News/posts

SI audio podcast #3: Andy Beckerman remembers the wild kindness of David Berman

18 August 2019

photo: the host + the guest, sometime in 2004 or 2005.

I dusted off the microphones to record the first Serious Introspection audio podcast in over two years. Sadly, the occasion was the passing of David Berman, poet and musician, whose death has affected me immensely. I called up Andy, a comedy writer and proper podcaster based in Los Angeles, to talk about...

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SI audio podcast #2: Girilal Baars

06 August 2016

My pal Girilal stopped by Helsinki last month and we recorded this conversation, which touched on science fiction, improvisation, being an audience member, and lots more. This is also an attempt to keep the SI podcast feed alive with some occasional content, as enough interesting people pass through my life that I should try to share their ideas with a larger audience.

Detailed notes will...

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SI extra: Lin Hixson & Matthew Goulish audio podcast

08 November 2015

Those of you who saw Matthew Goulish on my show last week (or on the video here) know how much I admire his writing and approach to art and performance. I wanted to talk further with him (and with Lin Hixson, who didn't come on stage during episode 5) while they were in Helsinki, so we recorded a conversation which is presented here in podcast format. We'll try to put...

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Devo's 'Smart Patrol' covered by me in 1998

11 October 2015

I was digging through cassette tapes tonight and found some real gems, which I will digitise as I get around to them. This is a cover of Devo's 'Smart Patrol' that I recorded for a Devo tribute compilation that Scott Beibin was supposedly releasing. I'm not sure if it ever actually was released or if this appeared on it, but I did it in one night on Jesse Trbovich's...

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Riga durational dialogues #4 and 5: Love Enqvist and Jonas Büchel

31 January 2019

The last two interviews are combined into one file, and unfortunately we were limited by time and couldn't keep going. Love Enqvist is a Stockholm-based artist who was coming to Talinn to lead the Diggers and Dreamers workshop, and was willing to come to Riga a bit early to participate in this project. Our conversation began from his work researching intentional communities, and began with...

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Riga durational dialogues #3: Mindaugas Gapševičius

31 January 2019

I found Miga's interview to be one of the more difficult elements of the day. To be honest, I'm intimidated by his intelligence, and his thoughtful, careful way of speaking should be a lesson to me. I don't know Miga well but he'll be coming to Ptarmigan Tallinn in January and February 2013 on residency, where we'll be working together on our (Il)legal Aesthetics programme....

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Riga durational dialogues #2: Maija Rudovska

31 January 2019

This was maybe my favourite conversation of the programme, as I felt Maija and I started to tap into something personal, universal, and honest. Unfortunately the fidelity takes a hit as the crowd became a bit busier and the background noise makes this a bit difficult to hear.

The Little Dipper part 2: Maija Rudovska

Maija Rudovska is a curator, researcher, and art historian based in Riga. She...

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Riga durational dialogues #1: Introduction and Lars Cuzner

31 January 2019

I belong to a new group of curators and artists called Blind Carbon Copy (BCC), and we recently held our first event, Curators Go to the Bar, at the KIM? contemporary art space in Riga, Latvia.

My contribution to this event was hosting a 3-hour talk show, interviewing other artists and creatives in attendance. This is a test run of the Constellations project that Ptarmigan will be...

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A new (small) project/toy

20 January 2012

My first visit to Estonia today (a cheap €10 return day ferry) was also my first visit to any former Soviet state; we decided to forego any sort of touristy things in favor of just walking around and hitting some charity shops on the periphery of the center. Proper photos of the city and its sights can come later; I'm just excited about the stereo amplifier I found and painfully...

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Serious Introspection
with John W. Fail was a live show in Helsinki, Finland from 2015-2016. We tried our best to entertain. No one is really sure why John hosted a talk show, but a lot of strange things have happened in the universe and this is ultimately pretty insignificant. You know, we did eight shows in the first season and it was pretty time-consuming, but we were excited to come back for eight more in 2016. It's all archived here. The show took place at Mad House Helsinki's Ihana Baari, and was free to attend. Each week, John along with hype man Justin Tyler Tate, interviewed people about their creative process and tried to deliver a direct, communicative experience about art and performance. We've made videos available from all episodes of the show here for you to watch. The show is indefinitely on hiatus as Justin moved away and other projects took over. We also will occasionally post audio podcasts when we get the time to go more in-depth with people, outside of the public show. The videos aren't always perfect and the audio even less so, but we hope you still enjoy them. But wait, there's more! We are still available, in theory to be booked for parties, wedding, bar mitzvahs and other events. The for-profit arm of Serious Introspection is called SI Services and we're up for anything, really! Now that we all live in different places, it's probably going to be quite an ordeal just to have three white guys host your kid's birthday party. But please believe me when I say that we would really, really love to do this. We will come to your event and offer our services for hosting, hyping and media specialisation (live tweeting) for a variable fee. If you'd like to find out more about Serious Introspection, you can start by watching these episodes and seeing if it's your cup of tea. The hashtag #SeriousIntrospection contains the running stream of live tweets from our media specialist Ernest Truely (and anyone else who might contribute). We have made the show available as a podcast where people get Podcasts, generally iTunes or Stitcher. Try the Overcast app, it's really nice. We have a Facebook page which we use to post info about the upcoming shows and videos as they are released. So yeah, that's it, pretty much. We will announce future events and SI-related matters here so feel free to check back any time. We're trying to keep this page simple, if for no other reason than our cup runneth over with websites already.