The Organist

What happens when the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves turn out to be wrong? And what if the attempt to shape our life stories to fit some formulaic narrative arc fundamentally distorts them? Could different narrative forms tell more honest stories? Or do all narratives falsify reality in their own way?

Three artists suggest new ways forward for narrative storytelling and making sense of the world. Maggie Nelson seeks to write stories that, in place of a traditional plot, instead reflect a mode of being in the world. Visual artist Brian Belott blends found sounds, Groucho Marxian humor, and playful nonsense into anarchic vocal freakouts. And writer and artist Renee Gladman confounds the boundaries of reading, drawing, and seeing to connect thinkers with landscape and turn ideas into architecture.

Buck Gooter is quite possibly the hardest-working band you’ve never heard of. Since forming in 2005, the band has logged 18 albums and 531 live shows. Their latest, Finer Thorns, just came out. But they’ve never had a hit, never been reviewed by Pitchfork.

A punk duo from Harrisonburg, Virginia, Buck Gooter is Billy Brett, 33, and Terry Turtle, 66. On paper, they’re an odd couple, separated as they are by a generation and change. But on stage, they’ve formed a tight and incredibly productive musical collaboration.

Together, Brett and Turtle criss-cross the country in a Subaru Forester to play heavy, abrasive rock music to small groups of 20-somethings in basements. They crash on couches, and when couches aren’t available, on floors.

Buck Gooter is not alone — surely there are thousands of bands like this, releasing music to no fanfare and touring for little or no money. In this cultural moment, when it can seem like ubiquity is the only criterion for artistic success, what keeps a band like Buck Gooter going?

[Explicit language]

In 2017, David Lynch’s metaphysical detective soap opera Twin Peaks returned to cable television screens 26 years after its network cancellation. Most of the original characters resurfaced, but in several cases, either those characters or the actors playing them—or both—were dying. Over its 18 new episodes, this specter of commingled on- and off-screen mortality became as much the substance of the show as the narrative of mysteries, disappearances, violence, slapstick, romances, and resurrections that played out in the foreground.

In the original series, Kyle MacLachlan, as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, investigated the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the all-American high school student with a double life. From there, the show spiraled into a web of secrets, conspiracies, red herrings, in-jokes, and epiphanies. Twin Peaks: The Return jettisoned much of the original series’ plot-based baggage. Instead, it explored the abstract possibilities of the form, tracing mystical and mundane contingencies that ran along a live wire from Lynch’s 1977 film Eraserhead directly into the circuitry of present-day Twin Peaks.

It is here critic Howard Hampton locates his own kinship with the world of Twin Peaks, together with the true source of the show’s screwball gravitas: the late Catherine Coulson as “the Log Lady,” Margaret Lanterman. Coulson had been with Lynch since his Eraserhead days. A beacon, a cipher, a beloved emblem of Lynch’s universe on the verge of death herself, she delivers a benediction disguised as an oracle’s warning.

On this week’s Organist, two stories about the surprising intimacy of anonymity. In the first, thousands of people sign up for a service, created by artist and programmer Max Hawkins, which wakes up thousands strangers with a phone call in the middle of the night then pairs them up at random and records their conversations. The vulnerability of that moment, and the anonymity of having a sleepy and total stranger on the end of the line, leads to recordings of astonishing intimacy. One night, a fighting couple, who have angrily retreated to their separate apartments, wake up to hear the voice of the other on the line, a one-in-four-thousand chance. After talking face-to-face has failed, can this weird art experiment bring them back together?

In our second story, Vanessa Lowe—host of KCRW’s Nocturne, a sound-rich podcast featuring stories about the night—walks home from her favorite coffee shop to find a handwritten note sitting under a rock on her front porch. It's from an anonymous stranger, who has listened to her every word in the cafe. The note’s contents pull her into a series of increasingly anxious encounters. Has this process made her more sinister, alienated, and critical than the anonymous note-writer him or herself?

If you’ve lived in L.A. anytime in the last thirty years, you know Angelyne. She’s the blonde bombshell on the billboards that used to be studded like rhinestones all over the city. Angelyne rose to prominence in the ‘80s, and she was a mashup of elements from the pantheon of Hollywood starlets: platinum hair, an hourglass figure, and a breathy, cooing voice. But Instead of a movie or a TV show or an album, Angelyne’s billboards just advertised herself.

A ninth-grader named Kate Wolf interviewed Angelyne at the height of her popularity by pretending she was a reporter for her school newspaper. Twenty-five years later, Kate wins a raffle for a ride in Angelyne’s hot-pink Corvette and asks Angelyne the tough questions about truth, image, aging, and her career as a looming pink archetype of gender.

This week we bring you dogs, many of them. So many dogs that you can’t possibly scratch the soft fur behind all of their ears or gently caress the scruff of all of their necks or pat all of their bellies when they climb onto your lap and roll over prone for your affection. To investigate the connection between humans and canis familiaris, we talk with acclaimed character actor Bob Balaban, who you’ve seen in dozens of movies and TV shows including Best in Show, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Midnight Cowboy, Seinfeld, Waiting for Guffman, Capote, and Moonrise Kingdom. You also might have heard him as the voice of King in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. When he’s not acting in dog-related films, Balaban is also the author of a series of children’s books about McGrowl, a courageous, bionic dog.

We also talk with André Alexis, author of the novel Fifteen Dogs. Alexis got his start as a novelist while dog-sitting eleven huskies in rural Canada. As he sat at his desk trying to write, Alexis also tried to learn the dogs’ language. Could he howl so that they believed he was one of them? And what would the moral consequences of that howling be?

This episode also features a short, absurdist radio fiction by Graham Mason in which you, the listener, encounter a highly skilled dog masseuse whose dog-petting prowess will drive a wedge between you and your dog forever.

Recalling the experimental films of David Lynch or Andrei Tarkovsky, Chris Reynolds’s comic books, newly anthologized as The New World, confound his readers’ expectations at every turn. In these dream-like narratives, Reynolds twists the trope of a space-helmeted comic-book hero into an uncanny figure. Comic-book plotlines, including kidnappings and interplanetary travel, dissipate as the story shifts to focus instead on ominous silences, images of weirdly depopulated cityscapes, and the mysterious appearance of a massive Roman archway. On this episode of the Organist, the artist speaks with the novelist and critic Ed Park. We also hear reflections from the celebrated graphic novelist Seth, who edited and designed this new collection, interwoven with audio adaptations of some of the more beguiling stories from the book.

Temple Grandin, an animal scientist and autism advocate, describes how she uses sound to make cattle slaughterhouses more humane. Journalist Bella Bathurst describes how she lost her hearing while conducting interviews with the last generation of Scottish lighthouse keepers and then how it felt, twelve years later, to regain it. Along the way, we’ll listen deeply to ABBA and the Beach Boys and hear an excerpt from Alexander Provan’s experimental essay/soundscape/bildungsroman Measuring Device with Organs, which explores sound connoisseurship and the tones that high-fidelity eliminates as unsavory.

Provan’s work is available as both an LP and MP3 from Triple Canopy.

This week we visit the shady glen where language and music make out with each other, in a field surrounded by phonemes, intonation, and the throw-away vocables of human expression. What’s important here isn’t what we say, but how we say it.

We talk with artists working at the boundary between language and music: the composer Kate Soper, the poet Jeremy Sigler, and the drummer Milford Graves.

This week, we explore how artists navigate disease, how disease can be both a stigma and an identity, and how artists both resist and embrace that identity even as it comes to define their work. We’ll listen to the audio diaries of multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992. We’ll also hear from author Sandy Allen, whose uncle Bob, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, mailed them a manuscript of the “true story” of his life, which Sandy has translated into a new book, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise, which questions our ideas on mental health. Andrew Leland discusses the #HowEyeSeeIt blindfold challenge, which pitted the ideologies of two different blindness organizations against each other.

David Wojnarowicz’s audio diaries are available as a three-LP vinyl release from the Reading Group record label and as a book, The Weight of the Earth, from Semiotext(e). Wojnarowicz’s art and music were the subject of a recent retrospective at the Whitney Museum. Lastly, you can read learn more about Sandy Allen’s book, A Kind of Mirraculus Paradise here.

This week we explore two beliefs that persist in the absence of proof. In a recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel, Donald Glover made comments linking him to a community known as “Stevie truthers,” conspiracy theorists who believe that Stevie Wonder is faking his own blindness. When Glover asks Wonder for permission to use one of his songs on his TV show Atlanta, he wonders how Stevie will be able to watch the episode—but Wonder’s work in soundtracks goes back to 1979, when he scored the New Age documentary The Secret Life of Plants, which proposes that plants are in fact conscious beings capable of communication (sometimes with aliens). That film abounds in pseudoscience, but it went on to make a lasting impact on both science and the arts. It set back the serious study of plant behavior by a generation, making the field itself a subject of ridicule in the scientific community, but also inspired musical experiments in which plants’ chemical reactions generate electronic compositions of real beauty.

Wendy Davis’s epic thirteen-hour filibuster made the Texas legislature’s livestream into a viral sensation. But Jen Rice, our producer in Austin, argues that beyond these viral scenes, its season-length, character-driven plot arcs make the Texas legislature—or as die-hard fans call it, “the Lege”—every bit the equal of prestige-television staples like Game of Thrones or Mad Men. In her recap of the 85th Texas legislative session, Jen brings us the escalating rivalries, tearful monologues, fighting in the middle of the night—all the pieces that build up to the climactic moments in the best show you didn’t even know you were missing.

And Niela Orr, our contributing editor and a writer-at-large, tells us about two summer albums she’s been listening to: one dark, funny, and totally sincere; the other bright, anthemic, and basically empty. In different ways, they’re both perfect listening for the end of this hot, depressing summer.

Lastly, we discover a new transmission from within the infinite hexagonal chambers of the iTunes Library of Babel, an alternate world which contains all possible podcasts. Aaron Thier, author of The World is a Narrow Bridge, brings us a city-council livestream, in which sentient trees, jars of radium, and severed fingers are all up for sale.

This week, two stories from the borderlands of the U.S. First, the story of poet Javier Zamora. When he was nine, he crossed the Sonoran Desert into the U.S. to reunite with his family, who had left home before him in order to escape the political violence in El Salvador. Years later, Zamora found a way to process this childhood trauma by writing furious, luminous poetry. In this interview, he describes indelible images from his border-crossing—guns, dogs, crawling through tunnels, conflicted border guards, and craving water—and how revisiting the experience through writing has brought him to a new understanding of what it meant.

At a time when the relationship between the U.S. and Canada has become unusually tense, we speak with Porter Fox, the author of Northland, who spent three years exploring the 4,000-mile border between Maine and Washington. His writing illuminates a stretch of land unknown to most Americans, and engages with its history and beauty but ends up encountering a very contemporary narrative of an increasingly policed border and Native American protests in Standing Rock and elsewhere.

Phonographer Ernst Karel explores physical space through sound. Using two microphones, each pointed at a different country, Karel created an uncanny soundscape of a triangular section of the border between Switzerland, France, and Germany, and how each uses the border region to different economic ends.

Lastly, as part of our ongoing series, Vi Vered sends a new dispatch from the iTunes Library of Babel.

You can read more from our interview with Javier Zamora at mcsweeneys.net.

After the death of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Franz Wright in 2015, his wife Beth gave producer Bianca Giaever 546 audio tapes that he made as he was dying. Unable to type because of pain in his wrists, Franz used an audio recorder to dictate his poetry, but it picked up much more: Franz talked with his wife, made phone calls, cursed at his cat, and fantasized about the first human to ever speak.

Franz was known in the poetry world as a genius and a lunatic. His father was James Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1972. Franz was plagued by mental illness and addiction, and he attempted suicide many times.

When Bianca visited his apartment in Waltham, Massachusetts, she was amazed by what she saw. Writing covered the apartment. Franz wrote poetry directly on the fridge, painted poetry on the walls, and even scribbled on coffee filters. All over the house Bianca found love notes they had written to each other. Franz had been given a terminal cancer diagnosis, but the tapes record an incredible vitality in the face of death. His wife’s decision to give her these tapes changed Bianca’s life.

You can find photos of the apartment Franz and Beth shared, including the poetry Franz wrote on a styrofoam Dunkin’ Donuts cup just after he awoke from surgery, at mcsweeneys.net.

This story was produced by Bianca and Jay Allison, and originally aired on the public radio website Transom.org. You can find the original story and read about their process here.

Support for this project came from the National Endowment for the Arts.

This week we bring you voices from heaven, hell, and everywhere in between. In documentary films, the authoritative “Voice of God” style of narration presents a seemingly omniscient, impartial, deep-voiced male narrator. No one has had more practice with the role than Peter Coyote, best known as the narrator of Ken Burns’ documentaries (The West, The Roosevelts, The National Parks). Here, Coyote gives a master class on the major differences in meaning that arise from tiny shifts in register, pulling a story out of melodrama into an illusion of objectivity.

Ellie Kemper (star of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) shares a mysterious sound that’s stayed with her for twenty-three years, and describes a high-school musical performance that changed her life.

Penelope Spheeris is best known as the director of Wayne’s World, but while filming the legendary documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part III, about homeless L.A. punks, she met her long-time boyfriend SIN, who performs dissonant guitar rock as psychological therapy to exorcise the demons in his mind: “It’s like listening to hell.”

And our host describes his changing relationship to voices and narration as he adapts to his own degenerative blindness.

Finally, we’ll inaugurate a new recurring segment, “The iTunes Library of Babel,” in which we present short excerpts from an infinite Borgesian library of podcasts.

Produced by Myke Dodge Weiskopf, Jenny Ament, Ross Simonini, and Andrew Leland. Library of Babel excerpts produced by Fil Corbitt and Owen Poindexter.

From KCRW and McSweeney’s, the Organist returns with its fifth season on July 12!

We’ll be drilling down into pop culture to reveal its dark, beautiful, pulsating inner-core to bring you funny, sad, and surprising stories about the complex ideas and feelings behind the artists and thinkers that we adore.

We’ll visit gutter punks and Pulitzer Prize–winners, we’ll talk to a poet who crossed the Sonoran Desert into the U.S. at nine years old, and a writer who traveled the entirety of the US-Canada border and stumbled into the beginning of the Standing Rock protests.

We’ll binge-watch the Texas State House live feed like it was prestige TV, and study prop comedy like it was Marxist literary theory. The Organist is your indispensable guide to this twisted landscape of contemporary art, culture, and ideas.

New episodes will magically appear in your feed every other week, starting Thursday. What, you don't already subscribe? Do it here.

(And while you're there — maybe leave us a review?)

The Organist is still in off-season hibernation, but we emerge for a moment in order to showcase KCRW’s newest podcast: Lost Notes. In this episode, writer Donnell Alexander examines the racial politics of a strange chapter of early 80s pop-music history. To white America, Boston’s music scene was synonymous with the hard rock of Aerosmith and J. Geils Band. But alongside rock and roll was a vital tradition of talent shows in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood which birthed the careers of Donna Summer and New Edition—a group perhaps best known for launching Bobby Brown and Bell Biv DeVoe. Through the lens of New Edition’s tumultuous career, Donnell Alexander lovingly, trenchantly, and often hilariously describes the group’s collaboration with Monkees’ songwriter Bobby Hart; Michael Jackson’s offer of clemency when New Edition faced a career-ending copyright-infringement suit; and how the boy band’s perceived betrayal of their roots at the height of the Celtics-Lakers rivalry drove a painful wedge into their fanbase.

The Organist will be back with new episodes on June 28, 2018.

Produced by Donnell Alexander. Lost Notes is produced by Myke Dodge Weiskopf and hosted by Solomon Georgio. Its executive producer is Nick White.

Between 1967 and 1975, the Firesign Theatre put out nine albums that carved out a new space somewhere between comedy, sound art, literature, and rock and roll. The music critic Robert Christgau called them “a comedy group that uses the recording studio at least as brilliantly as any rock group.”

In this episode, we focus not on how those albums were made, but how they were heard. From teenage house parties to soldiers’ barracks in Vietnam, the Firesign Theatre infiltrated thousands of American headphones and hi-fis. Jeremy Braddock, a scholar and critic currently writing a book on Firesign, brings us the story of how the group’s psychedelic psy-ops tactics created a new kind of collective listening in America.

Produced by Myke Dodge Weiskopf and Jeremy Braddock Image courtesy of Firesign Theatre

After King Kreon condemns her brother, a traitor, to rot on the battlefield, Antigone defies him, risking her own life, to give her brother a proper burial. This week, we present poet Anne Carson’s experimental translation of Sophocles’ play, an adaptation that incorporates within it 2,500 years of the play’s reception history, its performances (from Brecht to Vichy France), its interpretations (from Hegel to Judith Butler), and starring artist Margaux Williamson as Antigone.

Many thanks to Anne Carson, Ella Haselswerdt, Katie Fleming, Hannah Silverblank, New Directions Books, and Michael Barron.

Produced by Angela Shackel Image credit: Braden Labonté

In the early 90s, when Meshell Ndegeocello released Plantation Lullabies, her first album, she helped to usher in the era of neo-soul. Her debut inspired a slew of artists such as Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, and Lauryn Hill. On later albums, Ndegeocello went on to experiment with silky jazz ballads, staccato rapping, quiet meditations—all of it led by the fat, undeniable groove of her bass playing. But even as she began to work with the energy of rock and the introspection of folk, her sound remained steeped in soul.

This week, we hear about Ndegeocello’s most recent project, a theatrical work called Can I Get a Witness: The Gospel of James Baldwin. In the last few years, there’s been a resurgence of interest in Baldwin, who died in 1987. Baldwin has emerged as an icon for a new generation of literary essayists—figures like Jesmyn Ward, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah—whose writing carries forward the power and precision in Baldwin’s work, addressing the African-American experience in a range of registers, moving from journalism to memoir to sermon to polemic to fine-grained, fiercely argued sociological and psychological analysis.

Meshell Ndegeocello’s adoration of Baldwin is secular, despite its many religious trappings. Ndegeocello has sanctified James Baldwin for his intellectual curiosity, for the way his work leads its listeners and readers to enlightenment through argument, information, and analysis, rather than faith and mysticism. It’s an immersive performance, somewhere between an improvisational concert, a dynamic church service, a rowdy, communal literary reading, and an exuberant celebration of a masterful writer.

This week you’ll also hear fiction from Ben Greenman. Ben has collaborated on books with Questlove and George Clinton and is the author most recently of Don Quixotic, a darkly comic investigation of the internal workings on the mind of our forty-fifth president. His story is performed here by actor Hank Harris, who has recently appeared on Twin Peaks and The Man in the High Castle.

This week, we’re sharing a highly subjective journey through one narrow, eccentric, corridor of radio advertising, as heard through the ears of one man. His name is Clive Desmond. Clive is a radio advertising producer, writer, and composer. He’s been doing it for more than thirty years, and he’s won some of the industry’s top awards. Through those years he’s been sort of a zelig figure: you can find his face somewhere in the margins of every one of the medium’s key aesthetic revolutions. He’s rescued beautiful forgotten nuggets of radio history, and he’s delicately arranged them into a glittering associative chain—a constellation of jingles and spots that somehow all add up, to a life: The life of Clive Desmond as heard through the radio. 

Listen below to a special bonus playlist of some of the finest radio-advertising nuggets Clive assembled:

In this episode, you’ll also hear Josh Wilker read his review of our program. “A man claiming to be from The Organist came to the parking lot gate out back. He said he needed access to the building’s electricity meter. We looked at one another through the bars.†Josh Wilker is the author of the pop-culture memoirs Cardboard Gods, Benchwarmer, and The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. He lives in Chicago.

You can also check out our episode on Mal Sharpe, a man who was among the first wave of fake newsmen, paving the way from everyone from Borat to Colbert. In this week’s episode, Clive Desmond cites Mal as one of the originators of the “man on the street†radio commercial. Special thanks to Doug Thompson, Dan Aron, Nick Ream and Jennifer Sharper.

