Dr. Lisa Gives a Sh*t

Lana Siebel is a comedy mentor to me. She hosted the first open mic I ever went to and we just bonded. I think it's the abusive East European family background we both have endured. And just so you know—we still love our parents! They did the best they could and for Lana's family that includes bringing her to America as a child—a huge accomplishment!

I personally respect Lana in particular because of the combo of hard work and talent keeps paying off. She doesn't hesitate to be open about what it takes. As this is her fifth time on Dr. Lisa, the total of her episodes at this point are a lesson in how to how to keep going and the raw honesty, Lana shares about the tenacity that it takes. At this point, the reward of working with her teenage son and husband is growth for her whole family, and a great example of what motherhood can be,

Lana's Website ⁠HERE⁠

Follow Lana's Insatgram ⁠ HERE⁠

Lana on TikTok ⁠HERE⁠

⁠Previous Dr. Lisa Episodes:⁠

DLG2525 Lana Siebel is real about the hard work behind her career as a successful headlining, touring comedian.

⁠DLG344 This is a radical episode as comedian Lana Siebel does psychodrama with Dr. Lisa as her mother—it's CRA-ZY⁠

⁠DLG277 Lana Siebel is a rare find in the comedy world: talented, hilarious, smart and KIND.⁠⁠

⁠⁠DLG323 A funny/serious session with comedy mentor Lana Siebel.⁠

James and I had a very deep therapy session about James relationship with his mother and his relationships with women in general. It was highly personal and too revealing to post — so if you didn't hear it live, you missed it — but enjoy this video of James as Artist-in-Residence of Lockheed Martin .

Here's James show on Radio Free Brooklyn: James & Ibhan Radio Show:
Hosted by James Azzaretti & Ibhan Kulkarni LIVE every Sunday at 11:00am

James & Ibhan are Brooklyn Comedians who's lived and performed in the area for close to a decade. These golden voiced gods will regal you with wit, charm, smarm, and calm. Music, special guests, and special bits. Only here, only now.

Insta:

James Azzaretti: @snazzaretti

Ibhan Kulkarni: @doublelagaan

@jamesandibhan
@chickenbigcomedy

This is the Thursday before the Sunday of Amanda Mehl's fashion show. Here's the headline about it from the Bushwick Daily: Carnaval NYC brings a 70-model fashion procession to Maria Hernandez Park on October 18.

Read the story it's linked to for details.

At the same time Amanda is 8 months pregnant! She's amazing in so many ways. Her drive and creativity seem boundless. We talk about the ideas behind her clothing, how she fosters community, her love of dancing, her relationship with her fashion designer mother, Beverly Mehl and the lifestyle change she's embarking on as a first-time mother.

Amanda was seven when she moved from Argentina, so there's some Latin Culture learning I was able to receive as well. From my pov, Amanda is a great example of what someone's capable when they don't let fear get in their own way.

BIO: Amanda Mehl is an interdisciplinary artist and founder of experimental fashion label Amehl. She works in various mediums including installation, sculpture, video, photography, digital art, performance, and fashion. Mehl is Buenos Aires born and NYC based. She has participated in several group and solo exhibitions and shown videos in Times-Square billboards. Founded in 2016, Amehl has produced 10 collections alongside a wealth of creative content and innovative shows verging on performance. Notable shows included a runway inside a school bus, a hardware store, a flower shop, a Diamond District arcade, and a parade on the streets. Amehl was praised for its ingenuity by The Cut, NY Post, CBS, Elle, and featured in Vogue Italia, Brazil, Mexico and Latin America. Mehl’s vision is a brand that is more than just clothes and profit. It has meaning and soul. Amehl acts as a collaborative creative community that bridges art, films and culture. ​

On this episode of Dr. Lisa Gives a Shit, Dr. Lisa sits down with artist Elizabeth Saloka, aka Betty Rubble, whose career proves that you don’t need an MFA, an art-world game plan, or even a fucking website to become a successful artist. Sometimes you just need a rock.

