A Brand-New Life
You cannot start a brand-new life while participating in your own destruction
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Podcastery
This week, I posted Episode 630 of The Virtual Memories Show, and it’s a weird one. I didn’t have a guest this week, so I recorded a (thankfully) brief monologue from a hotel room in Weehawken, NJ during a business conference for my day job. I talked about mental health, oblique mythology, Charles Crumb, comics and pharma friends, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and more. Give it a listen!
Last week I posted Episode 629, with author Elon Green celebrating his amazing new book, THE MAN NOBODY KILLED: Life, Death, and Art In Michael Stewart’s New York (Celadon Books), an investigation into a terrible episode of police brutality and its aftermath in mid-’80s NYC. We talk about what drew him to the story of Michael Stewart, a 25-year-old black artist-model-DJ who died at the hands of transit police in 1983, his amazement that no one else had written this book, and how his early assumptions about a coverup gave way to a different coverup. We get into how he so wonderfully evokes the gritty NYC of that era, spreading out a canvas that takes in the arts scene — think Haring, Basquiat, Madonna — and the awful crimes and police behavior — think Bumpurs, Goetz — of that era. We discuss the art of interviewing people 40+ years after an event without reopening old wounds, the judge on the case who talked with him for 3 hours and shared how his conclusions on the verdict changed, what he sees in Stewart’s art, why he considers himself a history writer (& despises the “true crime” label & genre), bringing his first book to life as an HBO series, and more. Give it a listen! And go read THE MAN NOBODY KILLED!
Recent episodes: Vanda Krefft • Seth Lorinczi • Martin Mittelmeier • Jonathan Ames • Witold Rybczynski • Matt Madden • Fred Kaplan
A Brand-New Life
YOU CANNOT START
A BRAND-NEW LIFE
WHILE PARTICIPATING IN YOUR OWN DESTRUCTION
So said the guy at the top of the #7 subway entrance at Hudson Yards this morning, trying to sell snack and sodas from a table. He was insistent on this point, repeating it loudly. It echoed as I took the first of two escalators to the underworld. I’d already taken a ferry across the river, but you can’t have too many pseudomythological allusions in your life. I can’t, at least.
As the 7 left the station, I thought about what he said, and wondered how many sodas and snacks he expected to sell with that attitude. The subway was at the end of the line, or the beginning.
The night before, I took the E down to 14th & 8th and walked on to Westbeth Artists Housing, for Peter Trachtenberg’s reading from his new book, The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists of New York (we recorded 2 weekends ago; it’ll post on April 1, when the book comes out; YOU SHOULD PRE-ORDER IT). I was in a gray suit & white dress shirt, for my pharma conference, and figured they might be suspicious of me.
I walked in the wrong entrance of the complex, and was directed to the courtyard to get to the community room for Peter’s reading. Which is where this happened:
The angle of the sun off the Hudson, the geometry of the buildings, the scale of the people: it all came together and took my breath away. I thought Yet Again about what a wonder my life is, how after 7+ hours of business meetings in midtown, I could find such beauty and nourishment as though it was waiting for me to see it.
I made it to the event, as the crowd of old & young Westbeth residents filed in, along with some non-residents like me. We all took our seats, and Peter gave a fantastic and funny reading of two sections of the book, choosing to focus on stories of deceased Westbethians, rather than anyone who might be in the audience with us.
I looked across the aisle of folding chairs and saw a white-haired woman who seemed awfully familiar, a few seats away. She seemed to acknowledge me, too, and I struggled to place her for a bit. I thought she might be a friend of Peter’s from his time teaching at the Bennington Low-Residency MFA program. “But she’s not Amy Hempel or Susan Cheever, so who . . .?”
Then it hit me: Sheila Keenan, whom Peter had introduced me to for a podcast eleven years ago. When the event wrapped, I got up to say hello to her and reintroduce myself. I told her my name, and she said, “Oh, I remember you, don’t worry. You’re dressed differently, but I recognized your eyes.”
*
This email setup runs $29/month, podcast-hosting is $20/month, and the remote recording setup is $20/month, so if you want to help out with these expenses or otherwise Contribute To The Cause, you can support the Virtual Memories Show with a contribution of any size, one-time or recurring.
Instaxery
Here’s are two new Instax I shot this weekend at a pod-guest/friend’s home:
Artistry
I draw a daily sketch with a rollerball pen in a cheap notebook, and a couple came out okay. Here’s a partial Brooklyn Bridge from Sunday night:
You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.
Postcardery
Let me know if you want to be on my postcard-a-day list. (Financial supporters of the podcast get a hand-drawn or painted postcard as a thank-you.)
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far. I’ll be back on Sunday with links, books, & workout-/meditation-craziness, and on Wednesday with a new episode, and maybe some art, maybe some Instax or an outtake.
Picking up the pieces of my sweet shattered dream / I wonder how the old folks are tonight,