All incidental music courtesy of the wonderful artists listed below from Free Music Archive FMA.org

Podington Bear, “Three Colors,†“Light Touch,†“Keep Dancing,†“Clouds Pass Softly Deuxâ€

Lee Rosevere, “Let's Start At The Beginning,†“Making A Change Blue Dot Sessions, “Diatom,†“The Zeppelinâ€

Anamorphic Orchestra, “Machine Elvesâ€

Chris Zabriskie , "Another Version of You"

This week, we pull out the stops and go full-Organist with an episode about Ákos Rózmann, an organist serving a Catholic church in Stockholm who played hymns during the day and by night invented unearthly electronic music in the recording studio he’d built in the church basement (where he often slept). It was there that he composed his roiling experimental six-hour-long composition 12 Stations—a sonic journey from hell to heaven, which emerged from the personal trauma of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Hungary and then his father’s death in a Communist-era concentration camp. Stephen O’Malley, the composer and guitarist behind Sunn O))) and other doom-metal projects has recently reissued Rózmann’s compositions on his record label Ideologic Organ.

  Ákos Rózmann

This episode also features Jordan Jacks’s organophilic flash fiction: “The organist at my parents’ church had severe arthritis, and as a child my job was to flip pages for her. Her hands were so stiff that I also had to pull the stops: clarion, chimney flute, vox humana. Occasionally, when her ankles were bad, I also sat under the bench and pressed the keys of the pedalboard with my hands, waiting to hear the organist whisper the note down to me.”

Produced by Thomas Henley Image credit: Courtesy of Ideologic Organ

As an artist, Martine Syms says she’s interested in how her experience—in particular, her experience as a young black woman—gets shaped and determined by various forms of media—especially digital media. She’s interested in the power of that media—not just the obvious power of those who produce it, but the ways in which reading and consuming can also be acts of power.

One of Syms’s best-known projects is a critique of Afrofuturism, the artistic movement that explores and imagines the intersections between black culture and technology, typified by writers like Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany or musicians like Sun Ra or Janelle Monáe. Syms’s work is preoccupied with the connections between media, technology, and black culture, but she rejects the afrofuturist mythology that imagines technology as a radical liberating funk-inflected fantasy. Syms is an afrofuturist, but, in her words, a mundane one. For her, the stakes are too high for an art that dwells in fantasy or the “harmless fun” of funky space aliens. The imaginative work of Afrofuturism takes the form of art that, for all its futurism and digitality, remains focused on our world, however upsetting, unjust, and mundane it may be.

For the Organist, Syms spoke with our contributing editor, Niela Orr, about Syms’s life and approach to art, and the new languages she invents for herself.

In this episode, we also travel with Carmen Maria Machado to an Iowa gas station, where we find a dusty Subaru, a herd of cat-eyed children, and air that smells like diesel and manure and, inexplicably, limes. Carmen’s book Her Body and Other Parties was recently long-listed for the National Book Award. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and elsewhere.

Produced by Niela Orr and Jenny Ament Image by Martine Syms, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

Warm yourself beneath an underpass of the information superhighway! Brian McMullen reads all one thousand of his epic catalog of unclaimed URLs in this special appendix to our recent episode, magnificentwebsite.com, which explored the disassembly of one’s public persona and internet-induced bewilderment.

Brian has worked as an editor, art director, and designer for McSweeney’s, BOMB, Grantland, Cabinet, and Lucky Peach. With his wife Katie, he operates a small clothing company called Pantalaine, specializing in clothes made to be worn by two or more people at the same time.

Brian is publishing a special printed zine edition of Still Not Dotcoms to coincide with the release of this episode of the Organist. And he’d like to make this print edition freely available to any Organist listener who emails him at brianmcmullen at hotmail.com and mentions the Organist.

Has the internet documented everything? This week we explore its lacunae and unmoderated chat rooms and the ways we might slip away from the public identities we create online and in the media.

Joshua Cohen, author of Moving Kings and Book of Numbers, writes a novel live online, each word as he types it visible to the spectators of a raucous unmoderated chatroom funneling Reddit-grade hate speech into the margins of the author’s screen as he types, completing the novel in just five days.

MF Doom, who raps while wearing a steel gladiator mask, began sending other rappers—known as Doomposters, or MF Dupes—to headline his own shows. We investigate MF Doom’s slippery approach to identity and its relation to black performance art in conjunction with the Believer magazine’s return to the newsstands.

“My idea of advanced technology is a toilet seat whose trajectory from up to down takes so long to complete, I can pluck my unibrow while waiting for it to happen.” Zoe Lister-Jones, writer, director, and star of the new film Band Aid performs short fiction from novelist Fiona Maazel, explores the nascent form of the podcast from a 4 am toilet seat in a retirement home with stops along the way for eating disorders, evasive children, and the sinking feeling of disappearing from reality.

Throughout this week’s episode you’ll hear a catalog of unclaimed URLs from artist and writer Brian McMullen. “Kittenlawyer.com, specialgrandson.com, coolgrandson.com, supergrandson.com, bestgrandsonever.com, cocainegalaxy.com, cocaineuniverse.com, cocainery.com, badassperson.com, decentemployer.com, decentemployee.com, splendidsex.com, sexaintbad.com, abolishsex.com…”

Caveh Zahedi conflates reality TV, experimental documentary, and discomfort comedy in unsettling high-stakes films about his own life. In each episode of his TV project The Show about the Show, the actors and crew recreate the conflicts, interpersonal dramas, and unwittingly shared secrets that occurred during the filming of the previous episode. Each level takes us further behind the performance, landing the viewer deep inside the eccentric mind of Caveh himself. With an oddly life-affirming honesty, his work violates ethical boundaries and triggers the unraveling of his marriage. Is it worth losing someone you love to make the art you believe in? When the Organist sends producer Rachel James to document the production of his TV show, she too becomes drawn into Caveh’s inescapable vortex of metanarrative.

Produced by Rachel James and Mickey Capper

Note: this episode contains salty and/or strong language. Listener discretion is advised.

Anne Thompson rented a billboard along Interstate 70 in Missouri to put up an artwork that says “Keep Abortion Legal.” Anne runs the I-70 Sign Show, a project that, since 2014, has displayed the work of artists including Ed Ruscha, Marilyn Minter, and Mickalene Thomas along a stretch of highway that runs across the state of Missouri. Though Anne wasn’t initially interested in addressing politics through the project, all of that changed after the election. The I-70 Sign Show’s billboards often collide with their setting in unexpected ways, and it’s not uncommon for billboards to be defaced. Will the “Keep Abortion Legal” billboard, originally designed by artist Aleksandra Mir, be riddled with bullets by the time it’s replaced by a discount boots sign?

Also, we occasionally get some complaints about our show, like this one which was recently posted on our Apple Podcasts page from J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is the author of two story collections and eight novels, including Mailman, Familiar, and Broken River. On this episode, he reads his review.

Below you’ll find a slideshow of billboards from Anne Thompson’s I-70 Sign Show project. We’ve also included a bunch of other non-art billboards, Anne Thompson’s favorites from along I-70.

Produced by Bram Sable-Smith.

Aleksandra Mir, "Keep Abortion Legal," June-July 2017 View of installation at I-70 West mile 101, near Boonville (Credit: Matt Rahner for the I-70 Sign Show)

Commercial billboard, I-70, Missouri.

Jeff Gibson, "Armagarden," 2015  On main billboard, in Hatton, Missouri, December 2015–February 2016 (courtesy of Anne Thompson / I-70 Sign Show)

Commercial billboard, I-70, Missouri.

Karl Haendel, "Plow Pose," 2015On main billboard March–May 2015 (courtesy of Anne Thompson / I-70 Sign Show)

Commercial billboard, I-70, Missouri.

Visit I-70 Sign Show’s website to see art billboards from Marilyn Minter, Ed Ruscha, Ryan McGinness, and others.

This week we talk to two artists who see themselves as detectives. Trevor Paglen has designed sculptures for the Fukushima Exclusion Zone, as well as art that’s been launched into geostationary orbit. His photographs of secret military bases (taken at long range, using equipment made for astronomers) appeared in the Academy Award–winning documentary Citizenfour. We spoke with him about how to care for one’s personal digital hygiene in the age of surveillance.

To document torture, mass executions, and human-rights abuses at Saydnaya Prison in Syria, Amnesty International enlisted the help of sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan. This week we’re presenting Abu Hamdan’s sound installation Saydnaya (The Missing 19DB)—that’s “DB” as in decibels, the standard measure for the volume of sound. It offers an uncompromising depiction of Saydnaya, a notorious military prison in Syria, believed to be the site of up to fifty hangings each day. It’s a compound in the mountains just north of Damascus holding up to twenty thousand people in conditions of enforced silence. Abu Hamdan made the piece through interviews conducted in Istanbul with five survivors from the prison.

This episode also features a luminous and digressive review of the Organist, ripped from the heaps of listener commentary on our Apple Podcasts page, by the writer Vu Tran—no stranger to art as detective work himself. His work has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories, and his novel Dragonfish adapts and carries forward the tradition of writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. In his reflections on this podcast, Vu finds Melville's Secret Sharer in the woods of Vermont.

To learn more about conditions in Saydnaya Prison, visit Amnesty International’s interactive digital model, as reconstructed from interviews by Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Forensic Architecture.

Produced by Ross Simonini

Featured photo of Drone Vision courtesy of Trevor Paglen

Horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, best known for Cthulhu, an octopus-faced cosmic entity, has long inspired obsessive fandom and his short stories, in the hundred years since they were first published, have influenced a wide range of figures, including William Burroughs, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, the makers of the Alien movies and the game Dungeons & Dragons, to name but a few. In Lovecraft’s cosmology, the human mind is incapable of comprehending the full psychic horror of reality and either must take refuge on a placid island of ignorance or be swept up in the black seas of infinity. Paul La Farge’s new novel, The Night Ocean, traces Lovecraft’s unusual friendship with a 16-year-old fan: the poet Robert Barlow, who Lovecraft followed to Florida, where they collaborated on a single story, the last work of fiction that either of them wrote before Lovecraft’s death and Barlow’s own tragic end.

In this episode, we also ask you to take the hand of “The Oldest Person in Town,” as—he, she, they—die and die and die again. Edgar Oliver, beloved for his monologues on The Moth Podcast, performs this short fiction from Kevin Moffett.

In our final segment, Yuri Herrera, author most recently of Kingdom Cons, and Lisa Dillman, translator of his novels, delve into noir in their collaborative meta-review of our show.

The excerpts from Lovecraft’s stories in this episode were performed by Omar Metwally, whose voice you may recognize from his television roles in Mr. Robot and The Affair.

Produced by Matt Frassica.

Will Marlon Brando’s anguished shout from A Streetcar Named Desire survive as a cultural meme long after Brando himself is forgotten? Will the Stella scream become an enduring cultural reference in the vein of Shakespeare’s quotations? In 2011, essayist Elena Passarello won New Orleans’ annual Stella scream competition by channelling Brando’s abject bawling. This week we speak with her about screams, cries, and the full range of the human voice. How does the body play into the sound of our voice? Is it possible to hear a broken foot bone when a performer speaks or sings? As interviewer Niela Orr puts it, “Passarello’s essays are what would happen if Joan Didion wrote captions for VH1's Pop-Up Video.” Passarello’s work explores the physical and cultural aspects of the human voice and how they might be connected. Our discussion encompasses vocality from opera, Flavor Flav, and James Brown, as well as automated voices, such as the classic Bell telephone operator, the voice of the Moviefone hotline, and contemporary AI, including Alexa and Siri—and how these automated voices mimic accents and human confusion. You’ll also hear Passarello’s rendition of how Koko, the gorilla with a lexicon of 1000 signs, tells the legendarily dirty vaudeville joke “The Aristocrats.”

You’ll also hear fiction from Chelsea Martin on attempts to woo an estranged ex—written in the form of a review of The Organist podcast itself.

Special thanks to Mickey Capper and Sidewalks podcast for the use of “Someone like Baby.”

Produced by Jenny Ament and Niela Orr.

If each episode of a podcast is an organ, an essential piece of a larger body, then this is an appendix to that body: a non-essential but still uniquely formed bonus episode. In it you’ll hear a hypnotic induction as performed and scored by the hypnotherapist Daniel Ryan. Ryan was featured on the Organist last week in our episode about the relationship between our bodies, our minds, and sound. One last note— it’s probably best if you stop operating heavy machinery while you’re listening to this podcast.

How does music resemble food? How can sound work like medicine? To treat chronic digestive pain, producer Ross Simonini tried everything until visiting hypnotherapist Daniel Ryan, who uses only the sound of his voice through a technique shared by orators, monks, musicians, parents—and magician David Blaine.

We also learn about the psychoacoustics of lawn sprinklers with Susan Rogers, a sound engineer who’s recorded albums for David Byrne, Barenaked Ladies, Tricky, and, most famously, Prince’s albums Purple Rain and Sign o' the Times. Rogers is one of the most legendary female sound engineers in an industry long dominated by men. These days, she’s also a professor at the Berklee School of Music, where she researches how our brains process sound.

Lastly, author Eugene Lim brings us speculative fiction on the interstellar connections between celebrity CEO Elon Musk and the Organist podcast itself.

Hypnosis segment produced by Ross Simonini. Interview with Susan Rogers produced by Jenny Ament.

This week, we voyage deep into outer space for a story that’s funny, strange, somewhat erotic and a little depressing. It’s a science-fiction outer space radio drama featuring Martin Starr (Silicon Valley, Freaks and Geeks), Matt Bush (Adventureland), and Lilan Bowden (Parks and Recreation). It’s part of a series called The Outer Reach, directed and produced by Nick White. In it, Leon and Michael are the only residents of The Topiary—a tiny tourist planet near the edge of the galaxy, lush with exotic plant life. But due to budget cuts The Topiary is shutting down. So Leon decides to document their remaining time together. When their final visitor arrives, her biting observations on the topiaries themselves are only the first step in driving Leon and Michael apart.

In this episode, you'll also hear Organist fan fiction from Stacey Levine, author of Frances Johnson.

Directed and produced by Nick White  Starring Martin Starr, Matt Bush, and Lilan Bowden Written by Katya Apekina Sound design by Jeff Emtman Music by The Black Spot

Thanks to Howl.fm for sharing this episode with us. THE OUTER REACH: STORIES FROM BEYOND Artwork by Jorge Jacinto

In New Orleans, Will Oldham, Solange Knowles, and five-year-old children have all played a (mega-) phone booth, the “self-rattling house,” and a vocal processor that mimics the experience of neighbors talking through walls. Each of these homemade instruments is part of Music Box Village, a project that turns architecture—in the form of a sprawling complex of makeshift buildings—into an investigation of sound, but it also returns performers to the intuitive composition and experimentation of first learning to play.

Also in this episode, Malcolm Margolin of Heyday Books talks about his “wanderjahr” (“I got fired for not wearing a uniform,”) huckleberry bushes, living with Parkinson’s, and the spontaneity of book publishing. Finally, the poet Ryan Tucker describes, in a luminous iTunes review, his transformative experiences as a WWI fighter pilot, for whom the Organist podcast unlocked the ethereal realm.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s books are menacing and powerful; they’re filled with intimate descriptions of bodily fluids and bowel movements, but, like Flannery O’Connor, they also cut deep into the psychic substrata of her characters. In this week’s episode, Moshfegh discusses her process of writing these books—which apparently involves visitations from the paranormal. Last year Moshfegh was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for her novel Eileen, which is a story about a woman desperately seeking the connection of another human being. She also wrote a novella, McGlue, which is a kind of murder love story set in Salem Massachusetts in 1851. Moshfegh spoke to Ross Simonini about the source of the darkness and the weirdness in her fiction.

In this episode, you’ll also hear Organist fan fiction from comedian Dan Sheehan, known for tweeting as his persona @SICKOFWOLVES, who is “DEFINITELY NOT A WOLF PRETENDING TO BE A MAN.”

In an era of fake news and alternative facts, what is the role of literature that blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction? Novelist Lynne Tillman has figured out one possible role. She’s been writing art criticism for more than three decades, including criticism starring a fictional character named Madame Realism—a name that is itself a retort to the way women artists were marginalized and made invisible within the Surrealist movement. Tillman’s Madam Realism stories encompass not only art itself but also the reactions that art inspires in the viewers around her character, as well as how the museum itself curates a viewing experience. In this episode, Tillman and writer Adam Colman visit the MoMA to discuss, in Tillman’s associative way, an exhibit on French avant-garde artist Francis Picabia. Their conversation takes them from the birth of the avant-garde to the squareness of Paris to institutional critique until they are finally kicked out of the museum by security.

In this episode you’ll also hear Organist fan fiction from Moira Cassidy (as read by Garrett Stewart).

Feature photo: Francis Picabia.  Optophone [I]. 1922. Ink, watercolor, and pencil on board, 28 3/8 × 23 5/8″ (72 × 60 cm). Kravis Collection. © 2016 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, John Wronn.

Francis Picabia (French, 1879–1953). Très rare tableau sur la terre (Very Rare Picture on the Earth). 1915. Oil, metallic paint, pencil, and ink on board, with gold and silver leaf on wood, in a wood frame possibly constructed by the artist, 49 5/8 x 38 9/16 x 2 3/16″ (126 x 98 x 5.5 cm), with frame. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

Francis Picabia. Tableau Rastadada (Rastadada Painting). 1920. Cut‑and‑pasted printed paper on paper with ink, 7 1/2 × 6 3/4″ (19 × 17.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller by exchange. © 2016 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, Peter Butler

Francis Picabia (French, 1879–1953). La Nuit espagnole (The Spanish Night). 1922. Enamel paint on canvas, 63 x 51 3/16″ (160 x 130 cm). Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Ludwig Collection. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Francis Picabia. Espagnole (Espagnole à la cigarette) (Spanish Woman [Spanish Woman with Cigarette]). 1922. Watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paper, 28 3/8 × 20 1/16″ (72 × 51 cm). Private collection. © 2016 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo courtesy Mercatorfonds

Francis Picabia (French, 1879–1953). Les Amoureux (Après la pluie) (The Lovers [After the Rain]). 1925. Enamel paint and oil on canvas, 45 11/16 x 45 1/4″ (116 x 115 cm). Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © Musée d’Art Moderne/Roger-Viollet Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction

Francis Picabia. Untitled (Espagnole et agneau de l’apocalypse [Spanish Woman and Lamb of the Apocalypse]). 1927/1928. Watercolor, gouache, ink, and pencil on paper, 25 9/16 × 19 11/16″ (65 × 50 cm). Private collection. © 2016 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Stephan Wyckoff

Francis Picabia. Le Clown Fratellini (Fratellini Clown). 1937–38. Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 × 28 3/4″ (92 × 73 cm). Private collection. © 2016 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

Francis Picabia. Aello. 1930. Oil on canvas, 66 9/16 × 66 9/16″ (169 × 169 cm). Private collection. © 2016 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

Francis Picabia. L’Adoration du veau (The Adoration of the Calf). 1941–42. Oil on board, 41 3/4 × 30″ (106 × 76.2 cm). Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle, Paris. Purchase with assistance from the Fonds du Patromonie, the Clarence Westbury Foundation, and the Societé des Amis du Musée national d’art moderne, 2007. © 2016 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN–Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York.

Francis Picabia. La Révolution espagnole (The Spanish Revolution). 1937. Oil on canvas, 63 3/4 × 51 3/16″ (162 × 130 cm). Private collection. Courtesy Dominique Lévy Gallery and Michael Werner Gallery. © 2016 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo courtesy Archives Comité Picabia

Humor lays the groundwork for a hard truth and, for poet Tommy Pico, that hard truth is about living as an indigenous person in occupied America. "Alien invasion overlord movies / r cute in a Monet way,” he writes. “I survive seven generations into a post-apocalyptic America / that started 1492. Maybe / you'll live too?" There are, he says, just a few images of Native Americans that have filtered into mainstream culture: the noble savage, the squaw, the horseback warrior, and the sad Indian, “whose religion and spirituality and land and resources and livelihood have been taken away from them. I want to write in defiance of the sad Indian.” Pico’s poetry builds a contemporary Native American persona, one that occupies multiple spaces simultaneously: New York City, the internet, pop music, and Grindr. It’s an identity that’s determined to be heard by the culture at large. Tellingly, Pico’s first book, IRL, is both in the form of a single epic text — maybe even a sext — and inspired by Kumeyaay “bird songs,” some of the last surviving remnants of the Kumeyaay tribe’s long-form poetry tradition.

In this episode, you’ll also hear Organist fan fiction from Jimmy Chen, performed by the legendary Edgar Oliver, as well as a series of “verbal selfies” from artist Robyn O’Neil.

Feature image of Tommy Pico by Eugene Smith for Poets & Writers Magazine.

Robyn O'Neil, "The Everywhere Citadel", 2016. Graphite on paper 60 1/4 x 38 1/4 inches

Robyn O'Neil, "Ascension", 2016. Graphite on paper 22 3/4 x 30 inches

Robyn O'Neil, "Suffocation Bed", 2013. Graphite on paper 23 x 30 inches

Robyn O'Neil, "Inflation Drill (after Guston)", 2016. Graphite on paper 22 3/4 x 30 inches

Robyn O'Neil, "The Husband Cathedral", 2016. Graphite on paper 34 1/8 x 60 1/4 inches

Robyn O'Neil, "The Mercy Quartet", 2016. Graphite on paper 34 1/8 x 60 inches

Robyn O'Neil, "Studies in Suffocation I", 2016. Graphite on paper 60 1/4 x 66 inches

Robyn O'Neil, "Studies in Suffocation II", 2016. Graphite on paper 60 1/4 x 66 3/16 inches

Robyn O'Neil, "Government Bureau (after Tooker)", 2016. Graphite on paper 22 3/4 x 30 inches

Robyn O'Neil, "These Moments", 2016. Graphite on paper 10 1/2 x 16 1/2 inches

Robyn O'Neil, "The Five Echoes", 2016. Graphite on paper 15" x 12 1/8 inches

Robyn O'Neil, "Ultralight Beam Terzetto", 2016. Graphite on paper 41 1⁄2 x 63 inches

In 1921, the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, after years of experimenting with different ways to use his artistic interests to expand the potential of psychoanalysis, created a series of inkblot drawings that reveal the unconscious mechanisms of a patient’s brain. Six months later, he died, just before the inkblot test became an international phenomenon. Since then, Rorschach’s inkblot test has become pop-cultural shorthand for both Freudian psychology and the depths of the human mind. It has become an inescapable reference in art, film and journalism. Damion Searls, author of the first-ever biography of Rorschach, explains how our application and understanding of the test diverge from Rorschach’s intentions.

In this episode, you’ll also find Organist fan fiction from author Elizabeth McKenzie, a “verbal selfie” from Casey Jane Ellison, and the winner of the Sarah Awards’ Very Very Short Short Audio Fiction contest.

Hermann holding daughter Lisa, 1918.

Hermann in his office in the Herisau apartment, cigarette in hand, 1920.

Hermann, Lisa, Wadim, summer 1921.

Rorschach age 6, in Swiss folk costume, 1819.

Rorschach early inkblot.

Rorschach notes on printers proof.

Rorschach on a hiking trip in the Santis, September 1918.

Rorschach rowing on Lake Constance, CA. 1920.

Roschach dressed in wizard costume.

Soldiers looking at inkblot.

Wedding Photo, May 1, 1910.Pictures credit: Archiv und Sammlung Hermann Rorschach, University Library of Bern.

The novelist and countercultural icon Paul Bowles -- author of The Sheltering Sky, friend to William Burroughs, Gertrude Stein, and Tennessee Williams, and husband of the brilliant writer Jane Bowles -- lived in Tangier from 1947 until his death fifty-two years later. In 1959, he received a grant from the Library of Congress to “preserve†the music of Morocco. He set off in a VW bug (with his two driving companions, a Moroccan and a Canadian), laden with a massive Ampex tape recorder, bottles of hot Pepsi, and a pound of hashish. These remarkable recordings have long been unavailable, but last year, the label Dust-to-Digital released them as a deluxe box set. The Organist asked the writer Brian Edwards to listen to the tapes, and to tell Bowles’s remarkable story. Brian went through hours of recordings dozens of times, and sent back this report, which raises important questions about the problems— artistic, technical, and of course ethical — of recording a music you love in a country that’s not your own.

Produced by Myke Dodge Weiskopf Written by Brian T. Edwards  

Bowles Marakesh — Credit: Courtesy Allen Ginsberg Estate / Dust-to-Digital

Bowles-older — Credit: Courtesy Irene Herrmann / Dust-to-Digital

Paul Bowles on street-Tangier, June 1955 — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital

Line of singers w Qraqab cymbals 1 drum — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital / Library of Congress

Double horn group by building — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital / Library of Congress

Musicians in front-men with guns behind — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital / Library of Congress

Foothills-figure by fortress — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital / Library of Congress 

VW bug along mtn road with small group — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital / Library of Congress

Bowles squatting by wall

Loc-Map — hand-drawn map by Paul Bowles, showing his itinerary through Morocco in 1959, aboard a VW Beetle, filled with recording equipment, supplies, and recording team — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital / Library of Congress

Bowles against tapestry — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital

Tangier Group (burroughs, bowles, ginsberg) — Credit: Courtesy Allen Ginsberg Estate / Dust-to-Digital

Sand village and palm trees — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital

Music in this episode is from Music of Morocco: Recorded by Paul Bowles, 1959. 

The Organist’s theme music is by Barry London of Oneida.

William Bell never became a household name. His debut single, the one he wrote and recorded the year that Satellite Records changed their name to Stax, barely cracked the Top 100 chart. That song, "You Don't Miss Your Water," worked out a bit better for Bell's friend Otis Redding, and for a band called The Byrds. That's more or less the same story as "Born Under a Bad Sign," the song he cowrote with Booker T. Jones, which got covered by Cream and pretty much every blues rock band since 1968. Bell might have had a better chance at stardom if he hadn't got drafted to serve in the U.S. Army in the middle of the sixties, right when Stax was taking off.  After Stax dissolved in 1975, Bell tried to reinvent himself. He had a top forty hit for Mercury, an easy-listening number with a funk beat called "Trying to Love Two." He moved to Atlanta, put out a few self-released albums, ran a business, and did well with songwriting royalties. He didn't lose himself in God or women or indulgence after the peak of his career, like some of the other stories we've heard before. He kept his voice and lived a comfortable life. You might say he was hiding in plain sight. This summer, Stax released Bell's first album for the label in forty years, in what may be the best album of his life. For the Organist, the writer Wyatt Williams drove around Georgia with Bell to bring us this story. Produced by Wyatt Williams and Jenny Ament 

Kyle Mooney grew up in San Diego, and many of his characters resemble hilariously contradictory and authentic depressive SoCal bros and antisocial, tenderhearted high school goths. In this interview, he talks about the deep YouTube research he does to produce the perfectly pitched homemade videos he makes for Saturday Night Live. Also: David J, the bassist from Bauhaus and Love and Rockets, recounts an uncanny encounter with David Bowie, where a single harmonica line spans the ages, from a jukebox in 1971 into the afterlife.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdwchohlMjI

Image: Film still from The Hunger (1983), dir. Tony Scott

A man screams “why are you closed? Tell us the reason!†over and over as he rattles a pair of locked doors outside a Toronto shopping mall. Klaus Kinski berates the officiant at his own wedding while he lavishes a disturbing amount of affection on his bride. A clean-cut guy in glasses beatboxes the entire drum part of Rush’s “YYZ.†The Tumblr Weird Dude Energy is singularly devoted to collecting the most inexplicable male behavior on the internet. It’s funny, and it’s weird, but if you study it carefully, it also raises some troubling and complicated questions: questions about contemporary masculinity and community. It even raises questions about violence, misogyny, and Donald Trump. For the Organist, the writer Mark Sussman stared into the testosterone abyss of Weird Dude Energy and sent us back this report.

Written by Mark Sussman. Produced by Mickey Capper.

 

Louis Chude-Sokei is a Nigerian-Jamaican- American writer and scholar at the University of Seattle, Washington. In this episode, he discusses the music culture surrounding Nigeria’s internet scammers (known as “Yahoozees”), his own experience as a black immigrant in Los Angeles’ Inglewood neighborhood during the era of NWA, and the way blackface performance is perceived outside the U.S. He’s the author of The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black-on- Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Duke University, 2006), which examines the life of Bert Williams, a top vaudeville performer-- a black blackface performer-- and one of the most famous entertainers of his era.

His new book, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Wesleyan, 2015), tackles the complex relationships between blackness, robotics, and technology. In this way, the book is in conversation with Afrofuturism. First coined by the cultural critic Mark Dery, Afrofuturism is a growing field of art, music, and academic scholarship which finds its roots in sci-fi imagery in black culture: Sun Ra, George Clinton, Octavia Butler, and Samuel R. Delaney. Afrofuturism seeks to find alternates to the current sometimes harrowing circumstances of contemporary black life through imagined futures and emergent possibilities. Its expression is visible in the work of Janelle Monae, producer Flying Lotus, and rap duo Shabazz Palaces.

In his conversation with Ben Bush for the Organist, Chude-Sokei emphasizes the emerging field’s pre-20th century roots as well as non-US aspects that have until now fallen outside the critical paradigm related to Afrofuturism—from PT Barnum’s black cyborg to the metaphysical echo of instrumental dub reggae.   Links: A playlist based on songs discussed in this episode (and in The Sound of Culture)  Louis Chude-Sokei on Joice Heth, PT Barnum’s black cyborg Bina48 on the Organist  Video trailer

Credits: Interview by Ben Bush. Produced by Mickey Capper.

Adam Colman examines the brutalist yearning of legendary punk band the Ramones and uncovers the rigorous curiosity that serves as the guiding principle for the scientific method. Then, Ross Simonini talks to musician and writer Sonny Smith (Sonny and the Sunsets) about his new album, "Moods Baby Moods." Smith performs two songs from the album, describes how he is able to use drawings and comics to write songs (and vice versa), and laments the modern age. Photo credit: Flashback 

Craig Dykers is a founding partner of Snøhetta, whose projects include the expansion of San Francisco’s Modern Art museum, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, and the redesign of Times Square. In these projects and others, Dykers and his team contend with an invisible challenge all architects must face: acoustics. In his conversation with the Organist, Dykers argues that proper acoustics can lower your blood pressure, speed up or slow down your movement through a space, and even encourage gentle smooching.

A lot of artists under the age of 30 find it natural to promote themselves and their work online. But the Bay Area rapper Lil B, and Steve Roggenbuck, in conversation with each other on this episode, both put social media at the center of their art. Their work lives and expands online, in an ceaseless stream of tweets and self-produced YouTube videos. Both artists communicate constantly with their fans, who speak to each other in the specialized idioms of their respective communities: Lil B’s followers gather around the idea of anything #based -- a notion he says has to do with “Just being who you are, and not afraid of that.” Roggenbuck’s fans assemble under the hashtag of #YOLO— theirs is an ecstatically earnest embrace of the beauty and absurdity of life on earth in 2016. Lil B also embraces the absurd, but his work is darker and more ambiguous. One the one hand, he can be overwhelmingly earnest and positive: the video for his track “I Love You” ends with Lil B weeping in a pet store, surrounded by aquariums, giving thanks for everyone in his life. He distributes his music mostly through hours-long mixtapes, some with nearly fifty tracks. His fans delight in discovering nuggets of lyrical genius buried within hours of first-take freestyles that range from brilliantly rough-edged to difficult-to- listen-to. Lil B inhabits a wide range of personae: he’s a self-described feminist urging his listeners to “stand up against rape” in one track, and then talks about “bitches” as currency in another. He recently posted a transphobic tweet that read, “I might start saying I’m trans and I’m a woman so I can be in the girls locker room with the ladies!!!!!!” He later apologized, saying, “I am transphobic and I need help to learn to accept.” Steve Roggenbuck asked Lil B about this incident and others, including the importance of his musical partnership with his adopted tabby cat, Keke. photo credit: Generation Bass 

Christopher Owens is an American singer/songwriter best-known as the frontman for the recently disbanded San-Francisco indie-rock band Girls—and for his curious backstory, which features both a fundamentalist cult and an eccentric Texan multimillionaire. Since his departure from Girls, Owens has been recording music independently, attempting through his more recent writing to confront in reflection the realities of his childhood.

In this episode, recorded live at The Organist’s first podcast event at PROXY in San Francisco, Owens chronologically retraces his evolution as a song-writer, which inevitably mirrors his evolution as a person, from his desire to capture momentary emotions in song, then eventually reaching into his complicated and difficult past.

Annie Clark, better known by her stage name, St. Vincent, gives the listener a tour through her personal musical history. She talks about the music that raised and influenced her from age two (Ritchie Valens) through high school (Sonic Youth, Solex, Fiona Apple, Big Black). She also made a mix tape for the Organist featuring some of her current favorites. Listen to it below.

This episode was produced by Jenna Weiss-Berman, Ross Simonini and Andrew Leland. Thanks to Gary Scott, Jenny Radelet, Melissa Morton, Mario Diaz and Miranda Mellis.

NOTE: CONTAINS LANGUAGE AND CERTAIN SITUATIONS THAT MAY BE INAPPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN.

A day on the streets of New York with the singular Alabama musician and artist Lonnie Holley. Holley always sang while making his junkyard assemblages out of objects including pick-axes and buckets, but it wasn't until the age of sixty-two that he began releasing records and performing live, both of which caught the attention of a younger generation of musicians (Animal Collective, Deerhunter, Dirty Projectors, Black Keys) who have since become his collaborators.

This episode also features a world-premiere of Apologies, a very short radio play written by Carrie Brownstein (Sleater-Kinney, Wild Flag) and Fred Armisen (Saturday Night Live), who together make the sketch-comedy show Portlandia on IFC. The play was performed by Tig Notaro (This American Life, The Sarah Silverman Program) and Kevin Corrigan (The Departed, Pineapple Express, Buffalo 66). This episode of the Organist was produced by Ross Simonini. The Organist is produced by Simonini along with Jenna Weiss-Berman and Andrew Leland.

Banner Image Credit: Matt Arnett

Christopher Knowles is often described as autistic, and his relationship to language is repetitive, humorous, and singular. He has worked with the theater director Robert Wilson and compose Philip Glass to write and perform massive, influential 20th century stage works including Einstein on the Beach and The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin. Knowles is also a visual artist; his paintings are currently on display in his first retrospective, at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. He recently sat down with the Organist along with his new bride, the artist Sylvia Netzer, to discuss art making, mutual marital caretaking, and bad reviews.

Painting by Christopher Knowles: Courtesy of Christopher Knowles and Gavin Brown's Enterprise

Scott McClanahan is from West Virginia, which accounts for his twang, and also for his love/hate relationship with the American South. In his 2013 memoir, Crapalachia, McClanahan tells his origin story, growing up in the backwoods of the South. McClanahan is a lovable nihilist when he discusses his writing, as producer Eliza Smith discovered when she spoke with Scott about his work for the Organist. This episode also features “The Firestarter,†one of McClanahan’s short stories that Smith adapted into a radio play for the Organist, in which a man causes car accidents by virtue of his being there to witness them.

CREDITS Produced by Eliza Smith. Radio play adapted by Eliza Smith and Jacob Winik with original music by Carly Bond and Robert Shelton.

Robert Kensinger moved to L.A. in the late 70's. He was hoping to make it as a film director after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. He stumbled into a job as a personal assistant to the legendary actor, writer, and director Orson Welles. Kensinger worked for Welles off and on for several years before he left to write scripts for indie producer Roger Corman. Then he carved out a long career as a set decorator on many studio films.

People tend to think of Orson Welles as inactive or diminished during those final years – living off Laurel Canyon on Wonderland Avenue, earning a living starring in wine commercials and making the rounds of TV talk shows. But Kensinger remembers the director of Citizen Kane as vital and alive, working hard as ever on projects including his last film, The Other Side of the Wind. It remains unfinished to this day.

Today's Organist features Bob Kensinger, remembering Orson on Wonderland.

Produced by Gideon Brower and Kristine McKenna. Edited by Nick White. Mixing assistance by Mario Diaz.

Still from a TV magic show pilot Welles shot, in which Bob Kensinger appears as a waiter.

Documents from Bob Kensinger's tenure as Welles's assistant, including shopping lists and a personal note. Originally appeared in Grand Street.

Screen grab from Orson Welles's appearances in Paul Masson Wine TV spots from the early 80's

Screen grab from Orson Welles's appearances in Paul Masson Wine TV spots from the early 80's

The legendary polymath broadcaster Studs Terkel hosted a radio show on Chicago's WFMT for 45-years, interviewing an astonishing range of artists, thinkers, workers, and activists. The writer and publisher (and prolific interviewer in his own right) JC Gabel dips into Terkel's massive archive to highlight three moments where Terkel stumbles sidelong into moments of sublime illumination, including arm-wrestling with Zero Mostel, sparring with Muhammad Ali, and impromptu guerrilla street theater with the organizer Saul Alinsky.

Produced by JC Gabel and edited by Nick White.

Photo courtesy WFMT and the Studs Terkel Radio Archive

Barbara Maier Gustern is an 80-year-old classically trained singer in New York City. She teaches singing lessons out of her two-bedroom apartment in Chelsea. For decades, she’s taught a wide range of singers: Argentinian and opera singers, aspiring cantors, the Grammy-nominated vocalist Roseanna Vitro. But she’s become a favorite among the edgy and powerful voices of New York’s downtown queer, performance and rock scenes: Her students include Debbie Harry, Taylor Mac, Justin Vivian Bond, John Kelly, Lady Rizo, Penny Arcade, Handsome Dick Manitoba, Miss Guy and Kathleen Hanna.

Barbra Maier Gustern

A shared love of dirty jokes and wild performances made her an unlikely matriarch to this talented and raunchy family of artists. The avant-garde composer and musician Diamanda Galas called Barbara, “the baddest bitch in New York City."

Machine Dazzle

Reported by Nicole Pasulka. Produced by Nicole Pasulka and Jenna Weiss-Berman.

Photo: Michael Blase

Writer Hua Hsu on the mystifying genius of the great New York hip-hop group Mobb Deep, the genius of obsessive German hip-hop fans on the Internet, and the unfathomable, haunting piano loop that connects them.

Photo courtesy Mobb Deep

Archivist, educator and filmmaker Rick Prelinger has a remarkable eye for the unexpected value of ephemera. A massive collection of educational and industrial films he collected under the auspices of the Prelinger Archives was acquired by the Library of Congress, and with his wife, Megan Prelinger, he co-founded the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, stuffed with printed material you’d be unlikely to find elsewhere. More recently he’s been working with old home movies — thousands of them, donated or otherwise acquired. This is basically material nobody else wanted, not even the descendants of whoever made them. He’s used it to build a remarkable series of films – one is made of footage from San Francisco, another from Detroit. Old home movies are mostly silent, and he adds no narration or even a score. Instead, he stands on stage at screenings, riffs about the clips, and encourages viewers to chime in from their seats. This actually works: the audience at Prelinger’s screenings are surprisingly vocal. Prelinger’s most recent is the more broadly themed No More Road Trips? Writer Rob Walker spoke with Prelinger about the film and his career in finding joy and insight in media most people eventually throw away.

 

The stills, below are all from No More Road Trips? (2013), courtesy of Rick Prelinger. 

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Produced by Rob Walker with Shelby El Otmani.

We unearth two gems from season one of the Organist: a funny and strange interview with the funny and strange songwriter and artist Devendra Banhart, followed by "Old-News Summary" with novelist Sam Lipsyte. CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE.

Image courtesy Devendra Banhart

The wildly, diversely prolific artist Miranda July discusses her earliest, rarely seen punk plays, her radio work in the 90s, and her brand-new novel. CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE.

Banner Image Credit: Miranda July

An exploration into the Aeolian tones of field recording, an art which uses contact microphones to summon alien compositions from the depths of seemingly benign ponds, bridges, and fence-posts.

Produced by Lawrence Dunn.

