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The ArtiFact Podcast is a long-form show on books, culture, painting, and music hosted by Alex Sheremet, Joel Parrish, and a revolving door of co-hosts and guests. Each subject is covered in depth and at length, with past shows featuring the Epic of Gilgamesh, Charles Johnson's "Oxherding Tale", Leonard Shlain’s "Art & Physics", John Williams's "Stoner", and more. Opinionated, controversial, and prone to making enemies and friends of friends and enemies, ArtiFact delivers new perspectives on the arts by artists of talent.
Episodes
Wednesday Feb 23, 2022
Wednesday Feb 23, 2022
Although considered one of Kurt Vonnegut’s minor works, 1987’s BLUEBEARD is an interesting novel that covers some fresh territory for the author. It follows the life and work of Rabo Karabekian, the son of Armenian immigrants who flee to California after the Armenian genocide. Starting as a highly realistic, technically proficient painter, Karabekian shifts his aesthetics to Abstract Expressionism, and, after “failing” as an artist, becomes a collector with one magnum opus left inside of him, which is tucked away under padlock in his barn. This is a work of modern Expressionism which a pseudonymous writer, Circe Berman, tries to wriggle out of him, a work which touches upon Kurt Vonnegut’s own experiences at war.
BLUEBEARD tackles the questions of art and meaning, aesthetic preference, and masculine / feminine conceptions of history in ways both similar and not to Kurt Vonnegut’s more well-known works.
You can also watch this conversation on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/mMNcCdj6XOM
Subscribe to the ArtiFact podcast on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3xw2M4D
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ArtiFact #24: Kurt Vonnegut’s “Bluebeard” | Ethan Pinch, Alex Sheremet
Timestamps:
0:18 – introduction; where does Bluebeard fit among Kurt Vonnegut’s other novels; its writerly vs. painterly qualities; why Ethan thinks it’s the best novel ‘about’ painting that he’s ever read, as well as one of Vonnegut’s best; Alex on his own ‘writerly’ narrative biases when he approaches the visual arts; the pitfalls of ekphrastic poetry; cultural criticism masquerading as art criticism
14:00 – why Bluebeard is a “conflicted” work, and has complex things to say about Abstract Expressionism; the self-destructive streak in AbEx painters; Kurt Vonnegut’s empathetic treatment of their work vs. the existentialism within AbEx
21:32 – Alex’s love/hate relationship with Abstract Expressionism; conspiracy theories around AbEx going back a century; why non-narrative art or claims to non/anti-narrative are not logically tenable; Ethan’s skepticism of (and grudging respect for) Clement Greenberg
34:20 – Kurt Vonnegut’s introductory note to Bluebeard; can it be read as both praise and critique of Abstract Expressionism?; would Kurt Vonnegut say something similar about his own work, or literature that he respects?; AbEx machismo & Kurt Vonnegut’s response to it
45:18 – Ad Reinhardt’s cartoons on the history of visual art; abstraction vs. ‘the tangible’ in elements such as brush-strokes; a story about a poor Winslow Homer reproduction; Rabo Karabekian’s strange comment about the deaths of his AbEx friends – is he offering an implicit critique of their lack of purpose?; art and art-adjacent financials
01:03:00 – setting Bluebeard in its diegetic & historical contexts; photorealism-adjacent commentary in Bluebeard; the importance of Dan Gregory’s ‘forgery’ of a ruble; why Dan Gregory, not Rabo Karabekian, is the true Bluebeard of Kurt Vonnegut’s title
01:18:20 – Alex’s criticism (and praise) of Bluebeard’s writing; how Kurt Vonnegut recapitulates his views on art by way of his own structural and aesthetic decisions within the book; comparing these decisions to earlier texts; Dan Gregory, Circe Berman, and the “Jesus” metric; Circe Berman’s own character arc; what can we make of her “kitsch” aesthetic, as well as her deeper artistic critiques of Abstract Expressionism & beyond?
