Ken Brandon | Photograph by Adam Williams
Overview: Ken Brandon seems to be a kind of philosophical Stoic, Buddhist, absurdist Spartan, who is known for riding a bicycle around Salida, Colo., while wearing a giraffe head and a three-piece suit. And yet he describes himself as “boring.”
Ken also is a designer, a painter and a screenwriter, and he’s the creator of Box of Bubbles in Salida, Colo.
Adam talks with Ken about his “boring” approach to life and his appreciation of the surreal. They dabble in Dalí and da Vinci, Taosim and Dadaism. And talk about Ken’s astonishing collection of American idioms, which is 20+ years in the making. Among other things.
SHOW NOTES, LINKS, CREDITS & TRANSCRIPT
We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and is supported by the Colorado Public Health & Environment: Office of Health Disparities.
Along with being distributed on podcast listening platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple), Looking Upstream is broadcast weekly at 1 p.m. on Tuesdays, on KHEN 106.9 community radio in Salida, Colo., and can be listened to on-demand via khen.org.
Ken Brandon & Box of Bubbles
Website: theboxofbubbles.com
Instagram: instagram.com/boxofbubblessalida
We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream
Website: wearechaffeepod.com
Instagram: instagram.com/wearechaffeepod
CREDITS
Looking Upstream Host, Producer, Photographer & Website Manager: Adam Williams
Looking Upstream Engineer & Producer: Jon Pray
We Are Chaffee Community Advocacy Coordinator: Lisa Martin
Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment: Andrea Carlstrom
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts are produced using a transcription service. Although it is largely accurate, minor errors inevitably exist.
[Intro music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:15): Welcome to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream, a conversational podcast of community, humanness, and well-being, rooted in Chaffee County, Colorado. I’m Adam Williams, and today, I think we have an especially fun conversation.
I’m talking with Ken Brandon, who I learned is kind of a philosophical, stoic, a Buddhist, an absurdist Spartan who is also known for riding a bicycle around town while wearing a giraffe head and a three-piece suit. And to think that Ken describes himself as boring. We talk about the giraffe and how it serves Ken as a sort of separate way of experiencing life, while also bringing a lot of joy and light to others.
Ken is an artist. He’s a designer, a painter, a screenwriter. He’s also the creator of Box of Bubbles, which contrary to what some passers-by think, it’s not a laundromat or a car wash.
(01:05): We talk about that and how a Burning Man experience factors into the creation of Box of Bubbles. We explore his quote, boring approach to life and his appreciation of the surreal, and we come as close as I ever have to so unfairly putting a guest on the spot to tell us the meaning of life.
We dabble in Dalí and da Vinci, Taoism, and Dadaism, and we talk about Ken’s astonishing collection of American idioms, which already is 20 plus years in the making, and it’s a wildly lengthy list. Along the way, I also learned that there was a precursor to Bob Ross on TV. I had no idea, he was a man who inspired Ken’s early years as an artist.
(01:47): We talk about Ken’s time early in his career as a printer’s devil as well, among other things, so many things.
The Looking Upstream Podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority. As always, you can find show notes with relevant links and a transcript of the conversation at wearechaffeepod.com. Now, that’s a new website for this podcast, so I will say it again, wearechaffeepod.com.
Now, here we go with Ken Brandon.
[Transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams: So we had to do that thing where we turn off our cell phones to get started on this, right? We don’t want people ringing, interrupting as we get going in the conversation. And Ken, you don’t have a cell phone?
Ken Brandon (02:37): Nope.
Adam Williams (02:37): Which I think is worth highlighting just because I’m in awe of it. And I imagine a lot of people are, whenever they find out that you are not reachable by cell phone.
Ken Brandon (02:45): That’s pretty much the reaction I get when people say, “I’ll text you something,” and I go, “Don’t have a cell phone.” And they go, “That’s amazing. I’m jealous.” And yeah.
Adam Williams (03:00): Isn’t it a funny reaction? Because I, of course, had the same reaction and then I’m also aware, but we all have choice. I could choose to not have the phone, and yet somehow, I just keep going down that rabbit hole.
Ken Brandon (03:11): Yeah, and I guess I maybe assumed that if I got one, then I would lose my choice of whether to live with it or without it. So I just never got one.
Adam Williams (03:26): At some point…
Ken Brandon (03:26): Plus, I’m cheap. That I think is.
Adam Williams (03:29): Okay. Well, and they are not inexpensive, are they?
Ken Brandon (03:30): Right.
Adam Williams (03:32): I mean, these things are like a thousand-plus dollar pocket computers at this point. It’s wild. So I want to talk with you about one of the things that locally people might recognize you for most, and that is riding a bicycle around town wearing a sizable giraffe head. I hope I’m not spoiling secrets. I don’t think I am, right? People know this, don’t they?
Ken Brandon (03:55): A lot of people do, but it was interesting because I had a combination anniversary and birthday party at Box of Bubbles, which I own, and we’ll probably talk about that later.
Adam Williams (04:08): Yeah, sure.
Ken Brandon (04:10): But at the party, people were on the dance floor and this one guy came over to me and said, “I just found out that you are the giraffe.” And he says, “I wish I didn’t know.”
Adam Williams (04:27): Okay. Well, spoiler here, I guess.
Ken Brandon (04:30): Yeah. So I jokingly told him that we were offering a program where we would erase people’s memories and so he could come in and have that done and then he wouldn’t know any longer.
