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Artist Oscar René Cornejo talks about burning his home down as a child and other early artistic endeavors. Neil talks about the erotics of Amazon checkout. ABOUT THE GUEST Oscar René Cornejo earned an MFA from Yale School of Art, a BFA from the Cooper Union, and was a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship for research in El Salvador. In 2004, he cofounded the Latin American Community Art Project (LA CAPacidad), where for seven years he directed summer artist residencies to promote intercultural awareness through community art education. He is a founding member of Junte, an artist project based in Adjuntas, a town in the mountains of southern Puerto Rico. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including To look at the sea is to become what one is, at Radiator Gallery, Queens International 2018: Volumes, at The Queens Museum, White Flag, at Princeton University; and Parliament of Owls, Diverseworks, Houston, TX. Cornejo has completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where he is a Fresco Instructor, and at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2016. He currently teaches at the Cooper Union. 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 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 & Jesse Kimotho Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION NEIL: I'm so happy to have with me on SHE'S A TALKER, Oscar Rene Cornejo. I fear my pronunciation probably leaves something to be desired. OSCAR: No worries. It sounds good. You can't, unless you want to start rolling your R's that's another thing, but it sounds pretty good to me. NEIL: Okay. Well, I can roll an R but I think this is like a little metaphor for how I can go through life. It's like, I'd rather not try and then not be accountable for having tried, in terms of the rolling the R's, is a metaphor for me. OSCAR: They say that some, even though I do roll my R's, sometimes my parents tell me I exaggerate the rolling. NEIL: What do you think that's about? OSCAR: I don't know what it is. Maybe it's growing up and teaching others to roll the R. And so you backlog some self consciousness in the back of your head and you [inaudible 00:01:02] . And I have no idea, but it's like, "Oh, okay. That's a little extra, but it's fine." It's like, "All right. Well, I'm always caught in between where I'm like, English is my second language here. And then I visit El Salvador and then Spanish becomes my second language over there. I'm stuck in between. NEIL: Do you have anything that you would consider your first language? OSCAR: Yeah, I guess just loving to manipulate material. Just fucking with shit since did one. I remember, I don't know what age I was, but they called me ranch burner back in El Salvador. Because I was always tinkering with things. And that led me to burn a ranch down when I was a small child. NEIL: What is a ranch? A whole house? OSCAR: There was apparently an original ranch burner in El Salvador and my parents came over. I don't know if it was four or five, and I burned an apartment down and only left everyone with the clothes on their back. NEIL: Wow! OSCAR: They got wind of it in El Salvador. And apparently when I burned it down, was the week that the original ranch burner passed away. And so I inherited, Quemar Rancho, is what they called me, ranch burner. NEIL: Wow! And where was the apartment that you burned down? OSCAR: Houston, Texas. So it was an apartment unit, I think on the second floor they say. NEIL: And how did you burn it down? You were how old? OSCAR: I don't know, like four or five. I do have a memory of lighting something on fire, like in a closet, on a shiny surface. It was like the dry clean plastic that you cover your clothes. And I think the plastic caught on fire and it turned into liquid flame or something. And it got out of hand. NEIL: Do you put this on your art resume by the way? OSCAR: No, but it used to be my Instagram profile, ranch burner, in Spanish. Like what the hell is Quemar Rancho? Well, it's Quemar Rancho. NEIL: I was expecting it was your first enchantment with materiality, the translucence of the dry cleaning bag. And do you need it to do an intervention on it by way of a match? OSCAR: Yeah. Well, before that there was a draw towards the flame and I would set up stuff and then burn them down. I guess maybe I was a little pyromaniac or something, but I was always fiddling with things. NEIL: How do you succinctly describe to someone who doesn't know you, what it is you do? We're talking like you have an elevator ride with them. OSCAR: That's a tough one. I guess I reflect on the histories that I come from, that at a young age I had no idea that I was a part of. And so to make visible the history of my immediate family and community through objects. I feel that growing up my community and my family had a lot of PTSD due to the civil war conflict. They absorbed and internalized a lot of violence and were displaced. And so where do those energies go? And so I tried to, in my head, reconcile those energies in the types of objects that I'm making. So the objects become, not necessarily a MacGuffin. You have a conversation around the object, but it's something where you start project and amplify things that are considered whispers or not important. NEIL: Mm-hmm (affirmative). OSCAR: And so it becomes a speaking piece, something to a screen in order to project light onto and see what shadows have been cast onto that screen. NEIL: How would your parents describe what it is you do to their friends? OSCAR: They probably have no... They're like, "Oh, he's obsessed in working with kids in villages somewhere, like missionary work. Not that it's futile, you should just get a real job. NEIL: Can you just for our listeners, describe the work that you're talking about, that they would say he's a missionary. OSCAR: I spent a lot of time, when I was still an undergrad, I felt the closing door or light of losing that community and facilities. And while I was, I think towards the end of sophomore year into my junior year of undergrad, I started inviting my peers and friends of my peers down South to central America, offered them free studio space, but they had to teach two to three days out of the week what they knew, to the community.                 And so it was this mutual cultural exchange. It was a way to put our theories into practice and to anchor some of our ideas around some of the injustices that we thought were going on in the world. And then hitting hard reality too, with trying to do idealistic things in like a place with no running water, for instance. How do you run silkscreen workshops for that? How do we basically apply these idealistic notions of what a community should be developed when there's these conditions present? Like people living on dirt floors, or no running water, but they still should be exposed to culture and not just be treated as a workforce thing. NEIL: Right. OSCAR: So, yeah, that's the missionary work. NEIL: And your parents don't like that you do this work or what did they say about it? OSCAR: I know you mean well, but these people don't care kind of thing. You need to take care of yourself because it's always about the struggle and surviving and taking care of the family. NEIL: In their eyes? OSCAR: Yeah. It's like, "Why do you care so much about these other people?" Kind of thing. And I was like, "Well, that's exactly why. Because you're saying that." Because someone said that about you when you were displaced immigrant fleeing death squads in El Salvador and you're being dismissed as criminals or cockroaches in a new society. And so that's exactly why I do it. They don't really know, I guess the resume and what that means. They don't know Cooper union or... I don't want to start listing names. But Things that- NEIL: I'll do that for you at the beginning. OSCAR: No. Other people, their parents would be very proud. And for me they're like, "What about being a mechanic?" Which I don't mind, I would love to fix cars and pay bills that way. But they just want something that they feel that it's stable and it's not fleeting. I guess they'll stop thinking that way if I get a tenure track position or something. NEIL: There we go. Which if there's any justice, which there isn't, but if there were, and maybe there will be, you would have. It sounds like your parents' histories really informed the themes in your work. Have they informed the making of the objects, the form of the objects? OSCAR: I don't know something about just seeing my mom always cooking and my dad always working in constr... Working with their hands, their hands were always manipulating things. And I think I just tried to copy them. And then as I got old enough, I ended up joining them. I would clean houses with my mom and, or being assistant to my dad on construction sites.                 I didn't see it immediately. It became very evident much later, I would say even into my early thirties, when I started to be very over scrutinizing every decision I was making, formal decisions. Then I started seeing fabrics, draped fabrics. Thinking about changing beds and pillows or washing clothes with my mom. And then carpentry. Even before carpentry, I got into woodcuts a lot, carving wood to make images. And so that was the close connection that I had with my dad, as far using knives and tools and manipulating wood that eventually evolved into carpentry and fresco, which I feel share a relationship to the construction site. Working with plaster and covering surfaces. That instead of using cement, you're using plaster, but there's an [inaudible 00:10:42] affinity, it's physics and it's chemistry that made it easy for me to be drawn to those mediums as an artist, just the visual vernacular of the construction site starts to come into the way I make decisions in the studio. Yeah. NEIL: If your parents were looking at, let's say an object that you made, how would they describe that? OSCAR: I had an installation at the Queens Museum, and I think that my mom would respond to the fabrics, the naturally dyed cotton fabrics. She would associate them to altars. And my dad would respond to the material, the construction, like joints and carpentry and chalk lines and tar. He would respond to the materiality, that it's being used in a fine art setting, but they could easily translate to finishing the surface of a countertop or cutting a surface of a wall or cutting into and repairing a broken window by putting new two by four studs. And so he would respond to it in a construction material manner. NEIL: Deep. Did any of them- OSCAR: What's a right angle. What's not. It's like, "Oh, that's not meeting," and stuff. NEIL: Do you get critiques about your construction skills? OSCAR: Oh yeah. It's still a little wonky. NEIL: That's what they would say. I would say your work is often strategically wonky. Wouldn't you say? OSCAR: Yeah. NEIL: If I looked at, not consistently, but if I see something that isn't a good right angle, I feel deep trust that that is significant. Is there ever any joking about like, let's set this on fire, burn down the ranch. OSCAR: Personally, I do have a fantasy of a body of work in a certain timeframe to, instead of keep paying storage on it. Like burn all that series of work and take the ash as pigment and a one monochrome painting. So I've consolidated and condensed the entire body work into one piece. NEIL: And would you call it... How do you say ranch burner? OSCAR: Quemar Rancho's dream or requiem or something. I don't know. I don't know why. NEIL: Not to put titles on your piece, but I could talk about this forever, but shall we, Oscar, move to some cards? OSCAR: Yeah, sure. NEIL: First card is, the uncanniness of bird songs. Not just the sound of them, which can sound so electronic, but how the sound feels disconnected from the movement of the bird's mouth. OSCAR: I have a bird myself. I have a parrot. NEIL: What's your parrot's name? OSCAR: Her name is Pepper. She's charcoal, peppery and has a bright red tail like a red pepper, but she's also sassy and spicy in character. So it's just like pepper all over. Uncanniness of bird songs. Yeah, it's like really weird to see this static beak. You usually associate lips and you think that lips and the tongue is super important to articulate the sounds, but their beak is just static and just opening and shutting and they have a stiff tongue.                 