She’s A Talker

Songwriter Stephin Merritt talks about bridges and key changes.

ABOUT THE GUEST Stephin Merritt is a singer-songwriter who has released more than a dozen albums with his band the Magnetic Fields, along with albums from the 6ths, Future Bible Heroes and the Gothic Archies. He’s also composed music for movies (Pieces of April, Eban and Charley) and stage (Coraline, The Orphan of Zhao, Peach Blossom Fan) and was the subject of the documentary Strange Powers.

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 & Jesse Kimotho

Intern: Emme Zhou

Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg

Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor

TRANSCRIPTION

STEPHIN: Should we do a slate?

NEIL: Yeah, sure. I'll just clap. Neil, talking to Stephin Merritt whose work he has adored since whenever the Faraway Bus came out.

STEPHIN: Wayward.

NEIL: Wayward Bus. There's a faraway. Where does faraway fit in that? I know there's something.

STEPHIN: I don't know. I have a large catalog.

NEIL: Yeah, I've heard. Word on the street. But it is true, I have just so profoundly loved your work since way back then.

STEPHIN: Thank you. I'm thirsty. It's hot in here because I've turned the air conditioner off for audio.

NEIL: I appreciate that.

STEPHIN: I will be doing product placement for Mineragua Sparkling Water again and again.

NEIL: Mineragua sounds like it could be a symptom. I'm sorry, I can't have a podcast today. I have Mineragua. I feel a little bit refreshed just looking at the label. Do you mind my asking, before we got on online, you were mentioning that you had COVID and you are experiencing brain fog. Can you describe what that feels like?

STEPHIN: Well, it feels like writer's block and an inability to organize anything. I mean, everybody, pretty much... A lot of people have writer's block, but I have really weird writer's block. I agreed to write an article about ELO for a book someone is doing about the albums that changed my life. And I tried to write about ELO out of the blue. I just had to write 1000 words. I happened to have already written 1000 words on ELO out of the blue in junior high school, so it should not be a problem. But it took me six weeks and I eventually gave up. I just couldn't do it.

STEPHIN: At the risk of interviewing you, in your background you have what seems to be a painting studio with a television on it, on the desk. Do you paint the television?

STEPHIN: When I was in film school I filmed the television all the time. It's a really good source of images.

NEIL: I don't paint, my studio mate does, so those are her paintings. Then the TV, I've got asked to do a project where I'm reviewing some work I did back in the mid 90s and reflect on it, so I broke out the old CRT and I've been pulling a Stephin Merritt in film school, I've been filming the TV set. Which is a very familiar, old feeling because I used to do that a bit too.

STEPHIN: Everything looks better if you record it onto more than one medium.

NEIL: You mean if there's like a generation loss?

STEPHIN: Yes. Well, two generation losses of different kinds so that they have a sort of moire pattern in between them, so that you got the grain of the film and the scan lines of the video distorting each other. It makes everything prettier.

NEIL: I love that. It's almost like wearing a plaid tie and a striped shirt, but the plaid tie is translucent or something like that.

STEPHIN: Yes.

NEIL: I didn't know you went to film school, though.

STEPHIN: Yes. I never finished, but I went.

NEIL: I remember when you wrote in TimeOut, was that about film? No. Or was it about books? No, it was about music. What the fuck am I talking about?

STEPHIN: I reviewed a lot of different things in TimeOut, music, theater, food. I don't think I reviewed any books for TimeOut. Every year, I reviewed the calendars for the following year and the Christmas records, which is the worst job I have ever had. Entailed listening to at least 10, well, I chose 10, so a lot more than 10, Christmas albums. I hate Christmas albums.

NEIL: Where are you speaking to me from?

STEPHIN: New York City. I have a view of the Empire State Building from my chair.

NEIL: Is it a north view, are you looking downtown onto the Empire State Building or uptown?

STEPHIN: No.

NEIL: Sideways?

STEPHIN: You think I'm uptown? Jesus Christ.

NEIL: Yeah, sorry.

STEPHIN: No, I'm downtown baby. I am looking at the southern angle of the Empire State Building.

NEIL: That's beautiful.

STEPHIN: Where are you?

NEIL: I'm on the lower east side, where I used to be able to actually to see The World Trade Center right out my window, speaking of landmarks.

STEPHIN: I hope you were not able to see it burning.

NEIL: Yeah, I did see it burning. Did you?

STEPHIN: I saw it burning, but not from my room.

NEIL: It is a different thing.

STEPHIN: I would have been very upset. I mean, I was very upset. No, I saw it from my roof with binoculars, an experience I'm glad to never repeat. I now have a phobia of binoculars.

NEIL: Because of that?

STEPHIN: Yeah.

NEIL: Some entomologist is really loving that they have, on the tip of their tongue, the scientific name for the phobia of binoculars. I've never heard that before, though.

STEPHIN: Diocularaphobia, or something.

NEIL: Also, there's something about a phobia is sort of in a meta relationship to something, which binoculars are in relationship to the thing being seen, so it's like... I don't know. There's something very complex going on. I'm detecting a kind of like lens theme happening. You spotted the TV set, film school, the filming of one thing with another thing, binoculars. What's going on?

STEPHIN: Sometimes when suddenly a theme occurs to one it's always been there in everything and you just grabbed onto it as a filter.

NEIL: Can I ask, when people don't know you, do you have a succinct way that you describe what it is you do?

STEPHIN: I'm a songwriter not aligned to any particular genre. My preferred genre is variety. And I recently realized that my favorite genre is variety because I grew up on AM radio, and that was what AM radio was like. It would be Frank Sinatra followed by Black Sabbath.

NEIL: That's so beautiful. I love it as a genre. I often say my favorite TV show is the menu, and I have spent vast amounts of time pretty contentedly looking through the selection of things to watch on the Netflix menu, whatever, and then kind of called it a night.

STEPHIN: Reading the TV guide listings was almost always more entertaining than watching television.

NEIL: It was a precursor to the genre variety.

STEPHIN: Yes. Also, I'm not a good cook, but I do collect bento boxes and I make bento for lunch for myself.

NEIL: Bentos are like a structure for variety.

STEPHIN: Yes.

NEIL: Shall we try some cards? But if anything doesn't speak to you just say pass or whatever.

STEPHIN: No, I'll say brain fog.

NEIL: Brain fog. Yeah. But so the first card says certain art ideas, when you come back to them or like a cup of coffee you left out on the counter.

STEPHIN: I don't drink coffee, so I don't know what it's like when you leave coffee out on the counter. But I suppose if you have milk in it, the milk is probably curdled.

NEIL: It's gotten cold.

STEPHIN: What about iced coffee? Can you make iced coffee out of coffee that is simply gone cold or does it now taste bad?

NEIL: I have very specific requirements around the iced coffee. I need for it to be designated from the start as iced coffee.

STEPHIN: I'm a tea drinker and tea doesn't work that way at all. You can just heat it up again and it's fine.

NEIL: Well, what's it like for you? How do you return to something that's in process, the cup of coffee that's been put down, and follow through on it maybe even after the initial heat, I'm really pushing the metaphor, has gone?

STEPHIN: If I don't find what I worked on yesterday to be inspiring, I don't work on it again. I guess I don't work on things where the initial heat has dissipated. Red says I dump out the coffee. Or if I don't dump out the coffee, what I'm more likely to do is find something fun in it, cross out everything else, copy that to another page, and just go with the fact that Wallaby turned out to rhyme with.

NEIL: Implicit in that is the idea that your working style involves pushing through to a type of finish.

STEPHIN: Well, the most recent Magnetic Fields album was called Quickies. And by the standards of, say, The Cure, none of the songs on Quickies are finished because they're all under two minutes 20 seconds long. And I think that the two minutes 20 seconds is actually made that long by the guitarist tacking on an intro and outro that isn't a part of the song.

STEPHIN: Everything is under two minutes long and all of the songs are a maximum of two parts, they don't have middle eights or anything, and they end as soon as they can. They don't have vamps at the end and that sort of thing. So there's that kind of finished/unfinished, but also I usually have a pretty wide variety of lengths of song on a given record. 69 Love Songs goes from 15 seconds to five minutes. So a song is really finished when I say it's finished.

STEPHIN: I guess the recording is what's going to sound under cooked or not under cooked, not so much the song itself. I don't think I've ever left in a really stupid line in a song just because I can't think of something else. I don't know. Maybe on... I was going to say maybe on my first album, but then I was a perfectionist on my first album, so no, probably not.

NEIL: Have you become less of a perfectionist with time?

STEPHIN: I think every artist becomes less of a perfectionist with time. Especially Mondrian, who got bored. He got bored quite rightly.

NEIL: Is there any correlation between a duration of time that it takes to, let's say, "finish" a song and the duration of the song itself, or can it take a really long time to do a short song?

STEPHIN: There's a number of songs on Quickies that have been sitting in notebooks for decades unfinished, and they were finished by, sometimes, my simply looking at them and saying, "Oh, they're finished," and other times by my saying, "Well, if I just subtract this part, then it'll be finished." So I take songs that were really awful because the verse was so terrible, but the chorus was great, just play the chorus, and the song is done.

NEIL: That is wisdom.

STEPHIN: Finish by subtracting.

NEIL: Yeah. Hello. One of the cards I hadn't thought of, but that I remember now, is I hate bridges in music generally. How do you feel about bridges?

STEPHIN: I'm trying to think of one that I love. Here's a bridge that I love. In the ABBA song, Hole In Your Soul, it's a hard rock song, the closest ABBA could conceivably come to being hardcore. And then there's a bridge and the bridge is completely different. No drums, everything drops out, and you hear a beautiful synthesizer and an almost operatic tone of voice. You really hear Agnetha doing her Connie Francis imitation, because Connie Francis was her favorite singer, and then it goes out of that into a shrill, very high note, and you can't believe she can sustain this note, as the hardcore comes rushing back. And the bridge has actually done what bridges are supposed to do, which is give you something completely different to listen to for 10 seconds as an excuse to play the chorus a fourth and fifth time. That's the only bridge I can think of that really justifies the existence of bridges.

NEIL: I feel like we're comrades on that. Because it always seems to me the bridge is serving a purpose outside itself. You know what I mean?

STEPHIN: Generally the purpose of the bridge is to make the song longer than two minutes and 50 seconds, which is the length that singles used to have as a maximum in the heyday of the seven inch single. Before Bohemian Rhapsody you were never going to get a song on the radio if it was more than two minutes and 50 seconds long, unless it was going to be on FM radio and who cares about FM radio? So yeah, bridges are a purely commercial thing. Art songs never have bridges and folk songs never have bridges.

NEIL: I feel so vindicated. What about key changes? I feel like often there can be a type of hubris in a key change.

STEPHIN: The Barry Manilow problem is that once you're tired of the chorus, he goes up one half step and plays the same exact chorus all over again in identical arrangement, except that it's one half step up. And sometimes that pesky Barry Manilow does it again, more than one.

NEIL: Can't Smile Without You.

STEPHIN: Can't Smile Without You, yes. I actually love Barry Manilow's voice, but the key change habit drives me nuts.

NEIL: You're someone who, if there's a key change in your music, I am 100% all in. Nothing is coming to mind. I know there is one. There's got to be.

STEPHIN: I always make sure that if I really hate something, I make sure that I put it into my music. So I agree that there must be an unnecessary modulation somewhere, I just can't think of where it is.

NEIL: Perhaps we'll call this episode, unnecessary modulation. Next card.

STEPHIN: Maybe gratuitous. Gratuitous modulation.

NEIL: Gratuitous modulation. See now gratuitous bridge is almost redundant, right?

STEPHIN: Yes, it's redundant.

NEIL: We've determined.

STEPHIN: Except in Hole In Your Soul, where the bridge is at least half the point of the song.

NEIL: I can't wait to hear it. And I should apologize, every now and then I'm speaking over you just because there's a little delay in my earphones.

STEPHIN: That's fine.

NEIL: Apologies if that's confusing to you.

STEPHIN: A friend of mine hates being interrupted. That's her problem. She's miserable. She thinks everyone disrespects her. Not at all, it's the way everyone speaks. She just has a pet peeve that she should get over.

NEIL: It's interesting, so I teach and I had this student who was amazing, but was completely... She was wild, and she was also a just insane interrupter of other people in the class, but-

STEPHIN: Classrooms are not conversations, and if the other person is trying to learn something from you, then her interrupting them, interrupting a question in particular, is much ruder than it would be in an ordinary conversation.

NEIL: Great point. And so I said, "How would you like to be interrupted?" And she said, "I love being interrupted." And I really believed her. It wasn't just like she was okay with it, she loved it.

STEPHIN: I also love being interrupted. I'm all in favor of that. However, it's not really her decision to make if this is a hierarchical class. I don't know. Was it a lecture or a seminar? It makes a difference.

NEIL: Studio art class. I mean, that's very contested hierarchy there.

STEPHIN: If she did it all the time, it's just annoying.

NEIL: And she did indeed. She was a great student, though. Sondheim related card. The song Ladies Who Lunch, I really get stopped on the line, aren't they a gem? And I know you're a stickler for grammar, and I don't know if this is a grammatical error or what it is, or it's just a choice. But how do you feel about that? Here's to the ladies who lunch, aren't they a gem?

STEPHIN: I'm failing to see what you're pointing out as a grammatical error.

NEIL: Aren't they gems? Unless ladies who lunch is singular.

STEPHIN: They collectively. Aren't they a circus? Aren't they a gem? Aren't they a peach?

NEIL: Aren't they a peach. Aren't they peaches. You don't have a problem with it. See, aren't they a circus I would be okay with because that a circus is a collection of... I guess a gem is a collection of what?

STEPHIN: Carbon atoms.

NEIL: So you're okay. That was in Sondheim's notebook, aren't they a collection of-

STEPHIN: Carbon atom. More than on carbon atom. A gem, in fact.

NEIL: All right, you've solved it. We're done in terms of my issues with that song. Next card.

STEPHIN: All of my Sondheim quibbles are from West Side Story, but I don't really want to air them.

NEIL: I have a lot of quibbles with Sondheim. Can I just go there? Sorry Stephen Sondheim, if you're a listener of She's A Talker. I don't emotionally trust his work. So much of it is about relationships, but the way he talks about it, it feels very outsider speaking as an insider. It doesn't ring true, maybe, is all I'm saying.

STEPHIN: Do Rodgers and Hammerstein ring true? Do you find Flower Drum Song to be a photorealist masterpiece? Not a hint?

NEIL: I guess I am talking to the wrong person. But is it claiming to be? Or maybe it's in the uncanny valley of sentiment. Meaning it's trying to represent-

STEPHIN: And then it's not realistic enough for you.

NEIL: Exactly. I don't go into Rodgers and Hammerstein song, at least in this historical period, expecting that. Sondheim represents himself as offering this kind of acute nuanced insight into the dynamics of relationship. Or am I wrong?

STEPHIN: I don't want to speak for him. I certainly don't present myself as offering a particularly subtle or nuanced insight into relationships.

NEIL: But, I'm going to interrupt, that's the paradox.

STEPHIN: My work is more about other work than it is about portraying reality. And you could say, I'm not sure that Sondheim would be comfortable with it, but you could say that Sondheim's work is more about theater and music than it is about whether Bobby is going to get married.

STEPHIN: I always say that the kind of plot that I hate boils down to, will the boring straight people fuck each other? And it is. Two thirds of the plots in the world are, will the boring straight people fuck each other? Which is why gay cinema should not emulate straight cinema.

NEIL: Not to mention gay life.

STEPHIN: Gay life.

NEIL: The thing I was going to say about your work is there's a paradox, for me at least, which is I've heard you say that you don't, and you've just said it, that you're not aiming for a certain type of realism, for lack of a better word, but paradoxically it inadvertently achieves it one way or the other, for me at least. Emotional-

STEPHIN: Realism.

NEIL: Emotional realism, absolutely.

STEPHIN: Psychological realism, in fact.

NEIL: Indeed. Verily.

STEPHIN: I'm not a fan of psychological realism as a genre, so I don't delve.

NEIL: You may be getting in through the back door, as it were, speaking of queer.

STEPHIN: Hubba hubba.

NEIL: Dog's name?

STEPHIN: What's the next card?

NEIL: This one's about animals, and I know you're a dog person. What are your pups' names?

STEPHIN: Edgar and Agatha. They are not named after the mystery novel prizes, they're named after the people the mystery novel prizes are named after, Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Christie, because they were from mysterious origins.

NEIL: Where are they from? Or it's mysterious.

STEPHIN: They were found rooting through garbage in Atlanta, Georgia.

NEIL: Beautiful origin story.

STEPHIN: They should probably have been named after some realist authors like Zola and Tolstoy, or something.

NEIL: We could talk more about that, but I'll say that my cat's origin story, and Beverly is the mascot of the podcast, was found hiding in the wheel-well of a car in Brooklyn as a little kitten. She's a survivor. But this card says, the way an animal's affection and vulnerability are connected.

STEPHIN: Is what?

NEIL: It's just an observation, I guess. That, at least for cats, they'll do things like they'll slow blink, which is a way of making themselves vulnerable, which apparently is a way of, according to the interpreters of cat behavior, it's a way of expressing affection for you.

STEPHIN: Like putting your head down is a way of being lower and therefore more vulnerable.

NEIL: Yeah.

STEPHIN: Like kneeling before the queen to be knighted. She could decapitate you, but she doesn't. She symbolically decapitates you in order to show that you are loyal enough to present your neck for decapitation by the queen.

NEIL: Is that what that's about?

STEPHIN: Yes.

NEIL: How does that live with Edgar and Agatha?

STEPHIN: They put their heads down, I don't decapitate them, we live happily.

NEIL: All right, one more card. The sound of turning off an NPR story mid-sentence always makes me feel like I'm in a movie. Like, let's say I have to get out of the apartment, but I'm listening to NPR and there's a news story and I turn it off, suddenly I'm like, I'm in a movie. No? Yes?

STEPHIN: This is Nina Totenberg reporting on the zombie massacres happening in Lebanon today. We have the BBC correspondent. Are you there? Are you there? I can't quite hear you. Well, we'll have to get back to Lebanon. Now, we go... Yes, sounds like you're in a movie.

NEIL: To me, it does. Just when I turn it off in the middle of a sentence, do you have that experience?

STEPHIN: I am so unlikely to turn anything off in the middle of a sentence that I would have to say non-applicable.

NEIL: Is that because you're a completist or is it because... What's that about?

STEPHIN: I'm sure it's a mental illness of some kind, but although I'm willing to interrupt people who are having a conversation with me, I'm less willing to interrupt people who are mechanical reproductions, I guess.

NEIL: Kind of reminds me of someone I know, came as a child from Romania for the fall of communism, and she saw Tony the Tiger on TV saying, "Buy Frosted Flakes, they're great." And then she went to the store with her mom and she became desperate, telling her mom, "We have to get the Frosted Flakes." She didn't realize that someone on TV telling her to get something, it's actually optional. Could it be that?

STEPHIN: What a sad story.

NEIL: She's doing okay now.

STEPHIN: It's probably more that I want to hear the end of the sentence.

NEIL: So the unit is the sentence.

STEPHIN: It's not like I wait until the end of the show to turn it off or anything.

NEIL: Got it. All right, well, last question. When current circumstances, however you understand them, COVID, quarantine, social distancing, are over, what is it that you're looking forward to, if anything?

STEPHIN: BEAR WEEK!

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 overwhelmed by the empathy I felt for my parents who were going through some tough stuff, and I found that past a certain point, empathy can almost feel toxic.

KATHLEEN: Empathy poisoning. If anything, I might get that more from the characters that I play than other people. You play Martha in Virginia Woolf for 500 performances and there's no way you're going to keep yourself completely separate from her. So I would say that that's more empathy poisoning to me than other people.

NEIL: So in other words, your empathy with the character can kind of embody itself in you.

KATHLEEN: Yeah. Yeah. Oh yes. It's like when you're creating a character, take Martha. At first when you really start to study her, you think, "What is wrong with this woman? She's sitting around drinking endlessly and ruining the one friendship relationship in her life, what the hell?" And then you go a little deeper and you think, "All right, this is 1962, and no women held any tenured position in any university. All their energies and praise came from the status of their husbands."

KATHLEEN: She has a husband who has assiduously worked to remain an associate professor for 17 years. She's ambitious, she's intelligent, she has energy, and absolutely no way to use it. What's she going to do? Just host faculty wives teas? And then you start to understand, "Okay, wait a minute now. If I had these endless barriers in my life, how would I fight?" Anyway, you can understand how you would start to really, really feel something for this woman and with her. The rage, I think more than anything. Yeah.

NEIL: At the end of a performance, is there a process by which that empathic connection is released, or is it over the course of a run?

KATHLEEN: Well, I used to believe that I did not bring any characters home. My ex-husband and my daughter have made it clear that that's not entirely true. Anyway, part of it's the energy at the end of a performance, say. Maybe you just had a standing ovation of 1100 people. It's thrilling, it's fantastic, and you can't just say, "Okay. Well that's all right, now I'm going to go home and have a different life." I have to work it off. I've been known to go up and down the stairs in my building just to get rid of some of this energy that keeps me going. I try to just, I don't know, tire myself a bit, I guess.

NEIL: Since we're talking about acting, which I'd love to keep talking with you about, next card would be acting. Pretending to notice something when you walk into a room. I could never do that. That, to me, seems like a monumental challenge.

KATHLEEN: But if you wanted to talk about what acting is, I'll tell you that acting is a very carefully chosen series of communications, both physically and through the text. It is incredibly deliberate and detailed, and never really spontaneous. I don't do ... what do you call it when you get thrown something and the-

NEIL: Improvisation?

KATHLEEN: Yes. I'm not good at improv, no.

NEIL: But how does one perform surprise?

KATHLEEN: Oh. Well, it isn't just performing. You allow yourself to be surprised. This stuff is half physical, half in the body, and half in your mind making the choices, but then you feel them in the body.

NEIL: You teach acting, correct?

KATHLEEN: I do. I coach, and now I'm starting to teach online a bit, which is very difficult, really, because I can really work on the text. I can really work with them on the meanings and the basic, but I cannot get them on their feet and have them move. Because then I really wouldn't be able to see them well. And so that, I really miss. I miss being in the room with somebody and looking at them from their feet to their head and going, "Okay, wait a minute. You just said, 'I hate you,' and your legs are crossed." It doesn't work like that. The body is not saying the same thing your mouth is. So I miss not being able to be in the room with them, but still, we can do good work.

NEIL: Do you feel effective as a teacher? Yeah. Do you feel-

KATHLEEN: Yes. Yeah. I find it very fulfilling. I really enjoy it.

NEIL: See, I teach art, visual art, and I also find it super fulfilling, and I also feel effective, but sometimes when I step back, and I'm curious how this is for you, recommending references and theory. I do believe it works, but I don't know. I don't know, I sometimes feel like an effective quack or something like that.

KATHLEEN: Well, heavens to Betsy. I'm not sure that's our responsibility. We give them what tools we think they can use, but we're not responsible for what they actually do with them.

NEIL: I love that you're able to comfortably ... to own that. And it may be a difference between teaching acting and teaching visual art in that I wonder if there's something less mediated, more direct, I wonder, about teaching acting.

KATHLEEN: Well in acting, we have a specific text. Chosen words to work with, which is a structure, and I don't know that you have that in art.

NEIL: Not really, no. And I think so much of the teaching of art involves almost manufacturing parameters to contain the ideas. The worst thing you can do for a student is to say like, "Make a video," versus, "Make a video that has to be two minutes long and that doesn't use sound and that involves some aspect of memory." Whereas I guess, as an actor, that's such a great point. You always have the text as a kind of infrastructure for your teaching, correct?

KATHLEEN: Yes. Yes.

NEIL: I love it. Next card. Actors and animals. They're both about commitment. I feel like my cat is never fully other than 100% in what she's doing, and that could just be a question of I don't know if I'm interpreting her correctly. But it seems to me that actors, to be effective, kind of have to have something akin to that. Do you sense a connection?

KATHLEEN: I do. I do. I believe very strongly in getting commitment. Again, you make your choices, and then you have to fill them. You have to fill them physically, vocally, mentally. I can tell when an actor hasn't committed to the role they're playing. It's very clear to me.

NEIL: And when you look at Simon, are you ever inspired as an actor?

KATHLEEN: I look at Simon and I see just a cat boy. He walks around with this swagger with his ass kind of swinging around and you go, "Oh, you're a real Butch, aren't you, cat?" No, I enjoy him that way, yes.

NEIL: Oh, I love their embodied presence. I love the way they walk.

KATHLEEN: Yeah.

NEIL: You mentioned you can tell when actors aren't committed. Next card would be actors who are bad at acting, even in the posters.

KATHLEEN: Oh. Wow. Well, that's very poor photography or choice then. I find still photography very difficult because I feel so fake. I feel staged-

NEIL: Interesting.

KATHLEEN: ... as opposed to the actual doing of the character, which feels quite natural to me. So then I really have to say, "All right. The PR people, the photographer they choose, I'll listen to them."

NEIL: That's interesting. So it's sort of that fact that your character, when you're performing, unfolds in time.

KATHLEEN: Yeah. He's moving.

NEIL: Right.

KATHLEEN: And it's stopped in a poster, in a photograph.

NEIL: So do you have any tricks for that? Are you trying to kind of-

KATHLEEN: No, I've never been very good at it. I don't like being photographed. Just still photography. It makes me uncomfortable to be just still.

NEIL: What's your relationship to a fear of failing?

KATHLEEN: Oh, I'm going to. I have to. If I don't risk failure, then I'm not going far enough. If you don't, and I say this to all my students as well, look, you go to the point of failure, you will have to risk to the point of failure. Now, sometimes that means, uh-huh (affirmative), yeah, you will go over the edge. But at the other times it means that have pushed yourself further and found more than you had previously, and I think that's our job.

NEIL: Do you feel like in acting, is there the notion of having succeeded?

KATHLEEN: Yes, I think so. I know when I've done a good performance when I've hit all the marks that I set up for myself. I know when I have done what I hoped and wanted, what I set out to do. I will never forget opening night on Broadway. Well, any opening night on Broadway, but Virginia Woolf, and there were four of us in that play. And when the curtain came down, I was holding onto two of my co-stars, and I said, "Do not ever forget this moment. Don't ever allow yourself to forget this because they are few and far between."

NEIL: As a visual artist, you rarely get that experience.

KATHLEEN: Yes.

NEIL: It's always mediated. I always say I love attention, but I like it kind of bounced off a wall. But what you're describing sounds so powerful, for lack of a better word.

KATHLEEN: It is. It's astounding. There's such an extraordinary phenomena in theater where people sit so close, or they used to sit so close to each other. Total strangers. Closer than they sit in their own homes to people and they start to breathe together and they start to hold their breath at the same time and they laugh at the same time. So in a way, they become one body, one person, and it works for them in that they leave the theater feeling that they were part of something. They weren't just the individual that walked in that door to begin with. That it was something more than that. And as they become more attuned to each other and more one, they're easier in a way for me to work with.

NEIL: Is there work that has to be front-loaded in a performance to kind of help create that feeling of coalescent?

KATHLEEN: A lot of it has to do with the actor's confidence. Because if they see that you feel confident and good about what you're doing, then they'll trust more easily.

NEIL: Do you always go out feeling confident, or do you perform confidence?

KATHLEEN: I always think that I'm so much more confident in my working self than in my private self that I'm quite sure the decisions I make as an actor are right. But then take me off the stage and give me a decision to make about whether you want to see these people or not and I'm like, "I don't know. I don't know." Yeah. And so it's very difficult sometimes.

NEIL: I'd love to do sort of a quick lightning round of a couple of quick cards. First card would be gratuitous eye work in movies. I notice certain actors sort of try and telegraph a type of subtlety or something by way of a whole lot of stuff going on in the eyes that doesn't need to happen.

KATHLEEN: That's interesting. Yeah, I can see that. I don't know, I guess. To me, for example, it will be too much smiling also. It's hiding. It's hiding yourself. It's feeling like you're keeping busy and you're doing something, but in fact, you're just dodging.

NEIL: One of the cards here says, "Friendships that are tenured."

KATHLEEN: That are what?

NEIL: Tenured.

KATHLEEN: Oh, yes. Well, to me, and this is something that I learned from my mother, for me, women friends. Really strong, interesting women friends are essential. And out of this poker group, we have an investment banker, a gynecologist, a film editor, a retired lawyer. I don't think any of the businesses are repeated, necessarily. And these are women I've met over the years through some reason or another and wanted in my life and said, "Come on. I want you in my life." I will actually say that.

KATHLEEN: Anyway, my mom, when she got older, she had three or four very, very important friends in her life, and they would check on each other, and they would celebrate birthdays together, and they'd go to concerts together, and they'd volunteer at the library together. And so there was a constant. She didn't end up feeling that she was that alone.

NEIL: People are less surprised by my age as they used to be. It used to be I would tell people, especially students, I'd say, let's say 10 years ago, I'd say, "I'm 45," and there'd be a, "What?" Now, when I tell them I'm 56, they're like, "That's about right." That's what the look says.

KATHLEEN: No. For years and years, I always played characters older than I was, and it started with Body Heat, that once I was cast, only then did the director, Larry Kasdan, say, "By the way, how old are you?" And I said, "Well, I'm going to be 26." "No, you're not. No, you're not. You're 29." It was wrong for a woman to be that powerful that young is what he said. So then for years I played women who were older. I was not 42 when I did Peggy Sue Got Married, for God's sake. I don't think it was until Virginia Woolf, where the character is 50, that I actually got to be 50 playing 50.

KATHLEEN: And now, I tell you, the thing that I find most extraordinary, I'm turning 66 next month, and I find it fascinating how the looks have changed over the years. How time and everything that contributes to your life has affected how you look or if you care.

NEIL: What is your relationship to caring?

KATHLEEN: Yeah. I don't. I certainly don't care as much as I know I used to. I still like to look nice as it were, but no, I don't set out to knock somebody out, you know what I mean?

NEIL: I'd love to end, if you don't mind, with two questions I like to ask. First question is, fill in the blank for X and Y. What is a bad X you would take over a good Y?

KATHLEEN: What is a bad ... Oh. Hell, why would you? Well, I suppose a bad meal but with good company would be doable.

NEIL: I love it. And what's something you're looking forward to when this crisis, as it were, is over?

KATHLEEN: Oh, getting back on stage. Theater is just shut down. I was booked for the fall at the Guthrie in Minneapolis and looking forward to that, and they've closed their whole fall season. There's to lot of figure out how you can get an audience again. And if you can only sell half the seats, how do you survive? Because these companies need full houses. So there's a lot of figuring out that's going to be there, and whether we survive or not. And I miss it. I miss being on stage.

NEIL: What's something that keeps you going?

KATHLEEN: Oh, I suppose a kind of a belief. I'm thinking that there will be something after this and there will be changes to be made and understood, and that keeps me going.

NEIL: That seems like such a wonderful place to end it. Kathleen Turner, huge, huge, thank you for being on SHE'S A TALKER. I so appreciate it.

KATHLEEN: Well, it was good, Neil. You said I'd know at the end.

NEIL: Oh, right.

KATHLEEN: Yes. It was good.

NEIL: Thank you. I really, really appreciate it.

KATHLEEN: You're most welcome.

NEIL: All right. Have a great rest of your day.

KATHLEEN: I'm leaving the meeting.

NEIL: All right, bye-bye.

KATHLEEN: Bye-bye.

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 what happens?

MONIQUE: Yeah.

NEIL: Also, the ratio of labor to bang for the buck.

MONIQUE: Yeah. Well, I think about that in terms of the shower. Indoor plumbing and the shower feels that way to me. I mean-

NEIL: Yeah. That's true.

MONIQUE: It's more bodily, but sometimes it's definitely spiritual when you're in there.

NEIL: Yes.

MONIQUE: I have to say that I enjoy the shower the most when it's raining outside.

NEIL: Is it because you feel an alignment like?

MONIQUE: Yeah. Also, like the absolute kind of ... It's, one's a luxury, but also it's almost like a way of saying, "It's I control the water. I control ..." You know?

NEIL: Yeah.

MONIQUE: It feels very powerful.

NEIL: I totally get that. I mean, it's how I feel when I turn on the air conditioning and I think how my cat understands that. I mean, air conditioning is horrible and I don't like the feeling of it, but I often wonder if it's like, "Wait, not only can he make it be light or dark out, but he can also change the climate." This connects to privilege, but I also love the feeling of simply being inside when it's raining and seeing that thing of there's the rain out there and I have this thing that makes it so that the rain isn't landing on me.

MONIQUE: Then you can go into a room of your house and create a rain space.

NEIL: Exactly. I wonder if that's the German word for shower, rain space. That's rain space. Do you speak German?

MONIQUE: I don't, but that's so funny that you would ask that because I was just listening to a German radio today.

NEIL: Okay. Because one can. Is it like talking ... It's like the rain space of the audio space.

MONIQUE: I was doing it because ... Okay, the most recent novel, The Sweetest Fruits, the German translation is out. It just came out in January. My books do oddly well in Germany and it was just recently named ... Like among the literary critics, they have this monthly list of books, top 10 books that they wish that readers would discover and read. It's not the bestselling, but it should be, that kind of idea. For the month of June, The Sweetest Fruits is number two, which is really-

NEIL: Cheers.

MONIQUE: Yay. Thank you.

NEIL: As it should be. You all in Germany, you don't know what you're in for. You are in for a real treat.

MONIQUE: There I was listening because they did a 15-minute long presentation with a host and two literary critics. I mean, I'm assuming this based on what I can gather from Google translate. Talking about the book. Yeah. I was listening to that, even though I don't have any German, but it was still fun to hear Lafcadio Hearn and Rosa and the names of my characters mentioned.

NEIL: That sounds wonderful. Oh my God. Didn't the Greeks, or maybe it was the Romans, would invite people from other ... I'm sure inviting wasn't the right word. In either classical Greece or Rome, they would have people who spoke other languages simply in public speaking and people would just listen to the sound of the speaking.

MONIQUE: Wow.

NEIL: That could be an urban myth. We'll see. I feel like some very enthusiastic classmate of mine in college told me that.

MONIQUE: An urban Greek myth.

NEIL: Exactly. Exactly

MONIQUE: I love that. I hope it's true.

NEIL: Well, I'm going to get all my fact-checkers on it. When homemade bread is just past its prime, how the memory of it in its prime shapes eating it in the present. Very relevant during COVID times. Also-

MONIQUE: Exactly.

NEIL: I mean, I was making bread before this, but yeah. What does that mean for you?

MONIQUE: Yeah. Well, right. I also made bread pre-COVID and bread, I have to tell you, is one of the very first things that I made as a kid in the kitchen. Does that even make sense?

NEIL: Yeah. Absolutely.

MONIQUE: Yeah?

NEIL: Kitchens, making bread.

MONIQUE: I know, but-

NEIL: Childhood. All the elements stand.

MONIQUE: Okay. We can get back to that, but I think it's because so much of the pleasure of food for me has to do with memory.

NEIL: Aha. That makes sense.

MONIQUE: Right?

NEIL: Yeah. It's certainly how it lives in your work.

MONIQUE: Yeah. Yeah. I think what I have realized over the years is that the memory is often so much better than trying to recreate the memory. Yeah. The simplest way of thinking about it is, should you wait until you get that beautiful sun-ripened tomato that you get in the middle of the summer? Not in New York, but maybe if you are lucky enough to go somewhere. Yeah. Or should you just cave and buy whatever is in your Key Foods and try to make that simple tomato and grated carrot salad that you once had in Provençal. Do you know what I mean?

NEIL: Yeah. I wonder if maybe the way that it doesn't live up to that memory can be actually great in that it buttresses the original memory. You know what I mean? It's like, "Well, this is nothing like that."

MONIQUE: Right. Yeah.

NEIL: That's interesting. That's a more hopeful reading on the card than I have. For me, it's a little bit about whenever I look at someone who is currently young and beautiful, I can't help but mentally age them and think like, "Okay. Well, this is what they're going to look like when they're maybe still beautiful, but not young." I think partly it's a way to mediate my own, I don't know, ambivalence about getting older or whatever. I would say the flip of this card really lives for me too.

NEIL: When I'm eating homemade bread that's fresh, I will sometimes think like, "Okay. Well, this is fleeting. It's not going to be this way. What is this going to taste like tomorrow?" I guess that does help me appreciate it in the moment, but it also just highlights the absolute ephemerality of that experience, and by extension, absolutely everything. It's a real mortality moment somehow. The trajectory between fresh bread and our own death is so direct.

MONIQUE: Yes. Do you ever do the reverse, Neil? When you look at someone who is old, do you ever see them as their younger self or imagine?

NEIL: Yes. Yeah. Oh, I love that. That's a delight.

MONIQUE: Yes.

NEIL: I mean, how can you not look at an old person and do that? I think maybe if I'm just real ... old person, whatever that means. I think if I'm really committed to not liking someone, I may not do that process, but otherwise it's one of the great options that's available

MONIQUE: That's what I miss about riding the subway. You know?

NEIL: Yeah.

MONIQUE: Because you have all that time to look at these strangers and imagine things about them. I remember once seeing an older man and a younger man sit back to back. You know?

NEIL: Yeah.

MONIQUE: They did look like the younger man was the younger version of the older man and vice versa and I mean, really looked like before and after. Yeah. I mean, there were something so uncanny and wonderful and just fabulous about it. I miss that.

NEIL: Me too. The smell of food at the end of life. I thought about this because I had COVID and it was mild. It lasted for a long time, but it was mild. I didn't have any of the scary respiratory symptoms.

MONIQUE: Oh my goodness.

NEIL: By the way, so many people reported losing their appetite. I super didn't. I was hungry all the time. Anyhow, it was like a little preview of death, if I can be melodramatic. Just in that it's like, "Wow." One felt the effort that it took to simply stay alive. That sounds way more dramatic than what the experience was. I found myself thinking like, "How is food going to smell at that point at which you're transitioning out of life?" For instance, when my father was dying, just to go right there, there was a lot of handholding and there was a certain point that he pushed my hand away and I believe the hospice nurse had said that that may happen.

NEIL: He died pretty soon after that. It felt like I could totally imagine that like, "Okay. Listen, I have to go die now and so I have to disconnect." I think this card partially comes from that feeling that I was reflecting on during COVID of like, "Well, I wonder if that happens with food at a certain point." It's like, I have to disconnect from the process of nourishing myself and continuing to live.

MONIQUE: Right. Wow. The first thing that comes to mind is one of my pet peeves in life is once your meal is done and the dirty dishes are still on the table and the half-eaten food are still in their bowls or whatever, I can't stand the smell of that. Yeah. Because the experience is over, right?

NEIL: Yeah.

MONIQUE: I think in that way, I would imagine that I may have the same feelings about the smell of food at the end of life, that the experience of the pleasure of food, the community of food, that food brings with it, all of that, that is coming to an end as you say. Yeah, and so let's not linger, maybe. Yeah.

NEIL: Next card. The ugly look of people selling things. I find anyone in a sales context to me somehow looks ugly. Maybe it's by virtue of their need, I guess maybe it's my problem with neediness or something.

MONIQUE: Yeah. I think for me, I equate that with the desperation.

NEIL: Yeah. Yeah.

MONIQUE: Right?

NEIL: Yeah.

MONIQUE: I see ... You know what? That's also something I've been thinking about a lot because folks I know who are writers and performers all of our gigs have been canceled, right? All the book tours, all the readings and all that, so it's all gone online on Zoom and so on. Talk about desperation. I mean, we are at the height, we are at peak desperation. I say this because the paperback edition of The Sweetest Fruits is coming out at the end of June. I'm going to be that desperate author.

MONIQUE: I don't know if I could do it, Neil. I really don't. I mean, so what's the alternative? You just sit at home and hope for the best with Amazon? I mean, that seems absurd, but again, I really don't know if I could do it.

NEIL: I hear you. What keeps you going?

MONIQUE: I feel the pause is very long here on my part. I mean, this question takes on such weight now, right?

NEIL: Yeah.

MONIQUE: I think about this morning, waking up and not wanting to get out of bed, what got me up. Well, an answer certainly is knowing that we would have this conversation. Yeah.

NEIL: That makes me so happy.

MONIQUE: Yeah. I suppose it's looking forward to the interactions that I will have with people that keeps me going. I mean, people that I choose to be with and to know. Yeah. I think that's my response.

NEIL: I love it. I love it and it makes me happy to figure in your response. Then, the last question is, when social distancing is over, what are you looking forward to?

MONIQUE: Again, I think it would have to go back to something as lovely as sitting around a table with friends and having a dinner party.

NEIL: Decadent.

MONIQUE: Yeah.

NEIL: Risky.

MONIQUE: Risky. Right. I have to say that I qualify that looking forward to a meal as being a dinner party, as opposed to going out for a meal with friends because I actually don't miss restaurants at all the way that they're configured now.

NEIL: Me neither.

MONIQUE: Yeah.

NEIL: I mean, this is really telling me and I wonder how much is it going to shape behavior? I always had the inkling like, "Wait, I don't feel about restaurants that other people seem to." It's just utterly confirmed during this time. I am not fucking missing restaurants.

MONIQUE: [crosstalk 00:28:58].

NEIL: Are you talking though about you're not looking forward to them given that they have that social distancing or just generally your feeling about restaurants?

MONIQUE: Generally. Generally, because New York is so full of places to sit down and have a grand meal, simple meal but it's so rare that a place is truly hospitable. You know?

NEIL: Yes. Yes.

MONIQUE: Right?

NEIL: Yeah.

MONIQUE: Yeah.

NEIL: Totally. Well, on that note of hospitality, Monique Truong, thank you for that hospitableness of being on SHE'S A TALKER, even though I feel like, I guess I was hosting you, but in any case, I appreciate it so much.

MONIQUE: Thank you so much for having me on, Neil.

NEIL: Cheers.

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 mouth. NEIL: Right. CASSIE: She's happy. NEIL: God. CASSIE: It reminds me of when people are like, thank you in advance. NEIL: That's so hostile. That's so hostile. CASSIE: But it's a very hostile statement, but it also in a way speaks to something true, which is that we in polite society have to conduct ourselves in such a way as if we are already grateful for the promise of goodness to come. NEIL: We've really changed the way I think about thanks in advance. CASSIE: Oh yes. NEIL: I guess the question is then, okay, thanks in advance, but what happens if the person you're thanking in advance doesn't do the thing or whatever that you're thanking them in advance for. Does the thanks still hold? CASSIE: Yeah. I think that's where I think sometimes we talk about, ooh, the ultimate zen, like your ability to be, oh, this word is so loaded, but be grateful even when you do not get the outcome you hoped for. I actually think that maybe the best version of gratefulness is how do I hold space for myself to be okay even when things don't turn out how I wanted them to turn out? To not to be okay right then, but to eventually be okay. NEIL: Right. Yeah. It's dispositional or it's a chosen relationship to something. Is that right? CASSIE: Yeah. A chosen relationship and not everyone has to make that choice. I think that's the argument, right? That maybe we're forcing everyone to try to have that disposition and not everyone's going to have it and that's okay. NEIL: Yeah, exactly. Oh, my God. All right. Next card. I don't like when someone pantomimes putting a gun to their head and pulling the trigger. I notice it's usually done by someone experiencing or describing something as annoying, that it's actually a privilege to experience. I have a relative who will be unnamed, who often will do that about a kind of domestic issue that they're dealing with, that actually they're secretly happy to be dealing with. CASSIE: I feel like it may be, I could be wrong, I'm making this up. But it could have originated as a slapstick gesture that was very purposefully an exaggeration. And that's why it was funny, because obviously you wouldn't shoot yourself in the head for this reason. NEIL: Right. CASSIE: Maybe you would, but the common thinking would be that you wouldn't, and now maybe the affect has changed. NEIL: Yes. Yes. It used to be ironic, I guess would it be? It used to be the mismatch between the thing and the gesture was what made it funny. And now, what makes it not funny is the mismatch between the thing and the gesture. CASSIE: Yeah. Yes. It's gotten too on the nose, which I think is so true for a lot of gestures, lot of affect has become ... Even the affect of I don't have to wear a mask and people in the grocery store yelling. I think in a way it comes from that, because it's kind of like, well, you better kill me first. NEIL: Right. Exactly. CASSIE: You know, before I ... But the thing that they're so angry about, it doesn't really matter? And they're kind of deriving glee out of all of this. NEIL: Absolutely. It is a way to have, that whole mass thing, is such a way to have outsized impact. CASSIE: It's a built narrative. It's an imagined narrative. And I think, yeah, like the shooting yourself in the head pantomime has weirdly gotten subsumed into people's own little stories, rather than like a way of entertaining other people. NEIL: Yeah. It speaks of a type of feeling of being put upon, maybe. Is that part of it? CASSIE: Yeah. Right, right. Or, if someone's nagging you and you pantomime shooting yourself in the head, or whatever. NEIL: It still has a little bit of the trace of that original irony, you know what I mean? But it really, it's flipped, or the balance has flipped, so that we really should be identifying with you for how frustrated you are because you have to whatever, be on a conference call about whatever, that you're lucky to have a job about or something. CASSIE: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, I think that's been a big conversation across different issues that have come up in the last few years on the internet and elsewhere. Which is to say who gets to complain and to what degree? And obviously there's no straight answer, but I think there has been more criticism about whose grievances get projected the loudest, or historically have been. And how they've been positioned and taken seriously, whereas other people's haven't. A lot of the things I write about are ultimately about that, and how for some reason, the people who have maybe had dominance in those areas, somehow all of a sudden feel like, oh, I'm the victim in this, and my grievances are not being heard, and I'm oppressed. And it's really alarming. It's just like, what? NEIL: Right. CASSIE: Why do you think this. NEIL: Right. Right, and actually it does, I would think, provide a conduit through which you could feel empathy. You could actually, I think, step back from that feeling and think like, okay, I am genuinely feeling not heard. That's my subjective experience. Okay. That's unassailable. Then, maybe you might want to look at why this feels like you're not being heard. But then you could indeed then think like, well, what does not feeling heard feel like? Who has been heard? It seems like that could be a gateway drug to a type of useful transformation, I think. CASSIE: You would hope. And I think for some people it is. But, unfortunately, for many people it really isn't. I think it's also because whether it's the way that we grew up and we were taught about feelings, a lot of people, you learn that when you feel bad, then it's good to blame someone. NEIL: Yes. Yeah. CASSIE: It's not good to reflect and look around. And maybe in a way, look to your own behavior in the past. Yeah, there's just not a great template for most people, for how to deal with those feelings. NEIL: This doesn't apply here around in the political context about who's heard, who's not heard, but then there is the kind of existential scenario of there's no one to blame. And that's a tough one for me. I have a card that I've talked about in the past which is, whenever I stub my toe, I look for someone to blame. I guess, because if there's no one to blame, then it's like, I don't know. That's a much scarier world to live in, which is actually the world. CASSIE: Yeah. Yeah, and I think I have probably the stubbed toe problem all the time. I'm embarrassed, or I'm hurt, and I'm just like, this is somebody's fault. NEIL: Exactly. Exactly. Next card. Thinking about all the bad theater that's going to be made about Corona. CASSIE: I'm glad I'm not a theater reviewer, but I'm sure there'll be many a TV show and movie made. NEIL: But maybe not as egregious as how it will manifest itself in theater. CASSIE: Yeah. Theater does have a way of taking things a certain place that they never needed to be taken. NEIL: [inaudible 00:23:26]. CASSIE: Yeah. Well, the opportunism that will erupt if it hasn't already. I think to be optimistic or to be kind of silver lining about it, I think there has been some good reflection that's taken artistic form. And people, who are led by their curiosity rather than their need to make things, who've made things. And that those have been good. But yeah, there's certainly going to be people who are like, all right, I got to make something out of nothing in the time of COVID. Here's my show. NEIL: Right. CASSIE: And I wish those people the best. I really do. NEIL: Yes. Thanks. And thanks in advance. I say COVID, but also there are the uprisings around racial justice, which I don't know in a certain way, maybe are not as available to the people. But I am not thinking about the bad art or theater that could arise from that. CASSIE: Yeah. NEIL: I somehow don't imagine it. CASSIE: Yeah. I see what you're saying actually, which is to say that the people who I think would have the courage to make theater about this, for the most part, at least that I'm aware of, even if I didn't love it, would probably actually do something that wasn't egregious. But, maybe I'm naive. NEIL: Yeah. Yeah. CASSIE: That did happen with Black Lives Matter. I felt like there were films that were made that I just thought were just completely ridiculous, that were made in the years following. NEIL: Is there an example? I can't think of, and maybe this is just me not going to movies a lot, but I can't think of any movies that addressed or obliquely engaged with Black Lives Matter. CASSIE: I wrote a piece about Queen & Slim earlier this year, it was very disparaging of the film. NEIL: Oh, uh-huh (affirmative). I didn't read it. CASSIE: And some people were very mad at me for going in on the film in that way, even though I think quite a few people agreed that it wasn't good. My feeling was that the film ... I'm not going to make any claims about the intentions. From what I've read in the interviews, and I think it came probably from a very earnest place, I don't really know what's in these people's hearts and minds. But the effect of the film to me felt like a kind of a stylization of Black Lives Matter that was ultimately shallow, that was hollow. And, that there's a major risk run there when there's an economy being made of these issues. It's hard if you're like, okay, if people are only going to hire black filmmakers and writers to write about these issues, and it's much harder to get hired to write about anything else, even if that's where your work is, then, okay, how do you criticize this kind of work when it misses the mark? And for me, I was just like, well, I'm just going to criticize it like anything else. Because I'm black, I guess this work is made for me, but to other people. So, I'm going to be honest about how I feel about it. But yeah, It's funny because I do think there's some very careful treading that's done around certain films, and it's not merely because of the subject. It's also because of who might be making it and how they're positioned in the industry. Do some of these critics writing want to have careers in the arts outside of criticism? And if they're too mean about this thing, will that compromise their ability to get certain opportunities? I think all of that stuff is at play. Maybe that's why it seems like, oh, I haven't seen anything or heard of anything like this. It's because people either won't write about it, or they'll just write something very lukewarm that doesn't really say anything one way or another. NEIL: Right. Yeah. Props to you for, I was going to say, for that courageousness. Although I feel like that's another word like grateful. Courageous and generous. CASSIE: Well, I laugh because I don't think it's courageous. I think people who know me would say that the reason I don't have fear is because I don't value what I would get out of not saying anything. So to me, there's not really a dilemma. I wasn't like, ooh, should I publish this? Will people even mad at me? I was like, okay, well. I'm not ambitious in that way. I'm sure there are other ways in which I'm ambitious, but it's not in that particular way. NEIL: I love it. What is a bad X you'd take over a good Y? CASSIE: Oh. Okay. This is a good question. I would take a bad Whitney Houston song over a good Taylor Swift song. Is that too easy? NEIL: It's pretty easy I'm going to say. But that's okay. CASSIE: I'm trying to think deep. NEIL: Yeah. CASSIE: But, I guess my point is that I would take a bad song from a nostalgic tradition, over a good song from something that I feel like, yeah, is kind of ubiquitous in a way. I love- NEIL: And contemporary. CASSIE: And contemporary. I love bad stuff that comes from what feels to me like a very, I don't know, something that's kind of disappeared because everything is so crafted now. Everything is so branded. So even when stuff is good, I'm kind of like, okay. I do have to, and I do listen to new music all the time because of the work I do, but I don't listen to it with the same frequency and allegiance that I listen to stuff maybe made from 2005 and before that. NEIL: Okay. I love that highly specific demarcation point. CASSIE: I don't know. I might have to amend it in the post. NEIL: Okay. The question is, what are you looking forward to when all this is over, but I'm not really sure what the all this is anymore. CASSIE: Well, on a very simple level, I can't wait to see my family. My parents, I really miss, and my sisters. And I look forward to, hopefully, I guess more instances in our society of people being proactive to take care of each other, rather than waiting until when things go wrong. But I don't know if that's actually something that will happen. NEIL: Right. CASSIE: It's a hope. NEIL: Why would it happen? Why would it happen? CASSIE: Well, because I think that the vulnerability of this time, for not everyone, but for a lot of people has meant that they've had to become more engaged. Whether it's with their own family members and friends or wider communities, that they've had to be more attentive and more aware of things going on around them that maybe don't necessarily directly affect them. But I also think that people really struggle to do this and fail to do this in many ways. So I hope that there's learning there, and change that happens as a result. But also it's very possible that that really won't happen. So, we'll see. NEIL: On that note, Cassie, thank you so much for being on SHE'S A TALKER. CASSIE: Thank you, Neil. This was a real pleasure, and a very welcome break from my day.

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 also because it’s beautiful! NEIL: Oh absolutely. ISAAC: It’s beautiful. But, by the way, you know, there've been times where I go like, “Oh, wouldn't it be great if this was naked?” You know? And, you know, it wouldn’t because then it's not about anything but the bodies, you know what I mean? Like, yes it’s all about the body, but it's not just about-— it's not only about a body. I rarely like naked dancing. There was one show I saw when I was a kid that I loved that was, oh, what's her name? It was Garden of Earthly Delights. That wonderful choreographer I can't remember. But they were all naked and I loved it. It was a great show. Cause it was set in the Garden of Earthly Delights! But yeah, I don't love nudity on stage. I never think it really has a place except to shock people, you know? NEIL: Mhm. But your talking makes me realize that something about— in a way it's about abstraction. You know, the bodysuit creates almost an abstraction of the body. Is that it? So you're not getting, like, balls and cock and ass and tits or et cetera, but you are— ISAAC: Yeah, maybe so! To me, the figurative is stronger than the literal. I don't know. I always feel like it's kind of a let down when you see someone without their clothes. NEIL: Absolutely. ISAAC: And I don't think it's an abstraction of a body. I think it's a kind of leveling of the body, and it's the best way to see the body. Sometimes I think the only great costume is a leotard. And the more I work as a costume designer, which I don't really do that much, I work with Mark Morris. Still, it's really interesting to me because we're really, really close friends. We're best friends. So it's really interesting for me to do that. I always love rehearsal clothes better than any costume you could possibly come up with anymore. It makes me focus better. Does that make sense? NEIL: Did you see that recent Cunningham documentary? ISAAC: Yes, I did. NEIL: The balance so many of those costumes struck between— You know, they were often bodysuits, but adorned and decorated. ISAAC: I was actually gonna bring up Merce because, you know, usually it was some kind of a bodysuit. I'm a huge Merce Cunningham fan. I loved that stuff so much growing up. I was there so often and, by the way, not liking it and not understanding it a lot too. It never stopped me from going. I kind of went so as not to understand everything. I didn't want this feeling of understanding when I went to see Merce. I wanted to be immersed in something. Almost like being immersed in your own organs or something. It's like the insides of your own body that you're looking at. NEIL: For me, Merce— I have such a similar relationship to the whole cognitive experience of watching Merce and not getting it. I almost feel like it's about a type of productive spacing out. Like, the ways in which I don't connect or the way it throws me back into my mind by virtue of not getting it is a productive space. Is that part of what you're saying, perhaps? ISAAC: Absolutely! Yes, 100%. One of the things I don't think a lot of choreographers answer is the question: Why the hell are we here? You know what I mean? Why are we here? Right. A lot of choreographers don't do that. Some of the best. And it bugs me. I can't work with them unless they can answer that question. And with Merce, the question doesn't even arise. You are there because you are there. To me, it transcended everything. I mean, that music, that idea about what art is, I mean, to me, it's what it is. And you know, for a long time, my favorite movie was 2001: A Space Odyssey because of the attraction and because of the wonderful coming together of this kind of futuristic look at something and this ancient look at something. Monoliths and space people and ape-men, et cetera. I thought it was this incredible thing. And then I saw it again and you know what? It didn't really age that well. I have to say it didn't stay with me. And if you look at Merce it not only ages well, it's just the most beautiful damn thing. It's as beautiful as anything you will ever look at. NEIL: I so agree. ISAAC: Graham doesn't age that well, does it? It's like a little drama. It looks great out of costume. If you ever get a look at Graham in rehearsal out of the costumes, it looks so beautiful. It looks so beautiful. NEIL: That makes sense because it adds to the melodrama, the costumes. ISAAC: Merce was just doing it all without costuming. You know, you look at some of the pivots, and some of the flexing, and some of the arched back, and that kind of deep, deep plié, and the relevé, everything on the relevé never touched. It's Martha Graham only without costumes and on steroids and an abstract— no subject matter, no story, nothing. You know? NEIL: Yeah. Yeah. Product placements: the kind of psychic work you have to do to get past them. How do you connect to that, if at all? Like when you're watching a TV show or a movie and you see— “Okay, there's that Coke.” ISAAC: Yeah, exactly. Right. You know, I think they're doing a really good job because I notice it less. You know? I notice it less. You know when I notice it? Is on, like, Ellen or something. Like talk shows? NEIL: Interesting. Uh-huh. ISAAC: I notice it a lot. You know, it's like, “Oh, who made that deal to use that spatula on the cooking segment?” You know what I mean? That's when I think about it. In the movie, I don't exactly think about it unless there's a giant product name. I don't know why, but it doesn't bother me. And I feel like they're doing a good job or something. They're doing a good job. NEIL: Well you know they're measuring it. God knows. ISAAC: I know. Or else I'm getting callous and I don't care or something. I don't judge a show by its ability to place a product without notice. But at a talk show, it's like, well, of course it's about— that's all it's about. Why else are you watching the talk show right now? It's to plug someone's new movie and someone's new spatula. Right? That's the only reason to have a talk show. NEIL: Do you have a favorite spatula? ISAAC: I do actually. My favorite spatula is an OXO Good Grips spatula. NEIL: Absolutely know what you're talking about. ISAAC: I love it. NEIL: I know you're into astrology and see, for me, I feel like, as a hardcore four planets in Virgo, that the spatula is the Virgo tool. ISAAC: Yes it is. You know I have a Virgo ascendant. Yes, NEIL: Yes. you're a Libra. Right? If I remember correctly? ISAAC: Yes, a Libra with a Virgo ascendant. NEIL: As a Libra, does your choice in kitchen tools connect at all to your— ISAAC: A few things. A few things that I adore. I have the best ice cream maker in the fucking world, it’s huge! And it makes basically a cup of ice cream, but it does— It's so great. When you turn it on the whole house vibrates and you know this ice cream is being churned. And I loved it so much I got another one for the city. So now I have two of these babies and I feel so rich. I feel like I’m a rich person because I could afford two ice cream makers, you know, like, of such quality. And then the other thing I have, which is so special and I love it: if you go on my Instagram page— speaking of product placement, Isaac Mizrahi! Hello? Hello!— So the thing is that I did this cooking segment. I made this really good pasta with— NEIL: With pork! I saw it! ISAAC: Yeah, exactly. And I have this wonderful sausage smasher. It smashes the sausage really effectively NEIL: Sausage smasher sounds like a euphemism somehow. ISAAC: Doesn't it? It sounds like something you would— like a terrible thing you call someone. NEIL: Okay. Another card is: I always feel the gesture of holding something away from my eyes to read it because I'm not wearing reading glasses somehow looks cool. Like I do it in front of students, but of course, it looks just the opposite, but I still haven't let go of it. ISAAC: No, you mustn't do that. You mustn’t. That ages you so much. You know what else ages you? If you wear glasses and, at some point, you look over your glasses to see something. NEIL: Oh, don’t do it. Don't do it. ISAAC: I remember, I'm not gonna mention any names, but I worked for an older designer at a time and he used to look over his glasses and I was like, “You're so old.” I came close to saying it to his face once. Like, you gotta stop doing that because it's just so aging, you know? Don't do it! Do not do it. NEIL: I'm thinking of your life in cabaret, this other world that you occupy. So how I wrote it down on the card is: The connection between camp and paying the check while performers are still singing at Joe's pub. And I know it's the cafe Carlisle as well. I remember seeing Justin Vivian Bond breaking my heart with a song, but, at the same time, the server is coming or I'm doing that tip. And somehow navigating that mental space between being moved by something on stage, but also having to negotiate this transaction feels like the essence of camp. ISAAC: You know, I honestly, and especially after that exhibit, shall we call it, last year at the Met called Camp, I don't know what the hell camp is. I always thought I knew what camp was and I always kind of understood that people associated a certain amount of camp with me because I embrace it. I do love camp but I don't know what it means anymore. You know? NEIL: Yeah. ISAAC: And so all I can say to you is I would never associate the word camp with the confluence of those two things happening at once. Like, you know, on stage singing a heartbreaking song with the fries coming and paying a bill. That's not, to me, campy. To me, that's ironic. And it doesn't detract because that's the understanding that you have as a performer in a nightclub. That’s the understanding that you have. The irony kind of adds to it. It makes it better in a certain way because all artists are there to be appreciated. Right? So if this person came and is sitting there and the agreement is that he can order food and he can pay his bills while you're doing what you're doing, then I say, “Bring it, bring it, bring it on.” I mean that. I never— I don't flinch when that happens because I think, you know, I'll tell you this one thing: I used to kind of be friends with Azzedine Alaïa a little bit, a little bit. Like, we had dinner three times. I said to him, “Oh, you know, this person was wearing the dress and she was wearing it with this bra—” and he was like, “Darling, I don't care if she's wearing it with a flower pot on her head, she bought the dress, bless her.” You know? And I was like, well, thank you Azzedine. You know, I thought that was a great piece of advice. Like as I age, I get less and less precious about certain things and more and more precious about other things that I didn't. One of them is not people paying attention to me on stage because if they already paid, they can do— I count the sleepers sometimes. I’m not kidding you, it’s like, “Oh she’s sleeping, he's sleeping…” And I'm counting people who are asleep. If you play a big room, you're going to have some sleepers. You know? And I go, “Hurray!” Because darling, some of the best sleep I ever got was at ballet or the opera or the theater. And I love the show, by the way. I come out thinking “That's the best show I ever saw in my life.” A) Because it was great. And B) because I got like a 10-minute nap and it was my favorite thing. NEIL: Yeah. And sleeping is a form of interactivity too. It's like an edit. ISAAC: Exactly. This is true. It's like a way of making it your own, shall we say? NEIL: Yes, yeah. ISAAC: Hooray! I'm glad we got that straight because I mean that. NEIL: I love that idea of the things that you become more precious about and less precious about. Does anything immediately come to mind as something else you've gotten less precious about or more precious about with age? ISAAC: I've got less precious about meet and greets and autograph signing. I’m much less precious about that. And I’ve gotten more precious about, like, what happens to me before a show, because I feel like I have to be in a certain space to do a show. NEIL: Mhm. ISAAC: I'm more precious now. Like I beg people to get me this or not offer me with that. You know, make sure that something is set up properly so that I can make my entrance because I feel like doing that thing that I do at the Carlyle or whatever I'm playing, you have to show up exactly right. Because if you don't show up exactly right they'll eat you alive. You have to really believe that you're not nervous. And in order to do that, you know, there's a lot of preparation. But now afterward, I can meet people, I can do meet and greets, I can sign autographs, I can do all that. In the fashion business, I hated doing meet and greets. I hated— I couldn't do trunk shows. God. I mean, like, really? I have to now sell the shit? Like I designed the shit, I showed the shit, I taught the shit, and now I have to sell the shit. I don't know why, but I feel like this is just on more of a personal level. Like, I guess I just like theater better. I like the theater better than I like fashion. It’s just better— Sorry. I'm old enough. I can judge. It's probably sour grapes. NEIL: Well, that's for you to decide. It doesn't sound like that. That sounds more like what artists do, which is that they have an evolving relationship to the forms that they engage with. Two last questions. What's a bad— I mean, it relates to this “what's precious, what's not anymore.” Fill in the blank for an X and Y: What's a bad X you would take over a good Y? ISAAC: I would take a bad episode of Mary Tyler Moore over, hm, oh, I shouldn't say this, over, a really, really good fashion show. NEIL: Cheers. Cheers. ISAAC: I mean it. I shouldn't say that, but I did. I said it. You got it. But could I tell you something apropos of Mary Tyler Moore? NEIL: Please. Anything. ISAAC: I have been inspired by Mary Tyler Moore before in my life and everyone knows that. So people think that that's all I think about and I live for or whatever, but, I mean, I watched the show when I was a kid a lot, whenever it was on. And then here and there, because it really wasn't one of those shows they reran to ad nauseum, you know? Anyway, I've been here since the middle of March. I swear to you, one of the first things I started doing was watching that show every single night. I watched like two or three episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore show starting from season one. By the way, it’s seven seasons of literally like 24 shows or 26 shows. So it's like 175 shows. NEIL: Wow. ISAAC: It is the most brilliant, heartbreaking, beautiful shit in the world. The writing is so unbelievable. The grasp on, like, the quality of comedy, but it's not really— I mean, comedy, yes, but it's so melancholy and it's so— it's like Peanuts, but adult Peanuts. You know, like, Charlie Brown or whatever. They're all kind of hapless and just, they're all bordering on depressed, and they're all so fucked up, and, like, so three dimensional, and they deliver you three jokes on every page. I mean, it is unbelievable. That's been getting me through. I watch whatever I'm supposed to watch on Netflix or whatever. You know, I get through all that, and then I put on Mary Tyler Moore right before I'm going to go to bed and I just watch the two or three episodes and I eat ice cream while I'm doing that. NEIL: Heaven. ISAAC: It’s heaven. Ice cream and the Mary Tyler Moore show, darling. I'm serious. NEIL: Finally: What's something you're looking forward to when this is over? ISAAC: Here's what I'm really looking forward to: David Hallberg or any male dancer in tights. Like, seeing that on stage. That's what I'm looking for. NEIL: I love it. May you have it soon. On that note, Isaac Mizrahi, thank you so much for being on She's A Talker.

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 like, “On one side of this card, tell me a job that you want based on your experience here. And then on the other side, tell me a job that you would love to have if money were no object or job security were no object?” And it’s like stockbroker, magician. The world of the jobs they want is the world we all want to live in. It’s like, runs a dog farm, is a chef, is a magician. And the really problematic ones are the ones that are stockbroker, stockbroker.

MIKE: I think in my most compassionate sense, I want to be like, for kids who are really freaking out, but really good students just be like, “This is great, it wasn’t awesome. There’s a lot more in the world that you should be thinking about besides this class. Go call your mom, go be with your family, go do something that’s about your life that’s worth living because you’re getting lost in the illusion of mastery.”

NEIL: Professor Dimpfl, what’s my grade?

MIKE: Yeah, literally at the end of all that, I’ll give them this whole… I will put on my NEIL: shaman cloak, I will go for a walk around Duke’s campus and I’m trying to share some… I’m always trying to get all my aphorisms in check and at the end they’re like, “But do I still have an A minus?”

NEIL: Okay, those people who you think are going to eventually feel embarrassed for themselves, but never do.

MIKE: I feel like they’re from a more perfected future. People who are never embarrassed, I feel like they just are doing it better, right? Their inability to feel shame is in some ways a rejection of our worst selves, right? Shame is a wasted emotion, it’s not even they’re proud, it’s post embarrassment. Not being able to feel embarrassment is not about not being ashamed, it’s just being beyond embarrassment. If we could only live in that world, think about how forgiving you would be about being wrong, if being embarrassed wasn’t a part of being wrong.

NEIL: So where does Donald Trump fit in that? Sorry to do that but…

MIKE: Donald Trump is from the post embarrassed future, at his best self. There’s some childhood version of Donald Trump that would be able to exist in the post embarrassed future. And in a tragic way, he was just corrupted in the most horrible way by his life and turned into this horrible… He is his own portrait of Dorian Gray, there was some switch that happened. He walked through the mirror, in the mansion early on and that was it. It’s actually Ronald Trump that we wanted to be living with and Donald was the one that we got. But the ethos there, I think isn’t wrong. The content is horrible and hideous, but the idea that you would live in a world where your mistakes, aren’t the thing that define you is a world beyond embarrassment.

NEIL: This episode is going to be called post embarrassment, I think.

MIKE: I hope for all of us it is, I want that… Because shame is such a heavy, historical emotion. I don’t know if you read, I always want to call it The Velvet Rope, but that’s the Janet Jackson album, The Velvet Rage.

NEIL: No, I never did.

MIKE: The Velvet Rage is some queen wrote a book about how, it’s problematic in a number of ways, but the overarching theme is that gaze of a certain era learn shame before they have a word for it. And it just festers inside of them and creates all this anger and frustration and all these problems later on in life, the closet and all that stuff. And I think just in general, we govern ourselves so much through shame. Instagram culture is shaming. Facebook culture is all about shame. Mastery is about shame. Our actual inability to deal with the future, and the inevitability of death is about being ashamed that we’re not going to be living a life that’s rich enough to justify our death. I think that there’s a lot tied up in that experience.

MIKE: And to be looking at someone who’s beyond embarrassment. I mean, I think about the people that I was like, “Gosh, I hope they feel embarrassed about that.” And now in retrospect, I just admire them all. I’m just like, “God, you just don’t care that everybody hates that joke. You just don’t care.” And your joie de vivre is unassailable and it’s a like a Teflon joie de vivre, what a joy.

NEIL: Okay, next card. When someone mentions shit while you’re eating.

MIKE: Oh my God… Okay, first of all, it just reads as when you mention shit, because I am this person. I still get toilet news from people that I’ve encountered across the globe, all the time.

NEIL: Could you share for the audience, your professional relationship to shit?

MIKE: My professional relationship to shit, I am not only a person who shits, like all of your audience, but I wrote a master’s thesis, I would like to say that it’s about toilet feelings. I interviewed a bunch of people who had been forced by the city of Syracuse to install composting toilets in their lake side cabins, as a means of protecting what was an unfiltered watershed. So they couldn’t install septic systems. They had this kind of high functioning, but archaic system where they all had outhouses, and instead of shitting just into a hole, they would shit into buckets. And then every week the city would come around on a shit boat and collect all of their buckets of shit and take them away from them.

MIKE: A job that I think about a lot, just when your job is to, in the hot summer sun, drive around on a beautiful, pristine lake with a boat full of buckets full of shit. That boat is post embarrassment, that boat is living a post embarrassment life. We have nothing on that boat.

MIKE: Anyway, so I wrote this master’s thesis and I interviewed all these households and it was a lot of older folks, people who have had these cabins for a long time and a lot of retired folks. And I’ll tell you what, if it’s summer and you’re going to visit an old retired couple and you actually want to talk to them about their shitting, they’re there for that. They are really there for that. In some ways, the knowledge of their own death to get back to it, the fact that they’re like, “It’s coming.” They’re like, “There’s no reason to hide.” They’re all trying to, for better or for worse, are trying to deal with these strange toilets that don’t flush and encountering them with their bodies that sometimes don’t work with them.

MIKE: So this one couple, the wife was always on antibiotics and you can’t use a composting toilet when you’re on antibiotics because it kills the bacteria in the shit that actually digests the toilet, so it just becomes a kind of cesspool, kind of anaerobic nonsense. And so they had two toilets, one, one of my favorite, the macerating toilet, which is a toilet that has a food processor on the back that you turn it on and it makes this kind of horrible grinding noise, and it turns your poop into kind of a poo shake. And the other was this incinerating toilet, and it has a little jet engine in it and you poop and then this jet engine thing turns on and just burns your shit to ash, it’s like an outer space thing. I mean, obviously I had to use all of them, so it’s this crazy noise of like, “…” It’s like being in an airplane.

MIKE: And so to be honest, I did it for two reasons. One was how we structure our relationship to the nature in our households is a real problem, right? We have a lot of weird ideas about what is inside and outside. I think that’s the kernel of truth behind it, if I were to be my post embarrassed self. But I think the other is that I just was so aware of the absurdity of grad school at a certain point that I was like, “I’m just going to write my stupid master’s thesis about people shitting.” So that I get to go to conferences and give presentations, which are like, “Here are things that people said about their own shit.” On panels of academics who were like, “What is the materiality of the biological other?”

MIKE: All this theory that actually not only makes no sense, but it’s profoundly unethical and has no politics. And is the bread and butter of graduate school theory. All of these things where they’re like, “What is the boundary of the human? And we cannot tell.” And what do you say? It makes no sense.

NEIL: I was just reading Jacques Derrida on the animal, he’s talking about the violence done on the animal. And someone asked him, “Are you a vegetarian?” And he was like, “I’m a vegetarian in my soul.” It’s like, “Fuck you.” I’m sure the suffering pig is so happy that you’re a vegetarian in your soul.

MIKE: So happy to hear that, like in a real zen like moment.

NEIL: Yeah.

MIKE: But the crazy thing about that shit thing is I was at dinner the other weekend with Jackson’s sister’s family and she’s a plastic surgeon. And I just thought about, I’m mentioning shit at the table and maybe people are uncomfortable with that or whatever. And she was like, “Yeah, this…” One of her former clients was run over by a backhoe or something. But she talked about reconstructing one of her breasts and then did this gesture of like, “And then you just kind of stitched up her chest.” And kind of did this putting out a vest of your chest skin kind of gesture. And I had a bite of food in my mouth and I was like… It turned to like ash.

MIKE: On the one hand, it was perhaps the appearance of mime at the dinner table that I was like, “Goddammit, mimes.” I wanted it to seal myself up in my own mime box to not have to hear it. But then I was sort of like, “Wow, props to mime, it’s a powerful medium. Actually, I get it now, you can fake make the wall all you want.”

MIKE: But when you hear someone mentioning shit, are you that person? Or are you someone-

NEIL: I’m not mentioning shit at the table, no.

MIKE: You’re not

NEIL: I think about it all the time, but I know I don’t talk about it at the table. And Jeff, for instance, my husband, Jeff will casually mentioned shit at the table and I’ve never told him in our 12 years of being together…

MIKE: Don’t do that.

NEIL: Yeah, because at that moment, something happens in my mouth. Yeah, where it’s just like, it’s wrong, but yeah.

MIKE: You got to be post embarrassed about it. You got to just be like, “Yep, I’m just chewing future shit right now.”

NEIL: Right, future shit, future shit. I love… Oh, God. Makers spaces and the fetishization of making.

MIKE: I don’t even know what’s that… I just want them to just be like, “Call it a real thing.” Where I understand what’s going on there. Makers spaces, it’s like we work. I find it to be such a twee like… The maker space is just Ren Fair trying to be normal. It’s like Ren Fair without the foam swords. I’m like, “What’s the point of going to Ren Fair if you can’t have a foam sword?” It’s like Ren Fair without the carbs, I guess is what I would say.

NEIL: I think it’s Ren Fair with 3D printers.

MIKE: It’s Ren Fair with 3D printers. Where is the raw craft in that? I feel like 3D printing is the cheating of making.

NEIL: But the flip side of it, first of all, this is going to come back to shit, I just realized. But the flip side of it is the fetishization of making. Why don’t you just make and not tell us about it?

MIKE: I think that there’s something there, the fetishization of making, because we live in embarrassed culture, so we know that we don’t make anything, right?

NEIL: Right.

MIKE: In the system we live in, we don’t make anything, right? You don’t make shit, you maybe make your lunch and that’s the end of it.

NEIL: You exactly make shit. That is what you make.

MIKE: You only make shit, and even that you’re like, “Let’s not talk about it.” The fetishization to me is just all back to the leg, what is missing? I mean, I’ll wear a cutoff overall that’s handmade, for sure. But I don’t need to post it on it in my Etsy account or the hand carved spoons, even though I really love the hand-carved spoons. It was a local spoon maker that I just found that’s in the triangle or whatever, and they make these gorgeous spoons and the fetishization of spoon making is that it’s very hard. People are like, “Oh, it’s a very…” I don’t know if you’ve heard that, but people are like, “If you carve wooden spoons…” It’s some achievement of woodwork to make a spoon. And I always think in my head, spoons have been around for a pretty long time, we’ve known how to scoop a thing for awhile.

NEIL: Well, just the idea that you fetishize it by virtue of its difficulty, that is a…

MIKE: Totally, totally. It’s like endurance performance art, right? Which I love, I’ll tell you this, I have been doing a performance art project with my friend Ginger for a couple of years now. It’s called, Leaving Impossible Things Unattended, it’s a waste project. And we work with plastic… We’ve made this half mile long braid of plastic bag that we roll in unroll in awkward ways. But we went to Miami to the art fair this year, and the piece that we did, it’s physically super, super hard. But watching people say stuff about it there, it’s like the fetishization of how painful it is, becomes the mark of its value.

NEIL: Oh my God, yeah.

MIKE: What I want to be is like, “No, encounter your fetishization of that as the mark of the thing you’re supposed to be thinking about here.” Your fetishization of that is more important to me as a thing that you’re engaging with right now, then anything that we’re doing. What is it about you that you need to see someone bleeding from the cut glass that they’re crawling over to be like, “That’s real.”

NEIL: The thing I wanted to add, to just put a button on the whole question of maker spaces and what are we making, is when I was a kid, my parents would ask me, “Do you need to make?”