Adam Williams (04:43): You’re also Santa Claus, just to throw another spoiler out there. Well, I’m wondering how that got started when and how long you’ve been doing that and why?
Ken Brandon (04:54): Well, I belonged to, was originally Central Colorado 350, which was an environmental organization, I guess worldwide, but we had a Chaffee County chapter and we on Earth Day would do a parade for the species where we would invite the community to dress up as their favorite endangered animal. And the first year that we tried it, I opened up Box of Bubbles again as a venue or a place for people to come and do paper mache and create their costumes.
And we’d have maybe a dozen people prior to Earth Day come in and work on costumes. And I had blown up a bunch of balloons as kind of a foundation for paper mache heads, and one balloon was left over that was just this weird shape. And so I took it and started working just covering it with paper mache.
(06:04): And at some point I looked at it and I said, “What could this be?” And giraffe seemed like it had a long kind of protuberance on it. And so I just started making that head for the Earth Day Parade and got it finished.
And one of the people that was coming in was Krista Jarvis, who a lot of people know in the community. Wonderful lady. She did a lot of the costumes for the circus and for different performances that we had at various times in Salida. And she looked at that giraffe and she just said, “Wait a minute, I’ll be right back.” She leaves and she comes back with this plaid three-piece suit that was tan with amber and black and white stripes, looked like something that a used car salesman would wear. But I put that on with the giraffe head and it was magical.
(07:18): And then went in the Earth Day Parade, and after the parade, I just thought I had so much fun wearing that, why do I need to limit it to one day? So I would just get on my bike and ride around town and observe that people’s reaction to me was one of just laughter and smiling. And I realized a different thing about it was how it made me feel because I was no longer Ken Brandon.
I was this giraffe and I seemed like I was channeling just some character that was all about love and making people happy and being weird, and it just sort of stuck. So I use it as my therapy, if during the day I’m feeling a little bit out of sorts, I’ll say, seems like a good time to become the giraffe. And so I’ll get on it, ride around town, and after about 15 minutes of having people yell out, “We love you.” Everything is good.
Adam Williams (08:31): And it’s a good quid pro quo, you’re out there to serve smiles for those people, and then you can come back in a lighter spirit yourself, it sounds like.
Ken Brandon (08:39): Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Adam Williams (08:40): Is there freedom in that experience because I know that my face is not visible? Even for the people who maybe know who is inside of that, do you feel like as you’re writing that there’s sort of a barrier or a protection, something that is the difference between-
Ken Brandon (08:57): Autonomy?
Adam Williams (08:57): … you walking in the world?
Ken Brandon (08:59): Oh yeah.
Adam Williams (08:59): And you being this giraffe on a bicycle?
Ken Brandon (09:01): Yeah. In fact, a contrast, one day I did a bike round as the giraffe, and then I got out of the giraffe character, got on my bike and had to run up to Ace Hardware or something. And it was just such a contrast with how I felt and how people reacted to me. No one paid any attention to me at all when I was Ken, but yeah.
Adam Williams (09:35): Have you tried walking into a store being separate from that experience of biking around with the giraffe head on?
Ken Brandon (09:41): Well, I got kicked out of a bank because I was supposed to go up there for a photo op, and I walked into High Country Bank and people…
Adam Williams (09:52): Okay. Yeah. I mean, there are movies where people wear masks in to rob banks.
Ken Brandon (09:56): Exactly.
Adam Williams (09:56): So that’s probably immediately what flashes.
Ken Brandon (09:58): The giraffe didn’t even think about that when he walked in.
Adam Williams (10:02): The giraffe, a separate entity.
Ken Brandon (10:04): Yeah. Yeah.
Adam Williams (10:06): That’s wonderful.
Ken Brandon (10:07): Yeah.
Adam Williams (10:07): From chatting with you before, I feel like I have a sense of how you approach life and with the… Well, serendipity was a word that came to mind when you were talking about how the giraffe head and the suit and everything came together for you.
Ken Brandon (10:23): Yeah, right.
Adam Williams (10:25): And so I thought of this [inaudible 00:10:26].
Ken Brandon (10:25): That’s my whole life.
Adam Williams (10:27): That’s great. And I want to talk about that because I think it’s really remarkable, and there’s a line from John Lennon that comes to mind that life is what happens while you’re making other plans and it seems like something that might really resonate with you and how you approach life. Is that a line that you have remembered, that you think about or at least resonates in this moment as I’ve shared it with you?
Ken Brandon (10:48): Well, I don’t know. The first thing that comes to mind is that I don’t try not to make plans. And I guess I had to for the bulk of my life, but now that I’m in the position I’m in with being semi-retired, I just try and keep things open so that whatever happens happens. But I think I probably was doing that even before.
Adam Williams (11:20): Well, what made me think of the line was when we were chatting and you said, well, the way I look at things, if I come out to my car and there’s a flat tire, and that means I can’t go to wherever it was I was intending to go, I just take it as well. I guess I’m meant to do something else today.
Ken Brandon (11:34): Another opportunity. Yeah. Yeah. I think that goes to, I think, a conscious effort on my part to try not to have expectations, and that’s not only just expectations about the normal daily things that we tend to do, but also with people and with myself. So I really just make an effort to don’t have expectations. Everything’s good.
Adam Williams (12:04): That is at least the way we all process through the filter of what our experience and our knowledge and what we’re paying attention to is. And so for me, I’m thinking, okay, that sounds like a Buddhist sort of approach, because when we have desires, then we have suffering. And you’re saying, if I don’t set expectations, then I’m not going to be bothered by what happens in life.
Ken Brandon (12:25): Right. Yeah.
Adam Williams (12:25): So you’re Buddhist, is that what we’re announcing here?
Ken Brandon (12:28): Well, I guess that philosophy is something that… Well, that, and I can remember in probably junior high studying about the Spartans, and it’s interesting that I now live in a town where the team mascot as a Spartan, but was intrigued with their approach to life and simplifying their existence. And that’s always appealed to me. So maybe I’m a Buddhist in a Spartan uniform.
Adam Williams (13:05): With a giraffe head?
Ken Brandon (13:06): With a giraffe head, yeah. I also really am intrigued in stoicism, appeals to me of just being indifferent to pleasure or pain. And probably, maybe that’s why I think my life is pretty boring because I just keep such an even keel. I don’t get really excited and I don’t get depressed. I just sort of ride through the middle, which is kind of boring.
Adam Williams (13:35): There’s a Stoic expression that I had thought of too. I have a list of these things that you brought to mind because from different philosophies that all sort of intersect around the things we’re talking about. And one from the Stoics is amor fati, love of fate. So it’s not getting upset, not identifying whatever happens in life as good or bad. It’s taking it as it comes and saying essentially, “I love whatever it is that happens, let’s continue the ride.”
Ken Brandon (14:02): Right. Yeah. And then you got to throw in a little pinch of absurdity because I really believe that it’s all absurd.
Adam Williams (14:13): Tell me more.
Ken Brandon (14:13): No, I don’t have anymore. It’s just absurd.
Adam Williams (14:16): Well, what is it? All of life? All of…
Ken Brandon (14:20): Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. When you really break it down, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Adam Williams (14:28): Did you grow up with that around you? Were your parents-
Ken Brandon (14:29): No.
Adam Williams (14:31): … or whoever of your family that way? Did you have to sort of cultivate that as an adult at some point?
Ken Brandon (14:38): Yeah, I think probably it was in college studying different philosophies and whatever. And then also getting in, my background is in art, and I just loved art history and especially the surrealist, the Dadaist movements just really rang true to me, and that their whole basis is just the absurdity and the existential movement to a certain extent.
Adam Williams (15:10): That there’s no rhyme or reason to life? It all just it?
Ken Brandon (15:13): Yeah, or meaning. Yeah. I think we individually have meaning in our lives, but as a whole, I just have a hard time really figuring out, if by its nature, our existence here is limited, the sun will eventually burn out. So then the point that our existence here doesn’t go on forever, there’s an end to it then that just seems like what’s the meaning of it?
Adam Williams (15:55): I appreciate the distinction that there’s meaning within an individual life, not necessarily in the collection. That’s a little harder to see maybe.
Ken Brandon (16:01): Right.
Adam Williams (16:02): What is it that you figured out throughout life that might present meaning to an individual’s life, whether that’s yours specifically or just in a broader concept?
Ken Brandon (16:14): Gee, you didn’t tell me you were going to have hard questions.
Adam Williams (16:19): Well, I didn’t know this was going to lead me to this.
Ken Brandon (16:21): I understood that it was only true or false or multiple choice.
Adam Williams (16:25): Sorry, I misled you.
Ken Brandon (16:26): Yeah. Yeah. I think everyone has their own, discovers their own meaning for themselves. I, for myself, have a meaning of just having friendships.
Adam Williams (16:50): Cultivating that joy for others?
Ken Brandon (16:52): Yeah, and doing the best that you can and making decisions and being good, whatever that means.
Adam Williams (17:02): I mentioned good and bad, these ideas of labeling things or taking life as it comes. And are you familiar with the Taoist parable of the Chinese farmer and good, bad, I don’t know, is the boiling down of that, and I’m not going to recount the story here, but the idea is that something that might generally be perceived as bad and the farmer would say, “I don’t know. We’ll see.”
Because ultimately it might lead to some other opportunity that presents good. And you have an experience with that that you had hinted at in a previous conversation with me, and that was that you were in prime position to be drafted for the Vietnam War, and then something happened that ultimately kept you from being draftable.
Ken Brandon (17:48): Right. Yeah.
Adam Williams (17:49): And that actually very closely aligns come to think of it with that parable, because in that, the Chinese farmer had a son who got injured, became disabled, and then a war started within the next year, and he realized he was going to get to keep his son. And you have a very similar story, so would you mind sharing that? And it seems like that might also shape some philosophy for you in this good, bad, I don’t know, sort of context.
Ken Brandon (18:15): Can’t remember the exact year, but I think it was probably ’67, and I was in my junior year at college, and I decided to just take a little break during the summer and into the first semester of the next year to do a little self-discovery. And it included going out to the East Coast. I had a sister and her husband that were stationed in Alexandria, Virginia, and I went out there and I thought, well, I have a background in printing. I can get a job in a print shop someplace, but I beat the bushes and couldn’t find a thing and kept looking.
And finally, a job came open with a roofing crew in Alexandria, Virginia that serviced the whole Baltimore, Washington DC, that whole area. And so I got on this roofing crew, and I was anticipating finishing college, but I had gotten a very low draft lottery number, and so I just assumed that I was going to get drafted as soon as I graduated, and I had questions about the validity and the necessity of a war across the world at the time.
