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"content": "\u003cp>Cult filmmaker and self-described “filth elder” John Waters, 73, has plenty of ideas about what older people should and shouldn’t do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The worst thing, he says, is to get a convertible: “Because believe me, old age and windswept do not go hand in hand. It’s really a bad look! You can’t be trying too hard to rebel [when] you’re older.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Waters knows about being a rebel. He became famous for his 1972 film \u003cem>Pink Flamingos,\u003c/em> in which the characters compete for the title of filthiest person alive. That film became a midnight movie classic and led to other films, including \u003cem>Female Trouble\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Hairspray\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Along the way, Waters became accepted in the mainstream more than he ever expected. \u003cem>Hairspray \u003c/em>was adapted into a Broadway musical, and he has also given a\u003ca href=\"https://vimeo.com/129312307\"> commencement address\u003c/a> and had museum retrospectives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though he jokes that he can’t be anarchist — “I have three homes!” — he adds, “There’s plenty of rules that you can still break. … I think you have to use humor and you can’t be so angry about it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Waters looks back on his unlikely path to respectability in his new book, \u003cem>Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13857743\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-13857743\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/mrknowitall-1020x1565.jpg\" alt='Cover of \"Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder\" by John Waters.' width=\"640\" height=\"982\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/mrknowitall-1020x1565.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/mrknowitall-160x245.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/mrknowitall-800x1227.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/mrknowitall-768x1178.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/mrknowitall-782x1200.jpg 782w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/mrknowitall.jpg 1335w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Cover of “Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder” by John Waters.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>Interview highlights\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On growing up in Baltimore and being inspired by “bad kids”\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was the opposite of me, and I still like to be around people that are the opposites of me. … We didn’t have juvenile delinquents in my school, in my preppy grade school. … But I always was kind of just amazed to see these supposedly “bad kids” hanging out. I went to the Elvis movies, Jerry Lee Lewis — all that stuff. So I knew about juvenile delinquency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was always corrupted by \u003cem>Life \u003c/em>magazine because we got it every week and it always covered beatniks, drug addicts. Everything that I was interested in I would read every word of it. And then my parents got the encyclopedia — the W\u003cem>orld Book Encyclopedia, \u003c/em>I think — and that had everything in it! I would look up everything in there that you weren’t supposed to. So I was corrupted by the things that my parents brought in for educational reasons in our house — but not for the educational reasons they had in mind. … Everything about trouble in the arts I looked up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On whether his parents’ death changed him\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I don’t think I’ve ever changed, Terry. I think I’m the same as when I first started. I mean, my first film was called \u003cem>Hag in a Black Leather Jacket\u003c/em> and it was about a black man and a white woman being married by a Ku Klux Klan preacher on the roof of my parents’ house. And the last film I made was \u003cem>A Dirty Shame,\u003c/em> which was this sexploitation movie that got an NC-17 rating. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The only thing I could think about my parents dying [was] thank God my mother doesn’t have to read [my book]. … But my parents had a happy marriage for 70 years. They both lived to be about 90. I’m wondering why I’m kind of as nuts as I am, really, because I had … pretty good role models from them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how his parents reacted to his being an eccentric child \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was obsessed by car accidents, and I “played” car accidents. My mother would take me to junkyards and walk around with me and I’d be like, “There’s been a terrible one over here! Look at this!” And I think [now], what did the junkyard or junk man think? What is this little ghoul? … I don’t know [what my mother thought]. That wasn’t in the Dr. Spock book of “What to Do if Your Kid is Obsessed By Car Accidents.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size='medium' align='right'] “… what parent would be happy their child made ‘Pink Flamingos’? Really, none.”—John Waters [/pullquote]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[My parents] didn’t know what to do, really, but they didn’t freak out too much. They were confused by it. And what parent would be happy their child made \u003cem>Pink Flamingos\u003c/em>? Really, none. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some of the people that I would bring home, my friends, [my mother] would be horrified, but she was polite. I remember when we made \u003cem>Multiple Maniacs\u003c/em> [a 1970 film about psychotic killers who perform in a traveling sideshow] at my parents’ house and filmed the “Cavalcade of Perversion” [the sideshow act] on the front lawn. Divine came in afterwards in a bloody one-piece white woman’s bathing suit carrying an ax, and my mother served us tea, as if Princess Di had come over!