Money Can't Buy You Class

Gemma and Phoebe are joined by cultural critic and novelist Natasha Stagg to discuss the various social and technological implications of final season of Keeping up with the Kardashians, the desire for revelation, and cinematically-disguised tackiness.

Gemma & Phoebe recap the penultimate episode of The Bachelorette, discussing Milton’s Paradise Lost, the purgatorial affect of middles, and the choice of the camera over true love.

Read/Watch:

"Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit..." John Milton, Paradise Lost 

The Bachelorette: Season 17, Episodes 8 & 9

Return of the Real, by Phoebe Kaufman in Forever Magazine

https://forevermag.net/Phoebe-Kaufman-Return-of-the-Real

Kimposium! The Sequel - September 14-16, 2021

https://www.brunel.ac.uk/research/Institutes/Institute-of-Communities-and-Society/Kimposium

Gemma & Phoebe discuss the current seasons of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills & Real Housewives of New York City, with a focus on class allegiance, the racialization of emotionality, & the feminine politics of aging.

Gemma & Phoebe are joined by Eloise Hess & our first Gen Z-er, Tobias Hess, to discuss the fragile & confounding world of The Bachelorette. We focus on the Season 17, Episode 3 trauma episode, the compulsion to share stories, and the enforcement of intimacy.

Song of the week:

Greatest Lover - Katie Thurston by Connor B. From Nashville 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE8rn306F-Q

Readings:

The Cult of Storytelling, Tobias Hess

https://genzero.substack.com/p/the-cult-of-storytelling

The Moral Precarity of Telling our Stories, Tobias Hess

https://genzero.substack.com/p/the-moral-precarity-of-telling-our

GenZero on Substack:

https://genzero.substack.com/

Gemma & Phoebe struggle to convey the emotional minutia & toll of their night out at Lisa Vanderpump’s supposedly acclaimed West Hollywood restaurants, Sur & Pump. Gemma tries the Goat Cheese Balls, Phoebe reviews the bathrooms, and both revel in the vulnerability of fandom.

Bravo Song of the Week:

Raise your glass - Memoir featuring Dena Deadly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQyLehzSpIE

Readings:

SUR Menu

https://surrestaurant.com/dinner-menu

Gemma and Phoebe are joined by the infinity-obsessed Emmett Mathison to discuss holograms, resurrection, and the possibility that Kim Kardashian will never die.

Housewives single of the week: “Revelation” by Gretchen Rossi (Orange County)

Episodes

Keeping up with the Kardashians, S20 EP4 + EP5

Readings

Jean Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation: Ch. 11, Holograms

Alexander Bogdanov  Essays in Tektology

Mackenzie Wark  Molecular Red 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Formation of the Noosphere

Alexander Svyatogor Biocosmist Poetics

Anastasia Gacheva Art as the Overcoming of Death: From Nikolai Federov to the Cosmists of the 1920s

Gemma and Phoebe get lost in the inarticulate void of the future of reality television.

https://danielpinchbeck.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-art

https://www.vulture.com/article/kim-kardashian-kanye-west-divorce.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Absinthe

Gemma & Phoebe are joined by our favorite Adorno scholar Becca Teich to discuss Vanderpump Rules’ stakes in the culture industry and fascist propaganda.

Buy Becca’s Caffeine Chronicles from Portable Press here:

https://yoyolabs.com/teich.html

Phoebe and Gemma are joined by Chris (@YAgambem) to take a deep dive into the Kardashian obsession with apocalypse and RHOBH’s Erika Jayne’s legal… situation.

Gemma & Phoebe are joined by Housewives fan Alex Weinstock to discuss Kelly Bensimon, psychosis, Manet’s Olympia, and Al Sharpton