We come back from our break to do some light but cutting literary gossip and criticism. Our focus: the millennial essayist Sam Kriss.

Kriss is one of the last erudite men of letters and blesses us all with his uber long Substack pieces that weave medieval history and current politics and go for tens of thousands words. Brevity is soul of the wit, as some dead British guy said. But to Kriss verbosity is essential — he needs to make his readers so confused and overwhelmed and so stuffed with facts and obscure tangents that they end up being convinced this is the work of inexplicable genius rather than a product of an insecure over-educated empty vessel.

Enjoy the episode.

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We’re posting part two of our conversation with Dmitriy Khvorostov (aka Artur Dugin, son of Alexander Dugin) about politics, art, and culture in Russia today — specifically we discuss what Russian traditionalists think about America’s new right.

If you missed part one, you can listen to it here: Sovereign Art.

We had a small 35th anniversary screening of Ghost at Kingston last Saturday and I had a talk with Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote the screenplay and won an Oscar for it.

The movie was the biggest box office hit in 1990 even though it was an original screenplay and a story that was both melodramatic, funny, scary, and spiritual at the same time. “Just like life,” as Bruce would say. It’d be hard to imagine a movie like that would be noticed today or even made when every movie has to be a remake of a new installment of an existing franchise. Bruce also wrote Jacob’s Ladder, which was filmed at the exact same time in New York as Ghost and came out the same year, too. They are in a way the same story, just different manifestations of it.

—Evgenia

PS: There was a problem with recording the audio at the event so I’m using my iPhone recording here instead. It starts about a minute into the talk.

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A YASHA LEVINE VAMPIRE CASTLE TRANSMISSION

With the Charlie Kirk assassination, political influencers are freaking out. It’s dawning on them that the Spectacle is not just an abstract entity. They’re realizing deep down inside that all the hate and misery they pump out into the Spectacle can be made flesh. And that this flesh can be killed. And that this flesh can be theirs.

I wrote about this yesterday but since no one reads anymore, I decided to record a video from the safety of my bathroom. As always, remember:

DON’T SHARE.

DON’T SUBSCRIBE.

GET OFF YOUR MACHINES.

—Yasha

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We dial Moscow to talk to art curator and philosopher Dmitriy Khvorostov (aka Artur Dugin, son of Alexander Dugin) about art in Russia and about current attempts by Russians to find a new sovereign identity after the war and their rupture with the west. You can follow Dmitriy on Telegram at Sovereign Art.

PS: This is part one of a two-part conversation. The second half — about what Russian traditionalists think about America’s new right — will be posted soon.

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We put on our matching army green outfits to talk to Ori Goldberg — a former academic and a dissident Israeli — about what it’s like to live in a society as it commits genocide. (Spoiler alert: They’re mostly fine with it. Ori thinks maybe one out of a hundred Israelis opposes the slaughter in Gaza.)

—Yasha

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We had filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov on again to talk Russian politics in the age of war and global realignment. Does the “Russian Idea” have anything to offer? Is there something there that’s unique? Can the Russian people be convinced to be enthusiastic about a centralized capitalism?

Andrei was recently arrested and bizarrely held in detention for several months for accidentally filming in front of an FSB building. We had him on before to talk about Russian politics and culture. Check out our eps: History's Revenge and Tarkovsky, a Soviet artist. And be sure to check out Andrei’s great films, including his doc Case and The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes. This last film caused a huge scandal in America and Europe and was the focus of a long and sleazy largely successful attempt by Bill Browder to smear Andrei and to censor the film. Watch it online here.

—Yasha

Some notes…

* Evgenia and I recently talked about her time in Moscow and her thoughts on what to her feels like the dawn of a new era for Russian society.

* The “codex” for a new Russia Evgenia mentioned can be read about here.

* Evgenia talked about syncretism being attempted in Russia, including bringing together Soviet and Russian Orthodox iconography…like in the new Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces. Here are some photos:

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We have a great time chatting with historian Greg Grandin about the end of the American Myth, collapse, America’s war against itself, Clinton and MAGA, how the USSR propped up the social welfare state both in America and Europe, toxic nationalism vs universal nationalism, individualism under capitalism vs communism, Israel…and a bunch of other things that are on our minds.

Greg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Yale. Buy his latest book: “America, América: A New History of the New World.”

Been thinking about the Vampire Castle that is the internet and how we’re being drained by information, so I sat down to talk about it a bit.

I come across people all the time who can’t read anymore, are revolted by screens, made sick by technology, their minds overstimulated, groaning under the weight of news and shows and infinite content…and yet they still can’t log off. Few of us can. We can’t escape. It is the Vampire Castle, after all. But something has to change. We need new values and a new culture that rejects this impulse to be plugged in, to hoard info…because when we’re plugged in, the vampires feed on us. That’s what the Vampire Castle is for. We need to exit the Vampire Castle — and to exit it more radically than Mark Fisher imagined. It has to be a physical exit, not a symbolic one.

—Yasha

SAY NO TO THE VAMPIRE CASTLE, SUBSCRIBE TO NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

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Evgenia joins me on the phone from the Duchy of Moscow for a late night convo about what’s happening in Russia and about what to her feels like the dawn of a new era for Russian society. You heard it here first…

Sooner or later, for better or worse, a real monarchy is coming to the Russian Federation.

—Yasha

Vintage Lenin for sale

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