Podcast appearances and mentions of andrew litton

SynopsisIn recounting the life story of many composers, it's a familiar and perhaps romantic cliché that their work will be — as a matter of course — not appreciated by their contemporaries, and that the composer in question will have to toil for years in obscurity before his or her music is appreciated by performers and audiences.In reality, we're happy to report, that isn't always the case.Consider, for example, American composer Lowell Liebermann, who was born in New York on today's date in 1961. When he was 16, his Piano Sonata No. 1 premiered at Carnegie Hall, resulting in a number of prizes and awards. By his 30s, Liebermann was being commissioned and championed by some of the leading performers of our time.For James Galway, Liebermann composed a flute concerto, and Liebermann's two-act opera The Picture of Dorian Gray was the first work the Monte Carlo Opera commissioned from an American composer. In 1998, Liebermann was appointed composer-in-residence with the Dallas Symphony, and that orchestra premiered his Symphony No. 2 in February 2000, and, in a symbolic millennium gesture, simulcast their performance on the new-fangled worldwide web.Music Played in Today's ProgramLowell Liebermann (b. 1961) Flute Concerto; James Galway, flute; London Mozart Players; Lowell Liebermann, cond. BMG 63235Symphony No. 2; Dallas Symphony and Chorus; Andrew Litton, cond. Delos 3256

SynopsisThe short career of Charles Tomlinson Griffes is one of the more tragic “might-have-beens” of American music history. Griffes died at 35 in 1920 just as his music was being taken up by the major American orchestras of his day.As most American composers of his time, Griffes studied in Germany, and his early works were, not surprisingly, rather Germanic in tone. But beginning around 1911, he began composing works inspired by French impressionism and the art of Asia.The Boston Symphony, under Pierre Monteux, premiered his tone poem The Pleasure Dome of Kubla-Khan and the New York Symphony, under Walter Damrosch, his Poeme for flute and orchestra. On today's date in 1919, the Philadelphia Orchestra, under Leopold Stokowski, premiered four orchestral pieces: Nocturne, Bacchanale, Clouds and one of his best works, The White Peacock. The Philadelphia newspaper reviews of the premieres called Griffes' work “one of the hopeful intimations for the future of American music.”A severe bout of influenza left Griffes too weak to attend these Philadelphia premieres under Stokowski, and he died of a lung infection the following spring.Music Played in Today's ProgramCharles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920) The White Peacock; Dallas Symphony; Andrew Litton, cond. Dorian 90224

SynopsisOn today's date in 1922, the British Broadcasting Corporation began daily radio transmissions from London, at first offering just news and weather — the latter read twice, in case anyone wanted to take notes. The following month, on Dec. 23, 1922, the BBC broadcast its first orchestral concert.Over time, the BBC became affectionately nicknamed “the Beeb,” or, less affectionately “Auntie,” due to the upper-middle class, slightly patronizing tone of its music announcers in the 1940s and ‘50s.That said, Auntie has proven to be hip in one aspect: The BBC has been a major commissioner of and advocate for new music by a wide range of composers — and not just British ones. In 2007, for example, the BBC Symphony premiered the Doctor Atomic Symphony, by American composer John Adams, live on-air at a BBC Proms Concert at the Royal Albert Hall.And it's not just famous, big-name composers who get an airing on the Beeb either. Each year, BBC Radio 3 hosts a competition for teenage composers. Winners participate in a mentored program and have one of their orchestral works developed, rehearsed and performed at the BBC Proms.Music Played in Today's ProgramJohn Adams (b. 1947) Violin Concerto; Tamsin Waley-Cohen, violin; BBC Symphony; Andrew Litton, cond. Signum 468

Today on ‘Conversations On Dance', we are joined by Musical Director of the New York City Ballet, Andrew Litton. Andrew takes us on a journey from his days as a kid learning about music by sitting in the orchestra pit at the metropolitan opera, to the first ballet performances he played in accompanying Rudolf Nureyev, to the work he does now bringing scores to life rehearsing and conducting performances at the New York City Ballet. You can catch Andrew at the podium starting September 19th at New York City Ballet's fall season.LINKS:Website: conversationsondancepod.comInstagram: @conversationsondanceMerch: https://bit.ly/cod-merchYouTube: https://bit.ly/youtube-CODJoin our email list: https://bit.ly/mail-CODEmail us: info@conversationsondancepod.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Je dagelijkse portie muzikale verwondering. Welkom in mijn wonderkamer, vol muziek, verhalen en voorwerpen. Een muzikale reis door eeuwen, windstreken en genres. '20 maart 1847: Opening K&W, Utrecht' Het kwam er eindelijk van; een prachtig nieuw gebouw hartje stad. Geschikt voor vele doeleinden, waaronder het geven van concerten. De beroemde pianovirtuoos Litolff bracht met veel succes zijn speciaal voor de opening geschreven Concerto Symphonique nr.3 Meer zien? Klik hier (https://www.nporadio4.nl/klassiek/podcasts/1773b33b-3b37-4daf-b107-c99863bf55e0/dit-hoor-je-deze-week-in-franks-klassieke-wonderkamer-week-12-20-t-m-24-maart)   Henry Litolff Concerto Symphonique nr.3, op.45 ‘National Hollandais'; Andante & Allegro vivace Peter Donohoe, piano BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra olv Andrew Litton (album: The Romantic Piano Concerto nr.26) Franks Klassieke Wonderkamer is straks niet meer via de Bach van de Dag feed te beluisteren. Niks missen? Abonneer je dan op de podcast Franks Klassieke Wonderkamer.

durée : 00:58:25 - Andrew Litton, chef aux multiples talents - par : Aurélie Moreau - Actuellement Directeur musical du New York City Ballet et Chef principal Invité de l'Orchestre Symphonique de Singapour, Andrew Litton, apprécié dans le répertoire d'orchestre et à l'opéra, est aussi un pianiste accompli.

Synopsis On today's date in 1948, Maestro Efrem Kurtz led the first subscription concert of the newly reorganized Houston Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra was founded in 1913, but after struggling through the “minor” disruptions of two World Wars and the Great Depression, the symphony's 1948 season marked its rebirth as a major player among American orchestras. Since then, the Houston Symphony's roster of conductors has included some of the greatest: Leopold Stokowski, Sir John Barbirolli, André Previn, to name just a few. For its 1948 debut concert, the new Houston Symphony commissioned and premiered a new work by Aaron Copland—a concert suite adapted from his latest film score. Copland had gone to Hollywood early in 1948 to write the music for the cinematic version of John Steinbeck's novella, “The Red Pony,” and spent ten weeks writing about an hour's worth of music for the new film, which was scheduled for release in 1949—so that meant his 1948 concert suite from “The Red Pony” debuted even before the movie. The Houston Post's review called Copland's suite “clean, joyous, ingenious and irresistibly spirited,” and correctly predicted “Mr. Copland's ‘Red Pony' has grand little gaits, and will stand playing again—here and in a lot of other places.” Music Played in Today's Program Aaron Copland (1900-1990) The Red Pony Suite Dallas Symphony; Andrew Litton, cond. Delos 3221

durée : 00:14:21 - Chostakovitch : Jazz & Variety Suites - Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Litton - Andrew Litton dirige l'Orchestre symphonique de Singapour et ensemble ils interprètent un programme dédié à Dmitri Chostakovitch, dans un registre plus léger que celui qu'on lui connait d'habitude. C'est notre disque du jour.

durée : 01:57:24 - En pistes ! du mardi 14 juin 2022 - par : Emilie Munera, Rodolphe Bruneau Boulmier - Andrew Litton dirige l'Orchestre symphonique de Singapour et ensemble ils interprètent un programme dédié à Dmitri Chostakovitch, dans un registre plus léger que celui qu'on lui connait d'habitude. Nous écouterons aussi la musique de Beethoven, Franck ou Smetana.