And so that for me is so super weird. And especially with birds that speak, right? NEIL: Right. OSCAR: How did you just say that word without lips and very stiff tongue? NEIL: Did you ever say that on a date? OSCAR: No, I think they bring it up. Especially parrot tongues, it looks like the head of a penis. NEIL: Oh, really. OSCAR: Yeah. It's weird. NEIL: Wow! Sexy. OSCAR: Yeah. They're like, ugh. But I think that the way it operates is that they have amazing muscles in their trachea. And so their tubes or their trachea is so sophisticated that it does all that movement for them to create the sound of words. Or even like a chainsaw. NEIL: Yeah. OSCAR: It's so weird. NEIL: You've named something though, so the uncanniness is about the lack of lips, primarily, and also the stiff tongue, which I haven't observed before. But now that you say it, yeah, I could see that. OSCAR: I think that's what it is. It's kind of opening and shutting that beak and these sophisticated sounds are coming out of it. Like it's being let loose. It's being let loose, like prerecorded. NEIL: Right. OSCAR: But it's this kind of internal thing that you're not seeing that's moving in such a complicated way, that's manipulating those sound waves that create such a beautiful thing. NEIL: I love it. It just sounds other worldly. It's like an electronic, like I said, it has an electronic quality to it or something. OSCAR: My parrot sounds like a robot or a voicemail. Usually there's parrots that sound phonetically like their masters or their owners or whatever you want to call it, their companions. But mine sounds like a terminator. It's like, "Hello Oscar," like, "Stop it, stop it." And they pick up electrical sounds easily. Those are first things that she picks up, are those electrical sounds. And I'm sure there's other things on higher frequencies that we're not even catching or lower frequencies. That I think it is, I'm wondering how it sounds to a bird. It sounds electronic to us because of the type of limited hearing that we have, but to birds could sound completely, I don't know, godly. NEIL: Right. OSCAR: They also have ultraviolet, like I know parents have ultraviolet vision. They can see [inaudible 00:17:29]. Right? And so certain flowers look like landing strips and we just see a little flower. NEIL: Oh God. I spend so much time thinking about what things look like to animals, especially my cat. But just generally it's the eternal question. Because cats, we have our cat, Beverly. He just spends so much time looking, and so you spend a lot of time looking at them looking, and I'm just wondering like, what is it?                 And you know that they have different color spectrum, as you say, are available, or in the case of predator animals, I know they have different contrast or reduce variation in color as a way to target and focus their attention. So I have a pet that prays on your pet. How do you feel about that? OSCAR: I'm always flirting... We were talking about, when things go out there, there's always that danger. Like God, my roommates, I'm enlightened at the moment, and my roommates have two cats at this farm house and one's definitely a killer. And it's not like you want to prevent anyone from doing what they got to do, but it's like you just got to monitor and be very mindful. I haven't been put in a position of a [inaudible 00:18:49] cat where you see those memes where the parrot is hanging out with the cat or it's on top off the cat and they're cuddling.                 But there's always that sense of danger in the back of my head, because just a cat scratch can kill a bird, just the bacteria in its claws. NEIL: Yeah. I never trust those videos of the... It's such a trope in internet culture in generally this idea of animals getting along. And I think I read something about that in certain interpretations of the story of the garden of Eden. It's that before the fall there was no predation. But whenever I see, yeah, the cat snugging with the parrot, it's like, "Well, what comes next? OSCAR: Yeah. Well, and that's where the hard wired nature of the animal. Like you can socialize a parrot but it's still wild. It's not domesticated like dogs. NEIL: Right. OSCAR: And they even say that with cats, if the cat's were just- NEIL: Exactly. OSCAR: 20 pounds larger, they will totally kill their owners. NEIL: I hear that. Totally. OSCAR: They're like,"You didn't feed me, you got to feed me. All right?" NEIL: Yeah. Next card. How everything changes at the cart stage of an online transaction, like in sex when you say, "I'm close." OSCAR: I'm more curious what you have to say about it. NEIL: All right. So this is something I had the other day, I'm just going to talk about Amazon here, speaking of birds. So when you're browsing on Amazon, it's a guilty thing I try not to do. But when you're browsing on Amazon, there's a kind of casualness. It's like, this is what other people say. You might also like this, click here. And then you put it in your cart, and okay, it's in your cart and maybe you go look at something else you need. But then I find, once you hit the cart button, everything gets really fucking intense. It's like, "Do you want to buy it in one click? "Where do you want to send it?" And it just reminds me of like, okay, that's like in sex when you go from just fooling around to, okay- OSCAR: That moment. NEIL: I'm going to cum, or I'm getting close. Do you feel that at all? OSCAR: Yeah. I think, I think when you started sharing your relationship to that, it is being like overly self aware and not being... When you're shopping, you're kind of swept off your feet. You're shopping, you're only gazing, you're going through, you're not over analyzing. And if you are over analyzing, it's like really to legitimize your buy, it's like [crosstalk 00:21:39] in the reviews and all that. But it's still part of the courting, the dancing of that final [inaudible 00:21:45], that final click. And I feel like going to the cart is somehow replaying all the foreplay and then putting up the possibility of criticizing, "Oh, I did that wrong." Or I took too long. It's like, "Do I really need to buy all this stuff?" It's like you're overthinking it. And it's funny you say that because you're kind of reliving your life right before you cum.                 And for some people, they say when you cum, [inaudible 00:22:20], that it's a little death. NEIL: Oh right. OSCAR: Yeah. NEIL: [inaudible 00:22:26]. OSCAR: Yeah. And so I think that the cart or the clicking is like seeing a little portrait of how you lived your life in that shopping cycle. And it's like, "Do you really need that?" When it just started with a casual, like, Oh, and then being captivated and seduced by the product, and you courting it and being coy and all that stuff. And then you come to the finish line, it's like, "Oh, was it all worth it?" NEIL: Oh my God. I love it. I love it. It's also a little different for me. I think this also speaks to, well, it speaks to a lot of things, but I find, like in sex, not to go too deep into it. There can be a certain part of me that's like, "Okay, this is so intense. Let's just get this over with.' So with shopping, it can also be like, "Let's just resolve this. Let's just-" OSCAR: Well, they even add more stuff. It's like, "Is this a one time buy? Is this a 12 week recurring buy?" Or, "We do have warranty on it. And if you want one its used at 30 days.", How committed are you into this [crosstalk 00:23:37] or this relationship? NEIL: Right. It's almost like that, you know that meatloaf song, I'm going to date myself like paradise by the dashboard light. OSCAR: Oh my God, no. NEIL: Do you know that song? OSCAR: I've probably heard it. I just don't know it by title. NEIL: Basically, it's a fucked up song, but the gist of it is he wants to have sex. His partner wants to get him to commit to marrying him. So there's this negotiation of, he's saying, "Let me sleep on it. I'll give you an answer in the morning." And she's like, "I got to know right now." And so, I think that thing that happens with the ad-ons is like, because you're trying to cum, you're trying to make the purchase, and then they're like, "Yeah, do you want to subscribe? Can we do the subscribe and save?" Because they have you, they have your right before you're about to cum. OSCAR: Yeah. And sometimes, yeah, there's a shame of, of course it's like I definitely don't shy away at it from commitment, but the kind of sincerity, and maybe impulse is a strong word, but the initial seduction or eye contact, the initial moment of connecting and organically following through to then start to rationalize it. Like, what is this? Is this going to be a longterm thing? When you could just be in the present and enjoying the moment. NEIL: But that also is a big part of like, I don't know how this extends to the Amazon shopping cart stage. But so much, I think of the work in a relationship where you're already fully committed is finding your way back to those initial seductions where the pleasure is not knowing, you know what I mean? OSCAR: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative). NEIL: It's just in your cart. OSCAR: I think that's romance right there. NEIL: Neoliberalism and feeling virtuous about donating your plasma. I noticed I had COVID as, maybe, no. And as soon as that happened, this is early in the pandemic. It was like, "Well, you get to be a hero by donating your plasma." And there was a type of language around it. I often feel that way about like, to me, blood drives or the height of neoliberalism or walk-a-thons. It's like, "Why should this be something that gets this outsized validation?" Why isn't it just something you do? I don't know. Does that resonate with you at all? OSCAR: Yeah. It's the same... Valentine's day or you show your love by how much you spend. Yeah. It cheapens things. It should be natural for you to want to share your plasma because you're trying to find a cure. But it doesn't mean it should be tied to heroic deeds. But it's not in your nature to supposedly share and care about the other, you're just trying to survive. But if you do this, you're a hero. I start to think in relationship to neoliberalism is that you start to create human emotions and human qualities into commodities. NEIL: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right. Yeah. Yeah. OSCAR: Because what they're asking is literally a piece of you and your time, which is precious. And so, what do you have for me, for me to take time out of my day? What do I get out of it? NEIL: Right. And so what they're offering you is the feeling of being a hero rather than whatever you wouldn't- OSCAR: Whatever sells at the moment. If it's xenophobia or nationalism, or whatever's kind of hot at the moment. They'll use something that's very natural and a part of us, but it's been pushed down. It's not practical to evoke those feelings of like, yeah, I am contributing. I guess it's social capital to think that you're courageous and a hero, short of like giving you money.                 And so they're selling you an idea for you to donate instead of it being like, I don't want to say social duty, but your care and love for your people. NEIL: All right. Some closing questions. What is a bad X you take over a good Y? OSCAR: Huh. A bad X over a good Y. I'm going to expose myself here. I'll take a really funny, dumb cartoon over a good independent or supposedly good independent film. Because I'm maybe spending a little bit too much time watching the good independent films for preparing for a syllabus or something, I'll probably take a break and breather for a good bad episode of cartoon network, which I haven't done in a year or something. But now you've reminded me. NEIL: When the specific limitations of quarantine, however you want to describe this current situation around COVID is over, what are you looking forward to? OSCAR: When it's over? NEIL: Yeah. OSCAR: When I drive through New York, I do get nostalgic feeling when people are basically not social distancing, they're not wearing masks. They're like, "Oh my God, you're killing me." But I'm like, "Oh man, I miss just going out to a bar and just meeting with a bunch of friends with the coffee in the background of-" NEIL: Right. OSCAR: Connecting on a social level without the invisible boogeyman. NEIL: Right. So you're having, when I look at those scenes and I think when a lot of people look at them, they're like, "How fucking irresponsible." Like a lot of judgment, a lot of anger. You're secretly not feeling that or not so secretly not feeling that. OSCAR: I do feel that, but then there's this aftertaste of like, "Oh man, it would be nice to just go it all, just to be social in that manner. NEIL: Yeah. OSCAR: But then going back to what is COVID or this situation presenting is presenting a situation to be more nuanced of the different types of way that we are social. For instance, in this, like what we're doing now, it's like another element of... And so that has been amped up like FaceTiming and connecting with people more frequently, that usually it would be related to a zip code if you're not in the city. Like, I probably won't see you. So there is a silver lining of gaining that type of social connection, even though it's mediated through technology that is being lost by just the kind of serendipity of going to a bar and then bumping into someone. Which in New York is I think the great thing about New York. Is walking through space and just meeting someone by chance and like, "Oh, what are you doing here?" And then you grab a coffee or a beer or something. NEIL: Let's say I never liked that kind of stuff. OSCAR: No. NEIL: I'm so relieved not to have that opportunity, but that's me. But on that note, Oscar Rene Cornejo, I try to do a little [crosstalk 00:31:52]. But what about if you were trying to do that thing you were talking about before of like doing a more flamboyant rolling of the R. OSCAR: It'd be like, Oscar Rene Cornejo. Yeah. So there's a little like, okay, that R was a little bit millisecond too long. NEIL: Right. Oh, I love you. I love talking to you. Thank you for making the time. I do feel like this is a model for me of like, God, a hopeful model for how one can exist in the world without physical presence. Thank you for being on SHE'S A TALKER.      

