Last night I put the finishing touches on this website, then read the final 46 pages of Roberto Bolaño’s By Night In Chile. It’s a novel that explores the ways art and history collide with each other, elide each other, describe each other, and betray each other.
While rarely rising to the level of art itself, the work of Talk Shop LA engages with a similar set of concerns. Namely, what to do in the face of history? How to reconcile one’s life and one’s work and one’s attention with the shadows of death, destruction, poverty, and politics.
Putting this website together, the first major update since 2020, I’m reminded of the ebbs and flows of history that course through my work. I launched The Deep Read, a community reading project at UC Santa Cruz, just as the world beat a retreat from Covid-19 behind closed doors, fear, and masks.
A year later I launched COGSEC, a conference at UT Austin on strategies for combating disinformation, on the day Trump supporters (heads full of vitriol and disinformation) stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the presidential election and transition of power.
A few years later I launched the new brand and website for the Berman Archive at Stanford, focused on documenting American Jewish communities. The October 7 Hamas attacks happened days before an event on Jewish Media in America with the top Jewish editors at the Forward and Jewish Currents.
To document a community undergoing one of its most potent and persistent transformations is not a project for the faint of heart. But it sure is a compelling and inspiring way to spend my work days and nights. To fight for meaning, memory, curiosity, and expertise is a gift. Building this site, looking back and looking ahead, I’m in awe of the history and tragedy and controversy and change that has churned through this little shop in its first 7 years.
The purpose of this website is to make my work and services legible to prospective clients and collaborators. I think this website does that quite well. But know: every process, case study, selling point, and pithy bit of copy has the heft of history behind it.