This week's INTERPLAY features a Conversation In Music with a miracle of a musician, ANDREW LITTON. Conductor and pianist of undeniable gifts, Maestro Litton is a perfectly natural musician with organic attention to phrasing, style, and projection. We recall our many similar paths over the years, his conducting symphonic works versus ballet, building orchestras and audience across the globe, and how an attention to humanity informs everything he does. Please enjoy this sparkling discussion! www.michaelshapiro.com

durée : 00:15:48 - Brahms : Valses et concerto pour piano - Emmanuel Despax, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Litton

Phillip Interviews conductor Andrew Litton

In this very special episode, I'm speaking with violinist and pedagogue Simon Fischer, who is recognized world-wide as a performer, educator and recording artist, and who's published work greatly influences the teaching of the violin. In this conversation Simon talks to us in details about the fundamentals of high quality practice and performance preparation, and shares incredible wisdom on various aspects of efficient learning.   Join my FREE 3-day training: The Performance Makeover Masterclass Monday 4/20 through Wednesday 4/22 11 am CT / 12pm ET I can't wait to discuss optimal performance with you! Sign up here: https://mailchi.mp/f2552e4cb885/performancemakeover       MORE ABOUT SIMON FISCHER: Website: https://www.simonfischeronline.com/ YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqleyIypa4AsYxW1bnOYGoQ Facebook: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqleyIypa4AsYxW1bnOYGoQ Simon's INCREDIBLE books: https://www.simonfischeronline.com/store/c1/Featured_Products.html   Simon Fischer is recognised as one of the pre-eminent musicians of our time, enjoying a distinguished and wide-ranging career as a performer, educator and recording artist. As a recitalist he has performed in the UK, the USA, Europe and Australia, at venues including the Wigmore Hall and the Purcell Room. Alongside standard repertoire he delights audiences by performing his own transcriptions of famous works by composers such as Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Johann Strauss, Rossini and Purcell.  For many years Simon played duo recitals with his father, the pianist Raymond Fischer. Amongst UK and foreign touring projects they played the three Brahms Sonatas in a live broadcast from Sydney, Australia. These Sonatas have also been recorded on CD, receiving high praise in Gramophone Magazine. Simon Fischer has frequently played as soloist or leader/soloist with major orchestras including the Philharmonia, Royal Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, Scottish Chamber and the Ulster Orchestra, working with celebrated conductors such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Sir Charles Groves, Richard Hickox, Andrew Litton, Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Yan-Pascal Tortelier and André Previn.  As a chamber musician he was leader of the Chamber Group of Scotland, with whom he gave many broadcasts and concerts of contemporary music, and worked closely with composers such as Sally Beamish and James MacMillan. He has directed the European Union Chamber Orchestra on tours including to Korea, China and Ireland. Simon Fischer is recognised as having a place amongst the world's elite teachers. Having studied in London with Yfrah Neaman, and in New York with Dorothy DeLay, Fischer's approach unites the best elements of the French, Russian and American violin traditions. He is a professor at the Guildhall School of Music. He has also held positions at three specialist music schools, the Yehudi Menuhin, Wells Cathedral and Purcell, For 15 years he was also a visiting professor at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music. Fischer's published work greatly influences the teaching of the violin. Having written for The Strad magazine from 1991-2014, his monthly articles attracted a worldwide following. Published by Edition Peters, his technique books Basics and Practice, Scales and The Violin Lesson (translated variously into Korean, Italian, Japanese and German),  have become standards on many continents - as has his DVD The Secrets of Tone Production, His book and DVD Warming Up, was described by The Strad magazine as "23 pages of pure technical gold". In 2014 Simon Fischer was awarded the European String Teachers Association prize "In celebration of a lifetime contribution to String Teaching". In conjunction with his playing engagements he frequently gives masterclasses and workshops . Recent residencies have taken place in the USA, Holland, Italy, Norway, Ireland, Hong Kong, Germany and Australia. Simon Fischer plays a violin by Peter Guarnerius of Venice from c. 1732.   Visit www.mindoverfinger.com and sign up for my newsletter to get your free guide to a super productive practice using the metronome!  This guide is the perfect entry point to help you bring more mindfulness and efficiency into your practice and it's filled with tips and tricks on how to use that wonderful tool to take your practicing and your playing to new heights! Don't forget to visit the Mind Over Finger Resources' page to check out amazing books recommended by my podcast guests, as well as my favorite websites, cds, the podcasts I like to listen to, and the practice and podcasting tools I use everyday!  Find it here: www.mindoverfinger.com/resources!   And don't forget to join the Mind Over Finger Tribe for additional resources on practice and performing! If you enjoyed the show, please leave a review on iTunes!  I truly appreciate your support!     THANK YOU: Most sincere thank you to composer Jim Stephenson who graciously provided the show's musical theme!  Concerto #1 for Trumpet and Chamber Orchestra – Movement 2: Allegro con Brio, performed by Jeffrey Work, trumpet, and the Lake Forest Symphony, conducted by Jim Stephenson. Also a HUGE thank you to my fantastic producer, Bella Kelly!   MIND OVER FINGER: www.mindoverfinger.com https://www.facebook.com/mindoverfinger/ https://www.instagram.com/mindoverfinger/

Andrew Litton takes us from his earliest experiences growing up in New York through to his time as being Music Director in Bournemouth, Dallas and Bergen. I found out what it was like to commute from the U.S. to Norway, how to conduct and play the piano simultaneously and what being assistant to Rostropovich was like. A chat I loved having, full of laughter, insight and bon homie! 

SEASON 2: EPISODE 8 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 shesatalker@gmail.com 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!

SEASON 2: EPISODE 3 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 shesatalker@gmail.com 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!

