Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - False Alarm! (Stormy Daniels 2023 Appreciation remix)

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

Back in 2018 your host met Stormy Daniels as part of his 15 part investigation into America’s disinformation complex. You can find that series here. On this historic day, as we learn that no American floats above the law, we turn back to this historic TOE moment, a remix of False Alarm, featuring a profile of the artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, a conversation with writer Susan Jacoby and Benjamen Walker’s meeting with Stormy Daniels!

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. One of my favorite books about America's problem with the real and the fake is called The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies. This is what the New York Times wrote about it when it came out in February of 2008. There are few subjects more timely than the ones tackled by Susan Jacoby in her new book. Susan Jacoby's just updated her book for 2018. I paid her a visit to find out why. So if it was timely in 2008, what do we call the updated version that you're putting out in 2018?

Super timely? Bigly timely? Bigly timely, yeah. That sounds good. In her book, Susan Jacoby traces two critical ingredients of American anti-intellectualism and public ignorance, which have remained largely unchanged since the 1890s. The first is the belief that intellectualism and secular higher learning are enemies of faith and religion. And the second is the toxin of pseudoscience, which Americans on both the right and the left continue to imbibe as a means of rendering their social theories impervious to any evidence-based challenge.

The battle between stupidity and knowledge is constant. The battle between science and pseudoscience is constant. What's different now is what we didn't have then in earlier eras of rampant anti-intellectualism was the means to communicate this instantly to millions of people in millions of different places every single second. It's not like she didn't address technology in her book from 2008. Even though the iPhone was barely six months old and Twitter and Facebook were still in their infancy, she had some really smart and deep things to say about technology. It interrupts our attention more.

That's the crucial thing and makes our focus jump from one thing to another so that it makes it more difficult to get to the bottom of the thing that you've started working on. Susan Jacoby isn't a technologist. She's not even a technology critic. She's a scholar of ideas, a scholar of history and culture. But the main reason she's updated her book was a realization that she gets technology better than the real technologists and the real technology critics. I was afraid of being called a technophobe. Now, I mean, one of the reasons I did the new edition was I'm a lot more comfortable being an old nut who's railing against technology because I was right.

That's why. That's why. I don't think that the blur between reality and fiction is new at all. I think it's something we've always toyed with as human beings. And sometimes the best way to define what is true is by using fiction. The blurring of fiction and reality is central to the art practice of Lynn Hirschman Leeson. You'll find a reference to it in almost everything she does, including her latest film, Vertigo. In Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Kim Novak plays a real woman named Judy

who's playing the part of a fake woman named Madeline, and Jimmy Stewart plays the detective determined to turn Judy into Madeline. In Lynn Hirschman's Vertigo, the real Kim Novak tells us Hitchcock was also consumed with creating this female fake. He was obsessed with it, obsessed with the look. He knew exactly what he wanted.

It was as if he was playing the part of Jimmy Stewart. Vertigo was made for San Francisco's Legion of Honor, a really important location in Vertigo. Lynn's film played on the exact same wall on which hung the painting of Carlotta, who was haunting Madeline. This painting was a film prop. It wasn't real. But it was real to art historian Natasha Boas. I really actually came back later in my life to see if the painting was here and was part of the collection.

I really believed it was here. Boas is one of the women we meet in Vertigo's who talk about their relationship with the real and the fake. And she delivers my favorite insight of the film. We aren't at war with the fake. We're like Jimmy Stewart. We prefer it. I don't really believe in authenticity.

I don't believe in the real. I feel like the stand-in object can be more real and create more desire than the object itself. The fraudulent is much more appealing than our perception of what the truth is. Vertigost ends with a number of women dressed up as Madeline, wandering the streets of San Francisco. Lynn Hirschman leases home since the 1960s. And since the 1980s, America's tech capital.

She's taken full advantage of the technology boom. I really benefited a lot from all of the technology slumps because there were a lot of out-of-work programmers that then became interested in just doing things for the sake of doing it with no monetary return. Yeah, yeah. I really want to know about how your relationship with the real and the fake has changed as technology has gotten better. You know, like what new possibilities have opened up to you that are specific to technology, especially since, you know, so much of the work you did was pioneering work that utilized interactivity, live streaming, artificial intelligence. True. Thank you for recognizing that, because that fact often escapes the history books. I mean, I started working with AI in 1995, and we created the first AI work around 2000,

and Siri was born in 2012. And our project, both Agent Ruby and Dina, do far more than Siri does. Agent Ruby and Dina were both chatbots. And Lynn is right that they could do more than Siri. For example, Agent Ruby's mood would be affected by how many people were talking to it at once. And Dina ran for election. Dina is an artificially intelligent bot running for telepresident, waging a campaign for virtual election. That's Robata, a tour bot guide you'll find on Lynn Hirschman Leeson's Secret Agents DVD.

You can also see some of these early technology projects like Dina and Tilly, a doll with webcams in her eyes that live-streamed on the internet in 1996. Viewers in the gallery see themselves on a small monitor, and internet users can see what the doll sees, whatever environment she's in. Users thereby become virtual cyborgs, seeingators didn't know what to do with it. In 1966, she had a series of pieces called Breathing Machines in an exhibit at Berkeley University Art Museum. They were removed. As the university put it, sound is not art. Oh, there you are. I've been waiting for you all day.

The breathing machines were sculptures of Lynn's head, painted black that used motion sensors, so the head would start talking to the viewer as they approached. I'm so glad that you've come to see me. I've never met anybody else quite like you. After Lynn was kicked out of this exhibit, she rented a hotel room, a space of her own, safe from the closed minds of curators. And she filled this room

with artifacts of a fake person. This was the birth of Roberta Brightmore. Roberta Brightmore was a private performance about the construction of a fictional person who lived in real life in real time. Surveillance photographs, artifacts such as personal checks and a driver's license, psychiatric records and discarded clothing, as well as ephemera, provide credible evidence of her reality.

There were many similarities between Lynn and Roberta. Both of them moved to San Francisco from Ohio to make their fortunes, but they were totally separate people. Roberta went to her own psychiatrist and worked her own job as a secretary to pay her rent at her own apartment. Roberta also went out on dates. Lynn would put on a blonde wig like Judy in Vertigo and bring a hidden recorder. Besides, you're very attractive anyway. Do you think so? Do you think so? No, I don't think so. Oh, come on, really? Lynn also created a few male alter egos, art critics, Herbert Good, Prudence Juris, and Gay Abandon.

And these men would write reviews for journals and newspapers like Art Week. Often these fictional critics disagreed, but they nearly always mentioned the work of Lynn Hirschman in their columns, thereby allowing her access to galleries and museum exhibitions. For me, this gets to the core of Lynn Hirschman Leeson's practice. She's playing around with fakes, but she's also deadly serious about creating things she wants to be real. It was kind of a little joke, you know, that I would do this. And the fact that very quickly these critics were taken seriously and museum directors and curators were writing to these critics and asking them to review shows.

So, I mean, it revealed to me kind of the underbelly of that whole system. And I don't think it was any more dishonest than turning women down from being taken seriously. Last night, there was a fire on Powell Street. Although there were flames and smoke leaping from every window of the San Francisco Academy of Art building and four fire trucks arrived with sirens screaming, it was a false alarm. How could that happen? Well, Lynn Hirschman of the Academy of Art is here to explain that. How could that happen? Was there a fire last night?

Well, there was and there wasn't. Another amazing project that uses technology to blend the real and the fake is called Fireworks. We had rear-projected film so that when you were on the street and stood and looked at it, it looked like the building was both on fire and filling with water. How many projectors does that take? We have 12 projectors and fog and fog juice and two live actors. And they go through the sequence of running back and forth on the third floor and jumping out the window into the fog.

It's difficult for me to imagine any artist getting away with something like this today. Well, we did get fire permits. I don't know what happened to them, but we warned them that this was going to be happening. I think the one that you couldn't get away with now is Roberta, because I did it, you know, in 72, there was no computers. Somebody actually tried it in the 80s, and they were arrested for identity theft and for fraud. Because there were no computers and people couldn't check that I was getting all these bank accounts and credit cards on a non-existent person, I got away with it. In 1978, Lynn Hirschman Leeson gave Roberta Brightmore a pretty amazing send-off, a funeral in Italy. It was a well-deserved ending for one of the greatest real fakes ever created by an artist.

But after talking with Lynn, I see her death differently. She was a victim. She was an early victim of the computer. A couple of weeks before Stormy Daniels went on 60 Minutes to tell the world about her relationship with Donald Trump, she went on a tour of strip clubs across the USA. It was the Make America Horny Again tour. And so when I saw that she'd be stopping at Gossip, a strip club in Long Island, I rented a car and took TOE's Andrew Calloway with me to meet her. As soon as we paid the $20

cover charge, we were set upon by journalists looking for Trump supporters. I'm really sorry to bother you. Are you here for us? There's reporters interviewing each other. This is sad. There really was a British media section. And one of the tabloid writers actually found a Trump guy. He doesn't care who she's fucked, he's only come to see her tits. We're a bit too much of a family newspaper.

I might have to use a few bullet points. Eventually, the journalist left us alone. But then, we had to fend off the strippers. Hey Andrew, nice to meet you. I'm Aubrey. Nice to meet you too. Why are you laughing? What's the deal? Oh, nothing. I'm just, uh, I'm more interested in politics. That's amazing. Yeah. I love how politics brought you to the you too. Why are you laughing? What's the deal? Oh, nothing. I'm just, I'm more interested

in politics. That's amazing. Yeah. I love how politics brought you to the strip clubs. Hell yeah. Once they realized we had no money though,

they left us alone. Except for Tony Ann. You guys, smile. You're acting hard. Don't look so hard. When Tony Ann got off the stage,

she flashed us and said, we had to try harder to have a good time. So I asked her to sit down with us. And when she told us that she loves Trump, I asked her if we could record. What's this? Oh, awesome!

Oh, can I put it in my underwear? No, you didn't get it. Can I get in between you guys? It's very hard to stand in stripper heels. I'll sit in between. It's a sausage fest. Let's clear this up a bit. So, for the record, you like this guy.

You like our president. Yes, I love our president. Why do you love our president? I can relate to him because, you know, as a stripper, you know, you come into the world of fantasy,

and I'm like, oh, yes, I'm going to give you this. I'm going to give you that. And then you give me money and I run away. So, I get where he's coming from. It's business. But you got to remember, you know

what? I like him. You know why? He does something that we do on a daily basis. He mind fucks people. If he was a woman, he would have had a great career as a stripper. He's that good of a mind fuck that he has trained the whole entire USA. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, make some noise for the one, the only adult in the team,

the superstar, Stormy Daniel. Finally, at midnight, Stormy Daniel strode out onto the stage in her little Red Riding Hood outfit. Hey there,

Red Riding Hood. Make sure you're looking good. And as she took off her cape and then her cap, I realized all of my hopes are riding on this woman. Which is unfair, I know. But if an unabashed, unashamed exhibitionist can't help us see that the emperor has no clothes, then who can? Of course, there's absolutely no evidence to support my theory that she can do it. In fact, after the 60 Minutes interview in which she detailed how Donald Trump had her spank him with a magazine with his face on it, his approval with evangelical voters went up.

So yes, I get it. It's irrational to believe that Stormy Daniels has the power to take this corrupt regime down. But I do. I really do believe. And sitting there, watching her dance, I realized I had to tell her. And so I stood up and I approached the stage. I believe Stormy Daniels. I believe Storm, Daniel. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything.