Today we will sneakily bypass Donald Trump’s Canadian tariffs by smuggling in a funny short story about spies, written by the classic Canadian author and humorist Stephen Leacock. It’s called “My Revelations As A Spy.”
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear my reading of the piece, as broadcast this week on the Arts Express radio show, heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica stations across the nation.
One of the joys of spending some of the summer in upstate NY is the Ashokan Summer Hoot outdoor folk festival. This performance by The CIty Stompers wound us up, just watching…
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Dolly Parton, One of the GOATs
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Thanks to YouTuber ShoutFactoryVEVO
“The minute I stepped inside the Washington Heights branch of the public library, I fell in love with Miss Anna Gilfinane, assistant librarian. I fell in love with her glinting green eyes, with her shimmering auburn hair, with her luscious red lips – I was nineteen…”
Last week, I posted my conversation with Tom Allon, the editor of the new book, Sez I To Myself: The Collected Essays of Frank and Malachy McCourt. This week, with permission, I did a reading over the air from one of my favorite short pieces in the book called, “James Joyce Destroyed My Romance,” written by Frank McCourt.
Click on the small white triangle or mp3 link above to hear my reading of the story, as broadcast this week on the Arts Express radio show, heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica stations across the nation
The Mayor of Macdougal Street, Dave Van Ronk, growls the Gary Davis classic at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. Click on the image to play
Thanks to YouTuber Historic Films Stock Footage Archive
Dave Frishberg with a song that never gets old. Music by Dave, lyrics by Samantha Frishberg
More Dave Frishberg at Dave Frishberg – Topic
Our semi-occasional weekly round-up of the most absurd and head shaking news!
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link to hear it as broadcast on the Arts Express program this week on WBAI FM NYC, WBAI.org and Pacifica affiliates across the nation
For Shakespeare’s birthday today, a startling contemporary passage from Sir Thomas More performed by the incomparable Ian McKellan:
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an agèd man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.
[…]
Say now the king,
As he is clement if th’offender mourn,
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
Country Joe McDonald at Woodstock, RIP
(WordPress is having problems with displaying video–if you don’t see one, click on the title to go directly to the blog post.)
“Hi this is Jack Shalom, Last week we began our conversation with composer, professor, performer, activist Andy Teirstein. I had met Andy through our mutual immigration rights work at the NYC immigration courts for the New Sanctuary Coalition. In the process of getting to know him I learned that he had taught music and theater at a couple of upstate prisons. We left off our conversation as Andy was describing what it was like for both him and the men in prison to learn in that setting. So here’s Andy…”
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear Part two of my interview with Andy Teirstein on the Arts Express radio program broadcast on WBAI FM NYC, WBAI.org and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
You can find Part One here:
“We’re going to do something a little bit different today. My guest is someone who I just only recently met a few Fridays ago at an immigration court accompaniment, under the auspices of the New Sanctuary Coalition here in NYC. We started talking and I found him to be a fascinating guy with a really eclectic, creative, and political background including all kinds of awards and honors. So, I’m happy to be speaking today with actor, musician, composer, professor and political activist, Fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts, and also BMI Woody Guthrie Fellow, Andy Teirstein…”
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear my wide ranging conversation with Andy, as heard on the Arts Express radio program broadcast on WBAI FM, WBAI.org and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
And you can find Part Two here:
“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.
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.
Part One:
Part Two:
I was happy to have this cross-continental conversation with cultural critic, novelist, and Arts Express Paris Correspondent, Dennis Broe. I think you’ll have fun listening to our wide-ranging conversation with topics from the French street uprisings to media consolidation to AI to Robin Hood to Zohran Mamdani. We broadcast it last week and this week on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the country.
This was conceived originally as a fundraiser for listener-sponsored radio station WBAI, home of Arts Express, but we edited the conversation for the affiliates (and this blog!) to eliminate most of the pitching.
Click on the small triangle or mp3 links to play.
Once again, In the never-ending battle for shelf place, I’m giving away some very nice magic books. One of them can be yours. Here’s what to do:
Please follow ALL the bolded directions, or I cannot accept your entry. I have generated a list of 10 random whole numbers between 1 and 10,000. Email me, at jshalom@worldshare.net one whole number between 1 and 10,000 that you think might be on the list. Put the word “Contest” in the subject line. Make sure to include your full name (not a company name!) and a current shipping address. One entry only please. If you won a prize last year, please do not enter this year to give others a chance. Do this before the deadline. Deadline is Sunday, November 30th 11:59 PM Pacific Time. That’s it. (Sorry, but due to shipping costs, this is only open to folks who live in the Continental US.) Please follow ALL the bolded directions, or I cannot accept your entry. Prizes will be awarded in December.
Whoever is closest to the first number on my random list gets first prize; whoever is closest to the second number gets second prize, and so on. There will be 10 prizes given out.
First prize is first choice from the terrific grab bag of magic books I’ve put together; second prize is second choice from the grab bag; and third prize, in a parallel, numerically pleasing manner, is third choice from the grab bag, and so on, down to 10th prize gets 10th choice. The items in the grab bag are all commercial magic books at least one of which, I guarantee, you will be very happy to have.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
And now a little Halloween cheer with the short story, The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe, adapted for Arts Express Radio.
Click on the mp3 link or small triangle above to hear the tale as broadcast on the Arts Express radio program on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
One of the most astonishing and entertaining magic acts I’ve ever seen. Belgian Magician Laurent Piron stuns Penn & Teller, the audience, and certainly me.
More at Laurent Piron
In the cultural and political explosion that became known as the 60s, music was an incredible unifier, and arguably the most important cultural and political form of expression. But what culminated in Woodstock in 1968 had its precursor in the Newport Folk Festival from the early 60s. Now, a new documentary about the Newport Folk Festival based on archival footage that hasn’t been seen in sixty years has been released called Newport and the Great Folk Dream. I was happy to talk with the director and producers of the film, Robert Gordon and Joe Lauro.
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear the interview, as heard this week on the Arts Express radio program, broadcast on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
And you can find Part 2 here:
“Probably one of the strangest interludes in my life was the time I spent as an employee in Alfred Wunsiedel’s factory…”
This time, for Labor Day weekend, I’ll be reading a droll story by Heinrich Böll about a pensive worker who finds his true calling in a world that seems to demand action at all costs. It’s called Action Will Be Taken.
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear our Labor Day Noir, as broadcast on the Arts Express radio program heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
Jesse Welles, as always, up to the minute, gives some recruiting advice, in lieu of the current budget allocation of 75 billion dollars to reward our national gestapo/paramilitary
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Monday morning finds Jesse Welles with just the greatest smile and joy singing about his true passion in life! What a kick.
More at Jesse Welles
Monday morning, Nat King Cole reminisces about a summer Sunday.
Thanks to YouTuber catman916
