She's A Talker

Neil talks about air conditioning and sense memory. His guest, literary scholar Sharon Marcus, imagines a daredevil visit to a perfume shop.

ABOUT THE GUEST Sharon Marcus is editor in chief of Public Books and the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Council of Learned Societies, she is the author of Apartment Stories (University of California Press, 1999), Between Women (Princeton University Press, 2007), and The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton University Press, 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: Okay. So, Sharon, thank you for being on She's A Talker at this fucking crazy time.

SHARON: Thank you for having me, Neil.

NEIL: So, Sharon, if you need to succinctly tell a stranger what it is that you do, what do you say?

SHARON: I try to avoid volunteering what I do because I'm a professor of literature, and when people hear that 97% of them say, "Are you going to correct my grammar?"

NEIL: Oh my God.

SHARON: 2% of them say, "Can you recommend something that I should read?" Or, I once sat next to someone in a plane who launched into a, "What would you say the greatest book ever written was? What would you say the five greatest novels ever written were?" After I, like, just looked at him, and I said, "You seem really quite obsessed with lists and rankings. Why do you think that is?" To his credit, he laughed good-naturedly and said, "It's true. It's true. I am." And then 1% get this like deer in the headlights look and say things like "I wasn't very good at school."

NEIL: What do you say back to that?

SHARON: Well, in this particular case, I was on a date and I said, "Yeah, well, you don't have to be good at school. I do. I'm the one, who's a professor." First and last date, as you can probably guess.

NEIL: Yes. Can I ask you, what are you thinking about today, March 21st?

SHARON: Okay. So I'm just going to be a total fucking pain in the ass and say that the question, "What are you thinking about today?" doesn't actually resonate with me with how I think or how I get through a day. Like, I don't wake up and go, "What am I going to think about today?" Or even find myself thinking, "I'm thinking about blah, blah, blah." Thoughts come in, they go out, I see things, I observe things, but it feels a little more organized maybe than my brain actually is.

NEIL: Oo, I love it. So how could that question be reframed to more?

SHARON: For me?

NEIL: Yeah.

SHARON: "What did you do today?" "What did you do today?"

NEIL: Nah, nevermind.

SHARON: Exactly! And I can tell you it hasn't been very interesting, so.

NEIL: Right, which is different from how it normally is for you, but maybe we'll get to some of that. Alright. Let's go to the cards, shall we?

SHARON: I'm ready! I'm doing some of the moves I learned in my hip hop class to warm up.

NEIL: Great, that's perfect. First card is: How hugging is meant to express intimacy, but it actually articulates the separation between our bodies.

SHARON: So apt! Well, it would be really nice to hug someone right now. So, my first response is it doesn't sound like it's really about separation. Hugging would be so nice, but I think, you know, that speaks to something very profound, which is you can only connect by acknowledging your separateness from someone. If you think you're merged with someone, if you think you're the same person, if you don't take them in as a separate different person, you can't really meet them and bond with them and touch them, even. And that does seem related to what's going on right now, where we have so much difference in how people are responding to the situation. People who are now being really reckless about their ability to be close to other people physically I think are doing so out of a lack of sense of the existence of other people as separate from them.

NEIL: Mhm.

SHARON: They're being very self-absorbed. They think they're the only ones that matter. And so, you know, I think we've all seen the huggers who also are hugging to assert a certain kind of power. Not even just like a power to touch you in a way that might not be fully consensual, but a power to have their interest in feeling intimate with you and feeling connected be dominant. You know, there's like that etiquette of: Do you go in for the hug, but then wait enough that the person can pull back without it being a big deal? Do you actually say, "Can I hug you?" Or, you know, how do you handle that? And that's all about recognizing the separateness. So I think implicit in that card is the sense that our separateness is sort of sad and that the hug is not aware of the sadness of our alienation from each other. But I would turn that around and say if we can just remember we're connected, but we're separate, this society thing can work.

NEIL: So what you're saying in part is that there is something paradoxical: That those people who go ahead and hug right now, in a way, don't recognize a type of connection. Is that right?

SHARON: They're just seeing other people as extensions of themselves. But that said, I think I would also say that it's okay that we're separate from each other and the hug doesn't overcome that. We're hugging because we're separate from each other and so we want to feel closer. I don't think that the total merger that maybe is implied by the perfect hug is really that desirable or really that merged.

What I'm saying is, to really connect with other people and bond with them you have to respect their separateness from you and your separateness from them.

NEIL: Beautiful. Next card: The ambiguity of the word helpless. "I feel helpless" is usually said in reference to, "I can't help someone."

SHARON: Right.

NEIL: And I feel helpless can also mean "No one's helping me."

SHARON: "And I need help."

NEIL: Mhm.

SHARON: "I need help so desperately because I can't help myself." I'm just trying to think it, how, if those are really different. I mean, I hate the word helpless because nobody's really helpless.

Everyone can always do something to help someone else. And when someone says, "I feel helpless in this situation," I think they're often saying that instead of saying "What can I do to help you?"

NEIL: Right. Right. Very true.

SHARON: One of the things that's been interesting and challenging for me about this situation — And I think everybody has their own particular circumstances that you can't help but bring to a pandemic and quarantine — is that my wife of 20 years died a year and a month ago of cancer. And she was basically dying of cancer for a year and a half before that happened. And she noticed that the people who really wanted to help her would either say, "What can I do to help you?" Or, even more powerfully, would say, "What can I do to help you? I was thinking I could…" and then they would say some very specific things. They wouldn't insist on doing those specific things, but they would follow up a general offer of help with ideas that they had come up with that they weren't imposing on her, but it was a demonstration of good faith.

And it was also definitely the case that there were people who not only demonstrated their helplessness by being pretty much missing in action but people who would go the extra mile and articulate, "I feel helpless," "I don't know what to do," "I wish there was something I can do for you." It's really annoying. I think in this current situation, it's probably pretty similar. I think people are saying, "Oh, I feel helpless, I don't know what I can do to help other people." You know, it's like a very quick Google search away.

It is challenging to figure out how to help other people when you can't leave the house and when the biggest thing you can do to help people is not leave the house. Because we're used to thinking of health as taking very concrete action and being very direct and present and, also, we like our help to be acknowledged and, offering help at a distance, it's harder to get acknowledgment for that. But there's plenty of things we can all do to help right now, the Internet's full of them: food banks that we can donate to, artists groups that are being set up to help support people who are being very quickly and harshly put out of work. So, you know, it seems like a disingenuous word to me, "helpless."

NEIL: Mhm.

SHARON: Whether applied to the help when gives others or the fact that one needs help oneself. Because nobody's — if you're talking, you're not that helpless in terms of your ability to take care of yourself. If you're breathing and you're talking, you could probably, instead of saying, "I feel helpless," again, just make a more specific request. Like, "I could really use help with X." But then again, I'm not a very empathetic person towards people who would use the phrase "I feel helpless." So I feel, I should just say that if you're feeling helpless, stay away from me, go find somebody else, which I think most helpless people figured out a long time ago.

NEIL: But you are a very empathetic person, just not around that issue.

SHARON: Yeah. The people in my circle who might apply that word to themselves, they don't usually do it in my presence.

NEIL: Next card: Remembering when headphones first dared to go inside the ear.

SHARON: I just love headphones. I think I recognize the value of the ones that fit in your ear because then you can wear a hat if it's cold out, but they really, really hurt my ear. So I have yet to go that route. I like the big kind that sit over your ear and kind of pillow your ear, which also serve the secondary function of sunblock so that the sun can't get on your ears, which are actually really susceptible to skin cancers, because they're so exposed and they stick out and the skin of your ear is quite thin. So, public service announcement: when you put on sunblock, make sure to cover your ears.

NEIL: You know, I knew that! You know what I didn't know, is to cover your neck! And I'm horrified to learn that all these years I've been a dedicated sunscreen-wearer every single day, but I haven't been putting it on my neck. And I am getting a little bit of a, you know, kind of waddle or something. I don't know what the word is.

SHARON: It's never too late to start.

NEIL: Right. That's true. What book was I reading where the answer was "the best time to do it is yesterday?"

SHARON: Mm, there is a message for our times.

NEIL: Oh, it was in this book, The Overstory, which I'm obsessed with. Have you read it? By Richard Powers?

SHARON: Not yet. Are you enjoying it?

NEIL: I finished it. I loved it. It's not imperfect, unlike all that other perfect art out there, but, one of the characters says "The best time to plant a tree is always 20 years ago. But planting it today is better than planting it tomorrow" or something like that. And that's a kind of a recurring — that returns in the book.

SHARON: It's true for some things. For other things it's good to wait and sleep on it and maybe don't do it, you know? Like that text you were going to send or that purchase you were going to make.

NEIL: Next card: Perfect Sleeper seems like a counterproductive name for a mattress. Stressfully setting the bar too high. Like what about the, just like, Great Sleeper? I think Perfect Sleeper stresses me out.

SHARON: As far as I'm concerned, if I'm asleep at all, that's perfect. I don't know what "perfect" sleep would be. It's like a pleonasm, a redundancy. Sleeping is perfect. If I can fall asleep and stay asleep for more than 10 minutes, perfection.

NEIL: Next card: Cathedrals as places that are both inside and outside. My love of them connects to my childhood wish never to leave my home; to be able to drive my house. So when I was a kid, I was always drawing a version of my house, the house that I grew up in, in Hicksville, New York originally, and I would put a turret on it that had a steering wheel so I could drive the house. And it was so comforting. I loved it. And when I go into a cathedral, I kind of get that feeling, how, without a doubt, it's an indoor space, but there is some quality of the outdoor to it.

SHARON: Because they're so vast and soaring?

NEIL: Yes.

SHARON: Kind of like an Airstream?

NEIL: Yeah. Yeah, I did love — Jeff's parents for a while had an RV. And I loved riding around in that.

SHARON: Hm, I do feel comforted and secure inside pretty much any dwelling that is mine, even if it's a very small apartment. But I also remember, that also reminds me of the show Romper Room when I was a kid. Do you remember Romper Room?

NEIL: Oh, yes. Miss Something. Miss Pat? Or Miss…

SHARON: Miss Something. I don't know. I really liked her. I feel like I can almost picture her and she would do a thing where she would have kids put boxes around them and pretend they were driving. So there is something I guess, about that rectangular — being contained within a rectangle that is house and car.

NEIL: See, for me it was less, at the time, about a pleasure of driving. The predominant thing was not wanting to leave the house.

SHARON: Mhm.

NEIL: But the idea of being able to move through space while staying inside.

SHARON: Without ever leaving your house.

NEIL: Yeah.

SHARON: So it wasn't so much about making your car into a home. It was about being able to make your home into a vehicle so you'd never have to leave.

NEIL: Exactly.

SHARON: Interesting. Interesting. Well, we're all going to get to have some version of that in the coming weeks and months, because we're leaving our homes less than we ever have. I think it's, I mean, this is certainly more true for people in a city. I mean, I think that people who are living in less populated, less densely populated, places are still getting in their cars and, for example, going to pick up food in a parking lot, rather than going inside the store to pick up the food. But, you know, most people who live in New York don't have cars. And what we're having to learn how to do is be inside, but learn to project ourselves out imaginatively.

Or, by talking to people who are located somewhere else I — One thing that's been really striking to me, it was just not exactly the same thing as driving your house, but it may be something like flying your computer. So, I stopped going out significantly on March 7th and a few days later, something kicked in where distance really stopped mattering and, in some ways, time did too. That will change because we're all going to have to get more on schedules to stay sane, I think. But right now it feels reasonable and healthy to just accept that we've been very disrupted and it's going to take us a little while to get into a routine. And so I thought, well, "Let me take advantage of this and see if I can speak to my friends who are, you know, in some cases, in such different parts of the world that I could only figure out what time it is, where they are if I look it up. I have to look it up every single time. Like, I can never remember if Australia is a day before, a day later, like, what's going on? So, you know, all of a sudden I really do feel like my computer is functioning for me the way a plane ride used to. So maybe, maybe I have figured out a way to drive my house metaphorically, virtually.

NEIL: Next card: The primal feeling of eating soup; of this liquid from the outside becoming part of the inside.

SHARON: So interesting that you bring up soup because I keep going back and forth on whether I should get a blender, which is the primary way I make soup. I feel like if you want a soup, it should just be liquid you bring up in the spoon. It can be, you know, thick, it can have texture, but if it's going to be chunky just go ahead and make a stew. So I really need a blender if I'm going to make soup. That's my "of the moment" response. But you're actually asking a more — Actually a lot of your questions have been about inside and outside and, you know, are we connected? Are we separate? And I guess the soup one is one as well, but I don't know if it's any different from any other food.

I mean, I think about that. I think about how we take a lot. Like, we take food in, we incorporate it into our bodies. Even the stuff that we excrete, like, I don't know about you, but I feel like my excretions are part of my body even though I let them go. Just like I feel like my fingernails are part of my body, even though I trim them. And yeah. To me, food really feels just like it's inside us. It doesn't feel separate. Read the card again. Read that card again, Neil.

NEIL: The primal feeling of eating soup; of this liquid from the outside becoming part of the inside. I guess maybe that comes, also, I think I had read, you know, maybe the fact that we all kind of originated as cells in this kind of primordial soup. I don't know what it is. Or that there's something soupy about, I don't know, something about this. Something from the outside that matches a little bit. Something about what it's like inside. I don't know what it is.

SHARON: I think it's that the ideal temperature of soup is very close to our body temperature. I think you don't want your soup to be quite as hot as maybe some other hot foods. And so it does feel like it's sort of copacetic with us.

NEIL: I had another thought just as you were talking: I think it's also that soup is this — like, coffee is a single note and I'm sure that there are tons of compounds in it.

SHARON: Tell that to the people writing tasting notes on coffee. "Oranges, shoe leather, tobacco, bergamot, bubble gum." But okay. I'll go with you on that. I only smell one thing when I smell coffee. So, you know, I'm with you.

NEIL: Yes. And I hear them, but with soup, at least it's — Okay. What is coffee made of? It's made of coffee. Let's put it that way.

SHARON: Yes.

NEIL: Okay. So what is soup made of? It's made of carrots. It's made of ingredients that have come together in this thing. Maybe it's that I'm saying we're like soup. We're like soup in a package.

SHARON: Yes. Yeah. We are. We're just this bag of organs and bones and muscle and blood, and it's all supposed to be working together until it isn't. And then you're drowning in your own bodily fluids internally because your immune system overreacted to a virus.

NEIL: Next card: Is there a fetish/porn structured around the dutiful sex couples that are having difficulty conceiving have?

SHARON: There's a fetish for everything. There's gotta be a fetish for conception sex. Sure. I don't know whose it would be, but when you've been alive, as long as I have, I mean, I think you just have to accept that there's a fetish for everything.

NEIL: You just named it conception sex, but there's a hitch which is it's, like, infertile conception sex. In other words, these are people who are having sex, it's not happening, and you have to be kind of really assiduous. Is that the word?

SHARON: Yeah, I understand what you're saying. My point is more global, which is: is there any sexual situation that is not susceptible to being fetishized? But, you know, in general, people fetishize pleasures they don't feel comfortable with. So the real question is, is anyone getting pleasure out of… Also, I don't think it would be the people who actually had that sex who would fetishize it. It would be people imagining it who probably had never gone through it who would fetishize it. On another note, I can't believe we've gone this far and not talked about my cat.

NEIL: I have a segue, a card segue if you want.

SHARON: Okay, yes, yes.

NEIL: Okay: Changing the kitty litter makes me think about the possibility of redemption.

SHARON: I don't know about redemptive, but a fresh start. I guess that's what some people's idea of redemption is, "My sins will be redeemed and I will have a blank slate and be able to start again." I'm not Christian so I don't really think that way.

NEIL: That's what it brings out for me. Especially scooping. It's just like, okay. But cleaning the whole thing, it just feels, like, "Okay, this is possible. This is possible."

SHARON: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And conversely, there's always a tug of like, "Is it time to scoop? I should probably go scoop. I don't really wanna scoop. I guess I better go scoop." And then when you finally do it, there's also the satisfaction of doing something that you've been procrastinating about.

NEIL: Right. I don't procrastinate on the scooping. It's part of my, like basically morning and evening ritual. And it's a little bit, uh, truly like a treasure hunt for me because we use, I use this recycled newspaper kitty litter that is kind of brown, and it's shit-colored basically. So I always feel like a radiologist trying to like find the pattern of her shit in it. And, I don't know. It also reminds me of like those Zen gardens, those Zen sand —

SHARON: Absolutely! Right. Where you're raking and then making little hillocks that are supposed to represent Mount Fuji. Absolutely. Yes. Does your cat ever, when you give her food that she doesn't like, do the scooping gesture that you normally use to move their litter box around? They do it on the floor as though to say, literally this food is shit.

NEIL: No. I think part of it is we've never given Beverly any food that she doesn't like.

SHARON: You know, for me, her eating habits are a little bit of a mystery to me, but I'll never really know what goes through her mind. That's one of the things about living with a cat. I think it's one of the reasons we enjoy living with pets, especially cats because dogs are easier to project onto and at least imagine we know what they're thinking. Cats I think we've bred to be a bit opaque.

NEIL: Exactly. I think that that's true. That's what people don't get. It's like their inscrutability is a feature, not a bug.

SHARON: Well, Darwin, when he is trying to explain evolution at the beginning of On the Origin of Species, uses the example of domesticated animals and also how people graft plants onto each other to say, "We know we can change species." We do it all the time, and that's why he calls it natural selection because, for him, pets are an example of artificial selection. We have artificially selected inscrutability, a certain standoffishness. You know, all of these traits in cats.

NEIL: What's a bad X you would take over a good Y?

SHARON: I'd take a bad sweet over a good salty.

NEIL: What are you really looking forward to? What are you most looking forward to after this is over?

SHARON: I am really looking forward to going to a perfume store where all people do is walk around, picking things up with their hands, bringing them up to their faces and noses, and inhaling deeply, and trying a bunch of perfumes. It's going to feel like, for me, the equivalent of scaling Mount Everest in terms of risk-taking, but when I'm ready to do that I'm really looking forward to it.

NEIL: Sharon, I love you so much. I cannot believe fate has brought us together and here we are living through — I feel like we spent a lot of 9/11 time together.

SHARON: We did.

NEIL: You came and slept over and here we are with this one.

SHARON: Yep. So nice to get to live through all this. So great. I feel so lucky. But, we are lucky because we're here and we're alive and we're talking. And so, you know, I'm just going to soldier on.

NEIL: Yea. Thank you, Sharon, so much for being on She's A Talker.

SHARON: Yes. Thank you for having me.

JEFF HILLER: 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!

BONUS EPISODE In this bonus live episode, artist Michael Smith talks about how to get creative with bad teaching evaluations. Season 3 coming soon!

ABOUT THE GUEST Michael Smith's recent solo exhibitions and performances include Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Yale Union, Portland, Oregon; Tate Modern, London; and Greene Naftali, New York; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. His work is in the collections of the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin; Inhotim Institute, Brumadinho; LWL Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; Mumok, Vienna; Museion, Bolzano; Paley Center for Media, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

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 Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock

TRANSCRIPTION

NEIL GOLDBERG: Hello, I'm Neil Goldberg, and this is She's A Talker. We recently finished our second season, and we'll be launching Season Three very soon. In the meantime, we thought as a bonus we'd share a live episode that was recorded with artist Mike Smith way back in the good old days of February, 2020. The event happened at the New York headquarters of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Skowhegan's primary program is an intensive summer residency up in Maine for sixty-five emerging visual artists from all over the world. And in 2015, I had the good fortune of being faculty there, and it was actually there that I took the first steps for what would become this podcast. I was inspired by all the experimentation happening, and I decided to play around with this collection of thoughts I'd jotted down on index cards for the past twenty years as the basis for some sort of performance work. So here we are. My guest, Mike Smith, was also faculty at Skowhegan a couple of years before me and has been a favorite artist of mine for years. He's recently shown work at the Tate Modern in London, and his work is also in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Walker Center, the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, and many other places. Here it goes.

NEIL: Hi everybody. Thank you so much for coming. So, the premise of the podcast is I typically start with some recent cards, uh, before I bring on a guest. And I thought, uh, this is a recent one: seeing an unflushed toilet at an art school. Now, um, I teach at Yale and, uh, I try to like use the bathroom as far away from where I teach as possible. And I also like to try and mix it up a little bit. So, you know, every now and then I'll go into the basement. Other times I'll go to the second floor. Uh, keep them guessing. And there was a while, very recently at Yale, where every time I walked into a bathroom stall, there was an unflushed toilet full of shit. And I started to think like, okay, is this like a student's like art project? Um, but then beyond that, I really was cognizant of the impact it had on the crits I did later in the day, which is like, I found myself sort of evaluating everything I was seeing in relationship to the impact that seeing a unflushed toilet unexpectedly will have on you. Because think about it, that moment where you're kind of like, you open the stall door and there is the unflushed toilet. That is, I think, what we're all going for as artists. Um. Anyhow.

With all that in mind, I am so happy to have, as my guest, Michael Smith, who I have been a fan of for a very long time. I have actually had the experience, Michael, of going to your shows, and I will say that its impact on me was not unlike that of an unflushed toilet encountered by surprise. So, please welcome Michael Smith.

NEIL: Hi, Michael, how are you?

MICHAEL SMITH: I'm okay. I guess I, I don't know if I should be flattered or - what I'm following in terms of the conversation or -

NEIL: when in doubt, be flattered.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I have so much to say. I don't know if we'll be able to get to another card.

NEIL: I know, right? Well, what's your elevator pitch for yourself when you? When you encounter someone who doesn't know what it is you do, how do you succinctly describe what it is?

MICHAEL: Well, it's usually layered. I usually, I mean, if it's a total stranger, I'll say I'm an artist. And then they say, "Oh, are you a painter?" And I say, no. And then sometimes I'll just cut to the chase and say I'm a performance artist. And then it doesn't go any further.

NEIL: Do you feel like that's accurate though? I mean, that doesn't feel to me like it encompasses the breadth of what you uh, do.

MICHAEL: Well, when I first started performing or thinking about performing, I would tell people I was a comic. Because it was, I dunno, it was a little more interesting at parties or whatever. And also performance artist wasn't really part of the vocabulary then. Usually I'd say I'm a comic, and then they'd look at me and they said, "You haven't said anything funny." So, it was like, well, I didn't say I was funny, you know? So.

NEIL: Um, are your parents alive?

MICHAEL: No.

NEIL: When, when they were alive, what would they say that you did?

MICHAEL: My mother probably would say, Michael is Michael. And Michael -

NEIL: That is a full-time job, isn't it?

MICHAEL: Michael had such a sweet voice when he was a child. And my father said, I don't know what the hell he does, you know, he didn't know what it, yeah.

NEIL: Right. I didn't know you were Jewish until quite recently. You're like one of those stealth Jews, you know, Smith. Okay.

MICHAEL: I asked my father once what it was before Smith, and he, he said, Sutton.

NEIL: Sutton? That's like a wall that's been painted multiple times, like, okay, and what was it before Sutton? That's where it gets into like Schmulowitz or whatever.

MICHAEL: That got too deep.

NEIL: Yeah, exactly.

MICHAEL: It was, yeah. It's opaque.

NEIL: And what's something on you - today, what's something you've found yourself thinking about?

MICHAEL: Well, you know that card you first -

NEIL: Oh yeah.

MICHAEL: That card you first brought up. I actually, I've been in my studio for, since '99. And I actually cleaned the toilet in the public bathroom for the, the building because it was just getting a little gross, so I thought I'd clean it.

NEIL: You just took that on yourself?

MICHAEL: I took it on.

NEIL: Wow.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I should also say that when I first came to New York, I was a professional cleaner.

NEIL: Really?

MICHAEL: Yeah. I was very good.

NEIL: I bet.

MICHAEL: Mike the Wipe. I was originally I, I was, I originally was going to be a house - well, I was going to, I advertised in the New York Times, "Mr. Smith will cook and clean." And no one wanted me to cook, you know, just wanted me to clean.

NEIL: So many follow-up questions, Mike. Um, shall we move on to the cards? You don't have a choice at this point. We're all in. Uh, this card says: There are no friendly reminders. You know, like, I feel like, is there anything more passive aggressive than someone's like, just a friendly reminder.

MICHAEL: That's like, if they, if they preface what they're going to say with that, yeah. That would be horrible.

NEIL: But they do all the time.

MICHAEL: Really?

NEIL: Yeah. Or in an email - friendly reminder. How many, I mean, haven't you? I've probably gotten a friendly reminder in the last week.

MICHAEL: I guess FYI is not a friendly reminder, huh?

NEIL: No, FYI can be pretty passive aggressive too, but I use it a lot

MICHAEL: BTW?

NEIL: That's fine. Yeah. I dunno.

MICHAEL: So, I have a feeling I probably do it, but I'm not aware of it.

NEIL: Of a friendly reminder?

MICHAEL: Yeah.

NEIL: Hmm. So you're not bothered by it?

MICHAEL: Probably, yeah.

NEIL: Probably not bothered by it?

MICHAEL: Probably bothered by it. Yeah, I am. I get bothered by people easily. And I had something really good to say, but I've, I've already forgotten it.

NEIL: I'm excited for the rest of this conversation, Mike. This is, um.

MICHAEL: I'm still thinking about that dirty toilet.

NEIL: We could go back to that anytime you want.

NEIL: Uh, this card says: Things that are lost but you know will turn up. Talk to me.

MICHAEL: Well, I, I was with a friend the other day, and, um, I, I said, Oh, I don't, I don't recognize that person. I said, I'm not good with faces. And then she mentioned the name and I said, no, I'm, I don't recognize the name. I'm not good with names. And she said. Mike, what else is there besides faces and names? So anyways, I just wait until it comes, you know, it just till, the name comes, I just wait and wait. And in the morning, I figure, after looking at all those places for the keys or whatever, I'll eventually find it. And then I'll look in the unlikely places and I find it.

NEIL: What are the unlikely places in your life for keys?

MICHAEL: You know where I've been to keeping them lately? On my front door. So I go outside and they're always there now, so yeah. That's where I seem to keep them.

NEIL: That is really, why don't we all just keep them there?

MICHAEL: Right. I trust my neighbors, evidently.

NEIL: We just very recently got a knock on the door from our neighbor Arlene. A shout out to Arlene if you're listening, and I know you're not, but, um, bless Arlene who very aggressively knocked on our door. She kind of is like policing the hall in a very loving way, but authoritative. And I left the keys in the door. And um, you could tell Arlene lived for this moment. The keys, they're in the door! You know, it's like, and uh, and then of course I have to like reciprocate with like, um, thank you so much. Oh God. Wow. How did we do that? Thank you, Arlene.

MICHAEL: I have - the person that polices our place, uh, has a Trump hat.

NEIL: Oh no. I don't know if I could deal with that.

MICHAEL: He is taking over the recycling, which is great, but he's got it under lock and key, literally under lock and key. So you go downstairs to get rid of your bottles and stuff. And it takes a lot longer. So then everybody just leaves it down there.

NEIL: Every now and then, forgive me, is there like a, an immigrant child in there as well?

MICHAEL: Oh, there's not an immigrant child, but there is something I think it, I realized it bothers him, that people pick through the garbage and it's mostly like, you know...

NEIL: The people who shouldn't be here. From the shithole countries.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So I thought about that later and then I just didn't want to think about it anymore cause I was getting all upset.

NEIL: Um, have you had a political conversation with him or?

MICHAEL: I don't go there. Yeah, he's on, he's a little unstable and he asked, one time he asked me if I wanted to take something outside.

NEIL: Oh, he asked you if you want to, I thought, take something outside like garbage.

MICHAEL: Right.

NEIL: But no, he wanted to take a discussion outside.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

NEIL: Wow. I'm gay enough that I have never had that conversation, you know? Uh, or if it is, it's like, it's nasty and it's happened a long time ago and it wasn't a fight. Um, wow. Okay. I'm glad that worked out okay. Uh, this card says: Read my -

MICHAEL: Can I be, can I, I had a hard time reading that, kind of, reading them.

NEIL: Yeah. Well.

MICHAEL: Your penmanship is like...

NEIL: Well, I always say if my, if my handwriting were a font, it would be called Suicide Note, so I'm...

MICHAEL: Not judging. I just said I had a hard time, you know, deciphering it at times.

NEIL: Yeah. Read my course evaluations at my funeral. That's what that says.

MICHAEL: Oh, well, I was thinking that when, when I do pass, I would like to get ahead of the thing and have people send out a, uh, an announcement saying, if you happen to be in the neighborhood, you know, come to my show, I'll be like, you know -

NEIL: I'll be here for eternity.

MICHAEL: Um, class evaluations. Yeah. I love my class evaluations and I save them and I, I find them very funny. One, I actually made a poster and it was, uh, it was, "I'm not sure if I agree with the way Professor Smith teaches this class. He called my work crap and he called us idiots. This is a waste of my time and money." I was very happy with that.

NEIL: And you made that into a poster?

MICHAEL: I made it into a poster.

NEIL: Do you, do you have any other ones that come to mind? I bet you get great course evaluations.

MICHAEL: Some are good. But like I, I forget them, you know, um, I get them, I still get them handwritten. You're supposed to, a lot of people just go online, but I always, I always hand them out and, and I, I have to leave the room and I always say to them, before, "My livelihood and my future is dependent on how you judge me. And I'm so sorry, I meant to bring the donuts. We'll get to that."

NEIL: Huh? See, I try to be real coy about it. Like, you know, they make me do this and, you know, try and like keep it open to, um, other than positive feedback. But obviously it's a desperate wish for approval.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I, I always tell them I care deeply for them too, when I'm, yeah. You know, I care deeply for all of you.

NEIL: See, you can,

MICHAEL: One thing - I, one of my students who I happen to, like, he-

NEIL: Happen to like. Whatever.

MICHAEL: He came up to me and he said, you know, Mike, even when we're watching videos in the dark, we always know what you're thinking. We can always read you.

NEIL: Wow. That's a scary thought.

MICHAEL: It is. Cause I'm, I have no filter with, you know, I, I just, it, it comes out, I just sort of convey it with my face.

NEIL: See, I find you, because there is a kind of like genial neutrality, you know, like the, the idea of like quote unquote resting bitch face. You have kind of like resting, mm, bemused face. Um, I find it actually kind of opaque. I wish I knew what you were thinking.

MICHAEL: You know what? A lot of times nothing. I get the feeling I'm not answering the, I'm not answering these cards very, uh.

NEIL: Do you need me to take care of you a little bit right now in terms of - I think you're doing a phenomenal job. You know, this is a fucked up, um, project, by the way, because everyone, like I, I once was doing an iteration of it and this kind of high powered curator said to me, did I do okay, or did I do it right? And I wanted to say like, you did, there's no way of not doing this right, but let's talk about why you've never put me in a show. But that's a different story.

The faces of spectators at art world performances. The dutifulness and absence of pleasure. We've all seen this like documentation of a performance at an art event and you see like the spectators, like-

MICHAEL: I often say to my, uh, um, to myself and sometimes my students, where's the joy? Looking for the joy. You're talking about pleasure. I'm looking for the - all the time, I'm wondering about that.

NEIL: Where's the joy? Yeah. I'm stealing the hell out of that for any teaching I do. And also, that would be my teaching evaluation for like 95% of the art I see. I mean, it can be art about, um, Auschwitz and you can still appropriately ask the question, where's the joy? Don't you think? Provocative question.

MICHAEL: Um.

NEIL: What was the question?

MICHAEL: No, no, no. I thought I'd get some room tone. You know, we start with the toilet and then we put, where's the joy with Auschwitz. You know, this is-

NEIL: This is like a balanced meal or something. I'll take the toilet, joy, and Auschwitz. Well, we'll have to talk about what constitutes dessert within that.

NEIL: Uh, okay. Let's try this: The brutality of a memorial service having a duration.

MICHAEL: All right. Are you, a duration, like a time limit or like, um, it doesn't end?

NEIL: You answer it however you want.

MICHAEL: Well, I, I, I think brevity can be good, you know, um, and I don't think I need to go to a durational memorial. I may have misunderstood the question or, not the question, the card. I have been in position where I've, I've helped organize them in a, you know, like emceed them. So you get a little nervous, you know, so you want to keep it like, it becomes like a fucking variety show.

NEIL: Exactly. That is so true. Memorial services are a variety show.

MICHAEL: I don't know if that's appropriate. You know?

NEIL: What should it be instead?

MICHAEL: Well, it can, I guess it, it should be kind of free-flowing and with me at the helm, it's not going to be free-flowing.

NEIL: Because you keep it, you keep it moving?

MICHAEL: I try to, yeah.

NEIL: That's a lot of responsibility. I've never, I, I've done, I, I seem to be the person who you will call to do the slide show for your loved one's memorial. I've done a number of them.

MICHAEL: That's a lot of work.

NEIL: It is. And you can't complain about it. Uh, you know.

MICHAEL: And also you have to be in touch with people to get that material.

NEIL: That I - that I have subcontracted and, you know, but even so, it's a lot of work. And you do not want to fuck that one up. Um. But see, for me, I love the idea of durational, like for those of our listeners who don't know, there's a terminology within the art world of durational art, and to me that is like the height of decadence. Like we have such a surplus of time, you know, that we're going to make art from that surplus or something. You know what I mean?

MICHAEL: I have a, getting back to my students, I have a, um, a three-hand rule.

NEIL: Oh, let's hear it.

MICHAEL: Um, well, if some of the, when I'm covering some work like early seventies, you know, and you kind of get the idea after like five minutes and it goes on. If, if one person, three people raised their hand, we'd go onto the next video.

NEIL: I am learning so much today.

MICHAEL: But I don't think you can do that in memorial service. I don't think that'll, I don't think that'll work, no.

NEIL: Oh, that's funny.

MICHAEL: How surprised would they be if you, you mentioned that in the beginning of the memorial?

NEIL: Yeah, listen, not to create pressure, but it's kind of like the Apollo where you get the hook.

MICHAEL: How am I doing, how am I doing? Yeah. Right.

NEIL: Okay. A bad X you would take over a good Y. So, for me, perpetually, my example is I would take a bad episode of RuPaul's Drag Race over a good Godard movie. So, what's a bad X you would take over a good Y?

MICHAEL: Well, I'm of the school that something bad can have lots of charm. There's something redeeming about it. Where there's something is overly so good, like a certain kind of Broadway kind of, um...

NEIL: Careful.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, you understand a certain kind of large delivery or something. A certain styling, a certain song-styling. Um, oh, I'm going to lose the whole audience on this reference.

NEIL: Go for it. You have me.

MICHAEL: Okay. The, the, the Bobby Short commercial singing Charlie. I would, I will always cringe at that one. And then I would much rather take a bad public access, uh, commercial than that.

NEIL: There's a fragrance that's here to stay and they call it Charlie.

NEIL: Um, so Mike, uh, what is it that keeps you going?

MICHAEL: Uh. Hm. I don't know what's keeping me going right now. Um, that's a big one. Um, I, you know, when I was lot younger and doing my work, I, you know, and reinventing the wheel, you know, reinventing the wheel and stuff, I was very excited. But I don't, I wonder what, what keeps me going? No one knows. No one knows. Looking for the joy.

NEIL: On that note, thank you to all of you for being here. Thank you, Mike, for coming to this live taping. Thank you to everyone at Skowhegan. Sarah, Katie, Kris, Carrie, Paige, everyone else. Um, now, this series is made possible with generous support - thank you Jesus - for Still Point Fund. Oh, Siri, something set Siri off. That's, that's my husband, Jeff. Um, oh, sorry. I know, you know, it's interesting. One of the cards I have is every time I stub my toe, I look for someone to blame. And it's often Jeff. And, um, so. Uh, the calls are coming from inside the house. The house being my subjectivity. Let's do that again cause this is important.

This series is made possible with generous support from Still Point Fund. Devon Guinn is our producer. Molly Donahue and Aaron Dalton are our consulting producers. Justine Lee handles social media. Our interns are Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho, and Rachel Wang. Our card-flip beats come from Josh Graver. And my husband, Jeff, sings the theme song you're about to hear. And he's going to perform it live. He's a professional.

JEFF HILLER: She's a talker with Neil Goldberg. She's A Talker at Skowhegan. She's A Talker, it's better than it sounds.

NEIL: Thank you, everybody. Thanks everyone for listening to this bonus episode. Keep your eyes open for She's A Talker, Season Three, coming soon. And in the meantime, be well.

Writer and performer Annie Lanzillotto talks about how, actually, old people are the future.

ABOUT THE GUEST Born and raised in the Westchester Square neighborhood of the Bronx of Barese heritage, Annie Lanzillotto is renowned memoirist, poet, and performance artist. She's the author of L IS FOR LION: AN ITALIAN BRONX BUTCH FREEDOM MEMOIR (SUNY Press), the books of poetry SCHISTSONG (Bordighera Press) and Hard Candy/Pitch Roll Yaw (Guernica Editions). She has received fellowships and performance commissions from New York Foundation For The Arts, Dancing In The Streets, Dixon Place, Franklin Furnace, The Rockefeller Foundation for shows including CONFESSIONS OF A BRONX TOMBOY: My Throwing Arm, This Useless Expertise, How to Wake Up a Marine in a Foxhole, and a'Schapett. More info at annielanzillotto.com.

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 Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock

TRANSCRIPTION

Coming soon...

In this episode, Neil talks to the one person he's not isolating from: his husband, actor and comedian Jeff Hiller, from TV's 30 Rock, Broadway's Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, solo shows at Joe's Pub at the Public Theatre, and many, many others. The podcast has always been about the everyday, and right now our everyday is coronavirus.

ABOUT THE GUEST Jeff Hiller is an actor and comedian has appeared in guest roles on television in "30Rock", "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend", "Broad City", "Difficult People", "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt", "The McCarthy's", "Community", and a lot of shows that no one remembers. Jeff was a regular on Ali Wentworth's series Nightcap, and played Maggie's new work friend on the third season of "Playing House". At the movies, Jeff played a snooty waiter to Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne in "Adam", a pissed off waiter in the Netflix comedy, Set It Up and got fancy as the head waiter opposite Chloe Grace Moretz and Isabelle Huppert in "Greta". Jeff also played the Naked Ghost opposite Ricky Gervais in "Ghost Town". As a stage actor, Jeff originated the role of John Quincy Adams in Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson on Broadway. Off-Broadway, they took over Bright Colors, Bold Patterns from creator Drew Droege and have performed as part of Shakespeare in the Park in Midsummer Nights Dream and Love's Labours Lost. Recently they have been presenting solo storytelling shows their solo storytelling show, "Grief Bacon".