MIKE: Oh yeah… Yeah, totally, to take a shit.

NEIL: Right, do you need to make?

MIKE: Yeah, no, I feel like do you need to make is a North Eastern cultural description for taking a shit that is so like… I want to just know the colonial etymology of that, is it the puritanical thing or like… Also, I find, do you need to make to be similar to people who say that they make instead of take pictures, I make pictures, I make photos.

NEIL: Oh, that’s interesting.

MIKE: I’ve heard photographers say I make photos, instead of saying I take pictures.

NEIL: Oh, right, right, I take photos, yeah. I get that.

MIKE: …around shitting in the exact same… it’s like, do you need to make a shit or do you need to take a shit? I mean, why don’t we say, I need to leave a shit because that’s really what’s happening.

NEIL: Okay, let’s end with one last question, which is, what keeps you going?

MIKE: I think the thing that mostly keeps me going is a pretty secure notion that it’s not supposed to be bliss, it’s just supposed to be work. So if you’re ready to work in whatever way, then life is just going to keep unfolding for you moving forward, right? There is a future if you think that life is a struggle. Because that’s a beautiful thing, even though it’s incredibly difficult. And I think that, even though I have a deep, deep concern for the future and I certainly worry about it a great deal, I don’t feel hopeless. I don’t feel like a cynic or a nihilist I guess. I don’t have that energy in me whatsoever because it’s not supposed to be easy.

NEIL: Mike…

MIKE: Neil…

NEIL: This is amazing, thank you so much for being on She’s a Talker.

MIKE: And it’s my absolute pleasure.

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 checkmark. Next card: I feel infantilized by shorts. CAKES: You wanna know what? I think it has to do with the length of the short. I think the higher the short, like, if it's like a hot pant, that doesn't make me feel infantile. That makes me feel like- NEIL: Yes! CAKES: It makes me- it brings a different type of, like, thing to it. But what I will say is shorts, I completely agree. You know, those right above the knee shorts? You know what I really hate too? The combo of a short and a sneaker and a high sock. Oh my God. I can't. NEIL: I know! CAKES: It's very camp counselor. It's very that. NEIL: Started camp counselor and now it's like normcore, whatever, post-normcore, but it's still not working. I could never pull it off. CAKES: I would much rather wear a long shirt than a short and a tee shirt. That's just me. NEIL: Wait, so you're wearing a long shirt... CAKES: With like a sliver of like a denim, like a denim coochie cutter, like a denim short. Something really- I consider myself more of like a damsel in distress denim. Always. NEIL: That makes such perfect sense though. Also about the length, it's kinda paradoxical, because you would think the longer the short, the more it becomes like regular pants so you would feel less kid-like. But actually, maybe it's that the longer the short, the more it starts to approach pants that are too small on you or sometimes the infantile thing. CAKES: Right. It's true! This visual of these- We should just have shorts that we could just, we could just grow. Like, we should be able to do that at this point. NEIL: Next card: the macho-ness of certain artists saying they like tough feedback. I'm not sure how it lives in the music world, but I know in the visual art world, there's this, I noticed this thing about, "Yeah! You know, bring it on!" A type of macho-ness. CAKES: Right. I don't really think that that exists in music. I think it did when music had a standard and when there was a certain level of respectable accolade. Nowadays, the reason why music is so shitty is because there is no bar. There is no standard and there is no self-editing or critiques. You know what I'm saying? So I think we need to bring a little bit more of that harsh criticism back to music to bring the level up a little bit. NEIL: What form would that criticism- how would it be, you know, distributed? Or where would it live? CAKES: First it starts at the home and between your personal circles. Start telling your friends that their music sucks. We could really start at the ground level. If we start there, then everything will trickle up and everything will be better. So tell your friends their music sucks. NEIL: Do you have an approach? Let's say I'm your friend. You love my work generally, but you hate a particular song I just came out with. CAKES: Right. This is, this is definitely like happy hour. This is definitely girlfriend talk. My delivery, the way I would go about it, is it's very like: "What inspired this song?" Like, "What were you thinking? Were you trying something different?" And so you fish at it to kind of get a sense of where they're coming from and if they're not giving you the layup, then you just go forward and be like, "I don't think it's your strongest piece of work." I think that's fair. NEIL: I think starting with a question is brilliant. You ask them the question and they may say, "Well, I'm trying to express X, Y, or Z." And then you can come back and say, "It's not doing the thing that you've just now said you wanted it to do." CAKES: Or the answer, the answer could make you look at it differently. NEIL: Aha! Right. CAKES: And also the truth of the matter is, artists have their favorite things and things that they know are not that good. So you might fish for something and the person may be like, "Yeah, you know what? This is actually not the best that I've done." So you might just get the truth. NEIL: I want to ask a Corona related question. The card just has: Dreams of blow jobs, dreams of masks. Which comes from a personal space for me, which is, you know, I'm ancient and so I came up while, you know, the AIDS crisis was- CAKES: Right. NEIL: Nineties, et cetera. And I remember at the time I would have these dreams of like, I'm in the middle of giving someone a blow job and then I realized, "Oh shit, I've just done this non-safe sex thing." And I noticed lately a recurring dream I'm having is I'm outside and I'm outside without a mask. CAKES: I'm screaming! Equating that same level of exposure, but it's so true. It's so true. NEIL: How are you living with it? CAKES: I- Let me get over this moment first. Hold on. Okay. So. As far as wearing a mask, I don't like doing things that are not necessary or is not doing what people tell me it's supposed to do. So first it was like, "Don't wear a mask" and now it's like "Wear a mask." So at this point I just wear it because I don't have a car and I have to get on public transportation. But your point about the blowjob is just sending me. Let's go to the next card please, because the reoccurring dream... I'm screaming. NEIL: The next card is: Don't make fun of what rappers call themselves without thinking about corporate names like Exxon and Xerox. CAKES: Okay. Tangent, but still on topic... NEIL: I love tangents. CAKES: Right. I named myself Cakes Da Killa because I have a big butt and I'm effeminate and I wanted something that was sweet and campy, right, but I still wanted to have a little edge. So I put Da Killa. Obviously, I had no idea that I would become a touring artist and it would be my main source of income. It was a joke. You get what I'm saying? Now I can't fucking change my name because of all the years of me painting the town red from fucking Bushwick to Berlin. So, I go back and forth with that. Rappers do name themselves some pretty wild things, but you have to do it because you have to go draw attention to yourself. But speaking, me personally, I didn't think I would get attention at all. Like, I wasn't trying to do that. You know what I'm saying? NEIL: Uh huh. CAKES: So the thing about my name is I wanted to change it maybe like two years ago. And I was having really deep conversations with my council of tastemakers and they wouldn't let me do it. Like they would not let me do it. And it was like, I already had the new name picked out. I had the name chain made and it was supposed to be this reinvention, you know, kinda like Prince, you know what I'm saying? And they completely talked me out of it. So I think I go in and out with it. So that was the tangent. Maybe that artist might show herself though in the future. Who knows? Yeah, I don't know. Rappers have funky names, but, definitely, these companies too. They have funky names too. NEIL: Yes to redistribution of wealth. But what about redistribution of shame? CAKES: That's a heavy one. Obviously, yes to redistribution of wealth. Shame... Where was it going? Where's it going? NEIL: I offer this kind of with mixed feelings only in that I think shame is not productive and yet maybe it is productive to the extent that it can push one in a direction. It just seems like a little dose of shame distributed appropriately could be transformative in the culture. I think. CAKES: I feel like understanding and compassion does that more. Because to me, I feel like we're in this generation where shame and guilt are being trickled down and redistributed in these funny ways. Like even today, you know, with Bandcamp who was doing this free promotion, where all the artists who upload their songs, Bandcamp doesn't take a commission. So now it's like, we're in this, it feels like it's Black History Month. All these websites are making all these playlists and all these countdowns of Black artists you should support. Black artists! And I'm like, support these artists because they're Black, but also support them because they're making good music and don't make this a thing where- I was just talking about this online. Like, is it really genuine? If your actions are fueled from guilt does that- you know what I'm saying? NEIL: Yeah. CAKES: If you do it out of guilt or out of shame, it doesn't change the curse of where the thing started from. It just repeats itself, which is what we see time and time again. Where, if you actually fully face it and understand it, then it's no longer a thing. NEIL: Yeah. And also shame, I guess, asks something. Or guilt certainly asks something of the person who you feel guilt in relationship to, I suppose. CAKES: I feel like a lot of people shouldn't feel shame because a lot of people aren't really- they're not really aware of what's going on anyway, or what's being enforced. They haven't been educated about it. They don't see it, they hear about it. So it's like, how could you be ashamed about something that you're just born into like, no, it's not about shame. It's not about guilt. It's about educating yourself. And it's about being honest. And it's about looking in the mirror and being real. You know what I'm saying? NEIL: Yeah. CAKES: I think the majority of it is: I'm going to do this because I'm not like this, or because I'm different. You know what I'm saying? But that's fine. You may feel different or you may act different, but that doesn't take away from the reality of the playing field not being leveled. It's kind of like, in a way, having your cake and eating it too, where it's like you're still benefiting from these things, you know? So it's, it's deeper than, you know, showing up to the Black cookout. You know what I'm saying? It's deeper. NEIL: Well on that note, I want to ask you just these closing questions. Fill in the blank for X and Y. What's a bad X you'd take over a good Y. CAKES: In this age right now, I would take a bad bottle of wine over a good bong. At this age, at this age. NEIL: At your incredibly young age, but I love it. CAKES: At my ripe age. Final answer. NEIL: Yeah. Yes. Okay. Another question is: What keeps you going? CAKES: Myself. Myself is what keeps me going. Definitely. NEIL: How does that work? CAKES: If you think about it, you're going to die and you don't know when you're going to die. How could you live your life, you know, through someone else's filter? It makes no sense. So that's why I was able to come out in the third grade. That's why I was able to start recording music as an openly gay artist before, you know, this was even heard of, why I was able to tour and do what I want to do because this is my life. And I took control of my life very, very young. And I don't see me taking my hands off the wheel anytime soon. If you haven't experienced, like I have, where your mother has you when she's a teenager and you remember going to work with her as a child and witnessing the sacrifices she had to make to keep you taken care of, you just have a different sort of ethic. So it's the reality that no one is ever going to give you anything in life. Nothing is free and you have to work. You know? So it's just that NEIL: Last question. What are you looking forward to when this is all over, "this" being COVID, although you name the "this" at this point. CAKES: Definitely. I want people to have a different type of lust for life. You know, obviously I want people to be healthy and I want this to reform the world and how we look at things. But selfishly, I really want people to have a better appreciation for nightlife. I think people kind of, now that me and my peers are getting older, people are kind of over-read and they don't really appreciate it because of the drinking and the drugging or whatever. But nightlife employs a lot of people in a lot of cities around the world. And I think it does add a certain spice that is essential to life. So I feel like it should be respected from the bartenders to the security, to the DJs, to the promoters. And I really hope after this people are really mindful of that. NEIL: I love it. That's a beautiful place to end it. Cakes, thank you so much for being on She's A Talker. CAKES: Thank you so much. NEIL: Really appreciate it.