SEASON 2: EPISODE 1Violinist Alicia Svigals talks about the erotics of dishwashing. ABOUT THE GUESTAlicia Svigals is violinist, composer, and co-founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics. She has taught and toured with violinist Itzhak Perlman and has composed for the Kronos Quartet, has appeared in stadium shows with Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, recorded for John Cale's album Last Day On Earth, and the Ben Folds Five's Whatever and Ever Amen. Her debut album Fidl was instrumentation in reviving the tradition of klezmer fiddling, and in 2018 she released the album Bergovski Suite with jazz pianist Uli Geissendoerfer. Recently she has been commissioned to compose scores for silent films, including The Yellow Ticket and Das Alte Gesetz. More info at https://aliciasvigals.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 AlmorMedia: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse KimothoThanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock TRANSCRIPTION ALICIA SVIGALS:  I have, over the years, you know, since we got married in 2011, done that thing that I was doing before with "partner" and "my significant" - uncourageously obscured the fact that I'm a lesbian and... NEIL GOLDBERG:  Uncourageously obscure could be the title of my autobiography. NEIL:  Hello, I'm Neil Goldberg and this is SHE’S A TALKER. This is the first episode of season two, and we'll be back with new episodes every Friday. Today I'll be talking with violinist Alicia Svigals. 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, I've been jotting down thoughts, observations, and reflections, often about things that might otherwise get overlooked or go unnoticed. I write them on index cards, and I've got thousands of them. I originally wrote the cards just for me, or maybe to use in future art projects, but now 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: NEIL:  The particular Grim Reaper-gloom of a rolly bag coming up behind you. NEIL:  Sleeping naked, but wearing a mouth guard. NEIL:  People in New York get so jovial when they see you carrying a pizza box. NEIL:  I am so excited to have as my guest, my dear friend, Alicia Svigals. Alicia is a world-class violinist who specializes in klezmer. If you’re not familiar with klezmer, here’s Alicia playing at the River To River Festival… [Klezmer music plays]… Klezmer was originally a type of Eastern European Jewish music that then came to the United States and became influenced by jazz. Alicia was one of the founders of the Klezmatics who won a Grammy. She's played with all kinds of fancy people like Itzhak Perlman, John Cale of the Velvet Underground, and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, which was just a brunch where we listened to Led Zeppelin, which turns out to be a great combination. Here's our conversation. NEIL:  Alicia Svigals. Thank you so much for being in SHE’S A TALKER. We went to college together. We've known each other for more than 30 years, but, um, I do like to ask everyone, I'm about to sit down next to you on a plane. Hey, what do you do? ALICIA:  I'm a violinist and a composer. Uh, I specialize in a kind of traditional East European Jewish music called klezmer music, which, you know, in the past people would be like, "Oh, what?" And now they're like, "Oh yeah, of course I know that." NEIL:  Right, right. It's almost like the way coming out has kind of changed, although maybe without the shame element, or maybe not. ALICIA:  I know that the shame element is there. It's a little apologetic, like I'm a violinist composer, well, not like a classical violinist. ALICIA:  I do this weird thing. NEIL:  Yeah. Yeah. It vaguely reminds me of how my referencing my husband has changed. You know what I mean? When Jeff and I got married, we did kind of make an informal commitment that we would just always use 'husband' as a way to kind of desensitize the world to it. Yeah. If we were going to take advantage of that privilege. NEIL:  Um, but now I, I usually don't think twice about it. ALICIA:  Wow. NEIL:  How about you? ALICIA:  I think about it practically, I mean, absolutely every single time, it always feels weird and awkward and like I'm pretending it's no big deal, and there's a social contract now that of course it's no big deal, and everybody secretly in their mind thinks it's a very big deal. NEIL:  Exactly. ALICIA:  I'm wondering, like, how has their entire vision of me now changed and are they, have they stopped listening to what I'm saying? Cause there's digesting that... NEIL:  Right. When you're meeting someone for the first time and you just drop a "wife." ALICIA:  Yeah, or if I'm in a professional context. NEIL:  For me, I always feel like, to your point, that every time I use "husband", it's a little micro acting exercise. You know? ALICIA:  It's like... NEIL:  It's performing casualness. ALICIA:  Exactly. Like, and everybody knows it's a performance. So the conversation was doing whatever it was doing and it was normal, and all of a sudden we're faced with that moment like, what else are we going to do? We have no choice. Either we're going to perform casualness and feel weird and fake about that, or we're going to, uh, uncourageously obfuscate, or there's a third possibility, which I've seen people do, which is to say like, be sort of transparent about all that, but then you've made a big deal of something perhaps unnecessarily. NEIL:  Right. How has that sounded? Like, "I'm gay and I have a husband." ALICIA:  You know, I'm not even sure, I've seen other people do it and I haven't liked it, so I'm not sure, but it... Yeah, exactly. "I'm gay and I have a husband." NEIL:  All right. Now, another question I like to ask people is, uh, what is something you were thinking about today? ALICIA:  I mean, since I woke up. NEIL:  I'll let you define 'today'. ALICIA:  Okay. Okay. Okay. Cause I don't usually start thinking till about one or two. NEIL:  Oh, okay. ALICIA:  And it's still early. NEIL:  So you haven't thought about anything yet? ALICIA:  Not very much, but some - okay, some of the things I'll tell you, I thought, um... I hope that Ellen, my wife, hears me doing the dishes because she has told me that turns her on. NEIL:  Do you think she's saying that just as a way to get you to do the dishes? ALICIA:  You know, I have discussed that at length with my therapist and she says, I need to take that literally. NEIL:  Wow, okay. ALICIA:  And all kinds of things turn people on. And that's not even a weird one in her experience here. And hearing all kinds of things from all kinds of people, because, for a lot of people, having the other person do the dishes means they're being taken care of. NEIL:  Oh yeah, totally. ALICIA:  You know, for some people, you know, they want to wear diapers. NEIL:  Exactly. ALICIA:  No, we don't do that. NEIL:  Okay. ALICIA:  So maybe... NEIL:  No judgement if you did though, but, but feeling taken care of doesn't necessarily map directly onto being turned on. Like I feel very taken care of by Jeff often. I guess sometimes that can be a turn on. It lives in a different space though. ALICIA:  Right. ALICIA:  For me too. But apparently there are a lot of people, like it's a very common thing. They won't feel turned on until they feel taken care of. It's really, really separate for me. Like I'm sure it's connected somewhere in there, sometimes in some ways, in some fantasies and so forth. But, um, according to my shrink, who is a genius - NEIL:  Yeah. ALICIA:  And is the smartest person I've ever met. NEIL:  Wow. ALICIA:  Kind of hoping she'll listen to this. NEIL:  Do you want to do the dishes too, while you're at it? ALICIA:  Anyway, I tend to think that my way of thinking and feeling and... My brain is really the right way. And other people's, if it's different, they must be making it up, they must be putting it on. It must be a ploy to get me to do the dishes. And I wrote the quote somewhere, somebody who said, "Everybody's got a weird brain", and I really like it, and I try to remind myself, and everybody's got a weird brain. NEIL:  Absolutely. I love not being in therapy anymore. ALICIA:  Oh you're not in therapy anymore? NEIL:  No. After, after, I think almost 25 years on the dot. ALICIA:  Wow. NEIL:  Um, we terminated like, uh, three or four years ago now, maybe three years. I love it. ALICIA:  Wow. Wow. NEIL:  You don't spend the money and you have the time and you don't have to kind of think about yourself in that same way. NEIL:  You don't have that accountability. ALICIA:  Yeah, the time part I, you know, couldn't relate to. Um, I feel like currently I'm like a snake in the process of getting ready to shed its skin. There's no crisis. Knock wood, you know, cheap too. But I feel like a transformation is going to happen. NEIL:  That's great. ALICIA:  I can't imagine leaving. NEIL:  Although, sorry, not to be a buzzkill, but, um, that's the thing that I'm happy not to have going on for me in therapy, which is the feeling of like, okay, life is just ahead of you. You know what I mean? And, and when I would say this to my therapist, he would be like, that's not the way to be holding this. But I found it hard to avoid that. I mean, toward the end, it, there was an alignment of like the, you know, the me who was in therapy, but also living my life and feeling like this is also my life. ALICIA:  You know, you're right. Like I'm, I am thinking of it as life is going to be so great once the skin - it's very itchy now, but once I've shed the skin. NEIL:  Yeah. ALICIA:  And yeah, that's problematic. And, uh, one day I think I probably would like to no longer be the kind of person who's like talking about themselves and their therapy, which I think is probably boring to most people. NEIL:  Oh, I know. I don't think talking about therapy stops after your - case in point - stops after you're in therapy. Here I am. NEIL:  Alicia, let's look at some of these cards now. Okay. I've picked out some cards, especially for you. Our first card is the diplomacy of saying a child resembles one parent or another. ALICIA:  Oh... NEIL:  You and Ellen are a very specific case of this, if you'd care to share with our podcast audience. ALICIA:  Right. We're a specific case of this, because, um, we each gave birth to one of our sons with the same anonymous donor. They're very much alike in a lot of ways, and they're each very much like each of us, and it's, it's a different case because we're not competing to be the one whose traits appeared more. ALICIA:  It's just a lovely thing to hear that, you know, one of them looks like one of us, um, because it means our genes worked at all. NEIL:  Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Cause I feel very skeptical about whether my jeans would work. ALICIA:  I'm sure they would, Neil. NEIL:  Well, thank you. Isn't it, it always grosses me out when one kid looks powerfully like one of the parents, you know what I mean? It speaks of like their parents fucking in it somehow, it's like a big genetic smear or something like a litter of pups. ALICIA:  There's something like biologically obscene about it. NEIL:  Exactly. Biologically obscene. ALICIA:  Yeah, like an infestation. NEIL:  Exactly. Exactly. ALICIA:  It's like it kind of, impolitely exposes biology too much and it's rude. NEIL:  Exactly, it's like someone flashing you or something. ALICIA:  It's rude. Cause we're supposed to be self-made individuals and we were supposed to have created our own faces. If I didn't have our personalities and which we chose, which we selected using our moral rectitude. NEIL:  We are not bodies. We are pure. You know, in that whole kind of mind. ALICIA:  Ether, mind. Where my, like, Ooh, we must be bodies cause those two completely different people look exactly alike. NEIL:  Oh yeah, exactly. Disgusting. NEIL:  Next card. As soon as I stub my toe, I look for someone to blame. ALICIA:  How did you know that