Radio Curious

The Alloy Orchestra is a group of multitalented musicians with widely diverse abilities, based near Boston, Massachusetts.  This group provides live, in house orchestral backup to the Chaplin, Keaton and other classic silent films of the 1920s.

Our guest in this edition of Radio Curious is Terry Donahue, an Alloy Orchestra partner, a skilled player of the accordion, musical saw, drums and bells, to name only a few.

Terry Donahue and I visited by phone from his home near Boston Massachusetts, on May 10, 2013, and began with his description of the composition of the Alloy Orchestra.

The book Terry Donahue recommends is “Accordion Crimes,” by Annie Proulx, and “Delicatessen” a French film.

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The more than 20,000 crows that inhabit the largest metropolis in the world, have come to be an imposing and sometimes harassing influence on the daily lives of the people with whom these clever birds share the city of Tokyo, Japan.

“Tokyo Waka: A City Poem” is a film poem about these crows and their people. In this edition of Radio Curious we visit with filmmaker Kristine Samuelson, a Professor of Humanistic Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. She is the co-creator, along with her husband John Haptas, of the film “Tokyo Waka.”  Their website is Stylofilms.

Our visit with Kristine Samuelson from her home in Berkeley, California on May 3, 2013 began when I asked her to describe the nature of their film poem.

Kristine Samuelson recommends two films: “Oblivion,” and “Underground Orchestra,” by Heddy Honigmann, a Peruvian born Dutch filmmaker.

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The film “We Still Live Here,” tells the story of the revival of an indigenous Native American language that was not spoken or written for over 100 years. Our guest in this edition of Radio Curious is Anne Makepeace, the writer and producer of the documentary film.

The Wampanoag people of Southeastern Massachusetts ensured the survival of the Pilgrims in New England, and lived to regret it. After nearly 400 years of forced cultural assimilation the Wampanoags have brought their language home again.

Radio Curious visited with Anne Makepeace from her home in northwestern Connecticut on April 29, 2013, and she began by pronouncing “We Still Live Here” in Wampanoag.

The films Anne Makepeace recommends are “The Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Dersu Uzala.”

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If you like interview programs perhaps you have listened to Fresh Air, produced in Philadelphia and broadcast regularly on public radio stations, and hosted by a woman named Terry Gross, our guest on this edition of Radio Curious.  I wanted to know who she is, and what she does to prepare for and create Fresh Air.  I spoke with her by phone from her home near Philadelphia in 1994 and asked her how she does it, how does she put together so many interesting programs so frequently?

The books Terry Gross recommends are “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs,” by John Updike & “U and I,” Nicholson Baker.

Originally Broadcast: March 7th, 1994.

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Our guest in this program is Gregg McVicar, the host and producer of Under Currents. Under Currents is Public Radio’s freewheeling eclectic music mix of Triple A, Rock, Folk, Blues, Native, Americana, World, Reggae, Dub and Electronica.  It brings you five hours of music every day.

Gregg McVicar and I visited in the Under Currents state of the art studio in the San Francisco Bay Area on April 6, 2013.  We were in the sound booth listening to it’s superb quality and I realized that it was really Radio Curious on tour.

The book Gregg McVicar recommends is  “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” by Stieg Larsson.

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One of the greatest early conservationists of America was a Scottish immigrant named John Muir who, as a young boy, went first to Wisconsin and then later, as a young man in the 1860s, he moved onward to California. A friend of president Theodore Roosevelt, he successfully sought to preserve the spectacular Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Nevada range, it was joy in his lifetime. Yet the loss of the equally spectacular Hetch Hetch Valley to a dam to provide water for San Francisco was his greatest sorrow. John Muir founded the Sierra Club and is credited with founding the National Park system in the United States.

I visited with John Muir in the person of Lee Stetson in the studios of Radio Curious in October of 1995 and discussed his life and observations.

Originally Broadcast: October 1995.

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The Music Man is coming to town, right here in River City, also known as Ukiah, California.

In this program Radio Curious visits with Reid Edelman, the producer and director of the musical extravaganza.  Edelman is a professor of Theater Arts at the Mendocino College in Ukiah, California.  This production of the Music Man, presented by the Mendocino College Theatre Arts Department and Ukiah Civic Light Opera, involves more than 100 people from the Ukiah community. It opens April 12 and plays through April 21, 2013 at the Mendocino College Center Theater on the Ukiah campus. For more information call (707) 462 9155.

I met with Reid Edelman in the Radio Curious studios on March 29, 2013 and began our visit when I asked him:  Why the Music Man?

The book Reid Edelman recommends is “Improv:  Improvisation and the Theatre,” by Keith Johnstone.

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Do we really know the people around us? Our children? Our family? Our friends? Or are we strangers in our own community? Mary Catherine Bateson, the author of a book entitled, “Full Circles: Overlapping Lives, Culture and Generation in Transition,” believes that we are strangers. She describes us as immigrants in time, rather than space.In this interview from the archives of Radio Curious, recorded in April 2000, we visit with Mary Catherine Bateson, the daughter of two distinguished anthropologists, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.

Originally Broadcast: April 17, 2000.

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The place of women in the world and in the American society has changed in many aspects in the recent past.  Many people say this is due to the politics of feminism, and some inquire where it will lead.

Our guest in this archive edition of Radio Curious is Estelle B. Freedman, a professor of history at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who has a specialty in feminism.  She is the author of “No Turning Back—The History of Feminism and the Future of Women.”

Originally Broadcast: April 2002.

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