Working The Midnight Shift
Broadcast #008: Glenn Ligon / Whitney Mallett; Benvenuto Cellini! & November's Angel-of-the-Month!
Good Morning, Angels…
Angelic Transmissions #008 broadcasts live today 12-2pm EST via East Village Radio. First we’ll speak with the great Glenn Ligon about his new book Distinguishing Piss from Rain: Writings and Interviews (2024). Next we’ll by joined by Whitney Mallett to discuss her eponymous new outlet for criticism The Whitney Review of New Writing. In between we’ll talk with Leigha Mason about one of the best art films of all time, Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) playing around the corner at Anthology Film Archives.
If you’ve missed any of the episodes, they can be heard anytime via the East Village Radio archive:
#007: Nick Mauss / Julia Bryan-Wilson (10.21.2024).
#006: Camille Okhio / Josephine Halvorson (10.07.2024)
#005: Matvey Levenstein / Ajay Kurian (09.23.2024)
#004: Lara Allen / George Nelson Preston (09.09.2024)
#003: Gaby Collins-Fernandez / Zachary Pace (08.26.2024)
#002: Stephen Ellis / Sanford Schwartz (08.12.2024)
#001: Simon Wu / Tabboo! (07.29. 2024)
The violent, slutty, funny, and profoundly devout Life of Benvenuto Cellini is one of the first memoirs written by an artist and, almost 500 years later, it remains perhaps the greatest. No less an eminence than Jacob Burkhardt in his magisterial The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) cites Cellini’s book as modeling a new form of fully rendered humanity: “Benvenuto as a man will interest mankind to the end of time. It does not spoil the impression when the reader often detects him bragging or lying; the stamp of a mighty, energetic, and thoroughly developed nature remains. By his side our northern autobiographers, though their tendency and moral character may stand much higher, appear incomplete beings.” Indeed, todays popular genres of artist’s memoir, —in the forms of either involuted auto-fiction or celebrity tell all, — come across as downright anemic in comparison.
My essay on Benvenuto Cellini is out now in the current issue of Blau International (No.11).
And now, I’m happy to announce November 2024’s Angel-of-the-Month:
