She's A Talker - TopPodcast.com

*/ ?>

Latest Episodes:

Michael Smith: Room Tone May 01, 2020

Show notes

BONUS EPISODE In this bonus live episode, artist Michael Smith talks about how to get creative with bad teaching evaluations. Season 3 coming soon! ABOUT THE GUEST Michael Smith's recent solo exhibitions and performances include Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Yale Union, Portland, Oregon; Tate Modern, London; and Greene Naftali, New York; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. His work is in the collections of the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin; Inhotim Institute, Brumadinho; LWL Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; Mumok, Vienna; Museion, Bolzano; Paley Center for Media, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as "tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny." His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he's a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE SHE'S A TALKER was the name of Neil's first video project. "One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate's cat and found myself saying the words 'She's a talker.' I wondered how many other other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying 'She's a talker.'" A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Andrew Litton Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock TRANSCRIPTION NEIL GOLDBERG: Hello, I'm Neil Goldberg, and this is She's A Talker. We recently finished our second season, and we'll be launching Season Three very soon. In the meantime, we thought as a bonus we'd share a live episode that was recorded with artist Mike Smith way back in the good old days of February, 2020. The event happened at the New York headquarters of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Skowhegan's primary program is an intensive summer residency up in Maine for sixty-five emerging visual artists from all over the world. And in 2015, I had the good fortune of being faculty there, and it was actually there that I took the first steps for what would become this podcast. I was inspired by all the experimentation happening, and I decided to play around with this collection of thoughts I'd jotted down on index cards for the past twenty years as the basis for some sort of performance work. So here we are. My guest, Mike Smith, was also faculty at Skowhegan a couple of years before me and has been a favorite artist of mine for years. He's recently shown work at the Tate Modern in London, and his work is also in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Walker Center, the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, and many other places. Here it goes. NEIL: Hi everybody. Thank you so much for coming. So, the premise of the podcast is I typically start with some recent cards, uh, before I bring on a guest. And I thought, uh, this is a recent one: seeing an unflushed toilet at an art school. Now, um, I teach at Yale and, uh, I try to like use the bathroom as far away from where I teach as possible. And I also like to try and mix it up a little bit. So, you know, every now and then I'll go into the basement. Other times I'll go to the second floor. Uh, keep them guessing. And there was a while, very recently at Yale, where every time I walked into a bathroom stall, there was an unflushed toilet full of shit. And I started to think like, okay, is this like a student's like art project? Um, but then beyond that, I really was cognizant of the impact it had on the crits I did later in the day, which is like, I found myself sort of evaluating everything I was seeing in relationship to the impact that seeing a unflushed toilet unexpectedly will have on you. Because think about it, that moment where you're kind of like, you open the stall door and there is the unflushed toilet. That is, I think, what we're all going for as artists. Um. Anyhow. With all that in mind, I am so happy to have, as my guest, Michael Smith, who I have been a fan of for a very long time. I have actually had the experience, Michael, of going to your shows, and I will say that its impact on me was not unlike that of an unflushed toilet encountered by surprise. So, please welcome Michael Smith. NEIL: Hi, Michael, how are you? MICHAEL SMITH: I'm okay. I guess I, I don't know if I should be flattered or - what I'm following in terms of the conversation or - NEIL: when in doubt, be flattered. MICHAEL: Yeah. I have so much to say. I don't know if we'll be able to get to another card. NEIL: I know, right? Well, what's your elevator pitch for yourself when you? When you encounter someone who doesn't know what it is you do, how do you succinctly describe what it is? MICHAEL: Well, it's usually layered. I usually, I mean, if it's a total stranger, I'll say I'm an artist. And then they say, "Oh, are you a painter?" And I say, no. And then sometimes I'll just cut to the chase and say I'm a performance artist. And then it doesn't go any further. NEIL: Do you feel like that's accurate though? I mean, that doesn't feel to me like it encompasses the breadth of what you uh, do. MICHAEL: Well, when I first started performing or thinking about performing, I would tell people I was a comic. Because it was, I dunno, it was a little more interesting at parties or whatever. And also performance artist wasn't really part of the vocabulary then. Usually I'd say I'm a comic, and then they'd look at me and they said, "You haven't said anything funny." So, it was like, well, I didn't say I was funny, you know? So. NEIL: Um, are your parents alive? MICHAEL: No. NEIL: When, when they were alive, what would they say that you did? MICHAEL: My mother probably would say, Michael is Michael. And Michael - NEIL: That is a full-time job, isn't it? MICHAEL: Michael had such a sweet voice when he was a child. And my father said, I don't know what the hell he does, you know, he didn't know what it, yeah. NEIL: Right. I didn't know you were Jewish until quite recently. You're like one of those stealth Jews, you know, Smith. Okay. MICHAEL: I asked my father once what it was before Smith, and he, he said, Sutton. NEIL: Sutton? That's like a wall that's been painted multiple times, like, okay, and what was it before Sutton? That's where it gets into like Schmulowitz or whatever. MICHAEL: That got too deep. NEIL: Yeah, exactly. MICHAEL: It was, yeah. It's opaque. NEIL: And what's something on you - today, what's something you've found yourself thinking about? MICHAEL: Well, you know that card you first - NEIL: Oh yeah. MICHAEL: That card you first brought up. I actually, I've been in my studio for, since '99. And I actually cleaned the toilet in the public bathroom for the, the building because it was just getting a little gross, so I thought I'd clean it. NEIL: You just took that on yourself? MICHAEL: I took it on. NEIL: Wow. MICHAEL: Yeah. I should also say that when I first came to New York, I was a professional cleaner. NEIL: Really? MICHAEL: Yeah. I was very good. NEIL: I bet. MICHAEL: Mike the Wipe. I was originally I, I was, I originally was going to be a house - well, I was going to, I advertised in the New York Times, "Mr. Smith will cook and clean." And no one wanted me to cook, you know, just wanted me to clean. NEIL: So many follow-up questions, Mike. Um, shall we move on to the cards? You don't have a choice at this point. We're all in. Uh, this card says: There are no friendly reminders. You know, like, I feel like, is there anything more passive aggressive than someone's like, just a friendly reminder. MICHAEL: That's like, if they, if they preface what they're going to say with that, yeah. That would be horrible. NEIL: But they do all the time. MICHAEL: Really? NEIL: Yeah. Or in an email - friendly reminder. How many, I mean, haven't you? I've probably gotten a friendly reminder in the last week. MICHAEL: I guess FYI is not a friendly reminder, huh? NEIL: No, FYI can be pretty passive aggressive too, but I use it a lot MICHAEL: BTW? NEIL: That's fine. Yeah. I dunno. MICHAEL: So, I have a feeling I probably do it, but I'm not aware of it. NEIL: Of a friendly reminder? MICHAEL: Yeah. NEIL: Hmm. So you're not bothered by it? MICHAEL: Probably, yeah. NEIL: Probably not bothered by it? MICHAEL: Probably bothered by it. Yeah, I am. I get bothered by people easily. And I had something really good to say, but I've, I've already forgotten it. NEIL: I'm excited for the rest of this conversation, Mike. This is, um. MICHAEL: I'm still thinking about that dirty toilet. NEIL: We could go back to that anytime you want. NEIL: Uh, this card says: Things that are lost but you know will turn up. Talk to me. MICHAEL: Well, I, I was with a friend the other day, and, um, I, I said, Oh, I don't, I don't recognize that person. I said, I'm not good with faces. And then she mentioned the name and I said, no, I'm, I don't recognize the name. I'm not good with names. And she said. Mike, what else is there besides faces and names? So anyways, I just wait until it comes, you know, it just till, the name comes, I just wait and wait. And in the morning, I figure, after looking at all those places for the keys or whatever, I'll eventually find it. And then I'll look in the unlikely places and I find it. NEIL: What are the unlikely places in your life for keys? MICHAEL: You know where I've been to keeping them lately? On my front door. So I go outside and they're always there now, so yeah. That's where I seem to keep them. NEIL: That is really, why don't we all just keep them there? MICHAEL: Right. I trust my neighbors, evidently. NEIL: We just very recently got a knock on the door from our neighbor Arlene. A shout out to Arlene if you're listening, and I know you're not, but, um, bless Arlene who very aggressively knocked on our door. She kind of is like policing the hall in a very loving way, but authoritative. And I left the keys in the door. And um, you could tell Arlene lived for this moment. The keys, they're in the door! You know, it's like, and uh, and then of course I have to like reciprocate with like, um, thank you so much. Oh God. Wow. How did we do that? Thank you, Arlene. MICHAEL: I have - the person that polices our place, uh, has a Trump hat. NEIL: Oh no. I don't know if I could deal with that. MICHAEL: He is taking over the recycling, which is great, but he's got it under lock and key, literally under lock and key. So you go downstairs to get rid of your bottles and stuff. And it takes a lot longer. So then everybody just leaves it down there. NEIL: Every now and then, forgive me, is there like a, an immigrant child in there as well? MICHAEL: Oh, there's not an immigrant child, but there is something I think it, I realized it bothers him, that people pick through the garbage and it's mostly like, you know... NEIL: The people who shouldn't be here. From the shithole countries. MICHAEL: Yeah. So I thought about that later and then I just didn't want to think about it anymore cause I was getting all upset. NEIL: Um, have you had a political conversation with him or? MICHAEL: I don't go there. Yeah, he's on, he's a little unstable and he asked, one time he asked me if I wanted to take something outside. NEIL: Oh, he asked you if you want to, I thought, take something outside like garbage. MICHAEL: Right. NEIL: But no, he wanted to take a discussion outside. MICHAEL: Yeah. NEIL: Wow. I'm gay enough that I have never had that conversation, you know? Uh, or if it is, it's like, it's nasty and it's happened a long time ago and it wasn't a fight. Um, wow. Okay. I'm glad that worked out okay. Uh, this card says: Read my - MICHAEL: Can I be, can I, I had a hard time reading that, kind of, reading them. NEIL: Yeah. Well. MICHAEL: Your penmanship is like... NEIL: Well, I always say if my, if my handwriting were a font, it would be called Suicide Note, so I'm... MICHAEL: Not judging. I just said I had a hard time, you know, deciphering it at times. NEIL: Yeah. Read my course evaluations at my funeral. That's what that says. MICHAEL: Oh, well, I was thinking that when, when I do pass, I would like to get ahead of the thing and have people send out a, uh, an announcement saying, if you happen to be in the neighborhood, you know, come to my show, I'll be like, you know - NEIL: I'll be here for eternity. MICHAEL: Um, class evaluations. Yeah. I love my class evaluations and I save them and I, I find them very funny. One, I actually made a poster and it was, uh, it was, "I'm not sure if I agree with the way Professor Smith teaches this class. He called my work crap and he called us idiots. This is a waste of my time and money." I was very happy with that. NEIL: And you made that into a poster? MICHAEL: I made it into a poster. NEIL: Do you, do you have any other ones that come to mind? I bet you get great course evaluations. MICHAEL: Some are good. But like I, I forget them, you know, um, I get them, I still get them handwritten. You're supposed to, a lot of people just go online, but I always, I always hand them out and, and I, I have to leave the room and I always say to them, before, "My livelihood and my future is dependent on how you judge me. And I'm so sorry, I meant to bring the donuts. We'll get to that." NEIL: Huh? See, I try to be real coy about it. Like, you know, they make me do this and, you know, try and like keep it open to, um, other than positive feedback. But obviously it's a desperate wish for approval. MICHAEL: Yeah. I, I always tell them I care deeply for them too, when I'm, yeah. You know, I care deeply for all of you. NEIL: See, you can, MICHAEL: One thing - I, one of my students who I happen to, like, he- NEIL: Happen to like. Whatever. MICHAEL: He came up to me and he said, you know, Mike, even when we're watching videos in the dark, we always know what you're thinking. We can always read you. NEIL: Wow. That's a scary thought. MICHAEL: It is. Cause I'm, I have no filter with, you know, I, I just, it, it comes out, I just sort of convey it with my face. NEIL: See, I find you, because there is a kind of like genial neutrality, you know, like the, the idea of like quote unquote resting bitch face. You have kind of like resting, mm, bemused face. Um, I find it actually kind of opaque. I wish I knew what you were thinking. MICHAEL: You know what? A lot of times nothing. I get the feeling I'm not answering the, I'm not answering these cards very, uh. NEIL: Do you need me to take care of you a little bit right now in terms of - I think you're doing a phenomenal job. You know, this is a fucked up, um, project, by the way, because everyone, like I, I once was doing an iteration of it and this kind of high powered curator said to me, did I do okay, or did I do it right?…