01:52:12 – on the nature of storytelling; Alex doubts that Ad Reinhardt offer a valid response to critiques of AbEx; on the nature of meaning
02:14:45 – Alex and Ethan debate the use of Rabo Karabekian in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions; how Kurt Vonnegut critiques Abstract Expressionism by crafting pro-narrative, technical prose; assessing Karabekian’s version of The Temptation of St. Anthony; how abstract values pervade life; on “oblique” criticism, and why James Baldwin did it so well in The Devil Finds Work; a story of Clement Greenberg’s aesthetic strategies in real life; art and the ego; Kurt Vonnegut as realist
2:50:20 – the ending to Bluebeard; the ‘feminine history’ in the text, as reflected in Rabo Karabekian’s final painting, “Now It’s The Women’s Turn”; the idea of women re-creating the world into something better; what of Circe Berman’s own strategy for survival, and how it complicates Kurt Vonnegut’s other observations?; Sateen Dura-Luxe & other tropes
3:05:12 – how cultural & historical context generates artistic currents: hyper-competition in the arts in ancient Greece; spiritual undertones of Giotto’s “perfect circle”; commercialization via Dan Gregory’s need to replicate the ruble; why Ethan is skeptical of both capitalism as well as material / anticapitalist analyses of both life and art
Video thumbnail © Joel Parrish: https://poeticimport.com
Ethan Pinch’s YT channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/AnthropomorphicHorse
Read the latest from the automachination universe: https://www.automachination.com
Read Alex’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com
Tags: #KurtVonnegut, #Bluebeard, #AbstractExpressionism
Monday Jan 31, 2022
Monday Jan 31, 2022
Just as television eventually gave way to mass adoption and lowest common denominator programming, the Internet, once niche, has given a means for narcissists, sciolists, and other bad actors to carve out an unsuspecting audience. Taken from the Latin “scius” (knowing) and its diminutive “sciolus” (little knower), the word “sciolist” refers to a pretender towards knowledge – conscious or not. Of course, this is a cross-cultural, cross-political phenomenon, for there is a basic, simian drive to not only “know”, but to pretend to know when one does not.
Over the past decade, pretenders such as Jordan B. Peterson, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, the latter-day Richard Dawkins, Christopher Langan, Ben Shapiro, as well as their liberal counterparts have taken attention away from those with genuine ideas to impart. In this video, Alex Sheremet and Dan Schneider comb through these sciolists’ aesthetics, their claims, their craving for an ever-expanding audience of know-nothings, and various intellectual traps they’ve laid for themselves in the quest for pelf.
You can also watch this conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/9e0sb886l1Y
ArtiFact #23: Sciolism & Sciolists – Jordan B. Peterson, Christopher Langan, Athena Walker & Quora Experts | Alex Sheremet, Dan Schneider
Timestamps:
0:18 – introduction to sciolism; Dan Schneider’s history with such, interpretation of the word, and the “wisdom of the common man”; Joe Rogan as a vector for sciolism; comparing the Intellectual Dark Web to Noam Chomsky
7:06 – Jordan B. Peterson; his evolution from trite academic to on-camera actor; Jordan Peterson’s audience capture; the Richard Dawkins / Jordan B. Peterson connection; the growth of the Internet as fuel for sciolism; how Ted Talks transformed from science shows to a Lowest Common Denominator money-grab
18:32 – Jordan Peterson as a malignant sciolist; critiquing Video 1- “One Of The Greatest Speeches Ever”: Jordan B. Peterson as Oprah for white men; Peterson’s superficial understanding of truth vs. reality; his terrible advice to “stop Auschwitz”; his total dearth of material analysis; the way his fans edit video montages of JBP reveal how much they crave cliché
50:00 – critiquing Video 2- “Jordan Peterson: His Finest Moment” – how malignant sciolism makes its way into questions of equality; Jordan B. Peterson’s “stand up at the funeral” hypocrisy; how JBP ends up a shill for mainstream status-quo thinking by obfuscating reality
01:18:16 – critiquing Video 3- “Truth About The Evil 1% Of Society” – Jordan B. Peterson obfuscates what it means to be “for” poverty; more hypocrisy about drug abuse and “laying face-down in a ditch” after his own addiction problems were ameliorated by huge personal wealth; the folly of comparing living standards in an attempt to stop history; why homelessness IS, in fact, a simple problem; Peterson’s willful misreading of the Matthew Effect; how Jordan Peterson confuses money with genuine value
02:07:46 – critiquing Video 4- Jordan B. Peterson is about to have another mental breakdown, this time over vaccination
02:24:45 – Christopher Langan; Dan Schneider’s experiences with Mensa & IQ tests, Alex Sheremet’s experiences with school, the SATs, graduating Valedictorian in college; emotional insecurities generating a wish to ‘succeed’; why don’t high IQ individuals produce things of value?; intelligence vs. accomplishment
02:54:06 – critiquing Erroll Morris’s short film on Christopher Langan; assessing Langan’s style of communication, obfuscation tactics, & extremist ideas
03:53:02 – Christopher Langan’s incoherent concept of “evil”; the CTMU & its language games; why non-artists try to use artistic language to cover up more “boring” ideas
04:02:20 – Christopher Langan’s totally insane social media presence; how can “the smartest man in the America” have such patently terrible ideas?; Langan’s incoherent quotes are poorly written, trite, and without a deeper purpose
04:13:34 – Quora sciolism; benign vs. malignant sciolism; the ‘types’ such websites can sometimes attract; introducing Eva Glasrud, a writer on various topics; TERFs, trans activism, & more; issues with meta-studies vs. individual studies
04:33:08 – more on trans rights activism; are lesbians being pressured into having sex with MtF transsexuals; Eva Glasrud’s white privilege re: black Americans & policing in the US; facts of day-to-day harassment that cannot make it into statistics; if Eva Glasrud believes she is entitled to send aggressive, boundary-setting texts to potential romantic partners on account of her vulnerabilities as a woman, why doesn’t she extend the same empathy to those outside of her own circle?
