This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit yasha.substack.comWe record an emergency ep to talk about Sean Baker’s sweep at the Oscars with his new film Anora. We talk about Sean Baker’s sentimental style and his “changemaker” interest in stories of marginalized people. He comes from good New Jersey suburb but the only layer of American society he’s interested in are the lower classes — the delivery workers, trans prostitutes, third rate porn stars, strippers, poor immigrants. We discuss our opinion of the film, the reaction that other Russians had to it, and end up talking about Todd Solondz a lot, who like Sean Baker, grew up in upper-middle-class suburban New Jersey but couldn’t be a more different director.As a bonus, I tell the story of how I tried to score heroin on the LA corner where a lot of the action in Tangerine, Baker’s breakthrough hit film about transgender prostitutes, takes place…and how I ended up going to a gay brothel in West Hollywood.Do the Anora Oscar wins signal that Hollywood is ready to reset relations with Russia? Only time will tell.—YashaPS: We discuss Evgenia’s short film Changemaker — watch it here.
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3:55
Red Scared
We continue our discussion of Red Scare’s turn into a real red scare platform. We have been doing deconstruction of their rhetoric on Twitter the past week, which has been going viral and has been drawing all the nastiness and poison of the Red Scare universe to the surface for everyone to see. And we’ve come to a very grim conclusion about the nature of this podcast project, and it’s this: What Red Scare promotes as “good” politics is captured by The Zone of Interest — where the happy family of the commander of Auschwitz lives on the other side of the wall from the death camp surrounded by sounds of suffering and not caring. They see themselves as good people. These are the morals that the Red Scare women want to push on people. To them the only thing that makes you a “good” person is treating your family and friends right. That’s it. The pain and suffering of other people doesn’t matter. In fact, it doesn’t even exist. And if you care about anyone outside your little world, you’re fake and manipulative and just projecting your own mental issues onto the world. Our world is already a series of Zones of Interest. But what Red Scare tries to do is to sell this kind of cynical tribalism as something cool and avant-garde. They’ve become agents of nihilism.We want to draw the line in the sand and call it what it is, and to remind young (and not so young) people that there is a black and white and good and bad in cases like this. Not everything is gray. —EvgeniaListen to part one of our Red Scare saga: Red Scare's Wake……and subscribe for more and join us on the chat. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit yasha.substack.com/subscribe
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1:35:13
Back to the Future
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit yasha.substack.comWe talk about my recent epiphany that the scary and volatile world of Russia that I grew up in post-collapse in the 1990s might be the future of America, rather than a distant, embarrassing past that I used to think was irrelevant to my new life here. Turns out I’m a time traveler of sorts. I am from your future.—EvgeniaPS: At the end of the ep, Yasha ruminates on how when collapse finally does come, he’s willing to become a peasant at a PMC women-run colony that will surely pop up here in the Hudson Valley…working the land in exchange for protection from the brutish bands of MAGA scavengers.
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3:05
Red Scare's Wake
We talk about the rise and fall of Red Scare, America’s once-coolest Soviet immigrant podcast. They lost their edge. We’re #1 now.Want to know more? * The Secret Power of Lex Fridman* Konstantin Kisin's KGB Konnektions* …other eps — and subscribe! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit yasha.substack.com/subscribe
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2:00:04
The Theatre Experience with Matthew Gasda
We talk to playwright and theatre director Matthew Gasda about his plays, his theatre company Brooklyn Centre for Theatre Research, and the zeitgeist of the post-COVID downtown New York scene. We talk about how theater is a peculiar art form for a millennial to be engaged with, as it is completely offline and intentionally unrecorded, un-televised, and impossible to make viral on social media. In that way, theater points to a future where people abandon virtual reality and want to experience things live…in the flesh. —IBWRPS: Doomers, Gasda’s play about the geniuses behind our AI takeover, is playing now. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit yasha.substack.com/subscribe
Polska