05.05-07.16 : Kyle Furlane : Cincinnati, OH

"For fun I go down into the basement stacks whose dust, big, smelly books, and lack of lighting make it a perfect setting for a ghost story. Or alternatively it makes one feel like an explorer - like one could really find some fucking wisdom down here."

Sometime last month, walking the night streets of the Northside neighborhood in Cincinnati, on our way to the Comet for some live improvised music performed over random YouTube videos, Kyle and I got into a heady back-and-forth about the merits and implications of Beyonce's recently dropped album, Lemonade. He arguing her capitalistic endeavors nearly cancelled out the importance of her work; I arguing that regardless of all that it's still a fine fucking piece of work and for all its downfalls, it's still important.

Now, a conversation with Kyle Furlane is not always so much classified as a "conversation", but more of an exercise of will and never-ending class A (sometimes B) arguments. Not necessarily the kind of arguments you'd want to smack him in the head for (though his girlfriend Lucy may beg to differ), but arguments that really make you think if you truly believe the convictions you hold as strongly as you think you do.

Currently, Kyle is still ever studying philosophy as well as teaching it to young thinkers in what I believe is desperately needed pedagogical way. Rather than presenting and upholding philosophy as a thing to be studied abstractly in and of itself (as is so often the case), he is applying it in the classrooms he teaches by introducing concepts such as studying the city of Cincinnatti in regards to ethics and interweaving current pop cultural elements alongside history.

So if you dare, take a dive into this philosopher's mind and see if you come up thinking differently about the comparisons of professional wrestling and porn: