Once more, another installment of 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.
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
If you’re a longtime listener to WBAI, you’re probably quite familiar with the name of the late actor, writer, and Radio Free Eireann raconteur, Malachy McCourt. And contrariwise, you may be even more familiar with the name of Malachy’s older brother Frank McCourt, author of the extraordinary memoir Angela’s Ashes and more. But both Frank and Malachy were more than book writers, they both had careers as newspaper and magazine columnists. And now for the first time, a delicious selection of the brothers’ essays have been collected in a new book called Sez I to Myself: The Collected Essays of Frank and Malachy McCourt. I was happy to speak with the co-editor of that collection, Tom Allon.
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear my interview with Tom Allon on the Arts Express radio show this week, heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica stations across the nation.
Yet another installment of 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.
What are the implications for Artificial Intelligence in art, and what’s the best way to fight it? That’s what Cory Doctorow, author of the new book the Reverse Centaur’s guide to Life After AI, will talk about today. Last week we began a conversation with him where he explained how AI is a stock-driven growth bubble, fueled by tech bros who hype up AI’s ability in order to seduce bosses who have wet dreams of replacing all workers and gaining world-destroying power. However, AI is also a Ponzi scheme scooping up unimaginable amounts of investor money in a bubble that is bound to burst. So now let’s pick up our conversation with Cory Doctorow, as I ask him, should we be worried about AI art?
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear part two of my interview with Cory Doctorow on the Arts Express radio show this week, heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica stations across the nation.
Part one can be found here:
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
“This past week, we lost Mitchel Cohen, a passionate radical Marxist activist, thinker, writer, environmentalist, organizer, poet, and Phil Ochs fan, who was seemingly everywhere, connected to everyone on the left, including here on WBAI and Pacifica. It seemed like there was hardly a protest, demonstration, civil disobedience, or conference that he wasn’t a part of in one way or another…”
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear our remembrance of Mitchel, as broadcast this week on the Arts Express radio program, heard on WBAI FM NYC, WBAI.org and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
With an army sergeant using his inside info on the kidnapping of Maduro to win $400,000, and Donald Trump Jr. on the board of advisers to Polymarket, the world, as Jesse Welles sings here, is one big slot machine
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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.
During these past weeks of the American-Israeli War on Iran, we’ve been deluged by the unhinged words and actions of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth. It’s been much rarer to hear the direct words of those from the Iranian administration, but In a bold statement, the President of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, posted a letter on social media directly addressed to the American people. Pezeshkian, who before going into politics was a heart surgeon trained at the Tabriz University of Medical Science and who served as a doctor in the Iran-Iraq War, has a wide historical perspective. I thought you might be interested in hearing the letter that he wrote, so I’ll read it in full now…
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear the letter as read on the Arts Express program, heard on WBAI FM NYC, WBAI.org, and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
“John Sayles, filmmaker and novelist, known especially for his labor films, including the celebrated Matewan, has a new novel out. In his latest historical fiction, Crucible, Sayles furthers the story of the struggle of American labor, when organized labor in Michigan took on that force of nature–or better, force of capitalism–Henry Ford…”
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear my interview with John Sayles as broadcast on the Arts Express radio program, as heard on WBAI FM NYC, WBAI.org and Pacifica affiliates across the nation
“Last week we began our delightful conversation with Ryan Goldberg, author of Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds. Ryan talked about how the social and even political structure of New York city has been shaped by, and shaped, New York’s birds from beaches to parks, cemeteries to garbage dumps, airports to salt marshes. We left off our conversation where I had asked Ryan about the New York City so-called celebrity birds that from time to time blow up on social media…”
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear the continuation of 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 1 of our conversation here)
“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)
“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.
“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.
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.
“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
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.
“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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