E274: Merry Brutalistmas w/ Ross Wolfe & Susannah Grossman Wolfe

The Antifada

Sean KB and AP Andy

Music, Arts

4.2 • 970 Ratings

🗓️ 25 December 2024

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Merry Christmas, everyone! This year, the Santifada is bringing you the same present as always: an episode about the themes of Jewish identity and antisemitism! We discuss Brady Corbet's new epic film, The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody as a Bauhaus architect and Holocaust survivor trying to rebuild his life in the absurd New World of America.

In the first half of the episode, our brutalism scholar guests, Ross and Susannah, explain what brutalism is and how it relates—or doesn’t relate—to Brody's character, Laszlo Toth, and the themes of the movie in general.

In the second half, available for subscribers at patreon.com/theantifada, we discuss the film's final chapter and epilogue, which features an infuriating, although perhaps excusable, political twist ending.

Music for the episode is mostly from the brutalist soundtrack by Daniel Blumberg. Closing song is La Bionda - One For You, One For Me

Transcript

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0:00.0	Do you know any Christmas songs you could start us off with?
0:11.1	Well, I was working on the band's version of Bruce Springsteen's Atlantic City,
0:16.9	which may or may not take place at Christmas.
0:19.4	I like to believe that, like, the couple in question, take place at Christmas. I like to believe that like the couple in question,
0:23.1	it's a Christmas fight out on the promenade, you know?
0:28.2	Christian is all in town for Christmas.
0:31.1	Wow, they blew up the chicken man on Christmas Eve.
0:34.1	On Christmas Eve.
0:35.6	That sounds like, it's like grandma got hit by a, like, run over.
0:39.5	By a reindeer, yeah.
0:42.0	Chicken man got run over by a reindeer.
0:45.9	All right.
0:47.0	It is our annual Christmas episode.
0:50.1	And for a long time, listeners of the show know that we have a little Christmas tradition here at the Antifada, where we, for some reason, talk about anti-Semitism.
1:01.5	This doesn't only happen on years when Hanukkah and Christmas started the same exact night.
1:07.6	Which is itself anti-Semitic. Christmas should have to move.
1:12.7	I think Hanukkah itself is vaguely anti-Semitic to be quite honestly. Let's invent a holiday so Jewish kids don't feel bad.
1:19.2	All right. They didn't invent. Yeah, but they elevated its importance.
1:22.6	It's not apocryphal status, yeah. I feel kind of ambivalent about being enthusiastic about the Maccabees, who I feel like
1:31.4	were kind of the Taliban of their day.
1:34.3	Yeah, the Antioch Greeks were cool.
1:36.8	Yeah, they were...
	...

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