Transcript

1-800-Late Fame · 1-800-1800

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SPEAKER_01: Hey, hey, hey.
0:01
SPEAKER_01: Hi, everybody.
0:03
SPEAKER_01: Hi, it's 1-800-1800, your favorite podcast, your personalized guide to the 19th century.
0:09
SPEAKER_01: Ciao, Bella.
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SPEAKER_01: Ciao, Bella.
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SPEAKER_00: Hello, you've reached 1-800-1800.
0:17
SPEAKER_00: 1-800-1800.
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SPEAKER_00: I have a burning question.
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SPEAKER_00: 1-800-1800.
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SPEAKER_00: 1-800-1800.
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[music]
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SPEAKER_00: 1800.
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SPEAKER_00: 1-800-1800.
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SPEAKER_00: I have a burning question.
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SPEAKER_01: My name is Mabel Taylor.
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SPEAKER_01: And I'm Madeline Porsella.
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SPEAKER_01: And we are the founders of Mandylion Press.
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SPEAKER_01: And this is just kind of our vibe.
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SPEAKER_02: This week, we read a book and saw a movie.
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SPEAKER_02: Which is crazy.
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SPEAKER_02: We never do that.
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SPEAKER_02: That's so cool.
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SPEAKER_02: And I have to write in my little journal list of movies and books.
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SPEAKER_01: I...
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SPEAKER_01: Put it in my list.
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SPEAKER_02: I think I must have put the book in my list because I read that a little while ago,
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SPEAKER_02: but the movie is fresh.
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SPEAKER_01: I don't write down movies.
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SPEAKER_01: I write down books that I read and there's nothing more satisfying than reading
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SPEAKER_01: a 100 page book and saying, I read it, mom, I read it.
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SPEAKER_02: So we should say we read Late Fame by Arthur Schnitzler,
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SPEAKER_02: which Mabel is holding up to the camera, but this is an audio medium.
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SPEAKER_02: So maybe we'll post this video.
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SPEAKER_01: And this was published by the New York Review of Books in 2017 and was kindly given
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SPEAKER_01: to us by New York Review of Books Classics.
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SPEAKER_01: And that was incredibly nice of them.
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SPEAKER_01: This was a work of translation.
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SPEAKER_01: So it was originally written in German between the years of 1894,
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SPEAKER_01: 1895, and then was lost to time.
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SPEAKER_01: And we'll explain why.
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SPEAKER_01: Which is sort of appropriate given the subject matter
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SPEAKER_01: of the book itself.
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SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is a podcast about the impossibility of metaphor,
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SPEAKER_01: you know, like everything is real.
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SPEAKER_01: Everything is real.
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SPEAKER_01: And the movie we saw is also called Late Fame.
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SPEAKER_01: And it was directed by Kent Jones.
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SPEAKER_01: Kent Jones, written by Sammy Birch.
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SPEAKER_01: Sammy with one M. So Sammy Birch, who also wrote May, December.
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SPEAKER_01: Probably just pronounced Sammy still, right?
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SPEAKER_01: Sammy.
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SPEAKER_01: And it was starring Willem Dafoe, Greta Lee, and Edmund Donovan.
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SPEAKER_01: It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2025.
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SPEAKER_01: And we saw it at Film Forum,
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SPEAKER_01: which was actually also a really cool place to see it because Film Forum has
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SPEAKER_01: a brief appearance in the film.
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SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was cool.
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SPEAKER_01: There was layers upon layers here of irony and sort of fact.
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SPEAKER_01: So let's start with the person who wrote the book.
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SPEAKER_01: Okay.
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SPEAKER_01: Okay.
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SPEAKER_01: Arthur Schnitzler was a man born in 1862, shout out, who died in 1931.
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SPEAKER_01: A Jewish man,
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SPEAKER_01: I was just trying to remember where was he actually born and he was born in Vienna.
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SPEAKER_01: I was trying to remember if he was born somewhere a little bit outside of Vienna,
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SPEAKER_01: but it seems like he was born in Vienna.
3:01
SPEAKER_02: People in Vienna used to just kind of park it.
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SPEAKER_01: Park it.
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SPEAKER_01: I mean, who would want to leave Vienna?
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SPEAKER_02: Me.
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SPEAKER_01: Can you briefly tell the story of what else will happen in Vienna one night?
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SPEAKER_02: I was going to say, should we pause to explain my experience in Vienna?
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SPEAKER_02: So I was in Vienna for
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SPEAKER_02: two months, I think two years ago now, doing a language program.
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SPEAKER_02: And actually, there were several insane things that happened while I was there.
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SPEAKER_02: First of all, it was when the Ukraine war started.
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SPEAKER_02: There were all these like refugees in my language program that were like young men
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SPEAKER_02: of army age who were trying to get into universities in Vienna.
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SPEAKER_02: And so I felt like I had a real like historical experience being in Vienna with
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SPEAKER_02: a bunch of refugees.
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SPEAKER_02: For multiple reasons.
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SPEAKER_02: For multiple reasons.
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SPEAKER_02: Second of all, yes, another cast of refugees that was swarming.
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SPEAKER_02: So I was there when the Taylor Swift concert was canceled due to terrorism.
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SPEAKER_02: And it was the summer that, what tour was that?
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SPEAKER_02: Eras?
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SPEAKER_02: Eras, of course.
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SPEAKER_02: Eras, I think.
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SPEAKER_02: So it was like so hard to get tickets to the US
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SPEAKER_02: that people were literally like booking trips to Europe to go to these shows abroad.
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SPEAKER_02: And I was there for the two days after,
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SPEAKER_02: like I was there the entire time that this saga was unfolding.
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SPEAKER_02: And basically all of these blonde American teenagers that had flown to Vienna,
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SPEAKER_02: a capital historically of music, art,
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SPEAKER_02: culture and Historically significant,
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SPEAKER_02: rich with museums,
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SPEAKER_02: seat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
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SPEAKER_02: has some of the most amazing wonders of the 15th through 20th centuries.
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SPEAKER_02: These girls were just sitting on the street with their heads between their knees,
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SPEAKER_02: like unable to find anything to do.
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SPEAKER_02: Local businesses were like offering free drinks and things to them as a consolation prize.
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SPEAKER_02: All the museums had special events, all because these poor girls couldn't go to Taylor Swift.
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SPEAKER_02: And it was like truly the most depressed I've ever seen a city.
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SPEAKER_01: That was the Taylor Swift era of Vienna, you could say.
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SPEAKER_02: So in many ways,
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SPEAKER_02: actually,
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SPEAKER_02: between the Ukrainian war refugees and the Taylor Swift devastation,
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SPEAKER_02: I do feel like I've experienced Vienna in its sort
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SPEAKER_02: of like early 20th century horrors.
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SPEAKER_01: And wasn't there something with pigeons happening?