about me? NEIL:  I guess we're similar in that way. Not everyone's that way. ALICIA:  Oh, it is so... When, when the boys were little, one of them, I'm not going to say who, cause you know, it's a little personal. NEIL:  50/50 chance though. Two kids, Ben and Philip. ALICIA:  True. True. NEIL:  If you're listening, this is about one of you. ALICIA:  But I'm respecting your privacy, cause it's just, it's all, you get all the plausible deniability if it's a 50/50 chance. So if he, like, fell, or if he stubbed his toe, like let's say he hurt himself on the floor, he would bang that floor, angry at the floor. NEIL:  When he was a kid? ALICIA:  Yeah, hitting the floor, mad at the floor. He was mad at the object that hurt him. But I absolutely, I stub my toe and I try to think of whose fault was that. Isn't that nutty? NEIL:  Absolutely. It's horrible. Jeff is not like that. ALICIA:  I don't care if they hear it, but my parents are totally... My mom... Mom, I love you. But you know, you're always looking for the blame. And I'm always like, and of course, you know, I'm always trying to blame Ellen, and right? NEIL:  Right? Yeah, of course. Proximity. ALICIA:  And it all seems like completely reasonable to me until I notice I do it even when I stub my toe. And then it's like, wait a minute... NEIL:  I mean, I guess it begs the question, what are the consequences of there not being - ALICIA:  Someone to blame - NEIL:  There's no fault. ALICIA:  Man. NEIL:  What, I mean, in a way, that's a beautiful moment somehow. I think it's also like a very scary moment. ALICIA:  Frightening, out of control, random. NEIL:  Right. But also free somehow. I think? I don't know, whatever part of the brain that assigns blame to discharge that. ALICIA:  Perfectible. Cause if the person would only not. Then no one would stub their toe again if they'd only get it right. NEIL:  Next card. I know you, at a certain point in your life, were a subway musician. I'm going to say something provocative. ALICIA:  Okay. NEIL:  We don't need subway musicians. ALICIA:  They need us. NEIL:  I don't care. We don't need, we don't need buskers of any sort anywhere. We don't. ALICIA:  What about parkour? NEIL:  Parkour, they're doing it for themselves. You mean where they rebound off buildings and shit like that? ALICIA:  No, they do it in the subway car and they ask for money. NEIL:  Oh, Showtime. Nope. Not that neither. That neither. I'm more disposed to that particular narrative than to like the heartfelt  acoustic singer or really anything, but I'm just ready to come down with a full, like no buskers anywhere. ALICIA:  Uh huh. Well, you know, did you feel that way 30 years ago? NEIL:  I think I might have. ALICIA:  Really? NEIL:  Yeah. Because for me, the subway is enough. The subway, everything is enough. ALICIA:  More than enough. NEIL:  It's more than enough. Absolutely. This street is enough. The Plaza is enough, and I understand that that's proposing a separation between the Plaza and the musician or the musician and the subway. NEIL:  Actually, up until very recently, I was like not into putting headphones in when I was on the street. It's like, the street will do just fine. Now, by the way, I do put the headphones in. ALICIA:  To escape the street or cause you're bored without them? NEIL:  I think it's for the same reason that I like not being in therapy. It's like I'm going to choose not to use this time to think. Or my thinking will be directed by whatever I'm listening to, whether it's a podcast or music. So I think I always felt that, yeah. ALICIA:  I always loved street performers. They made me feel like the joy of humanity. Oh my God. NEIL:  Really? If anything could make me change my mind, which it can't, it would be knowing something like that, like that makes other people happy, I - maybe it's my own narcissism or solipsism or whatever ism. It's like, I just assume everyone feels a slight variation on what I feel. I mean, I feel like at best people are like, interested. Um, I didn't know that, like it's actively bringing joy to people like you. ALICIA:  I would go out looking for them. I mean - NEIL:  Wow! ALICIA:  Partly it was youthful, naivete and enthusiasm, but it was like I would love to go to Central Park, and I would like, uh, street performer hop. I'd go from one to the next. That was my idea of an exciting , you know, adventurous Sunday. NEIL:  Holy shit! My God. Who the fuck knew? ALICIA:  Yeah. Um, and I would love, like if I had friends visiting from another country or city - to show off New York, I would show off all these different performers. NEIL:  I might've  done that, possibly, possibly. Not go out of my way, but if I'm going into a subway platform and there's the street musician, I could kind of inwardly feel like, Oh, I live in a city where we have street musicians. That. Well, at the same time, privately feeling like - ALICIA:  Like stop! NEIL:  Yeah, enough. We don't need it. ALICIA:  You know, in the seventies and eighties, it was new and I would love to see like a P pop player and then, you know, the Pam pipe players. NEIL:  I just feel like the pan pipe, if I may, I just feel like pan pipes only have one emotional register, which is wistful. You know?. And I'm not into wistful ever, ever, ever. You don't need wistful. What are you wistful for? What are you wistful about? Come on. ALICIA:  I'm wistful in advance for the things I have now, but might not in the future. NEIL:  I'm something else about them, but not wistful. ALICIA:  Do you like Brahms, and Dvorak, and romantic chamber music? NEIL:  I don't really know it. ALICIA:  You probably heard it and never pursued it because it was wistful. NEIL:  Next card. Male singers showcasing their vulnerability by singing falsetto. ALICIA:  Ooh. I always thought of it as supreme confidence, but showcasing your vulnerability is confidence. Isn't it? NEIL:  But I feel like it's almost performing vulnerability. ALICIA:  I just am remembering something, which I remember all the time for some reason. When I was in junior high, ninth grade I think, a friend of mine, a female friend... I said something like, Do know this guy? He's got like longish feathered - okay, this is the 70s - reddish straight feathered hair. He, he was just walking by the principal's office singing, you've got a cute way of walking, which is the BG's and it's falsetto, right? NEIL:  It's Leo Sayer. ALICIA:  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. It's the era, but yeah, right. It's not the BG's. And he was singing that and, and she said, Ooh, sounds cute. Like the guy sounds cute. And that was a moment I thought, I don't understand what girls see in boys. I was like, why is that cute? I'm so perplexed what my female friends think is cute and sexy about boys. You know? That probably was a clue. NEIL:  And was that the moment you became a lesbian? ALICIA:  Listen, it was not. I was just like, I don't get heterosexuality. I didn't really know there was an alternative at that point. So. I don't get heterosexuality. I'm not empathetic. I expect heterosexuals to get homosexuality. I can't, I don't get like, it's so hard for me. NEIL:  You're pretty extreme, pretty extreme lesbian. ALICIA:  Not, not in entire, it shouldn't entirely be hard because I think on some level, you know, I'm not a zero or a 10 on the Kinsey spectrum, but like I always have to like do the mental exercise very deliberately of, yes, this heterosexual couple really does love each other. They're not just making it up. Yes, women really do fall in love with men and cry themselves to sleep, and you know, go into deep depressions of if it doesn't go right and they obsess over them and you know, just like I would do with women, like it's so hard. It's so hard for me. I have to believe that truly. NEIL:  And the emotional part is hard for you to believe. So it's not like the idea of like heterosexual people have sex. ALICIA:  No, that's easy. NEIL:  Interesting. The idea that the affective, the emotional part, is hard to believe, that they love each other. ALICIA:  That, that they're out of control, you know, in love with each other or that, I mean, I love men. Like I love you, my friend. NEIL:  I love you too, Alicia. ALICIA:  And I love my sons to infinity, you know. And I, I, they're, they're like no beings I love more in the world than these two males and not despite their maleness. It's what they are. You know, like I love everything about them, and it's very easy for me in a way to imagine anybody being in love with them, of course. Who wouldn't be in love with my sons. But, when I consider, it's mostly movies and literature, it's like, really? NEIL:  I find it really refreshing. You really have carved yourself a bit of freedom within heteronormativity to be able to like, not believe in heterosexuality in the way that you're talking about. ALICIA:  Do you make an analogy, like do you identify with the woman in a heterosexual couple or do you have no trouble imagining that, that romantic love? NEIL:  I don't. No, super don't. I mean, sometimes I have more trouble imagining it in a homosexual relationship, I think. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a, that's a bigger problem for me, probably, even though I'm in love with Jeff and, you know, and, uh. ALICIA:  You see? Everybody has a weird brain. NEIL:  Oh, okay. We can agree to that. I love it. Okay, Alicia. Let's do bad over good. What's the X you would take a bad of over a Y you would  take a good of? ALICIA:  You know what, even this is a loaded question, because what I've been thinking about a lot lately is like I have a hard time recreating, basically. I'm such a nerd. It's like... NEIL:  You want edification. ALICIA:  I know, and part of it is sincere, like I do enjoy the learning, learning languages and reading, but, it seems to me like I would take a bad history book over a good mystery book because I don't know how, I don't know how to have fun, you know? ALICIA:  And that's how I live anyway. I'm trying to like explore that, but I'm just noticing. If I have some free time, it's like, Ooh, now I could practice my scales and go back to Duolingo where I'm working on Hebrew and Japanese right now, and it's like, you know, Ellen, my wife is like, Oh, now I could finish a season of the Bachelor. ALICIA:  But, I think I'd rather read a badly-written edifying thing than watch the most hilarious season of the Bachelor. NEIL:  Wow. You're a paradox, or not a paradox. It's opposite day for Alicia Svigals. That's great though. I hear that. I think that's what gives the pleasure to doing the TV thing. It's the release from the imperative for edification. NEIL:  There's just a certain pleasure that becomes available when your intention is different than to be eating your spinach on some level. You know what I mean? ALICIA:  All I do is frigging eat my spinach. I'm trying to stop that. NEIL:  On that note, Alicia Spiegels, thank you so much for being on SHE’S A TALKER. ALICIA:  Thank you for having me. This was like, just like having coffee with you, with an engineer present, very discreet and like, I totally forgot that we were recording. NEIL:  Thank you. NEIL:  Cut. NEIL:  Huge thank you for listening to this episode of SHE’S A TALKER. If there's someone else you think might like it, I'd love it if you'd share it with them and if you have a couple of seconds to rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, it really helps people find this during season one, a number of folks let me know they had their own responses for some of the cards. NEIL:  If you have thoughts you'd like to share, we'd love to feature them too. Write to us at shesatalker@gmail.com or on Instagram @shesatalker. 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 handles social media. NEIL:  Our card flipped 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, Alicia Svigals, 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.

