Show for May 13, 2012: Documentary Filmmaker Joshua Dylan Mellars
Joshua Mellars has a thing for world travel and world music, and he combines both passions in his latest pair of films. Play Like a Lion: The Legacy of Maestro Ali Akbar Khan is a portrait of the late Indian classical virtuoso and his son Alam Khan, who’s carrying on the family musical tradition. Heaven’s Mirror: A Portuguese Voyage is about Portuguese Fado music, and features some of the top contemporary fadistas (fado singers), including Katia Guerreiro, Ana Moura, Camané, and Carlos do Carmo. Joshua joined me to discuss the films and the music that inspired them.
Play Like a Lion is screening at the Santa Cruz Film Festival.
Ali Akbar Khan, with sarod. Fado singer Camané.
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Show for May 6, 2012. George Dyson: The Dawn of the Digital Universe
Historian George Dyson tells the story of the Electronic Computer Project. Led by the brilliant polymath John Von Neumann in 1940’s and 50’s, the project laid the groundwork for much of modern computing. In doing so, Dyson says, it birthed a new, digital ecosystem, a world of self-reproducing, ever-evolving numbers that may be said to have a life of their own.
We talked about that and about Dyson’s own very personal connection to the story. He’s the son of famed physicist Freeman Dyson and grew up at the Institute for Advanced Study, where Von Neumann and crew did their pioneering work. He’s also an earth-loving outdoorsman, and has a foot in both the natural and technological worlds.
John Von Neumann and the “MANIAC” computer at the Institute for Advanced Study. The cylinders at bottom house cathode ray tubes used as memory devices. Most present-day computers are descendants of this ancestral machine, as Dyson explains in his new book Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe.
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Show for April 22, 2012: Comedian Michael Ian Black on Not Doing it Right
Michael Ian Black doesn’t usually reveal a lot about himself in his comedy. He’s generally more comfortable playing characters who at most manifest fragments of his personality, like the hilarious solipsism of “Michael Ian Black” in Michael and Michael Have Issues. His new memoir, You’re Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations, is different. It’s bracingly candid, full of unromanticized and unflattering real-life detail. It never seems self-indulgent or confessional, though, and it’s both funny and insightful. Same goes for my conversation with Michael, in which we discussed all of the aforementioned humiliations.
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Show for April 15, 2012: Astrophysicist Michael Turner
Michael Turner, of the University of Chicago and Kavli Institute, has had his hands in some of the biggest cosmological advances of recent years. He’s also contributed to the scientific lexicon, coining the term “dark matter” and presaging its discovery. We talked about that and some of the universe’s other big conundrums.
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Show for April 8, 2012: The Life and Music Edith Piaf (rebroadcast)
It was Easter Sunday, so I resurrected my 2011 interview with Carolyn Burke, discussing her book No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf. Carolyn is equally strong on the biographical details and the musical oeuvre of France’s great songstress, and provided astute commentary on some of Piaf’s signature songs.
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Show for Apr 1, 2012. The Authoritative John Hodgman.
I thought this might turn into an entirely risible April Fool’s interview with John Hodgman’s mock-pundit character, but after some japery, the conversation got sorta serious. John may lampoon the whole notion of expertise and authority in his TV appearances and books, but his thoughts on the subject run deep. We talked about his days studying literary theory at Yale, the real-life model for his professorial persona, truth vs. artistic license and his up close and personal view of the Mike Daisey/This American Life debacle. John also made a passionate statement about paying for the things you love—quite timely, since this show aired during KUSP’s Spring Pledge Drive. Last I checked, the station was still short of its fundraising goal, so if you love public radio, or just like it, please consider paying for it.
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Show for March 25, 2012. Philosophy Fights Back.
In the age of science, what’s a philosopher to do? As physics, biology and other hard sciences advance, is philosophy left with only a few increasingly recherché questions? Nope, says philosopher Colin McGinn. McGinn argues that philosophy is a kind of science (though it could use some rebranding to that effect), and those other sciences would do well to pay it some mind. A dose of philosophy could help clear up many scientific confusions and save theorists from a mess of conceptual errors (homuncular fallacy, anyone?). Colin McGinn and I talk science vs. philosophy, different kinds of knowledge, the nature of objectivity, problems with the scientific study of consciousness, and his Campaign to Rename Philosophy (CRP), which he wrote about recently in the New York Times.
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Show for March 11, 2011. Gay Writers and Gay Rights.
In his new book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, Christopher Bram says it was literature more than any other art form that opened America’s eyes to same-sex relationships and paved the way for gay rights. In the years following World War II, when homosexuality was taboo territory for movies, TV and other mass media, it was writers who broke the silence. Chris and I discussed the impact of writers such as Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, James Baldwin and Allen Ginsburg; the sometimes nasty critical reaction to their work; and how Chris himself read his way out of the closet.
Chris’s previous nine books include Father of Frankenstein, the basis for the movie Gods and Monsters.
