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Tangentially Speaking with Christopher Ryan

466 - Jenny Odell (Artist and Author of How to Do Nothing)

Tangentially Speaking with Christopher Ryan

Chris Ryan

Society & Culture, Arts

4.82.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2021

⏱️ 96 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jenny is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer based in Oakland, California, whose work generally involves acts of close observation, whether it's birdwatching, collecting screen shots, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. Her work has been exhibited at many prestigious museums and galleries, and she was the artist in residence at the San Francisco dump!

Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Believer, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, SFMOMA's Open Space, The Creative Independent, and Sierra Magazine. Her NYT bestselling book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, was published by Melville House in 2019.

Jenny, on Twitter, and Instagram.

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Intro music: “Brightside of the Sun,” by Basin and Range;"Mouhamadou Bamba," by Orchestra Baobab; "Smoke Alarm," by Carsie Blanton.



This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrisryan.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Radio Manu, Papa Tzango

0:02.3

Music

0:29.0

Hey Chris, my name is Richard Salmon

0:30.8

I'm an ex-sitee guy who gave up the game a couple of years ago after 25 years

0:35.5

to become a bus driver in Sydney, Australia. I've been playing your podcast on the bus stereo

0:42.2

so that my passengers can have a listen and catch an idea or two or just have a think on the way to work.

0:50.2

And last week a lady came up to me and said that she wanted to know the title of the book that was being discussed

0:58.0

which was the vegetarian miss and that she'd been a vegan all her life and hadn't found the bravery

1:07.5

to make a change that she'd been thinking of making and it was no longer for her and so on so

1:13.7

she was very grateful and I thought you needed to know that man. We've been doing the same thing

1:21.3

perhaps traveling down the road and meeting numerous strangers and not really knowing how to start

1:26.0

the conversation until you start a conversation that is and then you find out you've got more

1:32.1

in common than you first thought hey so thanks for what you do man there are more of us freaks out here

1:38.7

than you think. Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard, first of all what the hell are you doing

1:49.9

playing my podcast on the bus you're going to get your ass fired and then I'm going to feel

1:55.3

really badly about that unless buses are just very different in Australia than they are in the

2:02.1

United States where people are getting fired for god damn tweets that they sent out 10 years ago

2:11.8

when they were 17 years old. Ah the latest thing going on here is the teen vogue controversy.

2:22.3

The editor of teen vogue has been caught up in the various cancel culture nonsense and I was

2:33.0

looking at Twitter last night there are all these things about this woman and should she be fired

2:38.1

or shouldn't she be fired and what did she say her anti-Asian racist tweets where you know what

2:45.2

they basically boiled down to was three tweets one of which said outdone by an Asian and then like

...

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