to what might happen in the future.” So is ambition by definition a young person’s game? And is letting go of it a sign of maturity, or resignation? Gradually abdicating long-held and largely unexamined ambitions, a couple of middle aged guys might start to notice something that can feel like a kind of success, uncoupled from rubrics of notoriety, power, or wealth. At the same time, ambition will always to some extent be shaped by the historical and technological moment – whether that is Restoration England, 1920s Hollywood, or post-COVID America and Europe – and by the particular identities and inheritances with which everyone has to grapple. Still, it might be nice if a few people knew who you were when you died.

Either Aaron and Ira have become mature adults, or they’re rationalizing their own failure, but either way, ambition no longer seems to hold the same power for them that it once did. As Ira puts it, “We do not want to live our lives as sacrifices ...

09/02/2023

Jiggle It A Little It'll Open takes on Art + Life in its 12th episode, though have we ever really been talking about anything else?

Episode 12: Art Time + Life Time
As Aaron observes early in this episode, the relationship between art and life is something that has been considered by everyone from Stanislavsky to Ani DiFranco, but JIALIO decides to give it a whirl anyway. The discussion of art and life quickly becomes a meditation on how to live a life in art, and what is required to do so. It seems that money, scale, yoga, and happiness each may help, or get in the way, depending on which way one is heading. The words of a surprisingly insecure AI language model, working in both song lyrics and dramatic prose, offer little clarifying perspective, only something between empty platitudes and rote sincerity. Reminded of a remarkable phone call he once overheard Aaron’s end of, Ira is shocked to learn that Aaron has somehow retained no memory of what might be the most unusual Craigslist roommate inquiry quite possibly in all of history. Then the Angels sing.

(This is just one example of how this episode could go, and can be adjusted accordingly.)

As Aaron observes early in this episode, the relationship between art and life is something that has been considered by everyone from Stanislavsky to Ani DiFranco, but JIALIO decides to give it a whirl anyway. The discussion of art and life quickl...

03/02/2023

If you were watching the clock waiting for a new episode of Jiggle It A Little It'll Open to drop this week, do not fear -- your patience will soon be rewarded. Episode 12 will be heading your way next week, look for it on Thursday, February 9th.

19/01/2023

Jiggle It A Little It'll Open is back, though no reason you would know we'd been gone. But we had been, and now we're not. Find out what we learned and how we changed during our sabbatical. First up: comedy. Just sit back and imagine it's 1987, you're stuck in rush hour traffic, heading to work in downtown St. Paul on I-354, and these are the voices you hear on your radio...

Episode 11: Anagnorisis
Aaron and Ira return to the podcast studio for a new batch of episodes after a 6-month hiatus from recording. The thread they choose to pull from the previous episode, and the whole first season, is comedy. Comedy may actually be one of the key threads running through their friendship, which was cemented in part over Aaron’s concept for a still-as-yet-unrealized, obscurely comic short film. What makes something funny, anyway? Who gets to be funny? Should Aaron try stand-up? Is US Senate Minority Leader Micth McConnel really who he says he is? Things get more personal in a discussion of Aaron’s liberal use of accents, and how that might have figured into his expatriation. In the end, Aaron and Ira once again acknowledge that they are not drive-time DJs in the 1980s Minneapolis/St. Paul commercial radio market, and never will be. The ghost of Leonard Cohen closes things out with a surprisingly suggestive take on “I Have a Little Dreidel.”

Aaron and Ira return to the podcast studio for a new batch of episodes after a 6-month hiatus from recording. The thread they choose to pull from the previous episode, and the whole first season, is comedy. Comedy may actually be one of the key th...

05/01/2023

Start your year off with Jiggle It A Little It'll Open's 10th episode!

Episode 10: The Right to Ski
Inaugurating JIALIO’s new format, your hosts choose the topic of work, specifically the value produced by labor, as a thread they want to pick up from the previous episode. They begin with jokes that deliberately do not work as jokes. This leads to a discussion of French humor and the tendency of French comic artists – from Moliere to Jacques Tati – to appropriate, in the name of refinement and elevation, comedic aesthetics originally found elsewhere in the world. Finally getting around to a conversation specifically about work, they find themselves focusing on vacation and debt, comparing (as they so often do) attitudes and practices in France with those in the U.S. Ira struggles to articulate his experience of the relationship between professional and personal identities in the U.S. context and, thanks to Aaron’s time in Lithuania, learns the term “Free-Air Director,” a euphemism for unemployment he can put on his business cards. If he doesn’t hit it big as a Jeopardy! champion first, that is.

Inaugurating JIALIO’s new format, your hosts choose the topic of work, specifically the value produced by labor, as a thread they want to pick up from the previous episode. They begin with jokes that deliberately do not work as jokes. This leads t...

29/12/2022

Thanks for your patience while JIALIO takes a short holiday break. We will be back with a new episode ( #10!) next Thursday, January 5th. In the meantime, episodes 1-9 are available for your holiday listening needs wherever podcasts are found.

Happy New Year! We'll be talking to you in 2023!

15/12/2022

Nearly six months after it was recorded on the Summer Solstice, episode 9 of Jiggle It A Little It'll Open has finally been released! Listen now at the link below, or wherever you like to get your podcasts.

Episode 9: The First Podcast That Barbara Almost Finished an Episode Of
This is what we call a shorty. After the duration and weight of the previous episode, Aaron and Ira spend significantly less time covering a greater variety of topics than usual, beginning with Aaron’s plans for the estival solstice, and moving on to a meaningful recent conversation with their mutual friend and collaborator, the weird internal logic of the song “Doctor Worm” by They Might Be Giants, and an invented experimental Chinese restaurant. This leads to some discussion of the strange ways that time moves now (“now” being either the post-pandemic era or middle age, or both), the economic impact and non-impact of the pandemic shutdown, and its salutary culinary ripple effects in Chicago and Paris. Marking their milestone 9th episode, which statistically most podcasts never get beyond, they propose a new device to thread episodes together, without sacrificing the podcast’s signature indeterminacy. Before this shorty concludes, some awkward attempts to lure sponsorship deals are made, and both Aaron and Ira somehow manage to draw a blank on the word “proliferation”.

This is what we call a shorty. After the duration and weight of the previous episode, Aaron and Ira spend significantly less time covering a greater variety of topics than usual, beginning with Aaron’s plans for the estival solstice, and moving on...

17/11/2022

After a longer than anticipated hiatus, your favorite inscrutable podcast, Jiggle It a Little It'll Open, is picking up right where we left off with unreleased episodes recorded many moons ago. Episode 7 is available now for your listening convenience at the link below or wherever you usually go for podcasts. And check back every other Thursday for more!

Episode 7: Live For You + Me
After hosting JIALIO's first guest on the previous episode, Aaron and Ira hash out how that decision was made back in episode 5, and how it might impact the direction of the podcast going forward. At issue, in part, is the value of centralizing difference and conflict versus prioritizing solutions, a tension which has characterized much of the collaboration between Aaron and Ira over the years. Their conversation veers between the metaphysical and the pragmatic, touching on the eschatalogical hypotheses of Architect Paolo Soleri and Jesuit/Paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, before concluding with the seductive, but empty, pleasures of The Amazing Race.

After hosting JIALIO's first guest on the previous episode, Aaron and Ira hash out how that decision was made back in episode 5, and how it might impact the direction of the podcast going forward. At issue, in part, is the value of centralizing di...

15/11/2022

After some down time to pursue other projects, reflect, and work on our mutual personal growth, JIALIO will finally start releasing additional episodes THIS THURSDAY November 17th, with more to come biweekly on Thursdays for now.

We hope you've missed us as much as we've missed you.