Writer and performer Annie Lanzillotto discusses the pleasure of wolfing food down and how the "feels like" temperature is measured. 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. Catch Annie performing her one-person show Feed Time at City Lore in Manhattan on November 15 at 7:30pm. 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 and other museums, 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: Stella Binion, Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue  Assistant Producers: Itai Almor, Charlie Theobald  Editor: Andrew Litton  Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver  Theme Song: Jeff Hiller  Media: Justine Lee with help from Angela Liao and Alex Qiao  Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Roger Kingsepp, Tod Lippy, Nick Rymer, Maddy Sinnock, Sue Simon, Shirin Mazdeyasna TRANSCRIPT: ANNIE LANZILLOTTO: In the Bronx we weren't poor. You're in the Bronx. My father was, working class, had his own business. There wasn't such big class distinctions. It was like Fiddler on the Roof class distinctions, like the butcher ate better. NEIL GOLDBERG: Right. ANNIE: We all had Raleigh Choppers. That was the best bicycle and really, most of us on the block could get that, a Schwinn or a Raleigh, you know? That was it really. That was in terms of being a kid, that was the class distinction. I achieved it, so I grew up feeling pretty rich until I was 13. NEIL: Hello, I'm Neil Goldberg and this is my new podcast, She's A Talker. On today's episode I'll be talking to one-of-a-kind of poet, playwright, memoirist and performer Annie Lanzillotto. But first, I want to tell you a little bit about the podcast itself. I'm a visual artist, but for the last million or so years I've been writing passing thoughts down on index cards. I've got thousands of them. I originally wrote the cards just for me or maybe as starting points for future art projects, but now I'm using them as prompts for conversations with some of my favorite artists, writers, performers, and beyond. Why is it called She's A Talker? Way back in 1993, I made my first-ever video project which featured dozens of gay men in their apartments all over New York city combing their cats and saying the words, "She's a talker." 25 years later, I'm excited to resurrect the phrase for this podcast. NEIL: Each episode, I'll start with some recent cards. Here they are, photo project, the litter boxes of celebrities, those people who have strong feelings about you're saying, "Bless you.", Before they sneeze. Babies making their dolphin noises at a wedding. Those glass buildings that appear curved, but then you realize it's just an approximation of a curve made from rectangle. I am so excited to have as my guest, writer and performer Annie Lanzillotto. Annie and I went to college together many, many years ago and have been dear friends ever since. She produced, what to this day, is still one of my favorite performance pieces ever. A site-specific opera featuring the vendors at the Arthur Avenue market near where she grew up in the Bronx. I remember a butcher singing a gorgeous love aria while frying up chicken hearts. NEIL: Annie has a new double book of poetry out from Guernica Editions, called Hard Candy / Pitch Roll Yaw, which touches on parental mortality, her own struggles with cancer and poverty. And if that sounds heavy, there is so much beauty and joy and pleasure and straight-up polarity in the work. I spoke to Annie very late on a very hot August night in my art studio in Chinatown. NEIL: I'm recording. I'm recording. NEIL: I'm here with Annie Lanzillotto. Okay, Annie. Here are a couple of questions that I ask everyone. What is the elevator pitch for what you do? ANNIE: Oh my God, that's so hard. I write and speak and put my body on stage, and in live and an audience, whoever's in the room, I resuscitate that room. NEIL: Is that what you would say to someone in an elevator who asks, "Hey, what do you do?" ANNIE: No. NEIL: What would you say to them? I resuscitate the room. ANNIE: Some people I say, "Well, I do theater. Oh, I'm in theater." Then they say, "Oh, I saw the Lion King.", or something. Oh, that's beautiful. At some point when I was cleaning out the closets, I found the picture I drew as a kid. I think the question was, what do you do or what do you want to do or what do want to be or whatever? I drew five situations where this stick figure was commanding a story. One was at the table, one was on a corner, one was on the stage, and I thought, "That's what I do." NEIL: I love it. I love it. ANNIE: The truth about my elevator pitch is I'm listening to the other person in the elevator. That really is the truth. I always feel like I'm very good at bonding but not so good at networking. So, that elevator pitch, in my mind, is someone who is in a position maybe to help me advance my work, which is a problem to frame it that way. But in reality they end up telling me about their sick kid and we're hugging and that's really the elevator pitch. NEIL: Right. ANNIE: I'm just listening to- NEIL: Do you do an elevator catch? ANNIE: Yeah. Just listen. NEIL: What did your mom, Annie, let's say a friend of hers asked her, "What does Annie do?" What would she say? ANNIE: Well, she at times, probably would've said, I taught. I did workshops, taught writing and theater. I think with her neighbors, she would really share with them her love and pride. NEIL: How about your grandmother? Why would she say? ANNIE: Oh God. Well, Grandma Rose, she would, Grandma Rose always wanted to know you were eating good. At the time when she was alive, I was hustling a lot of teaching jobs, like Poet in the Schools. Mostly I was a Poet in the School, so I would call her between schools. I was running from one school and another school and she'd just always want to know cosa mangia oggi? What did you eat today? Really that was the conversation. NEIL: Would she, in talking about you with friends, would she tell them what you had eaten that day? How's Annie doing? ANNIE: She's a good eater. She eats good. Mangia bene. No, I don't know. I don't think she talked to her friends that way. NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: But to boil it down, she would want to know if you're making money. And that's the conversation with friends. Oh, she's a good girl. She makes money. She helps her mother. NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: It wasn't about career choice or something. NEIL: Annie, what's something you find yourself thinking about today? ANNIE: One thought I'm having is that prices are arbitrary. The other day I went for breakfast in a diner. I ordered one way, but the waitress understood in a different way. So anyway, it was two eggs, whatever. So she said, "That'll be $17." I said, "That sounds like a lot." She said," Oh well you got this, you got that" I said, "Yeah, but I ordered the combo. It's shouldn't be that much." So she rang it up a different way. She was like, "All right, how about $12?" It's almost seems like prices don't matter and it seems arbitrary. I think this is a new experience for me because in the past I started noticing what my mom, every time we went food shopping, several items were rung up more than they were supposed to be. My mother was sharp at this because I think in ShopRite if you caught a mistake, you got a lot for free, whatever the, there was some bonus like you got that item for free or whatever it was. So she caught them a lot. But it was pretty much every time. NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: I'm cognizant now not to buy too many items at once because then I can't keep track of what the prices were on the shelf. The old way, if you go to the market for two, three things, string beans, peaches and a piece of meat you don't lose track because you're buying, you have a push cart with a million items, how can you keep track? So I guess the thought is that prices have no relevance anymore to what the thing is. NEIL: Okay Annie, let's go to the cards. Shall we? ANNIE: Let's do it. Let's go to the cards. NEIL: Okay. Our first card, the card says the pleasure of wearing things out. ANNIE: I love that you brought that up. Well, I was always wearing out my sneakers and throwing them up on the telephone wires or the light wires, or whatever wires were over our heads in the Bronx and that was the joy to wear them out. My mother, who was a cripple as a kid because she fell out a window, would always say to me when she bought me new sneakers, PF flyers with the sneakers that I wore as a kid, "Wear them out. God bless you, be in good health. Wear them out." Every two months I'd wear out those sneakers, and my grandmother was horrified. NEIL: But your mother would love it? ANNIE: Yeah, because to her that was health. Wear out your sneakers. That meant I was doing the work of a tomboy, of the kid. I do feel worried about wearing out pajamas and things that I don't really have money to replace. So my neighbor saw me sewing a new elastic in my pajama bottoms with the flannel pajamas. She was making fun of me." Why don't you just go buy a new pair?" I was like, "Well this season I really don't have another 40, 50 bucks for LLB or whatever. I want to get through the season.", which is something I grew up hearing, but it stayed with me, like see if he could get into the season out of it. NEIL: I wonder if we'll ever feel that way about our lives. Let's see if I can get another season out of this. ANNIE: Well, I do hear people saying, "I wish I had a few more summers at the beach." Or, "I could, I hope I could have a few more summers." People do count like that. NEIL: That's true. ANNIE: Like seasons. NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: "I hope I see Italy one more time." I hear people, "Will I get back to Paris." NEIL: Right. ANNIE: You know, I hear people saying things like that. NEIL: yeah, ANNIE: So they do try to stretch it out, I think. I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I've done enough. There is a part of me that feels like I've done enough to be satisfied if there's no more. If there's no more, it's okay. NEIL: Okay, next card. ANNIE: I love these cards. It's like playing a game like Monopoly. NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: And you get Community Chest or whatever the- NEIL: I know. ANNIE: Chance. It's like Chance. NEIL: Yeah. Here's this Chance. I think it's important to have access when you are eating something you love to imagine them as they are to people who hate them. For me the classic example of that is dark chocolate, which I love. It's very easy I think, for me to plug into how someone would find this disgusting and somehow my tuning into finding it disgusting, helps me to enjoy it even more. ANNIE: Really? NEIL: Yeah. Do you remember the first time you had coffee? ANNIE: No, because I was probably two years old with expresso on my bottle, like most Italian kids. NEIL: Right. ANNIE: I don't eat things that I know people who, they hate what I eat. But people do, I feel like having a version to my proportions, the amount I eat. I think that freaks people out because I grew up, and I still wolf food down. Just Wolf it down and too much of it. Just shoving it in your mouth. Like your cheeks bulging, you're chewing and you're just yeah. Shoving as much as you can in your mouth, basically. NEIL: In Yiddish, you say, and I think it's related to German, human beings es but animals fres. So, if you're talking about someone eating in a certain way, you say they use the term for how animals eat versus how people eat. ANNIE: Fres? NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: What does that mean? Like that? NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: Like a piece of pizza I could just shove in my mouth, inhale, a good piece, out on the corner. NEIL: Right. ANNIE: I just pull up in Hoboken where my friend is, where she works, there's a great pizzeria right on the corner. She gets free pizza because she does their printing services. So I meet her, she says, "Oh I'll meet you outside" So we get a piece of pizza. Oh you want a piece of pizza. All right, give me a piece of pizza. Fine. I'm an Hoboken, eat a piece of pizza. She gets a few slices. We stand on the corner. Just boom, shove it in our mouth. Wolf it down like folded by. No soda, no water. Just inhale the piece of pizza. NEIL: Is there pleasure in that? ANNIE: Yes. NEIL: Because see I always just associate the pleasure of eating with eating slowly but- ANNIE: No. Not Italians NEIL: Talk to me about it. ANNIE: It's just, this pleasure of your mouth is full of this gooey perfect thing. You just can't believe that you lived another day just to have ... It's like then I want to stay alive because it's such satiation, with just shoving it in your mouth. You're not taking your time because you're not worried there's another bite. It could just be gone. NEIL: See, this makes me feel good because I remember when my dad, after he had a stroke, he couldn't feed himself. He couldn't communicate and we had this person who would help him. She was cold and she used to feed him so quickly, spoonful after spoonful, to get it over with. I knew that my dad actually like to eat slow. I know I talked about with my sister. I was like, you know, do you think I should ask? I can't remember her name, little trauma blocked out, but to feed him slower. My sister said. "No, I think there can be pleasure in eating fast." Speaking of food, but this question doesn't need to just apply to food, what is a taste that you've acquired? ANNIE: Well, coffee, vino, peppermint soap. Dr. Brown's peppermint soap. Myrrh. NEIL: Oh wow. Okay. ANNIE: The street oil from the guys. I've grown accustomed to Myrrh, and the smells of the city, I've learned to groove on in a way. I sometimes feel in the grassy suburbs, I could sneeze hundreds of times and I just need to get to the city and it'll stop. So something about like, yeah, I'm good with the asphalt, tar. My mother used to tell me to go breathe where they're burning tar. She said it clears out your lungs. NEIL: Wow. ANNIE: She said tar ladies and never get colds. NEIL: Okay, next card. I feel really judgmental of people with a strong will to live. ANNIE: That gives me so much good feeling because I'm so tied to having to struggle to live. But the best, Jimmy Cagney in this movie I saw, I don't know what movie. It was on TCN, and he's about to run into this gunfire and he says to his partner, who was hesitating, he says, "What, do you want to live forever?" I thought, "Thank you, thank you. That's just what I needed to hear." I'm so tired of fighting to live, from the cancer and the breathing issues and just, Oh my God, that's a relief. It really is. NEIL: Next card. Life is hard, but how the pitch rises when you fill a water bottle can still be pretty beautiful. ANNIE: The pitch.? NEIL: Yeah. Is that the word for it? ANNIE: Like, how you feel? NEIL: You know when you fill a water bottle and it goes, errr? There's always that still. ANNIE: I like filling my water bottle. I've been filling it in the Britta, so I have to stand there with the fridge open to fill it and then I water the plants and it's the same kind of feeling. I like doing that. I like seeing the plants grow and it's the most pleasurable thing in my life to see in these plants growing and feeding them water. NEIL: I went away and we sublet our place. I have one big plant that really only needs to be watered every two weeks. But I had one plant that needs to be watered, I water it every other day. ANNIE: Every other day? NEIL: Truthfully, this plant, I remember one day I came in, it had wilted, after. I hadn't watered it for three days and I found myself saying out loud, "Drama queen". So anyhow, we were down in DC for a month and I was going to take the plant with me, but we had this really wonderful sub-letter and I just said to her, "Do you think you would be okay watering the plant twice a week? Totally no problem. "If you're not, I'll just take it down with me". She was like, "Absolutely no problem." When I came back, she left me a note that said, I'm so sorry but I killed your plant. ANNIE: Oh my God. NEIL: It was clear it hadn't been watered the whole time I was gone. ANNIE: Really? NEIL: Yeah, I don't think so. I moved on, but my point is, I don't get how a plant could be there in your living room and he could not see it and it could be dying over there without you're taking that in. ANNIE: When I'm someone's house and the plants don't look healthy, I register that in a big way. NEIL: What is that registration? ANNIE: Well, people could think they're so smart or hip or they make such great decisions and doing this. But if you can't take care of a fucking plant, it doesn't mean anything to me. Sometimes I can't go back to people's houses for reasons like that because I can't witness the abuse. NEIL: Plant abuse. ANNIE: Well, any sentient being. Yeah, some of the stuff I just can't stomach, to be honest. The plants dying or no one's ... You're that busy? Then what do you have plants for? Give it away. I just can't- NEIL: I hear you. Do you think of plants a sentient? ANNIE: Yeah, a plant is alive and I think communicates in ways we'll never understand. A plant has movement, responds to light, water, earth, the sky, the sun, everything. NEIL: I just have a card that's called, swallowing pills. ANNIE: Swallowed a big one today. NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: Before I go to the dentist, I have to take Amoxicillin. In America they give you a 500 milligram pills. You got to take four. NEIL: Wow. ANNIE: They go down easy. But I had some Amoxicillin from Sicily. They were one- gram pills. They were big and I tried to swallow three times. I couldn't get it down. I had to really focused then. Should I bite it, should I swallow it? what can I try? Am I going to choke on it? Finally I got it down this morning, but it wasn't coated so it stuck a little in the mouth. I went through this whole thing with this pill. NEIL: You really have to consciously will yourself. The experience of swallowing pills is such an odd, it's not eating. You have to do this thing where you don't chew something. Swallowing- ANNIE: You got to open the back of your mouth a little bit, the throat a little bit. NEIL: Yeah. And it goes against something really basic or a bunch of things that are really basic. ANNIE: It does. Right. You don't swallow M&Ms. NEIL: Right. ANNIE: You'd never swallow an M&M. NEIL: Absolutely not. ANNIE: Never would you swallow an M&M. it would be like, what are you doing? NEIL: I had a colonoscopy recently. ANNIE: Oh, brother. NEIL: Thank you. ANNIE: Nice and clean? NEIL: One thing, I was telling a friend, I got a colonoscopy and he said, "Oh, you know, I had it. I just did one, a couple of months ago, and my doctor really commended me for how clean my colon was." I realized when I had a, because I've had to have a few because of this history in my family. Every time, they go out of their way to praise what a job, how clean your colon is. So when I was done with the colonoscopy, and I was talking to this friend and he said, "Well did he praise you for how clean your colon was?" I was like, "He didn't." ANNIE: He didn't? NEIL: He didn't, but then I got the report about the colonoscopy and it's like very formal, and it's the patient presented with an exceedingly clean colon or something. ANNIE: Which is abnormal. NEIL: Exactly. ANNIE: Very abnormal. NEIL: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Last card. The feels-like temperature. ANNIE: Feels like. NEIL: You know how you feel when the weather- ANNIE: It feels like, yeah, that's weird. NEIL: What is the feels-like temperature? ANNIE: I don't know but- NEIL: How do they- ANNIE: But today when I felt like, before I put on a jacket, I had to go on the stoop to feel what it was going to feel like. Then I didn't do it. But I don't know how they measure the feels-like temperature. That's a sweet thought. So there's a thermometer, then there's a naked lady standing there saying, "Well the thermometer says this, but it really feels that." That should be a job for somebody. NEIL: Oh my God, to come up with the feels-like temperature? ANNIE: Yeah. Like is it a nipple hard day? Is it what day? What kind of day is it? NEIL: Okay. Annie, this is a quantification question. What's something bad or even just okay that you would take over a good thing of something else. ANNIE: All right, I'll give you a list. A bad eggplant Parmesan hero over a good raw sushi meal. A bad thunderstorm storm over a hundred-degree day. A hard day in the hospital with someone I'm close to, over being at the beach with 10 friends. Take any day, bad or good in the rehearsal room, over chit-chat brunch. A bad rant in the basement of the mental home with my father over a beautiful meal with intellectuals. NEIL: On that note, Annie, I love you. Thank you for being on the show, She's A Talker. ANNIE: She's a talker, baby. Thank you, Neil. You're my favorite host. NEIL: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of She's A Talker. I really hope you liked it. To help other people find it, I'd love it if you might rate and review it on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to it. Some credits. This series is made possible with generous from Stillpoint Fund, and with help from Devon Guinn, Aaron Dalton, Stella Binion, Charlie Theobald, Itai Almor, Alex Qiao, Molly Donahue, Justine Lee, Angela Liao, Andrew Litton, Josh Graver, and my husband Jeff Hiller who sings the theme song you're about to hear. Thanks to them, to my guest, Annie Lanzillotto, and to you for listening.  

Top picks from across the week on In Tune including conductor Andrew Litton, tenor Bryan Hymel and soprano Kristin Lewis from the Royal Opera House, saxophonist and composer John Harle, tenor Nicholas Mulroy with lutenist Toby Carr, and French Harpsichordist Jean Rondeau with percussionist Keyvan Chemirani.

Årets första CD-revy är här! Vi hör musik av Vivaldi, Verdi, Dvorák, Copland och Janácek och möter den franske violasten Antonie Tamestit I panelen sitter Alexander Freudenthal, Bodil Asketorp och Camilla Lundberg som tillsammans med programledaren Johan Korssell betygsätter följande skivor:GIUSEPPE VERDI Operaarior Krasimira Stojanova, sopran Münchens radioorkester, Pavel Baleff, dirigent Orfeo C885 141 Betyg: 4 radioapparater ANTONIO VIVALDI Fagottkonserter (IV) Sergio Azzolini, fagott LOnda Armonica Naïve OP 30551 Betyg: 4 radioapparaterAARON COPLAND Billy the Kid - Rodéo Colorados symfoniorkester Andrew Litton, dirigent Bis BIS 2164 Betyg: 4 radioapparater JANÁCEK DVORÁK Sinfonietta Symfoni nr 9 Anima Eterna, Brügge Jos van Immerseel, dirigent Alpha ALPHA 206 Betyg: 2 radioapparater Sofia möter Antoine Tamestit Sofia Nyblom träffade den franske violasten Tamestit i november 2015 i samband med konserten i Berwaldhallen i Stockholm, där han framträdde som solist på sin Stradivariusviola i Jörg Widmanns nykomponerade violakonsert.Andra nämnda/rekommenderade inspelningarKrasimira Stojanova som sopransolist i Verdis Requiem tillsammans med Bayerska radions kör och symfoniorkester under ledning av Mariss Jansons på skivmärke BR Klassik.Janáceks Sinfonietta med Chicagos symfoniorkester dirigerad av Seiji Ozawa på EMI och med Tjeckiska filharmonin ledd av Karel Ancerl på Supraphon.  Dvoráks nionde symfoni med Tjeckiska filharmonin under ledning av Karel Ancerl inspelad på Supraphon; Berlins filharmoniker ledd av Rafael Kubelik på DG; Londons symfoniorkester under István Kertész på Decca samt med Budapests festivalorkester och dirigenten Iván Fischer utgiven på Decca.Johans svep Johans svep går i de italienska färgerna. Vi hör valda delar ur Alfredo Casellas första symfoni med Gianandrea Noseda på pulten framför BBC filharmoniker i Manchester, utgiven på Chandos samt ur Ennio Morricones musik till filmen The hateful eight regisserad av Quentin Tarantino och soundtracket är inspelat på Decca.

