Hitting The Links: 3/30/25
This one's got a LOT of links, a listener's praise, my niece's wedding, the hyperactivity of Hans-Ulrich Obrist, why I keep doing this, Birdy on patrol, how to look good with a crappy head/chest cold, and more
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Bodies, Rest & Motion
Jonathan Sandler, a writer & blogger in England, wrote a lovely appreciation of my podcast, from a comics perspective. (Go get The English GI, a graphic novel he wrote/edited from his grandfather’s WWII memoirs, drawn by Brian Bicknell). I’m always happy to find out how the podcast touches people’s lives & art. I put a lot of work into this, even if I downplay that sometimes; it means a lot to me know people are paying attention.
Jonathan’s listened a lot of my shows and has drawn a lot of good advice & wisdom from my guests, and that makes me feel awfully good. The piece includes almost 200 quotes from ~70 of my guests, so he’s clearly a devoted listener. Go read it. (Feel free to write your own encomium to me sometime.)
(The downside for me is when devoted listeners pick up on all the stories & phrases I repeat from show to show. I figure the guest hasn’t heard all that stuff before, is my excuse.)
Semi-along those lines, this week’s Orbital Operations newsletter from Warren Ellis begins
I was reading this week about a famous art curator called Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and here’s how he lives: he sleeps between fifteen minutes and five hours a day, he wears a hood for catnaps, he has an assistant who clocks on at midnight and keeps the machine running for a few hours while he recharges, he can’t cook or make coffee for himself, he travels the world constantly to talk to artists, he has two phones and his meetings are soundtracked by notifications constantly going off in his pockets, he once started a crack-of-dawn talking group in London called The Brutally Early Club, he records every meeting he has with an artist using three digital devices at once, he speaks five languages, he keeps an apartment in Berlin just to store his books, and the one question he asks every artist is “what is your unrealised project?”
Ellis contrasts that with his own much less frantic routines, then writes [sorry to quote so much]
But I think about the amount of discovery he experiences every day. It almost made me miss those years of cars, trains and planes, going to all those lonely immiserating events that nonetheless introduced me to new ideas. Obrist is in many ways the pronoiac meme-broker of our millennial fictions, batting across the planet like a lunatic, soaking up the next new thing and connecting up all the people that make them.
He’s a curator. He pursues the future all over the planet and doesn’t stop. I am, at heart, just a writer. Sometimes my phone doesn’t go off for an entire afternoon, and I love that.
I found myself wondering: if he was given permission to stop, would he fall over? Or would he refuse it, and just blast on, hypermobile dromomaniac, high velocity art futurist who’d die if he stopped. Obsessed with discovery. Living on the breath of tomorrow.
I often get asked how I manage to do all the stuff that I do, and I joke it’s because I don’t have kids, don’t drink, and have no social life. As I noted a couple Sundays ago, an upcoming guest inscribed his new book, “To Gil, who works harder than fuck.”
“Permission to stop”? I know all this has to end some day, that there’ll be a point when my body or mind fail, or circumstances push me away, but I admit I find it tough to imagine not having all this. I mean, needs must when the devil drives, and all that, if we consider these pursuits a demonic/daemonic activity.
About body & mind failing: I’m currently annihilated by a head cold, which I must’ve contracted during the previous week’s 4 days in NYC business meetings or the previous weekend’s 3 days in Kansas City for my niece’s wedding —
she was beautiful, btw
— or on the flights, in the subways, etc. The up/downshot is, I’m wrecked, can’t sleep, body’s sore, head’s pounding, can’t focus, and I have another trade show in NYC this Tue/Wed. (This whole immunocompromised thing is no fun, tbh.)
And somehow the new episode’s going to come out a day early, to achieve cosmic balance after getting last week’s show out a day late.
If I’m not feeling too stupid and contagious, maybe I’ll even see a friend Tuesday evening after the trade show. (But I’ll likely just pick up dinner at Little Spain, then take the ferry back to Weehawken and read next week’s guest’s book through the evening, once I figure out who next week’s guest is.) (I still need to record with Jonathan Sandler sometime about The English GI; I’m hoping to do an in-person during a London trip this fall.)
‘Coincidentally’ (haha there’s no such thing, but let’s pretend) this morning’s lengthy chapter of The Man Without Qualities includes a character saying,
“He devotes himself to his business as another man might give himself over to a human being entrusted to his care. He deeply needs to make a real difference in the world. If he makes himself available to people, it is because, as he says, a man must keep moving if he wants to be moved.”
Keep moving.
Birdy Of The Week
Birdy is ever-vigilant, even during playtime.
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And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: David Shields • Meeting Across The River • Elon Green • Vanda Krefft • Seth Lorinczi • Martin Mittelmeier • Jonathan Ames • Witold Rybczynski
RIP Hy Eisman . . . RIP Leonard Polonsky . . . RIP Nancy Bea Hefley . . . RIP Herb Greene . . . RIP Kilmer McCully . . . RIP Dag Solstad . . . RIP Reinaldo Herrera . . . RIP Gai Gherardi . . . RIP Young Scooter . . . RIP Han Jong-Hee . . .
This week’s Warren Ellis newsletter also has a tribute to Mr. X, one of the great comic books of the ‘80s/early ‘90s.
Loved this Jerry Saltz writeup about the renovation of the Frick. I hope to visit sometime this spring/summer. (His 2021 piece about the relocated Frick got me to check out Fragonard in a new context, which was good, as I always glossed over/hated them in their room at the Frick.)
Bard College acquired Lapham’s Quarterly & plans to bring it back, so yay.
This archeological story in North Yorkshire reminds me that we still need to see the Detectorists 2022 special.
For no particular reason, Matt Zoller-Seitz reupped his 2018 piece on The Death of Stalin, a movie I consider the greatest black comedy since Dr. Strangelove.
Frogs in time capsules: not just the province of Looney Tunes.
This story of Danny Elfman and his #metoo accuser is . . . complicated. (And long.)
This story of a crypto-sucker’s suicide is monumentally messed up in every direction (Come for the live-streaming of Russian roulette! Stay for the folks making meme coins of his corpse for rug-pull scams!). Also, I need a ruling from Jesse Sheidlower (2013, 2018, 2021) as to whether this constitutes a first usage of a variant of The F Word (speaking of, go get the new edition!) in the WSJ.
Current/Recent Reading
Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory - Janet Malcolm
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age - Vauhini Vara
Hold Still: A Memoir With Photographs - Sally Mann
Insecurity, for an artist, can ultimately be a gift, albeit an excruciating one.
The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil (tr. Wilkins/Pike)
“Our ordinary state is an averaging out of all the crimes of which we are capable.”
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
Man, I am shot. It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve done any real exercise — those 2 treadmill runs last weekend in KC don’t count — and I’ve been so sick with this head cold I even skipped a couple days of my morning 15-min. stretch/exercise routine. Blech. (I did the routine yesterday afternoon, and also this morning, trying to get my body back on track.)
My crappy physical state tends to lock me into my body and keep my meditation sessions from going free, so that’s sucked, too. I’ve had little moments here and there where I start to go under myself, but the pressure in my head, the sinus-noise of my breathing, the coughing as this cold travels down to my lungs, the chaos of This Whole Situation — they all constrain me. I hope I can get body & mind in (some semblance of) order.
As crappy as I’ve felt all week, I still look okay and I can even make brown cardigan and a dark gray turtleneck work together.
Of course, this is merest vanity, a trick of the light. During Tuesday’s meditation, I thought about all these selfies and portraits in relation to the desire to be desired, a notion that came up in my first conversation with Celia Paul. I didn’t go anywhere with that line of thinking, just let it flicker across my consciousness, but I do feel more vain than usual posting that pic, so yay?
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Wednesday with a new episode, an Instax throwback, & maybe some art, and on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness (I hope), & maybe a little profundity or something.
My heart is crammed in my cranium, and it still knows how to pound,