INTERLOCUTOR Interviews

Joseph Keckler is a singer, writer, and multifaceted creator. Keckler has performed everywhere from dive bars and DIY venues to NPR Tiny Desk, Centre Pompidou, and Lincoln Center. His story and essay collection Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World was published by Turtle Point Press.His new performance piece, A Good Night in the Trauma Garden, was commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Live Arts and co-commissioned by ArtYard and Coffey Street Studios. He will be performing the latest version of it on Saturday, November 22, at ArtYard in Frenchtown, NJ. This piece weaves together original new songs with a vivid narrative portrait of a wild and unforgettable friend, meditating on what it means to be a classic.

Educator, activist, and organizer Amirtha Kidambi discusses her newly launched podcast, "Outernational,” her new album with her ensemble Elder Ones, New Monuments Live in Vilnius, out on November 14, and her upcoming performances with Elder Ones at the Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht on Friday, November 7. She also talks about her guest curation event at the festival on November 8, featuring performances by Dirar Kalash; Ghadr غدر (Jad Atoui, Sandy Chamoun, Anthony Sahyoun); One Leg One Eye (ft. Ian Lynch from Lankum); Saint Abdullah & Jason Nazary; Elder Ones; and various collaborative combinations of the above, plus an "Outernational" panel discussion moderated by Kidambi and improv performance with Saul Williams, Dirar Kalash, and Masello Motana  

Logan Royce Beitmen interviews Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel, who works intersectionally with scent, performance, video, sound, and installation. His work is currently in the group show Winter Nights (Vetrnætr) at The Association of Visual Artists in Oslo, Norway, on display until November 2, 2025.

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Peter Pavlakis discusses his debut feature, APOSTASY BLUES. The film focuses on two cult members who expect to be raptured at an appointed time. However, their leader appears to have raptured without them, taking their donation money with him, so the two members head out to look for him while they deal with their personal issues as they readapt to the secular world. The film will be shown at the Soho International Film Festival in NYC on Friday, October 10, and the Buffalo International Film Festival on Sunday, October 12.

Author and journalist Charlie Wells discusses his new book, What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation. At the birth of America’s largest living generation, the outlook was strong: unparalleled economic growth, the emerging Internet, the rise of the cell phone, and a geopolitics that had allegedly reached “the end of history” all set expectations exceedingly high for a cohort entering adulthood at the dawn of the new millennium.That adulthood—a work in progress for more than a quarter century—has been disrupted by war, recession, pandemic, and a sharp turn toward cultural and economic polarization. It has also been endlessly critiqued by others as immature, lazy, weak, incomplete, selfish, and supposedly riddled with failure.Now, 25 years after the first millennials began turning 18, Bloomberg News reporter Charlie Wells comes to the generation’s defense with a cultural history of an adulthood disrupted. Drawing on hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with five millennials from across the country, he explores how the biggest events, ideas, and transformations of the century played out in private lives.

Artist Dan Alvarado discusses his solo exhibition PANDORA'S SWIPE, a satirical take on the temptation, overstimulation, and hypersexualization of online dating apps. Opening on September 5 and running through September 22 at Bushwick, Brooklyn's Botanica Grove, Alvarado’s paintings, composed of digitally altered and collaged dating profiles, become a landscape of portraits across the ether.Complimentary bright, colorful emojis accentuate the sexual stimulation and dopamine that dating profiles promote, and comment on how human society interacts and flirts with one another. To create a feeling of overstimulation, the profile images and emojis are screen-printed in vibrant colors before being hand-painted for their final touches, resulting in portraits with a more playful take on profiles users would see on dating apps.Significant events in the first half of this decade, such as the COVID pandemic and the correlation of ramped-up usage of dating apps during this time, inspired Alvarado to explore creating works on this particular topic.​ With dating app companies like Hinge, Tinder, and even Facebook promoting the idea that you can find love, many individuals are persuaded to take the leap and rely on these digital platforms to find their partners or significant others.

Pulitzer Prize–winning culture critic Robin Givhan discusses her new book about fashion icon Virgil Abloh. She profiles Abloh’s legendary work and impact, revealing how the son of Ghanaian immigrants was able to infiltrate all aspects of our culture and inspire millions. Not only a remarkable biography of his singular creative force, the book is a powerful meditation on fashion and race, taste and exclusivity, genius and luxury. With access to Abloh’s family, friends, collaborators, and contemporaries, and featuring a cast of fascinating characters ranging from groundbreaking Black designers like Ozwald Boateng, to Abloh’s mercurial but critical employer and mentor Kanye West, Givhan tells a captivating, great American story of how a young man’s rise amid this cultural moment would upend a century’s worth of ideas about luxury and taste.

Musician Bob Holmes of the New York-based trio Suss talks about his unique and ambitious Across the Horizon music series. Bob and Northern Spy Records invited eight innovators from the wide landscape of instrumental music to curate the first volume of Across the Horizon, which was released at regular intervals over the past year, culminating in a double vinyl, which is out now and available to Bandcamp subscribers of the series.Curators and participants in the project include Mark Nelson (Pan American), Luke Schneider, Dave Harrington, Marisa Anderson, Stelth Ulvang, Walt McClements, David Moore, William Tyler, Chelsea Bridge, Melissa Guion (MJ Guider), Julianna Barwick, and many more.

Estefanía Vélez Rodríguez (b. 1985, Mayagüez, PR) is a Puerto Rican artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. As a dual-tongued individual, she utilizes the symbolic language of painting as a bridge between many cultures and spaces. Her paintings formally address questions between abstraction, non-representation, simplification, symbol, and painting as a language with ambiguous structural limitations. Her landscapes meander and distort physical spaces like mazes meant to be misleading.Utilizing chemical reactions within a painting, Estefanía experiments with raw pigments, spray materials, oil mediums, and acrylic polymers. Her painting language ruptures visual spaces, opening the viewer's receptivity to fleeting spaces, times, and emotional presence.In this interview, she talks in-depth about the seven paintings she has on display as part of the group show Past Tense/Future Perfect at NYC's Marc Straus Gallery, which will be up through August 8.