Category Archives: Writing

“Something That Was Once Potentially Good”

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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.

We Did Okay, Kid: Anthony Hopkins

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“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.

Culture and Barbarism With Dennis Broe

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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.

Ensh*ttification

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“Crap, crap crap crap crap. I’m saying crap because that’s the euphemism I’m going to have to use now for the new book by Cory Doctorow whose name will not pass FCC rules, so I’ll just call the book Encrappification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What You Can Do About It, though of course  the real title rhymes with Ensittification. If you’re wondering why everything, especially the internet and Big Tech, which Doctorow primarily focuses on, is in the crapper, this is the book for you…”

Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear my commentary as broadcast on the Arts Express radio show this week, heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica stations across the nation

The Black Cat

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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.

Action Will Be Taken!

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“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.

Join ICE

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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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The Great Caucasian God

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Jesse just keeps knocking out the songs with alacrity and aim.

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Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins

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It seems every generation there is a new upsurge of white supremacy and with that new attempts to justify it in some pseudo-scientific manner. We’ve had some great books in the past such as those by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin laying out the scientific fallacies of those racist justifications. And now with the advances in genetic technology, it’s only natural that we have to update that scientific de-bunking. I was happy to talk with the author of a new book called Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins, Dr. Shoumita Dasgupta.

Click on small triangle or mp3 link to listen to the interview as broadcast on the Arts Express radio program, heard on WBAI FM and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

The Prison Poetry of Ho Chi Minh

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This week marks the convergence of a number of important dates: May Day, the end of National Poetry Month (April 30th), and the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon (also April 30th). So I thought I’d acknowledge all of them at once with the poetry of Ho Chi Minh. He was arrested as a spy in August 1942 by the Kuo Min Tang and put into a series of Chinese prisons, enduring harsh conditions. He wrote over hundred short poems in prison, mostly in quatrain form, and they have been translated by several English translators including Aileen Palmer, Timothy Allen, and Kenneth Rexroth.

Click on the small triangle or MP3 link above to listen to a selection of the poems, as broadcast this week on the Arts Express radio program, heard on WBAI-FM and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

The Winter’s Tale: Preserving Possibility

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“It’s Shakespeare’s 461st  birthday coming up April 23rd, and you might wonder, what does an author write after it seems like he’s done it all?”

For the answer to that, click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to listen to my commentary, as broadcast on the Arts Express radio program, heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

Fentanyl: Jesse Welles

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Monday morning, a world runs on its favorite drug.

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The Best Folk Singer/Songwriter Of His Generation?

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“Jesse Welles has got a voice like John Prine, plays guitar like Bob Dylan, and can write a song that’s as topical and clever as the songs of Phil Ochs or Tom Paxton or Woody Guthrie. It turns out, despite his handsome shaggy-haired babyface look, he has been making songs for a long time. In an age where so much music is artificially created with plastic lyrics and digitally manipulated instruments, it is refreshing to hear a protest song on a simple acoustic folk guitar that doesn’t just talk about generalities, but actually names names, and has a political point of view…”

Click on the mp3 link or triangle above to hear the rest of my commentary on Welles, as broadcast this week on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the country.

Firesign Theatre: Part Two

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Herein, Part two of our conversation with Jeremy Braddock, author of the book, Firesign.

Click on the mp3 link or triangle above to hear the interview as broadcast this week on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the country

Note: Our posting lately has been more sporadic than usual–we hope to be back up to speed in a week or two.

Beat The Reaper With The Firesign Theatre

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If you are of a certain age, growing up as a high school or college kid during the late 60s or early 70s, then odds are that at least one time as you were toking up, the surrealist record LPs of the Firesign Theatre invaded your brain. As the albums brilliantly shifted in and out of tv, film and radio parody, they broke down walls of time, space and authority. Now in a new book about the Firesign Theater, called Firesign, author Jeremy Braddock provides a wonderful non-linear look at the four influential guys who turned the art of radio and recording upside down. I was happy to have as our guest on the show, the author of Firesign, Jeremy Braddock.

Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear the interview as heard on the Arts Express radio program broadcast this week on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation

Part Two here:

Firesign Theatre: Part Two

The Ultimate Hidden Truth Of The World

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A posthumous collection of essays by anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, who coined the phrase “We are the 99%,” has just come out, and we look into one of its most interesting pieces.

Click on the triangle above or mp3 link to hear my commentary on the book, as heard on the Arts Express radio program this week, broadcast on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

Slaves

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Monday morning, it’s Martin Luther King Day, and Capitalist Class Leader Inauguration Day, but Jesse Welles reminds us how things actually work.

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The Mockingbird

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An anti-war story by the great Ambrose Bierce, which I adapted for radio and broadcast yesterday on Arts Express, heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to listen.

140 Syllables by Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982)

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All my life I have wondered,

Why doesn’t somebody write

A terrible poem that says

In so many words, this world

Is a fraud, the people who

Run it are murderous fools,

Everything they ever printed

Is a lie, all their damn art

And literature is a fake,

Behind their gods and laws, and

Pee hole bandits, their science

Is just a fancy way to kill

Us and our girls and kids.

What I want to know is why

Somebody doesn’t write it

All down in about twenty

Lines of seven syllables

Once and for all, and scare the shit

Out of all the dirty squares.

Dumber

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And we’ll finish off the week with one more great song from Jesse Welles

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War Isn’t Murder: Jesse Welles

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Monday morning, another great song by Jesse Welles. It’s gotta be one of the best anti-war songs I’ve heard in the last fifty years. Take good care of yourself, kid, the world’s going to need you.

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United Health

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This is the first I’d heard of Jesse Welles, but he’s quite the songwriter.

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Sonny Boy: Al Pacino

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“It’s said that talent is common, and that’s true. But what is much more rare than talent is longevity. How does one take talent and have it develop and last decade upon decade? I’m thinking about this, because I’ve just finished reading the new autobiography by Al Pacino called Sonny Boy, and it was totally engrossing. No one would call It a work of literature, but you can certainly hear Al’s voice loud and clear, as if he were sitting in a bar with you telling intimate stories about his life and work…”

Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear my complete review of Al Pacino’s memoir, Sonny Boy, as broadcast yesterday on the Arts Express program, heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

Speechless

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“We have just had our elections, and I’m not even going to speak one way or the other about the results. It was an awful choice, if you want to even call it a choice. But I think no matter what point of view you had about the candidates, the one thing that could not be escaped was the absolutely idiotic and moronic level of discourse. To anyone who loves words and rhetoric and language it seemed that the very concept of speech had been broken and bent out of all proportion. Now, by an interesting coincidence, in this year, which happens to be the 65th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, across my desk came a book published by Seven Stories Press called the Fidel Castro Reader. And what it is, is a large 500 plus page book of Fidel Castro’s speeches translated into English, which is a great boon to me, since I’m not a fluent reader of Spanish. I had to laugh when I thought about the prospect of a 500 page book on the speeches of Kamala Harris, or Joe Biden, or God, help us Donald Trump…”

Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear the rest of the segment as broadcast last night on the Arts Express radio program over WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.