We talk with Alexander Melamid, the most famous Soviet-American artist of his generation. He moved to NYC in late 1970s after being an underground artist in Moscow for a decade — part of the creative duo Komar & Melamid.

He was a success in the NY art world overnight and knew Warhol and everyone who is anyone in the art scene back in the day. Since then he’s lost his optimistic naivete about art but has kept his High Priest of the Art Church status and has been trying to destroy the art world from within — denouncing it, calling modern art senile, and saying artists are welfare queens.

He believes it’s not money that corrupted art — it’s the artist who wanted money, and got it. His advice to young artists is to get the hell out of the profession and he suggests creating reeducation camps for them to become plumbers.

Alexander is full of great one liners — “hubris is the definition of our profession,” “trump is the artist in chief”…

Enjoy the show.

—Evgenia

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We talk to our friend Mark Ames about nihilism, cynicism, culture wars, Red Scare, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Russia of the 1990s, and the vibe shifts of America’s political culture — from punk to the podcasts of today.

—Yasha

Want to know more? Read Evgenia’s hit essay “Against Nihilism” and listen to our ongoing series…

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We recorded this in bed over a week ago while we were in Miami — mostly for our ourselves…to talk through some ideas and concepts. We weren’t going to release it. But I gave it a listen and I thought we had a great conversation — genuine pillow talk before going to bed.

Some of the things we discuss: the start of our crusade against Red Scare, Anna K’s ties and similarity to Mike Cernovich, the beta-lib-husband-turned-pick-up-artist-turned-MAGA-boy-turned-trad-dad-influencer. We also talk about the pick up artist self help scene, Roosh…and how a lot of that world went trad and renounced their early whoring. And we discuss how the Red Scare women are the counterpart to the Cernovich and Tate influencer types — but they poison the minds of young women, rather than young men.

One thing that these influencers push, especially the trad types, is that having a family means you naturally adopt The Zone of Interest politics — that this is just how the world works. But this is a lie. There is nothing natural about it. You can be a father or mother without adopting a nihilistic view where nothing and nobody matters outside your immediate family. I know this personally...

Enjoy the ep. Sweet dreams.

—Yasha

Listen to our two previous episodes on Red Scare:

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We record an emergency ep to talk about Sean Baker’s sweep at the Oscars with his new film Anora. We talk about Sean Baker’s sentimental style and his “changemaker” interest in stories of marginalized people. He comes from good New Jersey suburb but the only layer of American society he’s interested in are the lower classes — the delivery workers, trans prostitutes, third rate porn stars, strippers, poor immigrants. We discuss our opinion of the film, the reaction that other Russians had to it, and end up talking about Todd Solondz a lot, who like Sean Baker, grew up in upper-middle-class suburban New Jersey but couldn’t be a more different director.

As a bonus, I tell the story of how I tried to score heroin on the LA corner where a lot of the action in Tangerine, Baker’s breakthrough hit film about transgender prostitutes, takes place…and how I ended up going to a gay brothel in West Hollywood.

Do the Anora Oscar wins signal that Hollywood is ready to reset relations with Russia? Only time will tell.

—Yasha

PS: We discuss Evgenia’s short film Changemaker — watch it here.

We continue our discussion of Red Scare’s turn into a real red scare platform. We have been doing deconstruction of their rhetoric on Twitter the past week, which has been going viral and has been drawing all the nastiness and poison of the Red Scare universe to the surface for everyone to see. And we’ve come to a very grim conclusion about the nature of this podcast project, and it’s this: What Red Scare promotes as “good” politics is captured by The Zone of Interest — where the happy family of the commander of Auschwitz lives on the other side of the wall from the death camp surrounded by sounds of suffering and not caring. They see themselves as good people. These are the morals that the Red Scare women want to push on people. To them the only thing that makes you a “good” person is treating your family and friends right. That’s it. The pain and suffering of other people doesn’t matter. In fact, it doesn’t even exist. And if you care about anyone outside your little world, you’re fake and manipulative and just projecting your own mental issues onto the world.

