A gumshoe is hired find to find God. Straight radio theater comedy I adapted, directed and produced based on the classic Woody Allen story.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:24 — 13.2MB)
Subscribe: RSS
This is a 38-minute narration-free documentary of the 20th century using (other than my one minute spoken introduction) only archival sound, speeches and other audio artifacts of that talkative 100 years. The montage is of my own making and perspective as the American I happen to be, and hopefully, will take the listener of whatever provenance or vintage, on a real voyage.
It was prepared for worldwide broadcast on the Voice of America on New Year’s Eve 1999; it subsequently won the Grand Prize and the Gold Medal at the New York Festivals, and a Special VOA award. I was later flattered to learn it is often used in journalism classes.
A note on how to listen to it: all on one 38 minutes go, with the lights off. It’s fun to try identify the source of the sound you are hearing the first time around. Then check your impressions against the complete list of sound elements which I hope to post as a sidebar on this blog (when I learn how to do it.) You can also write me and request an email copy, no prob.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:32 — 35.3MB)
Subscribe: RSS
Tony Kushner is one of America’s foremost dramatists, and not only because of his epic Angels in America. He also probles and continues to probe our culture and its values — about sexuality, money, race — and other things many of us would rather just leave alone. Here is my American Profile of Kushner, which was broadcast near the time that “Caroline, or Change” made its pre-Broadway opening. (Raw interview elsewhere in this blog).)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:57 — 6.4MB)
Subscribe: RSS
Avant-garde musical artists have always liked to stretch the limits of what traditional musical instruments can do. But some artists have gone even farther and explored the less orthodox music of familiar objects. This story explores the experimental music written especially for toys as performed in a concert in hipster Brooklyn. Features toy piano virtuouso Margaret Leng Tan, a balloon composer and instrumentalist, and Isabel Negron, among others.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:13 — 6.6MB)
Subscribe: RSS
Annie Finch is one of the most intelligent, sensitive and prescient poets writing about poetry and women’s poetry in particular. Here is a story I did about her when a new collection of her poems had been published. What a voice!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:53 — 8.1MB)
Subscribe: RSS
Art Spiegelman is most famous for his Pulitzer Prize winning work “Maus,” a graphic novel about the Holocaust in which Nazis are portrayed as cats, and Jews are depicted as mice. In this profile, Spiegelman talks about his roots as a Mad Magazine afficionado, underground cartoonist, and his experience growing up in a Queens NY family overshadowed by the Shoah.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:59 — 4.8MB)
Subscribe: RSS
From his “Sick, Sick, Sick” book to the Village Voice, the Phantom Tollbooth, biting political satire and beyond, Jules Feiffer is known for his beautiful simple lines that bring often neurotic characters to life in both funny and heartbreakingly human ways.
Here we get a taste of this American treasure in his own words, and learn just who that dancer girl is/was in real life. (I know I certainly had a crush on her, and I’m sure I was not alone.)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:22 — 6.7MB)
Subscribe: RSS
Professor Maxine Greene of Teachers College, Columbia University, 91, has spent her educating and inspiring educators, artists and children in humanistic “wide-awakedness” and the social imagination. Now 91, Maxine has also been Philosopher-in-Residence at the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education since 1975. She just received a Gold Medal from Barnarnd College. Maxine grew up with my mother in Brooklyn, and was a frequent dinner guest at our home on East 70th Street.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:42 — 5.2MB)
Subscribe: RSS
Pamelia Kursten is the 21st century’s greatest theremin virtuosa, who has turned an instrument most associate with creepy sci-fi “woo-woo” music into an art form. Hear what she has to say and how she does it in this sound-rich piece, originally produced for the Voice of America’s “Our World” science program.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:30 — 7.8MB)
Subscribe: RSS