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 Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock, Sharon Marcus

TRANSCRIPTION

Coming soon...

Film critic Melissa Anderson talks about the correlation between smoldering internal rage and a lighthearted use of exclamation marks.

ABOUT THE GUEST Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and a regular contributor to Artforum and Bookforum.

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 Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho, Rachel Wang Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock, Jonathan Taylor

TRANSCRIPTION

NEIL GOLDBERG.: Hello, I'm Neil Goldberg, and this is SHE'S A TALKER, coming to you today from the Lower East Side. Today's guest is film critic Melissa Anderson, but first I'm going to find someone here on the street to talk to.

We're doing a podcast, and we just need people to know... Oh, okay. Sorry to bother you.

Would you have a minute for a podcast, just to read this card into a microphone?

REMY: Why not?

NEIL: Thank you. I love the "why not?"

REMY: What podcast?

NEIL: It's called SHE'S A TALKER. It's built off a collection of thousands of these index cards doing interviews with people. Uh, but now we're playing around with having people on the street read them. Would you mind?

REMY: Okay. When people sing out loud to themselves with headphones, wanting to be heard.

NEIL: It's often a cutesy thing. You know, someone's on the subway. They got their headphones in. They're singing. They're pretending like they don't know they can be heard, but they can be heard. Do you know what I'm talking about there?

REMY: I have absolutely done that. It was another version of me years ago, if that helps.

NEIL: Tell me about that version of you.

REMY: A version that was, really wanted to be heard, man. I mean, everyone really wants to be heard, but especially like I had just moved to New York. Like when you find those little secret ways where you don't even admit to yourself that you are reaching out. It's, it's a little bit of a lifeline.

NEIL: Can I ask what your name is?

REMY: Remy.

NEIL: Remy. Would you do one more card or no? This, okay, great. Hang on. I'm going to find another one.

REMY: I feel a type of violence when someone marks a file as final.

NEIL: Do you know that experience? Like do you ever work with electronic files and like?

REMY: Yes. Completely. Yeah.

NEIL: Are you someone who is, uh, who marks things as final?

REMY: I try not to because then you end up with another final and final two and final seven, and yeah, it is a lot. Um, so I try and keep it organized, but never final. Nothing's final.

NEIL: I'm so happy to have as my guest, film critic Melissa Anderson. Melissa is the Film Editor for the unique art criticism site 4Columns, and frequently contributes to Book Forum and Art Forum, and before that was the Senior Film Critic for The Village Voice of blessed memory. Non-professionally, Melissa has a longstanding practice of emailing me abuses she encounters of the word 'journey', which she describes as the COVID-19 of nouns. We spoke just after the new year at a recording studio at The New School near Union Square in New York City.

NEIL: Melissa Anderson.

MELISSA ANDERSON: Yes. Neil Goldberg.

NEIL: Welcome to SHE'S A TALKER. I'm so happy to have you here. This is your first podcast.

MELISSA: Yeah.

NEIL: Wow. How does it feel?

MELISSA: I feel that I'm in the best of hands. I'm with a creative conversationalist of the highest order. And I'm, I'm ready to talk.

NEIL: Um, what is the elevator pitch for what you do?

MELISSA: Oh, it's very simple. I'm, I'm a film critic. I'm the world's preeminent lesbian film critic. There's my elevator pitch. Elevator to the stars.

NEIL: I love the lack of ambiguity about that.

MELISSA: I mean, of course. I'm a film critic. That would be my elevator pitch. I don't, I don't want to get too grandiose so early on in our conversation.

NEIL: Well, hopefully there'll be time later. You know, I'm, I'm thinking of criticism as its own literary form. So I would say, Melissa Anderson is truly a critic of film whose criticism rises and surpasses the attributes that we apply to the other literary arts. Or it rises to the level of literature. Would you agree with that? Is that an intention?

MELISSA: You are putting a woman in a very precarious position. I mean, if I agree with you, "Oh yes. All those wonderful things you said, oh of course, I am the best." But I also don't want to go into some display of false modesty.

I will just say that, yes, I practice the dark art of film criticism. I've done it for several years now. I always feel that my writing could be so much better. That's always the goal: to not just coast, to really play with language, have some ideas, say outrageous things. Yes. And, and not just rely on plot synopsis, because that is, is really the, the dullest form of cultural criticism, especially film criticism.

I think it's inevitable. You have to give the reader just some sense of what happens in terms of, you know, action or just the, the, the barest plot synopsis. And from there you can branch out and talk about the really interesting things, like Brad Pitt's face or what French actress I may have a very big crush on. You know?

NEIL: Do you get a lot of followup? Like what kind of followup does one get?

MELISSA: Yes. I do get the follow up question quite a lot, which is what kinds of films do you write about? In fact, this came up just the other day. I was meeting somebody for the first time, and I said, you know, I really try to cover anything.

And then the person I was talking to said, Oh, would you review the new Star Wars movie? And that's when I realized, actually, I do not cover the waterfront because I have not seen a Star Wars movie since 1983. And I almost never write about anything in the Marvel Comics Universe or DC Comics, simply because, I mean, I have, I, I have made a very concerted effort to see these films to keep up. But, and I'm not exaggerating, I found them so depleting. I remember watching Guardians of the Galaxy. And while I was watching it, I thought, this is like watching a toaster being assembled. It, it just, it simply seemed like nothing but a product where Tab A goes with Tab B, or this part slots into this part, and I thought this, this cinema is just simply not for me.

NEIL: Yes. Well, you use the word depleted, which is interesting, which I think of depleted as being like, something is taken from you. So what is taken?

MELISSA: Uh, well in those instances, my love of going to the movies. I mean it still really seems like an adventure to me. Anytime I go to a screening room, you know, anytime I'm, I'm, I'm there to review something, I'm there with my, with my uni-ball pen and my MUJI line notebook and I enter the screening room really as an act of good faith. And so these movies I'm describing, like Guardians of the Galaxy, or Thor, or whatever, those I saw as a civilian because I also think it's very important that as a film critic you, you see more than the movies that you are assigned to write about.

And so I went to see these superhero movies, comic book movies, intellectual property movies on my own, you know, just to keep up. And with these films, that sense of adventurousness - that ended. Then it just, it felt like a chore just to remain in my seat until the film's completion.

NEIL: Out of family obligation, I will be seeing a lot of the franchise movies or whatever they're called. I just saw Star Wars over the holidays. And, uh, it, it does feel a little bit like a tour. But you know, my approach to the movies and this sounds so snobby, but, uh, I really do feel like sleeping during a movie is a form of interactivity. You know what I mean?

MELISSA: Andy Warhol certainly thought that, and have your fact checking department vet this, but the great Amos Vogel, who was a crucial person in New York City film culture, one of the founders of the New York Film Festival, I believe, he also said that sleeping during a film is an absolutely legitimate response to, to what you're seeing on screen.

NEIL: Absolutely. You know, you're doing a little re-edit, you know, by, by sleeping and -

MELISSA: De tournage, you're detourning the moving image.

NEIL: Exactly. What is, what is a recurring thought you have? What's a thought you keep returning to?

MELISSA: Can I turn the oven off? No. Well, that is sadly... Uh. Well. It's a recurring concern, and I mentioned it earlier, which is, how am I going to make my writing better? Just yesterday, in fact, I looked at something that I wrote last year that when I completed it and filed it and went through the editing process, I thought, Oh, this piece is all right. Yesterday, while revisiting this year-old piece, I thought, how was I not run out of town? This is a colossal embarrassment.

Yeah. I don't know if, how you approach your previous works. Do you revisit older stuff that you have done or do you just, do you operate under the assumption that no, never, never look back? Just keep moving ahead.

NEIL: Revisit it to, to revise it or just to look at it?

MELISSA: Just to look at it.

NEIL: It's something, it's - one of the things I truly dislike the most is, as part of the whole artist shtick, one has to do artist talks and show past work, and I, I don't like doing it at all, primarily because it just feels so dead. Like, and I do feel like a work for me is not finished until the point that I have stopped really having feeling for it. You know what I mean? One becomes detached to it, and maybe there's a value to becoming detached from it in that, um, it allows one more flexibility, fewer feelings of darlings that are being killed and stuff. But I'd love never to look at it. For sure. But you, it sounds like you do kind of consciously revisit your past work.

MELISSA: Well, sometimes, you know, invariably, I will be writing about an actor, a performer who I may have written about in another film five years ago, and I'm curious to see what I wrote then, just so that I don't repeat myself. I'm revisiting stuff just to make sure I'm not saying the same thing over again, or I'm curious to gauge my different responses if indeed there is a difference.

NEIL: Let's go to the cards, shall we?

MELISSA: I'd love to.

NEIL: Excellent. Okay, so the first card is the correlation between smoldering internal rage, and the lighthearted use of exclamation marks.

MELISSA: I, when I see an abuse of exclamation marks, particularly in email correspondence, I feel nothing but a red-hot smoldering rage. Not even smoldering, just full-on Mount Vesuvius-level Krakatoa explosion. I have been told this is generational, that those younger than this elderess, and that is now billions of people, prefer the exclamation mark. And the period, which I think is a very fine mark of punctuation, is considered by millennials and younger to be somewhat passive-aggressive.

NEIL: Oh, that's interesting. I feel like exclamation marks aren't necessarily passive-aggressive, but they're meant to.

MELISSA: No, no, no. The period is passive-aggressive.

NEIL: Right. No, I get that. But I feel like there's a similar kind of belying or something happening with the exclamation mark, but it's about rage. Like, um. Well, I guess passive-aggressive typically means, uh, that you have aggressive feelings that you're masking. I think of it as a more diffuse, the, the exclamation mark, as more - it's not trying to communicate anger at someone, but a free-floating anger that is perfumed by way of the exclamation mark.

MELISSA: Right. Because the exclamation mark perfumes it with a cheerfulness or an excitement. It just exhausts me.

NEIL: Oh, absolutely. It asks so much of you. You always have to ask, what does it mean?

MELISSA: Yes.

NEIL: And when was the last time you used one?

MELISSA: Just yesterday, in fact, wishing someone a happy 2020.

NEIL: Oh yeah. You got to do that. A period there is, is slightly hostile.

MELISSA: That seems very dour and grim.

NEIL: Next card: that bring-down moment, after you've watched a transcendent performance, when you first go to look at your phone. And perhaps this applies to movies.

MELISSA: Well, after I've seen something really terrific, whether it be a live performance or a motion picture - to maintain that feeling, I will defer looking at the phone for quite some time. I just like to replay it in my mind.

NEIL: Yeah. How do you feel right after a show if you're with someone and they're, like, wanting to analyze it?

MELISSA: This drives me crazy. Of the many billions of things that I appreciate about my fantastic lady, one of them is that, in the many years that we've been together, in the many thousands of movies that we've seen together, we will leave the theater, and neither one of us feels this compulsion to say, so what did you think? What did you think? Which really sends me into murderous rage. And, uh, there was a time when I was going to film festivals fairly regularly. And for seven years I went to Le Festival de Cannes, where, talk about depleting. Press screenings at the Cannes Film Festival begin at eight-thirty in the morning.

NEIL: Wow.

MELISSA: So one is rushing to see, you know, the latest Lars von Trier or whatever. You come stumbling out into the bright Mediterranean sun, and you are just surrounded by all of these film critics who are just assaulting, assaulting you with a quote. What did you think? What did you think? And I. This really, so many times, really put me over the edge. You just need time to simply let the images or the live performance, whatever you've just seen, let it wash over you. Sink in. So I find the question an assault.

NEIL: Next card, Melissa. Looking in my apartment's compost container is sort of like gossip. I find I enjoy looking in the compost.

MELISSA: You know, I also enjoy it somewhat, and I will also say that I feel that now one-fourth to one-third of my waking hours are spent taking the compost down to the compost bins. Yeah, it is, it is something of a time investment. But when I look at it, forgive me, I must say it - I'm overcome with a sense of virtue because my lady and I, we like to do a lot of cooking at home, and I make, uh, at least one, sometimes two cups, very strong French-pressed coffee. So all of my coffee grounds around there. And so, yes, in fact, before leaving the house, I took the compost out, and I thought, Oh look. Greens and coffee grounds and brown eggs. We're doing great.

NEIL: This is your own compost you're talking about.

MELISSA: My co- the compost of the soul.

NEIL: I hear that. It is deeply virtuous. I feel very embraced by compost. Like I like that compost, within its parameters will accept everything, and you don't have to tell food scraps how to become compost. I know that there's some work involved. It just feels embracing. It takes. Compost takes.

MELISSA: You know, one feels really in tune with the spirit of the first Earth Day in 1970.

NEIL: That feeling when the plane lands and they dramatically reverse the engines to slow it down.

MELISSA: Well, if it, particularly if I'm coming back to New York, I'm, I'm spirally thinking, will I be able to make it to the air train in time? Will I be able to make it to the LIRR to pull into the Atlantic Terminal, which is a convenient 10-minute walk from my house. One would hope that the slow brain would kick in. The slow brain being, Oh, how great. One has landed safely, although now that I mentioned that, should one be feeling grateful that one has landed, or should one be filled with what my Shero Greta Thunberg has us thinking about, which is Flygskam, or shame of flying.

Yeah. So I think the next time I fly, and I'm not sure when that will be, yeah. I, when the plane lands, maybe I'll just be feeling filled with shame.

NEIL: Yeah. I feel a variation on that because when it goes in reverse, you feel how much force is required to, to stop the plane, you know, which suggests how much, how much energy is going into propelling the plane forward, and you're burning fuel to send it in reverse. So it is a moment of -

MELISSA: And killing Mother Earth. You think, how big is my carbon footprint?

NEIL: Oh God.

MELISSA: Sorry, Greta.

NEIL: Yeah. I just watched Greta's um, speech, finally, um, over, yeah, over the vacation, because, I don't know how I hadn't seen it before, but -

MELISSA: I still haven't seen it.

NEIL: It's prophetic. A lot of it is like, You, meaning people of - I'm 56, like my generation. "How dare you" is the refrain, which, I think, I would have reworked that. Um.

MELISSA: You're going to copy edit Greta.

NEIL: Yes, exactly.

MELISSA: Take a red pen to Greta.

NEIL: But a lot of it... I can imagine 20 years, something down the line, I do feel like there's going to be a generational justified wrath, um, hitting us, hitting people of my age, you know.

And she speaks that.

MELISSA: I find her incredibly inspiring. I mean, yes, in all seriousness, I really am. I'm not someone who flies a tremendous amount. I'd say I'd average two to three flights a year. But this whole concept of the Flygskam, it has really made me think, thanks to this 16-year-old prophetess that, yeah, this is really, um, a great harm that I am perpetuating by flying so I can have a vacation in Paris or go visit friends in Los Angeles. So I have tremendous respect for this fiery, oracular, young person.

NEIL: Melissa, when you put your arm around a friend or hold their hand, but then the discomfort of when to disconnect emerges.

MELISSA: Um, I think of myself as a pretty physically-affectionate person with friends. I'm really not a hand-holder.

NEIL: Uh huh.

MELISSA: Even with my lover, and we've had some discussions about this. Because she, when we first began our love journey so many years ago, she would often like to take my hand out in public. And I thought, this kind of bugs me. But, and I, you know, I wanted to check in with myself. Why? Is it internalized homophobia? And then I realized, I, I, I landed upon what bothered me about it. There was something about my hand being held. It made me feel infantilized. Her arm around my shoulder, or even better, her arm around my waist - that I was into. Cause that felt more like a PG-13 type of public display of affection.

NEIL: Right.

MELISSA: And also with the hand-holding, you know, I try to be very conscientious about taking up public space. And when you're walking around a couple holding hands, it's an impasse.

NEIL: It is like a blockade.

MELISSA: If there's a way that one could have a public display of affection while walking single file, that is, that's the challenge of 2020.

Lovers, lovers of New York City. Think of how this can be done. The piggy-back ride. Will that be the way to show somebody you're really sweet on them in 2020?

NEIL: You do see the occasional piggy-back ride, but it doesn't make me feel good.

MELISSA: Not so sexy, right? You know, we're surrounded by an army of lovers.

NEIL: That's true. Taking up space. Um, you know, I feel the same thing about holding hands in public. It's not about the physical infantilizing thing, but it is a type of intern - I don't know if it's internalized homophobia. It's like, yikes. Are we gonna get a bottle thrown at us?

MELISSA: Hmm.

NEIL: I'm sure there's internalized homophobia in there too.

MELISSA: But again, I don't, it's, it's not that, it's just... Okay, well actually now I'm thinking about this more. I'm fact-checking myself, holding hands in the movies is okay. Because you're - one's parents, or certainly my parents, wouldn't hold my hand during the movie.

NEIL: True.

MELISSA: But holding, holding one's hand in public. That is something your parents did to you as a child.

NEIL: We've nailed it. You've nailed it. That's it. Yeah.

MELISSA: I'd like to thank all of the years of psychotherapy I've had on the couch of, well, should I name my psychotherapist?

NEIL: If you want to give a shout-out.

MELISSA: Well, she's a... She knows who she is.

NEIL: Yes, exactly. That. Let's hope. Let's hope one's therapist knows who they are. I've never name-checked my, my therapist either. Um, and yet all my years in therapy, I never came to the conclusion about the hand-holding.

NEIL: What's a bad ex you'd take over a good Y?

MELISSA: Me, who considers herself to be really one a gift of the gab - I'm stumped. I would take, I would take a bad movie that's not in the Marvel Comics Universe or a Star Wars movie - I would take a bad movie any day over a good television show. There's no romance to watching television.

NEIL: Is it context?

MELISSA: There's no sense of adventure in staying home and watching television. When you commit to seeing a movie, you have to leave the house. And it seems that, increasingly, even in New York City, this great, dynamic, incredible place, the messages we keep receiving are: stay at home, stay at home, cocoon. You never have to leave the house. Everything will come to you. You'll have your content delivered to you. You'll have your food delivered to you. Stay home, stay home.

No, leave the house, people. It's very exciting to go to the movies, even if it's a stinker. There's so much that could happen, so much that's beyond your control. It's terrifying, but it's exciting. Leave the house. Leave it. Leave your house.

NEIL: On that note, Melissa Anderson, thank you for being on - that didn't sound genuine. I have to do it again.

MELISSA: Yeah. Talk about passive-aggressive. Speaking nothing but periods.

NEIL: On that note, Melissa, thank you so much for being on SHE'S A TALKER.

MELISSA: It was a great honor, Neil Goldberg. I thank you.

NEIL: Bye.

That was my conversation with Melissa Anderson. Thank you for listening.

Before we get to the credits, there's a listener response I'd love to share with you. In my conversation with Jon Wan, in response to learning that they studied jazz saxophone in high school, I said, "I'm going to make a controversial generalization: I don't think jazz is gay." Jon and I then talked about the way jazz offered a model of cool and casualness that didn't feel available to us as awkward, closeted high-schoolers. Steven Winter emailed saying, "Jazz is self-expression within yourself being rendered into outer sensation. There are so many ways to cut the cake of the music called jazz, but three key essentials are: one, freedom; two, swing; and three, improvisation. Can these elements not also be used to describe the fundamental pillars of LGBTQ survival in the 20th century up till now? Jazz is about describing and finding yourself as an individual. That's why you can hear a dozen jazz versions of the same tune, and each will hit you in a different way. Can the same thing be said of the gay movement? Yes, it can." Thank you, Steven.

If you have something you'd like to share about a card or anything else you've heard on the podcast, email us or send us a voice memo at [email protected] or message us on Instagram at shesatalker. And also, as always, we'd love it if you'd rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or share this episode with a friend.

This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Devon Guinn produced this episode. Andrew Litton mixed it. Molly Donahue and Aaron Dalton are our consulting producers. Justine Lee handle social media. Our interns are Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, and Jesse Kimotho. Our card-flip beats come from Josh Graver, and my husband, Jeff Hiller, sings the theme song you are about to hear. Thanks to all of them, and to my guest, Melissa Anderson, and to you for listening.

JEFF HILLER: 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!

Poet Nick Flynn talks about the ways in which he won't die.

ABOUT THE GUEST Nick Flynn has worked as a ship's captain, an electrician, and a caseworker for homeless adults. Some of the venues his poems, essays, and nonfiction have appeared in include the New Yorker, the Nation, the Paris Review, the New York Times Book Review, and NPR's This American Life. His writing has won awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, PEN, and the Fine Arts Work Center, among other organizations. His film credits include artistic collaborator and "field poet" on Darwin's Nightmare (nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary in 2006), as well as executive producer and artistic collaborator on Being Flynn, the film version of his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. His most recent collection of poetry, I Will Destroy You, appeared from Graywolf Press in 2019. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Lili Taylor, and his daughter, Maeve. http://www.nickflynn.org/

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 Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock

TRANSCRIPTION

NICK FLYNN: I was driving my daughter to soccer. And she had a bike and I had a bike and we'd ride, even though it was a little cold.

NEIL GOLDBERG: Yeah.

NICK: But a guy went by on a bike and he had like a boombox, one of those boombox that plays, he's playing like a podcast, like really loud, and it was so odd. We both just laughed. It was like, what is that? You're just blasting a podcast going down the street, blasting.

NEIL: This is fresh air.

Hello, I'm Neil Goldberg and this is SHE'S A TALKER. I'm a visual artist and this podcast is my thinly veiled excuse to get some of my favorite New York writers, artists, performers, and beyond into the studio to chat. For prompts, I use a collection of thousands of index cards on which I've been writing thoughts and observations for the past two decades, kind of like one of those party games, but hopefully not as cheesy.

These days, the cards often start as recordings I make into my phone. Here are some recent ones: I really love how Beverly pronounces 'Meow'. It's never appropriate to share scrap paper from home with students. I'm never sure what a simmer is.

I'm so happy to have as my guest, poet Nick Flynn. I have been a hardcore fan of Nick's writing since his first book, Some Ether, came out in 2000 and was blown away by his memoirs, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and The Ticking is the Bomb. In the fall, he released a new book of poetry, I Will Destroy You, and in the next few months he has two more books coming out: Stay, and This is the Night Our House Will Catch on Fire. I met Nick briefly in, I think, the late eighties in Provincetown, and we reconnected recently via our mutual friend, Jacques Servin, who is on an earlier episode. Nick and I spoke in January at a recording studio at The New School near Union Square in New York City.

NEIL: Are you comfortable?

NICK: Like on a scale of one to ten?

NEIL: Like, you know those smiley faces, like if you're in the hospital.

NICK: How much pain I have? Uh, I hadn't even thought about it till you just said that. Now I'm wondering if I am, so.

NEIL: I feel like I'm, I'm totally not, I'm not feeling any pain at the moment.

NICK: No, I'm not feeling any pain. No, I'm feeling no pain.

NEIL: That's different from, feeling no pain is different from not feeling any pain.

NICK: That means if you're kind of fucked up, I think.

NEIL: Exactly.

NICK: You're feeling no pain.

NEIL: Um, I'm so happy to have you, Nick Flynn, on the show, SHE'S A TALKER.

NICK: I'm happy to be here, Neil Goldberg -

NEIL: I, you know -

NICK: on the show SHE'S A TALKER. Is the 'She' the cat?

NEIL: Yeah.

NICK: That's, that's who the 'she' is.

NEIL: It is, yeah. I, you know -

NICK: I guess I got that. Yeah.

NEIL: Well, you know, in 1993 when everyone was dying... Everyone is still dying, but just differently.

NICK: I remember that. Yeah.

NEIL: Yeah. Uh, you know, I did a video project where I interviewed, it turned out to be, like about 80 gay men all over New York City in all five boroughs who had female cats, combing their cats and saying "She's a Talker."

NICK: They were combing the cats?

NEIL: Combing the cat. It was just almost like, it was like a stealthy way to like, not stealthy, but it was a way to document a lot of gay men who felt like really imperiled, and it was my first video project. And, I don't know, when I decided to name this, that came up for me. But subsequently I get a lot of like, what does the word 'she' mean at this point?

NICK: Right, right, right. Yeah.

NEIL: Maybe I should rebrand it. What should I call it?

NICK: Uh, you should stick with it, I think. Hmm.

NEIL: Uh, when, when you're looking for like a short hand, like you encounter someone on the proverbial elevator and are looking for like a pithy way to describe who it is you are and what it is you do, what do you, what do you reach for?

NICK: I say I'm a poet.

NEIL: Period.

NICK: Period. Yeah. Yeah. Cause that usually gets a pretty dead-eyed stare like the one you just gave me. Like that's it? That's it.

NEIL: When someone is confronted with poet, silence, do you ever feel like helping someone out?

NICK: Well, it depends on like, often, that'll pretty much be the conversation-ender.

NEIL: Yeah.

NICK: So it does nothing to help cause they're gone right at that point.

NEIL: If your folks were around, how might they describe who it is you've become?

NICK: Wow, that's a, that's an interesting one. Would they, would they still be, are they like idealized, my, like my parents on their best day or on their worst day?

NEIL: Oh, I wouldn't mind hearing both if you don't mind. Like the...

NICK: Ah, like, you know, there's the idealized version of your parents. Then there's the, not the reality, but the, you know, but recognizing at a certain point that they had some rough days, you know. In my mind, it's hard to deny they had some rough days.

So, um, it's a little, it's a little harder to pretend. Yeah. Uh, my father, he knew that I'd published books and he was sort of, you know, strangely proud of that. Uh, but proud just in the way he knew I'd be a good writer because he was such a great writer, so I got it all from him. So he took all credit for any of it.

So I imagined he would still take credit for any accomplishments I've had or that he perceives I've had. I've, I'm trying to think if he had like on a good day, that's sort of like a not so good day. Yeah. On a good day, he did have a couple moments where he was able to just recognize the struggle it had been, uh, between the two of us, uh, to actually acknowledge that. And I think that would be like, he'd say like, yeah, this was, this must have been hard, you know? So I think that would be. That'd be a good day for him.

My mother's a little more enigmatic, like it's actually, when I think about it, like, cause I mean, she died before he did. I was younger. I didn't know her as well, probably. So, although I grew up with her, but, um, I sort of studied my father more, and my mother's more of a, uh, a construct of the imagination in some ways. Although, I mean, we spent so much time together too. It's strange to say that actually, I don't know if that's true.

You know, I, there's always the question like, what would my mother be like now? So I'm, I look at women that are my mother's age, that would be my mother's age now. Like I don't know how, how she would be. So either way, I think she's, since she, from her backhouse sort of WASP-y Irish background, she probably wouldn't say directly anything. I'd have to decipher what she said.

NEIL: So it would be cryptic in terms of her estimation of you, or?

NICK: I mean, she, I think she'd say, "Oh, I'm, I'm proud of you." But the deeper levels of that I think would be harder to get to.

NEIL: Yeah. I see you came in, you were, you had a bike helmet, which I connect to. Um, on your bike ride over, did you have any thoughts?

NICK: Wow. Thoughts as I was coming here - the sort of meta thing is I was listening on my headphones to SHE'S A TALKER. And you're talking to someone about riding a bike over the bridge.

NEIL: Right, yeah.

NICK: So like, yeah. I mean, at the moment I was riding over the bridge. I was listening to you talk to someone else about riding over the bridge and then thinking that I would soon be here talking to you, and I brought my helmet it, I didn't - usually I lock it on my bike but maybe I brought it in so you would ask me about it. It's possible, but I think I just brought it in cause it was cold, it was so cold outside. I wanted a warm helmet when I went back out. So.

NEIL: Aha, you didn't want to put on a cold helmet. I never thought about that.

NICK: What I thought about on the bridge was that it was way colder than I thought it was. It was the wind, it was like howling and I had a hat in my bag and I kept thinking, I'll just stop and put my hat on under my helmet and I didn't stop. I kept thinking, I'll warm up at some point, but I just kept getting colder and colder the further I went. I just never stopped, I just kept going.

NEIL: Well, let's, um, go to some cards that I curated for you.

NICK: You curate these for this conversation?

NEIL: Yes. Yeah.

(Card flip)

So the first card is: the specific, tentative, hyper-attentive way one tastes something to see if it's gone bad.

NICK: Um, what I usually do is I'll, I'll, I'll cook it and then give it to my brother.

NEIL: Mikey likes it?

NICK: Yeah. And then if he can get through it then it probably hasn't gone so far bad. Cause he's pretty sensitive actually. I mean, while I'm presenting, it sounds like he'd just eat anything. No. He's quite sensitive. So he's like sort of the. He's, he, he, he's a Canary. Ah ha. Yeah. So I'll just fix it up and give it to him and then, cause he'll, usually, he's quite happy if I make him something, give him some food, then if it's no good, then, then I throw it away. Yeah. If he eats it, I'll eat it.

NEIL: He's your taster. Um, where, where does your brother live?

NICK: He lives upstate, New York.

NEIL: Oh, okay. Yeah, but he's your older brother, right, if I'm remembering?

NICK: But why did you say, "but." Because he lives upstate?

NEIL: No, because of the scenario of like, your brother, the implication. He's an implied younger brother in the story.

NICK: Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. He's an implied younger brother in life too.

(Card Flip)

NEIL: Next card. When a toddler falls, that space before they start to cry.

NICK: Well. My daughter was, uh, three. And for us, like three was really like, spectacular meltdowns and just like, you know, tantrums and just like wildness, just like absolutely wild, like wild animal, just screaming and frustrated and like, you know, furious. And one day she, uh, she was in a tantrum, she fell and she hit her cheek on the corner of a staircase and it split open and like bled. It sort of woke her up. Like it was right at the end of her being three, she was going to turn four. It was a Sunday night. And my wife and I were like, Oh, what do we do? Like, I'm like, I guess, do we take her to her doctor or do we like, you know, just like, like leave her with a scar for the rest of her life?

And so I butterfly-stitched it, you know, like made a little butterfly thing, to hold it together to squish the skin together, you know? And, uh. That's what we did. We sort of looked up t see like how big and deep it had to be to go to a doctor and stuff and to need a stitch, and it was sort of right on the edge. So I butterfly-stitched it, and then. Yeah so now she just has this pretty little scar on her face and she's perfect.

NEIL: Wow. And does she know the story of the scar?

NICK: Oh yeah. I would say it's a part of her myth, part of her origin myth. The wildest, the wildness poured out of her cheek. Yeah. Yeah.

NEIL: Uh, can, can you share -

NICK: Did that answer your question?

NEIL: Yes and no. That's always the, um, I think it's beautiful. I have the idea, I'm not a parent, but when I see a kid having a tantrum -

NICK: I wasn't either before that.

NEIL: Yeah.

NICK: It comes on kind of suddenly.

NEIL: But how did you deal with tantrums?

NICK: I, I've been sort of attentive and amused by the whole process. Like I feel like we're really lucky. She's a really good kid and just a really interesting kid and like, so I just sort of like see it, like, I admire the tantrums in a certain way. Like, I think everyone should be like, just screaming, running down the streets, you know, most of the time. Like this sucks. Um, so there was something very, uh, wild about it.

Like just to see like, wow, like you can just do this. You can just go and like, you can go to a store and just pull a whole rack down. If you don't get your Popsicle, you don't fucking. She, she used to fire me like every day as a father. She said, if you do not give me that Popsicle, you will not be able to kiss me. You will not be able to hug me. You will not be my father.

NEIL: What did you say to that?

NICK: I'm like, Oh, that's really hard. I'd be sad not to be your father. She was like, you will not be able to, you will have to go to Texas and never come back.

NEIL: Crafty.

NICK: Yeah, she was good. Yeah, but I, you know, I was onto her though. Yeah. I'd be her father like in half an hour later.

NEIL: Did you ever say -

NICK: She'd rehire me like half hour later. Yeah.

NEIL: Was there a re-intake process?

NICK: No. No. We just pretended it didn't happen. Yeah, it was all moving forward. It was all the continuous present.

NEIL: Yeah.

NICK: You just kept this present moment. This present moment had no connection to the other moments whatsoever.

NEIL: Did you ever join your daughter in a tantrum?

NICK: Did I ever join her in a tantrum? Oh, wow. Yeah, I did. Yeah. I remember one night, like early on when she was like six months old and that. The beautiful hallucination of early parenthood where you just, you just don't sleep. You just like, you're just awake for like months.

Like just not sleeping. And you just fall asleep in the middle of things. Just like, you know, you can just barely do anything. Everything's filthy and like, you know, you just wash all the clothes and immediately they're filthy again, the food is just taken and thrown to the floor. I think the dogs eat it. You just give up in a certain way.

There's one night I was up with her at like three in the morning and she was just screaming. And I was just like, I think I filmed her screaming with my phone. I'm just like, okay, just scream. Just scream. I'm going to make a movie of you screaming. I was like, I don't know what to do. So I just made a little movie of her.

NEIL: Wow. But you didn't, but, but it didn't call on you the feeling of like, now I am going to lose it myself and cry?

NICK: Um, well, I think I viewed, it's like, you know, I'm from like a sort of WASP-y Irish background, and so we don't really show that stuff. And I'm sort of always like that, but it don't, I don't, I try. I think no one can see it, but I think everyone actually sees it.

NEIL: So always you're, you're crying always.

NICK: Melting down, yeah.

(Card Flips)

NEIL: Okay. Kids with artist parents. Because both you and your wife are artists. Like to me, the idea of like, two artists come together and they have a kid, well that's going to be a super kid. And then that kid maybe, will -

NICK: Be with another artist, yeah.

NEIL: It's almost like an artistic eugenics kind of vision or something.

NICK: Um, yeah. I always think it for our daughter, like Lord help her. Really. I don't think like, Oh, you've been, you've won the lottery. Like, like, this is the card, this is the hand you've been dealt. Good luck with it. You know, we're both like, yeah, we're both a little. I, I don't know, I don't know if neurotic is the right word, but like, you know. You know, we're, we're sensitive. We're like, you know, in some ways not made for this world, we're, we're awkward where other people are comfortable, we're, uh, you know, we found our place to, to survive, which is really lucky, you know?

And also, you know, in a culture, like I'm a poet too, I'm not, like, it's not that like, this is like some hugely respected artistic position in our culture at the moment. You know, like, that's why I say that I, I say it perversely if someone asks me, with the elevator pitches, like if they ask me what I do, I say I'm a poet.

And just because it's perverse, it's like it's so perverse, you know? You know when, if you go to a doctor's office, I write it on a form. I write 'poet', just, you might as well ride hobo or something. Right? That's not right. I'm a wizard. So it's not like, it doesn't feel like that she's suddenly being dealt like this, like, like a superhuman. Like, what are you talking about?

NEIL: Right.

NICK: It's just unfortunate. Like, you know. Artists get attracted to artists because we can vaguely understand each other, maybe. You know, we're not like, you know, I've tried to be with civilians before and it's like, not easy, you know? I really, I feel less understood, you know? I barely feel like I fit in now. To this world. So you know, you find someone who you feel like, yeah, you also don't feel like you fit in. So that's a kind of connection.

NEIL: How does your, how does your daughter describe what, what you both do? Does she unabashedly say -

NICK: Well, it's a little easier for Lily, for my wife. I mean, cause she's like, you know, people actually will sometimes recognize her on the streets and stuff, so she's a little prouder.

NEIL: But him, the hobo.

NICK: And my dad's a poet.

(Card Flip)

NEIL: Okay. Next card: the fetishization of storytelling.

NICK: Yeah. Right now there's a, there's a whole storytelling thing going on, right? Yeah. There's a whole sense of revival and stuff, and I don't exactly get it. I mean, I, I admire it, like I've gone to The Moth, I've participated in a couple of storytelling things. It's a, it's a strange form for me. It's a strange art form for me, and I admire it when it's done really well. I admire it. The ones I've gone to, that I've been part of, they were, kind of felt a little closer to stand-up, which is another art form too. But I'm like, the line is a little blurry and a little like strange and, and it makes sense that stand-up would be part of it. Cause they are sort of like, like jokes in a way. They're sort of packaged. I mean it's a packaged form. It's like improv is more interesting to me. Like where you don't know where it's going to go. But where, if you know where, I mean, like I say, people that do it well, it's really beautiful.

NEIL: Yeah.

NICK: It's just not what I do. It's like memoir is not storytelling. Uh, it's another form. And storytelling is like one part of it. You sort of tell the story, but then you sort of have to turn over the story and say like, why am I telling this story? Like what am I trying to present in telling this story, ignores all these other realities that are happening or all these other things I don't want you to know. People will come up and say like, you know, how's it feel to like, have that people know so much about you now? Like, well, you only know what I want you to know. You're gonna get some glimpse from a book.

NEIL: Right. Yeah.

NICK: From storytelling, I don't know even what glimpse you get, you get a glimpse of how they tell a story I guess. I want to know about other people. I want to know like what their, the interior life is of other people, what the landscape is. Which is why I like read... Or, why I, why I do anything. Like go see art. Or just to sort of like have that, so you're not so, so you recognize it's not all, all ego, you know? It's not all, like everything isn't sort of springing forth from within me. You know?

NEIL: Right. I'm not interested in other people's stories generally.

NICK: Yeah.

NEIL: Specifically too. I'm not interested in other people's stories, but I'm interested in hearing people think, which is what this podcast is about. So like the way their thought processes reveal themselves. That interests me. I don't know, but I'm, I'm, I'm not interested in the content.

NICK: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I understand. Yeah. I teach creative writing and often it's like, I'm much more interested in like, the stuff around the content. It's not about the content, like it's more about the stuff around like how you're like, like, you know, how this one thing transformed something else or how you chose to make this weird sentence, or how like these things that have sort of moments of excitement. The story itself can be rather deadening.

NEIL: Right.

NICK: Yeah. Because, I think because it's somewhat packaged too, it is a lot of times, yeah.

NEIL: But I also, the thing I really resist is this, like: "We're about stories." You know, like the, this fetishization of storytelling has creeped into like how, how stories are talked about. It's like, we bring you stories da da da, stories. It's like, it feels infantilizing too.

NICK: Well, you know, I was just talking about this with one of my, some of my students, uh. You know, the, what's the most famous Joan Didion line? "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

NEIL: Right, right.