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On getting paid for work that doesn’t get made \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I have been paid three times to write sequels to \u003cem>Hairspray — \u003c/em>real Hollywood money. I was paid to do a children’s movie called \u003cem>Fruitcake \u003c/em>that I never got made, but I was paid to write it. So I keep getting paid to do them, but they don’t get made — which I feel fine about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve made 17 movies. It’s not like I haven’t spoken. … And at the same time, the books do better than the movies and I just need a way to tell stories. … But mostly with independent movies, a movie that routinely used to cost $7 million now they want you to do it for $2 million or $1 million. And I can’t go backwards! I don’t want to be an underground filmmaker at 73. I did that. I went through all that. And Hollywood treated me fairly. I don’t have any real complaints.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On collecting unusual contemporary art \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I bought a painting — if you could call it that — by Karin Sander, a German artist I like, and what she did, she has never touched this painting or seen it. She gave her American art dealer a blank canvas, and told him to leave it outside in the Hamptons until it got mold all over it. And then the mold dried in kind of a beautiful way. It looks like a Robert Ryman white painting. But then the dealer said, “I can’t bring it in the gallery. And if you want to buy it, I have to get it treated.” So he got it treated, and then for me to buy it, which I did, I thought, “Isn’t this great? If I don’t have it treated it could wreck my house. It could make me sick. It could maybe kill my guests. It might disappear one day. It’s ugly, and it’s really expensive. And this is perfect! This is the perfect contemporary art!” … It hasn’t spread. None of my guests have been rushed to the hospital from it. But I liked the idea that it’s a dangerous painting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_10137298' hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/06/notpsycho.jpg' target='_blank']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On his plans to be buried in Baltimore, in the same cemetery as his friends\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a small little graveyard. They handled Divine’s funeral very well. … Mink [Stole] is going to get buried there, Pat Moran … all my friends, so we call it “Disgraceland,” and really I like the idea of being buried with your friends. Most people do not do that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vincent Peranio, who does all the set designs for my movies, I said, “Maybe you could design [a tombstone] for me that looks old. That has moss on it or something,” but I don’t want any jokes on it, no. I just want the day I was born and the day I died and my name. I don’t want like, “That’s all, folks!” or anything like that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sam Briger and Mooj Zadie produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27Filth+Elder%27+John+Waters+Says+There+Are+Still+%27Plenty+Of+Rules%27+Left+To+Break&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Waters looks back on his unlikely path to respectability in his new book, \u003cem>Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13857743\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-13857743\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/mrknowitall-1020x1565.jpg\" alt='Cover of \"Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder\" by John Waters.' width=\"640\" height=\"982\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/mrknowitall-1020x1565.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/mrknowitall-160x245.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/mrknowitall-800x1227.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/mrknowitall-768x1178.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/mrknowitall-782x1200.jpg 782w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/mrknowitall.jpg 1335w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Cover of “Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder” by John Waters.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>Interview highlights\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On growing up in Baltimore and being inspired by “bad kids”\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was the opposite of me, and I still like to be around people that are the opposites of me. … We didn’t have juvenile delinquents in my school, in my preppy grade school. … But I always was kind of just amazed to see these supposedly “bad kids” hanging out. I went to the Elvis movies, Jerry Lee Lewis — all that stuff. So I knew about juvenile delinquency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was always corrupted by \u003cem>Life \u003c/em>magazine because we got it every week and it always covered beatniks, drug addicts. Everything that I was interested in I would read every word of it. And then my parents got the encyclopedia — the W\u003cem>orld Book Encyclopedia, \u003c/em>I think — and that had everything in it! I would look up everything in there that you weren’t supposed to. So I was corrupted by the things that my parents brought in for educational reasons in our house — but not for the educational reasons they had in mind. … Everything about trouble in the arts I looked up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On whether his parents’ death changed him\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I don’t think I’ve ever changed, Terry. I think I’m the same as when I first started. I mean, my first film was called \u003cem>Hag in a Black Leather Jacket\u003c/em> and it was about a black man and a white woman being married by a Ku Klux Klan preacher on the roof of my parents’ house. And the last film I made was \u003cem>A Dirty Shame,\u003c/em> which was this sexploitation movie that got an NC-17 rating. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The only thing I could think about my parents dying [was] thank God my mother doesn’t have to read [my book]. … But my parents had a happy marriage for 70 years. They both lived to be about 90. I’m wondering why I’m kind of as nuts as I am, really, because I had … pretty good role models from them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how his parents reacted to his being an eccentric child \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was obsessed by car accidents, and I “played” car accidents. My mother would take me to junkyards and walk around with me and I’d be like, “There’s been a terrible one over here! Look at this!” And I think [now], what did the junkyard or junk man think? What is this little ghoul? … I don’t know [what my mother thought]. That wasn’t in the Dr. Spock book of “What to Do if Your Kid is Obsessed By Car Accidents.