05:03:42 – Athena Walker as a malignant sciolist; false claims about the nature of psychopathy; why psychopaths DO ‘feel emotions’; Athena Walker’s narcissistic Quora posts; Athena Walker’s fascination with Jordan B. Peterson; how Athena Walker moves from medical misinformation to spiritual psychobabble; how Athena Walker plays up to an audience for the sake of money
05:41:13 – Closing remarks
Video thumbnail © Joel Parrish: https://poeticimport.com
Dan Schneider’s YT channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN5kTfj5u8XcTBg51Z65EKw
Read Dan Schneider’s essay on early 2000s Internet sciolism: http://www.cosmoetica.com/B184-DES128.htm
Read the latest from the automachination universe: https://www.automachination.com
Read Alex’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com
Tags: #JordanPeterson, #ChristopherLangan, #AthenaWalker, #ArtiFactPodcast
Monday Dec 27, 2021
Monday Dec 27, 2021
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861) was one of the best poets of the 19th century, yet remains little known today and even less read. At a time when feminist literary criticism (among other relevant lenses) is ascendant, how did Barrett Browning go from a much-admired writer to one that is neglected in favor of her literary inferiors? In ArtiFact #22, Jessica Schneider, Ezekiel Yu, and Alex Sheremet tackle her classic novel-in-verse, Aurora Leigh, uncovering depths and dimensions to a work she considered containing her very best poetry.
You may also watch this discussion on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTYi0UMives
Timestamps:
0:18 – Introduction to Elizabeth Barrett Browning & Aurora Leigh – art vs. politics, other -isms; John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” vs. Aurora Leigh; Book 1’s introductory stanza; Christian theology vs. Old Testament myths
16:00 – Book 1; poetic compression; Aurora’s relationship with her parents & how this is conveyed; EBB’s feminist & anti-feminist strains; introducing Romney Leigh as an inverted Victorian trope; contrasts with Jane Eyre; Browning’s prescient critique of liberalism + liberal men; the Victor Erice (El Sur) + Aurora Leigh connection
36:38 – Book 2; Aurora Leigh’s youthful “hubris” & imperfect heroine trope; the understated humor in Aurora Leigh; Zeke pushes back against a Deist reading of the text; uses of Greek/Roman mythology in Aurora Leigh; Virginia Woolf’s (envious) attacks on Browning & EBB’s deep classical education; Browning’s unique spin on feminism; Aurora Leigh angrily rejects Romney Leigh’s marriage proposal
56:45 – Book 3; Aurora Leigh becomes a writer in London, but EBB turns her into an artistic failure; fame vs. genuine achievement & how EBB rejects simply ‘imitating the men’; Aurora Leigh’s thoughts of Romney do not recede; more critiques of faux liberalism via Marian, Romney’s new fiancée; introducing Lady Waldemar as villain; the text’s complex relationship with love and grief
01:14:32 – Book 4; Marian continues her story & meeting of Romney; Aurora Leigh casts doubt on their love as conflating mere charity with love; Aurora Leigh starts to develop feelings for Romney, but why?; EBB’s inversions of ‘goodness’; the material world vs. spiritual underpinnings
01:30:00 – Book 5; one of the philosophically richest books of the text; Aurora Leigh’s “distrust” of Golden Age thinking & how to extract value from the present day; back to Book 4- Marian does not show up to her wedding with Romney, and what this means; the use of women in instrumentalizing men’s identities; more humor from Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Aurora Leigh’s controversial use of “demeaning” language for lower classes
01:47:30 – Book 6; the France/England dichotomy as philosophically rich, but also a literary device; Aurora meets Marian again in France, but rushes to judgment about Marian’s child in the same way others had judged Aurora in the past; a powerful ending
01:57:30 – Book 7; Marian explains she was raped; Aurora writes a letter to Lady Waldemar expressing her rage, inverting some of the tropes of Victorian ‘banter’ in Book 3; painter Vincent Carrington & others praise Aurora’s manuscript, but (yet another) beautiful ending to the book reveals her own ambivalence; the idea that high art has some ethical imperatives
02:23:00 – Books 8 + 9; Aurora confronts Romney about Lady Waldemar, learns that they are not getting married; Waldemar writes an angry letter back to Aurora, absolving herself of the worst accusation; Aurora becomes the romantic aggressor, almost demanding Romney marry her; Romney/Aurora both seem to have grown up; the “blindness” trope- does Elizabeth Barrett Browning indulge in a cliché?; George Eliot & other critics of “Aurora Leigh”
ArtiFact thumbnail © Joel Parrish: https://poeticimport.com
Read Jessica Schneider’s essay on Aurora Leigh: https://www.automachination.com/low-to-the-ground-elizabeth-barrett-browning-aurora-leigh
Read Ezekiel Yu’s essay on Aurora Leigh: https://www.automachination.com/this-verse-in-fire-forever-elizabeth-barrett-browning-aurora-leigh
Read Alex’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com
Tags: #AuroraLeigh, #ElizabethBarrettBrowning, #ArtiFactPodcast
Tuesday Nov 02, 2021
Tuesday Nov 02, 2021
Taking up Mark Twain’s mantle, then expanding upon it, Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007) was one of the greatest comic writers to have ever lived. His best-known work, Slaughterhouse-Five, features everything from sci-fi to timeless political comment, thus overshadowing his other great works.