Our world is already a series of Zones of Interest. But what Red Scare tries to do is to sell this kind of cynical tribalism as something cool and avant-garde. They’ve become agents of nihilism.

We want to draw the line in the sand and call it what it is, and to remind young (and not so young) people that there is a black and white and good and bad in cases like this. Not everything is gray.

—Evgenia

Listen to part one of our Red Scare saga: Red Scare's Wake…

…and subscribe for more and join us on the chat.

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We talk about my recent epiphany that the scary and volatile world of Russia that I grew up in post-collapse in the 1990s might be the future of America, rather than a distant, embarrassing past that I used to think was irrelevant to my new life here. Turns out I’m a time traveler of sorts. I am from your future.

—Evgenia

PS: At the end of the ep, Yasha ruminates on how when collapse finally does come, he’s willing to become a peasant at a PMC women-run colony that will surely pop up here in the Hudson Valley…working the land in exchange for protection from the brutish bands of MAGA scavengers.

We talk about the rise and fall of Red Scare, America’s once-coolest Soviet immigrant podcast. They lost their edge. We’re #1 now.

Want to know more?

* The Secret Power of Lex Fridman

* Konstantin Kisin's KGB Konnektions

* …other eps — and subscribe!

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We talk to playwright and theatre director Matthew Gasda about his plays, his theatre company Brooklyn Centre for Theatre Research, and the zeitgeist of the post-COVID downtown New York scene. We talk about how theater is a peculiar art form for a millennial to be engaged with, as it is completely offline and intentionally unrecorded, un-televised, and impossible to make viral on social media. In that way, theater points to a future where people abandon virtual reality and want to experience things live…in the flesh.

—IBWR

PS: Doomers, Gasda’s play about the geniuses behind our AI takeover, is playing now.

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Artist and author (and mother) Nika Dubrovsky is back on the show to talk about Soviet cartoons and Soviet literature for kids and the unique radical progressive ethos children’s culture had in post-revolutionary Soviet society.

We talk about the utopian book series Dunno, about poems by Marshak and Chukovsky, who is considered the Russian Dr. Seuss, and we compare them to the American publishing system that censors interesting and alternative children’s books. Nika tells a fascinating story on how Dr. Seuss found publishing success despite all odds.

Nika is currently working on a book series she cofounded with her late husband David Graeber: Anthropology For Kids, which was inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “what is good and what is bad.”

—Evgenia

P.S. I had to talk to Nika alone since Yasha couldn’t come down to New York because our daughter was sick. The sound quality is not that great since my mic set up failed and the conversation was recorded on an iPhone. My tech support was not there!

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We continue our journey through the weaponized immigrant podcaster universe — this time with Konstantin Kisin.

Konstantin, a hack comedian turned political podcaster, is a classic weaponized immigrant — or a “court Russian,” as Evgenia calls it. He embodies all the tropes of one: gross subservience to “Western civilization,” trafficking in stereotypes about the savage totalitarianism of Russian society, blaming all the problems in the West on outside forces — particularly Russia and China…

His particular shtick, though, is to placate his Western audience with the notion that they live in the best of all possible societies and that a group of Russian FSB-connected asiatics are plotting to destroy their way of life. How? Through a new type of Marxism called wokeness. That’s how.

What Konstantin doesn’t divulge, though, is that he himself is part of this foreign bacillus injected into the UK with the help of the Russian security state. As we discuss, Konstantin’s fancy schooling in England (and his move to the island) was funded by his Russian bureaucrat-business father, who partook in the pure capitalism of 90s Moscow by embezzling and privatizing public funds while getting cover from the FSB.

—IBWR

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Want to know more?

* Listen to our ep on Lex Fridman

* Yasha’s was on the weaponized immigrant beat a long, long time ago — hence the title of this Substack

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