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[My parents] didn’t know what to do, really, but they didn’t freak out too much. They were confused by it. And what parent would be happy their child made \u003cem>Pink Flamingos\u003c/em>? Really, none. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some of the people that I would bring home, my friends, [my mother] would be horrified, but she was polite. I remember when we made \u003cem>Multiple Maniacs\u003c/em> [a 1970 film about psychotic killers who perform in a traveling sideshow] at my parents’ house and filmed the “Cavalcade of Perversion” [the sideshow act] on the front lawn. Divine came in afterwards in a bloody one-piece white woman’s bathing suit carrying an ax, and my mother served us tea, as if Princess Di had come over!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On getting paid for work that doesn’t get made \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I have been paid three times to write sequels to \u003cem>Hairspray — \u003c/em>real Hollywood money. I was paid to do a children’s movie called \u003cem>Fruitcake \u003c/em>that I never got made, but I was paid to write it. So I keep getting paid to do them, but they don’t get made — which I feel fine about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve made 17 movies. It’s not like I haven’t spoken. … And at the same time, the books do better than the movies and I just need a way to tell stories. … But mostly with independent movies, a movie that routinely used to cost $7 million now they want you to do it for $2 million or $1 million. And I can’t go backwards! I don’t want to be an underground filmmaker at 73. I did that. I went through all that. And Hollywood treated me fairly. I don’t have any real complaints.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On collecting unusual contemporary art \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I bought a painting — if you could call it that — by Karin Sander, a German artist I like, and what she did, she has never touched this painting or seen it. She gave her American art dealer a blank canvas, and told him to leave it outside in the Hamptons until it got mold all over it. And then the mold dried in kind of a beautiful way. It looks like a Robert Ryman white painting. But then the dealer said, “I can’t bring it in the gallery. And if you want to buy it, I have to get it treated.” So he got it treated, and then for me to buy it, which I did, I thought, “Isn’t this great? If I don’t have it treated it could wreck my house. It could make me sick. It could maybe kill my guests. It might disappear one day. It’s ugly, and it’s really expensive. And this is perfect! This is the perfect contemporary art!” … It hasn’t spread. None of my guests have been rushed to the hospital from it. But I liked the idea that it’s a dangerous painting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On his plans to be buried in Baltimore, in the same cemetery as his friends\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a small little graveyard. They handled Divine’s funeral very well. … Mink [Stole] is going to get buried there, Pat Moran … all my friends, so we call it “Disgraceland,” and really I like the idea of being buried with your friends. Most people do not do that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vincent Peranio, who does all the set designs for my movies, I said, “Maybe you could design [a tombstone] for me that looks old. That has moss on it or something,” but I don’t want any jokes on it, no. I just want the day I was born and the day I died and my name. I don’t want like, “That’s all, folks!” or anything like that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sam Briger and Mooj Zadie produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27Filth+Elder%27+John+Waters+Says+There+Are+Still+%27Plenty+Of+Rules%27+Left+To+Break&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>When the kerfuffle over the impending release of Harper Lee’s \u003cem>Go Set a Watchman\u003c/em> was cluttering up my news feeds in 2015, I confess that I didn’t pay much attention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Having not grown up in the United States, where Lee’s \u003cem>To Kill A Mockingbird \u003c/em>is often required reading in children’s education, I first read the classic when I was 20. It was part of a yearlong attempt of trying to catch up with what most of my college friends and professors considered canonical. It was with some trepidation, then, that I approached Casey Cep’s new book, \u003cem>Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I expected to be charmed by the writing; Cep writes regularly for \u003cem>The New Yorker\u003c/em>, and her style is detailed and evocative, sometimes dramatic in a fun way, as when she \u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/17/the-contested-legacy-of-atticus-finch\">wrote\u003c/a> of Harper Lee that “only Jesus made his father more famous.” As a relatively recent convert to the true-crime genre, I was hopeful that the book would deal responsibly with its subjects, and I wasn’t let down there either. But what I didn’t see coming was the emotional response I would have as I blazed through the last 20 pages of the book—yet there I was, weeping.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13857057\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 336px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13857057\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/furious-hours-harper-lee.jpg\" alt=\"'Furious Hours' by Casey Cep.\" width=\"336\" height=\"499\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/furious-hours-harper-lee.jpg 336w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/furious-hours-harper-lee-160x238.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 336px) 100vw, 336px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Furious Hours’ by Casey Cep.