Like It's 1999

New podcast with Phillip Lopate, hitting the gouache, and memory lane

Podcastery

This week, I posted Episode 563 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. master essayist Phillip Lopate in a conversation about his new collection, A Year And A Day: An Experiment In Essays (NYRB). We get into how he adapted to a short, time-constrained blog-form for The American Scholar, what it was like revisiting those 2016-17 pieces for this book, and whether an essayist can truly write about anything. We talk about Phillip’s integration of the private and public self in his writing, how his wife & daughter felt about being included in A Year And A Day, whether he’s fulfilled as a writer, why he hides his journal, and how editing the three Great American Essay collections allowed him to leave a canon behind for students & readers. We also discuss how his books and essays add up to a fragmentary, lifelong memoir (and why he’ll likely never write an actual memoir or autobiography), why his multiple myeloma diagnosis was more of a psychological hit than a physical one, how he found himself working on a biography of Washington Irving, the benefits of a fragmentary unitary self, his thoughts on present-day personal essay tropes, the career validation of being inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read A Year And A Day!

Last week, I posted Episode 562 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. the return of cartoonist Leslie Stein. With her wonderful, hilarious & heartfelt new graphic novel, Brooklyn’s Last Secret (Drawn & Quarterly), Leslie brings us the story of Major Threat, a getting-over-the-hill indy band on tour. We talk about how she mined the raw material of her own rock & roll tour experiences (and those of her friends) to make a comedy about touring life, why she started it during COVID lockdown in 2020, and how serializing it on Instagram served as an antidote to doomscrolling. We also get into the evolution of her cartooning style and how she finds new modes to work in, the expectations vs. the reality of artistic life, the experience of going viral with a comic about Nirvana T-shirts (and her time playing in a Nirvana cover band). We also discussed why it’s important to be an entertaining panelist at cons & festivals, the role of music in art-making, why it’s best not to open up emotionally to your bandmates when on tour, and more. Give it a listen! And go read Brooklyn’s Last Secret!

Recent episodes: Josh Bayer • Adam Sisman • Lisa Morton • Daniel Clowes • Rachel Shteir • Patrick McDonnell

Like It’s 1999

I had a call with a prospective client yesterday. He’d been in the industry even longer than I have, and we traded stories about people and companies. It was a fun conversation, and his company is likely going to join my association next year, so yay.

At one point, we were recounting famous flameouts in our industry, companies that went under in spectacular fashion, including one where employees arrived to the building only to find a big padlock on the front door and a notice from the US Marshals office saying the company owed ~$20 million to the bank and was closed until it paid up. (It never paid up, and all the biosamples inside went to waste as staff weren’t allowed in for monitoring.)

We tried to remember one company that melted down shortly after I began covering the industry for the trade magazine I accidentally helped launch, but neither of us could recall the name, although we remembered it was based in Kansas and that they threw a huge hospitality event during a trade show in New Orleans, only to misjudge the turnout and ran out of food & drink pretty early on.

I gestured to the door in the background and told the guy, “I have every issue of Contract Pharma in that storeroom back there, and I promise, once we're done, I'll go through those until I find the company.”

After we wrapped, I went in, started hauling out the first stack of issues in manageable groups, until I got to the bottom of the stack and pulled out Contract Pharma Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1999.

Flipping through the pages, I was walloped with memories. Advertiser after advertiser long gone to merger, rollup, rebrand, or business failure, a million stories to share with colleagues who’ve been around (seriously, only like 2 companies in the ad index still exist under the same name and haven’t been acquired). Page after page of news items, at a time when PR was still transitioning to the web. Half of the article contributors and advisory board members are people I still work with today.

I thought about the gamble of two publishers coming to our company with the idea for this magazine, unable to convince their editor to come with them and getting saddled with the weirdo who was editing the cosmetic packaging magazine (me). We built something special over the ~15 years we worked together, and I’ve made a difference with my second act in this industry, but seeing this premiere issue again reminded me of how little I knew, how we were flying by the seat of our pants. I finished a chunk of that issue while spending the weekend with friends up in Granville, NY.

I didn’t see any ads or news items with the name of the company I was looking for, but it turned out that we ran a list of all the exhibitors from the big trade show where the magazine would debut, so I started going through that line by line. Finally, I hit it: OREAD!

I emailed my prospective client with the name, and he wrote back, “THAT’S IT! (Mt. Oread is the name of the hill on KU’s campus in Lawrence, btw.)”

In 2 months, it’ll be a decade since I gave notice at the magazine. Looking back at 1999, I can’t imagine what 28-year-old Gil thought the future held. Most likely he took it one issue at a time.

Art

I made something good this week. For a while now, I wanted to do something with a photo that Marie Mutsuki Mockett posted on IG of two red-topped cranes in a mating dance, but never knew how to approach it. Then one evening I Had This Idea, which involved throwing out the white background of the photo, and finally using the gouache paints that Dmitry Samarov got for me a year-plus ago. That night, all I did was paint a black(ish) background on a watercolor postcard. The next morning, I painted the bird on the left side of the photo, discovering how white gouache interacts with a black background, how much water I can use, what can and can’t be lifted with paper towels. I let that dry, then returned in the evening to work on the more challenging crane on the right side. Lastly, I figured out a muted color to use for their beaks, so as not to distract from the red tops, and I was done. The piece, small as it is, represents a couple of big steps for me: first time w/gouache, painting directly without drawing the figures first, making the leap of imagination (this is significant for me) of just changing the background. I want to work with those birds again on a larger piece sometime, but as a proof of concept, I love what I managed to do here, even as I’m sure I’ll be embarrassed by it a year from now if I keep up with things. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.

Until Next Time

Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, and Wednesday with a new episode, maybe some art, & who knows maybe a little profundity or something.

Life is just a party, and parties aren’t meant to last,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
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