The Virtual Memories Show

With his amazing new book The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York (Black Sparrow Press), Peter Trachtenberg explores the 50+ years of history for Westbeth Artists Housing in the far West Village, the role of the arts in New York City, and the ways we build & sustain community. We get into his long-term history with Westbeth, how this book's was born from an essay about the suicide of his friend and Westbeth resident Gay Milius, how Westbeth managed to survive a series of financial crises over the decades before finding a sustainable model, and how architect Richard Meier repurposed the Bell Labs complex into affordable artists' housing in the 1960s. We talk about Westbeth's requirement that residents be professional artists and what that came to mean over the years (esp. when some residents' productivity diminished), what it's like to raise families in Westbeth, and how the community handled generational change. We also discuss how Westbeth reflects New York back on itself, how Vin Diesel's vandalism as a kid growing up in Westbeth led to his acting career, how the Village's Halloween parade originated there, how I stumbled across Westbeth in 2017 during — what else? — a podcast, how we build artistic communities when we don't have geographic proximity, whether there's a secret radioactive room left over from the Bell Labs years (!), and more. Follow Peter on Instagram, and subscribe to his newsletter • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Author David Shields returns to the show for a conversation about his new documentary, HOW WE GOT HERE, and the companion book, HOW WE GOT HERE: Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of Allan Bloom times Žižek squared = Bannon (Sublation Media). We get into how the world moved from the death of God to the death of essence to the death of truth, and how deconstruction, once the province of left-wing academia, was weaponized by right-wing authoritarians for political aims. We talk about how much blame he bears for all this with his 2010 book Reality Hunger, how it feels to be a radical with deep skepticism of radicals' language, his affinity for Werner Herzog's notion of the ecstatic truth in documentary films, what he learned from interviewing nonfiction writers about the nature of truth, and how he feels about going to his first WWE event. We also discuss nonlinear warfare and the endless deconstruction of reality, how writing can "build a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness" (per DFW), what he's learned from the collaboration of making documentaries, his fixation on hamartia (the tragic flaw), Walter Benjamin's notion of pursuing the truth even if we'll never reach it, bringing the public, social and personal worlds together in his writing, and a lot more. More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Uh-oh! Gil doesn't have a guest this week, so he recorded a monologue from a hotel room in Weehawken, NJ during a business conference for his day job! He talks mental health, oblique mythology, Charles Crumb, comics and pharma friends, the St. Patrick's Day Parade, and more! Follow Gil on Bluesky and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

With THE MAN NOBODY KILLED: Life, Death, and Art In Michael Stewart's New York (Celadon Books), author Elon Green brings us an investigation into a terrible episode of police brutality and its aftermath in mid-'80s NYC. We talk about what drew him to the story of Michael Stewart, a 25-year-old black artist-model-DJ who died at the hands of transit police in 1983, his amazement that no one else had written this book, and how his early assumptions about a coverup gave way to a different coverup. We get into how he so wonderfully evokes the gritty NYC of that era, spreading out a canvas that takes in the arts scene — think Haring, Basquiat, Madonna — and the awful crimes and police behavior — think Bumpurs, Goetz — of that era. We discuss the art of interviewing people 40+ years after an event without reopening old wounds, the judge on the case who talked with him for 3 hours and shared how his conclusions on the verdict changed, what he sees in Stewart's art, how he tries to build the entire environment of the world he's writing about in his books, why he considers himself a history writer (& despises the "true crime" label & genre), why being a good journalist means having a sense of decency, bringing his first book to life as an HBO series, and more. Follow Elon on Bluesky and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Biographer Vanda Krefft returns to the show to celebrate her wonderful & illuminating new book: EXPECT GREAT THINGS!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women (Algonquin Books). We talk about the turn of the (20th) century origins of Katharine Gibbs & her school, the legacy of her executive secretarial course for generations of women, "Gibbs Girls'" descendants' desire to honor their family members, the incredible quality of faculty Gibbs was able to recruit, the risks women had to take to enter the professional workforce, and the Trojan Horse campaign of teaching women to learn how businesses work until they're able to run them themselves. We get into Vanda's desire to write about people who were overlooked in history, how this book veered away from her initial idea, how it required a different mode than her biography of William Fox, the challenges of century-old research into women's lives, what she had to learn about the history of women in America, the myth that the 1920s were liberating for women, and her interest in mid-century America. We also discuss how the Gibbs school declined when the family finally sold it in the late '60s, what she'd like her next book to be about, her experience living in Santa Monica during the LA fires, a lengthy aside about publishing and the changes I've seen, getting inspired by Howard Fishman's book on Connie Converse, and a lot more. Follow Vanda on Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

