Monthly Archives: January 2026

Bird City

Posted on by
3

“When most New Yorkers look up they see skyscrapers, but award winning journalist Ryan Goldberg sees birds. In fact, he sees birds everywhere: New York City beaches, parks, cemeteries, even garbage landfills–and discovers how  birds help tell the social, cultural and even political story of our city…”

Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear my interview with Ryan Goldberg, author of Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds, as broadcast this week on the Arts Express radio program, heard on WBAI-FM NYC, WBAI.org, and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

(You can find Part 2 of our conversation here)

Cast Your Fate To The Wind

Posted on by
Reply

As we shovel out, or just look out the window Monday morning, George Winston plays the Vince Guaraldi composition with some improvisation of his own.

More at George Winston

Renee Good: On Learning To Dissect Fetal Pigs

Posted on by
2

“Renee Good, among other accomplishments, was an award winning poet and was deeply interested in questions of faith. She grew up as an evangelical Christian, but in 2016, now married, at the age of 28 she started college, and the clash of religious ideas versus science and secular ideas was explosive for her. In 2020, she wrote a poem about her trying to reconcile the two ways of experiencing the world, which foreshadowed the change in her political beliefs. The poem was called “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” and it won the Academy of American Poets University & College Poetry Prize. I’m going to read it now…”

Click on the small triangle or mp3 link to hear a reading of the poem as broadcast on the Arts Express radio show, as heard on WBAI FM NYC, WBAI.org, and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

“Something That Was Once Potentially Good”

Posted on by
Reply

How do you write fiction in a world that is perhaps post-fiction? When the horrors of the present world outstrip what our imaginations imagine? Arts Express favorite, Luke O’Neil, author of Welcome to Hell World and A Creature Wanting Form, writes stories that are full of the pain of men and women–but mostly men–who are trying to figure out how to deal with the helplessness and terror that make a mockery out of any John Wayne or Ernest Hemingway definition of manhood.

Now O’Neil has come out with his third collection of short stories called We Had It Coming, published by O/R Books.. We’ve always resonated with his work, but in this new collection especially, O’Neil’s short pieces are to our time what Raymond Carver’s short stories were to his. Stories of the soul and body struggling to make sense of the senseless cages in which capitalism has trapped us.

Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear my reading of “Something That Was Once Potentially Good,” from We Had It Coming, as broadcast on the Arts Express radio program, heard on WBAI FM and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

Venezuela: A European Perspective With Dennis Broe

Posted on by
Reply
Screenshot

“If you’re anything like me you woke up this past Saturday with shock and horror that Nicholas Maduro, the elected president of Venezuela, was kidnapped by US forces on the flimsiest of pretexts. Caracas was bombed and at least 40 people were murdered. And now Maduro is incarcerated in Brooklyn, ostensibly to be tried as a drug criminal, in the same prison where Luigi Mangione is being held . I’m really happy to have with us on Zoom our Paris correspondent and cultural critic, Dennis Broe, to give some of his insights from a European perspective…”

Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to listen to my conversation with Dennis Broe, as broadcast this week on the Arts Express radio program, heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica stations across the nation.

We Did Okay, Kid: Anthony Hopkins

Posted on by
1

“Earlier this year we had the great Al Pacino’s memoirs published, and now we have the new memoir of another great actor available, Anthony Hopkins, who as a child had to hear his schoolmates call him “Elephant Head.”  And while both Pacino and Hopkins grew up in working class circumstances with difficult upbringings, their writing voices, like their acting voices, could not be more different…”

Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above for my commentary on the new Hopkins memoir, We Did Okay, Kid, as broadcast this week on the Arts Express radio show, heard on WBAI-FM and Pacifica stations across the nation.