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Furious Hours \u003c/em>begins with a brief prologue that introduces its premise. In 1978, a largely unrecognized Nelle (pronounced \u003cem>Nell\u003c/em>, not \u003cem>Nellie\u003c/em>—apparently the reason she left the name off her famous book was frustration at the common mistake) Harper Lee sat in a courtroom in Alexander City, Ala., taking notes on the trial of Robert Burns, who was charged with killing the Rev. Willie Maxwell. Oddly, Tom Radney, the lawyer defending Burns—who everyone agreed did shoot Maxwell, as he did so at close range, inside a packed funeral home—had spent years defending Maxwell previously. Lee—who either never finished the book she wrote about the case or stashed a draft away somewhere that even the lawyer now handling her estate can’t find it—took copious notes, interviewed as many people as would speak to her and began considering how she could tell the complicated story of these three men.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Briefly, the story is this: Maxwell, an African-American man living in Alabama, was accused of killing his first wife, Mary Lou, but was exonerated. He cashed in on her life insurance and, apparently, was hooked—several other people in his circle died over the next few years, including his next-door neighbor Abram Anderson, who was married at the time to the woman who soon became Maxwell’s second wife, Dorcus; his brother, John Columbus Maxwell, known as J.C.; Dorcus herself; his nephew James Hicks; and his third (!) wife’s adopted daughter, teenager Shirley Ann Ellington. There was never enough evidence to charge him with any of the deaths after his wife’s; the copious numbers of life insurance policies he had taken out on each of them were considered circumstantial. But his community believed he was a killer, and rumors abounded that he was using voodoo to get away with it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was at Shirley Ann’s funeral that Robert Burns had, apparently, had enough, and shot Maxwell. Lawyer Tom Radney, who had also been a prominent, socially progressive politician in Alabama, defended Maxwell in the one and only murder charge brought against him, but went on to help him get insurance money for each of the first five deaths from companies that were trying to maintain that they didn’t meet the criteria for payouts. While Radney said he wouldn’t have defended Maxwell after Shirley Ann’s death, there’s no knowing for sure—but the point is that he chose to defend Maxwell’s killer. [aside postid='arts_13856915']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Where Lee failed or gave up on this story, Cep took up the challenge, using Lee’s own notes as well as her own research. \u003cem>Furious Hours \u003c/em>is divided into three parts, telling the tales of the reverend, his lawyer, and the famous writer each in turn. Along the way, Cep dives into a dozen obscure topics that she manages to relate with fascinating detail and social commentary—from the racist structures of the 20th century insurance business to the stigmatization of voodoo, one of various spellings and names encompassing ancient religious and spiritual practices brought to the Americas from Africa by their enslaved practitioners who were, often and early, forbidden to practice their faith, causing it to become a secret, fiercely protected underground endeavor. [aside postid='arts_13856737']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the last portion of the book, Cep turns to Lee’s eventual fascination with the Maxwell case, attempting, along the way, to correct many biographical mistakes that her family has had to see printed in unauthorized accounts of Lee’s life. Cep explores Lee’s complexities without flinching, recognizing them as human: On the one hand, she was eager to criticize the Southern tendency to erase or rewrite inconvenient history and the less-than-obvious racist ideologies that she saw around her, wherein people both disavowed the KKK and still favored segregation; on the other hand, she never came out in support of the civil rights movement. Another example: She helped Truman Capote with the majority of his research and note taking for \u003cem>In Cold Blood \u003c/em>and was deeply troubled by the inaccuracies and whole-cloth inventions that ended up in the book, yet still wrote a glowing profile of him prior to its release. And, of course, Cep shows Lee’s complicated relationship to writing, the success that seemed to block her forever after, and the human flaws and foibles that could never match the lionized reputation she held.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each section of the book could stand on its own, making it feel, in a way, like three books in one. But, ultimately, \u003cem>Furious Hours \u003c/em>delivers a gripping, incredibly well-written portrait of not only Harper Lee, but also of mid-20th century Alabama—and a still-unanswered set of crimes to rival the serial killers made infamous in the same time period.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12935470\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-800x42.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-160x8.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-768x40.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-240x13.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-375x20.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-520x27.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2019 \u003ca href=\"http://npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Ilana Masad is an Israeli-American fiction writer, critic and founder/host of the podcast The Other Stories. Her debut novel, \u003c/em>All My Mother’s Lovers\u003cem>, is forthcoming from Dutton in 2020.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>When the kerfuffle over the impending release of Harper Lee’s \u003cem>Go Set a Watchman\u003c/em> was cluttering up my news feeds in 2015, I confess that I didn’t pay much attention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Having not grown up in the United States, where Lee’s \u003cem>To Kill A Mockingbird \u003c/em>is often required reading in children’s education, I first read the classic when I was 20. It was part of a yearlong attempt of trying to catch up with what most of my college friends and professors considered canonical. It was with some trepidation, then, that I approached Casey Cep’s new book, \u003cem>Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I expected to be charmed by the writing; Cep writes regularly for \u003cem>The New Yorker\u003c/em>, and her style is detailed and evocative, sometimes dramatic in a fun way, as when she \u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/17/the-contested-legacy-of-atticus-finch\">wrote\u003c/a> of Harper Lee that “only Jesus made his father more famous.” As a relatively recent convert to the true-crime genre, I was hopeful that the book would deal responsibly with its subjects, and I wasn’t let down there either. But what I didn’t see coming was the emotional response I would have as I blazed through the last 20 pages of the book—yet there I was, weeping.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13857057\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 336px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13857057\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/furious-hours-harper-lee.jpg\" alt=\"'Furious Hours' by Casey Cep.\" width=\"336\" height=\"499\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/furious-hours-harper-lee.jpg 336w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/furious-hours-harper-lee-160x238.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 336px) 100vw, 336px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Furious Hours’ by Casey Cep.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Furious Hours \u003c/em>begins with a brief prologue that introduces its premise. In 1978, a largely unrecognized Nelle (pronounced \u003cem>Nell\u003c/em>, not \u003cem>Nellie\u003c/em>—apparently the reason she left the name off her famous book was frustration at the common mistake) Harper Lee sat in a courtroom in Alexander City, Ala., taking notes on the trial of Robert Burns, who was charged with killing the Rev. Willie Maxwell. Oddly, Tom Radney, the lawyer defending Burns—who everyone agreed did shoot Maxwell, as he did so at close range, inside a packed funeral home—had spent years defending Maxwell previously. Lee—who either never finished the book she wrote about the case or stashed a draft away somewhere that even the lawyer now handling her estate can’t find it—took copious notes, interviewed as many people as would speak to her and began considering how she could tell the complicated story of these three men.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Briefly, the story is this: Maxwell, an African-American man living in Alabama, was accused of killing his first wife, Mary Lou, but was exonerated. He cashed in on her life insurance and, apparently, was hooked—several other people in his circle died over the next few years, including his next-door neighbor Abram Anderson, who was married at the time to the woman who soon became Maxwell’s second wife, Dorcus; his brother, John Columbus Maxwell, known as J.C.; Dorcus herself; his nephew James Hicks; and his third (!) wife’s adopted daughter, teenager Shirley Ann Ellington. There was never enough evidence to charge him with any of the deaths after his wife’s; the copious numbers of life insurance policies he had taken out on each of them were considered circumstantial. But his community believed he was a killer, and rumors abounded that he was using voodoo to get away with it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was at Shirley Ann’s funeral that Robert Burns had, apparently, had enough, and shot Maxwell. Lawyer Tom Radney, who had also been a prominent, socially progressive politician in Alabama, defended Maxwell in the one and only murder charge brought against him, but went on to help him get insurance money for each of the first five deaths from companies that were trying to maintain that they didn’t meet the criteria for payouts. While Radney said he wouldn’t have defended Maxwell after Shirley Ann’s death, there’s no knowing for sure—but the point is that he chose to defend Maxwell’s killer. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Where Lee failed or gave up on this story, Cep took up the challenge, using Lee’s own notes as well as her own research. \u003cem>Furious Hours \u003c/em>is divided into three parts, telling the tales of the reverend, his lawyer, and the famous writer each in turn. Along the way, Cep dives into a dozen obscure topics that she manages to relate with fascinating detail and social commentary—from the racist structures of the 20th century insurance business to the stigmatization of voodoo, one of various spellings and names encompassing ancient religious and spiritual practices brought to the Americas from Africa by their enslaved practitioners who were, often and early, forbidden to practice their faith, causing it to become a secret, fiercely protected underground endeavor. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the last portion of the book, Cep turns to Lee’s eventual fascination with the Maxwell case, attempting, along the way, to correct many biographical mistakes that her family has had to see printed in unauthorized accounts of Lee’s life. Cep explores Lee’s complexities without flinching, recognizing them as human: On the one hand, she was eager to criticize the Southern tendency to erase or rewrite inconvenient history and the less-than-obvious racist ideologies that she saw around her, wherein people both disavowed the KKK and still favored segregation; on the other hand, she never came out in support of the civil rights movement. Another example: She helped Truman Capote with the majority of his research and note taking for \u003cem>In Cold Blood \u003c/em>and was deeply troubled by the inaccuracies and whole-cloth inventions that ended up in the book, yet still wrote a glowing profile of him prior to its release. And, of course, Cep shows Lee’s complicated relationship to writing, the success that seemed to block her forever after, and the human flaws and foibles that could never match the lionized reputation she held.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each section of the book could stand on its own, making it feel, in a way, like three books in one. But, ultimately, \u003cem>Furious Hours \u003c/em>delivers a gripping, incredibly well-written portrait of not only Harper Lee, but also of mid-20th century Alabama—and a still-unanswered set of crimes to rival the serial killers made infamous in the same time period.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12935470\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-800x42.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-160x8.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-768x40.