Writer Ray Lipstein describes the melodrama of looking in the mirror.  ABOUT THE GUEST RL (Ray) Lipstein is a writer, editor, and performer who works for The New Yorker, and previously for the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater and the United Nations. They were elected president of Girls Nation in 2009, on a universal healthcare platform, before leaving mock politics and organized gender. 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 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 & Jesse Kimotho Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION NEIL: I am so happy to have Ray Lipstein with me on a remote version of She's a Talker. Ray, thank you so much for being with me. RAY: It is my pleasure. More than my pleasure. NEIL: What is more than your pleasure? RAY: My pain, I guess. I don't know. NEIL: So you're saying it is painful to be here. RAY: Yeah. It fits somewhere between ennui and delight. It goes backwards. NEIL: There falls the shadow. So we're talking remotely, how are you doing? Whatever that means. We're talking, I think, probably two months into quarantine in New York. RAY: I am holding up well. I rearranged my bedroom last night in a feat of extreme 2:00 AM industriousness and it feels great. It's converted the bed psychologically into a day bed, the new orientation. So I'm excited for my roommate to get back who is with their partner. They're not a Gog. I'm going to send them away again. It's very big news. NEIL: Okay. When someone asks you what you do, how do you succinctly describe to them what it is? RAY: I work at The New Yorker. No further questions. NEIL: Okay. I'll accept that. RAY: No, no, no, don't accept it. Don't accept it. If someone asks me, what do I do, well, first of all, I would say, "Do you mean for a living? What do you mean? And why are you asking?" Those are all first line questions. And if push comes to shove, I say I'm a copy editor at The New Yorker. NEIL: All right. So first card is most photography is melodramatic. By definition, photography is melodramatic because it's the moment, right? It's always the moment. RAY: To preserve a moment is melodramatic. NEIL: Well, I don't know if to preserve it, to present it, to say, okay, here's this flux of life and I am going to take this one moment. Fuck preserving it. And I'm going to offer it. I'm offering you this one moment. Okay. That's the theoretical problem with it, but then I think pragmatically, photographs often look melodramatic just by virtue of something being stopped in the middle of something. So let's say you're looking at a picture from a photo album where your mother is looking into the camera and your father is looking off to the side and you're in the baby carriage holding a rattle. That is melodrama, because all that shit by virtue of being extracted from the flux of time is being given this outsized importance. RAY: It definitely seems like a bit arrogant or presumptuous. I mean, that seems like part of it, right? What you're saying that, to free. Yeah. And to present any moment, any given moment in time, it's something worthy of, as you say, isolating it out of that flux. I associate melodrama with overwrought emotionalism. NEIL: Which I think this has paradoxically by its restraint. RAY: Huh? Yeah. I mean, if you're going to say that, I mean, I have to say that all art is melodramatic then. I would say that card is melodramatic. NEIL: Oh, all the cards are melodramatic because it's by virtue of saying, look at this thought I had. It's worth your attention. It's sort of like at the beginning of the podcast, can I tell you this may be a slightly different thing, I've in the past introduced it by saying, "Hi, I'm Neil Goldberg, and this is She's A Talker. That to me seems like the height of presumption or melodrama or something, like who the fuck cares if you're Neil Goldberg and who cares if the podcast is called She's A Talker? RAY: Well, once you said that it's melodramatic in its restraint, I kind of start to feel like everything, including life, is melodramatic because then both the things that are literally melodramatic and the things that are restrained are melodramatic. And I absolutely feel that way. We're constantly looking to melodrama. NEIL: Everything. Everything is melodramatic basically. RAY: And you would only start it with most photography. How quickly were you realized? Yeah. I mean, I think for practical reasons I can offer a defense of you giving your name and the name of the podcast at the beginning, but I definitely see why it seems crazily hubristic and presumptuous and absurd, but it also feels crazily hubristic and presumptuous and absurd to look at myself in the mirror in the morning and try on multiple outfits and then go out the door thinking about how I look. I mean, it's presumptuous to have an identity. That's why you just got to strive for ego death. Everything short of ego death is melodrama. NEIL: Next card. Does the immune system ever get tired of all the conflict? RAY: This one made me giggle. I love to personify the immune system. NEIL: When you kind of personify it, does it have features? RAY: My immune system would be extremely neurotic. It would be anxious and avoidant and inefficient, over-reactive. Oh, all these sorts of things that you also might characterize me with. It would be true of him, my immune system. NEIL: Okay. Your immune system is gendered male. RAY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. Uses he pronouns for now, I guess. NEIL: You say that your immune system is avoidant. What does it avoid? RAY: I mean, I think of my immune system's avoidant in terms of hay fever. When allergies come, it just absolutely drops. The ball runs the opposite direction. It doesn't even put up or maybe that's wrong. Maybe it's an over, I forget exactly what is it. NEIL: If you have allergies, that means you have an overactive immune system, I believe. RAY: Yeah. I think we're going to have to scratch all this for my pride, but I mean, it may not be avoidant in a literal sense, but it's avoidant emotionally and it knows that and I know it. Just because you're tackling, you could be avoiding a real conflict by throwing yourself at the conflict in an inefficient way. There's all sorts of ways you can avoid. NEIL: Oh my God, that's the story somehow of my art career, but not about conflict, but about opportunities. NEIL: Once one has decided that the Zoom meeting is over the rush to end the call. I'm talking about pressing the button that actually ends the call, so as not to be in that zone between when the meeting is over and the call has been disconnected. RAY: Yeah. I'm so glad you named this. I relate to it strongly. And I embarrassed myself at work Slack bemoaning it happening to me with my therapist. Every time we Zoom, she beats me out of there. So I'm working on it. Because it feels, and that doesn't just feel like embarrassment. That feels like abandonment. I mean, it's therapy. Every time. NEIL: You don't want to be abandoned. RAY: You don't want to be abandoned. NEIL: That's it right? It's about abandonment. RAY: You don't want to be the schmuck alone in the room. Yeah. It feels like rejection, I suppose. But the Zoom, you have to click it and then it'll say, "Are you sure you want to leave the meeting?" So there's that second. That's where I always get held up. Everyone leaves while I'm waiting to confirm that I want to leave, but on FaceTime, they don't ask you anything. And I was talking to a good friend of mine yesterday or two days ago, and I wanted to beat her out of that call so that I didn't feel abandoned. And I tried to compensate for the popup and there was no popup. And instead I hung up on her in mid sentence and that's kind of like, that's the price you pay to make sure you're not the last one left. NEIL: That really reminds me. I was deep into magic as a kid in high school. No. Well, yes, in high school, but all the way in elementary school. And I remember I once did a magic show for the elementary school. Maybe I was in junior high and I came back to the elementary school to do a magic show. And the teacher was introducing me, but I had the feeling like, wait, she's actually not going to introduce me. She was doing kind of a roundabout introduction that I think was maybe speaking to magic broadly, and I had this profound fear that she's just going to forget to introduce me. So I just came out in the middle of her introduction and started doing my show. Let's sit with that, right? RAY: There's a lot there. NEIL: I think I do, and I suspect you do too, if someone is, well, an introduction is often praising and of course I desperately want to be praised, but I don't want to be seen needing the praise, so I try to preempt it. So if someone is saying something nice about my art, which of course I want to hear, but I'll often cut them off. This connects to a card actually that I have here, which is when people praise me, it makes me wonder what narcissistic thing they detect in me that is pulling for them to praise me. Whenever someone's praising me, I think, oh wait, they can tell I'm asking for the praise or my whole personality is structured around needing praise. RAY: Mm-hmm (affirmative). What makes you think that they can tell? NEIL: Because I feel like one is always 100% transparent. That I deeply believe. People can always tell, don't you think? RAY: I don't know. I don't know. I was in a dialectical behavioral therapy group for a bit and they have these versions of Zen koans, but they're kind of very banal phrases instead. And there's one that's like, never in the history of the universe has anyone ever read another person's mind. But I took issue with that one because I mean, it really just eliminates the idea of magic from the schema. I don't want to believe it, but also it does give me some comfort because then no one, you know. I remind myself that constantly that no one can read my mind and it helps. It might help you receive compliments, because you do. We really want them. NEIL: Okay. There's the magic version of reading minds, but reading a mind is also just picking up on cues that manifest themselves. I feel like I'm a terrible liar. I just know if I'm lying to someone, unless they're just really tuned out, they can tell it. So that's not them reading my mind that they know what I'm saying is a lie. They can read it on my face. Likewise, if I'm feeling greedy for a compliment, I just think that manifests itself. RAY: Maybe you have very expressive body language. NEIL: This card says, how animals hide their pain, but what about a hypochondriacal animal? RAY: Do you have an animal that is hypochondriacal? NEIL: No, I had known lots of people and people are animals, but no, the closest I could come up with are those birds that as a strategy to protect their nests, they fly away from the nest and pretend they have a broken wing to attract the predator to them and then they fly away. Is that hypochondria or is that, well, it's a strategy and maybe hypochondria is a strategy. And it draws attention, which hypochondria does. RAY: That's interesting. NEIL: That's the closest I can get to a hypochondriacal animal. RAY: There is a dog in this 19 whatever vet book about an English veterinarian who lives in the countryside. NEIL: All Creatures Great and Small? RAY: All Creatures Great and Small. NEIL: Oh my God. That was, I think, the first book I ever read. RAY: No shit. Yeah. Really? NEIL: Oh, I was obsessed with it. James Harriot. James Harriot, right? RAY: Yeah. Totally. So right. James Harriot goes, he's this country doctor and he has to earn the respect of his eccentric boss and join the practice. He's seeing a Pekingese, I think, who is owned, I forget what the Pekingese's name is. I'm trying to find the, oh, I opened to it. Amazing. Ms. Pumphrey. Oh, yeah. Tricky, the Pekingese and Tricky needs, I don't know whether it's Tricky who is the hypochondriac or Mrs. Pumphrey, but he needs to squeeze Tricky's anal glands every so often. NEIL: Oh, I remember this vaguely. RAY: Tricky gets uncomfortable. Yeah. Iconic. I mean, definitely an iconic one. And then the story is really about how Mrs. Pumphrey anthropomorphizes Tricky and how James Harriot has to make sure to thank Tricky and not Mrs. Pumphrey for the cigars and the sherry or whatever he gets at Christmas because the gift is from the dog, but the dog, he doesn't really even seem to need the anal glands being squeezed. So actually I think it's still the owner who's hypochondriacal unfortunately at the end of this whole story. NEIL: You're right. It's like Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy. God, lots of memories from that book. And I worked summers in high school at veterinarian's offices, because I wanted to be a veterinarian for a long time. An animal lover. RAY: Was it because of the books? NEIL: I think the books were because of that. I was just obsessed with animals from an early age, but one thing that will turn you off to being a veterinarian is working for veterinarians. I think for me, it was just seeing a lot of animals suffering. I just couldn't deal with it. But I saw a lot of anal glands being expressed. Did you say express? RAY: I didn't. NEIL: Because that's what it's called. You express the anal glands. RAY: I love that more than anything I've heard all day. That is. Tell me if this is true, because if so, it's tragic. Must anal glands always be expressed by another or can they express themselves? NEIL: I don't have the answer to that question. I got to believe that they can be expressed themselves, unless that was some real clever form of domestication that happened. It's like maybe that's why dogs domesticated themselves, to get their anal glands expressed. RAY: They lost the ability to express. Yeah. Well, let's just hope they don't take up photography. NEIL: People who go through a stage where they don't smile for photos should just skip that phase. I went through that phase, I should say. RAY: Let them just skip it. Let them skip it. They don't need it. NEIL: And there are some people who are stuck in that phase. But you're right. You don't need it, but is there any photograph that's better by virtue of the fact that the person's not smiling? RAY: Loads, millions, all of the ones. I think so. It introduces this kind of amazing mystery to all the photos before the convention of smiling in photographs. There's a photograph in my parents' basement of a great aunt of ours. And there're just all these incredibly pale looking Latvian girls in dark robes and they all look, they're so serious, but you know that they're school girls and someone's got gum in someone's hair and eight of them have crushes on each other. What's happening? And you can't tell. There's this sort of unaccountable distance that the imagination has to bridge between what these faces might look like if their personalities could have come through if they'd had more choice, I suppose, in how to form their expressions. RAY: I guess what I advocate for is choice ultimately. There shouldn't be a mandate to smile. If you think you have a crappy smile and it makes your face look funny, as I kind of feel about my face, then you shouldn't have to smile. You choose the expression most appropriate in the moment. NEIL: I like that. RAY: And that's the only way to really keep it from being a melodramatic photograph, I think. NEIL: I think smiling in a photograph is a way to acknowledge the melodrama. How's that? I think not smiling supports the melodrama. RAY: Yeah. Smiling fights it. I agree, because then it's a farce if you're smiling. NEIL: You're acknowledging. You're acknowledging it. RAY: Yeah. I'll just say if you take away the coy avoidant pout from me for a photograph, you'd be depriving me of one of my few remaining crutches, so I hope you come around. NEIL: I do know that pout. I know that pout. I like it. I love it. I also love your smile though, because I feel like your smile is a hard one smile. RAY: Interesting. It's about a great battle. That does recall, yeah, I was going to say something earlier when you were talking on the card, the card on people praising you because it makes you wonder what narcissistic thing you did they detect. I mean, please don't include this. But there was in high school, they called this face I made the a hundred face, which was when I got back an a hundred on a quiz or a test and it would be this evil, a rapid flicker between a smile and a frown and a frown that was exaggeratedly. It's a horrific, horrific bastardization of what a facial expression should be. Just a constantly moving war to prevent a smirk, a smirk for getting at a hundred on a quiz or a test, or just to hide the joy or to hide whatever the self satisfaction. And whenever it came, I was so conscious of what my face looked like to others, that they gave it a name. NEIL: The hundred face, but can we just completely put a button on this by saying, you say there's no such thing as mind reading, you were trying to kind of jam the signal of people's ability to read your mind as expressed by your facial expression. This speaks to the truth that people can read your mind, or at least you fear people read your mind. I have to include this. You prefaced by saying not include it. I just feel like I would violate, even though this isn't journalism, I would violate journalistic ethics to include that. RAY: Oh my God. Only if your credibility as a journalist is on the line. If those are the stakes, then I will see. NEIL: Oh my God. RAY: And maybe my friend, Lizzie, will hear her famous phrase. NEIL: Oh, I love Lizzie for naming that. You know what the hundred phase reminds me of by the way, although I think it's actually totally different, but it's this thing I do where I'm saying something and I'm about to use a fancy word. And by the way, I'm using that word not to show off, I think, but because it feels like the right word, but I don't want to be seen as trying to show off. So there's this little stumble or pause or something I do before I say the word that actually I think it then draws attention to the word or to me. I don't know. Do you have that situation? RAY: Yeah, I have that situation really bad. I don't know if I do the pause, but no matter what, the way I handle the self consciousness makes it more conspicuous. I think I just make a really shameful hand in the cookie jar kind of face and dark glances to see if anyone's noticed that I've used an unacceptable word. And I mean, I was made fun of this my whole life for using big words, I guess, was the common accusation. And like, "Why do you have to talk like that?" All sorts. And they're absolutely right. There was no reason to talk like that. I mean, it's just I was getting vocab words in my lunchbox every day from my mom from a book and there's only so much you can do with that much input and had to use it, use it or lose it. NEIL: Because your mom is a librarian, right? RAY: My mom, she works at the library. She is a library circulation. She's a clerk. NEIL: And she would slip a word into your lunchbox every day? RAY: She would casually slip a word of the day every day of the week. And then on Fridays, a vocab quiz, or maybe it was the end of the month after and I do 30 of them, I'd get quiz. NEIL: Wow. Now, would she ever slip in a vocabulary word, but forget your actual lunch? RAY: I think probably the words were what kept her remembering to make lunch. NEIL: Maybe your mom should be on She's A Talker since it's so centered around these index cards. RAY: Yeah. Well, in fairness, they were cards printed with the names of Lindt chocolates in different combinations, like milk chocolate shell with a hazelnut filling and a coconut shavings on top and numbered and then the backside was blank, and they were being reused from when my dad was a market researcher and Lindt Chocolate was his client at one point. And for our whole lives, our note cards were these focus group discarded Lindt Chocolate cards. NEIL: That's so beautiful. I hope you're saving that for whatever, for your novel, for your one person show. RAY: I think I was saving it for this. And this is where this memory will finally be discharged. NEIL: I love it a discharged memory, especially remotely. A remote discharged memory. RAY: I knew you wouldn't let me get away with saying discharge. NEIL: When this is all over, by this I mean our current who the fuck knows what over means, but what is it you're looking forward to? RAY: What am I looking forward to? One thing I miss is getting on the subway and moving through all the cars of the train in case my one true love is somewhere on the train, but not in the car that I got into and going from car to car to see if someone is there who I will meet, and none of that is possible now. NEIL: I love it. I'm sending you a huge virtual hug out to Bed Stuy from the Lower East Side. Thank you so much for being on She's A Talker. RAY: Neil, thank you so much for having me. It's been a total delight. NEIL: She's A Talker with Neil Goldberg. She's a talker with fabulous guests. She's a talker, it's better than it sounds. Yeah.  

