Dinner Conversation

Nostalgia/Mother's Day/Shambolic Voices

Photo from the 2024 Guinness Book of World Records of Most Fire Hoops Spun Simultaneously or Happy Mother’s Day!

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Dinner Conversation

At dinner a woman I just met tells me that Palantir has begun recruiting the brightest pupils from the upper Manhattan private school where she teaches. Palantir intercepts them after their acceptance to Ivy League schools, convincing them to defer their matriculation in favor of a job where they can earn four times their former teachers’ salary. After one year of work they return breathlessly to their alma mater to speak to the underclassmen about their classified projects in Taiwan, asking “foreigners” to leave the room. When the teacher objects they discuss a slightly less classified project in Ukraine. The boys defer Dartmouth, Princeton, or Yale indefinitely.

Nostalgia

Can we feel nostalgia for a past in which we still believe in a version of the future that no longer seems reasonable to anticipate? Can we feel nostalgia for a past in which we didn’t participate the way we wish we would have? I guess we can feel nostalgic about anything, since it’s always a fantasy feeling, a synthetic ache.

My colleague Hakan Topal wrote an essay on the death of art school that functions in a similar way to Josh Kline’s recent October essay; organized facts, comparisons and descriptions of the real working conditions within academia at the moment. For artists, teachers and students it narrativizes and validates our experience and contextualizes our concerns. I hope those outside of teaching arenas read it. See above re: Palantir.

Now people are celebrating/protesting the Venice Biennial. The MET Gala’s spectacle of wealth screams YOU CAN’T BUY TASTE. You can buy access, entire media outlets, and create a sense of ubiquity so all-consuming that it gaslights an entire population into thinking that these monsters in gilded rags are the height of beauty, creativity and refinement. The revolution will not be televised?

It’s not like the MET Gala, or Vogue for that matter, functions as the arbiter of what’s cool. These events and the magazines that amplify them have always positioned themselves as aspirational, a condescending posture to assume. Culture (improvised, provisional, spontaneous, necessary) is born in the street, for instance the one outside the gala where Chris Smalls was tackled while we watched Bad Bunny dressed as an elderly version of himself next to Heidi Klum as a haunted marble statue with glistening bloodshot eyes.

Was this specific scene a glimpse of actual art growing like a weed through the crack of the MET’s stone staircase? Dressing like an older version of yourself seems hilariously like a 2nd grader’s halloween costume; a droll and decidedly deadpan anti-spectacle. Maybe moments of transcendent surrealism are still possible, even in the least likely places; a gutter of opulence and privilege, a leaden gala celebrating “Costume Art.”

The word gala sounds like a billionaire gargling champagne.

Gala gala gala gala gala gala galagalagalagalagalagalagalalalalalalala!

Shambolic Voices

I went to Hudson, NY, to visit my friend, the great artist Nancy Shaver. She’s the proprietor of a store called Henry, a brick and mortar portal into Nancy’s exquisite mind. She’s closing the store and selling all its contents. We sat side by side, talking and chatting with customers as they wandered in and out. We observed them observing things. At some point I confessed to Nancy a desire to make recordings, like… a podcast… and she immediately said OH YES and told me to just figure it out as I go, let it be “SHAMBOLIC.” In that spirit we started recording right then and there. Nancy is 80. I do what she says, though this has nothing to do with her age and everything to do with her brilliance, which is an unusual combination of childlike play and sage concision. Her discernment is razor sharp. Here is a small piece of our conversation, a seed we planted together.

Nancy Shaver holding her treasure, an obliterated aluminum soda can.

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