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-240x13.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-375x20.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-520x27.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2019 \u003ca href=\"http://npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13856924\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 708px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-13856924 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/Revenge-of-She-Punks.jpg\" alt=\"Cover of 'Revenge of the She Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot' by Vivien Goldman.\" width=\"708\" height=\"900\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/Revenge-of-She-Punks.jpg 708w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/Revenge-of-She-Punks-160x203.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 708px) 100vw, 708px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Cover of ‘Revenge of the She Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot’ by Vivien Goldman.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Punk rock might be a relatively young genre, but the legend of its history has already become more or less solidified.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ask what makes punk \u003cem>punk\u003c/em> and you’ll probably get a story that starts in 1970s London, or maybe New York; you’ll get The Sex Pistols, The Ramones or The Clash; counterculture, anti-establishment and leather jackets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Would you hear about bashing the wage gap? Shutting down slut-shaming? Or even Patti Smith? If not, veteran punk (and punk scholar) Vivien Goldman has news for you. In \u003cem>Revenge Of The She-Punks,\u003c/em> Goldman sets out to rectify this gendered imbalance, tracing the formation, rise and global reach of punk rock and demonstrating women’s central place within it. A self-proclaimed “feminist music history from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot,” the book doesn’t just retell the story of punk with an added woman or two; it centers the relationships between gender and the genre, showing how, through the right lens, the story of punk is a story about women’s ingenuity and power.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the manifesto that opens \u003cem>She-Punks\u003c/em> — sorry, that’s the “Womanifesto” — Goldman places the book’s origins in 1976. She was fresh out of college and working as a journalist at the British rock publication \u003cem>Sounds\u003c/em> when she saw, for the first time in her life, a woman onstage playing rock music. It led her to publish her first article about women in rock. By the ’90s, Goldman says, this type of article had become “a predictable annual staple of rock magazines,” fueled by lifeless cliches — but at the time, it was an exhilarating angle and, as this book attests, fertile ground for her lifelong dedication to the topic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since writing that 1976 article, Goldman has built a reputation as a punk lifer in every conceivable role: She’s worked as a publicist, author, editor and biographer; she’s recorded and performed her own music; she’s been a producer and a back-up singer. She’s taught at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music long enough to earn the title “the punk professor.” And throughout her five decades as a punk, she has paid careful attention to female musicians and fans — “she-punks,” as she affectionately calls them — from the groundbreaking work of X-Ray Spex and The Slits through contemporary artists like Fea and Big Joanie. Goldman is driven by a true passion for the music’s transformative potential: “For this writer,” she writes in \u003cem>She-Punks\u003c/em>, “punk’s most enduring and significant achievement will always be its liberating impact on the less-privileged sex.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='pop_111468' hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2019/04/GettyImages-579380108-1020x708.jpg' target='_blank']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>She-Punks\u003c/em>‘ chapters are divided not chronologically but by themes, and each section opens with a playlist of the songs Goldman cites throughout the chapter. In “Girly Identity,” she explores self-knowledge and self-image within punk, including the impact of ’60s and ’70s feminist movements and the riot grrrl movement. “Money” focuses on the way she-punks have contended with the pressures of global capitalism. “Love/Unlove” combines songs about love and lust with those about sexual violence, positing the latter category as the former’s opposite; it’s a vexing choice and might perhaps serve the subject matter better to analyze them separately. Finally, “Protest” considers how she-punks have pushed back against repressive political regimes, gendered expectations, class privilege and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout \u003cem>She-Punks\u003c/em>, Goldman maintains a global view; while the majority of the book focuses on British and American music, it also includes punk bands from Japan, India, Colombia, Indonesia and the Czech Republic (among others). Goldman has worked extensively on reggae — she was, after all, Bob Marley’s first U.K. publicist — and is especially attuned to the impact of Jamaican music on the development of punk. And in keeping with her ethos that our traditional notions of punk can cut important voices out of the story, Goldman’s book takes a wide view of what the genre comprises and who deserves to fall under its umbrella, featuring stories about the Afropunk scene, supermodel and new wave queen Grace Jones and poet and activist Jayne Cortez.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13808185' hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/09/BikiniKill.SR_-960x373.jpg' target='_blank']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Goldman’s tone throughout \u003cem>She-Punks\u003c/em> mixes her years of research with larger cultural observations and her own personal history (she’s thrift shopping with Patti Smith in one chapter; attending Ornette Coleman’s birthday party in another). The approach is both disarming and purposeful — supporting the feminist notion that women’s lived experiences constitute a valid form of knowledge — yet there are moments when her more casual word choice can be distracting (her claim that punk singer Poly Styrene’s biracial identity makes her representative of a “future breed,” for example, or her passing reference to homosexuality as a “subculture,” are disappointing).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a thread of messiness that runs throughout \u003cem>She-Punks\u003c/em>: songs that could easily slip from one of the book’s chapter-defining themes to another; thoughts on race and LGBTQ identity that deserve to be more thoroughly developed. But attempting to encompass the entirety of this broad view of punk — and the diversity of women’s lives — in one volume is an ambitious mission. And for it to succeed, that messiness is inevitable; it only further underscores Goldman’s central argument that women’s contributions to punk are too important and varied to fit neatly into a clichéd article or two about “women who rock”; that womanhood is too complex and rich to be so easily categorized.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The reality of women’s lives, Goldman and her playlists argue, can be brutal, rule-breaking and paradigm-redefining — and, after all, what’s more punk than that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>She-Punks\u003c/em>‘ chapters are divided not chronologically but by themes, and each section opens with a playlist of the songs Goldman cites throughout the chapter. In “Girly Identity,” she explores self-knowledge and self-image within punk, including the impact of ’60s and ’70s feminist movements and the riot grrrl movement. “Money” focuses on the way she-punks have contended with the pressures of global capitalism. “Love/Unlove” combines songs about love and lust with those about sexual violence, positing the latter category as the former’s opposite; it’s a vexing choice and might perhaps serve the subject matter better to analyze them separately. Finally, “Protest” considers how she-punks have pushed back against repressive political regimes, gendered expectations, class privilege and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout \u003cem>She-Punks\u003c/em>, Goldman maintains a global view; while the majority of the book focuses on British and American music, it also includes punk bands from Japan, India, Colombia, Indonesia and the Czech Republic (among others). Goldman has worked extensively on reggae — she was, after all, Bob Marley’s first U.K. publicist — and is especially attuned to the impact of Jamaican music on the development of punk. And in keeping with her ethos that our traditional notions of punk can cut important voices out of the story, Goldman’s book takes a wide view of what the genre comprises and who deserves to fall under its umbrella, featuring stories about the Afropunk scene, supermodel and new wave queen Grace Jones and poet and activist Jayne Cortez.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Goldman’s tone throughout \u003cem>She-Punks\u003c/em> mixes her years of research with larger cultural observations and her own personal history (she’s thrift shopping with Patti Smith in one chapter; attending Ornette Coleman’s birthday party in another). The approach is both disarming and purposeful — supporting the feminist notion that women’s lived experiences constitute a valid form of knowledge — yet there are moments when her more casual word choice can be distracting (her claim that punk singer Poly Styrene’s biracial identity makes her representative of a “future breed,” for example, or her passing reference to homosexuality as a “subculture,” are disappointing).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a thread of messiness that runs throughout \u003cem>She-Punks\u003c/em>: songs that could easily slip from one of the book’s chapter-defining themes to another; thoughts on race and LGBTQ identity that deserve to be more thoroughly developed. But attempting to encompass the entirety of this broad view of punk — and the diversity of women’s lives — in one volume is an ambitious mission. And for it to succeed, that messiness is inevitable; it only further underscores Goldman’s central argument that women’s contributions to punk are too important and varied to fit neatly into a clichéd article or two about “women who rock”; that womanhood is too complex and rich to be so easily categorized.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The reality of women’s lives, Goldman and her playlists argue, can be brutal, rule-breaking and paradigm-redefining — and, after all, what’s more punk than that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13856809\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13856809\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/nowwallsani-800x1208.jpg\" alt=\"Cover of Ani DiFranco's new memoir 'No Walls and the Recurring Dream.'\" width=\"800\" height=\"1208\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/nowwallsani-800x1208.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/nowwallsani-160x242.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/nowwallsani-768x1159.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/nowwallsani-1020x1540.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/nowwallsani-795x1200.jpg 795w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/nowwallsani.jpg 1357w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Cover of Ani DiFranco’s new memoir ‘No Walls and the Recurring Dream.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the Artist)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/14966211/ani-difranco\">Ani DiFranco\u003c/a> grew up in a house with no walls. “It was like a brick carriage house there. Inside there was just one room on the first floor and one room on the second floor. So it was an intimate house for a non-intimate family.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DiFranco’s deep craving for intimacy led her to writing music. And the things DiFranco wanted to write were exactly what a generation of women coming of age in the ’90s wanted to hear. DiFranco relives those early years in her new memoir, \u003cem>No Walls and the Recurring Dream.