Full show notes at the publisher

Annie Lanzillotto: The Most Beautiful No Mar 27, 2020

Show notes

Writer and performer Annie Lanzillotto talks about how, actually, old people are the future.

ABOUT THE GUEST Born and raised in the Westchester Square neighborhood of the Bronx of Barese heritage, Annie Lanzillotto is renowned memoirist, poet, and performance artist. She's the author of L IS FOR LION: AN ITALIAN BRONX BUTCH FREEDOM MEMOIR (SUNY Press), the books of poetry SCHISTSONG (Bordighera Press) and Hard Candy/Pitch Roll Yaw (Guernica Editions). She has received fellowships and performance commissions from New York Foundation For The Arts, Dancing In The Streets, Dixon Place, Franklin Furnace, The Rockefeller Foundation for shows including CONFESSIONS OF A BRONX TOMBOY: My Throwing Arm, This Useless Expertise, How to Wake Up a Marine in a Foxhole, and a'Schapett. More info at annielanzillotto.com.

ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as "tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny." His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he's a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com.

ABOUT THE TITLE SHE'S A TALKER was the name of Neil's first video project. "One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate's cat and found myself saying the words 'She's a talker.' I wondered how many other other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying 'She's a talker.'" A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast.

CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Andrew Litton Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock

TRANSCRIPTION

Coming soon...

Jeff Hiller: Lockdown Cuddle Duds Mar 20, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, Neil talks to the one person he's not isolating from: his husband, actor and comedian Jeff Hiller, from TV's 30 Rock, Broadway's Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, solo shows at Joe's Pub at the Public Theatre, and many, many others. The podcast has always been about the everyday, and right now our everyday is coronavirus.

ABOUT THE GUEST Jeff Hiller is an actor and comedian has appeared in guest roles on television in "30Rock", "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend", "Broad City", "Difficult People", "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt", "The McCarthy's", "Community", and a lot of shows that no one remembers. Jeff was a regular on Ali Wentworth's series Nightcap, and played Maggie's new work friend on the third season of "Playing House". At the movies, Jeff played a snooty waiter to Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne in "Adam", a pissed off waiter in the Netflix comedy, Set It Up and got fancy as the head waiter opposite Chloe Grace Moretz and Isabelle Huppert in "Greta". Jeff also played the Naked Ghost opposite Ricky Gervais in "Ghost Town". As a stage actor, Jeff originated the role of John Quincy Adams in Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson on Broadway. Off-Broadway, they took over Bright Colors, Bold Patterns from creator Drew Droege and have performed as part of Shakespeare in the Park in Midsummer Nights Dream and Love's Labours Lost. Recently they have been presenting solo storytelling shows their solo storytelling show, "Grief Bacon".

TRANSCRIPTION

Coming soon...

Melissa Anderson: Compost of the Soul Mar 13, 2020

Show notes

Film critic Melissa Anderson talks about the correlation between smoldering internal rage and a lighthearted use of exclamation marks. ABOUT THE GUEST Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and a regular contributor to Artforum and Bookforum. ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as "tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny." His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he's a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE SHE'S A TALKER was the name of Neil's first video project. "One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate's cat and found myself saying the words 'She's a talker.' I wondered how many other other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying 'She's a talker.'" A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Andrew Litton Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho, Rachel Wang Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION NEIL GOLDBERG.: Hello, I'm Neil Goldberg, and this is SHE'S A TALKER, coming to you today from the Lower East Side. Today's guest is film critic Melissa Anderson, but first I'm going to find someone here on the street to talk to. We're doing a podcast, and we just need people to know... Oh, okay. Sorry to bother you. Would you have a minute for a podcast, just to read this card into a microphone? REMY: Why not? NEIL: Thank you. I love the "why not?" REMY: What podcast? NEIL: It's called SHE'S A TALKER. It's built off a collection of thousands of these index cards doing interviews with people. Uh, but now we're playing around with having people on the street read them. Would you mind? REMY: Okay. When people sing out loud to themselves with headphones, wanting to be heard. NEIL: It's often a cutesy thing. You know, someone's on the subway. They got their headphones in. They're singing. They're pretending like they don't know they can be heard, but they can be heard. Do you know what I'm talking about there? REMY: I have absolutely done that. It was another version of me years ago, if that helps. NEIL: Tell me about that version of you. REMY: A version that was, really wanted to be heard, man. I mean, everyone really wants to be heard, but especially like I had just moved to New York. Like when you find those little secret ways where you don't even admit to yourself that you are reaching out. It's, it's a little bit of a lifeline. NEIL: Can I ask what your name is? REMY: Remy. NEIL: Remy. Would you do one more card or no? This, okay, great. Hang on. I'm going to find another one. REMY: I feel a type of violence when someone marks a file as final. NEIL: Do you know that experience? Like do you ever work with electronic files and like? REMY: Yes. Completely. Yeah. NEIL: Are you someone who is, uh, who marks things as final? REMY: I try not to because then you end up with another final and final two and final seven, and yeah, it is a lot. Um, so I try and keep it organized, but never final. Nothing's final. NEIL: I'm so happy to have as my guest, film critic Melissa Anderson. Melissa is the Film Editor for the unique art criticism site 4Columns, and frequently contributes to Book Forum and Art Forum, and before that was the Senior Film Critic for The Village Voice of blessed memory. Non-professionally, Melissa has a longstanding practice of emailing me abuses she encounters of the word 'journey', which she describes as the COVID-19 of nouns. We spoke just after the new year at a recording studio at The New School near Union Square in New York City. NEIL: Melissa Anderson. MELISSA ANDERSON: Yes. Neil Goldberg. NEIL: Welcome to SHE'S A TALKER. I'm so happy to have you here. This is your first podcast. MELISSA: Yeah. NEIL: Wow. How does it feel? MELISSA: I feel that I'm in the best of hands. I'm with a creative conversationalist of the highest order. And I'm, I'm ready to talk. NEIL: Um, what is the elevator pitch for what you do? MELISSA: Oh, it's very simple. I'm, I'm a film critic. I'm the world's preeminent lesbian film critic. There's my elevator pitch. Elevator to the stars. NEIL: I love the lack of ambiguity about that. MELISSA: I mean, of course. I'm a film critic. That would be my elevator pitch. I don't, I don't want to get too grandiose so early on in our conversation. NEIL: Well, hopefully there'll be time later. You know, I'm, I'm thinking of criticism as its own literary form. So I would say, Melissa Anderson is truly a critic of film whose criticism rises and surpasses the attributes that we apply to the other literary arts. Or it rises to the level of literature. Would you agree with that? Is that an intention? MELISSA: You are putting a woman in a very precarious position. I mean, if I agree with you, "Oh yes. All those wonderful things you said, oh of course, I am the best." But I also don't want to go into some display of false modesty. I will just say that, yes, I practice the dark art of film criticism. I've done it for several years now. I always feel that my writing could be so much better. That's always the goal: to not just coast, to really play with language, have some ideas, say outrageous things. Yes. And, and not just rely on plot synopsis, because that is, is really the, the dullest form of cultural criticism, especially film criticism. I think it's inevitable. You have to give the reader just some sense of what happens in terms of, you know, action or just the, the, the barest plot synopsis. And from there you can branch out and talk about the really interesting things, like Brad Pitt's face or what French actress I may have a very big crush on. You know? NEIL: Do you get a lot of followup? Like what kind of followup does one get? MELISSA: Yes. I do get the follow up question quite a lot, which is what kinds of films do you write about? In fact, this came up just the other day. I was meeting somebody for the first time, and I said, you know, I really try to cover anything. And then the person I was talking to said, Oh, would you review the new Star Wars movie? And that's when I realized, actually, I do not cover the waterfront because I have not seen a Star Wars movie since 1983. And I almost never write about anything in the Marvel Comics Universe or DC Comics, simply because, I mean, I have, I, I have made a very concerted effort to see these films to keep up. But, and I'm not exaggerating, I found them so depleting. I remember watching Guardians of the Galaxy. And while I was watching it, I thought, this is like watching a toaster being assembled. It, it just, it simply seemed like nothing but a product where Tab A goes with Tab B, or this part slots into this part, and I thought this, this cinema is just simply not for me. NEIL: Yes. Well, you use the word depleted, which is interesting, which I think of depleted as being like, something is taken from you. So what is taken? MELISSA: Uh, well in those instances, my love of going to the movies. I mean it still really seems like an adventure to me. Anytime I go to a screening room, you know, anytime I'm, I'm, I'm there to review something, I'm there with my, with my uni-ball pen and my MUJI line notebook and I enter the screening room really as an act of good faith. And so these movies I'm describing, like Guardians of the Galaxy, or Thor, or whatever, those I saw as a civilian because I also think it's very important that as a film critic you, you see more than the movies that you are assigned to write about. And so I went to see these superhero movies, comic book movies, intellectual property movies on my own, you know, just to keep up. And with these films, that sense of adventurousness - that ended. Then it just, it felt like a chore just to remain in my seat until the film's completion. NEIL: Out of family obligation, I will be seeing a lot of the franchise movies or whatever they're called. I just saw Star Wars over the holidays. And, uh, it, it does feel a little bit like a tour. But you know, my approach to the movies and this sounds so snobby, but, uh, I really do feel like sleeping during a movie is a form of interactivity. You know what I mean? MELISSA: Andy Warhol certainly thought that, and have your fact checking department vet this, but the great Amos Vogel, who was a crucial person in New York City film culture, one of the founders of the New York Film Festival, I believe, he also said that sleeping during a film is an absolutely legitimate response to, to what you're seeing on screen. NEIL: Absolutely. You know, you're doing a little re-edit, you know, by, by sleeping and - MELISSA: De tournage, you're detourning the moving image. NEIL: Exactly. What is, what is a recurring thought you have? What's a thought you keep returning to? MELISSA: Can I turn the oven off? No. Well, that is sadly... Uh. Well. It's a recurring concern, and I mentioned it earlier, which is, how am I going to make my writing better? Just yesterday, in fact, I looked at something that I wrote last year that when I completed it and filed it and went through the editing process, I thought, Oh, this piece is all right. Yesterday, while revisiting this year-old piece, I thought, how was I not run out of town? This is a colossal embarrassment. Yeah. I don't know if, how you approach your previous works. Do you revisit older stuff that you have done or do you just, do you operate under the assumption that no, never, never look back? Just keep moving ahead. NEIL: Revisit it to, to revise it or just to look at it? MELISSA: Just to look at it. NEIL: It's something, it's - one of the things I truly dislike the most is, as part of the whole artist shtick, one has to do artist talks and show past work, and I, I don't like doing it at all, primarily because it just feels so dead. Like, and I do feel like a work for me is not finished until the point that I have stopped really having feeling for it. You know what I mean? One becomes detached to it, and maybe there's a value to becoming detached from it in that, um, it allows one more flexibility, fewer feelings of darlings that are being killed and stuff. But I'd love never to look at it. For sure. But you, it sounds like you do kind of consciously revisit your past work. MELISSA: Well, sometimes, you know, invariably, I will be writing about an actor, a performer who I may have written about in another film five years ago, and I'm curious to see what I wrote then, just so that I don't repeat myself. I'm revisiting stuff just to make sure I'm not saying the same thing over again, or I'm curious to gauge my different responses if indeed there is a difference. NEIL: Let's go to the cards, shall we? MELISSA: I'd love to. NEIL: Excellent. Okay, so the first card is the correlation between smoldering internal rage, and the lighthearted use of exclamation marks. MELISSA: I, when I see an abuse of exclamation marks, particularly in email correspondence, I feel nothing but a red-hot smoldering rage. Not even smoldering, just full-on Mount Vesuvius-level Krakatoa explosion. I have been told this is generational, that those younger than this elderess, and that is now billions of people, prefer the exclamation mark. And the period, which I think is a very fine mark of punctuation, is considered by millennials and younger to be somewhat passive-aggressive. NEIL: Oh, that's interesting. I feel like exclamation marks aren't necessarily passive-aggressive, but they're meant to. MELISSA: No, no, no. The period is passive-aggressive. NEIL: Right. No, I get that. But I feel like there's a similar kind of belying or something happening with the exclamation mark, but it's about rage. Like, um. Well, I guess passive-aggressive typically means, uh, that you have aggressive feelings that you're masking. I think of it as a more diffuse, the, the exclamation mark, as more - it's not trying to communicate anger at someone, but a free-floating anger that is perfumed by way of the exclamation mark. MELISSA: Right. Because the exclamation mark perfumes it with a cheerfulness or an excitement. It just exhausts me. NEIL: Oh, absolutely. It asks so much of you. You always have to ask, what does it mean? MELISSA: Yes. NEIL: And when was the last time you used one? MELISSA: Just yesterday, in fact, wishing someone a happy 2020. NEIL: Oh yeah. You got to do that. A period there is, is slightly hostile. MELISSA: That seems very dour and grim. NEIL: Next card: that bring-down moment, after you've watched a transcendent performance, when you first go to look at your phone. And perhaps this applies to movies. MELISSA: Well, after I've seen something really terrific, whether it be a live performance or a motion picture - to maintain that feeling, I will defer looking at the phone for quite some time. I just like to replay it in my mind. NEIL: Yeah. How do you feel right after a show if you're with someone and they're, like, wanting to analyze it? MELISSA: This drives me crazy. Of the many billions of things that I appreciate about my fantastic lady, one of them is that, in the many years that we've been together, in the many thousands of movies that we've seen together, we will leave the theater, and neither one of us feels this compulsion to say, so what did you think? What did you think? Which really sends me into murderous rage. And, uh, there was a time when I was going to film festivals fairly regularly. And for seven years I went to Le Festival de Cannes, where, talk about depleting. Press screenings at the Cannes Film Festival begin at eight-thirty in the morning. NEIL: Wow. MELISSA: So one is rushing to see, you know, the latest Lars von Trier or whatever. You come stumbling out into the bright Mediterranean sun, and you are just surrounded by all of these film critics who are just assaulting, assaulting you with a quote. What did you think? What did you think? And I. This really, so many times, really put me over the edge. You just need time to simply let the images or the live performance, whatever you've just seen, let it wash over you. Sink in. So I find the question an assault. NEIL: Next card, Melissa. Looking in my apartment's compost container is sort of like gossip. I find I enjoy looking in the compost. MELISSA: You know, I also enjoy it somewhat, and I will also say that I feel that now one-fourth to one-third of my waking hours are spent taking the compost down to the compost bins. Yeah, it is, it is something of a time investment. But when I look at it, forgive me, I must say it - I'm overcome with a sense of virtue because my lady and I, we like to do a lot of cooking at home, and I make, uh, at least one, sometimes two cups, very strong French-pressed coffee. So all of my coffee grounds around there. And so, yes, in fact, before leaving the house, I took the compost out, and I thought, Oh look. Greens and coffee grounds and brown eggs. We're doing great. NEIL: This is your own compost y…

Full show notes at the publisher

Nick Flynn: Storytelling As Illness Mar 06, 2020

Show notes

Poet Nick Flynn talks about the ways in which he won't die. ABOUT THE GUEST Nick Flynn has worked as a ship's captain, an electrician, and a caseworker for homeless adults. Some of the venues his poems, essays, and nonfiction have appeared in include the New Yorker, the Nation, the Paris Review, the New York Times Book Review, and NPR's This American Life. His writing has won awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, PEN, and the Fine Arts Work Center, among other organizations. His film credits include artistic collaborator and "field poet" on Darwin's Nightmare (nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary in 2006), as well as executive producer and artistic collaborator on Being Flynn, the film version of his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. His most recent collection of poetry, I Will Destroy You, appeared from Graywolf Press in 2019. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Lili Taylor, and his daughter, Maeve. http://www.nickflynn.org/ ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as "tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny." His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he's a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE SHE'S A TALKER was the name of Neil's first video project. "One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate's cat and found myself saying the words 'She's a talker.' I wondered how many other other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying 'She's a talker.'" A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Andrew Litton Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock TRANSCRIPTION NICK FLYNN: I was driving my daughter to soccer. And she had a bike and I had a bike and we'd ride, even though it was a little cold. NEIL GOLDBERG: Yeah. NICK: But a guy went by on a bike and he had like a boombox, one of those boombox that plays, he's playing like a podcast, like really loud, and it was so odd. We both just laughed. It was like, what is that? You're just blasting a podcast going down the street, blasting. NEIL: This is fresh air. Hello, I'm Neil Goldberg and this is SHE'S A TALKER. I'm a visual artist and this podcast is my thinly veiled excuse to get some of my favorite New York writers, artists, performers, and beyond into the studio to chat. For prompts, I use a collection of thousands of index cards on which I've been writing thoughts and observations for the past two decades, kind of like one of those party games, but hopefully not as cheesy. These days, the cards often start as recordings I make into my phone. Here are some recent ones: I really love how Beverly pronounces 'Meow'. It's never appropriate to share scrap paper from home with students. I'm never sure what a simmer is. I'm so happy to have as my guest, poet Nick Flynn. I have been a hardcore fan of Nick's writing since his first book, Some Ether, came out in 2000 and was blown away by his memoirs, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and The Ticking is the Bomb. In the fall, he released a new book of poetry, I Will Destroy You, and in the next few months he has two more books coming out: Stay, and This is the Night Our House Will Catch on Fire. I met Nick briefly in, I think, the late eighties in Provincetown, and we reconnected recently via our mutual friend, Jacques Servin, who is on an earlier episode. Nick and I spoke in January at a recording studio at The New School near Union Square in New York City. NEIL: Are you comfortable? NICK: Like on a scale of one to ten? NEIL: Like, you know those smiley faces, like if you're in the hospital. NICK: How much pain I have? Uh, I hadn't even thought about it till you just said that. Now I'm wondering if I am, so. NEIL: I feel like I'm, I'm totally not, I'm not feeling any pain at the moment. NICK: No, I'm not feeling any pain. No, I'm feeling no pain. NEIL: That's different from, feeling no pain is different from not feeling any pain. NICK: That means if you're kind of fucked up, I think. NEIL: Exactly. NICK: You're feeling no pain. NEIL: Um, I'm so happy to have you, Nick Flynn, on the show, SHE'S A TALKER. NICK: I'm happy to be here, Neil Goldberg - NEIL: I, you know - NICK: on the show SHE'S A TALKER. Is the 'She' the cat? NEIL: Yeah. NICK: That's, that's who the 'she' is. NEIL: It is, yeah. I, you know - NICK: I guess I got that. Yeah. NEIL: Well, you know, in 1993 when everyone was dying... Everyone is still dying, but just differently. NICK: I remember that. Yeah. NEIL: Yeah. Uh, you know, I did a video project where I interviewed, it turned out to be, like about 80 gay men all over New York City in all five boroughs who had female cats, combing their cats and saying "She's a Talker." NICK: They were combing the cats? NEIL: Combing the cat. It was just almost like, it was like a stealthy way to like, not stealthy, but it was a way to document a lot of gay men who felt like really imperiled, and it was my first video project. And, I don't know, when I decided to name this, that came up for me. But subsequently I get a lot of like, what does the word 'she' mean at this point? NICK: Right, right, right. Yeah. NEIL: Maybe I should rebrand it. What should I call it? NICK: Uh, you should stick with it, I think. Hmm. NEIL: Uh, when, when you're looking for like a short hand, like you encounter someone on the proverbial elevator and are looking for like a pithy way to describe who it is you are and what it is you do, what do you, what do you reach for? NICK: I say I'm a poet. NEIL: Period. NICK: Period. Yeah. Yeah. Cause that usually gets a pretty dead-eyed stare like the one you just gave me. Like that's it? That's it. NEIL: When someone is confronted with poet, silence, do you ever feel like helping someone out? NICK: Well, it depends on like, often, that'll pretty much be the conversation-ender. NEIL: Yeah. NICK: So it does nothing to help cause they're gone right at that point. NEIL: If your folks were around, how might they describe who it is you've become? NICK: Wow, that's a, that's an interesting one. Would they, would they still be, are they like idealized, my, like my parents on their best day or on their worst day? NEIL: Oh, I wouldn't mind hearing both if you don't mind. Like the... NICK: Ah, like, you know, there's the idealized version of your parents. Then there's the, not the reality, but the, you know, but recognizing at a certain point that they had some rough days, you know. In my mind, it's hard to deny they had some rough days. So, um, it's a little, it's a little harder to pretend. Yeah. Uh, my father, he knew that I'd published books and he was sort of, you know, strangely proud of that. Uh, but proud just in the way he knew I'd be a good writer because he was such a great writer, so I got it all from him. So he took all credit for any of it. So I imagined he would still take credit for any accomplishments I've had or that he perceives I've had. I've, I'm trying to think if he had like on a good day, that's sort of like a not so good day. Yeah. On a good day, he did have a couple moments where he was able to just recognize the struggle it had been, uh, between the two of us, uh, to actually acknowledge that. And I think that would be like, he'd say like, yeah, this was, this must have been hard, you know? So I think that would be. That'd be a good day for him. My mother's a little more enigmatic, like it's actually, when I think about it, like, cause I mean, she died before he did. I was younger. I didn't know her as well, probably. So, although I grew up with her, but, um, I sort of studied my father more, and my mother's more of a, uh, a construct of the imagination in some ways. Although, I mean, we spent so much time together too. It's strange to say that actually, I don't know if that's true. You know, I, there's always the question like, what would my mother be like now? So I'm, I look at women that are my mother's age, that would be my mother's age now. Like I don't know how, how she would be. So either way, I think she's, since she, from her backhouse sort of WASP-y Irish background, she probably wouldn't say directly anything. I'd have to decipher what she said. NEIL: So it would be cryptic in terms of her estimation of you, or? NICK: I mean, she, I think she'd say, "Oh, I'm, I'm proud of you." But the deeper levels of that I think would be harder to get to. NEIL: Yeah. I see you came in, you were, you had a bike helmet, which I connect to. Um, on your bike ride over, did you have any thoughts? NICK: Wow. Thoughts as I was coming here - the sort of meta thing is I was listening on my headphones to SHE'S A TALKER. And you're talking to someone about riding a bike over the bridge. NEIL: Right, yeah. NICK: So like, yeah. I mean, at the moment I was riding over the bridge. I was listening to you talk to someone else about riding over the bridge and then thinking that I would soon be here talking to you, and I brought my helmet it, I didn't - usually I lock it on my bike but maybe I brought it in so you would ask me about it. It's possible, but I think I just brought it in cause it was cold, it was so cold outside. I wanted a warm helmet when I went back out. So. NEIL: Aha, you didn't want to put on a cold helmet. I never thought about that. NICK: What I thought about on the bridge was that it was way colder than I thought it was. It was the wind, it was like howling and I had a hat in my bag and I kept thinking, I'll just stop and put my hat on under my helmet and I didn't stop. I kept thinking, I'll warm up at some point, but I just kept getting colder and colder the further I went. I just never stopped, I just kept going. NEIL: Well, let's, um, go to some cards that I curated for you. NICK: You curate these for this conversation? NEIL: Yes. Yeah. (Card flip) So the first card is: the specific, tentative, hyper-attentive way one tastes something to see if it's gone bad. NICK: Um, what I usually do is I'll, I'll, I'll cook it and then give it to my brother. NEIL: Mikey likes it? NICK: Yeah. And then if he can get through it then it probably hasn't gone so far bad. Cause he's pretty sensitive actually. I mean, while I'm presenting, it sounds like he'd just eat anything. No. He's quite sensitive. So he's like sort of the. He's, he, he, he's a Canary. Ah ha. Yeah. So I'll just fix it up and give it to him and then, cause he'll, usually, he's quite happy if I make him something, give him some food, then if it's no good, then, then I throw it away. Yeah. If he eats it, I'll eat it. NEIL: He's your taster. Um, where, where does your brother live? NICK: He lives upstate, New York. NEIL: Oh, okay. Yeah, but he's your older brother, right, if I'm remembering? NICK: But why did you say, "but." Because he lives upstate? NEIL: No, because of the scenario of like, your brother, the implication. He's an implied younger brother in the story. NICK: Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. He's an implied younger brother in life too. (Card Flip) NEIL: Next card. When a toddler falls, that space before they start to cry. NICK: Well. My daughter was, uh, three. And for us, like three was really like, spectacular meltdowns and just like, you know, tantrums and just like wildness, just like absolutely wild, like wild animal, just screaming and frustrated and like, you know, furious. And one day she, uh, she was in a tantrum, she fell and she hit her cheek on the corner of a staircase and it split open and like bled. It sort of woke her up. Like it was right at the end of her being three, she was going to turn four. It was a Sunday night. And my wife and I were like, Oh, what do we do? Like, I'm like, I guess, do we take her to her doctor or do we like, you know, just like, like leave her with a scar for the rest of her life? And so I butterfly-stitched it, you know, like made a little butterfly thing, to hold it together to squish the skin together, you know? And, uh. That's what we did. We sort of looked up t see like how big and deep it had to be to go to a doctor and stuff and to need a stitch, and it was sort of right on the edge. So I butterfly-stitched it, and then. Yeah so now she just has this pretty little scar on her face and she's perfect. NEIL: Wow. And does she know the story of the scar? NICK: Oh yeah. I would say it's a part of her myth, part of her origin myth. The wildest, the wildness poured out of her cheek. Yeah. Yeah. NEIL: Uh, can, can you share - NICK: Did that answer your question? NEIL: Yes and no. That's always the, um, I think it's beautiful. I have the idea, I'm not a parent, but when I see a kid having a tantrum - NICK: I wasn't either before that. NEIL: Yeah. NICK: It comes on kind of suddenly. NEIL: But how did you deal with tantrums? NICK: I, I've been sort of attentive and amused by the whole process. Like I feel like we're really lucky. She's a really good kid and just a really interesting kid and like, so I just sort of like see it, like, I admire the tantrums in a certain way. Like, I think everyone should be like, just screaming, running down the streets, you know, most of the time. Like this sucks. Um, so there was something very, uh, wild about it. Like just to see like, wow, like you can just do this. You can just go and like, you can go to a store and just pull a whole rack down. If you don't get your Popsicle, you don't fucking. She, she used to fire me like every day as a father. She said, if you do not give me that Popsicle, you will not be able to kiss me. You will not be able to hug me. You will not be my father. NEIL: What did you say to that? NICK: I'm like, Oh, that's really hard. I'd be sad not to be your father. She was like, you will not be able to, you will have to go to Texas and never come back. NEIL: Crafty. NICK: Yeah, she was good. Yeah, but I, you know, I was onto her though. Yeah. I'd be her father like in half an hour later. NEIL: Did you ever say - NICK: She'd rehire me like half hour later. Yeah. NEIL: Was there a re-intake process? NICK: No. No. We just pretended it didn't happen. Yeah, it was all moving forward. It was all the continuous present. NEIL: Yeah. NICK: You just kept this present moment. This present moment had no connection to the other moments whatsoever. NEIL: Did you ever join your daughter in a tantrum? NICK: Did I ever join her in a tantrum? Oh, wow. Yeah, I did. Yeah. I remember one night, like early on when she was like six months old and that. The beautiful hallucination of early parenthood where you just, you just don't sleep. You just like, you're just awake for like months. Like just not sleeping. And you just fall a…

Full show notes at the publisher

Jon Wan: Complex Enchantment Feb 28, 2020

Show notes

Performer Jon Wan argues that kids are campy. ABOUT THE GUEST Slipping in and out of drag skin Kiko Soirée, animagus Jon Wan serves an alluring feast of emotion - sensual, sincere, stupid. Kiko (@kikosoiree) is a queer comedian, host and drag queen, performing at venues like Club Cumming, Joe's Pub, The Bell House, Ars Nova, Caroline's, Union Hall, MoCA, Caveat, and UCB. They've been named by Time Out Magazine as one of the rising LGBT POC comedians to watch. Monthly, Kiko hosts 'A+, The Pan-Asian Drag and Burlesque Revue', in the Lower East Side, and seasonally, produces the original musical advice show, 'Dear Kiko'. Their Spanish is better than their Cantonese which hasn't made their mother proud but tracks for the American Born Chinese narrative. ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as "tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny." His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he's a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE SHE'S A TALKER was the name of Neil's first video project. "One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate's cat and found myself saying the words 'She's a talker.' I wondered how many other other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying 'She's a talker.'" A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Andrew Litton Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho, Rachel Wang Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock TRANSCRIPTION JON WAN: I just took saxophone cause my friend was also gonna play saxophone, and I just played it through middle school. Then I just continued in high school, and then after freshman year I was like, I don't actually like this instrument. And I'm definitely not a jazz person. Cause I was having saxophone lessons with this person who was a very cool cat. And I was like, I am not understanding fundamentally why I'm here. This isn't clicking with me. NEIL GOLDBERG: I'm going to really make a controversial generalization here. I don't think jazz is gay. JON: Oh, no, I don't think so either. You have to be like kind of loose and like - NEIL: Exactly, a type of casualness. JON: Yeah, and like comfortable with your body and expression, and I was not - like I was learning classical piano from an oppressive Russian teacher, growing up as a Chinese American, closeted, in a primarily white town. I did not know how to express myself in a healthy way. NEIL: Right. JON: Right. NEIL: Hello. I'm Neil Goldberg, and this is SHE'S A TALKER. I'm a visual artist, and I have a collection of thousands of index cards on which I've been jotting down thoughts and observations for about two decades. In SHE'S A TALKER, I explore the cards through conversations with guests and responses from listeners. These days, the cards often start as voice memos I record throughout the day. Here are some recent ones: When a parent says to a kid, "Look at me," I'm suspicious and think the parent is probably a narcissist. Thick Sharpies are to thin Sharpies as water bugs are to roaches. Art project: drawing all the missing arms in selfies. Today, my guest is Jon Wan. Jon, who often appears on stage as their drag persona, Kiko Soiree, describes themself as a Swiss Army knife performer whose work weaves together musical comedy, storytelling, standup, and beyond. Jon's performed at Club Cumming, Joe's Pub, the Bell House, Ars Nova, Caroline's Mocha, and has been named by Timeout Magazine as one of the rising LGBT people of color comedians to watch out for. We spoke in February at a recording studio at The New School near Union Square in New York City. I'm so happy to have with me Jon Wan. JON: Hello. NEIL: Hi Jon. Thank you for being on SHE'S A TALKER. JON: I'm enchanted to be here. Simply. NEIL: Simply. What are the alternatives, in terms of enchantment, besides simple enchantment? JON: Oh, very complex. Yeah. Like arcane magic, you know? Not for pedestrian folk. NEIL: Yes. Complex enchantment. What is your elevator pitch for what you do? JON: I am a drag queen, performer, comedian bopping around New York City. You might know me as my drag persona, Ms. Kiko Soiree, performing and doing shows here in this beautiful garbage city and really always aspiring to one day live within walking distance of a Trader Joe's. NEIL: I see it for you. I really see it for you. You know, a Trader Joe's just opened opposite where Jeff and I live. JON: No, which one? NEIL: Uh, it's on Grand Street. Grand and Clinton. JON: Oh, wow. NEIL: It's the biggest Trader Joe's on the Eastern Seaboard, I'm told. JON: That's crazy. So you live near not only a Trader Joe's, but a historic one. NEIL: Yes, exactly. Uh, what does your mom, when she's talking to her friends, what does she say you do? JON: Oh, (In his mother's accent) oh, Jon um, oh, Jon lives in New York City. (back to normal voice) And then she kinda just like shoos the conversation. I think, she knows I'm a drag queen. I don't think she publicly has the language to talk about it the way she might alternatively say, "My daughter works for a pharmaceutical company." Do you know what I mean? NEIL: Right. Do you have a sister that works...? JON: She does. Don't worry. It's a good pharmaceutical company. NEIL: Oh yeah. Uh, what does your dad say? JON: My dad, uh, is actually very vocally supportive of my creative life. He usually says, "He's a performer and a comedian, and..." NEIL: What kind of performances does he do? JON: "Oh, (In his father's accent) Jonathan does his funny stand up in New York City." And just stuff like that and yeah, I don't think they're, they're like ashamed of anything I do, but my dad came here for college. My mom came here when she was 13. They're kind of this transition generation, you know, they, they were really straddling both cultures and had to deal with the more brutish parts of assimilation. They came from traditional Chinese parents, but they're, you know, they're open-minded. They both grew up. They were like hippies. You look at old photos of them. My mom had like hair down to her waist. But, you know, you know, I'm the first drag queen of my family. NEIL: That you know of. JON: Hopefully not the last. NEIL: Yes. What is something you find yourself thinking about today? JON: Um. Today, I was thinking about how everyone is a walking advertisement. I was a sucker for the AirPods, the first ones that came out. They're just, I know when I put them in my ear, I'm going to feel very sexy, and I had this thought today as I was putting them in my ear. It's like everyone is a walking advertisement. NEIL: So when you're wearing AirPods, you're an advertisement for... JON: Yeah, for Apple. My AirPods now suck because I lost the original case and I bought a knock off one on Amazon for like 30 bucks and they do try to pair with everyone on the train. NEIL: Oh really? JON: I just kind of, but you can't do it successfully. NEIL: It's like your dog humping strangers' legs or something. JON: Truly. I can see on people's phones like something comes up and says, Not your AirPods. It goes all the time and I just keep my head down and I just. I didn't want to pay another $70 for the case. NEIL: I've curated some cards just for you. Um, first card, Jon. JON: Okay. NEIL: All kids' names are campy. JON: Absolutely. Cause kids are camp. NEIL: How so? JON: I used to teach, um, preschool in undergraduate. so I worked with three, four, and five-year-olds. And when you talk to a kid, it's very serious. It, it's of the utmost importance. And it's also insane. NEIL: Which is the essence of camp! JON: Which is the essence of camp. Um, but you know, when they're just playing, they're just talking very seriously about something. Or they're telling you an opinion, something they saw today, like. (imitates kid's voice) "Like, Mr. Jon? Today, I, I saw a dog and... Dog had a really long tongue." (back to normal voice) And they like will drop whatever they're playing with me to let me know about this thing, which neurologically like they're doing that thing where like, they have seen a new category that they don't yet understand and they're trying to integrate it into what they do, right? So I have to be there and say, "Daphne, tell me about the dog." You know, like I want to know more. Well, what color was the dog? You know what I'm saying? "It was, it was brown." I'm like, okay. All right. It was brown. I love that. So, but then it's also insane cause you're like, this is so crazy. NEIL: To me, it makes perfect intuitive sense how that connects to camp. But could you, could you... JON: I think it connects to, I mean, camp, I mean, treats itself seriously, but knows it's also ridiculous. You know. I mean, campy drag queens like divine, completely over-the-top makeup and personality, but acting and performing with a lot of conviction. NEIL: The difference, though, may be being, and maybe it's a technical difference, do you think kids know that they are ridiculous? JON: No. Absolutely not. Did you - NEIL: Okay. So they're inadvertently campy? JON: Unless they were like early stars and then they're like, Oh, okay, people are enjoying what I'm doing. NEIL: Right, right, right, right. (flip card) I love the smell of a drag queen. JON: Absolutely not. If you really smelled, uh, maybe the perfume that we put on at the very end, but if you smelled any of our undergarments or any of our clothing, that's, some of that, I mean, the vintage pieces maybe haven't ever been washed. Maybe just sprayed down with some alcohol and water. To get rid of the bacteria and the smell. Um. And I'm not washing pantyhose every single week. Are you thinking of the metaphorical smell? NEIL: I have no idea what that is. And I'm all in. JON: Every drag queen has a different energy and that can be very intoxicating. That's like half the fun, that someone's showing you something on the other side of the looking glass. NEIL: Aha. But the literal smell for me is always about just powdery perfume. But you're saying beneath that is just... filth. JON: I've, I guess I've, I've done it so many times. I'm no longer piqued by just the smell of powder and, and lipsticks and things like that. Just, that's kind of smells like the entrance of a, of a Macy's, you know? You know what I'm talking about, right? You walk into a Macy's and it's always like the perfume entrance, right? NEIL: Yeah, yeah. That somehow seems like a euphemism. Smells like the entrance of Macy's. JON: God, she smelled like the entrance of a Macy's. I'm not going back there, Charlotte. NEIL: Um, I guess I have thought about like with padding and tucking, uh... JON: Mhm. Machinery going on. NEIL: Yeah. Which does involve compressing the body, or, or depriving the body of air circulation, which I guess could generate smells, right? JON: Yeah. It's tight. I mean, if you're, I mean, if you're just, even if you're putting on hips, right? Let's say you're padding, some people, some queens are wearing four or five layers of tights, right? Just to make a smooth silhouette. Um, you know, and you're hot, you're moving around, your head is hot cause you're wearing a wig. My hair lines are glued down, so everything's sleek. So when I go, you know, getting out of drag is the best feeling. NEIL: I can imagine. Do you get out of drag at the venue or at home? JON: I am an at home queen. And I'm also a get ready at home queen, too. I just ride the train down. NEIL: Really? JON: Yes. I mean, I'm in drag, but have like a winter coat on, and a scarf, and I have sweatpants over my dress, so I look like just like a, a gymnast going to a meet or something. NEIL: To a Wheaties commercial. JON: I look like a suburban mom going to Costco. NEIL: That thing of posing people in nude photos, so their genitals are hidden by a raised knee or what have you. JON: That's very Black Mirror to me. NEIL: Oh really? JON: Oh, just like it's on the cusp of this is, this is very sexy, and also, what are we doing, right? What the hell are we doing? This is insane. I think of Instagram immediately. NEIL: Oh yeah, sure. JON: People just like, a sexy photo of themselves. It's like, "You're naked." You hid, you moved your body a little bit. We're one centimeter away from seeing whatever it is, you know? But it's like, if you cover a little bit, Instagram's like, Oh, you're not nude. NEIL: Isn't that deep? JON: It's crazy. It's true. It's true. It's truly wild. NEIL: I wonder if there is a fetish around obscured - like if there are people who get off on the actual obscuring. JON: Oh, 100% yeah. 100% think that's a fetish. I mean, in the same way that just wearing a leather chest strap, that's totally nonfunctional. NEIL: Right, exactly. JON: Like there's not even a function to it. NEIL: Yeah. JON: But I'm just imagining you in a different way. I mean, you know, cause you're an artist. Marina Abramovic's, um, performance where she stood naked, right? And she had a table of instruments. NEIL: Yeah. JON: That was, I think like the exploration of like is, is this actually like. Well, it was exploring a lot of things. Like one of the questions I had was like, is this sexual? Like, she had a feather. She had a knife. She had a gun, right? NEIL: Uh, may have had a gun, uh, I thought she had scissors too. Or maybe I'm confusing that with Yoko Ono's "Cut" piece. Um, yeah, there were things that could do violence for sure. JON: I think there was a gun. NEIL: Yeah, that sounds right. JON: Um, that sounds very Marina probably. NEIL: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. JON: But, um, I think the reason why I thought Black Mirror at first, cause it's like we are so... We are surfing the simulacra of society. NEIL: Oh my God. JON: Who, Baudrillard? Is that the philosopher? NEIL: Mhm. Society of spectacle. JON: I am really smart right now in this hour... NEIL: Oh my God. Um, it's funny you mention Marina Abramovic, cause one of the cards I have, or this is just an idea for an art project I would love to do, which is, you know, the artist is present where, you know, you would sit with and look into her eyes. But I'd like to do that with, butt warmth. You'd sit on chairs and then you would just switch. Like I could feel your butt warmth on the chair, and you could feel mine. JON: And I'm going to, I'm going to build on this. The seats, to kind of give it some sort of like, um, sexy factor. The seats are thermo-visually dynamic. So when you sit, you can see the warmth, um, like a print? That the last person - NEIL: The heat, the heat map. JON: Mhm. The heat map of the last person. NEIL: If that's what it's called. Our first collabora…

Full show notes at the publisher

Tony Bluestone: Death Is So Queer Feb 21, 2020

Show notes

Artist Tony Bluestone talks about the existential condition of the Wet Paint sign.

Kate Johnson: The Discomfort of Patience Feb 14, 2020

Show notes

Meditator Kate Johnson explores the connection between car horns and anonymous comment sections. ABOUT THE GUEST Kate Johnson teaches classes and retreats integrating Buddhist meditation, somatics, social justice and creativity at the Rubin Museum in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, the Kripalu Center and the Omega Institute. Kate works as a culture change consultant, partnering with organizations who are pursuing noble goals to achieve greater diversity and sustainability. She is also an utterly unprofessional dancer and performer who earned a BFA in Dance from The Alvin Ailey School/Fordham University and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU. ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as "tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny." His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he's a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE SHE'S A TALKER was the name of Neil's first video project. "One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate's cat and found myself saying the words 'She's a talker.' I wondered how many other other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying 'She's a talker.'" A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Andrew Litton Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock TRANSCRIPTION NEIL GOLDBERG: My favorite New York biking experience is going over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn. There's that long, gentle curve as you exit into Brooklyn, and you also don't have to pedal because you're ... KATE JOHNSON: Going down a hill. NEIL: ... going downhill. KATE: I know what you're talking about ... NEIL: I live for that. KATE: ... down to Jay Street. NEIL: Yeah, exactly. And I also love that moment, especially at night, coming from Brooklyn into Manhattan on any of the bridges, and when you reach that midpoint where you can stop pedaling, you're over the water, and you can basically just glide all the way back into Manhattan. KATE: Yeah, from the peak, right? NEIL: Yeah. KATE: Oh yeah, that is beautiful. Yes. I actually crashed my bike once on that because I was just having this peak moment as I was looking out at the water, then I hit the side and scraped my knee and hobbled the rest of the way. NEIL: Hello. I'm Neil Goldberg and this is SHE'S A TALKER. Today, I'll be talking to meditation teacher Kate Johnson. But first, here's the premise of the podcast, and I like to say it's better than it sounds. I'm a visual artist, and I have this collection of thousands of index cards on which I've been jotting down thoughts, observations, reflections for a good 20 years. They were originally meant just for me, maybe to hold onto something I wanted to remember, or maybe to use in a future art project. But in SHE'S A TALKER, I'm using them as prompts for conversations with some of my favorite New York artists, writers, performers, and beyond. NEIL: These days, the cards often start as recordings I make into my phone here and there throughout the course of the day. Here are some recent ones: English. Double letters are okay, triple letters are too much. I'm kind of surprised Trump likes Sharpies. Have to get home to feed one animal to another animal. NEIL: I'm so happy to have as my guest, Kate Johnson. Kate teaches classes and retreats that integrate Buddhist meditation, social justice work, and creative practice at places like the Rubin Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philly, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, and the Kripalu Center, among others. She also describes herself as an utterly unprofessional dancer who earned an MA in performance studies from NYU. We talked in January at a recording studio at The New School near Union Square in New York City. NEIL: I'm so happy to have Kate Johnson with me today on SHE'S A TALKER. Thank you, Kate, for being here. KATE: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. NEIL: I want to start with a couple questions I ask everybody. The first question would be, what is the elevator pitch for what it is you do? KATE: Oh my God. I am a mediation teacher and organizational consultant, and I often work at the intersections of spirituality, social justice, and creativity. NEIL: Whoa. That is an elevator pitch. KATE: Right? NEIL: That absolutely is. KATE: I pulled it together. NEIL: I can really see how that triad could inform each other. Spirituality, social justice, and creativity, yes? KATE: Yeah. I mean, I also feel like those are the things that I just like and am good at, so there's not a whole lot else, I think, that's for me in this world. I try to just make them go together whenever I can. NEIL: Right. Oh, isn't that what we're all doing? Just make the things that we like go together. Do you have parents, grandparents who are still around? KATE: Yeah. I have parents who are still around. NEIL: What, let's say, would your parents say to their friends when their friends ask what you do? KATE: Oh. My mom would say that I'm a spiritual teacher, and my dad would say that I'm a writer. NEIL: Oh, that's interesting. What's that split about? KATE: Well, my dad was a writer. He was a journalist, and so I think that he always really supported my love of language and saw that part of me. Then my mother, recently she started getting really into meditation, so she practices twice a day, she comes to mediation retreats that I teach. I don't know, I also feel like there are certain people in life where when you talk to them, your wisdom kind of comes out, and I think that my mom and I are that for each other. NEIL: Oh, that's wonderful. KATE: So I see her as a spiritual teacher, too. NEIL: Do you get nervous when she comes to a meditation retreat? KATE: A little bit. I mean, partially because I kind of have an internal commitment, even when I'm in meditation spaces, to really be honest about the way that I hope that our spiritual practice can inform our political lives. So oftentimes that means talking about my experience as a black, mixed race woman, and I have a white mommy. And so part of, I think, what's spiritual about our relationship is the willingness not to give up on each other as we have these conversations about what it means for me to be a black woman in America, what it's like for her as a mother of black children, and the ways in which, as a white woman living in kind of a middle-upper class area of Chicago, the things that she doesn't see or the attitudes she unconsciously picks up she didn't mean to. And so I think it's amazing. It's also frustrating in some ways to be in this long-term relationship with this person where we're not going to give up on each other because we have different views. KATE: But just to go back to your question, I'll often look out and be talking about experiences of racism, both within meditation centers and outside, and I'll look out at her and just wonder, "What's she thinking?" Does she feel bad that she couldn't shield me from those experiences? Is she feeling like, "Is Kate making this up? I don't know what she's talking about." So sometimes I'll try to read her face, but most of the time I'm just happy she's there and that she's ... I mean, she raised four children pretty much by herself, so I'm happy she has a little time to relax. We probably terrorized her. NEIL: You mentioned not giving up on each other. I mean, that's such an interesting way to put it. KATE: Well, every family's different, everyone's relationship with their parents is different. A lot of the people that I interact with often in my social life, they have a relationship with their parents, and I think sometimes with the elder generation in general, where there's a sense of ... I don't know, kind of objectifying them. Like we might have seen them once and then saw a mixed bag, as we all are, someone who in some ways has it together or is loving and in other ways maybe carries outdated notions of themselves or other people, or uses embarrassing language to describe a particular ethnic group. Then we just kind of ... There's this dulling of the perception that happens after that where we no longer are seeing that person, we're seeing our memory projecting it out and then reacting to our own projections. And so- NEIL: Oh my God. Story of my life. KATE: So I think not giving up is being, in some ways, willing to allow each other the grace that is actually offered to all of life, which is that we're all always changing and to be awake to each others' evolving experience and to be willing to be honest about what our experience is and shape each other. I think that's the other way in which I've seen friends give up on parents, is that they stop really telling the parents who they are. We fear we may not be accepted or parents just don't understand, that kind of thing, and sometimes that's true. Sometimes we have that fear and it's confirmed, and that's really hard. So it's like you can't have your whole sense of worth wrapped up in what a parent thinks, but also what if they couldn't see us once and then one day they could? And we kept kind of showing up and allowing ourselves to be seen, if that's not dangerous to who we are. I like to be surprised. NEIL: Shall we go to these cards? KATE: Cool, yeah. This is actually the part that I'm most excited about, so ... NEIL: All right, well. The first card I have is, "Patience always feels somehow wrong." KATE: The wrongness. I relate to the discomfort of patience. I think one of the blessings of Buddhist meditation training is it kind of gets drilled into your bones that just because something is uncomfortable doesn't mean it's wrong. I think to the point where it can even go a little too far and people can become scared of pleasure, and that's also not the point. In the Buddhist tradition, the word that's translated as patience is called khanti. It's K-H-A-N-T-I and it's one of the virtues, and so it's not different than other traditions where patience is a virtue. We often translate it as patience, but it means something like forbearance, also. KATE: So for me, when I learned patience as a child it was like holding on like hell until you get what you want, like, "If you're good, then you can have this treat when you get home." And so you just hold your little hands, you just sit on them and wait until finally, "Oh, I get what I want now that ..." I have a sense of relief and the patience that is talked about in the Buddhist teachings, which I also relate with ... and it's a little bit of a perspective shift, but it's like not just patience until I get what I want, but the patience that one has when we may never get what we want, or whether what we want is gone and will never return. The kind of patience that we have with our bodies as they get older and we go to do something that we used to do effortlessly. The suggestion, I guess, is that we can meet that experience with patience. NEIL: Yeah, there's so many different types of patience, too. For a long time, I supported myself in a day job that involved a mix of computer graphics and IT work. Working with people around computers brings up, for me, the deepest level of patience or challenges to patience. KATE: Because they're not going fast enough? Is that- NEIL: You could take the keyboard and mouse out of their hands and just do it absolutely in two seconds, but it is important to develop that muscle memory of using the mouse and the keyboard and da da ... going through the steps and having it be imprinted on your body in that way. KATE: Yeah. I mean, we're talking and I'm like, oh, so much of patience for me is about pace. It's about I either want a task to go faster than it's going, I would like time to go faster than it's going, and the frustration that it's actually not ... It's difficult. It's difficult. I don't know, would you say it's wrong? NEIL: That really segues, interestingly, into a card I have about honking. "People honking are not where they want to be." KATE: That's deep. I mean, that's really deep. Yeah, I mean, gosh, to just be able to make a noise and be like, "I'm here and I don't want to be." NEIL: Right, exactly. KATE: It makes me want to have a horn to just carry around and be like ... NEIL: Oh my God. KATE: Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think it's like they don't want to be here, but also, "I want someone to know that I'm here and I don't want to be. I want to make that heard. I want to make that visible." I can relate to that feeling. NEIL: Oh my God, yeah. God, that horn would be on frequent blast in my life. KATE: Yeah, yeah. Or when you see a child have a tantrum and it's just like, that's them honking their horn being like, "Something is not right." NEIL: Right, right, right. That's so true. Oh my God, the horn is metaphor. But I bike a lot, and I was stopped at a light where someone was honking the horn, and the biker next to me ... I love the conversations you'll have occasionally at a stoplight with someone else in the bike lane. He said, "Car horns should be just as loud inside the car as outside." KATE: Yeah, that's a cool idea. I mean, I can't imagine any car manufacturer picking that up, but you know. NEIL: I know, right. I think that's also a connection between honking and vulnerability. As a bicyclist, do you ever kind of make that connection? I often feel like when people are honking at me, they're actually expressing a fear of hurting me. KATE: Oh, oh. NEIL: Have you ever had that, or ... KATE: Yeah. I guess it can be like that the same way a parent will yank a kid, like, "Why'd you do ..." When they're doing something that they feel is dangerous. Yeah, I think the feeling of being in this giant metal thing that's hurling through space that could totally kill somebody is really kind of jarring. NEIL: Absolutely. KATE: I mean, I love that you're giving people the benefit of the doubt like that, like, I startled them and they don't want to hurt me. I think that's a wonderful attitude to take. I didn't often think that. I often felt like there was so much protection or something that, I don't know, they felt they could do whatever they wanted. I often would pull up next to a car at a stop light and look over and when the person looked at me, the impression that I had is that they forgot that they could be seen inside this compartment. NEIL: Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. KATE: So it almost is like an anonymous comment section or something where they can say whatever they want with their ... and then no one has to know it was them that trolled this nice biker. NEIL: Honking is like the anonymous comment section. That's fucking brilliant. The card sa…

Full show notes at the publisher

Jacques Servin: Crypto-Optimist Feb 07, 2020

Show notes

Activist and filmmaker Jacques Servin talks about shoplifting in airports. ABOUT THE GUEST Jacques Servin is co-founder of the Yes Men, an activist filmmaking collective that's plagued dozens of entities including Exxon, Shell, the NRA, and the US Department of Energy. In the process he's co-written, co-directed, and co-starred in three award-winning documentaries, with a fourth expected this fall. Servin has recently co-launched the Yes School, which teaches writers, theater people, and artists how to strategically bring creativity to ongoing activist campaigns; this spring, "students" are working with groups in Tanzania, Belfast, Istanbul, Toronto, and Budapest that oppose housing financialization and other forms of land theft. Servin has also published dozens of articles in all sorts of magazines, as well as two collections of short stories. ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as "tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny." His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he's a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE SHE'S A TALKER was the name of Neil's first video project. "One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate's cat and found myself saying the words 'She's a talker.' I wondered how many other other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying 'She's a talker.'" A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Andrew Litton Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock TRANSCRIPTION NEIL GOLDBERG: I am sitting in the apartment of my dear, very long term, long term friend. It sounds like a disease. JACQUES SERVIN: I'm sorry, I'm a disease. NEIL: No, you're the best disease. You're, you're, you're the kind of chronic, you're the kind of chronic, I like. JACQUES: That is so romantic. NEIL: Hello, I'm Neil Goldberg and this is She's a Talker.. NEIL: Today, I'll be talking to activist writer and filmmaker Jacques Servin. If this is your first time listening, here's the premise of the podcast. I'm a visual artist and for the past million or so years have been jotting down thoughts, observations, reflections on index cards. I've got thousands of them. I originally wrote the cards just for me or maybe to use in future art projects, but in, She's a Talker, I'm using them as prompts for conversations with some of my favorite artists, writers, performers, and beyond. These days, the cards often start as recordings I make into my phone here and there over the course of the day. Each episode I start with some recent ones. Here they are. I always feel proud of doing the math of calling something 19th century rather than 1800's . (Card Flip) Weird that sun can shine into an apartment. (Card Flip) The way people talk when they're trying not to wake you in the other room. (Card Flip) I'm so excited to have as my guest, my dear friend and fellow lower East sider Jacques Servin. Jacques is one of the two founding members of the activist group, 'The Yes Men', who take a unique, really powerful and subversive approach to political action by basically impersonating officials from corporations and government agencies and taking public positions on their behalf. He'll explain more in our interview, which took place just after the new year in the apartment complex where we both live. (Card Flip) Hi, Jacques. JACQUES: Hi, Neil. NEIL: do you remember, we met around the same time that the original, she's a talker, was being filmed. Do you remember that? JACQUES: Of course. I remember I wrote a short story called, 'She's a Talker.' NEIL: Oh, that's right. JACQUES: Yeah. NEIL: Shock. In addition to being a perpetrator of corporate identity theft is also a writer whose writing. I fell in love with way back in 1993 and you wrote a story called, 'She's a Talker' in one of your two, first books. JACQUES: Yup. Yup. Yeah, I remember it really well. NEIL: So for many years you were principally involved in the 'Yes Men'. What would be the elevator pitch? Just for our listeners of what the 'Yes Men' do? JACQUES: Oh God. Okay. The 'Yes Men' are best known for impersonating captains of industry and representing them at conferences and on television and so on. Giving versions of what those people should say. Or doing what has been called identity correction in civic identity theft, where you kind of like represent them as as they actually are. NEIL: Right. I remember a signature action of yours was impersonating someone from Dow Chemical going on BBC and announcing that at long last out chemical was going to be compensating the people of Bo Paul for that disaster there. And it had this implication for Dow Chemical stock. JACQUES: Yeah. They said it was seen by 350 million people, which is the audience of that show. BBC world. NEIL: Same audience as She's a Talker. JACQUES: Yeah, exactly. And but yeah, I ended up on, on BBC making this announcement on behalf of Dow chemical, spending $10 billion, I think, on compensating the survivors all this great stuff. Yeah. And yeah, Dow stock tank to immediately, I mean 4% NEIL: It was surreal. JACQUES: In that in their case it meant $2 billion. I think these days, my elevator pitch, which I'm refining, is I work with activist groups around the world to help them be more creative in their work. NEIL: Well, I love it. That's a real elevator elevator pitch. JACQUES: Yeah, but there's a second part of it too. That's equally elevator, but another elevator, which is, and I'm training people to do that also. NEIL: So like, so you're both helping and training people to help. JACQUES: Yes. NEIL: You're training people to do the job that you're currently doing? Yes. Okay. And what does that mean to, what does the first part mean? JACQUES: It's like we went to South Africa in September and worked with like 800 squatters. It's kind of amazing. They reached out to us long story, but they NEIL: were speaking to the Yes Men'? JACQUES: The 'Yes Men'. And they wanted to kind of do something. 'Yes Men-ish' around their issue, which is existence. Like they. Have a right to be there under the South African constitution. Everybody has a right to housing, but typically the government, if you demand your right, they'll give you some corrugated iron and send you 30 miles outside the city. Just like under apartheid, where they have these like racial settlements. Now it's economic. Basically the same apartheid policies are being replicated for economic reasons. Big surprise, and. So these people basically have squatted this on these two medical places that were empty, that are located in the most pricey real estate in Cape Town. And, and they've got a fully functioning society, not perfect. NEIL: Versus all those other perfect societies. JACQUES: Exactly. NEIL: Let's be realistic, JACQUES: you know? But yeah, but anything that goes wrong and it's like says, you know, see, they can't do it. And you know, in like, they do amazing stuff already, but, but it doesn't get attention because everybody's used to it. So they wanted to. Try to think of something that people weren't used to that would surprise people that would get across these ideas. And they came up with the idea of a Zombie March. So it's like, you know, apartheid ideas back from the dead. So the za, they all dressed up as zombies and all the kids, especially dressed up as zombies and they had zombie dance offs and zombie, you know, all this, these crazy activities for a week, getting ready for the Zombie March. Which were in themselves, a big point, you know, like the education and the connection and all that. And then they did this big March on the city, building. It was all super fun and it got front page news. There was tons of press. they got a new metaphor. Zombie embodying the should be dead ideas that were not dead NEIL: of apartheid JACQUES: of apartheid, zombie ideas. NEIL: Ah, so Jacques. Your parents were, remind me your parents' names. JACQUES: Henry and Genevieve. NEIL: Okay. So what would in turn Henry and then Genevieve, how might they describe what it is you do to their JACQUES: friends? I think they would say he makes movies or when I made movies, NEIL: cause the Yes Men made movies. JACQUES: We made movies, we made three movies. So I think, I think they would say that they would say they make funny movies. NEIL: Oh huh. I remember at some early point, your mom asked you something like, "Are you still making mischief?" Was that it? JACQUES: Yeah. Yeah. She characterized, the first thing I did as mischief. NEIL: So they've moved beyond just seeing what you do as mischief? JACQUES: It was mischief at the time. NEIL: So she was correct. JACQUES: She was correct. NEIL: Interesting. what is something you find yourself thinking about today? JACQUES: You mean like bigger than me? Cause like NEIL: Anything, what, what you happen to be thinking about today? JACQUES: God, what was I thinking about? Like insofar I was thinking today, I was, I mean, one of the things I was doing was trying to, I did headstands. Our mutual friend, Joe , who's a super adept, adept of Iyengar. NEIL: Yes. Relatively. JACQUES: Yeah. Showed me how to do headstands, which I used to do like 20 years ago, but that was a long time ago, and suddenly I was doing them again because the teacher wasn't there. The real teacher just didn't show up. NEIL: And Joe led the class JACQUES: No he led me and some other people kind of eavesdropped and did the same thing, but he, that's NEIL: That's very advanced to have you do a headstand. While he was just kinda like, filling in, you know. I remember back in, we're, if we're talking like 1991 at Jivamukti yoga center, when I had just really gotten deep into yoga and they had windows looking out onto second Avenue, I remember doing a headstand while it was snowing out. Oh my God. And seeing the snow fall up. Oh my God. It was just so great. JACQUES: That sounds amazing. NEIL: That was a yoga turning point for me. JACQUES: Oh my God. NEIL: Shall we go to the cards? JACQUES: Yeah, more cards. Didn't we go to one? NEIL: Now? These are, this is like the evergreen questions as it were. These are the questions I ask everyone. Now, these are bespoke cards that I've curated for you and only you. JACQUES: Oh my God. NEIL: So first card Jacques is actually something we came up with, or we found ourselves discussing together. First card is the way a couples bed feels, at a party. The way it kind of excludes you, you know? Oh, and the type of specific, JACQUES: Oh God. NEIL: Intimacy. I've seen a couple's bed at a party JACQUES: Covered with coats, usually NEIL: That's true. That's true. JACQUES: That always strikes me as weird. Like, Oh. NEIL: Putting the coats on it.? JACQUES: Yeah. It seems like a shame or something, or it's like, yeah, there's a little shame in it. You feel shame. No, I feel like there is shame in the offering of the bed for the coats. It's like, you know, it's like a way of acknowledging the bed without highlighting the bed. I t's like, just put the things on it. NEIL: Maybe that's what it's about though. Maybe it's about kind of hiding. Literally and metaphorically. Yeah, the bad. JACQUES: I think so. I think it's like the bed is there and you got to use it. A bed is made to be used, but clearly they're not going to have sex in front of everybody at most parties, so you put the coats on it to use it, you know, not obscenely or not, not embarrassingly. And, and, and there's a little shame in that. NEIL: So, yeah, no, I totally get it. It is almost like a Freudian right? Like, you know, we're a Youngian, right? Like, so that we may have festivities in this room, we must cover the place where the act of union happens. JACQUES: Yeah. It's like all about covering up the bed. NEIL: Yes. Yeah, totally. Totally. Totally, totally. funny. I, you know, I. Because it is like that bed is almost like throbbing. It throbs with this intimacy from which you are excluded. JACQUES: Yes. NEIL: Maybe the jackets are effective in extinguishing. Right? ] JACQUES: Because when the jackets are there, you're just focused on the jackets and your own jacket probably. NEIL: And yes. And will you be able to find it? You know, JACQUES: And then when you go get it, I always have the thought like, are people gonna think I'm stealing things? NEIL: Sometimes when I'm in a supermarket, and obviously this is like the product of like deep privilege. Like if I reach into my pockets, as I walk through an aisle, I think, Oh, is someone looking at a camera going to think I stole something? JACQUES: Right. And sometimes you have. But maybe not you. I steal in airports. I never steal in supermarkets. NEIL: What do you steal in airports? JACQUES: Anything I want. It's super easy to steal in airports. NEIL: Really? JACQUES: Yeah. I almost always steal something. NEIL: Wow! Have you ever been caught? JACQUES: No. No. You can't really be caught at airports. There's no security. They're not looking for that, NEIL: Or their security is all riveted on something else. It's like the ultimate, the real misdirection. JACQUES: Yeah. Yeah. Right, There's this like potential really bad thing, so you can do the minorly bad thing. and also I always have an alibi, so like, you know how the shops are always open and interconnected? I just like pick something up from one shop and walk to the cash register in another shop as if I think that's where it is. And then kind of like aimlessly wander off so I can always. Say, Oh, I, he, I did thought that was like, all right. NEIL: She's a Talker. Pro tip. How to shoplift. JACQUES: Yeah. In airports. NEIL: See, I feel judgmental of that. I do. I'm always looking for opportunities to feel judgment. JACQUES: Yeah. No, I'm glad to provide that. NEIL: You often do. (Card Flip) All right. Jacques, next card. Hypothesis - people who do torture, must actually be empathic in order to be effective. JACQUES: Ooh, yes, of course. Look, that's terrible. That's dark. That's good. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Otherwise it would be no fun. NEIL: It wouldn't be effective because you have to imagine what something would, JACQUES: yeah, I think, I think so. It's like sex, right? You, you, you can't really perform a good sexual act on somebody if you haven't had it performed well on you. I mean, is that true? NEIL: It may be true, but, but I think buried within that is the idea. I think you can't perform a sex act well if you can't inhabit someone else's subjectivity based on, and that doesn't necessarily have to come from having experienced it yourself, but from being able to like, you know, be in tuned with the cues that you're getting and stuff like that, which is like torture. I mean, often when I'm getting a massage, which I don't g…

Full show notes at the publisher

Andy Hawkes: Almost Art Jan 31, 2020

Show notes

Artist and baker Andrew Hawkes talks about bouncing around pixelated mansions. ABOUT THE GUEST Andy Hawkes is an interdisciplinary artist based in Harlem. He creates performances, videos and baked goods that interrogate intimacy, aspirational domesticity and desire. Hawkes has presented his work at Museum of the Moving Image,Present Company, and Secret Project Robot. For more information Andrew-hawkes.com or IG @Andyawesomepants. ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as "tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny." His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he's a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE SHE'S A TALKER was the name of Neil's first video project. "One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate's cat and found myself saying the words 'She's a talker.' I wondered how many other other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying 'She's a talker.'" A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Andrew Litton Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnoc TRANSCRIPTION NEIL GOLDBERG: I was going to say you were a former student of mine, but let's get real here. ANDY HAWKES: Almost student. I came so close. NEIL: What happened? Why did you drop my class? ANDY: Because they told me I had to. NEIL: Who told you that? ANDY: The people. NEIL: The people. You're putting it on someone else. ANDY: No, I was… NEIL: What went wrong? ANDY: What went wrong was I was a first year sculptural student and I wanted to take a class with you in graphic design and the class was full and I think I was told I could take it if no one else in graphic design wanted to take the class so I got bumped out, but I did do the first assignment, but then I never got to show anyone. I think it wasn't meant to be. NEIL: Here we are today though. ANDY: Here we are today. I think it's change and it's something different and special. NEIL: Hello, I'm Neil and this is She's A Talker. Today I'll be talking to artist and baker, Andy. If this is your first time listening, here's the premise of the podcast. I'm a visual artist and for the past million or so years I've been jotting down thoughts, observations, and reflections often about things that might otherwise get overlooked or go unnoticed. I write them down on index cards and I've got thousands of them. I originally wrote the cards just for me or maybe to use in future art projects, but in She's A Talker I'm using them as prompts for conversations with some of my favorite artists, writers, performers, and beyond. NEIL: These days the cards often start as recordings I make into my phone here and there over the course of the day. Each episode I start with some recent ones. Here they are. Animals are so straight edge. When you shake hands with somebody just after you've washed your hands and they're still wet and you have to say, "I just washed my hands." Photography is like taxidermy. I'm so excited to have as my guest Andy. Andy is an interdisciplinary artist who lists his mediums as performances, videos and baked goods. He's presented his art at the Museum of the Moving Image and a bunch of other art venues. He also works as a coordinator of public programs at the Whitney Museum. NEIL: We talked in January at a recording studio at the New School in New York City. NEIL: I'm sitting here with Andy Hawks. I'm so happy to have you here today. ANDY: I'm happy to be here. NEIL: Um, Andy, what's your elevator pitch for what you do? ANDY: I would say, and it's changed a lot since I've moved to New York, which is five years ago, I would say I am. I'm a performance artist and a video artist that's interested in. Food consumption and labor and whiteness and those sorts of things. Yeah. I just recently accepted to myself that my kitchen is my studio or an extension of my studio, and so I think my time since graduate school has been learning to unlearn that art happens when you make a concerted effort in the studio and you know, to realize that. I can make art when I'm not sitting at a desk saying, okay, this is the time in which I will make art, you know? So I say I'm interested in food and interested in cakes and baking and things like that because I am still coming to terms :with like, that is, I think, a big part of the materials I want to work with. Yeah. NEIL: I am blown away by the gorgeousness of these cakes that have appeared on your social media feed. ANDY: Thank you. NEIL: It seems to me like in what the last year possibly? ANDY: In the last year? Yeah, NEIL: And it's like zero to 60 I don't know what the term is, but they're, they're so exquisite looking and came to me as a really big surprise. But perhaps not for you or, or, or was this something that you've been working towards? ANDY: It was a big surprise for me. I started baking a year ago when I started posting. NEIL: Fucking A! ANDY: So what happened was, you know, uh, my partner really wanted to take a cake decorating class. And so for Christmas I signed them up for one and we did it together and he did not like it, But we had all this stuff and I wanted to use it. We had all this butter and all these bags and things, and I was like, well, I want to figure out how to use this. And I kind of got interested in it as a sculptural material and wanted to… explore it. And I started making cakes and seeing cakes on the internet and bringing them into work. And a big part of this was I started working in an office where it was, you know, predominantly white women who, you know, would bring in baked goods and stuff. And it was such a language of power play of like, "Oh, I baked these this weekend", or "I bake these with the kids." And I realized it was sort of like a… an interesting flexing that all these women were doing with each other. And I was like, well, I want to be a part of this. I want to like somehow get into this sort of like, "Oh, I made these cookies and they're really good". You know? And, and present them really prettily. So then I started trying to learn how to make them as beautiful as possible, which is something I'd never been interested in, which was beauty. Explain that for people who. Rightly are blown away by the idea of an artist who heretofore, was not interested in beauty. I think beauty in a way, to me means resolved in a certain way and a certain aesthetic and a certain kind of finish. And as an artist, I was never interested in… No, I was interested in things aesthetically making sense to me, but I was never interested in them aesthetically being at a resolved point where… It's sort of like drag makeup in a way, right? Like, you know, to have the idea that there's like a, a flawless application of, of eyeshadow or something, or like a flawlessness to it. And I was never interested in making something that was flawless. I had never really thought about that. And you know, I, I learned a lot of this to this school to YouTube, and there's so much conversation with these people who are making cakes about, like, how to make sure that your buttercream is perfectly smooth and how to make sure you have the perfect icing and making sure that you have the perfect, like the word perfect kept coming up so much because it was like, "Oh, this is about being perfect," you know? So I had never used the word perfect, or use the word harmonious, and in a way, you know. But that's something that I am interested in with like how something tastes or how something looks now. Yeah. NEIL: This perfection thing is really coming up for you, huh? ANDY: I guess so. Yeah. Does it in any way feel like it may be a response to Yale where perfection is questioned? It is. Question there. I came from mid Michigan, small school, you know, by a corn field. I remember in one of the critiques, one of my first critiques in Yale, one of the faculty members said, Oh, it's such an object as a critique. And I was like, and my head spin spun around and I was like, "Oh my, what? I thought we were supposed to be doing that here." Yeah. I thought we were supposed to be making objects, what am I doing? And so I, I know that like one of the things that I felt was that, that, you know, and I loved the program and I learned so much, I have to say that. But you know, one of the things that when I left, it was like I had completely abandoned making anything tangible or physical or like, an object. And so like maybe in a way, you know, I am striking back. I mean, a cake is an object. As long as you don't eat it, you know, as long as you don't cut it. So, you know, maybe, maybe it is a reaction against that and maybe there's some little trespassing, you know, it's a little naughty exploring perfection. Are your parents still in the world? Yes. They both are. Yeah. Oh, a little question mark. Yes. Both of my parents are alive. Yes. Yeah. NEIL: Um, how do each of them describe what it is you do to their friends? ANDY: Oh. So I work at the Whitney museum and I, uh, work with a small team to produce, um, programs for adult audiences. So I think that they don't think of me baking as, as an artistic practice. My mom probably would say that I am, you know, an arts administrator in New York. NEIL: Mhmmmm. ANDY: That's, I think as much as she would describe it. And I don't know if I've articulated to her that I think of what I'm doing. A sculpture, NEIL: Arts administration – as sculpture? Or baking as… ANDY: Baking as sculpture, not art. If arts administration is sculpture, my gosh, I have built the pyramids. Um, NEIL: How about your dad? ANDY: Ah, well my dad is, um. He's a.. He had a closed head injury a few years ago, so he.. That's why, you know, when you were like, "Oh, your parents.." My dad's alive, but he's not, um, he has a lot of memory loss and a lot of difficulty. So he's in an, um, in a nursing home. So he remembers me if I'm there in person, but I don't think on the day to day he thinks about it. If I call him, he'll be kind of confused. Right. Yeah. So that's why I said it with a question mark cause it's like, Oh well hmm…. NEIL: I hear you. I'm sorry to have been so, um.. uh, cavalier about that question. ANDY: But when he has a with us, I mean, you know, before his accident, I think he, I know he would describe me as an artist and he was very, he fancied himself an artist. And he took me as a kid, actually, is one of the reasons why I became an artist. As a little kid. He would take us the DIA, Detroit Institute of the Arts, you know, like once a month. And we were members. And I remember just having really formative experiences there. And when I turned like 13, he gave me his SLR, like film camera from, you know, he had since the 80s. And, and that sort of opened, I think the door to me being an artist. And he was a truck driver. But you know, he painted and he took photographs and he played the flute and he was a person that, you know, I think in a lot of ways I'm a lot like him. That if he took an interest in something, he fully committed and did a 0 – 60 so seeing him obsessively buy gadgets and obsessively commit to learning something was sort of really impactful for me. NEIL: What's something that you find yourself thinking about today? ANDY: Oh, today specifically? Or today is like a concept, huh? NEIL: What is today as a concept. Oh, like, like kids today? ANDY: Yeah. That sort of thing. NEIL: Take your pick. I love it. ANDY: I'm thinking a lot about, this is going to sound crazy. Watching 'Let's Play' videos. NEIL: What are they called, lip play? ANDY: Let's play. NEIL: Let's play? ANDY: It's when people play video games and record them. NEIL: Oh, right. Yeah, thats a thing huh? ANDY: Yeah. And I've been watching the Tomb Raider ones from like 1996 you know, with the… the worst resolution graphics on earth. And its just a very surreal experience to watch someone who's perfected playing Tomb Raider. It's just a really interesting, um, meditative kind of thing to watch. NEIL: Weird. ANDY: Yeah. It is weird. NEIL: Do you play video games? ANDY: I don't. NEIL: Me neither. You don't like playing them but you like watching other people play? ANDY: Yeah. NEIL: Huh. ANDY: I was a very scared child. I grew up with the PlayStation and I was always too stressed out to ever play past the first level of anything. And so now that I've discovered that you can just watch someone else play and be able to see again, I guess it's like I said, perfect. Again, like perfectly played Tomb Raider. NEIL: What was it as a kid that scared you back over to the next level? ANDY: I was afraid of the conflict. There's always a first boss that you have to fight, right? NEIL: Oh, is that what happens in a video game? ANDY: Oh yeah! With any video game you get to a part and you have to fight some sort of like guy who throws bricks at you or something or you know, some sort of like mushroom monster or something. And I, um, never wanted to do that. I was like, well, that's okay with me. I'll just play the first level again where you just, you know. Don't deal with that. So, you know, I, my favorite part of tomb Raider was there was a part where you could just play in Laura's house. The, the main character is like a millionaire and you could just like jump around her mansion and I, that was enough for me. And so it's nice to see.. to watch something that isn't just bouncing around someone's pixelated mansion I guess. NEIL: Right, isn't that what we're all doing? Bouncing around our respective pixelated mansions. ANDY: Well, or pixelated apartments or pixelated hovels in my case. NEIL: Let's go to some cards I curated for you. ANDY: Okay. (Card Flip sound) NEIL: First card is the profound thing about cooking show competitions is that the sense of taste is invisible. You can't know what they're tasting except in how it registers on their face or in their words. ANDY: That's really true. In a way, that's what I'm interested in, like trying to make, I've been trying to make more elaborate kind of baked goods, uh, different kinds of sponges and things like that, so I can actually know what they taste like. And actually experience that. And I think that in a lot of ways when you watch these shows we're there by proxy. We're there by what someone is what someone's facial expression is. What someone says about it. The camera. The music. The response of the other contestants. And we're never actually there. Sort of a mirror to a lot of… we're increasingly removed from most experiences, you know? NEIL: For sure. But I think about like baking shows in particular, or cooking shows are different from, let's say, a singing competition where you can experience it. Yeah. And how that shapes cooking shows, you know? So there's like, for me, I'm really interested in like the, the fetish…

Full show notes at the publisher

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

She’s A Talker

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected