Technical Difficulties
A new podcast with Peter Trachtenberg, day-job issues that will affect all of you, some nice views, and the cage is a chair. It all makes sense in my head.
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Podcastery
This week, I posted Episode 632 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. the return of Peter Trachtenberg as we celebrate THE TWILIGHT OF BOHEMIA: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York (Black Sparrow Press), his new book that explores the 50+ years of history for Westbeth Artists Housing in the far West Village, the role of the arts in New York City, and the ways we build & sustain community. We get into his long-term history with Westbeth, how this book’s was born from an essay about the suicide of his friend and Westbeth resident Gay Milius, how Westbeth managed to survive a series of financial crises over the decades before finding a sustainable model, and how architect Richard Meier repurposed the Bell Labs complex into affordable artists’ housing in the 1960s. We talk about Westbeth’s requirement that residents be professional artists and what that came to mean over the years, what it’s like to raise families in Westbeth, and how the community handled generational change. We also discuss how Westbeth reflects New York back on itself, how Vin Diesel’s vandalism as a kid growing up in Westbeth led to his acting career, how I stumbled across Westbeth in 2017 during — what else? — a podcast, how we build artistic communities when we don’t have geographic proximity, whether there’s a secret radioactive room left over from the Bell Labs years (!), and more. Give it a listen! And go read THE TWILIGHT OF BOHEMIA!
Last week I posted Episode 631, feat. David Shields‘ return to the show for a conversation about his new documentary, HOW WE GOT HERE, and the companion book, HOW WE GOT HERE: Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of Allan Bloom times Žižek squared = Bannon (Sublation Media). We get into how the world moved from the death of God to the death of essence to the death of truth, and how deconstruction, once the province of left-wing academia, was weaponized by right-wing authoritarians for political aims. We talk about how much blame he bears for all this with his 2010 book Reality Hunger, his affinity for Werner Herzog’s notion of the ecstatic truth in documentary films, what he learned from interviewing nonfiction writers about the nature of truth, and how he feels about going to his first WWE event. We also discuss nonlinear warfare and the endless deconstruction of reality, how writing can “build a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness” (per DFW), his fixation on hamartia (the tragic flaw), Walter Benjamin’s notion of pursuing the truth even if we’ll never reach it, bringing the public, social and personal worlds together in his writing, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read HOW WE GOT HERE and A Christian Existentialist and a Psychoanalytic Atheist Walk Into a Trump Rally!
Recent episodes: Meeting Across the River • Elon Green • Vanda Krefft • Seth Lorinczi • Martin Mittelmeier • Jonathan Ames • Witold Rybczynski
Technical Difficulties
I’d love to write more, but there’s a LOT going on at my day job, after yesterday’s mass layoffs at FDA. (This is going to be BAD.) I was on my way to a trade show in NYC when the news and rumors started coming out, so I was juggling meeting with clients & prospectives, schmoozing with folks, and getting video-interviewed by a marketing firm inside of their CybertruKKK (!), while trying to figure out who was still at FDA, who’d been fired, and what the ramifications may be.
I’m still parsing the FDA stuff and have to write up a piece for my member companies about it all, without succumbing to fog-of-war rumormongering.
Here’s the view from my hotel room this morning. (The trade show was a disappointment; if I hadn’t already paid for the hotel room, I’d have just come home last night.)
Anyway, that’s what’s going on. I don’t have a guest for next Tuesday either, so you might have to go find an episode in my archives to satisfy your need to hear me gab with someone.
Here I was on the ferry back to NJ yesterday, portrait-mode making wind-swept strands of my hair look like the sun is reaching out for me.
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Instaxery
Here’s a new Instax I shot this week at my newly configured writing desk.
Artistry
Didn’t draw anything, but I think I’m going to start another daily sketch-journal, maybe work with nicer pens & brushes.
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, and an Instax.
If I had my time again / I would do it all the same / And not change a single thing / Even when I was to blame,