One of these is 1986’s Galapagos, a novel which uses Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, as well as Kurt Vonnegut’s spin on “the oversized brain”, as a controlling metaphor to explore human behavior and self-destructiveness. Featuring one of Vonnegut’s more convoluted plots, it follows a handful of characters on a cruise to the Galapagos islands, which is suddenly canceled due to an unnamed financial meltdown, world war, and an infection which leaves most of humanity sterile. Only the women who make it to a remote island are able to conceive, repopulating the world as natural selection slowly makes these human beings less human.
You can also watch ArtiFact #21 on the automachination YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/CRQwn3ZW8Lc
Timestamps:
0:24 – introduction: Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos in context; plot machinations- do they work?; Galapagos relies more heavily on description, less on dialogue than other texts; synopsis of the text; how Kurt Vonnegut withholds certain details to reinforce the text’s themes; the “financial crisis” and what this entails; human intervention & financial pronouncements as self-fulfilling prophecy
21:22 – Chapter 1: more descriptive than typical Kurt Vonnegut; small details take on significance later; Vonnegut’s use of the Bible; debating the meaning of “A Second Noah’s Ark”; banter on spiders, bugs, Keith’s move to NYC, & whether he will be sleeping on Alex’s bed or on the cat couch in the basement
43:48 – James Wait, a well-sketched swindler in Galapagos; ironies of character; where (some) of the book’s convolution goes awry in its repetitiveness; lessons for modern writers who wish to improve on some of its deficiencies; did Kurt Vonnegut’s humor start to leave him in the 1980s?
01:03:55 – what is the function of Mandarax? is it effective? what can we make of all the quotes, and are all of them used well?
01:12:40 – Looking more deeply into Kurt Vonnegut’s interpretation of Charles Darwin & Social Darwinism; dissecting the society before & after the transformation(s); Kurt Vonnegut’s use of the “oversized brain” as a controlling metaphor throughout; are the characters in Galapagos “real”? What makes them relatable?; characters as fulfilling niches, more comments on biological determinism
02:00:32 – Why aren’t people interested in sculpture? – using one of Kurt Vonnegut’s best lines for fresh applications; people’s lack of interest in art, save to serve their own ideological biases; why is there ANY interest in art from the Red Pill / Pick Up Artist (PUA) community?; the Wall Street bull sculpture vs. the “little girl” virtue-signal; the Wall Street ape statue as a cultural comment without teeth; why Kurt Vonnegut’s alleged misanthropy is over-stated
02:12:12 – the ending of “Galapagos”: as a collection of odds-and-ends and character/idea arcs searching for some resolution, is the ending a cop-out, or something more?
Read the latest from the automachination universe: https://automachination.com
Read Alex’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com
Tags: #Galapagos, #KurtVonnegut, #ArtiFact
Wednesday Oct 06, 2021
Wednesday Oct 06, 2021
Like cinema, photography is a recent art form which has had to “prove itself” to a skeptical audience. After Louis Daguerre created the daguerreotype, photographers grew increasingly sophisticated, experimental, and art-minded, and soon a photographic language developed. Early photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Robert Demachy were surprisingly modern, while contemporary photographers, like Fan Ho, Vivian Maier, and Alexey Titarenko, continued to innovate into the 21st century.
What are some cues for better adjudicating photographs and photographic art? What is the relationship between cinema and photography? Can (or should) cinematic stills be great photographs? What is the “discretionary” part of the artistic process, and what does photographer Joel Parrish have to say about the thought process behind his own work? Alex Sheremet and Joel Parrish discuss this, ending with the photography and films (Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, Winter Sleep) of Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
Photographers covered: Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Demachy, Fan Ho, Masahisa Fukase, Vivian Maier, Sohei Nishino, Alexey Titarenko, Edmund Teske, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Joel Parrish.
You can also watch ArtiFact #20 on the automachination YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/CHcy2nQRTiA
Timestamps:
0:24 – introduction; Joel Parrish as photographer; claims for greatness among the earliest photographers; does art have a self-regulating function?