(19:38): But anyway, I took this job on a roofing crew and was severely burned on my left forearm, and I’m a quick healer. It healed pretty quickly. It was painful. It was an interesting experience. I even look at that as looking back on it as not a negative thing. It was just kind of a weird experience. And so I come back, I finish my college. I get called to get my physical with the draft.
And apparently during that year since the burn, I hadn’t been using my left hand as much as normal, and my hypothenar muscle had atrophied, and the doctor that was checking me out picked up on that, and he just said, “Nope, we don’t want you, you have an atrophied hypothenar muscle.” And so I didn’t get drafted and my life took a drastic turn.
Adam Williams (20:50): When you went into that situation with the doctor, I assume you were expecting, I’m good to go. This thing is a non-issue. I’m healed, whatever. I’m going to be drafted like I thought I was going to be drafted, when the doctor told you, Nope, you’re not going to be, do you remember that feeling? Was there relief? Was there confusion?
Ken Brandon (21:10): Yeah. I think there was relief and mostly just surprise because it was not expected. Yeah.
Adam Williams (21:18): I would imagine your family was assuming, well, it’s his turn, here he goes. And then I would assume your parents were happy to hear otherwise.
Ken Brandon (21:26): I think so. Yeah. Yeah. My dad, he was a veteran, and I think his expectation was that I’ll do my duty and go over there, but he knew how I felt about it.
Adam Williams (21:40): Had he been in World War II?
Ken Brandon (21:42): Yeah.
Adam Williams (21:43): It’s interesting you mentioned your concerns about the validity and value of that war, which of course a lot of people had. I’ve done some reading on Dadaism, which you had referenced in terms of art and the absurdity in that, and that was in response to World War I, and it was a way of using voice to express absurdity about what was perceived as the absurdity of a world war like that.
Ken Brandon (22:12): Yeah. I think the main point of the movement was that looking back at the history of our species, we had relied upon rational thought to get us where we were at that point and look where it got us. And so I think the objective of the Dadaist and the Surrealists were to introduce the possibility that irrational thought has a value. And so the Dadaist movement itself, the name came from an irrational arbitrary picking of a word from a dictionary. And so that’s why Dada became the name of the movement.
Adam Williams (23:10): I think it might’ve been Einstein who said, we can’t use the same thinking that got us into this to get us out of it. So in that way, that would make sense that, look, if we tried to logic our way into all these things, and where it has led us is a lot of violence, millions of people being killed in war and so on, or in this case, by your time, Vietnam, maybe we do need to try something different.
Ken Brandon (23:33): Yeah, relying upon arbitrariness, irrational kind of maybe dream states of consciousness to influence how we think decisions we make.
Adam Williams (23:51): I’m thinking of the artist Dali, which I assume was somebody you would reference as well–
Ken Brandon (23:55): Right. Yeah.
Adam Williams (23:55): … with Surrealism. Yeah. Well, I want to ask you about a story that I think also highlights sort of, I don’t know, I mean, there’s optimism. I don’t want to say impulsivity like it was a bad thing. It’s the fact that you proposed to your wife a week after meeting her, which is an extraordinary experience, I think. It is not… I mean, I would only know this from watching movies, but if you watch, say, a World War II era movie, you might see somebody who’s about to go off to war and be like, “Oh, let’s get married.” And other than that, outside of that context, I don’t know that I really encounter your kind of story very often, and yet you met her and seven days later.
Ken Brandon (24:38): Proposed, yeah.
Adam Williams (24:40): How did that come to be and how do you describe that as far as who you are and how you view your life?
Ken Brandon (24:45): Yeah. Well, it was out of my nature. I wasn’t a very impulsive person, I wouldn’t think. I wouldn’t describe myself at the time as being impulsive, but I don’t know. It was, I think, a combination of impulsive going with how I was feeling at the time, and then maybe also accidental, because when I proposed, I did it as a joke, and she didn’t take it as a joke. And so then I just said, okay.
Adam Williams (25:22): Oh, oh, was that part of it?
Ken Brandon (25:24): Yeah, right.
Adam Williams (25:27): Do you think you really meant it as a joke, or was that sort of-
Ken Brandon (25:30): Who knows?
Adam Williams (25:31): … the way of easing in and not being perceived as off your rocker?
Ken Brandon (25:37): Right, maybe.
Adam Williams (25:40): So she took it seriously, which of course…
Ken Brandon (25:43): Yeah. Well, and she might’ve even been joking to a certain extent because we had known each other for a week. She was living in San Diego. I was living in Las Animas, Colorado. She had come out on an errand to take her grandmother back to San Diego to live with her parents, and we just connected and had spent the full week together.
And then it was decision time when I had gone with her out to San Diego and was now preparing to fly back to Colorado, and where was that going to take? Where would that go? And so she said, “What are we going to do? You’re going to be in Colorado. I’m out here.” And I just said, kind of flippantly, “Well, you could marry me.” And she replied, “I’d be delighted.” And in my mind, I said, “I think I just got engaged.” And so then we started over the phone planning the wedding, and we had the wedding in San Diego.
Adam Williams (27:00): How long was the time between that proposal and when you actually got married?
Ken Brandon (27:05): Well, yeah, let’s see, it was February 12th was when we met, because that was Valentine’s Day, and then she came back out to see me one time between our wedding and having met, and that was for spring break. So we ended up getting married in May, the 6th of May. What is that? February, March, April.