NICK: And, yet, The White Album goes on. That's the first line of The White Album. That'll probably be on her tombstone. Uh, you know, they make bookmarks of it in bookstores, and yet if you actually read The White Album, that essay, she totally just doesn't believe it and contradicts it and says like, why? Like this makes no sense at all. And like that this is, I thought I could do this. Like I was, I was desperately trying to create a story that would protect me from something and it, none of it worked. And it just dissolves, the whole thing just all is like, so to take that one line out of context and say, this is actually a truism is so strange.

It doesn't make any sense at all. And there's a thing, my therapist came up with this thing of the, I don't know if he came up with it, but we talk about my, one of my disorders, uh, one of my many disorders is a narrative affect disorder where I'll create like stories like, but you know, it's not stories like you're talking about, it's creating books and creating like versions of what happened, um, in order to contain it and to be able to hold onto it in a way that seems safe, so I don't have to feel the actual emotional intensity of it.

NEIL: Right.

NICK: Um, and I think it's, it is a type of illness. I think storytelling is a type of illness, uh, that keeps you from actually feeling.

(Card Flips)

NEIL: Next card: often when I leave the apartment, I think, is this how I'd like it to be found if I die today?

NICK: I think that one's more about you than me. I think. Um.

NEIL: You don't think that when you leave?

NICK: Well, I don't think I'm ever going to die. I'm pretty sure.

NEIL: Do you really believe that?

NICK: Yeah. Like I, yeah, no. I have a thing where like, I'm, I'm, there's, well, I just know the ways I'm not going to die.

NEIL: Okay. Let's hear it.

NICK: I'm not going to die in an airplane crash. I'm not going to die by getting eaten by a shark. Might die by getting hit by a car on a bicycle. I mean I might, so I have to be careful.

NEIL: Yeah.

NICK: But I can swim for miles in the ocean filled with sharks. I'm fine. Yesterday I was on a plane coming from Houston and, uh, it was just like, like being on a ship in the middle of a, of a nor'easter. Like it was just wild, you know, like it really, like it was almost spinning. Yeah. I was fine. I'm like, Oh, this is cool cause I'm not gonna die in a plane. Like, you know, so I just have these sorts of things. They might be, you know, just delusional. You know, I mean, how could I possibly know? But I'm almost positive I'm not going to get eaten by a shark.

NEIL: Uh huh.

NICK: Which really, which really helps in Provincetown. Cause there's a lot of sharks there now and a lot of people don't swim in the water. And I'm like, ask yourself, are you going to get eaten by a shark? Do you really think that's the way you're gonna die? And most people would say no. I mean, wouldn't you say no? Like no.

If you know, on a rational day, like that'd be really, and if you did, that'd be so cool. Like how many people, how many poets get eaten by a shark? That'd be so excellent, right? Like it's a win-win. I have a poet, there's a poet, Craig Arnold, a really great poet that died a couple of years ago. He was writing a whole series of poems on volcanoes. Traveling the world, like got a grant to travel the world and look at volcanoes. He's just gone. He just vanished one day. He vanished. We think he fell into a volcano and died. Like, that's like an amazing story. Like it's terrible, terrible, awful. But I mean, there are a lot worse ways to die than falling into a volcano.

NEIL: Oh my God. How would you feel about being bitten by a shark and surviving it?

NICK: That's cool. That woman, that, that surfer that only has one arm, she's cool.

NEIL: You'd be okay with that?

NICK: If I could surf like her.

(Card Flips)

NEIL: Um.

NICK: I really killed this bottle of Perrier.

NEIL: Oh, awesome. I love it. Um, good job. Uh: the ambiguity of "It's downhill from here."

NICK: Oh. The whole idea of like, you know. There's a few things. Yeah. The opposite is all uphill from here, right. It's all, so downhill sounds pretty good, right? But it suggests like we're sliding into the grave, I think.

NEIL: Yes.

NICK: Like it's all like we've reached the peak.

NEIL: Yeah.

NICK: That was the peak. It was really hard to get to the peak. And as soon as you get to the peak, you start going downhill. Yeah. You know? Uh, and, uh. Yeah, I often joke, yeah, I'm on the other side of the, on the other side, now, you know, that you somehow that the, the, the greatest work and the greatest, uh, notoriety so that was a while ago. Um, and.

NEIL: But also maybe the greatest struggle, no?

NICK: Was a while ago.

NEIL: Yeah.

NICK: Yeah. Oh, I dunno. But I, I joke about it. I just, I don't really believe that. The most recent project I'm doing just feels completely, uh, uh, fulfills me. You know, I'd have this other book coming out, this book, Stay, coming out, which I'm, I worked on a lot last year and I'm happy with that. And another book coming out after that. So there's like, you know, I don't really worry about it, but it's, it's almost a thing. It might be sort of Irish too, like just so you don't want to sort of, uh, be too full of yourself. You know, you want to like sort of be somewhat, you don't want to show how many fish you caught that day cause then you have to give half away. So you sort of downplay it. You downplay it. So the downhill side is where we sort of live. We live on the downhill side. I don't know, it's a strange metaphor.

NEIL: It's, it's ambiguous.

NICK: Yeah, it's a strange metaphor.

NEIL: But I'm also thinking it's a paradox, too, and, as you talked, because take the downhill part. Um, it does get easier.

NICK: Yeah.

NEIL: I think, I mean, my life, I will say, and anything could change at any moment, has gotten so much easier, you know, now that I'm clearly on the other side.

NICK: Psychic.

NEIL: Yeah.

NICK: Psychically. Yeah.

NEIL: For sure.

NICK: Yeah. Yeah.

NEIL: Um, yeah. It's also, I am sliding into the grave. Yeah. I mean, hopefully it's a long slide, but...

NICK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mortality. The cold wind of mortality does start to, you start to feel it. At a certain point.

NEIL: In your back.

NICK: Yeah. You started, you know, it's blown in your face. Yeah. It's like, it's like you feel it, which I, you sort of thought you felt it in your 20's but you really, you could have, I mean, we know a lot of people that died in their 20's, sure. It was not like this. This is like the real thing. Yeah. This is like, yeah. There's no, like, there's no choice in the matter. So like, yeah, maybe I'll just overdose or something, you know, or, or, you know, or I'll just be reckless and didn't die. Now it's like, yeah, no matter what I do, doesn't matter what I do, I can, I can eat kale, I can eat kale the rest of my life.

NEIL: Yeah. I don't have to coax the process and it's still going to happen.

NICK: Yeah.

(Card Flips)

NEIL: The existential space of the clipboard.

NICK: Well, I mean, clipboard, I think when you say clipboard, I was thinking of just like first of a blank clipboard, but then I was also thinking of the thing you put clippings on, that you put other things on, combine things together.

NEIL: I'm thinking of the clipboard, the computer clipboard. Like when you cut something. That space.

NICK: Well, what do, what is it? What is that on the computer?

NEIL: The clipboard.

NICK: Yeah. What is that? I'm not sure what it, what do you mean? You cut and paste stuff? Or...

NEIL: Anytime you, surely you do Command X and Command C, right?

NICK: You mean like copy things and then cut things? Yeah. Yeah. Cut. Yeah.

NEIL: So when you copy something -

NICK: And Command V.

NEIL: Oh yeah.

NICK: Yeah, yeah. Can't forget Command V.

NEIL: Absolutely. When you do Command C -

NICK: Yeah. That copies it.

NEIL: Into the clipboard. And then that command, do Command V -

NICK: It takes it off the clipboard.

NEIL: Yeah. Well, it stays in the clipboard, but it also pastes the inside.

NICK: See I don't think, I never knew that. Yeah. I never would've thought of that.

NEIL: I'm acutely aware of the clipboard.

NICK: I never thought where it went. Oh. Oh. Well, this is a tough question cause I've never really thought of this before. So, uh, existential, I mean, that's kind of heavy to suggest it has to do with life or death. Um, uh.

NEIL: You don't think about your text in that kind of liminal state between when you cut it and when you've pasted it?

NICK: I figured it just, it goes away. Like it doesn't, like if I, if I cut something else, then that replaces the thing I cut before, or if I copy something else, replaces the thing. So I just assume there's not a clipboard holding all of them.

NEIL: No, it isn't. That's part of the existential condition.

NICK: Cause it just vanishes once you put something else on top, once you copy something else.

NEIL: Yeah. It's fragile.

NICK: Yeah. I make a lot of copies. I try to, I try to like, save things as much as possible and like, yeah, like I'm, and print things up. I, I prefer to write by hand first. Uh, really. Um, and then to print it and then to write by hand on the thing I've printed and then to keep going back and forth like that.

I like writing by hand. There's a, there's a young poet, um, who created an app called 'Midst.' It's hard to say midst, like in, you're in the midst of something. Yeah. I don't know how to - midst. M. I. D. S. T. It's very hard to say for me.

NEIL: Yeah. Me too.

NICK: Can you say it?

NEIL: Uh, yeah. I feel like it's going to intersect with my sibilant A-S. Let's try it. Midst.

NICK: Yeah. Oh, you do feel very well.

NEIL: But a little gay, right?

NICK: I didn't, I didn't say that. I raised one eyebrow, but I did not say it.

NEIL: When straight men raise one eyebrow, it somehow doesn't look gay. Midst. Midst. What's Midst?

NICK: Well, it's a, it's a program that she did where you can, where you write a poem, I guess you write anything, but it sort of keeps track of all the cutting and pasting you do and the, the process of making it. So you ended up, you send her like a final poem, but then she can press a button and can see all the stuff you did to make it. Um, so I have to try it though, but I usually, I really usually write by hand first and she's like, no, you have to write it on the, you have to compose the whole thing on the thing. I'm like, okay, so I just haven't quite done it yet, but I'm, yeah, I'm planning on it though.

NEIL: But this is basically, this isn't a useful tool. This is a tool to create a kind of -

NICK: To create a thing. She'll publish like a magazine that shows, like you look at a poem and then you press a button and it all sort of like, maybe it goes in reverse and dissolves back to the first word or something.

NEIL: Yeah. I just am not into those kinds of things. I feel like there's a lot of that peripheral to the art world. These things that kind of like perform a process or reveal a process. I'm just not into that. You know what I'm saying?

NICK: No, but that's okay. I mean, I try, I believe that you are not into it. I'm just like, process is nice. Like I love, I love, I love seeing the process. I love seeing, don't you love like, like thinking like Michelangelo's slaves, you know, on the way to the David, right?

NEIL: Oh yeah.

NICK: We get to see the slaves like coming out of the block of marble and everyone says that they were like incomplete.

NEIL: Yes.

NICK: Yeah. We just said, which is such bullshit. Like if you think about it, like what, he did twelve incomplete at the same stage, like they're half out of the block just, Oh, I'm just gonna stop them all here.

NEIL: Right?

NICK: Like, it makes no sense at all. Like you couldn't finish one of them?

NEIL: Right.

NICK: Like he clearly saw that it looked cool for slaves who were pulling themselves out of what they're stuck in. And that, I find it so much more interesting than David, which is complete and perfect. I think, I think that's the meta thing where it's like all about process. That's like the process right there.

NEIL: Huh.

NICK: Yeah. So I try to think about that. That was just sort of a highfalutin way to counter your anti-process.

NEIL: Doesn't feel highfalutin. I think my thing was like faux highfalutin.

(Card Flips)

What keeps you going?

NICK: Um. Uh, just wondering what's gonna happen next. Yeah. Yeah.

NEIL: Poet.

On that note, thank you, Nick Flynn, for being on SHE'S A TALKER.

NICK: Thank you, Neil.

NEIL: That was my conversation with Nick Flynn. Thank you for listening.

Before we get to the credits, there were some listener responses to cards that I'd love to share. In my conversation with artist Tony Bluestone, we talked about the card: That moment when you forget what you should be worrying about and try to reclaim it. In response to that card, Jamie Wolf wrote, "A single brussel sprout rolled under the stove, and I wasn't gonna let Shavasana get in the way of my at least remembering to retrieve it." John Kensal responded with what I think is a haiku: Please sit or flee, my wee and quiet executive function disorder. Another card Tony and I talked about was: Fog is queer weather, to which Jonathan Taylor wrote, "To me, fog is transgressive because it's like a cloud. So it's either you or it is not where it's supposed to be."

Thanks to everyone who wrote in. If you have something you'd like to share about a card on the podcast, email us or send us a voice memo at [email protected] or message us on Instagram at shesatalker. And also, as always, we'd love it if you'd rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or share this episode with a friend.

This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Devin Guinn produced this episode. Molly Donahue and Aaron Dalton are our consulting producers. Justine Lee handles social media. Our interns are Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho, and Rachel Wang. Our card flip beats come from Josh Graver. And my husband, Jeff Hiller, sings the theme song you're about to hear. Thanks to all of them, and to my guest, Nick Flynn, and to you for listening.

JEFF HILLER: 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!

Performer Jon Wan argues that kids are campy.

ABOUT THE GUEST Slipping in and out of drag skin Kiko Soirée, animagus Jon Wan serves an alluring feast of emotion - sensual, sincere, stupid. Kiko (@kikosoiree) is a queer comedian, host and drag queen, performing at venues like Club Cumming, Joe's Pub, The Bell House, Ars Nova, Caroline's, Union Hall, MoCA, Caveat, and UCB. They've been named by Time Out Magazine as one of the rising LGBT POC comedians to watch. Monthly, Kiko hosts 'A+, The Pan-Asian Drag and Burlesque Revue', in the Lower East Side, and seasonally, produces the original musical advice show, 'Dear Kiko'. Their Spanish is better than their Cantonese which hasn't made their mother proud but tracks for the American Born Chinese narrative.

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 Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho, Rachel Wang Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock

TRANSCRIPTION

JON WAN: I just took saxophone cause my friend was also gonna play saxophone, and I just played it through middle school. Then I just continued in high school, and then after freshman year I was like, I don't actually like this instrument. And I'm definitely not a jazz person. Cause I was having saxophone lessons with this person who was a very cool cat. And I was like, I am not understanding fundamentally why I'm here. This isn't clicking with me.

NEIL GOLDBERG: I'm going to really make a controversial generalization here. I don't think jazz is gay.

JON: Oh, no, I don't think so either. You have to be like kind of loose and like -

NEIL: Exactly, a type of casualness.

JON: Yeah, and like comfortable with your body and expression, and I was not - like I was learning classical piano from an oppressive Russian teacher, growing up as a Chinese American, closeted, in a primarily white town. I did not know how to express myself in a healthy way.

NEIL: Right.

JON: Right.

NEIL: Hello. I'm Neil Goldberg, and this is SHE'S A TALKER. I'm a visual artist, and I have a collection of thousands of index cards on which I've been jotting down thoughts and observations for about two decades. In SHE'S A TALKER, I explore the cards through conversations with guests and responses from listeners.

These days, the cards often start as voice memos I record throughout the day. Here are some recent ones: When a parent says to a kid, "Look at me," I'm suspicious and think the parent is probably a narcissist. Thick Sharpies are to thin Sharpies as water bugs are to roaches. Art project: drawing all the missing arms in selfies.

Today, my guest is Jon Wan. Jon, who often appears on stage as their drag persona, Kiko Soiree, describes themself as a Swiss Army knife performer whose work weaves together musical comedy, storytelling, standup, and beyond. Jon's performed at Club Cumming, Joe's Pub, the Bell House, Ars Nova, Caroline's Mocha, and has been named by Timeout Magazine as one of the rising LGBT people of color comedians to watch out for. We spoke in February at a recording studio at The New School near Union Square in New York City.

I'm so happy to have with me Jon Wan.

JON: Hello.

NEIL: Hi Jon. Thank you for being on SHE'S A TALKER.

JON: I'm enchanted to be here. Simply.

NEIL: Simply. What are the alternatives, in terms of enchantment, besides simple enchantment?

JON: Oh, very complex. Yeah. Like arcane magic, you know? Not for pedestrian folk.

NEIL: Yes. Complex enchantment. What is your elevator pitch for what you do?

JON: I am a drag queen, performer, comedian bopping around New York City. You might know me as my drag persona, Ms. Kiko Soiree, performing and doing shows here in this beautiful garbage city and really always aspiring to one day live within walking distance of a Trader Joe's.

NEIL: I see it for you. I really see it for you. You know, a Trader Joe's just opened opposite where Jeff and I live.

JON: No, which one?

NEIL: Uh, it's on Grand Street. Grand and Clinton.

JON: Oh, wow.

NEIL: It's the biggest Trader Joe's on the Eastern Seaboard, I'm told.

JON: That's crazy. So you live near not only a Trader Joe's, but a historic one.

NEIL: Yes, exactly. Uh, what does your mom, when she's talking to her friends, what does she say you do?

JON: Oh, (In his mother's accent) oh, Jon um, oh, Jon lives in New York City. (back to normal voice) And then she kinda just like shoos the conversation. I think, she knows I'm a drag queen. I don't think she publicly has the language to talk about it the way she might alternatively say, "My daughter works for a pharmaceutical company." Do you know what I mean?

NEIL: Right. Do you have a sister that works...?

JON: She does. Don't worry. It's a good pharmaceutical company.

NEIL: Oh yeah. Uh, what does your dad say?

JON: My dad, uh, is actually very vocally supportive of my creative life. He usually says, "He's a performer and a comedian, and..."

NEIL: What kind of performances does he do?

JON: "Oh, (In his father's accent) Jonathan does his funny stand up in New York City." And just stuff like that and yeah, I don't think they're, they're like ashamed of anything I do, but my dad came here for college. My mom came here when she was 13. They're kind of this transition generation, you know, they, they were really straddling both cultures and had to deal with the more brutish parts of assimilation. They came from traditional Chinese parents, but they're, you know, they're open-minded. They both grew up. They were like hippies. You look at old photos of them. My mom had like hair down to her waist. But, you know, you know, I'm the first drag queen of my family.

NEIL: That you know of.

JON: Hopefully not the last.

NEIL: Yes. What is something you find yourself thinking about today?

JON: Um. Today, I was thinking about how everyone is a walking advertisement. I was a sucker for the AirPods, the first ones that came out. They're just, I know when I put them in my ear, I'm going to feel very sexy, and I had this thought today as I was putting them in my ear. It's like everyone is a walking advertisement.

NEIL: So when you're wearing AirPods, you're an advertisement for...

JON: Yeah, for Apple. My AirPods now suck because I lost the original case and I bought a knock off one on Amazon for like 30 bucks and they do try to pair with everyone on the train.

NEIL: Oh really?

JON: I just kind of, but you can't do it successfully.

NEIL: It's like your dog humping strangers' legs or something.

JON: Truly. I can see on people's phones like something comes up and says, Not your AirPods. It goes all the time and I just keep my head down and I just. I didn't want to pay another $70 for the case.

NEIL: I've curated some cards just for you. Um, first card, Jon.

JON: Okay.

NEIL: All kids' names are campy.

JON: Absolutely. Cause kids are camp.

NEIL: How so?

JON: I used to teach, um, preschool in undergraduate. so I worked with three, four, and five-year-olds. And when you talk to a kid, it's very serious. It, it's of the utmost importance. And it's also insane.

NEIL: Which is the essence of camp!

JON: Which is the essence of camp. Um, but you know, when they're just playing, they're just talking very seriously about something. Or they're telling you an opinion, something they saw today, like. (imitates kid's voice) "Like, Mr. Jon? Today, I, I saw a dog and... Dog had a really long tongue." (back to normal voice) And they like will drop whatever they're playing with me to let me know about this thing, which neurologically like they're doing that thing where like, they have seen a new category that they don't yet understand and they're trying to integrate it into what they do, right? So I have to be there and say, "Daphne, tell me about the dog." You know, like I want to know more. Well, what color was the dog? You know what I'm saying? "It was, it was brown." I'm like, okay. All right. It was brown. I love that. So, but then it's also insane cause you're like, this is so crazy.

NEIL: To me, it makes perfect intuitive sense how that connects to camp. But could you, could you...

JON: I think it connects to, I mean, camp, I mean, treats itself seriously, but knows it's also ridiculous. You know. I mean, campy drag queens like divine, completely over-the-top makeup and personality, but acting and performing with a lot of conviction.

NEIL: The difference, though, may be being, and maybe it's a technical difference, do you think kids know that they are ridiculous?

JON: No. Absolutely not. Did you -

NEIL: Okay. So they're inadvertently campy?

JON: Unless they were like early stars and then they're like, Oh, okay, people are enjoying what I'm doing.

NEIL: Right, right, right, right. (flip card) I love the smell of a drag queen.

JON: Absolutely not. If you really smelled, uh, maybe the perfume that we put on at the very end, but if you smelled any of our undergarments or any of our clothing, that's, some of that, I mean, the vintage pieces maybe haven't ever been washed. Maybe just sprayed down with some alcohol and water. To get rid of the bacteria and the smell. Um. And I'm not washing pantyhose every single week. Are you thinking of the metaphorical smell?

NEIL: I have no idea what that is. And I'm all in.

JON: Every drag queen has a different energy and that can be very intoxicating. That's like half the fun, that someone's showing you something on the other side of the looking glass.

NEIL: Aha. But the literal smell for me is always about just powdery perfume. But you're saying beneath that is just... filth.

JON: I've, I guess I've, I've done it so many times. I'm no longer piqued by just the smell of powder and, and lipsticks and things like that. Just, that's kind of smells like the entrance of a, of a Macy's, you know? You know what I'm talking about, right? You walk into a Macy's and it's always like the perfume entrance, right?

NEIL: Yeah, yeah. That somehow seems like a euphemism. Smells like the entrance of Macy's.

JON: God, she smelled like the entrance of a Macy's. I'm not going back there, Charlotte.

NEIL: Um, I guess I have thought about like with padding and tucking, uh...

JON: Mhm. Machinery going on.

NEIL: Yeah. Which does involve compressing the body, or, or depriving the body of air circulation, which I guess could generate smells, right?

JON: Yeah. It's tight. I mean, if you're, I mean, if you're just, even if you're putting on hips, right? Let's say you're padding, some people, some queens are wearing four or five layers of tights, right? Just to make a smooth silhouette. Um, you know, and you're hot, you're moving around, your head is hot cause you're wearing a wig. My hair lines are glued down, so everything's sleek. So when I go, you know, getting out of drag is the best feeling.

NEIL: I can imagine. Do you get out of drag at the venue or at home?

JON: I am an at home queen. And I'm also a get ready at home queen, too. I just ride the train down.

NEIL: Really?

JON: Yes. I mean, I'm in drag, but have like a winter coat on, and a scarf, and I have sweatpants over my dress, so I look like just like a, a gymnast going to a meet or something.

NEIL: To a Wheaties commercial.

JON: I look like a suburban mom going to Costco.

NEIL: That thing of posing people in nude photos, so their genitals are hidden by a raised knee or what have you.

JON: That's very Black Mirror to me.

NEIL: Oh really?

JON: Oh, just like it's on the cusp of this is, this is very sexy, and also, what are we doing, right? What the hell are we doing? This is insane. I think of Instagram immediately.

NEIL: Oh yeah, sure.

JON: People just like, a sexy photo of themselves. It's like, "You're naked." You hid, you moved your body a little bit. We're one centimeter away from seeing whatever it is, you know? But it's like, if you cover a little bit, Instagram's like, Oh, you're not nude.

NEIL: Isn't that deep?

JON: It's crazy. It's true. It's true. It's truly wild.

NEIL: I wonder if there is a fetish around obscured - like if there are people who get off on the actual obscuring.

JON: Oh, 100% yeah. 100% think that's a fetish. I mean, in the same way that just wearing a leather chest strap, that's totally nonfunctional.

NEIL: Right, exactly.

JON: Like there's not even a function to it.

NEIL: Yeah.

JON: But I'm just imagining you in a different way. I mean, you know, cause you're an artist. Marina Abramovic's, um, performance where she stood naked, right? And she had a table of instruments.

NEIL: Yeah.

JON: That was, I think like the exploration of like is, is this actually like. Well, it was exploring a lot of things. Like one of the questions I had was like, is this sexual? Like, she had a feather. She had a knife. She had a gun, right?

NEIL: Uh, may have had a gun, uh, I thought she had scissors too. Or maybe I'm confusing that with Yoko Ono's "Cut" piece. Um, yeah, there were things that could do violence for sure.

JON: I think there was a gun.

NEIL: Yeah, that sounds right.

JON: Um, that sounds very Marina probably.

NEIL: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

JON: But, um, I think the reason why I thought Black Mirror at first, cause it's like we are so... We are surfing the simulacra of society.

NEIL: Oh my God.

JON: Who, Baudrillard? Is that the philosopher?

NEIL: Mhm. Society of spectacle.

JON: I am really smart right now in this hour...

NEIL: Oh my God. Um, it's funny you mention Marina Abramovic, cause one of the cards I have, or this is just an idea for an art project I would love to do, which is, you know, the artist is present where, you know, you would sit with and look into her eyes. But I'd like to do that with, butt warmth. You'd sit on chairs and then you would just switch. Like I could feel your butt warmth on the chair, and you could feel mine.

JON: And I'm going to, I'm going to build on this. The seats, to kind of give it some sort of like, um, sexy factor. The seats are thermo-visually dynamic. So when you sit, you can see the warmth, um, like a print? That the last person -

NEIL: The heat, the heat map.

JON: Mhm. The heat map of the last person.

NEIL: If that's what it's called. Our first collaboration.

JON: That's going to sell tickets at the MoMA.

NEIL: This is a card I found tucked under my, uh, the, the sofa in my studio, and all it says is: Anus.

JON: You know, synchronicity. Because we recently got a bidet. Um, which has quickly made my Top 2020 List of things to improve your life.

NEIL: Oh my God. Yeah.

JON: Um, bidet.

NEIL: Yeah.

JON: Pretty, uh very affordable. There are certain models that are just like, even under 50 bucks.

NEIL: Oh, wow. Okay.

JON: Will change your life.

NEIL: Huh? I, um, I would be, cause I feel like I've seen some like bidets that border on like the geriatric medical in terms of their appearance, you know, where they look like an add-on to the toilet seat. And, I feel like I would embrace a bidet deeply, but I need for the aesthetics to be on point.

JON: I hear you. I'm also someone who is an obsessed aesthete. And also I'm very practical and functional. And I really saw no point of a bidet cause I had a, was doing perfectly fine for God knows how many years, right? But we won it in a Santa Swap, like a, you know, the white elephant thing. Um, so we brought it home. I took it through the airport. My bag was fully paused cause they thought I was carrying home a bomb. Like what the fuck is in your bag, right? There's like piping and tubing, and this big shape of plastic and a knob. So, um, so this one's pretty sleek. And a bidet is, it's like a shower just for your ass. And. And that's it. It's, it's like, it's like taking a shower, but just for your anus. I, there's no other way to feel it. And I thought, and then I, I'm, and now I've, I've talked about it in my office because if I'm excited about something, I must to talk about it.

NEIL: Oh, yeah.

JON: And I'm going to put it out there - bidets are very sexual, and every straight man who's out there is understanding the queer experience. I, or like, this is like, you understand. It's like, Oh that's right, butt play isn't just like a gay thing. It's like a universal thing. And uh, you know, the anus is a sexual region, so you let it go for as long as you want. Some people have heated bidets, and that's nice cause then it's warm water. Mine is not, we have a cheap kind. So in the winter time it's frigid. But I like it because it makes me feel like I'm alive, and it's a test of character, which I get off on. And then you're done. And then it's, and then it's like you took a shower.

NEIL: Ah. But you know, you should have front loaded the part that it's not heated. That might be a deal breaker for me. Although I also, like you, I'm energized by like, as a depressive. I love winter because it really brings out, um, a feeling of like, the will to live in me.

JON: And it's good for your skin.

NEIL: Cheers. But I don't want. I don't think I want, I don't know. I've never had that experience. I don't think I want a cold-water anal shower.

JON: Uh huh. Well, you know, and neither did I, I thought it would, it would never be on my radar. And that's why it's made my Top 2020 List.

NEIL: Wow.

JON: And I know we're just wrapping up the first month, but I think it's going to be on there.

NEIL: Oh, I'm so confident in that, I'm so confident in that. I think if they called it a cold-water anal shower, it wouldn't sell as many units as a bidet.

JON: It would only sell in niche markets for sure.

NEIL: Uh, next card. The way you can tell certain people won't age well.

JON: Yeah. Um, you can just tell. Uh, for me it's just like an impression.

NEIL: Yes. It's not based on facts, for me.

JON: Truly not based on facts. A lot of it really just has to do with their energy.

NEIL: Exactly.

JON: Absolutely. Like their energy, the way they carry themselves, the way they think about themselves. Did you read that Roald Dahl book, The Twits?

NEIL: No.

JON: The Twits. I can't recap the entire plot in entirety, but there's this one part of like, they think ugly thoughts and then they became ugly. And it was, you know, he is an amazing writer. But yeah, that never left me as a kid. And I think that continues to apply today. Even there are people who are old, but they just. They look and appear and they feel so young. And they're aging like, "Oh my gosh, you're aging beautifully."

NEIL: Right. I love that.

JON: Right?

NEIL: Yeah.

JON: It's not about having wrinkles or things like that. There really is a disposition, the way you carry yourself.

NEIL: Yeah. I find also, I think that card for me came from like, it, it can be a strategy or it used to be a strategy for managing, like desire. Like I would see someone who was hot to me, but then I would mentally age them and be like, No, as a way to... Yeah, manage my desire.

JON: Yeah. I mean, I'm not petty, but I recently went to a high school reunion and I said, I loved that I did not peak.

NEIL: Oh my God.

JON: I'm still ascending.

NEIL: Oh, you so are. You totally are.

JON: Oh, thank you. And you are too.

NEIL: Um, I think I, I don't know where I am.

JON: You're aging gracefully.

NEIL: Thank you. I'm trying.

JON: That's, and that's the goal. Yeah. No. Cause it's like some people that were like super hot in like, in high school and you're just like, Oh wow. I think we, I think our people had a different kind of strategy. We had a different strategy.

NEIL: Yeah. It's like, um. I just read this book called The Overstory, which is all about trees. I don't know if you heard of it. It's so good. I recommend it, but, uh, it talks about the different things different trees' seeds need to become activated. Like some seeds need extreme cold. Some need to be set on fire. Um, so I think the gay seed... That sounds bad.

JON: No, no, no. Perfect.

NEIL: Um, benefits from not having peaked in high school.

JON: Yes, absolutely.

NEIL: Can I ask how old you are?

JON: 29. 29, my numerological golden year.

NEIL: Oh, what does that mean?

JON: Everyone has a life path number. Okay, so mine breaks down to 29 slash 11 slash 2. If you're a, ever all my die-hard numerologists out there. Um, and so 29 is the first reduction. And so I'm 29.

NEIL: I love it. Um 29 and 11 are both prime numbers, aren't they?

JON: Mm, I studied visual arts in undergraduate, so I'm going to pass on this one. But you know, you calculate your number by just adding your birthdate across like... So mine is zero plus eight plus zero plus two plus one plus nine plus nine zero equals 29. Two plus nine is 11. One plus one is two.

NEIL: I love it.

JON: And then they all have meanings. You know, there's a whole book. You can Google it.

NEIL: Yeah, I can imagine. Wait, so you were born in August? Was that what I heard? Leo?

JON: I'm a Leo. Are you a Leo?

NEIL: No, I'm a Virgo.

JON: Oh! I have a lot of Virgo friends.

NEIL: I have a lot of Leo friends. Well, Virgo teaches Leo. You're taught by the sign that follows you. So Virgo is taught by Libra. Leo is taught by Virgo.

JON: Yes, yes. And. The sign before you teaches a person after to remember that they didn't have to give up the qualities that they left behind.

NEIL: Cheers.

JON: Virgos are famously the perfectionists, right? Natural at managing their immediate environments and, you know, being very meticulous and they could run the whole system, but then they forget that they're also, you know, they can allow themselves to shine. They don't have to be so critical of themselves.

NEIL: That is such a beautiful, um, flipping of the teaching thing. I love it.

JON: You know who is a prime example of a Leo-Virgo cusp?

NEIL: Who?

JON: Beyoncé. So you can tell she has the Virgo energy of like, everything must be perfect.

NEIL: Absolutely.

JON: Um, and I'll think of my idea and then I'll present it to you. But then she's also, you know, still carrying her Leo energy of like, I am a star.

NEIL: Right, exactly. That's deep. You have forever changed how I think about, um, the Zodiac.

JON: And that's my time today.

NEIL: Yes. (flips card) What's a bad X you'd take over a good Y?

JON: What's a bad X you'd take over a good Y? Oh gosh. I would take a bad massage over a good meal.

NEIL: I'm with you, totally with you.

JON: I had to really think.

NEIL: Yeah, you look a little spent right now.

JON: No, I mean that, that took the, the, the final juice of my brain. Yeah. We have, we have gone to the trenches of my brain and pulled everything out. That was it. I mean, like, that's it. That's my, that's my ethos.

NEIL: Have you had a bad massage?

JON: Absolutely. And would I take it over a good meal? 100%. I'm a little, I'm a little surprised that I haven't vocalized this earlier in my life, but that's how you know this is the genuine response. Bad massages? Oh, I don't care. Someone's touching me, oh, I melt. I like, I think I'm like in a constant state of low-grade ecstasy when someone's touching me. Right?

NEIL: Yeah.

JON: It could be terrible. And I have had my share of terrible massages. You know, Chinatown massages have a spectrum.

NEIL: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JON: No frills. You can't complain.

NEIL: Yeah.

JON: Good meal? Okay. But I know I'm gonna be hungry again. You know, like... Meal goodness to me is controllable cause you could let yourself go to the brink of like, I can't see, I'm so hungry and anything will taste good. Yes. Sometimes I do that. Sometimes I let myself get so hungry if I'm, if there's a meal I'm not thrilled to eat. I'd be like, Oh, I'm more vegetarian now, but when I would, when I was less, I would hang out with some of my friends, I'm like, Oh, I'm going to go to their place. I'm going to let myself get famished cause then it won't matter what I eat.

NEIL: Cause they're not good cooks, potentially?

JON: Cause like, Oh, I really wanted meat. But like who knows what the vegetarian meal will be. A crap-shoot. But I'll be so hungry. It's going to taste like milk and honey from the Bible.

NEIL: You found a way to turn - you've made it predictable. You've managed it.

JON: I mean the gamble is, you do become more irritable and you have to kind of like have a lot of self-control.

NEIL: Right, right, right.

JON: People want to small talk with you. You'd be like, okay, when's dinner?

NEIL: When's the shitty dinner that I'm starving for?

JON: A shout out to all my vegetarian friends. I love coming over to your house and don't stop making food from me.

NEIL: On that note, Jon Wan, thank you so much for being on SHE'S A TALKER.

JON: Oh, thank you for having me, Neil.

NEIL: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of SHE'S A TALKER. Before we get to the credits, there were some listener responses to cards that I'd love to share. In my conversation with Buddhist teacher Kate Johnson, we talked about the card:

I can imagine thinking as I'm dying, "Here we go again."

In response to that card, David Coleman wrote, "The one time that I ever really thought I was about to die, all I could think was, 'Wow, so this is it. Nothing more than this.' It was a feeling of peaceful surprise. This story is from 9/ 11. My building was so close to the World Trade Center that when the first tower started to collapse, it appeared as though it was going to fall to the East, which would've completely flattened my building, and I felt so sure I was about to die. Actually, for the next several months, I had this little secret thought I'd never shared that maybe I really was dead. But then again, my neurologist also said I was the only person he'd ever heard of who enjoyed having a stroke. So don't go by me."

Thank you, David. If anyone out there listening has something that you'd like to share about a card on the podcast, email us or send us a voice memo at [email protected] or message us on Instagram at shesatalker. And also, as always, we'd love it if you'd rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or share this episode with a friend.

This series is made possible with generous support from Still Point Fund. Devon Guinn produced this episode. Molly Donahue and Aaron Dalton are our consulting producers. Justine Lee handles social media. Our interns are Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho, and Rachel Wang. Our card flip beats come from Josh Graver, and my husband, Jeff Hiller, sings the theme song you're about to hear. Thanks to all of them, and to my guest, Jon Wan, and to you for listening.

JEFF HILLER: 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!

Artist Tony Bluestone talks about the existential condition of the Wet Paint sign.

Meditator Kate Johnson explores the connection between car horns and anonymous comment sections.

ABOUT THE GUEST Kate Johnson teaches classes and retreats integrating Buddhist meditation, somatics, social justice and creativity at the Rubin Museum in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, the Kripalu Center and the Omega Institute. Kate works as a culture change consultant, partnering with organizations who are pursuing noble goals to achieve greater diversity and sustainability. She is also an utterly unprofessional dancer and performer who earned a BFA in Dance from The Alvin Ailey School/Fordham University and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU.

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 Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock

TRANSCRIPTION

NEIL GOLDBERG: My favorite New York biking experience is going over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn. There's that long, gentle curve as you exit into Brooklyn, and you also don't have to pedal because you're ...

KATE JOHNSON: Going down a hill.

NEIL: ... going downhill.

KATE: I know what you're talking about ...

NEIL: I live for that.

KATE: ... down to Jay Street.

NEIL: Yeah, exactly. And I also love that moment, especially at night, coming from Brooklyn into Manhattan on any of the bridges, and when you reach that midpoint where you can stop pedaling, you're over the water, and you can basically just glide all the way back into Manhattan.

KATE: Yeah, from the peak, right?

NEIL: Yeah.

KATE: Oh yeah, that is beautiful. Yes. I actually crashed my bike once on that because I was just having this peak moment as I was looking out at the water, then I hit the side and scraped my knee and hobbled the rest of the way.

NEIL: Hello. I'm Neil Goldberg and this is SHE'S A TALKER. Today, I'll be talking to meditation teacher Kate Johnson. But first, here's the premise of the podcast, and I like to say it's better than it sounds. I'm a visual artist, and I have this collection of thousands of index cards on which I've been jotting down thoughts, observations, reflections for a good 20 years. They were originally meant just for me, maybe to hold onto something I wanted to remember, or maybe to use in a future art project. But in SHE'S A TALKER, I'm using them as prompts for conversations with some of my favorite New York artists, writers, performers, and beyond.

NEIL: These days, the cards often start as recordings I make into my phone here and there throughout the course of the day. Here are some recent ones: English. Double letters are okay, triple letters are too much. I'm kind of surprised Trump likes Sharpies. Have to get home to feed one animal to another animal.

NEIL: I'm so happy to have as my guest, Kate Johnson. Kate teaches classes and retreats that integrate Buddhist meditation, social justice work, and creative practice at places like the Rubin Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philly, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, and the Kripalu Center, among others. She also describes herself as an utterly unprofessional dancer who earned an MA in performance studies from NYU. We talked in January at a recording studio at The New School near Union Square in New York City.

NEIL: I'm so happy to have Kate Johnson with me today on SHE'S A TALKER. Thank you, Kate, for being here.

KATE: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me.

NEIL: I want to start with a couple questions I ask everybody. The first question would be, what is the elevator pitch for what it is you do?

KATE: Oh my God. I am a mediation teacher and organizational consultant, and I often work at the intersections of spirituality, social justice, and creativity.

NEIL: Whoa. That is an elevator pitch.

KATE: Right?

NEIL: That absolutely is.

KATE: I pulled it together.

NEIL: I can really see how that triad could inform each other. Spirituality, social justice, and creativity, yes?

KATE: Yeah. I mean, I also feel like those are the things that I just like and am good at, so there's not a whole lot else, I think, that's for me in this world. I try to just make them go together whenever I can.

NEIL: Right. Oh, isn't that what we're all doing? Just make the things that we like go together. Do you have parents, grandparents who are still around?

KATE: Yeah. I have parents who are still around.

NEIL: What, let's say, would your parents say to their friends when their friends ask what you do?

KATE: Oh. My mom would say that I'm a spiritual teacher, and my dad would say that I'm a writer.

NEIL: Oh, that's interesting. What's that split about?

KATE: Well, my dad was a writer. He was a journalist, and so I think that he always really supported my love of language and saw that part of me. Then my mother, recently she started getting really into meditation, so she practices twice a day, she comes to mediation retreats that I teach. I don't know, I also feel like there are certain people in life where when you talk to them, your wisdom kind of comes out, and I think that my mom and I are that for each other.

NEIL: Oh, that's wonderful.

KATE: So I see her as a spiritual teacher, too.

NEIL: Do you get nervous when she comes to a meditation retreat?

KATE: A little bit. I mean, partially because I kind of have an internal commitment, even when I'm in meditation spaces, to really be honest about the way that I hope that our spiritual practice can inform our political lives. So oftentimes that means talking about my experience as a black, mixed race woman, and I have a white mommy. And so part of, I think, what's spiritual about our relationship is the willingness not to give up on each other as we have these conversations about what it means for me to be a black woman in America, what it's like for her as a mother of black children, and the ways in which, as a white woman living in kind of a middle-upper class area of Chicago, the things that she doesn't see or the attitudes she unconsciously picks up she didn't mean to. And so I think it's amazing. It's also frustrating in some ways to be in this long-term relationship with this person where we're not going to give up on each other because we have different views.

KATE: But just to go back to your question, I'll often look out and be talking about experiences of racism, both within meditation centers and outside, and I'll look out at her and just wonder, "What's she thinking?" Does she feel bad that she couldn't shield me from those experiences? Is she feeling like, "Is Kate making this up? I don't know what she's talking about." So sometimes I'll try to read her face, but most of the time I'm just happy she's there and that she's ... I mean, she raised four children pretty much by herself, so I'm happy she has a little time to relax. We probably terrorized her.

NEIL: You mentioned not giving up on each other. I mean, that's such an interesting way to put it.

KATE: Well, every family's different, everyone's relationship with their parents is different. A lot of the people that I interact with often in my social life, they have a relationship with their parents, and I think sometimes with the elder generation in general, where there's a sense of ... I don't know, kind of objectifying them. Like we might have seen them once and then saw a mixed bag, as we all are, someone who in some ways has it together or is loving and in other ways maybe carries outdated notions of themselves or other people, or uses embarrassing language to describe a particular ethnic group. Then we just kind of ... There's this dulling of the perception that happens after that where we no longer are seeing that person, we're seeing our memory projecting it out and then reacting to our own projections. And so-

NEIL: Oh my God. Story of my life.

KATE: So I think not giving up is being, in some ways, willing to allow each other the grace that is actually offered to all of life, which is that we're all always changing and to be awake to each others' evolving experience and to be willing to be honest about what our experience is and shape each other. I think that's the other way in which I've seen friends give up on parents, is that they stop really telling the parents who they are. We fear we may not be accepted or parents just don't understand, that kind of thing, and sometimes that's true. Sometimes we have that fear and it's confirmed, and that's really hard. So it's like you can't have your whole sense of worth wrapped up in what a parent thinks, but also what if they couldn't see us once and then one day they could? And we kept kind of showing up and allowing ourselves to be seen, if that's not dangerous to who we are. I like to be surprised.

NEIL: Shall we go to these cards?

KATE: Cool, yeah. This is actually the part that I'm most excited about, so ...

NEIL: All right, well. The first card I have is, "Patience always feels somehow wrong."

KATE: The wrongness. I relate to the discomfort of patience. I think one of the blessings of Buddhist meditation training is it kind of gets drilled into your bones that just because something is uncomfortable doesn't mean it's wrong. I think to the point where it can even go a little too far and people can become scared of pleasure, and that's also not the point. In the Buddhist tradition, the word that's translated as patience is called khanti. It's K-H-A-N-T-I and it's one of the virtues, and so it's not different than other traditions where patience is a virtue. We often translate it as patience, but it means something like forbearance, also.

KATE: So for me, when I learned patience as a child it was like holding on like hell until you get what you want, like, "If you're good, then you can have this treat when you get home." And so you just hold your little hands, you just sit on them and wait until finally, "Oh, I get what I want now that ..." I have a sense of relief and the patience that is talked about in the Buddhist teachings, which I also relate with ... and it's a little bit of a perspective shift, but it's like not just patience until I get what I want, but the patience that one has when we may never get what we want, or whether what we want is gone and will never return. The kind of patience that we have with our bodies as they get older and we go to do something that we used to do effortlessly. The suggestion, I guess, is that we can meet that experience with patience.

NEIL: Yeah, there's so many different types of patience, too. For a long time, I supported myself in a day job that involved a mix of computer graphics and IT work. Working with people around computers brings up, for me, the deepest level of patience or challenges to patience.

KATE: Because they're not going fast enough? Is that-

NEIL: You could take the keyboard and mouse out of their hands and just do it absolutely in two seconds, but it is important to develop that muscle memory of using the mouse and the keyboard and da da ... going through the steps and having it be imprinted on your body in that way.

KATE: Yeah. I mean, we're talking and I'm like, oh, so much of patience for me is about pace. It's about I either want a task to go faster than it's going, I would like time to go faster than it's going, and the frustration that it's actually not ... It's difficult. It's difficult. I don't know, would you say it's wrong?

NEIL: That really segues, interestingly, into a card I have about honking. "People honking are not where they want to be."

KATE: That's deep. I mean, that's really deep. Yeah, I mean, gosh, to just be able to make a noise and be like, "I'm here and I don't want to be."

NEIL: Right, exactly.

KATE: It makes me want to have a horn to just carry around and be like ...

NEIL: Oh my God.

KATE: Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think it's like they don't want to be here, but also, "I want someone to know that I'm here and I don't want to be. I want to make that heard. I want to make that visible." I can relate to that feeling.

NEIL: Oh my God, yeah. God, that horn would be on frequent blast in my life.

KATE: Yeah, yeah. Or when you see a child have a tantrum and it's just like, that's them honking their horn being like, "Something is not right."

NEIL: Right, right, right. That's so true. Oh my God, the horn is metaphor. But I bike a lot, and I was stopped at a light where someone was honking the horn, and the biker next to me ... I love the conversations you'll have occasionally at a stoplight with someone else in the bike lane. He said, "Car horns should be just as loud inside the car as outside."

KATE: Yeah, that's a cool idea. I mean, I can't imagine any car manufacturer picking that up, but you know.

NEIL: I know, right. I think that's also a connection between honking and vulnerability. As a bicyclist, do you ever kind of make that connection? I often feel like when people are honking at me, they're actually expressing a fear of hurting me.

KATE: Oh, oh.

NEIL: Have you ever had that, or ...

KATE: Yeah. I guess it can be like that the same way a parent will yank a kid, like, "Why'd you do ..." When they're doing something that they feel is dangerous. Yeah, I think the feeling of being in this giant metal thing that's hurling through space that could totally kill somebody is really kind of jarring.

NEIL: Absolutely.

KATE: I mean, I love that you're giving people the benefit of the doubt like that, like, I startled them and they don't want to hurt me. I think that's a wonderful attitude to take. I didn't often think that. I often felt like there was so much protection or something that, I don't know, they felt they could do whatever they wanted. I often would pull up next to a car at a stop light and look over and when the person looked at me, the impression that I had is that they forgot that they could be seen inside this compartment.

NEIL: Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

KATE: So it almost is like an anonymous comment section or something where they can say whatever they want with their ... and then no one has to know it was them that trolled this nice biker.

NEIL: Honking is like the anonymous comment section. That's fucking brilliant. The card says, "Childish laughter at Buddhist lecture." You know what I'm talking about? Any kind of spiritual lecture ... First of all, the teacher will often embrace a kind of, "The bird doesn't worry about da, da, da." You know, say something kind of like that.

KATE: Oh God. Yeah.

NEIL: And then in turn, the audience will laugh but it's not funny, and it's a childish kind of laughter.

KATE: I was talking with a friend about this recently because we were talking about the kinds of Dharma talks or spiritual teachings that become ritualized to the point that this person is telling a story that they have actually told many, many times. You've heard it on a podcast and you've heard them say it at last year's retreat and they're telling the same story and there's the same punchline and you laugh again and it's like, "Why?" We were wondering if it's less about novelty and more about familiarity, kind of like there's a sense of, "Oh, I know what's coming and it's comforting to me and I laugh because I know what to do here."

NEIL: I hear that. It's why we like sitcoms. You know the joke's about to come ... certain types of sitcoms.

KATE: Right. And it also depends on what's coming before it because sometimes I think that Dharma talks can also bring up heavy stuff, like death and aging and heartbreak of various kinds. And so it builds up a kind of energy that can actually be difficult for us to contain, and so there's this sense of it's powerful, but it's almost uncomfortable because it's building up this energy, then wanting it to release in some way. So even if the joke is bad, just being excited that there's a release valve that you can pull.

NEIL: Next card. "How I sometimes keep my shoelaces untied as a kind of mindfulness reminder." I'm aware that my shoelaces are untied as I'm walking. They become untied, it's not like I purposely don't tie them. They become untied and I kind of hold off on tying them just as a way to be like, "Got to walk mindfully."

KATE: Oh wow. What effect does it have, or how does it work? Does it help your mindfulness?

NEIL: Absolutely because it's like you don't want to trip. It then becomes a walking meditation. But also, it really makes you aware of how many people will tell you, "Hey, your shoelace is untied." Which is why New York is great.

KATE: I was thinking about that. I was like, "Oh my God, do you know what you're doing to people?

NEIL: Right, exactly.

KATE: For me, I get so scared when I see someone with their shoelace untied. I'm like, "You're going to fall." But I kind of love that. I also think it's ... Walking meditation can be kind of boring. I mean, all meditation can be kind of boring, so it's like ...

NEIL: Right, exactly.

KATE: ... juicing it up a little bit, living on the edge, walking meditation. I like it.

NEIL: Because you could trip, as mindful as you're trying to be.

KATE: Right. The wind blows a different way, it swings that little lace underneath you're other foot, and then you're just-

NEIL: Exactly, you're down.

KATE: Yeah. But I'm glad you haven't fallen yet. I think that's cool.

NEIL: May you not fall.

KATE: May you ever be upright.

NEIL: Do you have any little tricks like that, like meditation hacks?

KATE: Yeah. I mean, I think Thich Nhat Hanh's tradition is really amazing for this kind of thing because they talk about mindfulness bells and the way that you can ... And bell is a metaphor, it's something that makes you remember, and so you just ... It can be a bell, like every time your phone rings, you take a deep breath, feeling your feet on the ground before you pick it up. Or every time you touch a doorknob, you allow yourself to begin again, whatever that means. There's ways to do that.

NEIL: Oh, I love that.

KATE: I think for me now, a lot of my mindfulness bells are internal. I'll actually notice a disturbance in the field. I'll notice that my chest tightened up a little bit or my belly kind of swerved, or I feel something inside and use this moment to kind of actually pause and notice what happened there, and if necessary, to care of it. I'm big into letting my body talk to me these days as a practice, after having really ignored it for many, many, many years. I'm like-

NEIL: As a dancer, or in dance work? Or just as a human being, or ...

KATE: Yeah, definitely in dance work, although ... I was going to say, although I don't know if it started there. I might have ... But in dance for sure, there were ways of moving my body that didn't feel good, but then I thought, "Well, this is what the choreographer wants, so I'm going to do it." There's an element of dance training that is about don't pay attention to what you're feeling and just get it done, and that is capitalism. That's not-

NEIL: Dance is capitalism. That is hilarious, oh my God.

KATE: I think, right? It's like what matters is production and not necessarily your human feelings and needs, and so as humble as it is, actually paying attention to what your body is feeling and being willing to attend to that ... at least with your attention, if not with your actions ... is kind of this radical anti-capitalist act.

NEIL: I love it.

KATE: For some reason, from a early age I was really drawn to these European concert dance forms. I was really into ballet and then I was really into Martha Graham technique and some parts of the Horton technique, which I ended up in when I went to The Ailey School. They're not actually meant for everybody ...

NEIL: Yeah, everybody.

KATE: ... and I'm not even sure if they're meant for anybody. It's kind of this idealized form that we're all ... So anyway, I don't know if feeling or feeling good is always a part of dance for the dancer. I think sometimes it's helping other people feel something. But I don't think that's what dance has to be and I don't think it's what it is at it's best, but I think somehow that's the kind of dance that I end up doing most of the time.

NEIL: That's an interesting way of thinking of it. It's almost like this Christlike thing of, "It doesn't feel good for me, but it makes someone else feel good."

KATE: Feel amazing.

NEIL: Right, yeah. "I could imagine thinking as I'm dying, 'Here we go again.'"

KATE: Where did this come from?

NEIL: I just had the idea it could have a sort of familiarity to it, in the same way that falling asleep has a familiarity to it or something. I mean, of course, the beauty of it is I'll know but I won't be able to have a followup podcast episode about it. I think.

KATE: You'll just have to send us a sign or something.

NEIL: Yeah. And it's not even for me about necessarily believing in reincarnation, which I don't know if I believe in. But I don't think beyond that.

KATE: The thought that I had just now was like, I hope I'm familiar enough with death by the time I experience it myself that I can think, "Oh, this is normal, this is natural, this is the way of all things," instead of, "Oh, why is this happening to me?" Which, I think, from talking to people who volunteer in hospice and stuff, that can be the thought. Like, "Why me, doctor? Why me?" And it's like, "Well, you're 90."

NEIL: "Why not you?"

KATE: But yeah, so there's a lot of Buddhist practices that are preparations for death and dying, and some of them are visualizations, some of them are reminders. There's one that's, "I am of the nature to grow old. I am of the nature to become sick. I am of the nature to die. Everything and everyone I love will be taken from me and I am the owner of my karma, it's my only true inheritance."

KATE: I mean, I think that one of the things that make Buddhism a hard sell is that it can feel like a downer to be like, "Okay, we want to talk about suffering. We're going to talk about impermanent." The paradox is that somehow being in touch with those things lends a sense of, "Oh, I'm actually alive now and this is what life is," and maybe even a sense of urgency around understanding, "This will not always be the case, so I don't just have forever to bumble along until I finally decide I'm going to do the thing that I need to do." And that leads to a kind of freedom and happiness that denial of death and denial that things are changing actually ... We will never win that game.

NEIL: Right, oh wow. Yeah.

KATE: We will never succeed. This is a setup, actually, but it's a setup that you can buy a lot of products and goods on the way to realizing that's possible. So it's good for the economy, but it's not necessarily good for our spirits.

NEIL: Capitalism again. What's a bad X you'd take over a good Y?

KATE: A bad X I'd take over a good Y. So first thought is a bad day sober I'd take over a good day drunk.

NEIL: Are you in recovery, can I ask?

KATE: Yeah. Almost nine years, which means I was definitely meditating before I got sober. I was trying to become less attached to wine without actually having to stop drinking wine. But that didn't work out as well and I think that the meditation practice helped me to get real enough with myself to be like, "Oh, this is actually never going to work out. No matter how I dress it up or dress it down, it's never going to work out for me." Yeah.

NEIL: What is it that keeps you going?

KATE: Oh man. I think it changes. A couple of answers came to as I was letting your question resonate, and one is a sensory sense of smell kind of thing, like being able to smell a different future that's ... I think it's something ... What keeps me going feels like it's something in a future that is looking back or calling to me from a future moment, saying, "You really want to get here, actually. Keep going. I love you. Keep going. You're doing great."

NEIL: And that connects to smell for you?

KATE: Yeah, it's like a whiff. Having a whiff of something that is just kind of like cooking. I genuinely want to see what's going to happen. Like, "What's going to happen today?" It's very close to anxiety, but it's not anxiety. I know that there is kind of a way that anxiety can get people up in the morning for momentum, and I had that experience also, and this one is just a half-step back from that and it feels a little bit more sustainable for my system just to be like, "I wonder what's going to happen?"

NEIL: That seems like a beautiful place to end it. Kate Johnson, thank you so much for being on SHE'S A TALKER.

KATE: Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. It's been awesome.

NEIL: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of SHE'S A TALKER. Before we get to the credits, there were some listener responses to cards that I'd love to share. It's a new thing we're doing in season two.

NEIL: In my conversation with artist and baker Andy Hawkes, we talked about the card, "Leftovers as a kind of embodied memory." In response, Lex Brown wrote, "More than memory, leftovers make me think of the seemingly endless future of packing my lunch in middle and high school. I thought it would never end. Gladware, monotonous future food, foggy plastic lids, leftovers for school night dinner or for lunch the next day." John Pilson wrote, "I feel like the leftover with teeth marks deserves its own category, probably a name other than leftovers. Maybe evidence?" And finally, [Com and See 00:27:59] wrote, "One of my uncles in Hong Kong as a personal rule never keeps leftovers, even if he's making lobster or crab or abalone or delicious meats. It's so ruthlessly unsentimental, it breaks my heart every time I eat at his table."

NEIL: Thanks to everyone who wrote in. I loved all the responses. If you have something you'd like to share about a card on the podcast, email us or send us a voice memo at [email protected] or message us on Instagram @shesatalker. And also, as always, we'd love it if you'd rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or share this episode with a friend.

NEIL: This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Devin Guinn produced this episode. Molly Donahue and Aaron Dalton are our consulting producers. Justine Lee handles social media. Our interns are Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, and Jesse Kimotho. Our card flip beats come from Josh Graver, and my husband, Jeff Hiller, sings the theme song you're about to hear. Thanks to all of them and to my guest, Kate Johnson, and to you for listening.

Jeff Hiller: (singing

Activist and filmmaker Jacques Servin talks about shoplifting in airports.

ABOUT THE GUEST Jacques Servin is co-founder of the Yes Men, an activist filmmaking collective that's plagued dozens of entities including Exxon, Shell, the NRA, and the US Department of Energy. In the process he's co-written, co-directed, and co-starred in three award-winning documentaries, with a fourth expected this fall. Servin has recently co-launched the Yes School, which teaches writers, theater people, and artists how to strategically bring creativity to ongoing activist campaigns; this spring, "students" are working with groups in Tanzania, Belfast, Istanbul, Toronto, and Budapest that oppose housing financialization and other forms of land theft. Servin has also published dozens of articles in all sorts of magazines, as well as two collections of short stories.

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 Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock

TRANSCRIPTION

NEIL GOLDBERG: I am sitting in the apartment of my dear, very long term, long term friend. It sounds like a disease.

JACQUES SERVIN: I'm sorry, I'm a disease.

NEIL: No, you're the best disease. You're, you're, you're the kind of chronic, you're the kind of chronic, I like.

JACQUES: That is so romantic.

NEIL: Hello, I'm Neil Goldberg and this is She's a Talker..

NEIL: Today, I'll be talking to activist writer and filmmaker Jacques Servin. If this is your first time listening, here's the premise of the podcast. I'm a visual artist and for the past million or so years have been jotting down thoughts, observations, reflections on index cards. I've got thousands of them. I originally wrote the cards just for me or maybe to use in future art projects, but in, She's a Talker, I'm using them as prompts for conversations with some of my favorite artists, writers, performers, and beyond. These days, the cards often start as recordings I make into my phone here and there over the course of the day. Each episode I start with some recent ones. Here they are.

I always feel proud of doing the math of calling something 19th century rather than 1800's .

(Card Flip)

Weird that sun can shine into an apartment.

(Card Flip)

The way people talk when they're trying not to wake you in the other room.

(Card Flip)

I'm so excited to have as my guest, my dear friend and fellow lower East sider Jacques Servin. Jacques is one of the two founding members of the activist group, 'The Yes Men', who take a unique, really powerful and subversive approach to political action by basically impersonating officials from corporations and government agencies and taking public positions on their behalf.

He'll explain more in our interview, which took place just after the new year in the apartment complex where we both live.

(Card Flip)

Hi, Jacques.

JACQUES: Hi, Neil.

NEIL: do you remember, we met around the same time that the original, she's a talker, was being filmed. Do you remember that?

JACQUES: Of course. I remember I wrote a short story called, 'She's a Talker.'

NEIL: Oh, that's right.

JACQUES: Yeah.

NEIL: Shock. In addition to being a perpetrator of corporate identity theft is also a writer whose writing. I fell in love with way back in 1993 and you wrote a story called, 'She's a Talker' in one of your two, first books.

JACQUES: Yup. Yup. Yeah, I remember it really well.

NEIL: So for many years you were principally involved in the 'Yes Men'.

What would be the elevator pitch? Just for our listeners of what the 'Yes Men' do?

JACQUES: Oh God. Okay. The 'Yes Men' are best known for impersonating captains of industry and representing them at conferences and on television and so on. Giving versions of what those people should say. Or doing what has been called identity correction in civic identity theft, where you kind of like represent them as as they actually are.

NEIL: Right. I remember a signature action of yours was impersonating someone from Dow Chemical going on BBC and announcing that at long last out chemical was going to be compensating the people of Bo Paul for that disaster there. And it had this implication for Dow Chemical stock.

JACQUES: Yeah. They said it was seen by 350 million people, which is the audience of that show. BBC world.

NEIL: Same audience as She's a Talker.

JACQUES: Yeah, exactly. And but yeah, I ended up on, on BBC making this announcement on behalf of Dow chemical, spending $10 billion, I think, on compensating the survivors all this great stuff. Yeah. And yeah, Dow stock tank to immediately, I mean 4%

NEIL: It was surreal.

JACQUES: In that in their case it meant $2 billion. I think these days, my elevator pitch, which I'm refining, is I work with activist groups around the world to help them be more creative in their work.

NEIL: Well, I love it. That's a real elevator elevator pitch.

JACQUES: Yeah, but there's a second part of it too. That's equally elevator, but another elevator, which is, and I'm training people to do that also.

NEIL: So like, so you're both helping and training people to help.

JACQUES: Yes.

NEIL: You're training people to do the job that you're currently doing? Yes. Okay. And what does that mean to, what does the first part mean?

JACQUES: It's like we went to South Africa in September and worked with like 800 squatters. It's kind of amazing. They reached out to us long story, but they

NEIL: were speaking to the Yes Men'?

JACQUES: The 'Yes Men'. And they wanted to kind of do something. 'Yes Men-ish' around their issue, which is existence. Like they. Have a right to be there under the South African constitution. Everybody has a right to housing, but typically the government, if you demand your right, they'll give you some corrugated iron and send you 30 miles outside the city.

Just like under apartheid, where they have these like racial settlements. Now it's economic. Basically the same apartheid policies are being replicated for economic reasons. Big surprise, and. So these people basically have squatted this on these two medical places that were empty, that are located in the most pricey real estate in Cape Town. And, and they've got a fully functioning society, not perfect.

NEIL: Versus all those other perfect societies.

JACQUES: Exactly.

NEIL: Let's be realistic,

JACQUES: you know? But yeah, but anything that goes wrong and it's like says, you know, see, they can't do it. And you know, in like, they do amazing stuff already, but, but it doesn't get attention because everybody's used to it.

So they wanted to. Try to think of something that people weren't used to that would surprise people that would get across these ideas. And they came up with the idea of a Zombie March. So it's like, you know, apartheid ideas back from the dead. So the za, they all dressed up as zombies and all the kids, especially dressed up as zombies and they had zombie dance offs and zombie, you know, all this, these crazy activities for a week, getting ready for the Zombie March.

Which were in themselves, a big point, you know, like the education and the connection and all that. And then they did this big March on the city, building. It was all super fun and it got front page news. There was tons of press. they got a new metaphor. Zombie embodying the should be dead ideas that were not dead

NEIL: of apartheid

JACQUES: of apartheid, zombie ideas.

NEIL: Ah, so Jacques. Your parents were, remind me your parents' names.

JACQUES: Henry and Genevieve.

NEIL: Okay. So what would in turn Henry and then Genevieve, how might they describe what it is you do to their

JACQUES: friends? I think they would say he makes movies or when I made movies,

NEIL: cause the Yes Men made movies.

JACQUES: We made movies, we made three movies.

So I think, I think they would say that they would say they make funny movies.

NEIL: Oh huh. I remember at some early point, your mom asked you something like, "Are you still making mischief?" Was that it?

JACQUES: Yeah. Yeah. She characterized, the first thing I did as mischief.

NEIL: So they've moved beyond just seeing what you do as mischief?

JACQUES: It was mischief at the time.

NEIL: So she was correct.

JACQUES: She was correct.

NEIL: Interesting. what is something you find yourself thinking about today?

JACQUES: You mean like bigger than me? Cause like

NEIL: Anything, what, what you happen to be thinking about today?

JACQUES: God, what was I thinking about? Like insofar I was thinking today, I was, I mean, one of the things I was doing was trying to, I did headstands. Our mutual friend, Joe , who's a super adept, adept of Iyengar.

NEIL: Yes. Relatively.

JACQUES: Yeah. Showed me how to do headstands, which I used to do like 20 years ago, but that was a long time ago, and suddenly I was doing them again because the teacher wasn't there. The real teacher just didn't show up.

NEIL: And Joe led the class

JACQUES: No he led me and some other people kind of eavesdropped and did the same thing, but he, that's

NEIL: That's very advanced to have you do a headstand.

While he was just kinda like, filling in, you know. I remember back in, we're, if we're talking like 1991 at Jivamukti yoga center, when I had just really gotten deep into yoga and they had windows looking out onto second Avenue, I remember doing a headstand while it was snowing out. Oh my God.

And seeing the snow fall up. Oh my God. It was just so great.

JACQUES: That sounds amazing.

NEIL: That was a yoga turning point for me.

JACQUES: Oh my God.

NEIL: Shall we go to the cards?

JACQUES: Yeah, more cards. Didn't we go to one?

NEIL: Now? These are, this is like the evergreen questions as it were. These are the questions I ask everyone. Now, these are bespoke cards that I've curated for you and only you.

JACQUES: Oh my God.

NEIL: So first card Jacques is actually something we came up with, or we found ourselves discussing together. First card is the way a couples bed feels, at a party. The way it kind of excludes you, you know? Oh, and the type of specific,

JACQUES: Oh God.

NEIL: Intimacy. I've seen a couple's bed at a party

JACQUES: Covered with coats, usually

NEIL: That's true. That's true.

JACQUES: That always strikes me as weird. Like, Oh.

NEIL: Putting the coats on it.?

JACQUES: Yeah. It seems like a shame or something, or it's like, yeah, there's a little shame in it. You feel shame. No, I feel like there is shame in the offering of the bed for the coats. It's like, you know, it's like a way of acknowledging the bed without highlighting the bed.

I t's like, just put the things on it.

NEIL: Maybe that's what it's about though. Maybe it's about kind of hiding. Literally and metaphorically. Yeah, the bad.

JACQUES: I think so. I think it's like the bed is there and you got to use it. A bed is made to be used, but clearly they're not going to have sex in front of everybody at most parties, so you put the coats on it to use it, you know, not obscenely or not, not embarrassingly. And, and, and there's a little shame in that.

NEIL: So, yeah, no, I totally get it. It is almost like a Freudian right? Like, you know, we're a Youngian, right? Like, so that we may have festivities in this room, we must cover the place where the act of union happens.

JACQUES: Yeah. It's like all about covering up the bed.

NEIL: Yes. Yeah, totally. Totally. Totally, totally. funny. I, you know, I. Because it is like that bed is almost like throbbing. It throbs with this intimacy from which you are excluded.

JACQUES: Yes.

NEIL: Maybe the jackets are effective in extinguishing. Right? ]

JACQUES: Because when the jackets are there, you're just focused on the jackets and your own jacket probably.

NEIL: And yes. And will you be able to find it? You know,

JACQUES: And then when you go get it, I always have the thought like, are people gonna think I'm stealing things?

NEIL: Sometimes when I'm in a supermarket, and obviously this is like the product of like deep privilege. Like if I reach into my pockets, as I walk through an aisle, I think, Oh, is someone looking at a camera going to think I stole something?

JACQUES: Right. And sometimes you have. But maybe not you. I steal in airports. I never steal in supermarkets.

NEIL: What do you steal in airports?

JACQUES: Anything I want. It's super easy to steal in airports.

NEIL: Really?

JACQUES: Yeah. I almost always steal something.

NEIL: Wow! Have you ever been caught?

JACQUES: No. No. You can't really be caught at airports. There's no security. They're not looking for that,

NEIL: Or their security is all riveted on something else. It's like the ultimate, the real misdirection.

JACQUES: Yeah. Yeah. Right, There's this like potential really bad thing, so you can do the minorly bad thing. and also I always have an alibi, so like, you know how the shops are always open and interconnected? I just like pick something up from one shop and walk to the cash register in another shop as if I think that's where it is.

And then kind of like aimlessly wander off so I can always. Say, Oh, I, he, I did thought that was like, all right.

NEIL: She's a Talker. Pro tip. How to shoplift.

JACQUES: Yeah. In airports.

NEIL: See, I feel judgmental of that. I do. I'm always looking for opportunities to feel judgment.

JACQUES: Yeah. No, I'm glad to provide that.

NEIL: You often do.

(Card Flip)

All right. Jacques, next card. Hypothesis - people who do torture, must actually be empathic in order to be effective.

JACQUES: Ooh, yes, of course. Look, that's terrible. That's dark. That's good. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Otherwise it would be no fun.

NEIL: It wouldn't be effective because you have to imagine what something would,

JACQUES: yeah, I think, I think so.

It's like sex, right? You, you, you can't really perform a good sexual act on somebody if you haven't had it performed well on you. I mean, is that true?

NEIL: It may be true, but, but I think buried within that is the idea. I think you can't perform a sex act well if you can't inhabit someone else's subjectivity based on, and that doesn't necessarily have to come from having experienced it yourself, but from being able to like, you know, be in tuned with the cues that you're getting and stuff like that, which is like torture. I mean, often when I'm getting a massage, which I don't get a lot of, but when I do, I really love them.

But I often think, God, massage and torture are so related.

JACQUES: God, you're so dark. It is not true

NEIL: because they both require a type of empathic or a type of knowing touch, right? To the extent that torture is physical versus psychological. and I guess with torture, what you have to do is at a certain point you have to cauterize or do something to that empathic connection that permits you to, or turn that empathic connection around to generate pleasure from the fact that you're doing something to someone that you wouldn't want done to yourself.

JACQUES: Do you have any other cards?

(Laughter)

NEIL: Yes. Let's move on. I have another card about core torture, but using Kindles read a sample feature of a book about torture. I found myself doing that. A question of torture.

JACQUES: Oh God,

NEIL: Read a sample.

JACQUES: Read a sample

NEIL: Jacques, next card, that part of every Holocaust museum where they acknowledged the folks who are not Jewish, who helped. What if we had the audacity not to include that?

(Laughter)

JACQUES: Oh my God. First of all, as soon as you said the word words. The part of every Holocaust museum I had to burst out in laughter,

NEIL: Of course. Which is hilarious. Hilarious.

JACQUES: Yeah. What if you didn't include that? What would that mean?

NEIL: I'm not advocating it. I'm proposing it as a thought experiment.

JACQUES: If you just didn't bother, Oh my God, that would be so dark,

NEIL: Would it be dark?

JACQUES: I think it highlights the rest of the people who didn't help, but it also like makes it a little less dark. It's like not everybody was bad, you know, by and large they weren't. Maybe, but that's a different lesson, isn't it?

NEIL: I think that there's an element of internalized antisemitism in it. Like, I'm sorry that you needed to help us, or I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is.

JACQUES: I don't see that

NEIL: That may be a bridge too far.

JACQUES: I don't see that, but I do see it exceptionalizing and making people heroes, which is super interesting. Like I always think like blaming the CEOs of big companies is, is bullshit. Also, it's like by the same token, it's sorta like. You know, they're not the problem there.

There are these bad people, but exceptionalizing them isn't, isn't where it's at. It's like, just like the exceptionally good people aren't where it's at. It's great. They exist and the exceptionally bad people exist. But no, the main problem is that there's the, that perfectly nice people can do horrendous things.

NEIL: Right. Are you an optimist? Yeah. I know so many people who are like surprising optimists. So many people.

JACQUES: Ah! That's interesting. Like me, of course. Is it surprising? I feel obviously an optimist.

NEIL: I get that.

JACQUES: Otherwise, why would I be doing anything that I'm doing?

NEIL: So I'm not an optimist. I don't know if I'd call myself an activist, but I'm politically engaged because I don't want to feel regret. I want to feel like, at least I tried. Yeah, sure. But that's really different from optimism. Isn't it?

JACQUES: There's a probably a fine line, a gradation, a shades of gray. Ah. Cause it's like you do everything with a suspension of disbelief. Like it's very easy to do things without fully believing them scientifically. You can just do them. Maybe secretly you think it might make a difference, you know?

NEIL: If that's not what drives me, well...

JACQUES: You wouldn't do it.

NEIL: That's true. Like that's true. If there was zero chance, I wouldn't do it right. So that implies optimism, doesn't it?

JACQUES: It does. huh. It does. Absolutely. Cause you wouldn't, it wouldn't work for the regret thing.

NEIL: That's a great point. So maybe I'm a crypto optimist.

JACQUES: Yeah. I mean, at least somewhat. And maybe like you don't believe it's definitely gonna work, but you don't have to leave it believe it's definitely gonna work. To be an optimist. You have to believe there's a good chance or a chance, a chance, chance. And.

Yeah. When, when, when ever, has there been anything more than that ever in history? Like it's always been just a chance.

NEIL: You've changed the way I think about optimism and pessimism here on, She's a Talker.

(Card Flip)

What is something that keeps you going?

JACQUES: Oh, say one thing is. This sense of story wanting to make a complete story. that's only half done, or maybe more than half done, but like, it isn't complete. So it's like wanting to, you know, put a goal on it... The perfectionist. Yeah. The completest. Is that a word?

NEIL: Completist. Yeah. Oh, it's like a person who needs to read every book by.

JACQUES: Okay. Or finish every... Which is a lot of people, right. Not me. okay. So, yeah. Well that's, that's one thing is like, Oh, that would be a shame because it's, it's not, it's not done. It's not finished. It's not a package. There isn't a, a knot on it. And that's just, we, I'm not saying that's rational or like, I'm right to think that it's just, that's my psychology.

The other thing would be, Like have being ambitious, wanting to do things, wanting to do more things than I've done, thinking that I can do more things than I've done having these like ongoing, like back-burner projects that I know I'm going to get to. having that illusion of getting to them one day, which may not be an illusion or maybe, but having that illusion.

NEIL: Fill in the blank for X and Y. What's a bad X you would take over a good Y?

JACQUES: Oh wait, there's so many. A bad X over a good Y? I would take a bad, almost everything over a good, almost anything, I think.

NEIL: Really?

JACQUES: Yeah, like...

NEIL: A bad meal. Over a good meal?

JACQUES: Like often if it's good, if it's labeled good, I feel an obligation to enjoy it a certain way. Whereas if it's labeled bad, I can just like if, if I don't, it's no loss. I haven't failed.

NEIL: I know that. Yeah, there's freedom.

JACQUES: There's freedom and badness. Yeah. I dunno, there's a theater trick, right? Where you, you like say, okay, we're going to do this thing and we're going to do it as badly as we can.

NEIL: Right.

JACQUES: Okay. Who's the worst actor here? First role. You do that.

And you know, and it's amazing because you're free, right? And you don't have to worry about the quality and you know it's going to be bad. So you just go with it.

NEIL: On that note. Jacques Servin, I never use your last name, but...

JACQUES: Let's do it there.

NEIL: You, you never use your own last name or you never used my last name?

JACQUES: Mine.

NEIL: Okay. Jacques Servin thank you for being on. She's a Talker.

JACQUES: Thank you Neil

NEIL: Love you.

JACQUES: Love you.

(Neil airkisses Jacques, Jacques replies in kind)

NEIL: Before we get to the credits...

As promised, we have something a lot of people have written in with their own responses to the cards, and we're going to be featuring some of them in the show. For instance, Paul van Dakar wrote in about a card we featured in our episode with comedian Naomi Ekperigin. The card is:

My favorite TV show is the menu.

Paul wrote, "I have a love hate relationship with the menu. Whenever I stay at a hotel or a friend's place who has cable, I probably spend the most time on the menu channel. When I was growing up, we had channels two four five seven 38 56 and if you're lucky, maybe 68 that's why TV menus for me today are still like how I think Soviet immigrants used to feel when they moved to the US in the seventies and eighties. Astonished at the endless variety of breakfast cereal and deodorants and peanut butter on supermarket shelves. So like a bewildered immigrant to the land of cable. I scroll endlessly through the menu only to realize that the good stuff either ended a half hour ago or it doesn't start for another two hours, or never existed to begin with. And I start to feel dead inside. And then if I don't fall asleep, I might muster the strength to turn off the TV and read a book."

Thanks, Paul, for writing. If you've got a response, please email us that [email protected] or message us at shesatalker on Instagram.

This series is made possible with generous support from still point fund. Devon Guinn produced this episode. Andrew Litton mixed it. Molly Donahue and Aaron Dalton are our consulting producers, Justin Lee handles social media. Our interns are Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert and Jesse Kimotho. Our card flip beats come from Josh Graver and my husband Jeff Hiller sings the theme song you're about to hear.

JEFF HILLER: 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!