The Baltimore-based electronic duo Matmos break down the process behind a song from their last record, revealing cut-up ping-pong blindfolds, looped handcuffs, isolation chambers, and telepathic Ganzfeld experiments. Plus Jenn Wasner, from the band Wye Oak.

Photo by Matmos

Photo: Makkos Collection

David Weinberg brings us the story of Joseph Makkos, who made a once-in-a-lifetime discovery trolling Craigslist for free stuff.

Produced by David Weinberg

City on Shoulders New Orleans DNA

Mardi Gras, 1925 New Orleans DNA

Mardi Gras, 1927 New Orleans DNA

TV Radio Number New Orleans DNA

From the Chicago Tribune

From the NY Tribune

From the NY World

From the NY World

Dolly Dimples Comic, 1914 New Orleans Digital Newspaper Archive

This week, The Organist premieres Funeral for Everyone I Knew, a new radio play by novelist Jesse Ball (The Curfew, Silence Once Begun, etc.) Starring Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha) and Whip Hubley (Top Gun), the play follows the dark machinations of a dying man, and his elaborate plans for his own funeral.

Photo: Joe Haupt

Drummer Neal Morgan, who has supported Joanna Newsom, Bill Callahan, Robin Pecknold, and others, sat down with Creedence Clearwater Revival's Doug Clifford to dive into ecstatic detail on the arrangement of "Long as I Can See The Light."

Photo; Doug Clifford playing in Hamburg, September, 1971 (Heinrich Klaffs)

A greatest-hits compilation from The Organist’s first two years, created for a special holiday broadcast on KCRW, featuring Nick Offerman, David Cross, Sarah Silverman, Jack White, Lena Dunham, Judy Blume, and more!

This week, The Organist interviews the actress Greta Gerwig. Gerwig began acting in the New York film community of the 2000s with films such as Hannah Takes the Stairs and LOL. She has since worked with Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach, and Whit Stillman, and continues to lend her voice to the Adult Swim cartoon China, Illinois. On The Organist, Gerwig discusses acting with her voice, her body and how her love of fiction inspires her performances.

Amber Scorah went to Shanghai as a Jehovah's Witness missionary. But in one of the most restrictive, totalitarian countries in the world, for the first time in her life, she found she had the freedom to think.

Photo: Andy

Ilse Blansert (aka The Waterwhispers on YouTube) discusses her experiences with ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a curious, little understood physiological reaction to gentle sounds or "triggers" that provide relief from stress and insomnia. The videos of Blansert and her peers are hugely popular on YouTube and have helped to create a wide, digital community who can now sleep soundly as tingles dance up their spines.

Michael K. Williams (aka Omar from The Wire; Chalky from Boardwalk Empire) performs a short radio drama written by the lo-fi blues musician and writer Willis Earl Beal, based on Beal’s experiences as a “triple-fictional†security guard in Albuquerque, New Mexico. CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE.

Actor/director/screenwriter Thomas Lennon (The State, Reno 911!, Hell Baby) performs two short monologues written by playwright Nick Jones (Orange Is the New Black, Jollyship the Whiz-Bang) and Blake Butler (300,000,000, There Is No Year).

Interviews with three musicians who suffer from hearing disorders. Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields discusses his hyperacusis, a sensitivity to loud sounds. Chris Johanson of Sun Foot and electronic musician Gobby explore their tinnitus, a persistent ringing in the ear.  CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE

A mindbending new radio drama, written by the bestselling novelist and playwright Gordon Dahlquist, finds the connection between artificial intelligence and method acting. Starring Jared Harris (Mad Men), Leo Marks (co-founder, the Elevator Repair Service), and Laura Flanagan (numerous Off-Broadway productions).

CREDITS Produced by Ross Simonini, Jenna Weiss-Berman, and Andrew Leland. Special thanks to David Levine for his input in the conception of this piece.

Banner Image Credit: Max Barners

To celebrate the release of Lena Dunham's new book Not That Kind of Girl, out this week, we're re-airing a conversation recorded last year between Lena and Judy Blume.

To order Lena's book, go here: http://lenadunham.com/

Banner Image: Lena Dunham & Judy Blume. Photo by Jenna Weiss-Berman.

CREDITS Produced by Jenna Weiss-Berman, Ross Simonini and Andrew Leland. Thanks to Gary Scott, Jenny Radelet, Melissa Morton, Mario Diaz and Monika Scott.

Tao Lin is the author of the novels Taipei and Shoplifting from American Apparel, among others. For The Organist, Lin discusses his recent novel and reads his work aloud and employs rappers Kool AD and Kitty to read his prose at tongue tying speed for an experiment in reading comprehension. Christian Lorentzen, an editor at the London Review of Books, gives a critical perspective on Lin's work and Kitty provides a mixtape. CONTAINS ADULT LANGUAGE.

CREDITS: Produced by Ross Simonini. The Organist is produced by Simonini along with Jenna Weiss-Berman and Andrew Leland.

Banner Image Credit: Mallory Whitten

What if your neighbor's dog talks to you a la Son of Sam, except in this case it's just a mild daily annoyance that the neighbor's dog is always commanding you in vain to do horrible things? An original radio drama written by TV writer (Teen Wolf, Hannibal) and novelist (The Girlfriend Game, Fires) Nick Antosca and performed by legendary downtown actor and writer Edgar Oliver.

CREDITS Produced by Jenna Weiss-Berman, Whitney Jones, Andrew Leland, and Ross Simonini.

Banner Image Credit: Maia C

Peter Mendelsund is an award-winning book designer and the author of What We See When We Read, a phenomenological treatise on the visual art of reading. In this episode of the Organist, Mendelsund discusses the auditory side of reading and the sound of the classic orators of literature, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas. CONTAINS ADULT LANGUAGE.

CREDITS: Produced by Ross Simonini. The Organist is produced by Simonini along with Jenna Weiss-Berman and Andrew Leland.

Banner Image Credit: George Baier IV

We’re thrilled to unearth a classic story by legendary radio producer Scott Carrier, an inspiration for radio producers from Ira Glass to Jad Abumrad, which hasn’t been heard since it originally aired on All Things Considered in 1993.

CREDITS “The Drywall” was produced by Scott Carrier. David Weinberg interviewed Carrier and Ira Glass for the Organist.

Banner Image Credit: Paolo Trabattoni

Neko Case, whose musical career spans over two decades, brings the listener on a journey of the music that has shaped her, from the time she was a child listening to "Taking Care of Business" by Bachman Turner Overdrive until now, listening to "People Have the Power" by Patti Smith. Over the years she's listened to 80s hardcore, country, gospel, and punk, all of which have contributed to her unique sound. CONTAINS ADULT LANGUAGE.

CREDITS Produced by Jenna Weiss-Berman, Ross Simonini and Andrew Leland. Thanks to Gary Scott, Jenny Radelet, Melissa Morton, Mario Diaz and Monika Scott.

Pre-order the latest album from Neko's side project, the New Pornographers, out August 25th.

We take to the streets with Mal Sharpe, a man who, along with his partner James Coyle, was among the first wave of fake newsmen, paving the way from everyone from Borat to Colbert. Over the years Sharpe has conducted thousands of surrealist man on the street interviews, accosting random pedestrians and asking them a series of progressively strange and extreme questions, creating classic recordings of absurdist radio comedy. Reporter Ike Sriskandarajah found Sharpe in San Francisco and returned to the streets for a few new adventures in vox-pop.

CREDITS Produced by Ike Sriskandarajah.

The fiction writer, humorist, and essayist, George Saunders talks with the Organist's executive producer, Ross Simonini about the sonic aspects of his writing and reading. After reading aloud a passage from his most recent story collection, Saunders discusses his use of writerly voice as both a written and spoken device in his work. CONTAINS LANGUAGE THAT MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR YOUNG AUDIENCES.

CREDITS This week's show was produced by Ross Simonini with Jenna Weiss-Berman and Andrew Leland. Banner Image Credit: George Saunders. Music: "Fairyland" by Balam Acab.

This week's show features an interview with composer and singer, Meredith Monk, who holds the 2014-2015 Composer's Chair at Carnegie Hall. For 50 years, Monk has created music that bends the limits of the human voice, much of it connected to her own films, dance, opera, and site-specific performances. The Organist's executive producer, Ross Simonini interviews her about Buddhism, her early days in New York, and her wide array of curious vocal techniques.

CREDITS This week's show was produced by Ross Simonini, with Jenna Weiss-Berman, and Andrew Leland. Banner Image: Meredith Monk

This week the Organist explores sound design in two new documentaries, Irene Lusztig's The Motherhood Archives and Matt Wolf's Teenage. The films each use a combination of archival footage and original music to convey the cultural constructions of two very separate stages of human development--birth and adolescence.

the motherhood archives (trailer) from komsomol films on Vimeo.

Produced by Jenna Weiss-Berman, Ross Simonini and Andrew Leland. Thanks to Gary Scott, Jenny Radelet, Melissa Morton, Mario Diaz and Miranda Mellis.

Photo courtesy of The Motherhood Archives.

The story of Chris Stroffolino, who describes his journey from academia — writing Cliffs Notes to Shakespeare, teaching Creative Writing at NYU — to the downtown poetry scene of the 90s, to playing in the Silver Jews on their great 1998 album American Water, to a bicycle accident and eventual self-enforced homelessness – where he currently lives in a 1983 Ford Econoline van retrofitted with a piano in the back, performing for pedestrians. CONTAINS LANGUAGE THAT MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR YOUNG AUDIENCES.  Produced by David Weinberg.

 

 

 

 

 

Photos courtesy of David Weinberg

Daniel Fishkin is a young musician who played in bands and studied composition at Bard College. When he was 22 he got a bad case of tinnitus, a continuous ringing in his ears that drowned out all the sounds around him, and even some of the music in his head. It was a pretty tough blow for an aspiring composer. It wasn't the first time that a musician has had to deal with hearing loss, but what Fishkin did with this situation is remarkable.

Produced by Jascha Hoffman.