Adam Williams (27:39): It’s a little less than three months, just shy of three months from hello to I do.
Ken Brandon (27:44): Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Adam Williams (27:46): Yeah. Let’s shift gears here.
Ken Brandon (27:51): Okay.
Adam Williams (27:52): I understand you are a collector of idioms.
Ken Brandon (27:54): Yeah. Yeah.
Adam Williams (27:56): I would like to start with a definition of what is an idiom for a review for myself and anybody else listening who might need that, and then we can go from there, because I’d like to hear about how you came to idioms and all of that.
Ken Brandon (28:09): Yeah. Well, as I understand it, the definition of an idiom is a word or phrase that has general usage that when taken literally makes no sense. So bringing home the bacon is an example of an idiom. And to all of us, we know that that means whoever was bringing home the necessary means to exist, and usually in the term of wages or whatever, but someone that doesn’t know that, they’re looking for the bacon and there is no bacon.
Adam Williams (28:54): If you’re from another country and you’re trying to learn our language, this is one of the many, many that can throw you off.
Ken Brandon (28:59): Right. Yeah. And so anyway, I had been doing it just on my own, keeping a running list. And a friend of mine was also interested in it, and we would communicate back and forth and share. So we had maybe collected maybe 50 or 60 of them, and I was on a road family trip to San Diego and decided just to pass the time with my family. In tow, we would come up with as many idioms as we could.
And I think on the trip, we maybe got another 50 or so, and we felt pretty good about hitting a 100, but then I kept it going over the years, and I’d hit 200, 300, 400, 500. At present, I have 1,013 idioms that I’ve collected. And it’s just…
Adam Williams (30:01): That is such an amazing number, because how many of those, if we were able to look at the list right now, I wonder how many of them I would recognize be like, “Oh, yeah, that’s familiar.”
Ken Brandon (30:12): I would say 90%, maybe more.
Adam Williams (30:14): Wow. So we’re using a lot of expressions that we really don’t give thought to.
Ken Brandon (30:18): Right. Yeah.
Adam Williams (30:19): And how many of them just aren’t making sense?
Ken Brandon (30:22): Or we don’t think them literally, we don’t even think about them literally. We just glean the meaning of them. And what’s funny for me is if you were to ask me to start, I mean, I’ve collected a thousand. If you were to ask me to give you my top 10, I can’t. I cannot remember them because there’s no context.
Adam Williams (30:47): Sure.
Ken Brandon (30:49): But if I say take the word cake, then I’d say, okay, piece of cake, it’s a piece of cake, would be an idiom. And then if you hit me with some words, I can maybe source out an idiom that uses that word that… Yeah.
Adam Williams (31:12): Okay. How do you keep straight what you have encountered and written down, or actually, how do you keep them? I don’t know if you’re handwriting them, if you’re just keeping a list.
Ken Brandon (31:21): Well, I started handwriting, and then I just started entering them into a text program that has the feature that you can search. So just if I come up with a new one, I’ll copy and paste one of the words that’s in it and then do a search and it’ll highlight if I’ve already got it.
Adam Williams (31:46): How excited are you when you find a new one and you do that search and you don’t find it and you realize, I’ve got a new one for the list?
Ken Brandon (31:53): Another one. Yeah. Yeah. It’s kind of playing a game and getting a point in the game.
Adam Williams (32:00): This is a long-term game. How many years are we talking at this point?
Ken Brandon (32:04): Well, I’ve probably been doing it for 20 some years. Yeah.
Adam Williams (32:09): Could you imagine putting out a book of these or in some format for people at some point to share this?
Ken Brandon (32:16): Yeah. Well, I thought the only thing I could think of that made sense to me was an app that would be for people that are visiting this country or coming here and they’re in a conversation and they hear something like, he’s long in the tooth. And you go, “What does that mean?” And then you could just go or put it into the app and it would tell you-
Adam Williams (32:47): That makes sense.
Ken Brandon (32:48): … what it means. And I don’t know if I want to get into the ethnology of it, where it’s derived from and all of that, that would be [inaudible 00:32:59].
Adam Williams (32:58): The history lesson on each one of those as opposed to just a list, break a leg comes to mind.
Ken Brandon (33:03): Yeah. Right.
Adam Williams (33:04): So that would fit as one when we use that for actors going on stage.
Ken Brandon (33:09): Right. Yeah. Yeah. There’s just so many.
Adam Williams (33:12): Sounds like you’ve already got that one.
Ken Brandon (33:14): Yeah. Yeah.
Adam Williams (33:17): Okay. Well, you have a number of creative interests. Painting, I think is maybe kind of the origin for you, or at least maybe the central thread through it all.
Ken Brandon (33:27): Drawing, I think I started out as a child as most do with just drawing pictures, and I went to a public school that had no art program at all. I mean, not through… There wasn’t a specific art program in elementary, middle school, or high school.
Adam Williams (33:50): We’re talking in the ’50s then and maybe into the ’60s.
Ken Brandon (33:53): Yeah. Yeah. I graduated in ’65. But yeah, I just never had that, so I got most of my need for it fulfilled through, and I didn’t have a television until I was almost in my teens, our family didn’t. But once I got it, I realized that there were programs like drawing with Jon Gnagy, which was a afternoon program that a guy would get on there and sort of like Bob Ross, he was the precursor, but it was with drawing more than it was painting. And so I was strongly influenced by him. And then just the fact that I got encouragement from my friends that saw what I drew and seemed to be impressed with it. I think we’re all trying to impress people around us.
Adam Williams (34:53): It sure feels good to have people like what you do–
Ken Brandon (34:53): Sure. Yeah.
Adam Williams (34:55): … at any age. I often think about the influence of family and anybody around and what keeps us going creatively and what maybe stifles us if you happen to be around people who believe, well, this is child’s play, and now you’re no longer a child, it’s time to move on with adult things, but you’ve managed to retain this creativity lifelong.
Ken Brandon (35:20): Yeah. Yeah. It became a career. Yeah.
Adam Williams (35:23): Did you have people? Maybe it was your parents or maybe it was others along the way as you got older into adult life who helped encourage this and helped you believe, hey, a life of creativity is valuable, it’s worthwhile, and it can actually even be financially sustainable for a living. A lot of us are told otherwise.
Ken Brandon (35:45): Right. Yeah, for sure. And I came from a family, both parents were very pragmatic. They looked at my interest with what’s he going to do with it. I don’t think they really believed that I could have a career in it, which I took that. I weighed it in some of the decisions that I made because I went into commercial art rather than the fine arts. And that’s probably why, although even before I went, while I was in high school, I got employment as a printer’s devil, and that locked me into the graphics world of type and letter form.
Adam Williams (36:35): Did you say printer’s devil?
Ken Brandon (36:37): Yeah.
Adam Williams (36:37): I don’t think I’ve heard that term before.
Ken Brandon (36:39): It’s an actual apprentice for when the printing trades. It’s the very first, and I’m not sure why it’s called Printer’s Devil. I’d have to look that up. But it’s a position where what I did was I just took, it was back in the day of handset type. And so I would take the type after it had been used to print whatever it was intended to print and put it back into the job cases is what they’re called, where all the letters have to go in a certain slot, in a certain compartment in this drawer.
And so that was one of my jobs. And then just cleaning up, and eventually I learned how to run the press, learned how to run a Linotype machine, would melt down the lead that was used in the printing process to form into what are called pigs that are then reintroduced to the Linotype machine and melted back down to make the lead. So it’s this cycle, and I was part of that cleaning up, melting down, forming, making the pig forms.
Adam Williams (38:03): Now, here you are talking about a potential app for your idioms. The technological evolution over these several decades is something that continues to blow my mind. When I was…
Ken Brandon (38:15): Oh, yeah. The printing business is probably the most radically changed business there is.
Adam Williams (38:24): Is that because of so much that is now digital as opposed to physical tangible frame?
Ken Brandon (38:29): Yeah, and it even went from before it was digital between handset type, it went offset printing, which we don’t want to get into a lecture on the different modes of printmaking, but yeah, it went from actually relief printing, which is handset type letterpress to planography, which is lithography, which is offset printing, and then now…
Adam Williams (38:58): For the different tones, different colors?
Ken Brandon (39:00): Yeah. Yeah. And then to digital, which is another step where it’s just getting less and less connected to certain materials that were traditionally part of the printing trades.
Adam Williams (39:17): So this is how you got started and you came up learning a lot of things. You would end up having your own graphics design and printing business for decades, what, 35, 40 years, something like that?
Ken Brandon (39:29): Well, I got my sales tax license in 1970.
Adam Williams (39:34): Okay. That’s, I mean, 54?
Ken Brandon (39:38): Yeah.
Adam Williams (39:38): Okay. And all along the way then, you’re being a painter, like an artist, painter was one…
Ken Brandon (39:45): Well, there was a gap there. I painted through college, even when I was in the commercial art world, I still liked painting and so I did that.
Adam Williams (39:57): But it wasn’t your source of income–
Ken Brandon (40:00): Right.
Adam Williams (40:00): … and your focus of a career at that point? So it was put on hold for a long time.
Ken Brandon (40:04): I toyed with it, especially when I got into silkscreen printing where I could do a piece of art and then make multiple images of it. And so I would go to the trade shows or the art festivals and set up and sell, but I never made enough to live on. I always had a job, another job.
Adam Williams (40:29): And sold your graphics design business and then returned to these various creative forms, collecting idioms-
Ken Brandon (40:36): Right. Yeah.
Adam Williams (40:37): … painting.
Ken Brandon (40:37): And writing.
Adam Williams (40:38): And writing.
Ken Brandon (40:39): Screenplays. Yeah.
Adam Williams (40:40): I’d like to hear about that with screenplays, because I’m curious, that’s not a form that I’ve ever dabbled in though I’ve written in a few different ways. I think about that being with a very specific function. It’s a very specific type of writing, and it’s with the intention that actors are going to portray and carry out this story for the screen. So how did you come to that as the form of written expression that you wanted to go for as opposed to writing short stories or novels or poetry or whatever form nonfiction? And do you do that with the intention of people actually acting them out in front of a camera?
Ken Brandon (41:25): Well, I think that’s always the intention of someone writing screenplays, but once I get it written, I am not interested in the mechanics or the process to market it. And so there’s only a couple of screenplays that I’ve feel like are totally finished and would be ready to submit or get out there, but I’ve told people about it and people have heard what the concept of the screenplay is and say, “Well, there may be some interest in that.” They would take it, and then I’d never hear back from them. So nothing’s ever happened with it.
Adam Williams (42:18): Is it the sort of thing where you need to be circulating in New York or LA type of place?
