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

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

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

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

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