Adventures Within
Adventures Within is a radio show hosted by Jennifer Moon and music selected by Robert Watkins. The show aired on KCHUNG from July 2012 through December 2015, broadcasting live the third Sunday of the month from 6–8 pm (PT) on KCHUNG 1630AM Chinatown, Los Angeles, and streaming live at kchungradio.org/stream.html. Listen to the archived episodes from 2015 below or click for 2014 episodes, 2013 episodes, and 2012 episodes.
In January 2016, Adventures Within slightly shifted its focus and became Adventures With You. Robert Watkins continued with his own show, Tenderfoot, the second Sunday of the month at 7pm.
Adventures Within is a production of Faction 2 of The Revolution. Faction 2 of The Revolution is committed to creating alternatives to the established orders of both the bourgeois culture of the fine art world and the spectacle arena of representations that constitute popular culture in order to stimulate a new society that is both socially aware and politically motivated.
Adventures Within is fervent in its mission to heighten awareness in and of the personal and private realms in order to realize and sustain political action. The segregation of the personal and the political, the public and the private, the individual and the populace are no longer expansive.
The time is now to adventure within to make revolution possible!
Listen to Adventures Within:
Episode 35: ALL IN
Twenty-two years after making that fateful deal with the cosmic entity to forfeit eros for agape, unwittingly undermining love as a political force for revolution, and five years of intimate relational solitude, the person I called for in a love ritual at the beginning of this year has finally come into my life! Now, a month later, laub and I are ALL IN and we are merging. But what does that mean? Beyond fetishized role playing and the utilitarian aspects of our relationship, is this love? Is this real? Can we merge while simultaneously expand outward, creating something other than a closed system of coupling? The one thing we do know is that we both have an enormous capacity to believe and that we are connected through faith. Faith and love for laub, however, is complicated and informed by laub's Mennonite upbringing, a love from Jesus that is beyond human capacity and a subsequent loss of faith when laub "became gay" and left the church. Through adventuring within it becomes increasingly clear that our relationship is not just between us; it is a polyamorous relationship with Jesus, The Revolution, faith, honesty, and various belief entities we are committed to exorcise in order to discover what's underneath, a continual discovering of love and faith. We are essentially creatures having a non-normative relationship with emotions, driven by curiosity, searching for a way out; and the only way to forge a way out is to go ALL IN! (@agapeanderos) Broadcast date: 8/16/15.
Episode 34: The Queering of You and Me
The first time I met Johanna Breiding, I was station managing a show on KCHUNG, Kean OBrien's Conversations with Trans.audacity. Johanna was one of the guests and I thought she was super cute so the next day I sent her a message on Facebook revealing my attraction to her and asked if she'd like to get together sometime. Johanna, impressed by my honesty and openness, kindly explained that her hands and heart were full at the moment. However, my reaching out in such a frank manner created an immediate sense of trust for Johanna. And now, nearly two years later, I am psychically merging with Johanna, writing about the death of her mother, as if I am Johanna, for one of her pieces in Johanna's deeply personal and expansively political, multi-media exhibition, Epitaph for Family, which explores love, intimacy, loss, and queer family-making. This intimate collaboration between Johanna, me, and Cary Cronenwett required a giving up of self, a death of self, a queering of self—letting go. Johanna had to let go of herself to let me in and I had to let go of myself to access Johanna; and all three of us had to let go of any attachments we had to the story, the text, and the editing. What is queer family-making? Perhaps this is it. Listen to Johanna and me in this frankly lovely episode to adventure further within the possibilities of queerness and queering! Robert's queer love playlist. Broadcast date: 7/19/15.
Episode 33: The Rejection of Loneliness
After looking forward to an entire weekend of solitude and doing nothing only to experience unexpected and significant feelings of loneliness, a state of being or emotional response that I claimed to rarely encounter, I spent an entire week indulging in loneliness and, by the end of the week, I got the flu. As discussed in a New Republic article, "The Lethality of Loneliness," by Judith Shulevitz, psychobiologists have now proven that "long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you." Steven Cole, a leading researcher on the biological pathways by which social environments influence gene expression, asks "why we would have been built in such a way that loneliness would interfere with our ability to fend off disease: 'Did God want us to die when we got stressed?'" It is a predominant belief amongst many that each human being comes into the world alone, travels through life as a separate person, and ultimately dies alone. Loneliness then becomes an inherent human condition. But according to this new research in gene expression and the molecular processes, we are learning that we are actually fluid, porous creatures and that "the world passes through us." Loneliness, therefore, is not an essence of being human but, rather, a public health crisis. To quote poet, W. H. Auden: “We must love one another or die.” But moving beyond a state of loneliness and realizing our fundamental connection to the world is not as easy as one might think. Robert's lonely playlist. Background music: Lowlight by Rosie Tucker. Broadcast date: 6/21/15.
Episode 32: What is Love?!