Actor Kathleen Turner talks about not bringing characters home. Neil wonders if he himself created COVID. ABOUT THE GUEST Among Kathleen Turner’s numerous accolades are Golden Globes for Romancing The Stone and Prizzi’s Honor, an Academy Award nomination for Peggy Sue Got Married, Tony Award nominations for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. Most recently she guest starred on The Kominsky Method, Mom and Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings. Her film credits include The Man With Two Brains, Jewel Of The Nile, The Accidental Tourist, The Virgin Suicides, among many others. On Broadway, she has starred in High, The Graduate and Indiscretions. Also a best-selling author, she wrote the books Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts On My Life, Love, and Leading Roles and Kathleen Turner On Acting. 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 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 & Jesse Kimotho Social Media: Lourdes Rohan Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION NEIL: Kathleen Turner, thank you so much for being on SHE'S A TALKER. KATHLEEN: I think this is going to be a pleasure. NEIL: Oh. Let's check in at the end and see. What's something that you find yourself thinking about today, May 16th? KATHLEEN: Oh my. I'll tell you, being able to tolerate this isolation. Because I live alone. I have a wonderful cat, thank you very much, but this really means that I ... I don't have a spouse or a kid or something with me. And I've had a women's poker group for about ... some of them have played together for over 30 years. NEIL: Wow. KATHLEEN: And we get together at least once a month and play poker and eat and have a silly time. And so, we are Zooming together every Sunday evening, but they almost ... well all of them have spouses or people that they are isolating with, but it's hard. It's really hard right now. NEIL: I can totally imagine. Are you finding outside comfort in having your cat there? KATHLEEN: Yes, I do. He's this beautiful black. A little black cat. He can seemingly pretty much sense when I need him. NEIL: This podcast, the mascot of this podcast, is my black cat, Beverly. What's your cat's name and what color are his eyes? KATHLEEN: His name is Simon and his eyes are mostly yellow, sometimes into green. But when I went to get another rescue, I'd had one that died, I've been told that black cats are hard to get adopted out of superstition, or I have found out, being difficult to see in the middle of the night, especially if you have a dark rug. NEIL: Yes. Yeah. Often, if I wake up in the middle of the night, I will mistake certain things for the cat. Let's say I've left my backpack on the floor, and the tender way I touch my backpack makes me kind of think about the backpack differently. If only I touched everything as tenderly as the things I thought are my cat. I know you were born here, but you seem like such a quintessential New Yorker to me. Do you feel that way? KATHLEEN: Oh yeah. I do. I always knew I was coming to New York. I never thought of settling in Los Angeles. And even the time I've spent there working, which is the only reason I go, I'm not comfortable. I'm just not comfortable there at all. Never have been. Never lived there, never invested, which people tell me makes a difference. But no, all I ever wanted was New York, which I consider to be as close to the rest of the world as possible. NEIL: Can you identify what it is about Los Angeles that made you know it wasn't for you? KATHLEEN: Oh, heavens. There's no communication, there's no commune, there's no colony. People get to know each other's cars better than they do the people. They go, "Oh yeah, you're the black BMW 550," or something. You go, "Well, yeah." And it's so isolating. It's so lonely. I don't know how people survive. NEIL: The experience you're describing I connect to in my own way powerfully. My work has always been about New York, and I question everything about my life, but I never question New York, even now. KATHLEEN: Right. NEIL: But this is the first time in my whole time in New York where I'm finding it unpleasant to be on the street. And how are- KATHLEEN: It's hard. NEIL: Yeah. KATHLEEN: It's hard to go out and not being able to see people's faces. NEIL: Yeah. KATHLEEN: I miss that because I love looking at people's faces and seeing how they use them, and it might give me ideas for a character or something. So now this seeing just part of people, and then the shock of seeing somebody with no precautions, without a mask, without anything. NEIL: Yeah. I know. It does bring up a whole level of, for me, among other things, a type of not crankiness, but a like, "What the hell are you doing?" KATHLEEN: Yeah. NEIL: In New York, I can often feel pre-COVID, sort of, I appreciate generally how New York relative to other cities, there's a kind of sense of your body and space. That's something I noticed in LA, for instance, going into a supermarket. The way people occupied space there suggested that they didn't fully take in, "Hey, you know what? We're all sharing this space, so we have to be attuned to the fact that- KATHLEEN: Oh, I agree with that. Yeah, no, I like the unspoken treaties we have. NEIL: Thinking about what you're saying about the masks and not being able to read people's faces, it makes me realize how much I use ... One of my cards is I love mouthing, "Sorry." KATHLEEN: Yeah. Mouthing, "I'm sorry." Yes, I know it. The way somebody moves, holds their lips, you can immediately get a grasp of that person's personality. Does their mouth turn down at the corners in rest, or does it turn up? When they're not thinking about it, when they're not doing anything, what are the signs that their personality is left on their face? I like that stuff. NEIL: First of all, when you're wearing a mask and you want to kind of communicate, I don't know, acknowledgement to someone, do you find you're kind of making a lot of extra use from the nose up or something? KATHLEEN: Well, yeah. I think you kind of see when someone's smiling just from the eyes. I don't know. Yeah, it turns into a kind of sign language, but you use your body for that too. It's its own challenge, but I do miss seeing people's faces. NEIL: Let's just launch right into some of these cards. First card is, "I could see when I get toward the end of my life thinking, 'I'm done with this particular personality, I've worn it out.'" KATHLEEN: It seems to me that I've already had several lives. And I expect that this is the beginning of another. I kind of accept that easily, actually. I like change and having to adapt, it's not frightening to me. NEIL: Where do you think that comes from? KATHLEEN: I think I'm a pretty down to earth person, pretty practical, and some of my experiences fighting rheumatoid arthritis for years and other injuries have just made me more accepting. NEIL: It also seemed like your childhood involved a lot of the need to adapt. KATHLEEN: Oh yeah. A lot of change. NEIL: Yeah. KATHLEEN: Yeah. Yeah. I was the only one of the siblings born in the States, but then we moved to Canada by the time I was three months, and then from there, to Cuba. From Cuba, we had a year or so in Washington, and then Caracas, Venezuela for five years. And then we transferred from Venezuela to London, which was a marvelous thing because it was my high school years, and that's where I was so sure. I became so sure that this was the career I wanted. Many, many actors have had a kind of transitory background, either in the service, or with their parents being high-level executives, or in the military. And I think it kind of makes for good actors, I guess. NEIL: Could you break that down? What about that, do you think? KATHLEEN: Well, I can remember vividly when I went from Venezuela to London thinking, "Well, I can be anybody now. I can be anybody I want to be because nobody there knows me, nobody has any history with me. So how I present myself when I start school or something is completely up to me." And I thought that was rather exhilarating. NEIL: That's interesting. You also in your book talk a lot about the role of empathy in acting. KATHLEEN: Yeah. NEIL: I wonder if having to move around a lot develops empathy. KATHLEEN: Well, I'll tell you one thing it does is it takes away some of your sense of control. These things are out of your control, and that's kind of how I've approached the dealing with the rheumatoid arthritis and other things. I don't control this. Now, if you give up the idea that you control everything around about your life, then you are open to thinking about others and their choices and their needs because you're kind of advocated here. NEIL: So as long as we're talking about thinking about others and empathy, I'd love to talk about this card, which simply says, "Empathy poisoning." And that comes from a place in me where I found myself often as a kid overw