Atterbergs orkesterverk med GSO och Jonas Kaufmann i Nessun Dorma, det är innehållet på två av veckans skivor. Dessutom tipsar Johan om en riktig mastodont-Stravinskybox. I veckans panel sitter Boel Adler, Evabritt Selén och Måns Tengnér som tillsammans med programledaren Johan Korssell betygsätter följande skivor:GRAZYNA BACEWICZ Konsert för stråkorkester, Symfoni för stråkorkester, Pianokvintett nr 1 Ewa Kupiec, piano, Capella Bydgostiensis kammarorkester Mariusz Smolij, dirigent Naxos 8.573229NESSUN DORMA The Puccini Album Jonas Kaufmann, tenor Orkester och kör från Santa Cecilia-akademin, Rom Antonio Pappano, dirigent Sony 88875092492 6J S BACH Sonater och partitor för soloviolin BWV 1001-1006 Gil Shaham, violin Canary Classics CC 14KURT ATTERBERG Orkesterverk (Vol 3) Göteborgs symfoniker, Neeme Järvi, dirigent Chandos CHSA 5154Johans val Johan Korssell spelar valda delar ur Stravinsky-boxen: The Complete Columbia Album Collection.  Johans svepJohan sveper över Billy the Kid och Rodéo ur det nyutkomna albumet med Aaron Coplands balettmusik framförd av Colorados symfoniorkester dirigerad av Andrew Litton.Andra nämnda inspelningar- J S Bachs sonater och partitor för soloviolin med Rachel Podger på Channel Classics; Nathan Milstein på EMI och DG;  Mats Zetterqvist på Kultan records samt med Isabelle Faust på Harmonia Mundi. - Atterbergs femte symfoni med Stockholms filharmoniska orkester ledd av Stig Westerberg på Musica Sveciae samt alla Atterbergs 9 symfonier med Ari Rasilainen på CPO. - Puccini-arior med Placido Domingo. 