"Nothing that we call love is natural or inherent," states anthropologist Dredge Käng in this excavating episode dedicated to polyamory and revolutionary forms of relational love. My crestfallen response to hearing this: "There's no magic love thing?" I started off this show wanting to discuss how polyamory can eliminate unexpansive, socially constructed emotions like jealousy and what I got was an understanding of polyamory as an ethical form of intimate multi-partnered love based on values of consent, transparency, and communication plus an informative run down of how different cultural and economic systems produce different forms of normative relational love. The configuration of our intimate love relationships is sculpted by the needs of the system in which it resides. In a capitalist society like ours, extended families are not favored because capitalism thrives when workers are split apart from each other: when people are self-centered and individualistic, it is better for capitalism. Romantic love or who you fall in love with, which maintains this idea of autonomy and choice, then becomes the most important decision you will ever make in your life: it is The Ultimate Choice. So if romantic love is a construct of capitalism to maintain capitalism, what is true love?! Listen in and let's discover true love together! Robert's polyamory playlist. Broadcast date: 5/17/15.
Episode 31: Something Out of Nothing
Lately I have been struck with an unshakable feeling of nihilism, a nagging awareness of the meaningless of life. It began at the end of a meal, sitting across someone I believed I was in love with, looking at that person who was looking back at me with enchanted eyes, and realizing it was empty: my desire and where the relationship would lead even if it developed into a loving, long-term, committed partnership. If what I believed and cherished to be love is now empty, what does that mean about the rest of life? It seemed I had accessed the ethos of the modern age, what Nietzsche asserted as a widespread phenomenon of Western culture, that still persists today. "According to Nietzsche, it is only when nihilism is overcome that a culture can have a true foundation upon which to thrive" ("Nihilism," Wikipedia). But it seems nihilism today is only growing with the realization of misguided assumptions of progress and the very real threat of extinction through climate change and depleting resources. Join me and impromptu guest, John Tain, as we sift through contemporary nihilism in relation to past notions of nihilism in order to forge a way out. To quote John, "It's impossible to be a nihilist on a larger social policy level...on an individual level, they can be nihilistic and are nihilistic." Fuck the individual. I'm over nihilism. Aren't you? Robert's nihilism playlist. Broadcast date: 4/19/15.
Episode 30: Exorcism of Belief Entities
The Basic Principles of The Revolution asks us to embrace formlessness and question how we identify. Maintaining a fixed form or identity, an ultimate expression or manifestation of a belief entity, besides creating resistance to the inevitable flow of all that is, becomes an oppressive tool to appraise self and other agents and institutions within this system of hierarchies and binaries. In turn, these belief entities, values, and systems of appraisal have their own identities, further compounding belief upon belief until we are so removed from ourselves, others, and the world around us that we can no longer see and connect on a psychic heart level beyond our multi-layers of identities. But apart from these social constructions of identity, which extends to feelings, situations, and objects, is there a persisting essence within each of us that makes us unique? What are the conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, enduring through time despite superficial modifications? Who are we beyond the belief entities that utilize our bodies to realize themselves in the physical world? Exploring the possibilities of an inherent aura or a sense of self can get abstract real quick. Perhaps, once we completely exorcise all belief entities from our being, maybe only then will we discover who we really are. Robert's identity playlist. Broadcast date: 3/15/15.
Episode 29: The Gifts of Intuition
Perhaps one of the greatest gifts you can give another human being is to look inside their interior, to look past their constructed identities and see and respond to their energy. This depth of psychic energetic connection is what artist intuitives Asher Hartman and Haruko Tanaka of Krystal Krunch offer to the world. So often we suffer in that place of not being enough and through generous intuitive readings based on the energy points of one's subtle body (also known as chakras), Asher and Haruko help people come in contact with their highest and best potential. Listen in as Krystal Krunch peer inside my interior and pull out lavishly fantastical and profoundly delightful surreal imagery, pushing the limits of language and thought, in order to realign myself with my most expansive and most revolutionary self. To quote Asher, "The inside is so rich and complex and we're so far apart from it most of the time; we are led to believe that we can be smaller and smaller...but when we are in our full power then really we can do anything." It's time to acknowledge and hone our own intuitive abilities and help each other align with their full power and make revolution possible! Broadcast date: 2/15/15.
Episode 28: The Incomprehensible Demoralization of Love
A friend (and Facebook) pointed me to an article recently published in The New York Times by Mandy Len Catron titled, "To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This." In the article, Mandy discusses using a famous study by psychologist Arthur Aron to fall in love with a colleague and fall in love they indeed do. The study consists of 36 questions designed to accelerate intimacy and mutual vulnerability, which fosters closeness and hopefully love. Also recently, I started hanging out with David Bell. Finding myself attracted to David, I invited him to come on Adventures Within to engage in this experiment and see if we would fall in love (and, of course, my hope was that we would!). However, as you'll note if you listen to this episode, David does everything seemingly possible to avoid answering the questions in any intimate or vulnerable manner. As Mandy writes in her article, "It’s true you can’t choose who loves you..." and this experiment with David certainly proves you can't! Mandy sums up her tale of falling in love by stating, "Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be." Falling in love certainly has to be mutual and though David and I didn't fall in love, through a mutual interest in intimacy and honesty, we have certainly become BFF's. Broadcast date: 1/18/15.