Ken Brandon (42:23): Or you need to have an agent that is dedicated to trying to get your work out there seen or whatever. But the first one that I finished was, it’s kind of an art history tie-in. It’s a story that explains why Leonardo da Vinci was 500 years ahead of his time. And so I wrote this thing, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end to this story. And so I just knew it was the greatest thing that ever happened.
And so I even made the poster, the movie poster, of course, and cast it with Sean Connery playing Leonardo da Vinci, an Italian with a Scottish accent. And so I got the poster made, had the screenplay, I packaged it up and sent it to Lucas, George Lucas, and a month later, it comes back to me unopened with a nice letter saying that we do not accept unsolicited work for legal reasons. Because if they were to accept it and then they come up with a movie that’s similar to mine, they could get sued. So they just don’t touch it. Don’t touch it. Yeah.
Adam Williams (43:57): Wow. I always wonder about this. We don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts or whatever it is. Then how are you supposed to ever get in the door with something like that? It’s like you need job experience to get the job, but we’re not going to give you-
Ken Brandon (43:58): Exactly. It’s the catch-22.
Adam Williams (43:58): … that experience to get the job.
Ken Brandon (44:12): Yeah. Yeah.
Adam Williams (44:14): Well, that’s interesting. And I love the casting for da Vinci there. I think Sean Connery is great, and having the accent would be incredible.
Ken Brandon (44:24): Yeah.
Adam Williams (44:25): Let’s talk about Box of Bubbles a little bit because you referenced it a while ago, and I think we’d be remiss not to at least tell people about that. And those who are local, I’m sure are already familiar with seeing it, if nothing else, because it is a whimsical, creative, eye-catching sort of place, even just to drive by. I think you’ve described it as a resource center for creativity, something of that nature.
Ken Brandon (44:52): Yeah. Yeah.
Adam Williams (44:52): Will you tell me what your intentions are with that? What is it you do there? The name, I think bubble sounds whimsical and childlike and fun.
Ken Brandon (45:01): Right. Well, just yesterday had someone come in just tentatively opening the door, peeking in, I invited them. It was a couple. They came in and she says, “I’ve seen this place but never been in, and I thought it was maybe a laundromat.” And I said, “Yeah, I get that a lot.” And she goes, “I’m not the first to think that?” No. And there’s other things that people have come up with. They thought it was a car wash, designer soaps, but none of those things.
Adam Williams (45:46): Where does the name come from for you? What do you tell them when they say that? No, this is the reason I call it that.
Ken Brandon (45:51): Well, I purchased that location, which is on the corner of second and E Street in 1992. And that was where I was operating my design sign making and T-shirt printing business or silkscreen business. And it served me well as a place where I could produce graphics and so forth. But now, it’s been about 15 years ago, I could see the writing on the wall that it was time for me to move on to something else.
And I’d gotten to the point where I could make a sign or print a T-shirt with my eyes closed. And there wasn’t a lot of challenge in it. None of my kids had any interest in taking over the business. So I first just tried selling the businesses and I could do it. I could separate them as a signed business, sell it that way, and then as a T-shirt printing business could be separated.
(47:02): And I had no luck at all selling it. So then I decided, “Well, I’ll just give it away.” And so I gave it away and about after a month or two, they’d come back and go, “Here, take it back. We can’t do this.” And so I kept giving and then getting it back again and having to start over. And that’s not good for business when your customer doesn’t know if you’re going to be able to produce what they want you to.
And so anyway, I persisted in and finally got the sign business dissolved and given away, and the T-shirt printing after back and forth with it, I ended up just incorporating it into Box of Bubbles, but in a little outbuilding. So all of the T-shirt printing is still done out of the Box of Bubbles.
Adam Williams (48:07): Was Box of Bubbles in any way a name involved with the graphic design businesses?
Ken Brandon (48:12): No. When I was coming up with what I wanted to do with the space, if it wasn’t going to be a sign shop and a screen printing shop, I wanted it to just be a place for artists to maybe utilize the space to create work.
So studio space and then gallery space, and then maybe a place to do classes and workshops. And then other than that, just kind of a playground or a fun place for creatives to use and so I knew. I was trying to come up with a name, and the box kept coming to mind with the saying, think outside the box, but that’s so overused. It just didn’t seem like that was…
Adam Williams (49:09): Is that another idiom?
Ken Brandon (49:11): Yeah, probably. Yeah, outside the box, because there is no box.
Adam Williams (49:16): I want to get one on there. I know I got to go deeper than the most common ones that we’re talking about, but I want to be able to contribute.
Ken Brandon (49:23): You’d be surprised. Yeah. So anyway, I knew that if I designed it inside and outside in such a weird absurd way, I would attract people that are brave and curious and would come to me with projects or ideas that they had, whether it was writers that had a story that they wanted to produce, I’d be open to helping them with that.
If they were a musician that wanted to explore doing something with that as a career, or of course then the visual artist or the whatever. And I knew that they would be coming to me with their ideas, and I wanted to be supportive and didn’t want to burst anyone’s bubble. And so bursting one’s bubble-
Adam Williams (50:23): There we go. Yeah.
Ken Brandon (50:24): … is another idiom. Yeah.
Adam Williams (50:27): I’m not going to be able to stop thinking about idioms now going forward.
Ken Brandon (50:30): So anyway, that was where the name came from. I thought, well, if I’ve got people coming in with their bubbles and I wasn’t going to burst any of their bubbles, I would end up with a box. That box that was in my head, bubbles.
Adam Williams (50:44): It’s a safe space for bubbles. It’s creating a safe environment where they can bring those in and they’ll be protected while they work on their idea.
Ken Brandon (50:51): Exactly. Yeah.
Adam Williams (50:52): That’s great.
Ken Brandon (50:53): Yeah, and it’s worked well that way.
Adam Williams (50:57): How many years has that been now?
Ken Brandon (51:00): That was 2013.
Adam Williams (51:01): Oh, wow. So more than a decade.
Ken Brandon (51:04): Yeah.
Adam Williams (51:04): Okay.
Ken Brandon (51:06): Yep. And going to Burning Man, I think with a couple of friends of mine, Curtis Killorn and Mariah Sutherland, they kept at me, “You’ve never been to Burning Man, you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.” And so I was think in my late 60s when they were just pushing me, and finally, I okay.
And so went out there and experienced that, and I think that I’d already decided the name and what I wanted to do, but that sort of was just the nudge I needed. And I think the biggest impact that Burning Man had on me as it applies to Box of Bubbles was not to monetize it, not to have it be about making money. And so that’s the way I’ve approached it.
Adam Williams (52:01): Are there any other stories from Burning Man that you can share on radio?
Ken Brandon (52:04): No, but there are stories, yeah.
Adam Williams (52:10): I don’t know how you could go there and not come away with something.
Ken Brandon (52:13): Have you been?
Adam Williams (52:14): No. My wife and I got tickets at one point several years ago, and I cannot remember what happened. And we ended up getting rid of those, something intervened and we weren’t able to go, and we’ve never tried again.
Ken Brandon (52:29): Most people, when you say Burning Man, they just think that it’s this drug sex-fest.
Adam Williams (52:37): Sex, yeah.
Ken Brandon (52:38): Yeah. And it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, I went there just for the creative aspect of it. And so that’s what I went for, and that’s what I took away from it.
Adam Williams (52:52): Well, saying it that way makes me think that anybody who goes there looking for what they’re looking for, that’s what they will find, right?
Ken Brandon (52:52): Yeah, probably.
Adam Williams (53:00): So you can participate across the range of it, and you can also go in and focus on, I mean, we’re talking about a city that rises. I mean, is it tens of thousands? I can’t remember how many people go to this.
Ken Brandon (53:12): When I went, there were 60,000 people–
Adam Williams (53:14): So that’s a lot of creativity, a lot of art.
Ken Brandon (53:16): … that just influx, and then it just disappears.
Adam Williams (53:19): Did you just spend your days walking and walking and just sort of–
Ken Brandon (53:22): I walked, yeah.
Adam Williams (53:23): … seeing what you found?
Ken Brandon (53:24): I think in that whole week I was there, I maybe got 15 hours of sleep because it was just something going on 24/7, and music, techno music, just playing constantly, so yeah.
Adam Williams (53:40): Your giraffe head in the bike, you needed that there.
Ken Brandon (53:44): I know.
Adam Williams (53:44): I’m guessing it wasn’t there.
Ken Brandon (53:45): It wasn’t there, and I didn’t have it at that time.
Adam Williams (53:49): That would’ve been great.
Ken Brandon (53:50): Yeah, right. But it wouldn’t have even stood out at Burning Man.
Adam Williams (53:55): That’s a good point. It’s just a matter of fitting in, isn’t it? Because at that point, nobody would’ve really taken notice.
Ken Brandon (54:00): Right.
Adam Williams (54:02): Well, it certainly does here, and I’m grateful to be able to talk with you about it, Ken, and for all these other things, your perspective on life, as we’ve covered from different points, stoicism and the Taoist parable and all the things, I think it’s really remarkable, and that to me is reason enough to be able to help share your voice because these are the kinds of lessons I’ll walk away with, and it’s food for thought. So thanks for coming in and talking with me and sharing your thoughts with me.
Ken Brandon (54:34): An hour already gone?
Adam Williams (54:35): It is.
Ken Brandon (54:36): Wow.
Adam Williams (54:38): Yeah, close enough.
Ken Brandon (54:39): Well, I appreciate it. It’s been a great experience.
Adam Williams (54:43): Well, thank you.
[Transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams: Thanks for listening to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast. I hope that our conversation here today sparked curiosity for you. And if so, you can learn more in this episode show notes at wearechaffeepod.com.
If you have comments or know someone in Chaffee County, Colorado who I should consider talking with on the podcast, you can email me directly at adam@wearechaffeepod.com. I also invite you to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever platform you use that has that functionality. I also welcome you telling others about the Looking Upstream podcast. Help us to keep growing community and connection through conversation.
Once again, I’m Adam Williams, host, producer, and photographer. Jon Pray is engineer and producer. Thank you to KHEN 106.9 FM, our community radio partner in Salida, Colorado.
(55:44): And to Andrea Carlstrom, Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment. And to Lisa Martin, Community Advocacy Coordinator for the We Are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative.
The Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with the Chaffee County Department of Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and it’s supported by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Office of Health Equity.
You can learn more about the Looking Upstream podcast at wearechaffeepod.com and on Instagram at wearechaffeepod.
You also can learn more about the overall. We are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative at wearechaffee.org. Till the next episode as we say it, We Are Chaffee, share stories, make change.
[Outro music, horns and guitar instrumental]