Writer Monique Truong describes her love of showering when it's raining outside. Neil realizes he is bad in a crisis. ABOUT THE GUEST Monique Truong is the Vietnamese American author of the bestselling, award-winning novels, The Book of Salt, Bitter in the Mouth, and The Sweetest Fruits. She’s also a former refugee, essayist, avid eater, lyricist/librettist, and intellectual property attorney (more or less in this order). 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 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, Western Bridge, and the David Shaw and Beth Kobliner Family 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 & Jesse Kimotho Social Media: Lourdes Rohan Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION NEIL: I'm so happy, Monique Truong, to have you on SHE'S A TALKER. Thank you for joining. You mentioned that you were teaching up until now. I actually don't know where you teach. MONIQUE: Oh, well, it was the first time that I was teaching at Columbia at the school of the arts? Yes. School of arts. I don't know if there's an article. NEIL: It doesn't matter. It feels very important. MONIQUE: Yes. NEIL: Which would you prefer it to be? MONIQUE: The. NEIL: Yes. Exactly. MONIQUE: That sounds even more important. NEIL: Yeah. Yeah. MONIQUE: Yeah. I was teaching a fiction workshop. I had taught undergraduate fiction writing classes before, but never to graduate students and so that was interesting. NEIL: Interesting can contain so much. MONIQUE: Yeah. NEIL: Would you care to unpack interesting for us? MONIQUE: Well, okay. Let's begin here. I had heard from my friends who are women of color, who teach at the graduate level, that respect and authority was often an issue. Specifically, the lack thereof. Their suggestions to me was that really, even though the others professors would say to the students, "Please, call me Neil," that for me, it probably won't work out very well if I did that. I know you teach Neil and so you can imagine it's a small workshop. It ended up being nine students. NEIL: Okay. MONIQUE: Yeah. Yeah. It was really great in that way, and so I said, "Look, I'm going to ask you to call me Professor Truong as opposed to Monique. As soon as this workshop is over, we can see each other on the street and please feel free to call me Monique. For the rest of the semester, it's going to be a professor." They were really, I think, frankly horrified. I do think that it's a mistake to actually encourage your graduate school students to call you by your first name, because it assumes a non-hierarchical relationship. MONIQUE: That's actually a disservice to the students because if the lines are blurry and then let's say we, professor, act in some way inappropriately, it's the student, I feel, who will have the most to pay, will be at the disadvantage. NEIL: It reminds me of ... Maybe it's different, but those therapists who talk a lot about themselves or who do a lot of the talking versus those therapists who withhold that and in a way that can feel to some people ungenerous or something. To me, it actually feels like a form of caretaking maybe for the very reasons that you're talking about. It's establishing a type of care relationship. Not that I feel very, very strongly that as a teacher you're not a therapist, but in terms of certain boundaries setting, I do feel like some of the same ground rules apply. NEIL: I mean, the race and gender dynamic of it has got to be so powerful. It's interesting. I do say, "Call me Neil." In fact, one of my cards says when students call me professor, feels like when a kindergartner calls the teacher, mommy." I feel like that's contingent on a certain type of benefit of the doubt that attaches to gender privilege, white privilege and I think it's actually true on the other end. There are certain students that are only comfortable using professor. NEIL: For a while I was not insisting, but you know, feeding back to them like that, "You can call me Neil." Now, I just say once at the beginning of class, "You can call me Neil." If they call me professor from that point on, I don't correct them because that actually feels like a form of that doesn't feel fair to them in a certain way, or that feels like assertion of a type of casualness that may not serve them. A question I like to ask everybody is, if you're meeting a stranger, how do you succinctly describe what it is you do? MONIQUE: Novelist. NEIL: Period. MONIQUE: Yeah. NEIL: I like that. I don't know what the mortality situation is in your life, but are your parents still alive? MONIQUE: My mom is. NEIL: How does she describe what it is you do to let's say her friends? MONIQUE: Oh, I'm not sure. I'm not sure because I don't know if she would begin by saying that I was a lawyer. You know? NEIL: Right. Brace yourself, or just bear in mind. MONIQUE: That I was once respectable and had a way to make a living. I don't ... Yeah. Maybe she would just call me a writer. My mother is retired now, but when she was working, she was a registered nurse and she was an ICU nurse actually. NEIL: Low stress. Low stress job. MONIQUE: Right. The nurses and the doctors who worked with her, some of them were great avid readers of fiction. They would tell her that they've read one of my novels. I think that was always very surprising to her. You know? NEIL: Yeah. MONIQUE: Every time another feedback in that way would come to her, it would solidify the fact that I indeed wrote books. NEIL: That makes total sense. MONIQUE: Right? Yeah. NEIL: Yeah. MONIQUE: Yeah. NEIL: Well, shall we move to some cards? MONIQUE: Oh yes. NEIL: Okay. First card. I occasionally identify with the food in the pressure cooker and feel bad for it. MONIQUE: I would take out pressure cooker and for me, it's the food that ends up on our airline food tray. NEIL: Aha. MONIQUE: I mean, that is the most degraded thing to happen to a carrot. You know? NEIL: Right. MONIQUE: Or a piece of chicken. I mean, what? What? What? NEIL: Yeah. Yeah. MONIQUE: Yeah. NEIL: I might disagree with you on that. I mean, I think absolutely there's all kinds of degradation, but it's like what Andy Warhol said about how a can of Coke is 50 cents for everybody? I just like how everything gets leveled to, "Okay. There's this part of the tray, there's this on the ..." It's like the classic TV dinner thing. I find something reassuring about everything becoming compartmentalized, but you're talking about, if I hear you correctly, are you talking about the preparation or the presentation? MONIQUE: The preparation. Just what it becomes. NEIL: Aha, right. MONIQUE: Because I just can't believe what happens to food after all the processing and after all the horrors that we put it through. NEIL: See, but I think it goes to invisibility, this I think connects to factory farming. For me, when I'm cooking with the pressure cooker, I'm in proximity to it and I'm like, "Oh God, what must it be like in there?" Whereas with the airline food, it's like often hidden. It's often the institutional kitchen that thankfully we don't have to see. I'm spared the indignity and just get that the end result. Actually, I think airline food usually looks better than anything that comes out of a pressure cooker. I think- MONIQUE: Oh, well, okay. Well, this is the thing. I should admit that I have never cooked with a pressure cooker, so all of this is theoretical to me. Clearly I have not experienced the horror of this device. NEIL: Well, I can feel it about the oven too, by the way. MONIQUE: Really? NEIL: Yeah. That could just be my Jewish heritage or something. MONIQUE: Oh my God, Neil. Oh my God. Yes. It might be. NEIL: Yeah. MONIQUE: Yeah. NEIL: You don't identify with the food that is enduring when you cook? I just have to believe you cook just given the way that you talk about food. Am I correct? I mean, if- MONIQUE: Yes. NEIL: Okay. MONIQUE: Yes. NEIL: Because there's such intimacy. When you're cooking, you're not necessarily identifying with like, "Ah, okay. What this is going to have to go through." MONIQUE: Right. No. No. NEIL: That's probably for the better. I think that might be some primal animism that is left in me. I mean, I also feel that way about ... Do you have a dishwasher? MONIQUE: Yes. NEIL: I love the dishwasher and I have approximately a million cards about the dishwasher, but I often think about, "Oh God." Putting the dishes in there and thinking what they're going to go through in there. MONIQUE: Wow. NEIL: Do you ever have that? MONIQUE: No. No. I'm just so grateful for it. NEIL: Me too. I mean, my relationship for the dishwasher is truly when someone says it's a religious experience, I mean it literally. Just like redemption. Transformation. Can you imagine if you could have something metaphorically, that type of transformation on some, let's say, I don't know, psychological or spiritual level that's in any way akin to w