9:52 – Joel on the history of photography, tension + fear between the world of painting and photography, & how photography demanded that it be taken seriously as an art-form
28:20 – how should we look at photographs? what makes it a viable art-form? Alex and Joel offer abstract and pragmatic answers from cinema, painting, and more; why cinema stills are a good short-cut for understanding photography; the “discretionary” artistic process & what this entails
53:21 – Alfred Stieglitz (1864 – 1946): one of the breakout “art-first” photographers; married to George O’Keeffe & involved with High Modern artistic circles; good title conventions; landscapes, portraiture, lite abstraction, borrowings from Impressionism & other diverse work
01:16:45 – Robert Demachy (1859 – 1936): highly modernist in approach; pioneered post-editing with painterly, sfumato, and other effects; portraiture, staged and unstaged shots, and other artistic techniques; why staging works much better with highly edited shots; Joel presents Demachy’s lesser-known work from his photography books
01:40:14 – Fan Ho (1931 – 2016): Alex’s (new) favorite photographer & one of the greatest photographers ever; documenting life in Hong Kong; stark use of black/white contrasts for unexpected effects; great use of abstraction, geometry, conceptualization, and symbolism
02:07:07 – Masahisa Fukase (1934 – 2012): similar to our take on Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mt. Fuji, Fukase’s “raven” photo series offers increasingly clever takes and inversions on a single subject: the raven; plus, a novel take on the concept of the photographic self-portrait
02:23:17 – Vivian Maier (1926 – 2009): recently discovered photographer who lived her life in obscurity; thousands of undeveloped photographs in documentary, self-portrait, abstract, and symbolic styles; Joel Parrish: ever since she’s been popularized, lesser photographers have ripped off her style and innovations
02:39:14 – Sohei Nishino (b. 1982): a photographer using innovative techniques to create “dioramas” and “dioramamaps” of cities; Joel Parrish explains just how much work this process entails
02:45:37 – Alexey Titarenko (b. 1962): most prominent for his depictions of Russia’s post-USSR collapse; how Titarenko uses time-lapse to make statements; why tapping Cuba and Havana makes sense as analogues to post-Soviet Russia, as if frozen in time
03:05:09 – Edmund Teske (1911 – 1966), Andre Kertesz (1894 – 1985), Josephine Sacabo, Michael Ackerman & Alec Soth
03:32:00 – Joel Parrish on his own photography, thinking process, artistic decisions, & more
03:58:08 – Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962); how a movie can be shot using still images only; why there is still a great deal of cinematic scope in still images; La Jetee is full of individually great shots, irrespective of the broader film; why a great script is essential to a film like this
04:21:32 – Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (2011) and Winter Sleep (2014); Ceylan as cinematographer & photographer; how cinematography ought to be tapped and discussed outside of comments re: a film’s “beauty”
Read the latest from the automachination universe: https://automachination.com
Read Alex’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com
Joel’s website: https://poeticimport.com
Tags: #photography, #NuriBilgeCeylan, #frenchfilm
Monday Aug 23, 2021
Monday Aug 23, 2021
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861) was one of the best poets of the 19th century, yet remains little known today and even less read. At a time when feminist literary criticism (among other relevant lenses) is ascendant, how did Barrett Browning go from an almost universally admired writer to one that is neglected in favor of her literary inferiors? In ArtiFact #19, Joel Parrish and Alex Sheremet tackle her classic sonnet sequence, Sonnets from the Portuguese, going through roughly half the poems line by line to uncover Browning’s complicated views on love, art, and other subjects, highlighting her philosophical depth, technical skill, as well as her inversions of familiar tropes.
You can also watch this discussion on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nCaB4_tJCQ
Timestamps:
0:24 – Introducing Elizabeth Barrett Browning + Sonnets from the Portuguese in context; William Blake, Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, John Donne; Browning’s world-building, sonnet-units, and characterization from poem to poem
11:37 – Sonnet 1: “I thought once how Theocritus had sung…” – how Elizabeth Barrett Browning creates a world with values, assumptions, moods, and characters with their own narrative arcs; how a complex and even ambiguous view of love gets presented from the very beginning; the love of melancholy; love vs. death; introducing the objective-subjective distinction in Sonnets from the Portuguese
23:36 – Sonnet 3: “Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!” – inverting the vocative cliché; the modernity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; time and death as leveling forces for the objective + subjective divide
35:16 – Sonnet 12: “Indeed this very love which is my boast…” – a weaker sonnet that nonetheless has some redeeming features, such as ambiguity in the ending
40:49 – Sonnet 13: “And wilt thou have me fashion into speech…” – inverting the classic ‘I can’t even express my love’ trope in poetry; the use of literal images to offset generic and/or trope imagery; the subtle and underrated feminism of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
53:20 – Sonnet 14: “If thou must love me, let it be for naught…” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning seeks a more substantive love; cleverness from line to line; a lackluster ending
01:02:20 – Sonnet 15: “Accuse me not, beseech thee, that I wear…” – a truly great poem; some of the best clues to the narrator’s thinking about love, relationships, and more
01:13:28 – Sonnet 17: “My poet, thou canst touch on all the notes…” – is Elizabeth Barrett Browning presaging theoretical physics; how the narrator’s self-effacing words are strangely turned on the addressee
01:20:32 – Sonnet 18: “I never gave a lock of hair away…” – inverting the “lock of hair” trope in romantic writing
01:29:28 – Sonnet 19: “The soul’s Rialto hath its merchandise…” – more sonnet-units, forming a unit with Sonnet 18; Alex makes a decent number of mistakes after failing to refer to his own notes
01:36:43 – Sonnet 22: “When our two souls stand up erect and strong…” – how Elizabeth Barrett Browning uses conventionally “positive” images to opposite effect
01:46:35 – Sonnet 25: “A heavy heart, Beloved, I have borne…” – turning the “heavy heart” cliché into a literal image that becomes the fulcrum for startling imagery
01:52:16 – Sonnet 26: “I lived with visions for my company…” – some good images, but a mixed bag
02:01:04 – Sonnet 33: “Yes, call me by my pet-name! let me hear…” – one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s greatest + most famous poems; the strange mix of feminist eroticism and invocations of childhood; how EBB plays off of John Milton’s famous sonnet “On His Blindness”
02:12:29 – Sonnet 34: “With the same heart, I said, I’ll answer thee…” – merely recapitulative of the greater and more daring preceding sonnet
02:19:08 – Sonnet 36: “When we first met and loved, I did not build…” – proto-feminism in its treatment of love as an “unowned thing”; some good images
02:22:27 – Sonnet 37: “Pardon, oh, pardon, that my soul should make…” – some of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s most modern imagery; thematic connections between images help invert the familiar; the Hart Crane-like ending
02:29:49 – Sonnet 43: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s most famous poem; a mix of daring images + conventional choices
02:41:02 – Sonnet 44: “Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers…” – a great ending to the sequence; Alex and Joel disagree on the quality of the poem; how it recapitulates and refracts Sonnets from the Portuguese
Read the latest from the automachination universe: https://automachination.com
Read Alex’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com/
Thumbnail photo © Joel Parrish: https://poeticimport.com
Tags: #ArtiFact, #Sonnet, #ElizabethBarrettBrowning
Monday Aug 16, 2021
Monday Aug 16, 2021
Eva Schubert is a singer-songwriter, poet, and historian from Canada with several full-length albums, plus an upcoming record that was finished just weeks ago. In this conversation, Alex and Eva discuss growing up and growing into poetry, concepts of self-identity, the fears and imperatives surrounding human creativity, art as competition and communication, Eva’s thoughts as she writes her lyrics, how to avoid musical and writerly clichés, and an analysis of two albums: 2017’s outstanding “Borderless Sky” and 2019’s “Hot Damn Romance”. At the end of the discussion, we touch on our shared interests of fitness, deadlifting, nutrition, and injuries/injury prevention as they relate to middle age and beyond.
Time did not permit us to get to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, as planned, but we will make it up to the audience with another ArtiFact on this and other subjects down the road.
You can also watch this discussion on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCUorJjTv2c
Eva Schubert’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/evasajoo
Buy “Borderless Sky”: https://www.amazon.com/Borderless-Sky-Eva-Schubert/dp/B077BQY1X2
Buy “Hot Damn Romance”: https://www.amazon.com/Hot-Damn-Romance-Eva-Schubert/dp/B07WNZTNTQ/
Timestamps:
0:24 – Eva Schubert’s origin story: Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, T.S. Eliot, rhythm, music, and oatmeal
14:18 – Eva on self-limitations, and how her experience as an airplane pilot expanded her own self-definition
20:30 – The “fears” surrounding art, creation, and other pursuits at odds with financial + outward societal success
31:04 – Object-oriented art: why art is almost wholly about competition and communication
37:34 – Eva’s music: discussing her second album, “Borderless Sky” (2017) – why does Eva Schubert work mostly in the love-song/jazz tradition?
44:05 – The track “Backcountry Blues”: how the composition subverts the lyrics, and how the lyrics gradually re-inform the composition; how this can be extrapolated to other works of art; Elliott Smith’s “Waltz #2 (XO)” + Phosophorescent’s “Song for Zula”
57:34 – The track “Traces of You”: how to establish a Cole Porter vibe; the function of the A-B-A-A-B rhyme scheme; how to prime listeners for lyrical cleverness before the lyrics even begin
01:06:14 – The track “Ribbons and Bows”: dual male/female expectations in song traditions + in life; do women “really” know what men want?; the irony + tragedy of romantic closeness & mitigations of distance; the epidemic of cosmetic surgery and the faux-style feminism that downplays it; the overcorrection of the Slut Walk & the sexual pathologies + shame these things are trying (yet failing) to correct
01:27:40 – The tracks “They Say” & “Saying Goodbye”; inverting POVs & turning love into what other characters in a song perceive; how to write about love and death while avoiding the most obvious pitfalls- for example, clichés like “everything will die but our love will endure”
01:34:42 – Eva’s third album, “Hot Damn Romance” (2019): the track “Water”: how does Eva understand artistic improvement, and what does that even mean; how might Eva respond to charges of writerly cliché; inverting clichés by making them literal statements; Eva’s experience working alongside many artists with visions that might compete with or otherwise conflict with her own
01:52:48 – Exercise, nutrition, & fitness; how Eva got interested in weight training; injuries and injury prevention; the deadlift; Alex on getting over his childhood obesity; Stuart McGill, back health, the Big 3; what if the deadlift cannot (or should not) be performed at a certain age; the Turkish Get Up; physical therapy is still in the Stone Age of human knowledge
Read the latest from the automachination universe: https://automachination.com
Read Alex’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com/
Thumbnail photo © Joel Parrish: https://poeticimport.com
Tags: #ArtiFact, #EvaSchubert, #writing, #songwriting, #lyrics
Monday Aug 09, 2021
Monday Aug 09, 2021
As Alex Sheremet and Ethan Pinch argue, Woody Allen has been falling out of favor for a long time now – and not only for the more obvious and superficial reasons. Critics charge him with indulging a Pygmalion complex, by which he lives out his androcentric fantasies through his films, crafting the very same women he has an interest in, then letting them loose upon the screen.
There are issues with this analysis, however: not only has Woody written some great female characters that ought to be the subjects of feminist film theory, but Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” does more than meets the eye. After all, Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle is a powerful character well before her transformation, and the transformation itself belies her benefactor’s own self-conception. Woody Allen adopts a similar tactic in his films, skewering his male leads through his use of women.
In ArtiFact #17, Alex Sheremet and Ethan Pinch use this lens to analyze four films: Stardust Memories, Husbands and Wives, Midnight in Paris, and the much-neglected Another Woman.
You can also watch this discussion on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BA7TanP3ls
Subscribe to the ArtiFact podcast on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3xw2M4D
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3wLpqEV
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Amazon Music: https://amzn.to/2SVJIxB
Podbean: https://bit.ly/3yzLuUo
iHeartRadio: https://ihr.fm/3AK942L
Timestamps:
0:24 – The city aesthetic, international Rust Belts, and the rural/urban divide
04:37 – Woody Allen’s urban aesthetic, the illusions of “Manhattan” (1979), moral ambiguity & how cinematic imagery can be used to play off of viewer assumptions
11:52 – The Pygmalion connection: from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; how Woody Allen uses great female characters to skewer men; more on Manhattan, Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters
38:56 – Woody Allen vs. the stigmatization of male sexuality + male neuroses
44:45 – In-depth: Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives; the faux documentary conceit, how Judy gets some things right, Jack/Sally disconnect, character framing, the Rain arc, feminist ideology, & more
01:17:32 – In-depth: Woody Allen’s Another Woman; visual frames, Marion’s true feminism, Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, the viewer’s necessarily partial knowledge of character backgrounds and thoughts, & more
01:33:50 – In-depth: Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories; contrasts with Federico Fellini’s 8½, the usage of “freaks” in both films, pastiche vs. homage, Sandy Bates as the “true” Woody Allen stand-in, more on masculine impositions
02:04:30 – In-depth: Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris; contrasts with Manhattan, Owen Wilson’s acting, nostalgia vs. delusion, literary caricatures, the film’s faux closure
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Read the latest from the automachination universe: https://automachination.com
Read Alex’s review of Stardust Memories: https://alexsheremet.com/review-of-woody-allens-stardust-memories-1980/
Read Alex’s review of Woody Allen’s Manhattan: https://alexsheremet.com/woody-allens-manhattan-not-what-you-think-it-is/
Purchase Alex’s book on Woody Allen’s films, Woody Allen: Reel to Real – https://www.amazon.com/Woody-Allen-Reel-Version-Digidialogues-ebook/dp/B00PJF2F36/
Tags: #ArtiFact, #WoodyAllen, #Pygmalion
Monday Aug 02, 2021
Monday Aug 02, 2021
Over the last few years, we’ve heard that white people ought to “shut up and listen” when it comes to questions of race and racism. Yet Dan Schneider’s 2005 book, Show & Tell: A White Man’s Antiphonal Primer on Race, argues the exact opposite: that understanding white psychology, white leverage and material advantages is the key to unlocking all else. As he writes in the text, racism, to black America, is a burden to be lived through, but what is it to white America – and why does it persist? In this conversation, Dan Schneider and Alex Sheremet discuss these and other questions, set against the context of Dan’s own experience of racism in New York City through the 1970/80s. Topics covered: the black Noble Savage myth in liberal + conservative factions; the materially hollow antiracism of Robin DiAngelo (“White Fragility”); the killing of Ma'Khia Bryant; multi-ethnic racial tension; white “appropriation” of black culture; the myth of the model minority, and much more.
Purchase Dan Schneider’s “Show & Tell: A White Man’s Antiphonal Primer On Race”: https://amzn.to/37feJQK
You may also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/8bfdI_qvcYY
Timestamps:
0:24 – Why racism is a white person’s problem, the nonwhite’s burden, and ought to be discussed as such
09:08 – Why the Robin DiAngelo model of antiracism fails to do much of substance
12:48 – Alex: “Out of Africa” liberals & other race propagandists are trying to have it both ways
20:45 – How liberals and conservatives use the black Noble Savage myth for their own ideological purposes
24:18 – Dan: are our positions on race truly leftist?
28:23 – Dan Schneider describes 1960s – 1980s racism in Ridgewood, Glendale, & Jamaica vs. today’s Golden Age thinking
42:00 – Is racism biologically ingrained or otherwise “natural”?
45:18 – Are older black Americans reflexively deferential to whites?
54:40 – Why police brutality has gotten better since the 1960s, but began to go up again in the late 1990s; why ‘being a cop’ takes precedence over other in-group + tribal thinking
01:06:02 – Racial tensions between blacks, Asians, Jews, and Hispanics
01:14:00 – Is there a conflict between personal responsibility, “free will”, and a material analysis of history? Plus: the anthropology of black sexual dynamics vs. conservative hypocrisy
01:24:12 – The Asian “model minority” myth & reverse bottlenecks: why Hmong, Vietnamese, and Laotian crime rates in America approach that of the worst and poorest neighborhoods
01:29:19 – Why does there seem to be so little bigotry, violence, and resentment directed towards whites by the very communities whites have historically exploited?
01:35:38 – Black vs. white mask compliance, black vs. white vaccine compliance & why the Left is uncomfortable here
01:37:24 – What is the “wigger”, and how do different communities interpret him?
01:43:47 – The killing of Ma’Khia Bryant in Ohio
01:53:00 – Would Ma’Khia Bryant have been killed if she were a white girl?
01:59:00 – Why don’t police shootings of white victims garner the same media attention?
02:04:44 – How ideology inflates some stakes, deflates others; Tucker Carlson, more NYC crime from the 1970s/80s, reparations TODAY, cop non-compliance with mask mandates
Read the latest from the automachination universe: https://automachination.com
Read Alex’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com
Monday Jul 19, 2021
Monday Jul 19, 2021
In 1992, Edward P. Jones published what might very well be his best work of fiction: Lost in the City, a short story collection that deals with (mostly) black characters in Washington, D.C., set between the 1950s and 1990s. Primarily working through understatement, an amalgamation of poetic and prosaic style, and competing POVs, many of these characters could have been of any race, dealing with his characteristically “mature” drama in any time period. How does Edward P. Jones achieve these effects? Does he effectively move between the criminal and the working class, the religious and the disconnected, or does he have a preferred turf? What structural choices does Lost in the City make? Finally, how does Edward P. Jones use race – and why is it better, more credible, and deeper than the ways race gets misused by modern authors?
Alex Sheremet and Keith Jackewicz discuss these and other questions.
You may also watch this discussion on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihC2Fj6Vnw8
Timestamps:
0:24 – “I said, ‘I don’t need this anymore…’”
0:43 – introducing Edward P. Jones, Lost in the City, subjective/objective responses, the role of understatement
12:56 – Story 1 – The Girl Who Raised Pigeons – a father’s projection, encroaching danger, unexpected character arcs, stipulated meaninglessness
46:08 – Story 2 – The First Day – extremely compact writing, dueling child/adult POVs, growth of the narrator
01:06:54 – Story 3 – The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed – the fame lottery vs. racial politics, an ending that belies the children’s own sense of ‘adulthood’
01:28:04 – Story 4 – Young Lions – good, gradual characterization with an overlong middle; Keith on Caesar vs. community access
01:48:37 – Story 5 – The Store – Edward P. Jones’s best story? overturning stereotypes + archetypes, how to turn the prosaic poetic, character maturation
02:22:52 – Story 6 – An Orange Line Train To Ballston – a tight, realistic character sketch
02:28:19 – Story 7 – The Sunday Following Mother’s Day – surprising character arcs; Edward P. Jones playing off of competing + changing reader empathies
02:44:16 – Story 7 – Lost in the City – finding new territory in the “drugged-out haze” narrative
02:51:00 – Story 9 – His Mother’s House – Edward P. Jones goes Quentin Tarantino, and that’s no compliment
02:59:40 – Story 10 – A Butterfly on F Street – character sketch + unexpected trope inversions
03:01:54 – Story 11 – Gospel – gossip, religion, hypocrisy
03:07:35 – Story 12 – A New Man – one of the more mysterious, almost metaphysical stories from Edward P. Jones
03:20:00 – Story 13 – A Dark Night – another quick character sketch
03:27:14 – Story 14 – Marie – the POV of both a limited & powerful character, with a great, multi-faceted ending
Read the latest from the automachination universe: https://automachination.com
Read Alex’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com
Dan Schneider’s review of Lost in The City: http://www.cosmoetica.com/B235-DES175.htm