 

 

Daniel Fishkin Photo by Samuel Lang Budin

Daniel Fishkin's feedback system, where a piano string vibrates without being touched. Fishkin used this to create the Tinnitus Suites. Photo by Oliver Jones

Transducers attached to long strings that create a feedback loop when amplified. Photo by Oliver Jones

 

Banner image by Samuel Lang Budin

Mike Mills' new film asks the kids of Silicon Valley workers (the sons of Google's cafeteria line cooks; the daughters of engineers at Apple) about their relationship with technology and what the future looks like to them. The journalist and critic Gideon Lewis-Kraus sat down with Mills in San Francisco to discuss the film and the ways in which growing up in the corporate-technological landscape leads to a strange new worldview for these kids.

From now until July 1, Organist listeners get an exclusive sneak peek at the full version of A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought Alone at Believermag.com/mikemills. (password: BELIEVER)

 

 

 

Banner image: Mike Mills, A Mind Forever Voyaging through Strange Seas of Thought Alone: Silicon Valley Project (still), 2013; commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, courtesy the artist; © Mike Mills

 

NOTE: This show contains language that may not be appropriate for young audiences.

This week's show features two segments from the 2013 season of the Organist. Actor, writer, and artist James Franco (Spring Breakers, Palo Alto) performs a radio play by playwright Will Eno (Thom Pain (based on nothing), The Realistic Joneses) written exclusively for the Organist. Filmmaker Harmony Korine discusses his novel, A Crackup at the Race Riots, and some unreleased songs he wrote and recorded as a child for the sole purpose of annoying his grandmother. 

The untitled radio play was written by Will Eno and performed by James Franco. This episode was produced by Ross Simonini, Jenna Weiss-Berman and Andrew Leland. 

 

 

Banner Image Credit: Harmony Korine

This week's show features the premiere of an original radio play written by Alena Smith (@TweenHobo; HBOs The Newsroom) and performed by actor/director David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer, Wanderlust, Role Models) and Rachel Dratch (@TheRealDratch; Saturday Night Live, Second City, 30 Rock). The play is followed by a casual conversation between the actors and writer on television binge-watching and the life-saving benefits of psychoanalysis.

Horse Counselor was written by Alena Smith, performed by David Wain and Rachel Dratch, produced by Ross Simonini, Jenna Weiss-Berman, and Andrew Leland.

Banner image: Dale Hichens

Before he became a journalist, writing hilarious and harrowing books of reportage like The Psychopath Test and The Men Who Stare at Goats, as well as contributing radio stories to This American Life and BBC 4, Jon Ronson had a brief career as a musician. He played keyboards in a group called the Frank Sidebottom Oh Blimey Big Band, which was a sort of experimental-comedy new-wave act. The group's leader was the comedian Chris Sievey, who possessed a confounding absurdist charisma both on and offstage. He wore, for example, a giant papier mache head over his own head both on and off stage. Jon Ronson co-wrote a film, called Frank, that fictionalizes his time in the band. It stars Michael Fassbender and will be released in the US in August. Jon Ronson has this story of his experience driving around England in a van with a man in a huge papier-mache head. Ronson's book, Frank: The True Story That Inspired the Movie, is published by Riverhead.

This episode is produced by Jenna Weiss-Berman and Andrew Leland. Thanks to Lucie Elven and Paul Ruest.

The Birthday Song, sung every day of the year at birthday parties across the land, is sweet, simple, and 120 years old this year. But it's also a highly contested piece of intellectual property, pulling in millions of dollars for a large music conglomerate, Warner/Chappell, which charges films and TV shows who want to include the song, and pull the films from the shelves and file lawsuits if they don't comply. Andrea Silenzi looks at the strange and somewhat tortured history of the song's ownership, and offers a novel form of resistance to Warner's hegemony.

This episode was produced by Andrea Silenzi. You can find more information on the Happy Birthday contest at freemusicarchive.org, and listen to free birthday song entries.

Banner image: Greg Harrison

Free Black Press Radio, a new podcast by the avant-garde rapper Busdriver, is half lecture on the history of black resistance, and half freewheeling entropic swirl of cut-up Pharoah Sanders riffs. FBPR expands what's possible in the emerging podcast form, while also hearkening back to programs like Radio Free Dixie by the civil rights leader Robert F. Williams.

Toni Morrison once said that good writing shouldn't be "harangue passing off as art," but Free Black Press Radio (and its civil-rights-era forebears) are good models for how both impulses – the political and the artistic, the polemical and the musical -- can successfully merge (and how that confluence may only be possible within this medium).

What sort of liberation does the “free” in Free Black Press Radio and Radio Free Dixie demand?

CREDITS: Written by Niela Orr. Produced by Myke Dodge Weiskopf. Voice of Mabel Williams provided courtesy of the Freedom Archives, from their documentary Robert F. Williams: Self-Respect, Self-Defense, and Self-Determination.

Banner Image: Watts Towers via Joanna/Flickr

Since the early 2000s, Joshua Beckman has experimented with nature of performing poetry. He has traveled with gangs of poets around the country in a bus, reading in far-flung and unusual venues. He has written live improvisational collaborative poems and recently has given many one-on-one poetry readings. In this episode of The Organist, Ross Simonini speaks to Beckman about the way he reads and writes his poetry aloud, his favorite poetry recordings, and the many poets—Lew Welch, Frank O'Hara, Robert Creeley—whose verbal and performative antics have inspired him.

Joshua Beckman's Poetry Mixtape

For The Organist, Joshua Beckman selected eight of his favorite audio recordings of poets performing their work aloud.

John Cage - Mushroom Haiku John Wieners - from Memories in a Small Apartment Lorenzo Thomas - Anuresis Eileen Myles - April 5th Bernadette Mayer - 1979 Kenneth Koch and Allen Ginsberg - Improvisation Helen Adam - Cheerless Junkie's Song Yoko Ono - Let's Go Flying

Banner image of Lew Welch appears via the Poetry Foundation.

David Shields’s new book got his publisher sued by the New York Times. Then his publisher sued Shields. But the fair-use questions surrounding these lawsuits aren’t even the most controversial aspects of the book. War Is Beautiful gathers sixty-four color combat photos that appeared on the front page of the New York Times between 1997 and 2013, and many of the photos are, despite their subject matter, quite beautiful. We see a US military convoy driving through a luminous orange sandstorm in Iraq, a pop-art close- up of two homemade Iranian bullet casings, and an Apocalypse Now–grade shot of a marine vehicle sweeping through an Iraqi palm grove in glowing dawn light.

Shields argues that these images make a break with the photojournalistic tradition of artful but disturbing photos of war, from the Civil War to Vietnam. Instead, he says, these images function much like Judith Miller’s reporting from Iraq: manufacturing our tacit consent for war. The Organist spoke with Shields about this strange, polemical new coffee-table book he’s produced.

(And, after the credits roll: a short tribute to Alvin Buenaventura, 1976-2016.)

Banner image from War is Beautiful by David Shields, published by powerHouse Books

Since the early ‘90s, Graham Lambkin has created music that pushes the song form to its limits, using noise, samples, spoken word, and any sound that has the good fortune of finding its way into his field recorder. In this “Listening History†episode of The Organist, Lambkin discusses some of the songs that formed his sensibility, from experimental UK postpunk to the a recording of his family listening to Italian prog rock on a road trip through Britain.

Bina Rothblatt sat down at a computer and typed in her memories and thoughts and likes and dislikes for several days. Scientists at Hanson Robotics then took this “mind-file” she’d made and used it to create Bina48: a head-and-shoulders cyborg that appears to have many of the same memories and preferences as the “real” Bina, along with some unique fears and ideas of her own. The Organist sent Lois Parshley to the stifling garage in rural Vermont where Bina48 sits perched on a desk to talk with her and her full-time caretaker, Bruce Duncan, about the promise and the peril at the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence.

Image Credit: Lois Parshley

Located in a narrow alley in Lower Manhattan inside what used to be the ground floor of a freight elevator shaft, Alex Kalman’s Mmuseumm operates in a space that is almost as understated as the objects it exhibits. Kalman gives Rob Walker a guided tour through the exhibitions on display, which include homemade gas masks, KFC corsages, and a delicately detailed taxonomy of cornflakes.

Banner Image Credit: Alex Kalman / Mmuseumm

Today’s story is about a family business that sells nothing. Alan Zorthian and his daughter, Caroline, are the owners and operators of Zorthian Ranch. It’s hard to say what their jobs actually are – other than being Zorthians.

Alan’s father, the artist Jirayr Zorthian, built the ranch more than seventy years ago. It resembles a sprawling village built of out of driftwood and washing machines, perched on the northeastern edge of L.A., beyond Pasadena and Altadena, over a wobbly bridge and up a dirt path.

Jirayr Zorthian’s most famous work of art was this ranch – the homemade buildings and sculptures as much as the legendary parties he threw there: parties where Charlie Parker performed to an increasingly naked audience; parties where Andy Warhol and Richard Feynman rubbed shoulders with Buckminster Fuller, and they all wandered around amid the goats and the bees and the artful piles of junk.

The ranch’s future is uncertain, and so The Organist sent a radio producer, Jen Rice, to find out what remains of Zorthian’s weird legacy.

Photos of Zorthian Ranch by Jen Rice and Amanda Siegel.

After more than two dozen books ranging from the history of philosophy to David Bowie, Simon Critchley has written his first novel, which connects the Renaissance mnemonic device called memory palace to, among other things, pop songs. For The Organist, Critchley provides a guided tour through the pop music that constructs his life’s memories, offering reflections on Nietzsche, krautrock, Obama, and Swedish synth-pop along the way.

Jenny Slate (SNL, Obvious Child, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On) reads Lena Dunham’s Erotic Male Jewish Comedian Fan Fiction. We also catch up with the legendary undercover NYPD whistleblower Frank Serpico (played by Al Pacino in the classic 1973 biopic) and Sarah Vowell offers a new definition of “the fog of war.”

Produced by Jenny Ament and Jenna Weiss-Berman.

In this original radio drama written by Lena Dunham and performed by Dunham with Jack Antonoff, going insane and going straight to voicemail are intimately linked.

NOTE: This episode contains explicit content.

CREDITS: Written by Lena Dunham. Performed by Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff. Produced by Jenna Weiss- Berman. Music by Andrew Dost.