With DEATH TRIP: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir (Spiral Path Collective Press), Seth Lorinczi explores how trauma can be transmitted over generations, and how an ancient (& new) form of treatment can help overcome it. We talk about finding his family's story of the Holocaust, trying to understand why so much of it stayed hidden, how badly it warped his life, and how he & his wife found answers in psychedelic medicine (MDMA, ayahuasca, toad (!)). We get into the long-term damage of unmetabolized trauma and untouched grief, how psychedelics allowed him to recognize patterns in his life, family history, and the universe, the challenges of researching his family's Holocaust experience in Hungary, how his experiences led to a memoir (& a saved marriage), why Death Trip is a series of surrenders, how his close and distant relatives responded to the book, and why he thinks I should leapfrog therapy and try psychedelics first. We also discuss growing up in the punk scene of Washington, DC (and writing his next book about that), how coincidence becomes important after psychedelic experiences, how some married couples take up salsa dancing but he & his wife took up ayahuasca, how his daughter responded to all this, whether a person can change, how once you get the message you should put down the phone, and a lot more. Follow Seth on Instagram and subscribe to his Dispatches From The Fringe newsletter • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

With NAPLES 1925: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Summer That Made Critical Theory (Yale University Press, tr. Shelley Frisch), Martin Mittelmeier traces the roots of the Frankfurt School in southern Italy. We talk about the epiphany on the lip of a volcano in Lanzerote that brought this book to life, the years he spent poring over Theodor Adorno's writing (and the temptation to mimic Adorno's style), how Walter Benjamin's principle of porosity arose from both the tuff stone & the way of living of Naples, and the challenge of evoking the Naples of a century ago and how it led to a theory of society. We get into Critical Theory's attempts at understanding populism and oligarchic takeovers and why Adorno is having A Moment in Germany, the fun of speculating about meetings among great thinkers — yeah, I get into George Orwell, Henry Miller, and Inside the Whale —, the utopian aspect of local life in Naples and Capri, the complexities of reputation and destiny, and whether Critical Theory can hold up during the hyper-internet era. We also discuss the difficulties of translation with critical theory's associative language, why I need to read Hernán Diaz' Trust, his new work about Thomas Mann working with Adorno on Doctor Faustus in Pacific Palisades (a.k.a. Weimar Under The Palm Trees), how he's changed in the decade-plus since writing the book, and more. • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Can LA private detective Happy Doll live up to the Four Noble Truths and escape the cycle of Samsara? Jonathan Ames returns to the show to help answer that question and celebrate his new novel, KARMA DOLL (Mulholland Books)! We talk about the joy of reading (& writing) page-turners, how his lead character Happy Doll has evolved over three novels (so far!), what it's like bringing Buddhism into a detective novel, and how his (& Happy's) LA has changed since he began this series. We get into how he managed to avoid writing about the worst days of the pandemic while keeping Karma Doll contemporary, how writing the Doll novels has affected his understanding of Buddhism, and how he's living up to the lesson he always gave students: write what you love. We also discuss TV writing and how it took him away from prose-writing for a decade or so, the need to make art and the transitoriness of bliss, how the LA fires left him driving all over the place like he was in a Lew Archer novel, his fave reads & TV shows, how we both played with dolls as kids in the woods of northern NJ, and a lot more. Follow Jonathan on Bluesky • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

With his latest book, THE DRIVING MACHINE: A Design History of the Car (Norton), architect and architecture & design writer Witold Rybczynski explores how cars evolved from their earliest days through the befuddling styles of today's EVs. We get into the design language of cars and how it had no true precedent, why European styles were so different and varied than America's, his favorite era for car design, and the differences between writing about cars and writing about buildings. We talk about the cars in his life and how he integrated them into The Driving Machine's narrative (including the Mercedes that lasted him 25 years), the lives of the engineers & car-company founders he explored for the book, what he learned by drawing the book's car-illustrations himself, and how drawing all those cars brought him back to his youth. We also discuss the new book he's writing about his dissatisfaction with contemporary architecture, how it resulted from a Chat-GPT 'hallucination,' the cycles of architecture & the death of architecture criticism, the (sorta) imaginary house he designed for himself, and more. More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Cartoonist Matt Madden returns to discuss his new collection, Six Treasures of the Spiral. He delves into the liberation found in formal constraints and shares his experiences with OULIPO. Madden reflects on how these structures can spark creativity and storytelling. He also talks about his residency in France, the influence of Hergé on his work, and balancing comics-making with family life. Additionally, he highlights the importance of maintaining heart within constraints and maintaining accessibility in avant-garde storytelling.