Artist Angela Dufresne makes the case that painting is like cats, fashion is like dogs. Neil proposes that certain worked-out bodies are never naked. ABOUT THE GUEST Angela Dufresne is a painter originally from Connecticut, raised however in the town in Kansas (Olathe-Suburbs) that Dick and Perry stopped in before they killed the Clutters (In Cold Blood), and now based in Brooklyn. She received the first college degree in her lineage. Her work articulates non-paranoid, porous ways of being in a world fraught by fear, power and possession. Through painting, drawing and performative works, she wields heterotopic narratives that are both non hierarchical and perverse. She’s exhibited The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, The National Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, The Cleveland Institute of Art, The Aldrich Museum in Connecticut, the Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz, among others. She is currently Associate Professor of painting at RISD. Awards and honors include National Academy of Arts and Design induction 2018, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, residency at Yaddo, a Purchase Award at The National Academy of Arts and Letters, two fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, The Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California, and a Jerome Foundation Fellowship. 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 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: Fraser McCulloch Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor & Jesse Kimotho Social Media: Lourdes Rohan Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION

Neil discusses the micro-acting exercise of saying “my husband.” Writer Cassie da Costa finds deep truths in customer service language. ABOUT THE GUEST Cassie da Costa is a writer and editor who works for The Daily Beast and the feminist and queer film journal Another Gaze. Her newsletter of stories, Mildly Yours, is irregular and mysterious. 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 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: Fraser McCulloch Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor & Jesse Kimotho Social Media: Lourdes Rohan Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION NEIL GOLDBERG: I'm so happy to have with me on SHE'S A TALKER, Cassie. Hi Cassie. CASSIE DA COSTA: Hi Neil. Thanks for having me. NEIL: Oh, it's my pleasure. It's my pleasure. When you're meeting someone for the first time, how might you succinctly describe to them what it is you do? CASSIE: Succinctly. NEIL: Yeah. CASSIE: I would say I'm a writer and an editor, and I write both criticism and sometimes reportage. I sometimes do more investigative stories. NEIL: I believe both of your parents are around. Correct? CASSIE: Yes. They are. NEIL: So how would, if they were talking to their friends, how might they describe what it is you do? CASSIE: They would say that I'm a writer, and that I write for the Daily Beast, and that I used to work at the New Yorker. Yeah, that I'm a writer and an editor, I guess they would say. My dad's always been saying I'm going to write a book, and I'm like, oh dear. It's been a struggle to get beyond 5,000 words. So, I don't know that. NEIL: Right. What's the book he would have you write, do you think? CASSIE: I think he's thinking about a novel or something narrative, because it goes along with my personality as a child growing up and making up stories and being very much in my own head and in my own world. But it's funny because I didn't go into fiction writing. I thought maybe in college that I would be a poet, and then I kind of ... I'm very scatterbrained, so I just didn't do it. I ended up just doing other things, not for any thought through reason. NEIL: But I feel like you're already, if I may, writing poetry, For me, Mildly Yours, I understand that at least partly as poetic. I don't know, I guess- CASSIE: Yeah, it is. It definitely is. And I don't think that poetry has ever left the work that I do. I got in trouble a lot because the pieces that I wrote were too lyrical, and I've done things- NEIL: In trouble with who? CASSIE: Well, not in trouble in trouble, but just, editors would be like, what is this? Or, even professors in college, I would write a term paper and they'd be like, what the hell are you talking about? NEIL: I love the idea of getting in trouble for poetry. CASSIE: Yeah. That's my orientation towards poetry, that it is a kind of trouble. NEIL: Yeah. CASSIE: In a good way. NEIL: I would love to move on to some cards. Shall we? CASSIE: Ooh, yes. NEIL: Okay. First card, in the song, Proud To Be An American, the lyric, "Where at least I know I'm free," the at least. CASSIE: Hmm. NEIL: To me, that contains so much of the depressed side effects of individualism or an acknowledgement of our unhappiness by saying, "At least I know I'm free." CASSIE: Yeah. It really gets to the core of everything that's happening now around like mask wearing and all of that kind of [crosstalk 00:00:32] where it's like, there's genocide, yet I'm free. And also, it makes you wonder who the speaker of that sentence is, or you can certainly imagine who it is. Yeah. At least I... NEIL: Exactly. At least I... That should be like an instead of E Pluribus Unum. It should be, at least I... Oh my God. But I also wonder what is the, there's something on the other side of at least. It's like, so dah, dah, dah, dah, but at least. CASSIE: Right. NEIL: There's a but there. CASSIE: Yeah. I think they're getting at something very real there, which is like they need to say, well, at least I'm free comes from a very dark place. NEIL: Right. Exactly. Yeah. CASSIE: And it means that what you've done is you've already presumed the kind of defeat- NEIL: Exactly. CASSIE: And you have to overcome it. Yeah. NEIL: Exactly. Oh my God. That's so true. CASSIE: Weirdly baked into exceptionalism is a victim narrative, which is kind of funny in a dark way. But yeah. NEIL: That's so true. That is so true. CASSIE: I'm having a lot of thoughts about this. I really feel this about that whole freedom of speech letter that was in Harper's. NEIL: The Harper's thing. Oh my God. Can you describe for those who don't know it like just in, very quickly what that Harper's letter is, although I'd like to think that the SHE'S A TALKER audience is well acquainted with this kerfuffle. This highbrow kerfuffle. [crosstalk 00:02:17]. CASSIE: [crosstalk 00:02:17] I'm sure deep in this highbrow kerfuffle. A writer, I believe for New York Times magazine named Thomas Chatterton Williams, he wrote an open letter about cancel culture let's say, what he believes to be cancel culture. And a bunch of writers signed it who are amongst a certain set of people, controversial or not liked very much. They would disagree with this obviously. And it really represents, I think this idea that there are dwindling institutions and they represent something to people who have very different ideologies. And some of those people feel like we should all get to be in these institutions as long as the head honchos approve of us and other people who say, "No, I would like to remake these institutions to be tolerant and to be rigorous." CASSIE: And so that's the argument, but it's been framed very differently by the former group as a question of free speech. NEIL: [crosstalk 00:00:03:30]. CASSIE: It's such a silly thing, but it does come from a place of self-victimization, but it's really strange to me where I'm like, wow, these people really feel like they've lost something in all of their like, I don't know, jobs at major publications where they're writing all of their ideas. They really feel maligned, that is very American. NEIL: As you're talking, it reminds me of one time I was filming something and there were a group of us and it was, I think it was raining and we held a cab. This is when one did that, and got in the cab. But it turns out there had been someone who was waiting for the cab that we didn't see and who was like, understandably made a fuss when we started getting into the cab. So I was like, "Oh, sorry, take the cab." And they said, no, they weren't going to take it. And then when we drove away, he gave us the finger. So it's like, that is it. It's like you could... I mean, it's not the same maybe. I don't know. We could deeply deconstruct it. CASSIE: I see the resonances there where it's like, yeah, someone has already decided that unless it happens in their way or the way that they already imagined, then there's no path forward. NEIL: Right. Yeah. CASSIE: And I think when the response to people saying, we live in a world that's undressed in these ways, in which opportunities are hoarded, in which there's a culture of this and it's toxic. And people's response is, "Well, this isn't who I am, and that's not the truth." And it just, it forecloses any meaningful engagement. I don't know. I get that it's frustrating to be criticized by people who you don't really know or who have followings that you don't understand. But anyway, I have nothing else insightful to say about this. NEIL: Next card, more than happy, a term with genuine spiritual potential embedded within the customer service language of late capitalism. More than happy, I'd be more than happy to help you. CASSIE: Yes. NEIL: I remember early in therapy, a million years ago, I mentioned something about being happy and my therapist is like, "That's not what it's about." But I deeply on a deep spiritual level, whatever that means, think this whole happiness thing is such a ruse because so many of the, it feels important things to accomplish as a participant in the world don't have to do with happiness, yet it's lodged itself within that, I do love the language of late capitalism in the service industry. CASSIE: Yeah. I agree. There is actually some beauty in that statement, but it's probably not in its intended meaning. The way that certainly late capitalism positions this language is very telling. And I think that sometimes what happens as a result is that we want to reject all of it outright because that's the context in which we know it, which is fair. But I do feel like there's some power in interpreting it differently and saying, actually, this is how I think about it. NEIL: That's wonderful. Talk about a kind of odd form of reclamation. You're reclaiming something that was never yours. It's not like reclaiming queer. CASSIE: Right. No one called me happy, but... NEIL: So true of me. I bet people have called you happy. CASSIE: I don't know if that's the first thing that comes out of people's mo

Neil discusses the pleasure of medical touch. Designer/entertainer Isaac Mizrahi consoles us that at least Stephen Sondheim isn't the best bridge player. ABOUT THE GUEST Isaac Mizrahi has worked extensively in the entertainment industry as an actor, host, writer, designer, and producer for over 30 years. He is the subject and co-creator of Unzipped, a documentary following the making of his Fall 1994 collection which received an award at the Sundance Film Festival. He hosted his own television talk show The Isaac Mizrahi Show for seven years, has written two books, and has made countless appearances in movies and on television. Mizrahi has directed productions of A Little Night Music and The Magic Flute for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and has also performed cabaret at Café Carlyle, Joe’s Pub, West Bank Café, and City Winery locations across the country. He currently serves as a judge on Project Runway: All-Stars and his memoir, I.M., was published in February 2019. 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 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, Western Bridge, and the David Shaw and Beth Kobliner Family Fund Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Fraser McCulloch Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor & Jesse Kimotho Social Media: Lourdes Rohan Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION NEIL: Isaac Mizrahi, thank you so much for being on She's A Talker. I really appreciate it. ISAAC: So happy to do it. NEIL: I'm curious, today, May 15th, what is something that you find yourself thinking about? ISAAC: May 15th. I think about, of course, I think what everybody else is thinking about at the moment. Like, what the hell is going on? Really! What the hell is going on? It's so scary. Like, I was looking at Instagram, I follow this one dancer, this one beautiful dancer called David Hallberg. I love him, he's an old friend of mine. Anyway, so I was following him and I was looking at pictures of him dancing on stage in a costume with other dancers thinking like, “Excuse me? Will we ever get to go to a theater again?” I know that's really what I'm thinking. A lot about theater and how much I love theater, opera, ballet. So that's what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about David Hallberg in tights. NEIL: That's inspiring. ISAAC: I know. Never will I ever see David Hallberg in tights again. NEIL: May it be soon. May it be soon. ISAAC: I know, may it be soon! Exactly. NEIL: So that's what you're thinking about on May 15th. Do you have kind of like a recurring thought that seems to return to you? ISAAC: You know, I gotta say the recurring thing that I think about, especially in May, is my dog who died on May 12th, 2016, right? Since May 12th, I've been thinking about my first dog called Harry. My screen saver on my phone is still Harry and Dean, who we got, I don't know, six or seven years later. We got a second dog called Dean. And Dean is still with us. And he's aging now. I'd say he's like 14 or 15, and we have a younger dog named kitty. (dogs barking) Oh, there they are on cue! That's funny. All right, Dean, relax. He's a beagle mix so he’s very talkative. NEIL: I love it! Well, it's perfect for the podcast called She's A Talker. ISAAC: I know! She's A Talker! She's A Talker! And it's so funny because kitty, the bitch, is not a talker at all. She rarely opens her mouth. I was going to say that I was thinking about my screensaver and then I was thinking about, Jesus, when he goes, right, I don't know when that's going to happen, five years from now or seven years from now. When he goes, what would my screensaver be? To me, that screensaver is the truth of my life. It's those two dogs together in this house, in Bridgehampton. I have to say, like, I don't have a big fabulous mansion in Bridgehampton. I have a shack that I love! That's my home! And I've been here since the middle of March thinking, “Do I care if I ever see my apartment again?” Which is fabulous, the third-best apartment in the whole city or something, you know? And I keep thinking like, “Do I need to see that place again?” No, I would rather just be here now. But I think a lot about the dog situation! Like, when Dean goes does that mean that my screensaver has to change? Right? Because the truth of my life, the truest moment of my life is being here with Dean and Harry, even though he's still not here. Isn't that weird? His ashes are here. Harry’s ashes are on my shelf, in the den. I know it's a little morbid. Did we expect for She's A Talker to get so morbid today? NEIL: Oh, I'm fully prepared to go there, and also that doesn't feel morbid at all! That feels comforting. And it's interesting, you know, the show is based on these index cards I've been writing down over the years and one of the cards, I can't remember it exactly, is something about the different durations of our pets lives and our own lives. It creates a kind of musical counterpoint in that, you know, my partner is 12 years younger than I am, my husband, and my cat is five years and together we're all operating on these different lifespans. It feels somehow musical to me. ISAAC: Right. You know, I often think, especially, like, I've been writing more and more— I know this sounds insane to you probably. (dog barking) It sounds insane to Dean, but I've been writing a novel. I finished at the Carlyle February 8th or something like that. Then I had like four days off and I felt like, “Okay, what am I going to do?” I feel I’m in postpartum depression, I have to start something. So I started writing this novel that I've been taking notes about and thinking about for 30 years or something. And the more I think about writing, the more I think about what you're saying, which is if you stories going on, if you have simultaneous stories going on, you know the characters affect each other in this way. So the timeline you're talking about, I often think about that. And especially now. Like, you know, my husband and I are not cohabitating through this. My husband is in the city. He preferred to shelter in the city. I couldn't face it. I couldn't do it. NEIL: Yeah. ISAAC: Anytime I talked to him on the phone, I think to myself this thought that you're saying. This timeline thing, this emotional timeline of what's going on in his life. Because he has this whole other 90% of something else that's going on. You know what I mean? Like we think that's going along in parallel lines, but it isn't, and yet it works. My husband and I, we have separate bedrooms and I feel like we need that for a lot of different reasons. And we're comfortable. Like, I always kind of spoke about the fact that I was an insomniac and that's what kind of prescribed the separate bedroom thing. But it's not so much about that as much as, like, really sort of standing for the fact that we have separate lives, you know? I mean that. That's a really, really important part of our partnering. NEIL: Next card is— I'm going to mention this person's name and maybe bleep them out. It's really within the context of adoring their work, but— How the third story in ****’s latest collection is a little bit disappointing, but that feels like a relief from the relentless virtuosity. Do you ever have that feeling about like where something is so masterful, where it falters a little bit it's almost like— ISAAC: And you go like “phew,” yes. Thank goodness they're human. I have, but I can't think of any real examples of it. I will tell you I'm sort of friends with Steve Sondheim, right? Literally, he has never written anything bad. Like you can't find anything bad. But I played Bridge with him a long time ago. We used to play bridge and he wasn't the best bridge player. And that made me feel a little bit better. NEIL: Another card says: The technical differences between a performer being naked versus wearing a bodysuit; How that probably gives rise to a lot of fetishes. ISAAC: What a hilarious question on so many levels. That is a hilarious thing to ask. Dance belts, thongs, sports bras... Talk amongst yourselves, right? That's basically what you're doing. I think that people go to see dance shows not merely because it's an incredible art form or it's beautiful, but also because they're horny and it's like a sexy thing. NEIL: Of course, yeah. ISAAC: It's a really sexy thing to watch people dance. You see like body parts jiggling, you see butts, you see titties, you see, like, baskets on men. The weights of these things. I do. Of course, you can scream, you can laugh at me, but I swear, like, a large percent of what I have been doing all these years is that. You know, when I see a woman with beautiful legs and a tutu, I go like, “what?” You know, your legs just can't look any better than if you're wearing a tutu and pointe shoes. It just doesn't get better. Sometimes I design short short short tunics for boys so that when they fly up you get to see the flesh color dance. I mean, like, I just do because I'm a pervert and

Neil talks about his childhood wish to stop the waves. DJ and academic Mike Dimpfl talks about his research on "toilet feelings." ABOUT THE GUEST Mike Dimpfl is a teacher, academic, costume builder, and DJ. His academic work explores the connection between hygiene, bureaucracy, and institutional racism, particularly in the southern US. Mike’s costumes often focus on the comic and confusing relationship human beings have to their garbage and to the possibility of the divine. When music is his focus, he is especially committed to reckless abandon on the dancefloor. 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 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, Western Bridge, and the David Shaw and Beth Kobliner Family Fund Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Fraser McCulloch Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor & Jesse Kimotho Social Media: Lourdes Rohan Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION NEIL: Mike Dimpfl, welcome to SHE’S A TALKER MIKE: I’m so delighted to be here. NEIL: It’s impossible to imagine you’re as delighted as I am to have you here. Now, can I ask where this recording is finding you? MIKE: Yeah, this recording is finding me, sitting at my dining room table in Durham, North Carolina. It’s a lovely gray, 64 degree day. NEIL: Do you like a gray day? MIKE: I do right now because I have a bit of sort of structural gardening work to complete. And when the summer comes here it becomes so insanely hot that it’s just completely impossible to be outside. We’ve had a really long, cool spring, so the bugs aren’t here yet. NEIL: What is structural gardening work? MIKE: It’s a critique of the, sort of political economy of earlier forms of gardening. We’re remaking our yard and we’ve been doing all of the actual construction work. So not planting plants, but building walls and building fences and moving dirt around and things that. So all the things that are sort of a pain in the ass and give my sort of inner type A control freak a lot of pleasure, but don’t actually produce anything you would say is recognizably a garden. It’s a lot of getting your hands cut by all of the pieces of broken glass that are in the soil around your house. NEIL: Oh, how come there’s broken glass inside the soil around your house? MIKE: It’s just an almost a hundred year old house, and I think that over time things break and people throw bottles into the former dump behind the former garage that’s no longer there, and you find them and I’ve probably taken out an entire garbage can, an actual garbage can of broken glass out of the yard. NEIL: Wow, one shard at a time? MIKE: One shard at a time, yes. I’m going to start an Etsy store with all of the other things I found, like yard cured fork and yard cured wrench, they have a nice patina. NEIL: Oh, I bet, people would pay a pretty penny to give you their new wrench to make it look that. MIKE: To bury, totally, totally. NEIL: It’s like the kimchi of wrenches. MIKE: Exactly, exactly. NEIL: What drove you to leave New York? MIKE: Oh God, I had a terrible day job, crushing, horribly boring development work that I was doing. And I don’t know if you knew, I’d had a bunch of surgeries on my ears. I had a genetic hearing loss condition and they actually messed it up in my right ear, so I’m super deaf in my right ear now. And it meant that I couldn’t DJ as much. And so I kind of lost the love of New York, and I was like, “Maybe I’ll go back to grad school.” And I did, and of course grad school is a little bit returning to the fourth grade playground. But you realize that your bully is secretly closeted and you’d just know that. And then I did my PhD down here at Chapel Hill and was lucky enough to get a job at Duke, and I teach in the writing program there. And I have been kind of unlearning grad school since then, but enjoying life. NEIL: What is unlearning grad school consist of? MIKE: I mean, I’d be curious about what your own experiences of this actually is because you teach in another kind of weird, precious environment. The performance of mastery, I think is one of the most insane and weird things that we encounter. There’s some tension between mastery and a willingness to just be open to what is, I feel they push each other away. And I feel like a willingness to be open to what is, requires a particular kind of thinking and willingness to take things apart in a careful way. Whereas the production of mastery is, do I know these terms? Can I Lord over this seminar space? Can I make some comment that seems complex? And there’s so much value placed on that style of interaction. NEIL: That question of mastery makes for such a great segue to the first card, the connection between teaching art and 19th century medical practices. You tell someone like, “We will bleed you for 30 minutes and then you must go home and apply the poultice.” MIKE: Yeah like, “Wait for the moon to wax, and put these three stones on your back steps.” NEIL: Exactly, but instead it’s, watch this other artist read this text. MIKE: Yeah, I feel like mastery and practice are at odds with each other. NEIL: Yes, yeah. MIKE: Practice is what I’m into, practice, just keep practicing, right? You just have to keep doing. NEIL: Yes, yeah, and if you’re holding onto idea of mastery, you will make one piece of work, maybe. Because making art is about getting to the place of most resolved failure, where the failure becomes clear, and then that is what carries you over into the next piece. Also this idea of professional development, to use that term where, where so many students have the idea of, “Okay, well, if I do this, this, this, and this, I will have an art career versus if you do this, this and this, you will make art, I guess.” MIKE: Well, I mean mastery, it relies on it in some ways, like the way that we’re so addicted to exceptionalism. It’s a weird narrative that despite the fact that all, effectively statistically, all artists are failed artists, right? NEIL: Right, exactly. Exactly, exactly. MIKE: They’re like, “No, it’s going to be me. I’m going to be the next Jeff Koons, but I hate Jeff Koons.” That whole… NEIL: Totally, that is the Vegas thing that keeps graduate programs in business. This card is writing midterm evaluations for art school is like doing a horoscope. MIKE: Oh my God, I love that for a number of reasons, just because I imagined you doing it. Just sitting cross legged with your taro out and the incense going, just watching videos of student work on your phone or something. You’ve got a very rough hewn robe on, you’re like- NEIL: You nailed it. MIKE: … your wicker sandals, whatever it is that gets you in that sort of coastal medieval witchcraft mood. Yeah, it’s funny, as a grader, I tell my students that I’m a harsh critic, but an easy grader. We have to be able to look at our own work with critical kind of generosity and be willing to be wrong. But to be a generous writer is a whole thing that takes your whole life to do. It’s easy to be critical, right? It’s easy to be snarky and sarcastic or funny or quick, right? You can be creative and original, but also quick in a way that I feel is not always helpful, right? Being generous is about taking care, but also I was just thinking about it and if only we could be actually honest. If only you could just be super honest with your students about what they’re doing. MIKE: I mean, would that change what you said to yours? Because I feel like I am honest to a certain extent, but I’m also not, and I don’t mean this in a mean way, but I just want to be like, “This is just a terrible waste of your time, this thing that you’ve written. The way that you’re going here, isn’t going to get anywhere that’s going to be fun for you, interesting for other people, allow you to do the work that you’re going to do.” And I never quite do that. NEIL: That’s where the horoscope comes in though, about I’m honest but there’s always kind of a anomic, is that the word? You add this intentional ambiguity. MIKE: It’s both honest and a little bit of a sidestep- NEIL: Exactly, yeah, yeah. MIKE: You’re like, “There’s something that’s not right here. It’s in this thematic zone of things that aren’t right, consider that zone for yourself.” NEIL: You said something about mortality as it relates to grades and we’re all going to die. MIKE: No, my thing was like… I think the thing that I always want and increasingly want, I always want students to think of themselves in their lives… Think of themselves as living their lives, not as having goals about what it should be. I was at Chapel Hill and now I’m at Duke, they’re both iterations of very fancy campusy bubble experiences. The way that we produce the isolation of education always struck me as a little bit problematic. I used to teach about labor at Duke and I’d be on the first day, my activity was

