Perfume Genius Talks with Jia Tolentino, and Anthony Lane Examines Outbreaks in the Movies

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2020

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino has been following the artist Mike Hadreas, who records as Perfume Genius, since his first album; he has just released his fifth, “Set My Heart on Fire Immediately.” He sings about his life and his sexuality in a style that evokes Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison—simultaneously vulnerable and swaggering. “That’s the music I’ve listened to my whole life . . . but felt like there was always not completely room for me in the music,” he tells Tolentino. Plus, Anthony Lane, having completed an extensive review of plague-theme cinema, shares three picks with David Remnick: a German silent picture nearly a century old, a gritty piece of realism from the golden age of Hollywood, and a more recent film that everybody’s been watching these last three months.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.3	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:12.3	David, hi. Anthony, this is your first Zoom call?
0:15.2	This is my first Zoom call, and maybe my last, you know, Evie had to help. So that's what children are for.
0:22.1	Usually when I get a recommendation from one of our writers, it's something like, here's three good history books to
0:26.1	take to the beach, or here's everything you need to know about SoundCloud rap. But when I called
0:30.9	Anthony Lane the other day, he just finished a binge of movies about plague and pandemics.
0:38.0	How many films did you watch or watch part of together?
0:42.1	I watched as many a gig of it.
0:43.1	I suppose about 20 or 30.
0:47.2	And those are the ones which are basically about disease comes into a lot of movies, but it doesn't hang around.
0:53.4	But in fact, one of the first
0:54.4	signs that the pandemic of pandemic movies was starting to happen was when everybody started to
0:59.6	watch Contagent again, which is the Stephen Soderberg film. Now, do you rank Contagion pretty
1:04.7	highly? I do. I mean, people now saying, oh, I liked it all along, whereas in fact they
1:09.1	weren't that key in the first place. But now it's very hard to watch in a standback way because you just, you do tend to sit there. That's right. They do that. But that's exactly what you do. Don't touch that credit card. Did this one make your top three or four? Oh, yeah. So let's listen to a little excerpt. Yeah, this is, this is contagion.
1:28.5	Hello?
1:29.7	Hello?
1:31.1	Mr. Barnes?
1:32.4	Yes.
1:32.8	This is Dr. Mears from the Centers for Disease Control.
1:36.5	Hi.
	...

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