During the hiatus -- as you may have noticed -- we had some time to play with OpenAI's DALL-E 2 to try and generate some images that might help us all better understand what this podcast is and does. Here is one of the results for the prompt “A colorful screen-printed graphic that represents jiggling, opening, experimental theatre, Chicago, Paris, secular Judaism, friendship, and middle age”

Discuss.

27/09/2022

Jiggle It A Little It'll Open is taking a short hiatus for the High Holy Days and other more worldly interruptions, so Episode 7 will not be released today.

This gives you extra time to listen to any of our first 6 episodes that you may have missed, available for free wherever you tap into the podcast stream. If you are already all caught up, may you be inscribed in the Book of Life.

Stay tuned, we'll be back with more in October.
L'Shana Tova!

13/09/2022

JIALIO Episode 6, featuring our first guest Joel Henning, is now available for your listening pleasure:

Episode 6: Resisting Tyrants Since Pharaoh
JIALIO welcomes the first guest in its history, attorney, critic, author, patron of the arts, and Aaron’s maternal uncle, Joel Henning. Joel appears courtesy of the process established in the previous episode by which Aaron asks someone who has known him for a long time (in this case his brother Jason) who he should invite onto the podcast. The wide-ranging conversation covers arts clubs, societies, and councils; moving to Florida in a post-Trump, post-COVID world; and the Chicago neighborhood of Logan Square, where Ira lives, Aaron once lived, and Joel and Aaron’s mother grew up. Joel’s recollections include legendary Chicago columnist Irv Kupcinet and the special guest room he kept for Sammy Davis, Jr., the intricacies of liar’s poker, a surprise appearance by actor Eli Wallach, and a T-shirt with an important message.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1400386/11295062

JIALIO welcomes the first guest in its history, attorney, critic, author, patron of the arts, and Aaron’s maternal uncle, Joel Henning. Joel appears courtesy of the process established in the previous episode by which Aaron asks someone who has kn...

06/09/2022

If you've ever wondered about the sounds that open every episode of Jiggle IT a Little It'll Open, that is a cover of Roger Miller's 1973 tune "Open Up Your Heart" (which providentially contains the title of our podcast in its lyrics) recorded especially for JIALIO by Chicago's only end times vocal trio, 80 Foots.

https://www.facebook.com/80FPM

One Foot (or is that 23.3 Foots?), Emmy Bean, is currently in the homestretch of fundraising for Her Only Light: The Songs of Connie Converse, a collaboration with musician and arranger Ronnie Kuller and the 5th Wave Collective exploring the range of music Converse wrote before her disappearance in 1974. Please consider supporting the project and, if you are in Chicago next spring, come hear what they've created...

https://3arts.org/projects/her-only-light/

STRETCH GOAL! Wow, our team is so grateful to all of you for believing in this project. Now, if you'll just keep that belief going...we would like to keep fundraising toward a stretch goal of $10,000. The additional funds will help us pay musicians, create beautiful stagecraft, and make all of it as...

01/09/2022

In search of an image to communicate the nuances of "jiggling" and "opening," we cycled through a number of Jello molds and theater curtains parting before settling on our current FB page cover image.

But Aaron Kahn wondered if using artificial intelligence might yield a better result than using our own, and asked Open AI's DALL-E 2 to generate:

"A photorealistic painting of multicolored jello molds that spell “JIALIO” seen on the stage of a black box experimental theatre with curtains opening."

We may be on the verge of "transformational AI," but the resulting image suggests we may not yet be at the point where it can capture the essence of a vaguely defined podcast. Or, just as likely, text and images generated by AI systems are only as accurate and insightful as the human input behind them...

Check out this more informed reflection from the New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/technology/ai-technology-progress.html?smid=url-share

+ Don't forget to listen to JIALIO episode 5, now available on finer podcast providers everywhere!

30/08/2022

In episode 5 -- now available -- JIALIO gets back to the business of interrogating its own existence. Listen now!

(New episodes every other Tuesday.)

Episode 5: The Eye of the Brainstorm
To mark the 5th episode of Jiggle It a Little It’ll Open, Aaron and Ira invite an existential crisis by briefly looking back at what has happened so far on the podcast, and asking, “Where do we go from here?” Eventually, they agree upon an experiment that will finish playing out as a kind of trilogy over the course of episodes 6 & 7. Along the way, they encounter yet another cultural divide between Europe and America involving Venmo and sending aid to refugees, and clarify that David Brooks is NOT one half of Brooks & Dunn.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1400386/11135704

To mark the 5th episode of Jiggle It a Little It’ll Open, Aaron and Ira invite an existential crisis by briefly looking back at what has happened so far on the podcast, and asking, “Where do we go from here?” Eventually, they agree upon an experim...

19/08/2022

Now that JIALIO episode 4 has been released, be sure you're caught up through episode 3, recorded just after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine:

Episode 3.
Stuff We Can’t Affect

As an American who has lived the better part of the last 15 years in Europe, including Eastern Europe in recent years, Aaron reacts to the onset of the war in Ukraine. Wrestling with the enormity of what is happening, he describes his own thoughts during the first days of the attack and his surprise at the responses of many of the people around him to what, only a short time before, had seemed unimaginable. Ira asks questions from his perspective as an American in hopes of better understanding, and possibly helping to give some shape to Aaron‘s thinking.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1400386/10563659

As an American who has lived the better part of the last 15 years in Europe, including Eastern Europe in recent years, Aaron reacts to the onset of the war in Ukraine. Wrestling with the enormity of what is happening, he describes his own thoughts...

17/08/2022

Now available: JIALIO Episode 4!

New episodes every other Tuesday.
Like this page + subscribe on your preferred podcast platform to get the latest.

Episode 4.
“If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

Aaron and Ira unspool some tiny corner of the cultural response to COVID during the early days, and uncover some differences between American and European discourses. The changes and deprivations of the COVID era trigger a more expansive reflection on anticipating loss and absence when approaching great change, and the inner continuity that can sometimes be found on the other side. Evaluating the episode while still making it (never a good idea!), Aaron yearns for the energy of the morning drive time DJs of his youth, and he and Ira both agree that something (though probably not this podcast episode) should be titled Half Jimmy Carter, Half Jimmy Stewart: The Last Three Generations of American Thought. The actual title of this episode is a quote from Leonard Cohen. The episode concludes with a recitation of the poem that is at least partially responsible for Aaron and Ira’s friendship.

https://listen.stitcher.com/yvap/?af_dp=stitcher://episode/205763379&af_web_dp=https://www.stitcher.com/episode/205763379&deep_link_value=stitcher://episode/205763379

Aaron and Ira unspool some tiny corner of the cultural response to COVID during the early days, and uncover some differences between American and European discourses. The changes and deprivations of the COVID era trigger a more expansive reflection on anticipating loss and absence when approaching g...

15/08/2022

In our second episode, theatre emerges as one of the show's main preoccupations:

Episode 2: Revised Connoisseurship
Aaron and Ira contemplate the implications of a rather bureaucratic messianic revelation before turning to the purpose of theatre and, with a h/t to scholar Sara Jane Bailes, the uses of theatrical failure. Several important names in experimental theatre are dropped and one of the best plays you have probably never heard of is discussed at some length. In the end, they succeed in their goal to start funny and become gradually more ponderous and obscure as the episode continues.

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS8xNDAwMzg2LnJzcw/episode/QnV6enNwcm91dC0xMDQyNTg5NA?hl=en&ved=2ahUKEwikhqmgqbX5AhXoHzQIHYCtBPcQjrkEegQIAhAI&ep=6

Aaron and Ira contemplate the implications of a rather bureaucratic messianic revelation before turning to the purpose of theatre and, with a h/t to scholar Sara Jane Bailes, the uses of theatrical failure. Several important names in experimental theatre are dropped and one of the best plays you hav...