Neil talks about summer as its own lifespan. His guest, rapper Cakes Da Killa, discusses how to tell a friend their music sucks. ABOUT THE GUEST Cakes Da Killa is a rapper and the talent behind five critically-acclaimed mixtapes. Cakes has an international following that's brought him all around the world. From Europe to Australia, Cakes has been redefining what it means to be a respected lyricist in hip hop. He has been featured in various printed publications globally and in television specials such as VH1’s LHH: Out in Hip Hop and VICE’s Gaycation. His debut album, Hedonism, dropped October 21, 2016. Cakes' most recent single, Don Dada can be streamed on Bandcamp. 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 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, Western Bridge, and the David Shaw and Beth Kobliner Family Fund Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Fraser McCulloch Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor & Jesse Kimotho Social Media: Lourdes Rohan Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION Lourdes_02_SAT_CAKES_03_DG NEIL: Cakes. Thanks so much for being on She's A Talker. I love your work, I love you, and I'm so grateful you're on this. CAKES: Thank you so much for having me. NEIL: Where am I talking remotely to you from? CAKES: Where? Where am I? Where are you? I don't know where you are. NEIL: I thought I had a psychic on the phone. CAKES: She's clairvoyant but not a psychic. NEIL: Okay. Where is she? CAKES: I am in Brooklyn. I'm in Bushwick in my apartment. NEIL: Okay. And I am on the Lower East Side in my art studio. Can I ask for those who are not lucky enough to know your work, and let's say you encounter someone and you need to succinctly describe what it is you do. What do you say? CAKES: Cakes Da Killa is a writer who basically uses music as a medium to express different ideas that come from the Black gay experience. Mainly I produce a lot of club music, upbeat music. My music is rooted in escapism and just having fun and not taking yourself too seriously, but there's still a sense of skill in my music that a lot of people relate to nineties hip hop. So I'm kind of a mash-up of like, a DMX and a delight. If DMX and Lady Miss Kier had a baby. NEIL: Oh, what a beautiful baby that would be, but writing takes primacy in that I'm hearing. CAKES: Right. Because writing was the seed that started it. Initially, I wanted to be a writer as most homosexuals do being a little cherub, watching Sex in the City and fantasizing about a studio apartment in the Lower East Side, you know? Gallivanting in my Manolos and things like that. Then I started drinking. So that kind of floored and I stumbled into, into making music and rapping as a joke. And then the checks started coming in and 10 years later, I'm here doing this interview, so. NEIL: Can I ask you, we're talking on June 5th, broadly, what you're coming into this call thinking about? CAKES: Well, I actually just dropped a single for my new project today, so, I'm actually hitting the ground running. I'm like, let's do this. I just did an interview earlier, I made some salmon, so I'm feeling completely regenerated and I'm ready to go. NEIL: Can you tell me both about the salmon and the single? CAKES: Right. Well, they're both juicy. They both were cooked on stove, stove-top, little bit of olive oil, a lot of love, good seasonings. And you can't get into this salmon because it's gone, but the single could be listened to on Bandcamp, and it's called Don Dada. NEIL: Ah, after the- CAKES: That's like a high ranking gangster, which is basically what I am. NEIL: I haven't heard that expression before. CAKES: Yes. I think it's an Italian expression. It's from the mob, I'm assuming. NEIL: And can I ask, like the timeframe that you were working on it? CAKES: Well, I started recording the EP called Motherland during the first weeks of quarantine, because I was writing a bunch of material and I had just put my sophomore album on hold because of the quarantine. And I was like, Oh, I want to do something quick for the fans and I was also like, we have to hurry up and record this before everyone is no longer on the planet. NEIL: Talk about a deadline. CAKES: Yeah. So it was a very, very, very firm deadline. So I expedited it and yeah. NEIL: So it really it's a work that marks this period of time right now. CAKES: Yeah. The work is definitely talking about a lot of the anxiety that I was dealing with and how I took that anxiety and made fun and enjoyment out of it because I'm definitely known as someone that's like a nightlife fixture in New York and around the world running around gallivanting and running amuck. So to then put that, you know, wild orchid into a basement is not really good for me. So this is basically the effects of that, but that kind of was all before. This pressure cooker we're in now. So, so that kinda, it kinda was a little bit before that, but you know, for me being a Black male living in America, this police brutality and the treatment of Black people in this country and around the world, isn't anything new. And for me, I've always used my work as escapism or as a way to uplift, encourage, and just give people something else to think about. I mean, obviously there are important things in the world that we do have to face, and we do have to like put time and energy into those things, but we can't do that for 24 hours a day. Like sometimes we need downtime to just let our hair down, have a cocktail and, you know, bring it back to the love and the energy because you need both. So for me, with the project, I was a little apprehensive whether or not I wanted to continue with the rollout. And then I realized: Why am I letting these things that happened in the world and things that have been happening to Black people affect my Black voice? It just, to me, it felt counterproductive to not put out positivity in the universe, especially for my community. NEIL: I love it. And is there any part of you, if we're returning to the COVID thing, you know, so you're a wild orchid in a basement, has some part of you found that the wild orchid maybe likes the basement? CAKES: No with the wild orchid found out in the basement, she needed to get a job because her entire European tour got canceled. NEIL: Oh fuck. CAKES: The wild orchid decided she was essential because bills are still due. If anybody was wondering. NEIL: I know in the performance art world, there's all kinds of, I don't know what the word is, that there's consensus developing around how to compensate folks that you had a contract with, who you're not presenting. Does anything comparable live in, in the world in which you perform? CAKES: I don't think court jesters get stimulus packages, no. It's very much sink or swim for a girl like me NEIL: Right. Let's go to the cards. First card is watching people starting to dance, talking about that moment when they go from not dancing to dancing. CAKES: I don't know, I people-watch, so. Do you people-watch? NEIL: Oh my God. It's all my work. CAKES: Oh, you do love to be. Yeah. You do love to be- right, right. I, to be honest, I love to people watch, but I know for me, my transition from standby to motion is not cute at all. It's not pretty, not attractive. NEIL: Is it a pure kind of like kinesthetic thing? Or is it a psychological thing, which it is for me? CAKES: It's an "I don't care" kind of thing. And I dance all the time. Like, you know, I'm constantly in motion, cause music is constantly in my head, I'm constantly talking to myself, singing to myself, rapping to myself. So I think that the weirdness about it is how free it is. NEIL: Aha. Like the fluidity between it. CAKES: Yeah. Like the fluidity between it. And I always, like, I never understand those people that are like, "Oh, I don't dance." And it's like, well, what do you do with your body then? You're immobile? It just doesn't make any sense to me. NEIL: Interesting. Yeah. For a while, I didn't like to run, to go running, and the way I used to really experience it was that moment of going from not running to running. It's like, "Okay, now I am-" I even tried to do a video project about it, like, watching people take their approaches to starting to run. CAKES: I could only run on a treadmill with, like, a bento box in front of me. Like I can't- NEIL: Just out of reach? CAKES: Just out of reach. It's like, just, just right there. I can't run in the park or like run around the block. I don't know. It just doesn't, it doesn't seem satisfying. Like, my running has to be forced. It's either you run or you're going to fall off this machine. NEIL: Right, exactly. CAKES: I think maybe we're just all, we're all just desensitized from all those years of being like: don't run, walk. Maybe that's what it's about. We just hear that person in our head being like, "Ooh, don't run." NEIL: Right. Right! That could really be it! CAKES: Did you see how we just made that make sense? NEIL: I love it. It's like checkmark! Major checkm

Neil talks about air conditioning and sense memory. His guest, literary scholar Sharon Marcus, imagines a daredevil visit to a perfume shop. ABOUT THE GUEST Sharon Marcus is editor in chief of Public Books and the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Council of Learned Societies, she is the author of Apartment Stories (University of California Press, 1999), Between Women (Princeton University Press, 2007), and The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton University Press, 2019). 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 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, Western Bridge, and the David Shaw and Beth Kobliner Family Fund Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Fraser McCulloch Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor & Jesse Kimotho Social Media: Lourdes Rohan Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION NEIL: Okay. So, Sharon, thank you for being on She’s A Talker at this fucking crazy time. SHARON: Thank you for having me, Neil. NEIL: So, Sharon, if you need to succinctly tell a stranger what it is that you do, what do you say? SHARON: I try to avoid volunteering what I do because I’m a professor of literature, and when people hear that 97% of them say, “Are you going to correct my grammar?” NEIL: Oh my God. SHARON: 2% of them say, “Can you recommend something that I should read?” Or, I once sat next to someone in a plane who launched into a, “What would you say the greatest book ever written was? What would you say the five greatest novels ever written were?” After I, like, just looked at him, and I said, “You seem really quite obsessed with lists and rankings. Why do you think that is?” To his credit, he laughed good-naturedly and said, “It’s true. It’s true. I am.” And then 1% get this like deer in the headlights look and say things like “I wasn’t very good at school.” NEIL: What do you say back to that? SHARON: Well, in this particular case, I was on a date and I said, “Yeah, well, you don’t have to be good at school. I do. I’m the one, who’s a professor.” First and last date, as you can probably guess. NEIL: Yes. Can I ask you, what are you thinking about today, March 21st? SHARON: Okay. So I’m just going to be a total fucking pain in the ass and say that the question, “What are you thinking about today?” doesn’t actually resonate with me with how I think or how I get through a day. Like, I don’t wake up and go, “What am I going to think about today?” Or even find myself thinking, “I’m thinking about blah, blah, blah.” Thoughts come in, they go out, I see things, I observe things, but it feels a little more organized maybe than my brain actually is. NEIL: Oo, I love it. So how could that question be reframed to more? SHARON: For me? NEIL: Yeah. SHARON: “What did you do today?” “What did you do today?” NEIL: Nah, nevermind. SHARON: Exactly! And I can tell you it hasn’t been very interesting, so. NEIL: Right, which is different from how it normally is for you, but maybe we’ll get to some of that. Alright. Let’s go to the cards, shall we? SHARON: I’m ready! I’m doing some of the moves I learned in my hip hop class to warm up. NEIL: Great, that’s perfect. First card is: How hugging is meant to express intimacy, but it actually articulates the separation between our bodies. SHARON: So apt! Well, it would be really nice to hug someone right now. So, my first response is it doesn’t sound like it’s really about separation. Hugging would be so nice, but I think, you know, that speaks to something very profound, which is you can only connect by acknowledging your separateness from someone. If you think you’re merged with someone, if you think you’re the same person, if you don’t take them in as a separate different person, you can’t really meet them and bond with them and touch them, even. And that does seem related to what’s going on right now, where we have so much difference in how people are responding to the situation. People who are now being really reckless about their ability to be close to other people physically I think are doing so out of a lack of sense of the existence of other people as separate from them. NEIL: Mhm. SHARON: They’re being very self-absorbed. They think they’re the only ones that matter. And so, you know, I think we’ve all seen the huggers who also are hugging to assert a certain kind of power. Not even just like a power to touch you in a way that might not be fully consensual, but a power to have their interest in feeling intimate with you and feeling connected be dominant. You know, there’s like that etiquette of: Do you go in for the hug, but then wait enough that the person can pull back without it being a big deal? Do you actually say, “Can I hug you?” Or, you know, how do you handle that? And that’s all about recognizing the separateness. So I think implicit in that card is the sense that our separateness is sort of sad and that the hug is not aware of the sadness of our alienation from each other. But I would turn that around and say if we can just remember we’re connected, but we’re separate, this society thing can work. NEIL: So what you’re saying in part is that there is something paradoxical: That those people who go ahead and hug right now, in a way, don’t recognize a type of connection. Is that right? SHARON: They’re just seeing other people as extensions of themselves. But that said, I think I would also say that it’s okay that we’re separate from each other and the hug doesn’t overcome that. We’re hugging because we’re separate from each other and so we want to feel closer. I don’t think that the total merger that maybe is implied by the perfect hug is really that desirable or really that merged. What I’m saying is, to really connect with other people and bond with them you have to respect their separateness from you and your separateness from them. NEIL: Beautiful. Next card: The ambiguity of the word helpless. “I feel helpless” is usually said in reference to, “I can’t help someone.” SHARON: Right. NEIL: And I feel helpless can also mean “No one’s helping me.” SHARON: “And I need help.” NEIL: Mhm. SHARON: “I need help so desperately because I can’t help myself.” I’m just trying to think it, how, if those are really different. I mean, I hate the word helpless because nobody’s really helpless. Everyone can always do something to help someone else. And when someone says, “I feel helpless in this situation,” I think they’re often saying that instead of saying “What can I do to help you?” NEIL: Right. Right. Very true. SHARON: One of the things that’s been interesting and challenging for me about this situation — And I think everybody has their own particular circumstances that you can’t help but bring to a pandemic and quarantine — is that my wife of 20 years died a year and a month ago of cancer. And she was basically dying of cancer for a year and a half before that happened. And she noticed that the people who really wanted to help her would either say, “What can I do to help you?” Or, even more powerfully, would say, “What can I do to help you? I was thinking I could…” and then they would say some very specific things. They wouldn’t insist on doing those specific things, but they would follow up a general offer of help with ideas that they had come up with that they weren’t imposing on her, but it was a demonstration of good faith. And it was also definitely the case that there were people who not only demonstrated their helplessness by being pretty much missing in action but people who would go the extra mile and articulate, “I feel helpless,” “I don’t know what to do,” “I wish there was something I can do for you.” It’s really annoying. I think in this current situation, it’s probably pretty similar. I think people are saying, “Oh, I feel helpless, I don’t know what I can do to help other people.” You know, it’s like a very quick Google search away. It is challenging to figure out how to help other people when you can’t leave the house and when the biggest thing you can do to help people is not leave the house. Because we’re used to thinking of health as taking very concrete action and being very direct and present and, also, we like our help to be acknowledged and, offering help at a distance, it’s harder to get acknowledgment for that. But there’s plenty of things we can all do to help right now, the Internet’s full of them: food banks that we can donate to, artists groups that are being set up to help support people who are being very quickly and harshly put out of work. So, you know, it seems like a disingenuous word to me, “helpless.” NEIL: Mhm. SHARON: Whether applied to the h

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

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...

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”. 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, Sharon Marcus TRANSCRIPTION Coming soon...

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 h

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

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 ver

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

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 a

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. Showe

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 p