Audio by Adam

There are hundreds of musicians, good and bad, tooting and strumming and bowing and belting in the New York subway system, but Mr. Spoons is sui generis. Not only is he fantastic at playing the spoons, he has an outsize character to match. I spent some serious time with him, and filed this report for VOA.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:45 — 7.1MB)

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This is a look at the Iron John aka the Wild Man, an archetypal figure representing the deep masculine found in the Grimm Brothers tales, and other traditions. This was popularized by the poet Robert Bly as a story with much to tell modern Western man, who may have lost touch with their own wildness, and therefore their capacity to protect others, and to live fully.

See also my profiles of Robert Bly himself elsewhere in this blog.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:42 — 14.4MB)

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Folk all over the world have their own versions of homemade liquor that will blow the top of your head right off.,  but “White Lightning” from the stills of Appalachia have their own appeal for Americans who have heard about it through family lore and popular culture, or tasted it in a parking lot or next to a trailer or at a wood burning stove.  During a trip to the back-country road trip through Tennessee and North Carolina, I sought out a real “moonshiner,’ and I sure found one in the person of “Popcorn Sutton.”   With his long beard, beat up old hat, and impossibly thick mountain accent, he fit the stereotype to a “T.”  His booze ain’t bad ‘nuther. I still have some underneath the kitchen sink you are welcome to try.  Banana flavored!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:58 — 5.5MB)

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Annie Finch is one of the most intelligent, sensitive and prescient poets writing about poetry and women’s poetry in particular.  Here is a story I did about her when a new collection of her poems had been published. What a voice!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:53 — 8.1MB)

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Art Spiegelman is most famous for his Pulitzer Prize winning work “Maus,” a graphic novel about the Holocaust in which Nazis are portrayed as cats, and Jews are depicted as mice.  In this profile, Spiegelman talks about his roots as a Mad Magazine afficionado, underground cartoonist, and his experience growing up in a Queens NY family overshadowed by the Shoah.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:59 — 4.8MB)

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This is a profile of the entrepreneurial publisher and First Amendment activist Barney Rosset. During the mid 20^th century Rosset tirelessly fought America’s anti-obscenity laws in order to publish now-classic works by D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs and scores of other non-Establishment writers, several of whom went on to win the Nobel Prize.  Barney talked with Adam in the labyrinthine Greenwich Village apartment he shares with his wife Astrid, and the Evergreen Review offices.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:56 — 7.3MB)

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Meet David Isay, a humane and immensely talennted radio documentary maker and oral historian who has probably won every broadcasting award out there.  Isay has dedicated his career to celebrating the lives of everyday Americans by recording their stories, and chronicling the experiences of underdogs and colorful characters, many of them living outside the American cultural mainstream.  We meet him, and sample some of them, in this profile.

See also “Listening is an Act of Love” and “Storycorps” stories also in this blog.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:29 — 6.9MB)

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From his “Sick, Sick, Sick” book to the Village Voice, the Phantom Tollbooth, biting political satire  and beyond, Jules Feiffer is known for his beautiful simple lines that bring often neurotic characters to life in both funny and heartbreakingly human ways. Here we get a taste of this American treasure in his own words, and learn just who that dancer girl is/was in real life.  (I know I certainly had a crush on her, and I’m sure I was not alone.)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:22 — 6.7MB)

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Professor Maxine Greene of Teachers College, Columbia University, 91, has spent her educating and inspiring educators, artists and children in humanistic “wide-awakedness” and the social imagination.  Now 91, Maxine  has also been Philosopher-in-Residence at the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education since 1975. She just received a Gold Medal from Barnarnd College.  Maxine grew up with my mother in Brooklyn, and was a frequent dinner guest at our home on East 70th Street.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:42 — 5.2MB)

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Pamelia Kursten is the 21st century’s greatest theremin virtuosa, who has turned an instrument most associate with creepy sci-fi “woo-woo” music into an art form. Hear what she has to say and how she does it in this sound-rich piece, originally produced for the Voice of America’s “Our World” science program.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:30 — 7.8MB)

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