Soloka’s art practice began about ten years ago when she found a rock that looked exactly like a Nokia cellphone. She painted it, realized rocks were basically free blank canvases, and became obsessed. Now she meticulously transforms ordinary stones into remarkably convincing sculptures of familiar consumer products, from saltine crackers to packaged snacks and household objects. The work is funny, beautiful, and surprisingly profound, exploring how advertising, food, brand loyalty, and childhood memories shape our identities. Growing up in Minnesota, where money was tight enough that she fashioned Nike swooshes out of electrical tape, Soloka developed an appreciation for resourcefulness that continues to inform her work.

An adopted Korean American raised by a white family, Soloka also reflects on identity, belonging, therapy, and the complicated business of intimacy. Her mother, a fiercely independent single parent who rented out spare bedrooms to make ends meet, inadvertently gave her daughter a lifelong fascination with strangers and their peculiarities. Those childhood experiences may also explain why Soloka loves the clear boundaries of transactions: selling a rock is easier than figuring out whether you’ve overstayed your welcome at someone’s dinner party.

After years of making art while working office jobs, Soloka was laid off during the pandemic and eventually moved to the Hudson Valley. Now, after a decade of persistence, her work is finally attracting serious attention, including a major exhibition at Gotham. But success brings its own problems: suddenly, the artist who once made work without worrying whether anyone cared has to contend with expectations, self-consciousness, and the terrifying possibility of actually making a living doing what she loves.

Plus, Dr. Lisa discusses her Doghouse Gallery exhibition featuring Saloka’s work. Rocks, crackers, capitalism, and emotional baggage: turns out there’s a lot going on inside a stone.

Dr. Lisa talks to Kathleen Vance and Daniel Aycock, the married couple behind Front Room Gallery , about nearly three decades of surviving, adapting to, and participating in the New York art world. Daniel founded the gallery in Williamsburg in 1999. Kathleen joined a few years later, bringing her own artistic practice and a more strategic approach to the business. They talk about the gallery’s beginnings , the wild Williamsburg gallery scene, art-world parties, sponsorships, the move to the Lower East Side, and the relentless force of NYC real estate.

Then they get into talking how the art business actually works. Kathleen and Daniel talk about artists’ careers, why art sales and social-media popularity aren't necessarily measures of artistic value, and how online marketplaces can turn something deeply personal into a blind transaction. They also talk about artists moving upstate, and their decision to relocate Front Room to the Hudson Valley, where they’re finding a new version of the artist community that originally drew them to Williamsburg. More about Front Room Gallery HERE and on Instagram: @frontroomnyc

Kathleen Vance is also an accomplished environmental installation artist. Please view here work HERE. and on her instagram: kathleenvanceart

Brooklyn Raii: l Robert-l-Bowen-with-Tom-Huhn/

Robert L. Bowen Vimeo

Dr. Lisa talks to artist, photographer, educator, and digital-art pioneer Robert L. Bowen about his book The Human Shutter: Photographs, Stereoscopic Depth, and Moving Images. Bowen traces the book back to a strange Marcel Duchamp stereoscopic photograph he encountered in college that completely hooked him. From there, he spent decades investigating stereoscopic photography, early moving images, and the science of human perception. He also digs into the largely forgotten history of early photographers and scientists who were developing photography, 3D images, and motion pictures simultaneously—not as a neat technological evolution, but as interconnected experiments in how humans see.

The conversation turns to AI, and what it means for a world where images no longer need to document something real. Bowen discusses how AI breaks photography's connection to a moment in time, while Dr. Lisa worries about technology destroying our attention spans, making us dumber, and possibly contributing to our own extinction. They wrap up by considering the importance of human creativity and why, in a world full of artificial everything, there's still something irreplaceable about making art by hand, reading a real book, and experiencing things that actually exist.

Insta ⁠@erikbergstromrad⁠

TikTok ⁠@erikbergstrom⁠

Erik Bergstrom is a comedian, artist, and cartoonist with a very dark sense of humor and, according to Dr. Lisa’s completely unlicensed professional opinion, possibly some complicated shit going on underneath all that pleasantness. Eric talks about growing up in Minnesota, his parents’ divorce, his sister’s death, surviving stage-four cancer, and how the pandemic affected him in a completely different way. Cancer still allowed him to get onstage and turn the experience into jokes; the pandemic took away the audience, the social connection, and eventually the desire to write and perform.