Andrew talks to American conductor Andrew Litton about recording Prokofiev and Wagner in Bergen, as well as a recent labour of love involving his hero, jazz pianist Oscar Peterson

In the listening room of Grieg Hall, Bergen – a concert hall sometimes masquerading as a theatre and vice versa – Edward Seckerson talks to Mary Miller, Director of Bergen National Opera, and Andrew Litton, Music Director of the venerable Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra – about the genesis of opera in Bergen and the prospect of … [Read More]

Andrew Litton, Rachel Podger, the Takács Quartet and Sir Mark Elder: the Gramophone Podcast June 2012

We recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and it sounded so great that it was inspiring.

Conductor Andrew Litton returns to lead the NAC Orchestra on May 14-15. Here is an encore presentation of the wide-ranging chat that NACOcast host Christopher Millard had with the Grammy Award-winning conductor on his last visit to the NAC in January 2007.

On the Guest List this week Anne-Marie Minhall talks to renowned conductor Andrew Litton about being the first American music director of Norway’s Bergen Philharmonic….Also on the show is Buckingham Palace’s Choirmaster Andrew Gant and curator Caroline De Gee Toe who tell Annie all about the exhibition at Buckingham Palace to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the marriage of Her Majesty the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

Christopher chats with American conductor Andrew Litton. Litton's more than 60 recordings include the Grammy winning Walton's Belshazzar's Feast with Bryn Terfel and the Bournemouth Symphony.