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Show for March 4, 2012. Sebastian Seung—Mapping the Brain
And you thought sequencing the human genome was a big job. MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung is proposing something even more Herculean: tracing the trillions of neuronal connections in the human brain, collectively known as the “connectome.” He believes the connectome may hold the key to understanding the brain and the self. That follows from connectionism—the notion that learning, memory and personality are embedded in the brain’s wiring. Like so much else in neuroscience, that’s still hypothetical, and Sebastian is refreshingly candid about the limits of current understanding. We discussed what is and isn’t known about the workings of neurons, how the brain’s circuitry might encode information, the relevance of computer models, and artificial intelligence techniques that may help map the connectome. Also: the “Jennifer Aniston neuron,” whether or not to freeze your posthumous head, and the cautionary tale of the South Park underpants gnomes.
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Show for Feb 26, 2012. Ancient Stories, New Technology: The Thinning Veil
Everybody loves a good dysfunctional family drama, which is one reason the Oresteia and other Greek tales of the strife-torn House of Atreus have never gone out of fashion. Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra and the gang are at it again in a new play premiering this week at UC Santa Cruz. The production draws freely on classical sources including the Illiad and the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and adds a high-tech twist: it takes place simultaneously on two stages representing two distinct realities, bridged by live video streaming. I spoke with writer/director Kirsten Brandt and producer Ted Warburton, both of UCSC’s Theater Arts Department, about the performance, the timeless truths of Greek tragedy and the use of “telematic” technology in theater.
More details on the performance, which runs from Mr. 2 through 11, here.
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Show for Feb 19, 2012: The Post-Valentine’s Day Massacre
This episode originally aired on Feb. 15, 2009. Seeing as it was the morning after, I took a few swipes at love and romance with the help of some great guests and lots of music. This year, my broadcast slot fell on Feb 19, close enough to Valentine’s Day to revive the show. Segments include:
- Science writer Hannah Holmes on the biology of hooking up and dogging around
- Critic Laura Kipnis on monogamy and marriage as social engineering
- Writer Jonathan Ames on love and its disappointments*
- Writer and musician Glenn Kurtz on the death of dreams
- Edie and Simone on the real meaning of valentines
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*At the time, Jonathan was developing his HBO comedy series, Bored to Death, starring Jason Schwartzman as “Jonathan Ames.” The show debuted later that year and has become a hit, now going into its 4th season. Update (Mr 20, 2012): I’ve just learned from John Hodgman, an occasional cast member of BTD, that the show has been cancelled despite critical acclaim and an enthusiastic following. John talks more about that in an interview I’ll be airing April 1.
Show for Feb 12, 2012. The Living Music of Elena Kats-Chernin.
Despite an old-school classical education in the Soviet Union, where she grew up before emigrating to Australia as a teen, composer Elena Kats-Chernin is anything but tradition-bound. Her influences run the gamut from ragtime to nuevo tango to minimalism and pop. Her work is powerfully evocative and unabashedly listenable. She says for her, “music is a living thing.” She writes daily, and a lot of her own life inevitably makes its way into her compositions. In this interview, we listened to some exquisite tunes and dug deep into the sources of her music, including the very personal story behind some of her most affecting works.
Note: I previously interviewed Elena prior to the U.S. premiere of her Astor Piazzola tribute Re-Collecting ASTORoids at last year’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.
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Show for Feb 5, 2012. Matthew Polly’s Big MMA Adventure
Matt Polly was 36 and overweight, his days as a student of Chinese kickboxing long past. On the precipice of middle age, he took one last shot at glory. He plunged into the bruising sport of mixed martial arts, trained with the pros and eventually tested his skills in an amateur bout, as detailed in his book Tapped Out: An Odyssey in Mixed Martial Arts. Matt and I had a very entertaining conversation about his experiences and about the world of MMA. Matt explains that contrary to its reputation for primal thuggery, MMA is a highly technical sport and even an art.
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One subject Matt Polly and I discussed is how a good submission game can beat pure stand-up striking. Here’s my favorite illustration of that: the 400 lb Eric Esch (aka “Butterbean”) had respectable boxing and a string of knockouts against fellow heavyweights in professional four-round fights, but watch what happened when he took on the creative and fearless MMA fighter Genki Sudo, weighing in at a mere 150.
Show for Jan 29, 2012: Pulling the Wool Over Our Own Eyes—Robert Trivers on the Evolution of Self-Deception
Robert Trivers is a widely influential evolutionary thinker (as these tributes from Steven Pinker et. al. attest). His theoretical work on the genetic trade-offs underlying altruism, parent-child relationships and other social interactions are a cornerstone of behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology. His new book, The Folly of Fools, applies an evolutionary framework to another set of behaviors: deception and especially self-deception. Subjects discussed in our interview include: self-deception in nature, our capacity to simultaneously know and blind ourselves to the truth, the field formerly known as sociobiology, and Robert’s own life and career, including his friendship with the late Black Panther leader Huey Newton.
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Show for Jan. 22, 2012. They Might Be Giants at 30
The last time I spoke to John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, it was about the group’s science album for kids. This time we talked about the whole TMBG phenomenon: their beginnings and surprising success, aesthetic aims, being taken seriously while also having fun, and Sleestaks. TMBG turns 30 this year and is about to launch a national tour (1st stop, Santa Cruz) with some retrospective elements. Seemed like a good time to look back on their singular career.
TMBG’s two Johns: Linnell (L) and Flansburgh (R).
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