He talks about his love of old-school comedians, writing hundreds of jokes a day, dating, therapy, and the strange experience of living alone during lockdown. He also discusses his visual art—paintings featuring horses, pigeons, hot dogs, mushrooms, and other creatures—and his new obsession with writing mattress jokes.

@erikbergstromrad

@erikbergstrom

Lu Checkowsky has risen to the the top level of creative people from her career spanning legendary ad agency, Weiden + Kennedy, to executive creative director jobs at Comedy Central, MTV and Facebook. Make no mistake, Lu earns this all through extraordinary talent and hard work.

Lu’s worked behind the scene, managing the creative advertising of shows with just about every celebrity you can imagine — all while struggling with a serious eating disorder — at one point weighing almost 300 lbs. while excelling under crazy pressure. Subsequently, she gets seriously ill, forcing her to leave her career. The book she wrote about her experience and recovery Don't Buy What I'm Selling: On Breaking Up with Advertising and Finally Learning to Love My Whole, Fat Self, has just been published by Brown + Little. Currently she's and working on another book — this time, a novel.

Three months ago, (June 2026), and we find out about how Lu feels having her life in the form of a book out in public We also talk about her mother who passed away when Lu was 22, but infused Lu with some empowering ideas as well as some good lessons she would need in the future.

Personally am a huge fan of this book. Lu managed to take a stressful story so enjoyable to read, that my husband got mad because I literally wouldn’t put it down. 

Buy the Book / Instagram / Website / Tik Tok

Bio: Lu Chekowsky [she/they] is a writer and Emmy Award–winning creative director. In Lu’s most recent job in the advertising industry, she was lead creative director for video at Facebook. Before that, Lu was the SVP of brand creative at Comedy Central, where they developed campaigns for shows like The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, South Park, Nathan for You, and Broad City. Previously, Lu was VP, creative director at MTV, where they made ads for Teen Wolf, Jersey Shore, The Real World, and the Video Music Awards. Before working in entertainment, Lu was a creative director and copywriter at Wieden+Kennedy, where she over- saw work for brands such as Jordan, Noxzema, Delta Airlines, and The National MS Society. Lu is a 2023 New York State Council on the Arts / New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in nonfiction literature, and their writing has been supported by MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, Craigardan, and Tin House. Her essays and poetry have been published in The Rumpus, Pigeon Pages, and Autofocus, and her pieces about the cultural impacts of advertising have appeared in Ad Age and Muse by Clios. Lu lives in the Hudson Valley. 

Quite honestly, this session with Brooklyn based comedian, Joe Palana, is one of the most emotionally powerful that I have done. Joe grew up with a younger cousin that has both Down syndrome and autism. Joe formed a deep bond with him that as it turns out, has directed his life in ways Joe couldn’t have expected as a child. The way Joe articulates his relationship with his cousin really helped me understand that specific relationship, but more broadly, helped me imagine what it might be like to be living with Autism and/or Down Syndrome. It was a lot more uplifting than you might imagine.

Joe's Monday 6pm open mic at Pine Box Rock Shop

Loren Munk is an amazing painter and art world chronicler. His art and videos are an amalgamation of art history. The well-known painter, Katherine Bradford said he deserves a MacArthur "Genius" Award and I wholeheartedly agree. As James Kalm, he’s had over 2 million views of his web series covering art, galleries, artists, openings and even some street musicians. There is so much to learn about this former Mormon from Utah. Loren was talented as a child but art didn’t come alive for him until he was stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army during the 70’s. Loren was a highly active part of the art world in the 80’s. He never quit, but the art world went through it’s paces and he and his wife, Kate, focused on bring up two boys. In the meantime Loren, reentered the art world with a vengeance. This is genuine inside scoop, folks. There’s even a discussion of, “What’s more important for an art career,-the work or the relationships?” Find out more about Loren and see his work here: http://www.lorenmunk.com/ Enjoy his art world videos here: https://www.youtube.com/user/jameskalm and here https://www.youtube.com/user/jameskalmroughcut