All right, good morning or good afternoon, depending on what part of the country you're in. And thank you for joining this discussion. My name is Tom Zollner. I'm a professor at Chapman University and also at Dartmouth College. And I'm here today with Bob Reel, the author of the incredible book, Quest for the Presidency, the storied and surprising history of presidential campaigns in America from University of Nebraska Press. And this is one of these books that is welcoming to scholars and for armchair historians and for general readers of all sorts. One of the things that we do together, one of the really only unifying things we do together, all of us as a country is a presidential election. Every four years, we all have a stake in those of us of voting age, that is, in terms of where our country is going. And it distills the destiny of the United States into a single human being and index in essence for a range of ideas. This has been a feature of this country since the presidency of George Washington. And Bob Reel has pulled together a comprehensive history of every single presidential election in one readable volume. This is, the word surprising in the subtitle is not frivolous. Even presidential scholars, I think, are going to find details in here that they haven't seen before.  Thank you for doing this, Bob. And thank you to the National Archives for hosting us. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Tom. Thanks for that wonderful introduction. I feel unflattered. And yeah, I just want to second, thanks to the National Archives for having us on. And it's a great organization for research online or in person. And yeah, we appreciate it, thanks. Yes, and the other great organizations that we should talk about here in the United States are Coffee Houses and Caverns. Exactly. These were the social media of the day, certainly, and it is where a country persons got together to talk, argue, sometimes spiritually about the great issues facing the country and what they were going to do when it came to the massive decisions that we make every four years. So in that spirit, I'm going to open up. All right. Open up, Avere. I'm not gonna get loaded. Don't worry, this is a non-alcoholic beer, but... And then Bob, I believe... I have my coffee here and thank you for starting with this, Tom. It's a part of my book, as you know. Yeah. I tried to make the book accessible to a popular audience and one of the things I did was divide American political history into seven eras and the introduction to each era. As you know, I set in an historic tavern or coffee shop that was relevant to the time and all of them still exist today. So anybody who reads the book and wants to do sort of a seven-site tour of these places is welcome to.  So for instance, you know, at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans which everybody knows today as a pretty big tourist hot wing and you go there for your coffee and beignets. But it opened in 1862 in the middle of the Civil War. And at the time, New Orleans was under a Union blockade and there was a coffee shortage. So it was kind of an interesting time to open a coffee shop. So what residents did was they mixed coffee with chicory root to make the coffee last longer. And today, Cafe du Monde still serves coffee mixed with chicory root. It's their specialty. So for each era, I try to find a story like that that's relevant, but that, you know, provides a bit more context to that era. So the cheers to coffee shops and taverns. Here's the coffee shops and taverns. And you begin the narrative with a coffee shop that has been reconstructed in a sense, right of stride independence hall in Philadelphia. Can you talk about the significance of that particular coffee house? Yeah, so yeah, there's a couple of coffee houses. Yeah, so it's interesting because the original version of the book, I talk about city tavern in Philadelphia, which was very significant because it's where Philadelphia was the national capital for a while. It's where the Declaration of Independence was written, of course, in 1776 and the National Constitution in 1787. And city tavern was just down the street from Independence Hall. And who's who of the founding fathers used to go there and they used to grab beers. They had a coffee room. They had a tavern and they used to go there and after, you know, being in Independence Hall all day and debating the constitution, they'd go down there and have a beer and continue their debates. So unfortunately, city tavern closed during the COVID pandemic. It was an unfortunate victim of the pandemic. So we made a last minute change in the book, which may even have been after you read it. And we inserted Francis Tavern in New York City, which is also very, very relevant to the founding generation. George Washington met with his commanders there during the Revolutionary War. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr were actually there for a reunion of Revolutionary War veterans just a week or two before Hamilton killed Burr in the duel. So anyways, both of them were very connected to the founding of the United States. And they both, Francis Tavern still exists, City Tavern we hope is eventually going to be reopened. We mentioned earlier that these places were like the Twitter or the Facebook of their day in which ideas were batted around sometimes with great ranker. One of the defining features, the lasting impacts of presidential campaigns are the, if you all excuse the expression, the tweets, the ways that ideas are crystallized just down to a few words. I can think of typical new entire two. You even say in your book, yeah, that that's one of the only things that we remember William Henry Harrison for, right? Nixon's the one, right? Yes, Abe Lincoln, the rail splitter. Right, honest Abe, very Goldwater choice, not an echo. Can you talk about the crystallization of these ideas and some would say the gross simplification of complex policy into these, you know, chance? Yeah, and what I find interesting is yeah, this is obviously a big part of politics today. It really started in a way with typical new entire tour with the 1840 campaign, which I find fascinating. Democracy was becoming a lot more popularized around the time, I mean, it began with Andrew Jackson in, you know, 1828. But prior to Jackson, politics was still a sport for elitists really, and it began opening up, more states began having a popular vote with the advent of Jackson. But 1840, really interesting story, the Whigs nominated William Henry Harrison and the Democrats, Van Buren was the incumbent and they originally thought, well, you know, Van Buren beat Harrison four years ago and Harrison's old, he's in his late 60s. And, you know, of course we can beat him again.   And they created this amazing campaign and they had parades with log cabin floats and they used to sell bottles of whiskey, you know, shaped like log cabins and typically in Tyler II shaving cream and all these things. And it was really the first mass branding of a political candidate. And they did, they distilled it right down to that slogan, typical new in Tyler II. And many people listening will probably know this, but if you don't, typical new was William Henry Harrison defeated some Indian tribes at the battle of typical new who were trying to form a Native American Confederacy. And Tyler was his vice presidential candidate. So typical new in Tyler II, it was very alliterative, it rhymed. And they just ran with that. The irony of this is that Harrison was actually a pretty wealthy candidate. He grew up in a pretty wealthy estate in Virginia. He moved to the Northwest Territories. He lives in Ohio and his 22 were mentioned overlooking the Ohio River. And Martin Van Buren was the son of a Tavern owner in upstate New York in the Hudson River Valley. So Van Buren was actually the common man candidate and Harrison was the elitist, but the Whigs were able to make it so that Harrison seemed like the common man and they made Van Buren the incumbent president into the elitist. And I mean, ever since then branding and especially trying to distill the branding down to a slogan that it's been with us ever since all the way up to make America great again, you know. Is this a good way in your view? And I'm not just talking about recent crystallization of ideas down to 140 characters. Is this a healthy way to run a democracy? That's a good question.  I mean, obviously the easy answer is no, it's not. You know, we should have discussions of issues and we should vote based on that but it's the society we live in.  Back in 1960 when Kennedy and Nixon debated, I believe, I may be wrong in the exact numbers but I believe they had eight minutes for their opening statement each and they each had two and a half minutes to answer a question. And Theodore White who wrote that great book to making the president in 1960, he complained even then that it wasn't enough time, you know, how do you explain complex issues in two minutes or eight minutes or whatever, you just can't do it. But what he said was that what it did do, what the debate did do was it sort of showed candidates under stress and it showed them, you know, in a certain environment. And I think these slogans sort of do that too. I mean, if you can distill your candidacy into a slogan that resonates with people or that, you know, captures the zeitgeist, you know, sort of like Obama did in 2008 or Reagan did in 1980 or, you know, countless other candidates through the years. If you can do that, then I think it says something about, I hope it says something about your vision for where you want to take the country. So yeah, ideally, no, we have discussions of issues but that's not going to happen. So I think there is something at least to be said for the way it's distilled down. Sure, I mean, as much as we'd like to think of ourselves as rational beings who study complex policy issues and weigh the evidence and arrive at a carefully considered verdict, human nature just doesn't work that way, right? No, it doesn't. We, as every car salesman knows, we go on feelings and we justify it later after the fact with whatever data that we can marshal selectively, you know, cherry picked. Sure, absolutely, yeah. Was there an election that you covered in this vast research that, how do I say this, is was more carefully considered than others or did you find that current of passion underneath everything? When you carefully considered as in not emotional? Yeah, a more calm, thoughtful, if you'll excuse the phrase, kind of boring, you know, set of clear differences, clear choices that did not come down to raw charisma, raw feeling. I think if there's a set of clear choices, then no, I think emotion is always going to play a part. There are certainly a few campaigns that were less charismatic. One that comes to mind are the battles between Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and 1892, you know, Harrison defeated Cleveland's bid for reelection in 1888, although Cleveland won the popular vote, and then 1892 Cleveland came back and he defeated Harrison. Neither Cleveland nor Harrison, I think, can be accused of being very charismatic.  It did not inspire a lot of passion or a lot of parades or, you know, great slogans or anything. So yeah, there are a few elections like that, but I think in general, most elections elicit a lot of emotion. And I think that's one of the things that we forget because we're so focused on the present day or the past few elections in American history, you know, our memory only goes back so far, but sometimes we forget how fascinating some of these older elections really were and how much emotion they really stirred in people. In the introduction to my book, I quote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, where he said, you know, elections in the United States are, you know, like this, again, I'm not gonna give the quote exactly right, but this time in national passion, and he said, it's as if a fever takes over the entire country during an election. But he wrote that in 1835, you know, and so he saw that way back then. And so in that sense, you know, the passions that we're seeing today are not very different because people always think the future of the country hinges on the outcome of the election. And sometimes it's really true and sometimes it's not, but I think people often feel that way. Sure. It's easy to look at composite portrait gatherings of all the presidents. You get these guys with the mutton chops. And as you've mentioned, various interesting facial hair, particularly in the mid to late 19th centuries and, you know, their names come down to, you know, some older high schools, perhaps bear their name, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison. James Garfield. Yeah, names that are vaguely familiar, but, you know, we obviously forget that at one time these were pitched battles, spirited arguments. Titanic, wife or death struggles and some of them over issues that, as you say, have receded into our national consciousness. And, you know, when I think about those guys, for whatever reason, like maybe because I'm from the West, I think of James K. Polk, a Tennessean whose one-term presidency was enormously consequential. Don't think is widely appreciated just how much was done during that presidency in the 1840s, enormous decisions. Enormous, yeah, it was. Yeah, a lot of people don't think of Polk these days, but yes, excellent work, enormously consequential. And I have a piece, one of the other things I do in my book is at the end of every year, three or five elections, I have a piece that sort of tries to put these elections into context to try to connect elections across time, so you have a better understanding. And to put either those elections in context or put them in context of the current day. And I have a piece after Polk's presidency. He won in 1844, I mean, just by the skin of his teeth. He won the popular vote by a small amount and he won the Electoral College because he won the State of New York by I think it was 5,106 votes over Henry Clay. And Clay lost New York. There was a third party candidate, James Burney, of the Anti-Slavery, the Abolitionist Liberty Party who won about 15,000 votes in New York and might otherwise have gone to Clay. So Polk came very close to losing the election. And what's interesting is that this was when the annexation of Texas was on the national agenda. John Tyler had introduced it.  They wanted more safe territory in the country. And Henry Clay, although he was from Kentucky, he was more Northern in his sensibilities. He did not want to annex Texas. I mean, he came out and he said, Texas is going to be settled by our race. They're going to have similar customs to us. They're going to speak English. We're going to be good neighbors, but they're going to be their own country. And so if Clay had won the election, it's at least possible. I mean, nobody knows with history, but it's possible that Texas would never have been annexed. And certainly that there would never have been a Mexican-American war because it was the annexation of Texas and then Polk put troops in West Texas, over the dispute of boundary. The war started, and then the United States, of course, and troops went down as far as Mexico City, I believe. And the peace treaties after the war, the United States acquired what is now New Mexico, Arizona, California, parts of Colorado, Nevada. So it's possible none of that would have been part of the United States, which is fascinating to think about. And the Civil War, I mean, who knows? I mean, there would have been disputes over slavery, but the Civil War was triggered in large part because it disputes over whether there should be slavery in the West. So it's fascinating to think that 5,100 votes in New York in 1844 determined whether the United States would have California and the Pacific Northwest. It's just mind-boggling to think about. And Polk's presidency was enormously consequential in that respect. Sure, and I think also about the moving parts of history in the way that small, strange incidents sometimes precipitate these large movements of armies and borders. It's almost Tolstoyan in its scope. And I think of the cannon explosion that killed the Secretary of State, I'm sure, who was not nearly as rabid an advocate for the annexation of Texas as his replacement, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, insisting that Texas must be brought into the Union.  Interesting question. I mean, that's the one that comes to mind immediately that I always think about. Let me think about that. I mean, let's look at Florida 2000s. Well, yeah. I mean, yeah, I should have thought. We can make a case that had the Supreme Court been one vote different, had there not been a staged riot in Miami, Al Gore would have been the president, arguably no Iraq war, arguably none of the things that George W. Bush did would have on and on a butterfly flaps its wings, right? Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's really interesting to look at. And yeah, in the 2000 election, I go through it extensively in my book and the debate can go on forever about who the actual winner of that election was. The recount showed that depending on how you counted it, it could have gone either way. They had continued with the overvote count, Bush would have won if they had included undervotes, no, the opposite. They included if they continued with the undervotes, Bush would have won if they included overvotes, Gore would have won if the Palm Beach butterfly ballot hadn't caused thousands of people to unnecessarily vote for Patrick Buchanan. Gore would have won easily. Yeah, and the Iraq war, Afghanistan war and Supreme Court justices. I mean, something that we're dealing with today. I mean, if you want to think about something else in terms of the Supreme Court, I would go back to 1968, something that sort of lost the history, nobody really talks about it. But that was the year George Wallace, obviously, ran a really strong third party campaign. And his goal, he didn't think he could win the election, but he wanted to win enough electoral votes in the South running as a law and order candidate and as an original conservative, to sort of be the kingmaker so that then he could negotiate with Nixon or Humphrey for his electoral votes. And it's, he was about around 20% in the polls for a lot of the year until he faded near the end and won eight or nine, 10% somewhere on there. But it scared the heck out of the country because it became very close to throwing the election into the House of Representatives. And the country was scared that somebody could do this, that somebody came so close to doing this. And there was a big movement to abolish the Electoral College. And Nixon, after he took office in 1969, was in favor of it. I think like 80% of Americans were in favor of it. The House of Representatives voted to abolish the Electoral College by an overwhelming margin. I mean, like over 300 votes in the House and establish a national popular vote. And it had majority support in the Senate, but it was still a buster by Southern senators. Again, this was only a few years after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964-65. And they couldn't really abide by the thought of blacks in the South being put on an equal level to the whites who then controlled Southern governments and the whole one person, one vote thing. And so Southern senators filibustered this Electoral College Act. And they killed it, basically by filibuster, even though 80% of Americans supported it. And if it hadn't been for that filibuster, in 1969, we would have abolished the Electoral College and instituted a national popular vote. And you think of the ramifications for the past 20 years with five or the six conservative Supreme Court justices. I mean, no matter what your ideology is, I mean, you can be forward, you can be against this. But it's a fact of history that five or the six conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by presidents who came into office after first losing the Electoral vote. George Bush's appointments were in the second term, but he never would have had that second term, obviously, and Donald Trump had three appointments. So you think of one small event that changed history. I mean, that one filibuster by Southern senators in the late 60s, fascinating. You mentioned third parties, and something you hear a lot in modern politics. On the Democrat side, primarily, is that both parties are the same that they've both been captured by corporate interests. And so therefore we're gonna run a third party candidate who offers a true choice. Of course, Republicans talk about Rhinos, Republicans in name only. We think of this as kind of a modern complaint. But has that existed since the 18th century, kind of a moment that Americans really aren't offered a choice? Oh, yeah, absolutely, they're forever. I mean, the first one was the anti-Masonic party back in Jackson's day. It was made up of people who thought that too much of the government was talking about conspiracy theories controlled by masons, and they were elitists. And they actually won one vote, one presidential election, they elected a few governors. But yeah, go through it all. There's always, it's usually some precipitating issue, I would think. I mean, you know, Ross Perot in 1992 and 96 and John Anderson in 1980 or two examples of candidates who I think tapped into the sense that voters didn't appreciate either party's candidates. You know, they, in 1980, they were disappointed with Carter and they were afraid that Reagan might be too conservative. They didn't know. And in the nineties, you know, it was that lament that the parties are too much alike. But often there's some precipitating issue. I mean, go back to 1848, Martin Van Buren ran as the candidate of the Free Soil Party that wanted to limit the expansion of slavery in the West. And 1856, Millard Fillmore, interestingly, built ex-presidents was the candidate of the American party, which, you know, we know as the know-nothings, which ran a nativist campaign very, very similar to the 2016 Trump Republicans. And they, you know, they wanted to restore America to a previous age of greatness and they wanted to keep immigrants out that were polluting American culture. And at the time it was Irish Catholics that, you know, they were against. And they won, I think almost 22% of the vote in 1856 running on that campaign. In 1892, there was a People's Party, which was a prairie populist movement from the Great Plains. And they won four states, I believe, and they basically preached the rise of Williams, Jennings, Bryan in 1896 and the coming progressive movement in the early 20th century. They were running out a lot of the issues that the progressive later ran on. One of the most famous third party candidacies was Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, when he tried to arrest the Republican nomination back from William Howard Taft and was disappointed that he lost it at the convention, even though he had one vastly higher number of delegates and primaries that year. And so he started his own party, the Progressive Party, and finished second to Wilson that year and helped split the Republican vote. Yeah, all the way through 1948. Truman was, he faced a split in a Democratic Party on two different wings. The Democrats that year passed the Civil Rights Plank in their platform and Southern Democrats were so enraged that they broke away and they formed the Dixie Grant Party and nominated Strom Thurmond. And on Truman's left, Henry, a new progressive movement emerged and Henry Wallace, the former vice president was the nominee of the Progressive Party that year. So yeah, and then Wallace of course in 68 and all the way up through Perot in the president. So I think every couple of decades, something emerges where either people are disillusioned with the two major parties or some major issue emerges that neither of the two major parties is doing a good enough job dealing with. And so it kind of wells up from below. I was a political reporter once and spent a lot of time with elected officials. And one thing that I of course noticed is as everyone does who spends time with them is that they're enormously, usually charismatic, emotionally intelligent that they try and get you on what Robert Heinle would call a grokking level. In that experience though, kind of suspicious of charisma, suspicious of campaigns is I wanna vote for the person who most excites me who like really engenders that sort of strong feeling that this is like the quarterback of the football team that I want. You know, and what I've tried to tell friends, they're probably sick of listening to this, that you know, the candidates are ultimately index systems for ideas and a whole raft, particularly on the federal level of appointments. You know, not just Supreme Court justices, but the entire executive branch, cabinet secretaries, you know, who is gonna be the director of the Bureau of Land Management. You know, that's really important to Westerners like me. You know, that doesn't seem to be on the ballot, but actually it is by doing this kind of binary choice between two kind of distinct philosophies of how American government should work. And so what I tell people is don't get caught up in personalities, you know. It could be, you know, a wooden post that you're electing, just so long as it, you know, is the party label that conforms to, you know, the kinds of ideas that you wanna see. I wanna ask you, Bob, do you think that's a good way to vote or am I wrong on this? No, I mean, I think in an ideal world, yeah, you should vote based on that, but it's inevitable that people vote based on emotions. And yeah, I mean, I'm an idealist and I like to think that people weigh the issues and they vote for, they candidate under the party that most represents their concerns, but it's simply not true, you know, it doesn't happen. You know, I mean, Barack Obama is incredibly intelligent and capable, obviously, but people voted for him based on emotion in 2008. Ronald Reagan, you know, people voted for him based on emotion in 1980. John Kennedy, after people saw the debates, it was a small number, but it was enough to swing the election. I mean, when you look at the polling afterwards, the number of people who said the first debate when Kennedy was perceived as the winner by people who watched on TV as opposed to people who listened to it on radio, the number of people who said that it swayed their vote was enough to have tipped a popular vote in that year's election. So people do. And so what you hope is that you find a candidate who represents, like you said, a vessel for those ideas, somebody who represents that, but is also capable of tapping into the zeitgeist of moving people emotionally, that's the ideal. I've got a ton more questions for Bob, but I wanna open this up in the spirit of democracy to anyone who might be listening on the live stream to enter your questions into the chat. And I'd be glad to ferry them to our author here. And while we're waiting for that, I wanna ask Bob, what was your biggest surprise in this research? Did you have a moment in the archives or in the midst of doing your reading that you just were blown away by something that you'd learned? I don't know about blown away, but I think it's always surprising to realize how emotional these elections have always been. I mean, I'm going back to 1796 and 1800 with Adams and Jefferson.  And Jefferson, his opponent said that if you were elected that, you know, incest and murder would be openly practiced in the United States and the Bibles would be banned.  It's kind of amazing. And all the way through, you know, Andrew Jackson was devastated when he saw a report that suggested his mother had been a prostitute, brought over to the United States. He was a Scott's Irish immigrant and somebody suggested that his mother was a prostitute and he was the result of this. One of my favorite criticisms came actually from the pen of Davy Crockett, who, you know, we know is this, you know, Western frontier settler, but it was also a congressman for a while. And he took a pen and totally trashed Martin Fiume Buren.   And so I think that always surprises me. It surprises me too a little bit, Abraham Lincoln, you know, we revere him as one of our two or three leaders presidents. And it seems almost inevitable in retrospect that he, you know, of course he won 1860 in a four-way race and it was narrow, but it seems like, oh, of course he was reelected in 1864. But he was criticized by every side when historians said that conservatives taught him a radical and liberals taught him a failure. And it reminds me of the present day.  And, you know, people said the same thing about Lincoln. And a lot of people thought he was not going to win re-election. The country was exhausted by the Civil War. Radical Republicans didn't think Lincoln was doing enough to end slavery and Democrats thought he was doing too much. And everybody, even Republicans, Republicans thought we need to find a stronger candidate. There's no way he's gonna win. And they talked about nominating Ulysses Grant or Sam and Chase, the Treasury Secretary. And it was Lincoln himself, in fact, in August of 1864, he wrote a letter and he put it in envelope, he sealed it, and he had his cabinet sign it. And he said, we're gonna open this after the election. And in the letter, he said that after I lose the George McClell and the Democratic candidate, I'm going to cooperate with him between the election and the inauguration to try to save the union during those few months because he assumed he was gonna lose the election. And it wasn't until the fall when Sherman captured Atlanta and Grant started pinning the Confederate Army down in Virginia. And the radical Republicans that actually nominated their own candidate, again, because they thought Lincoln wasn't liberal enough, John Fremont, who had been their candidate in 1856, and later governor of the Arizona Territory. Anyways, he withdrew from the race in September because he thought, okay, the Union Army is in sight of victory. And I'm afraid if I stay in the race that it's gonna split the Republican party and it's gonna elect the Democrat that's going to preserve slavery. So it really wasn't until the last two months of that election that the stars sort of aligned for Lincoln and he, any one re-election. So yeah, things like that, things like that surprised me because we have the sense that politics wasn't like that then, but it was.  It's just popcorn, it's really fun. But I'll confess like a certain weariness when fully two years out before the contest, the news is already full of news from rubber chicken dinners from Iowa, these exhaustive portraits of all the contenders, the obsessive focus that the National Press has on these contests. And I wanna ask, do you think some of it is overblown? Overblown or overdone? Overblown, do we spend too much time on it? I mean, I'm asking a biographer to minimize the importance of his own subject, which is of course a very rude thing to do. But I wanna say like, do you think that for as important as they are, do we overvalue them? Yeah, I think we do, I certainly think we do. I think personally, my personal opinion, I think the elections go on for too long and we spend so much time evaluating every little thing, what everybody says on a debate stage and every gap and because of this obsessive focus on elections that goes on really for almost two years before an election, I mean, everything gets blown up and becomes a big thing. But it wasn't always like this though. I mean, the rise of television and then more recently the rise of the instrument as I think certainly exacerbated this. It was not always this obsessive focus for a year or two before. And we talked a little bit earlier about the 1968 election with George Wallace, but 1968 was also, it's indirectly related to this topic as well. I think 1968, I almost think we should have it before 1968 and after 1968, you know, dividing land in American politics. In 1968, Humphrey won the Democratic nomination without running in a single primary and he was the last candidate to do that. And a lot of the backers of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy were pretty upset that he did that. And so they started a movement in the Democratic party and eventually nationally to have more emphasis on primaries and caucuses. And so the Democrats essentially rewrote the rules between 1968 and 1972 as a direct result of Humphrey's nomination. And they gave more power to primaries and caucuses. Before that, I mean, starting between 1912 and 1968, candidates would run in primaries, but it was mostly to prove their medal, to prove that they could get votes. But the decisions were still made by party leaders for the most part on the convention floor. After 1968, that was no longer the case. And so 72 with McGovern, he was the first nominee who won his nomination entirely on the basis of primaries and caucuses and on voters. And I think we don't often appreciate how much that has changed American politics. We took away political parties as gatekeepers. You know, there's no longer this filter there. And I mean, television already contributed to the rise of candidate-centric campaigns, but it just really took off ever since then. And I mean, if you think about it, I mean, McGovern wouldn't have won the nomination in 72. Jimmy Carter in 76, nor Donald Trump in 2016 without this change in American politics. And you could argue a few others. I mean, I don't know, maybe Obama, maybe Clinton, who knows? But certainly Trump and McGovern and Carter would not have won their nominations if political parties still had to say. And so what you were saying about how this is overdone, I think it's overdone in large part because of that, because now no longer a political party is a gatekeeper, but the media is the only gatekeeper. And so the media then obsessively focuses on all of these things. But isn't the extended primary campaign also a fight for donations that the corporate and moneyed interests want to obviously put their cash on the winning marker in any election? They don't want to see an investment just go up in smoke.  Aren't primaries a contest for that viability and that access to money, which as your book points out speaks louder than ever. Yeah, absolutely. And there is something to be said for running this gauntlet, because if you can't run this gauntlet or primaries and caucuses, if you can't run a campaign, you can't run an oval office. I mean, some people can run a campaign and still can't run an oval office, but I would argue that if you can't run a campaign, certainly you don't deserve to be president. So there is that to be said for it. But on the other side, it has also put the media in the position of being the sole gatekeeper by taking away political parties and it's contributed to what your original question, whether this is all overblown. I think it's overblown to a large degree because of the candidate-centered nature of the process. Yeah, candidates need to start years ahead of time to raise donations. They need to get attention. They need to go up in the polls and the further they go up in the polls, the more attention they get, the more donations they raise. And hence the kind of cult of personality that emerges at various times? Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I see we have a question here. And this gets back into the what-ifs, the sort of alternative history. USS Grant, a pioneer for his time on race relations, but his administration was dogged with scandal. A question from an audience member here, had he been reelected? Would structures have been put in place that would have headed off the toxic effect of Jim Crow laws in the South? And reconstruction would have been done right instead of, as your book points out, ending as a compromise of the disputed 1876 election. Well, Grant was reelected in 1872. So I don't tell you to send that part of the question. He did actually, not a lot of people know this, but he considered running again. So he left office after 1876 and then in 1880, after taking a two-year trip around the world, believe it or not, he came back and a lot of Republicans wanted to nominate him for a third but not consecutive term in 1880. And he was kind of ambivalent about it. He sort of wanted to do it for his country, but it wasn't thrilled about getting it back into politics. And it turned out that the convention split between he and James Blaine. And then they ended up compromising on James Garfield in 1880. But I find it hard to imagine, yeah, that's a drunkard question, because you're right, Grant, I mean, he convinced Congress to pass the Ku Klux Klan Acts and he definitely was trying to bring blacks in the South into national politics and into national conversation. But we forget how furious Southerners were over the end of slavery and the black skating the rights of citizenship and voting.  We think about Jim Crow, but even before Jim Crow laws, I mean, they, this is where the Ku Klux Klan came from. I mean, they intimidated blacks into not voting. They would chase blacks away from voting sites and sometimes shoot and kill them. And blacks were lynched. There were bodies of blacks down along roadways for years in early in Reconstruction. And the reason that Northern Republicans finally gave up on trying to bring blacks more into the national political fabric is I think they got excited. They wanted to move on to other issues. I mean, for a couple of decades, Republicans kept trying to pass laws that would sort of overrule what Southerners were doing in voting rights or whatever. And they kept, they kept failing. It either didn't pass or get filibustered. And I think Northern Republicans finally just get exhausted by the effort. So I'm not sure that there's a lot that could have been done to avoid what happened with Jim Crow, short of just an even heavier hand by the US government. This is maybe a good time to ask about vice presidential selection. Given the rather disastrous choice in retrospect that Abraham Lincoln made in selecting Andrew Johnson as part of a ticket balancing act here that wanted to appease Southern Unionists by choosing this Tennessean who later went on to, I think it's putting it mildly due reconstruction in a really imperfect way. I think of John F. Kennedy selecting the Texan, Lyndon Johnson, who later became, of course, president. I think of John McCain selecting Sarah Palin as a kind of attack dog, if you will. George H. W. Bush made a similar decision with Dan Quayle to create a sense of mini-me who was younger and more outspokenly conservative to placate various wings of his party. Sometimes this decision comes for naught. I think it was John Nance Karner who said the vice presidency isn't worth a bucket of warm. He said, well, his court has been sanitized into space. Exactly, right. He said something besides space, right? What in your view was the best vice presidential selection? Oh, geez. Yeah, well, you mentioned the worst in Andrew Johnson, obviously, yes, that did not work out so well. I like Truman. Really? I mean, Truman would be quite a good president and it's really interesting how he ended up as FDR's running mate in 1944 because FDR, of course, his first eight years, John Nance Karner, who he just quoted, was his vice president. And then in 1940, Henry Wallace became vice president he was vice president between 40 and 44. He was very liberal. And by 1944, a lot of people in a democratic party, they, I mean, they knew Roosevelt was not in good health. They didn't necessarily know he was gonna die a few months into his next term, but they knew he was not in good health. And some Southerners and conservatives were not thrilled with Wallace because they thought he was too liberal and they thought he was too much on the side of civil rights for blacks. And he was also pretty eccentric, you know? He's what we today call, you know, he followed a lot of new age spiritual beliefs. So he was a bit eccentric. And so they got behind and they convinced Roosevelt to dump Wallace in 1944 and nominate somebody else. And Truman was just sort of a compromised candidate. He didn't even want to be vice president. And so they, but they convinced him to run. And there was a big to do with the convention. Wallace didn't want to go easily.  Iowa is where the tall corn grows, you know, and sort of Wallace's theme song and convention managers thought that they were gonna lose control of this and that they were gonna have to renominate Wallace.  And then they said that there were too many people in the hall and it was a fire hazard. So they had to end the convention for the night. And so they basically stopped this protest, this, they stopped the cheering.  And overnight, these states that had been voting for favorite sun candidates, the party leaders basically forced them into voting for Truman. So Truman was, you know, he was, he was derided as the Missouri compromise at the time. But yet it turned out to be sort of an inspired choice, you know, Truman was turned out to be a good president to lead the United States through the post-war era. And, you know, he's today considered, you know, one of the top 10 presidents and near great president, but really interesting how he came into office. These, these accidents, these sort of turning points. Yeah. There's a saying among Democrats, a little actually a bit of a doggerel goes like this, usually said in late November. The election is over, the ranker has passed.  And that's a statement of of course, the reunification that's supposed to happen around inauguration. Your book has this wonderful epigraph from Theodore H. White, the great documenter of presidential campaigns who said that inaugurations are a magnificent event. You know, this ceremony, this spectacle on the National Mall that we try to bridge the differences. There's a tradition, of course, that the elected president invites the losing candidate in for an Oval Office lunch. Based on your research, do you find that this is really the case that after all the shouting is over that we really do come together? We could easily point to 2020 and say, well, that's actually not the case. That, you know, the cut is still open. The bitterness intensifies. Is this new in US history, Bob? Or did you see this in prior contests? Well, both. I think there was a period for about a century or so where we did come together. You know, I mean, John Adams famously did not attend Thomas Jefferson's inauguration in 1800. Although to be fair, there wasn't a tradition yet established of a defeated president attending his successors inauguration. And Andrew Johnson, same thing, did not attend Ulysses Grant's inauguration. But I think from then, at least up to the 1990s, people were, I mean, there was definitely frostiness. I mean, Hoover and Roosevelt were not very friendly to each other and Carter was pretty devastated. I don't think he talked a lot to Reagan in a car on the way over to inauguration. But I think there was a tradition of the parties coming together at least initially. I mean, that's why we talk about presidential honeymoon. So I mean, there was an effort to give the new president a chance. Doesn't mean we're going to vote for everything, but we're gonna let you establish yourself in office. And I think that really started changing again in the 1990s. You know, when we talk about the roots of today's polarization and part of it goes back to the 1960s and the rise of social and cultural issues that have been with us ever since. But the other part of it, you know, goes back to the 90s and, you know, the rise of talk radio and Fox News and then later the internet and social media. But Newt Gingrich, you know, this has been talked about a lot, Newt Gingrich's really changed strategies of how the two parties would interact with each other. I mean, he's the one who developed the strategy of obstructing everything that a Democratic president would propose, even if it had bipartisan support under the theory that voters wouldn't notice the obstruction and they would just blame the ruling party for lack of progress.  And both of those things are still, I mean, they're so successful that they're still part of our politics today. I mean, the opposing everything that the, you know, the incoming Democratic president would propose and these words that are used. And so Gingrich had a strategy of, you know, we're not gonna give Clinton a honeymoon.  I mean, the only thing pro did was stop Clinton from getting 50% of the vote. They painted Clinton as an illegitimate president. And I think it's gotten worse since then. And obviously, you know, the Nader was, you know, the Trump-Biden campaign where Trump refused to accept their results of the election and didn't attend Biden's inauguration. But I think it's gotten worse since the 1990s. So I would say that, you know, from the 1870s to the 1980s, we did try to give the new president a chance. And I think that has started going away and there's no longer such thing as a presidential honeymoon or coming together. Right. I mean, I mentioned earlier that some of us are real junkies for this stuff. It's fun. It involves, you know, clashes and ideology and personalities. Part of me wonders, and you know, is this exacerbating the sense that we're not really neighbors or that the divisions between us are exploited by those chasing power. And so I'm gonna confess an ambivalent relationship to presidential politics. Is this realistic? Should I rethink that position? I always choose to remain idealistic, but yeah, it's been more difficult in recent years. I like to say that in my book, it did not take an ideological perspective. I tried to write it as nonpartisan as possible and I was pleased somebody just on Amazon that I don't know complimented me on that. They thought it was very nonpartisan, but I feel like I do have a bias that in my bias is pro-democracy. And you know, it makes me, so I'm not thrilled with, you know, whatever happened with Southern Democrats in the years after the civil war with Jim Crow and restricting voting rights that I'm not thrilled with that segment of the Republican Party today that won't accept the results of the 2020 election. So I do have a pro-democracy bias, but I like to remain idealistic and I think that presidential politics are, I like to think that they are important and that we should remain engaged. And it does make me a bit sad that democracy is suffering these days and makes me a bit sad that democracy may be at risk at all. Because I think the United States has, you know, since the late 1700s has, you know, been a beacon to the world as, you know, in terms of giving people choice and implementing democracy. And I hope that, you know, this continues for centuries into the future. Indeed. Some may consider that sentiment corny. And some may consider vast elements of presidential politics as corny or cheesy or, you know, pick your food product. But there's a reason why corn and cheese are popular is because they're pretty good. And so I wanna thank you, Bob, for, first of all, writing this enormously accessible, well-researched, surprising, knowledge-grounded book. And also thanks to the National Archives for the work in preserving our nation's past and understanding who we are. And I think that's it. Yeah, absolutely. And I just wanna second, thank you to the National Archives for having us on and for all they do. And thank you, Tom, for coming on with me. I've enjoyed our chat. It's been fun talking about two centuries of presidential history with you. Yeah, a huge topic, but like I said, the time flew by. So. Yeah, it sure did. Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone. I appreciate it. Take care.


Hello everyone and good evening. My name is Taryn Urquhart and I am the Arts and Special Events Programmer here at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. On behalf of the library and the West Vancouver Art Museum, I would like to welcome you to tonight's art talk. While I recognize that we are all in different places this evening, I would like to acknowledge that the West Vancouver Library and Art Museum reside within the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Squamish Nation, Flay-Waututh Nation and Musqueam Nation. We recognize and respect them as nations in this territory, as well as their historic connections to the land and waters around us since time immemorial. I am personally grateful to call the Pacific Northwest my home, and I'm thankful to the Coast Salish communities that continue to protect the natural beauty and animal diversity that surround me every day. It has been my great pleasure to work with Hilary Letwin and her guest tonight to bring this event to your screens. And now I would like to pass things over to Hilary, who's waiting over at the museum. Hilary. Good evening, everyone. I'd like to thank the West Vancouver Memorial Library for partnering with us on this evening's artist talk. It gives me great pleasure to welcome you and to welcome our exhibiting artists, Rosita Monashirazi and Pari Azhar Motamedi, who are both here to talk to us a little bit about our exhibition on currently at the West Vancouver Art Museum under the shade of the lotus tree. This exhibition includes work by both artists and this evening we're looking forward to hearing from them about their artistic journey and about some of the inspirations behind the work currently here on exhibition until April 1. Oh, good evening, Rosita. Good evening, Pari. Thank you so much for joining us. Pari, I'd like to start with a question directed to you. I'd like to learn a little bit more about your life and how we came to West Vancouver and exhibiting your work here at the Art Museum. Hi, Hilary, and thank you so much for organizing this exhibition and organizing this talk. It's been an honor to exhibit with you and to have my work with Rosita's in the same beautiful space. And I really enjoyed the whole process very much. I was born in Iran and grew up in Tehran, entered the Faculty of Fine Arts, Tehran University, the Department of Architecture in 1963. And after graduation from the School of Architecture, we moved with Bansur to London, England, and I started Master's Degree in Urban Transportation Planning. And after two years, we got back and started to work in Iran as an architect and urban transportation planner. By the time the Revolution happened in 1979, we were working in Iran and hoping to be part of the development of the country and to contribute to the well-being and in our professions to do whatever we could. It was cut short and with the start of the war in Iraq, with Iraq, we decided that maybe we should think of leaving Iran because it had become quite dangerous at that time to be in Tehran. They were bombings and various war-related events that were going on. So we came out of Iran in 1982 and I went back to school again in London this time to study urban development planning because I still thought that we would go back to Iran at some point. And urban development seemed to be something that would be a project to focus on and low-income housing was a component of that program. But as the days went by, we realized that we couldn't go back. We had two young sons. And so we applied and got accepted to come as landed immigrants to Canada. And so in 1984, we arrived in Vancouver and at that point there was a big recession here and really no opportunities for work as an architect in the immediate time that we had come. And I was actually very, very depressed because of what was going on in Iran.  And so I had become quite depressed actually. And so the only way that I could achieve some normalcy in life and to be able to function was to have this connection with Iran through the art and through painting and poetry. So I immersed myself in poetry, in Chayam's poetry specifically, and I started to paint. And what came out from those first several years was my connection to architecture and to the spaces of Persian gardens, which were very much in my psyche. And those were the spaces that gave me most pleasure when I was there. And so they emerged in my artwork, the geometries, the foliage, the whole architectural space of these gardens. And with Chayam's poetry they came together and they gave me this time or this space to find myself, to find myself as somebody who is displaced but still related to those precious and cherished spaces and still living in the west coast of Canada and enjoying the nature. So it was really a very, very, very enriching and productive time for me. I probably painted, I don't know, 10 hours a day in the middle of the night I would get up and go and immerse myself in the poetry and paint. And so that was the start of this process for me and has continued for 30 years now, more than 30, yeah. The title of our exhibition under the shade of the lotus tree is particularly important because the lotus tree is a place of refuge, a place of solace and parry that certainly applies to the work that we have in our exhibition here with our selection of work by you. Rosita, I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about your artistic background and your journey to this point. I think we, Iranians are sharing similar stories, but before that I would like to thank you for this opportunity and this beautiful exhibition in this very cultured environment. I also have to mention that I am honored to be with these two women, Peri and you, so smart, kind, passionate and courageous. This is truly my honor to be part of this exhibition and getting to know you in this journey. I grew up in a very peaceful environment in a city close to Tehran, a garage with a wonderful climate, nice rivers and beautiful nature, and when I was in grade two I realized that I like colors and I like to be a decorator or an artist. But the idea was very vague, but when I finished middle school, I entered graphic art school and right after I graduated from high school, all universities were closed because it was two years after the revolution. And the government closed all the universities due to cultural revolution, to change all the textbooks and fired all intellectual and elite profs and so on. The university was closed and as Peri mentioned, war happened one year after the revolution, and also the government started to execute and imprison the oppositions. So the country was under war, the situation was really dark, political, social environment was very, very dark and also there was no university for me to go. I decided to, I made my parents to accept and sending me abroad. I moved to Germany and I started university after I learned English in German language in Goethe Institute. I studied communication design there. And then I met my husband who was my roommate at that time. So I decided to move to a country that is more, have more acceptance for multiculturalism, and we decided to come to Canada. I left Iran in 1984, and I moved to Canada in 1990 with my husband and the little son. Here I learned the language again and studied at Emily Carr University. First Langara, I got the diploma and then transferred to Emily Carr University. When I finished university in 2003, we moved back to Iran because I came to abroad just because I wanted to study and go back to my country. So the idea was always with me, so I wanted to go back. And I moved to Iran in 2003 and stayed there until 2006. Here I met so many wonderful people, artists and educators, and I had the opportunity of study illustration. I got my masters of illustration in Iran, and I think the country is really rich in that it has over 5000 years of history of illustration. Art on clay, illustrating life of people on clay, carpet, you name it, and books and scripts. So I think I was very fortunate to have the opportunity of study in Iran. And when I moved back and along the way, actually, I have always been teaching, teaching art. And when I moved back and seriously started to teach, I realized students, usually art students quit after they graduate. After a few years of struggling, they quit. So that became something very important to me and I wanted to study further and get an answer from my question. And I applied for a PhD program at the University of Victoria.  I was about to be done, but all this theory became kind of meaningless at that point when I was very ill and in pain all the time. But my wonderful, wonderful supervisor, Michael Emi, Dr. Michael Emi, didn't allow me to do that. And actually he taught me a lesson how to not quit. So actually in a practical way, actually. And he organized a program and they offered me the masters of art education from the University of Victoria. And also I've been teaching at Emily Carr University since 2009. When they started the program of illustration, they invited me to teach there. And since then I've been teaching, working and being involved with their programs. Thank you so much, Rosita. It's such a pleasure to work with you and sorry for this project. I'd like to talk a little bit about poetry. You both have touched a little bit on the importance of it in your work. And it's certainly very present in our project. And it gives me much pleasure to see I'm looking out at the gallery right now and I can see all of our label texts, not just in English but also in Farsi and we've included the poems that have informed your work. Pari, you mentioned that you were seeking solace in poetry when you first came to Canada and that that was infusing itself into your work. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the poetry that we have included here in the exhibition and how on a practical level it influences you. Are you taking poems and illustrating them in your mind or is there a slightly different process going on? Pari, do you want to speak to that first? Yes. Well, thank you for that excellent question. Poetry is such a big part of the Persian psyche. Everybody recites poetry. It's a way of communication between scholars and between everyday people. In families, people would have quotations of poetry if they want to convey something that deeply affects them. And we have all these poets from a thousand years ago who have given us this wonderful heritage. So it was, for me, there was no, it wasn't something that I decided to do, but it was something that was part of me.  And my father always had a khayyam, a worn out little book that I took with me, and the lessons of life were there. My father was not a religious person at all. And Khayyam was his intellectual and spiritual place. And so that was why I started with Khayyam. And it wasn't really at all the surface or the words of the poem that inspired me. It was the mood of the poems, the way he speaks of nature and being in the moment and enjoying what you have. And not to dwell so much on the things that you don't know and that are beyond you, but to be here and present and connect to that beauty. And so it was for me, for me it was the gardens. And I had suddenly come into this city, which is a garden, a beautiful, huge garden. The ponds that were in the small Persian gardens is now the Pacific Ocean and the trees, everything. So for me it was really immersing in these two worlds and bringing them together that was really inspiring and motivating me to do this work. Then in one of our trips to Iran, I picked up a book by a poet who I didn't really know that much, a contemporary poet who is now in his late 80s and is still living. And he is Shafi'i Katkani, Muhammad Reza Shafi'i Katkani. And I brought his collections of poetry to Vancouver and started to read this poetry and realize how he has these layers of meaning in these words. And the more I read, the more I understand what is going on. And it was a very, very different experience because with his poetry, I had lived in the time that he is talking about. And I can read into his poems what I had lived, which was different from Qayyam's poetry for me. So I started to paint his work. And after I had done about 10 or 11 paintings, one day I told Mansur, my husband, who used to travel to Iran at that time. I said, you know, this poet doesn't know I exist in this world. And I'm always immersed in his work. Is it possible for you to find him and show him? Because I feel terrible about painting these poems without him knowing that I'm doing this. So he took these paintings on a disk to Iran and with the translation of the poems in English, because I had started to translate them into English because I wanted to really understand them and putting them into a different language for me was part of the process of painting them, really. So Mansur went back and met him through a mutual friend who was a publisher. And he immediately was so supportive of this work. He wrote a letter saying that you can translate all of my work into English and into paintings. And very soon after that, about a year after that, I was still in the process. I had painted some paintings and translated. And he suggested that we publish this work in Tehran, which was for me very too early, really. But they were in such a hurry to publish the paintings with the translations. And he suggested, of course, that I find a poet who is also conversant in Farsi and English and to ask him to edit my work. So he suggested that I connect with an English poet who has translated half his and very well known. He has a Persian wife. Do you remember his name? No? I can't. Anyway, he said I have no time. And then in a conference in Vancouver, we were talking with Rosita. And I was saying that I have to find an editor for this work, an English-speaking editor. And suddenly, the speaker who had just spoken about his translation of Rumi's poetry was standing behind me. And he said to me, you know, I can edit your English translations. And I looked at him and I said, well, thank you so much. But how do you know what I have done or what I am doing? So he said, this is Alan Williams now. He said, because Shafiq Adkani was my Persian teacher at Oxford University 35 years ago. So that was just the godsend. And he wrote a letter to Shafiq Adkani, which I took back. And so that was how that part of the work continued. And he became the editor and the book was published. And it got an award in translation a few years afterwards. And then I have been painting his work for about all these years.  And then, of course, I moved into translating and working on the work of Sohrabes-e-Pehri and Mehdi Akhaban-e-Sohles, whose work is presented behind you, my interpretation of one of his important poems. And, you know, I have been extremely, extremely lucky to have this, really this treasury of thinkers and poets who have given us so much. And I could live many lifetimes and work with these and still have more inspiration and more work to do. So it's just been an amazing opportunity to work with these poets. It's wonderful to hear how this process of translation has really permeated your visual process. You're not just translating the verses. And I loved what you said about how translating the poems into English gave you a deeper understanding of the poetry. Rosita, I'd like to speak also about your incorporation of poetry and it acting as an inspiration for your work. The main series of works that we have that we're exhibiting by you are, of course, based on a very important poem, The Seven Valleys. I'd love to hear a little bit about how you worked with this poetry, how it is similar to the way Pahri has in her work and how perhaps it's a little bit different as well. Obviously each individual have a specific ways of connecting with poetry because it's very, very personal and especially because it contains lots of metaphors and it goes back to the history of the life of each individual and their observation from the poetry. It changes the meaning completely sometimes, but the part that my father was also in love with Hayyam is very similar to Pahri's. I remember in 1986 when my father visited me in Germany and I was complaining and, you know, talking about being alone and so on. And it was the time that Muhammad Reza Shajarian had a cassette game out at that time. He actually recited poetry of Hayyam. My dad played the music and said, look, we live in a moment in this moment. Don't think about tomorrow. Let's enjoy the time together. And so poetry in my family was part of our ritual. My mom also writes poetry and they've been involved with it a lot and obviously as a child, as an oldest child, I have been always influenced by a Persian poetry in our household. But later on, when I started to read poetry myself, the idea of self-absorbent and also the metaphor actually haunted me the most. So I was so inspired by finding the meaning behind chains of words. For several years when I was younger, I couldn't get it at all. But the mystery actually really made me look for the magic of using literature in Persian poetry. And along the way, when I was involved with painting and reading different books and learned about conceptual art, I found out that these are completely conceptual. However, they belong to the time prior to conceptual art. Long before conceptual art came along in the West and so I learned how to combine them and find meaning through my own life in relation to the poetry that I have been reading all the years. And the pieces that affect me the most turned into visual form slowly. I think they have the poem by Hafez within me with this shattered heart. That's the time that I was super depressed and it was after 2009, the uprising in Iran, and I felt like I'm away so I can't do anything. I thought I have to stop painting forever because there is no reason for me to paint anymore since it has no use. So once I started to make some lines and this poem came to my mind and I realized this is it.  So, from that time, poetry became more, not effectively but consciously came to my work. And at the work, I just work with it, the story of Seymour. And it's the story that came to me right after I came back from Iran after four months being there, knowing so many wonderful people learned new techniques and also meeting so many young souls that they were struggling daily, you know, without feeling that they are intellectual or they are fighting for freedom, you know, in their daily lives. They scream for freedom. And when they came back, this poetry actually became so meaningful to me, like the story of rebirth. And so I started to visualize what it looked like if all these birds become free. I was also wondering how in this dark time, all these glitters and bright colors come to my canvas while I'm in tears, listening to news from Iran. So, and I think the idea of rebirth and the truth in the poetry of Attar actually made me work this way. So I'd like to talk a little bit more, Rosita, about the technique that you employ in the work, much of the work that we have exhibited. You've used reverse glass technique. And as you mentioned previously, you were in Iran for four months in the middle of 2022, you were there for the summer months. And I'd like to hear just a little bit about the technicality of how you do reverse glass painting. It's not straightforward and something that I'd love our viewers and our visitors to understand a little bit better. Can you explain how reverse glass technique works? Sure. Actually, when I traveled to Iran, I had a Tehran tour, and I visited old houses with a wonderful design windows. The part of it was covered with paintings, and the style was reverse glass painting. At that time, my plan was to learn traditional mirror work, which I learned. But it's, you know, the corner of my mind, you know, I was so inspired by those paintings. Before I learned glass work, I felt like I need to incorporate glass with mirror work. So, and sometimes I need color for my glasses. So, and how can I do that? I accidentally come across a wonderful master, his name is Mohsen Bani Asadi, who is one of the leaders of the Museum of Reverse Glass Painting. And I contacted him and he generously offered me to teach me how to work with this technique. And he is the curator of a gallery in Tehran. And after gallery was closed every day, so I visited him there and he taught me different techniques. How the technique works. You pick a piece of glass, usually two mils or three millimeters, not so thin because it breaks very easily. And clean the glass and then use rapidograph, which is a technical pen which I have right here right beside me. It has a really, really thin point. It looks like a needle, very, very thin, 0.10, 0.15, it's very thin.  You overlap the glass on top of the paper and start outlining your drawing. So this is very thin, but the traditional way of working with glass is different. They used very thin brushes. Thin brushes are hard to use and also at the same time easy to use because it has some sort of thickness and it will create a nice border between different colors. Whereas these thin pens, they have no borders basically. You have to be very careful when you want to create borders and margins between the two colors. And sometimes I pass the border and I had to clean my glass with needle to clean the parts of the main mistake. After you finish the outlining, you have to cover your glass with oil and some sort of varnishing oil and oil thinner. Leave it for a few days to get dry and make your lines secure. And then you start using powder paints, which you can see them in here, or oil paint. But I added a glitter mixed with oil. The magic of this painting for me is you work in reverse. For example, if you want to make wrinkles for your character, first you do the wrinkles. And then you want to create blush. You do blushes. And then you put the skin tone. It was very difficult for me to reverse all my training and start from the details first. And also the problem is if you make mistakes or you change your mind, there is no way to go back to it. And then you leave it for a while to get dry and after a month you cover the whole thing for the background with white paint and secure the whole painting. It's a very painstaking process and quite extraordinary. And I should think so interesting as you say to reverse your training and to build the surface first and work backwards. They're beautiful works. Harri, we've had a number of visitors ask about your practical techniques as well. You work in watercolor. And the piece that is behind me actually, the City of Stones, is very large and I'd like to hear a little bit about how you work in watercolor. And building up your layers, you had previously said that the blue sky and the work behind me was an incredibly difficult, consistent tone to achieve. Can you talk a little bit about your watercolor process? Yes. Thank you, Hilary. Yes, it's, I really enjoy working with watercolors. I have tried at different times to work with the other media, oil and acrylic and it never gave me the pleasure of working with watercolor. And what is really for me interesting and exciting to work with watercolor is that it's a medium where you can have a certain amount of control. But also there is a lot of accidents that happen and it's always wonderful to be able to work with these accidents and to accept them as a part of this happening on paper and see what can come out. So it's always like a voyage, like a thing that you are going through at the moment that you are working with this medium. There is very little, of course there is some planning and control ahead of time. But the actual moment of painting is the most important part that giving into this medium and see play with it all the time to see what you can achieve with this. In the beginning when I worked with smaller pieces, of course, it was different. It was more possible to work with this medium and there was a lot more control in them. There's a lot more specific geometries that are happening. But as I started to work in bigger pieces, which I loved when I started to do this, it became really, really challenging but also very, very exciting. So with watercolor you have to work on a flat surface. So you have to have these large pieces of very thick watercolor paper, which I do stretch. I soak it in water and stretch and tape it to my board so that it's completely flat at all the moments of painting. And then I start to work with the colors and my first moment is actually to do the outline. The architecture of the piece is what I do in pencil. But a lot of the things that you see is actually happening without any pre-thought and without any pencil. So for example in the background, the painting in your background, all of the form of the tree which I have there, the lotus tree, is actually my brush. And I use for that specific part of the painting acrylic ink and spontaneous because I can't really draw those lines in paint and try to follow the line because then it will become a very weak line if I want to do that. But when I just play with that, it becomes much, much more spontaneous to work with those. And then comes the time to put the paint on. Somehow from the very, very first paintings I did to today, the very first color that I have used in these paintings is blue. Different shades of blue, turquoise blue, the blue that you have in the painting at the back. And usually they are different blues that come together. And if I want to repeat the blue, I have to be very careful about what I am doing, how am I combining these blues. And sometimes it becomes quite challenging to remember what did I do, how did I get this blue. And then on top of that, it's the layering, which is also very interesting because with the layering you never really know what color will come out in the end. And you have to be, you have to just be courageous and go with it and see what happens. And so, you know, with the layering it becomes much more exciting. You have a very, very large palette really that you are creating as you go along. And a lot of people have asked me about the very precise lines in these paintings which come from my background in architecture. And somehow, even if I want to do a really free, free work, it's always, in the end, there's always this architecture, this geometry. And it has two parts for me. It sort of anchors the work and also geometry is always, for me, something that relates to infinity and to the ideas of limitlessness. Because you can take a square and then grow it from both sides so that it can go to infinity and it can go inside itself, you know, by just posing these squares on top of each other. So there is always the idea of something beyond the painting. I achieve that through the geometries. For example, in the work behind you, there is this idea of something going on beyond this image if you look at it. And of course, I use, I do not use any spray painting or anything. It's always working with brushes and watercolor and water. But I do use the architectural, the T square, which has an edge. So it's sitting above the paper. And I wet the area that I want to work with, either with water or with paint. And then I go with a very fine brush, but guided with the T square so that it becomes a line. But it doesn't stay as a line because it's wet on the other side. And so it becomes a graduated color. And so that's, I mean, with watercolor, there are so many things that you can experiment with and discover as you work. It's always like being in a class or in a, but you are the medium is actually your teacher, the medium and the paper and the accidents that happen. Teach you, this is how it happens. And this is how you can continue learning. Thank you for that explanation, Pari. As I say, a number of our visitors have been very curious about the techniques behind the work in the exhibition. I think this is probably a really good place to conclude our conversation this evening as much as I would love to keep talking. I know there's so much more that we could say. I'd like to thank you both for joining us this evening and talking about your work. We are very excited to have produced a publication for this project, which has, which has me, excuse me, which has two essays, one by Hussain Aminot about Pari's work and one by Astri Wright about Rosita's work. And that is of course available for purchase here at the Art Museum, along with Pari's publication about which we spoke earlier we have copies of that available to purchase as well. So if you would invite viewers, if you have not yet come in to see the work in our exhibition under the shade of the lotus tree, please join us for open Tuesday to Saturdays from 11 until five. And this exhibition is on until April 1. Thank you very much and have a nice evening. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Larry. Thank you. Bye bye. Thanks.


Item █ SCP-2933 Object Class █ Euclid Special Containment Procedures Under no circumstances are any individuals permitted to enter SCP-2933-1. Once monthly, a small automated surveillance drone is to enter SCP-2933-1 to assess SCP-2933-A. Description █ SCP-2933-1 is a partially submerged steel structure within a large saltwater reservoir. The exterior and interior of SCP-2933-1 are very heavily rusted or otherwise decayed, with several features having disintegrated completely and structural deficiencies being widespread. It is currently believed that SCP-2933-1 was designed to contain SCP-2933-A. The interior of SCP-2933-1 is labyrinthian and inconsistent. Passages have been observed as changing, moving, or disappearing completely. The severe destabilization and corrosion of SCP-2933-1 has not appeared to hamper its primary function. It is believed that all passages within SCP-2933-1 lead to SCP-2933-A, and there is no way to return to the entrance. Any individual or machine that enters SCP-2933-1 will slowly begin to show signs of iron oxide corrosion on their exterior surface. This affliction is believed to be permanent. The corrosion spreads across the entirety of the subject before affecting the subject's inner-mechanism organs. The speed of this phenomenon increases as the subject grows closer to SCP-2933-A. SCP-2933-A is an unknown humanoid entity located within the lowermost sections of SCP-2933-1. Very little is known about the appearance or nature of SCP-2933-A. Addendum 2933-1 Log transcript The following audio and video log was gathered by Subject D-13321, who was charged with investigating SCP-2933-1. All right, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Please proceed into the open entryway. Smells like oil. This isn't safe, is it? Please proceed into the entryway. Fine. D-13321 enters SCP-2933-1 through the primary access point previously opened by Foundation staff engineers on site.  Throw the light on your pack if you need it. Okay. Yeah, I see it now. Walls are metal. Floors are graded. Also metal. Can you see this? We can. Can you hear anything? Yeah, really faint, though. I'm not sure. Hard to pin. D-13321, you don't sound well. Are you all right? You don't feel it? Feel what? There's something bad in here. Can't put a finger on it, but it's there. There's a sense of foreboding, like it's built into the walls of this place. You haven't expressed any issues on previous assignments. Because of other assignments, I always felt like I'd get myself out of a bad situation. Something is different about this. Acknowledged. Please proceed. D-13321 proceeds down to primary corridor. Communications are hindered by the structure of SCP-2933-1, but D-13321 exhibits no sign of distress. So that thing I said I heard earlier, I think it's metal on metal, like some kind of grinding or scraping. Can you be more specific? Really hard to tell. The echo in here is really bad. It's a continuous sound, though, right? Maybe it's just in my head. I don't know. I see. D-13321, our communications are breaking down. I need you to return to the service as soon as possible. Been trying to for a while, don't think there's a way out of here. As I've marked down, start to lead to dead ends. No stairways that go up. Only way to go is down. Scan is starting to fall apart, too. It's all rusty, metallic, flakes off when you touch it. Are you alright? Yep. Been doing this for a while, boss. Got lucky long enough to make it this far, figured it would roll around to me eventually. I'll keep the comms and camera on line. Thank you. I'm sorry. Not your fault. Just is what it is. Don't tell. Extraneous conversation expunged. D-13321 continues to descend. Monitors report rising temperatures as well as high levels of gaseous pollutants in the air. After another hour, D-13321 stops to catch their breath. Command is no longer able to communicate with D-13321, but continues to receive audio from them.  I can hear grinding, too. Somewhere below me. Metal on metal. This sound is getting louder, too, what I said earlier.  Rust flakes everywhere. Burns really badly. Starting to get on my face. I don't think it's metal on metal anymore. There's something else in there, too. Doesn't sound right. Long passageway now. This room is huge. Can barely hear, though. It's so loud. That goddamn sound. Oh, god. Sound is shuffling. It's a person. Another voice is picked up on D-13321's microphone. The voice is audible, but noticeably distorted and metallic. Hello there. I SCP-2933-A screams. Sorry for all the, uh, commotion. Who are you? Me? My name is Mr. Smiles.  I apologize. It's just that everything hurts. So much, you know. Yes. Mr. Smiles. Right here. See? That says D-13321 coughs. That says property of the fact… Ah, hang on. SCP-2933-A scratches at rust on its leg. Camera briefly captures the word. Mr. Scary, property of the factory, printed into the rust before SCP-2933-A exposes the skin underneath it. There we… Uh, we go. That's much better. Yep. Mr. Smiles. That's me. Camera captures the word. Mr. Smiles, from Little Mystery, by Dr. Wondertainment, tattooed on SCP-2933-A's leg. What are you doing down here? What is this place? My father built this for me.  Sorry. He told me that it will keep me safe. Or keep people safe from me. I can't really remember now. Everything just hurts, but it's okay. What? My father told me he, uh, oh god, I'm sorry, I, screeching metallic tearing sound, I, that he would come back for me once he was finished. He needed me for something, and I wanted to, to be the best son I could be, right? Hang on, hang on. What do you mean he needed you for something? He needed you for what? Yes, see, father was very sick. The rust was inside him, so he promised me that if I took the rust from him, that he would make smiles for everyone. That was, was important. Everyone was, was smiling. Wait, so why did he put you down here? After he gave me the rust, he, well, he was afraid, you know? There's something about the rust that really, it, it really terrifies him. He didn't even want to, to look at me. That's just fine though, I understand completely. How long ago was this? Oh, uh, a while. I didn't really expect everything to hurt this badly to tell you the truth, but my father is out there making smiles right now, and he'll come back for me someday soon, and we'll be together again. Just you wait. SCP-2933-A, noticeably grimaces. Uh-huh. Guess you wouldn't know what I could do about this, would you? D-13321 holds up his arm, which is completely covered in iron rust and several large sections missing. Oh, no, no, no, nothing you can do about that. The pain really only gets worse from there, too. Once you've got the rust inside you, it just spreads and spreads until there's nothing left, just oil and smoke and rust. Got it. Thanks. Uh-huh. You got any smokes, kid? No, sir. I don't smoke. Don't want to do anything to my pearly whites, after all. I am Mr. S-smiles. Figures. Can you feel the rust inside you? Yeah, I sure can. End log. Communication lost. Addendum 2933.2, recover documents. The following document was observed near SCP-2933-A by an automated drone.  A limited edition collection from Dr. Wondertainment. Find them all and become Mr. Collector. Mr. Chameleon. Mr. Headless. Mr. Laugh. Mr. Forgetful. Mr. Shapy. Mr. Soap. Mr. Hungry. Mr. Brass. Mr. Hot. Mr. Sweetie. Mr. Life and Death. Mr. Fish. Mr. Moon. Mr. Red, discontinued. Mr. Money. Mr. Lost. Mr. Mad. Mr. Scary. And Mr. Stripes. Addendum 2933.3, remote observation. Following a series of failed exploration attempts, a remote drone was directed into SCP-2933-1 to observe SCP-2933-A. The drone maintained communication with command for three hours before failing. The following is an excerpt from the collected audio. Edited for maximum clarity.


This is Julia and welcome back to my channel and for today's video I'm good to be talking to you guys about some of my recent reads. Today I'm going to be showing you guys five books that I read recently giving you a brief synopsis as well as my thoughts on the book. Now I wanted to talk about Never Again by Lauren and David Hogg. This is a nonfiction very short book that revolves around the Parkland Florida shooting that occurred in 2018. So this book obviously trigger warnings for things like gun violence. Please do keep in mind how heavy this revolves around gun violence and if this is something that like is personal to you either prepare yourself properly to read it or skip it for now because it is a very heavy book and it talks about the actual tragedy that occurred. We follow someone that was inside the building during the shooting as well as the aftermath, campaigning and then also some politics around it gun violence. Small book this really packed an important message and it was really good to see the survivors perspectives and the campaigning process that occurred after the Parkland shooting. The running style was really straightforward easy to follow. You could definitely feel pathos for the characters and they're real people so I'm like not even the characters for everyone that was involved not the characters the people is what I meant to say. There are like more nonfiction books that go into more depth about this specific shooting but this was a really good overview on it and to give you kind of an inside perspective as well. Well this isn't going to be a video discussing gun control or anything like that but that is a topic of course in this book so there was discussion about that and a little bit of politics not too much but some controversial subject matter some discussion going on. I think this is important to read especially if you are like American I'm how want to just learn more about school shootings and kind of the aftermath and it was so tragic what happened but to see how much campaigning and stuff went into it after was really nice to see in this book. Overall for such a short book it really was like an excellent read and I think it's really important. I've been reading a lot of you'll see another book in this video about gun violence so I am going to be doing hopefully doing a video about books that deal with school shootings in the future. I have been reading a few books every month or so to prepare for that. It's a very tough subject a tough video I'm kind of nervous to film that and to upload that but I am going to be putting proper trick or warnings on the video and stuff like that but I do want to read more and educate myself so this was a good book for me in researching more of the Parkland shooting and getting a perspective from someone that was inside the building at the time. I ended up giving this book a solid four star reading. Next year I read a book that I do not own physically but that is Masquerade by Cyrus Parker. This is a recent poetry collection that came out that I was super excited for because I enjoyed their previous poetry collection. The collection deals with a lot of important topics such as self-esteem also talks about people who are non-binary as the author is themselves talks a bit about witchcraft pain and like body dysphoria. This was really refreshing to read about especially because I hadn't really read too much poetry that is more about dysphoria and like people who identifies non-binary and things like that. I just haven't read collections like that. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I really enjoy their writing. I think it's great to the point and overall just beautiful. I love so many poems from this. Illustrations were a perfect touch. I am so excited for whatever they come out with in the future. This author has so much potential and I'm so excited. They've only released two collections so far so I want to see what else they're going to bring to the table. I gave this one a solid 3.75 out of 5 stars. Next up here is the next book that I have to talk about revolving around gun violence so this is People Kill People by Ellen Hopkins. The book came out sometime last year. I am an Ellen Hopkins fan. I've read many of her books. They all deal with important subject matter. The majority of them are written in a verse format and this one deals with 16s who all somehow encounter gun violence and how all their lives intertwine and how they're all affected by this one thing. We go back and forth between this verse format to this like normal format which I thought was really weird. I don't think it worked in this case. I just really did not like the switch and I also just think that the way the verse was done could have been done like that alone like many of her other books. The normal kind of dialogue that like the normal kind of parts that were put in here with the actual like formatting were just locked for me and I think they were overall like it just didn't work for this kind of book. My main problem with this was the characters who were extremely one-dimensional even though we got this insight to their minds in the kind of normal formatting of the book. They are extremely flat characters and it was hard to differentiate them and figure out who was who and to keep track of who was who because they all kind of blended together. I just wish the topic had been done better. I just didn't care for the actual plot of the book. I was reading it mostly again for the gun violence kind of representation and for that point of view but I just didn't really get that like what I wanted from this book and usually Ellen Hopkins is kind of a bit known for her like dramatic endings and those endings that leave you like wow this didn't have that either so I was really let down by this one. I ended up giving this one two out of five stars. One more light heart to note I read Cheese Sweet Home Volume 3 by Konia Kanata. This collection is basically a full bind-up graphic novel about a cat and the cat's journeys with the cat with living in his bookmark spell out of this because I got this in New York. Not the most recent time I went but the time before that. So this is a full color illustrated beautiful graphic novel manga about a cat and it's in the manga section but like it doesn't read backwards like manga. Okay it doesn't matter but my point is I read the first two and absolutely love them. They're really expensive so I that's why you don't hear me talk about them a lot like the bind-ups a lot because these are like $40 bind-ups and justify spending that much money and then reading this in like an hour or two and being done with it. They are so so cute. I love like chi and the actual like just the cat in general like I love these stories and the illustrations are beautiful the coloring is beautiful beautiful but I got this at the strand for only 12 us so that's why I ended up picking it up because I could actually buy it. So I did like this one I didn't like it as much as the previous two so it kind of lacked for me in some areas and it just wasn't as like cute as the other ones but I did like the friendships that she has with other cats in the story. I think that was really cute and I love seeing the family dynamic with a pet involved. So I give this one a 3.5 out of 5 stars. Last book I have here to talk to you guys about is a poetry collection and this is with gratitude by Marla Scott. Marla Scott? Not really sure how to pronounce that. So this is a poetry book like I stated before. I was sent this a little while ago by Andrews Meal Publishing in exchange for an honest review. I do have a reading blog where I talk more about this and you can actually see me reading this and discussing like my thoughts and stuff but this is basically a collection of mostly advice. It's written as poetry and prose and things like that but it's mainly advice and gratitude for the things and everyone's life. I really enjoyed this. I think it's really important and inspiring. I hadn't read something like this before that was just overall like super positive because sometimes poetry collections mainly focus on tragedy and a lot of negative emotions because that's kind of what people write poetry about. But it's really nice to see a more positive outlook on life and in poetry and I think this is great even not even to read in one go but to read little bits of at a time and then like for inspiration purposes. This was like more advice than poetry like I said but I really enjoyed this. I am really excited to see what else is authorable right in the future and yeah I ended up giving this one a 3.75 out of five stars. So there you guys have it. Those are the books that I've read recently. Let me know your thoughts on them down below and if you've read them and or if you want to read them and your thoughts. Again thank you so so much for watching. If you want to subscribe you can down below as well as comment and like if you enjoyed the video. I would also really really appreciate it if you would check me out on other social media since as Instagram, Twitter, all that stuff, Goodreads I have. I also have a Patreon in case you want to support me on another platform which I'd really appreciate. So thank you guys so so much for watching and I'll see you super soon. Bye!