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During her adolescent years, DiFranco remembers searching for connection and intimacy she never felt at home. “As a teenager, I went out into the world armed with my guitar and my little songs and my aggressive eye contact and I was looking to connect with somebody else deeply,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At one point in the memoir, DiFranco reminisces on shaving her head at 18. “It’s funny to think back,” she says. “I shaved it all off because I didn’t want to be a sex object and there I was playing in bars you know mostly surrounded by men with drinks in their hands. And I was getting attention for not the right reasons. I wanted a different kind of power, I think.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DiFranco remembers the power of shaving her head was polarizing. The catcalling from men stopped, but so did casual pleasantries with strangers. The musician recalls people thinking she was a skinhead or punk ready to vandalize property.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People were visibly intimidated,” DiFranco says, “which, again: Here’s a girl moving through the world craving eye contact, craving human connection, even fleeting connection [from] passersby, you know. And so, the fact that people no longer even would look me in the eye … It really weighed on me and it started to accumulate in my chest. Even people who are politely nervous, just eventually enraged me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DiFranco poured that rage into her songwriting. As she wrote in her memoir, DiFranco struggled with making music and once it was made, she hated the idea of selling it. She remembers feeling repulsed by the idea of having to sell her tapes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I guess people were right in that I was kind of a punk kid. I was anti-everything, I was anti-capitalist,” DiFranco says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though she goes through many personal and professional trials in the book, DiFranco says her sheer determination always outweighed her self-doubt. “Youth is a powerful drug, you know? I was on a mission. So, yeah, I wasn’t gonna let anything stop me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Ani DiFranco will discuss her new memoir on Tuesday, May 14 at First Church Berkeley as part of Berkeley Arts & Letters. Details \u003ca href=\"https://nowalls.brownpapertickets.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here\u003c/a>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13856809\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13856809\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/nowwallsani-800x1208.jpg\" alt=\"Cover of Ani DiFranco's new memoir 'No Walls and the Recurring Dream.'\" width=\"800\" height=\"1208\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/nowwallsani-800x1208.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/nowwallsani-160x242.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/nowwallsani-768x1159.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/nowwallsani-1020x1540.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/nowwallsani-795x1200.jpg 795w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/nowwallsani.jpg 1357w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Cover of Ani DiFranco’s new memoir ‘No Walls and the Recurring Dream.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the Artist)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/14966211/ani-difranco\">Ani DiFranco\u003c/a> grew up in a house with no walls. “It was like a brick carriage house there. Inside there was just one room on the first floor and one room on the second floor. So it was an intimate house for a non-intimate family.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DiFranco’s deep craving for intimacy led her to writing music. And the things DiFranco wanted to write were exactly what a generation of women coming of age in the ’90s wanted to hear. DiFranco relives those early years in her new memoir, \u003cem>No Walls and the Recurring Dream.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During her adolescent years, DiFranco remembers searching for connection and intimacy she never felt at home. “As a teenager, I went out into the world armed with my guitar and my little songs and my aggressive eye contact and I was looking to connect with somebody else deeply,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At one point in the memoir, DiFranco reminisces on shaving her head at 18. “It’s funny to think back,” she says. “I shaved it all off because I didn’t want to be a sex object and there I was playing in bars you know mostly surrounded by men with drinks in their hands. And I was getting attention for not the right reasons. I wanted a different kind of power, I think.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DiFranco remembers the power of shaving her head was polarizing. The catcalling from men stopped, but so did casual pleasantries with strangers. The musician recalls people thinking she was a skinhead or punk ready to vandalize property.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People were visibly intimidated,” DiFranco says, “which, again: Here’s a girl moving through the world craving eye contact, craving human connection, even fleeting connection [from] passersby, you know. And so, the fact that people no longer even would look me in the eye … It really weighed on me and it started to accumulate in my chest. Even people who are politely nervous, just eventually enraged me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DiFranco poured that rage into her songwriting. As she wrote in her memoir, DiFranco struggled with making music and once it was made, she hated the idea of selling it. She remembers feeling repulsed by the idea of having to sell her tapes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I guess people were right in that I was kind of a punk kid. I was anti-everything, I was anti-capitalist,” DiFranco says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though she goes through many personal and professional trials in the book, DiFranco says her sheer determination always outweighed her self-doubt. “Youth is a powerful drug, you know? I was on a mission. So, yeah, I wasn’t gonna let anything stop me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Ani DiFranco will discuss her new memoir on Tuesday, May 14 at First Church Berkeley as part of Berkeley Arts & Letters. Details \u003ca href=\"https://nowalls.brownpapertickets.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here\u003c/a>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "On 'How To Do Nothing'—And Who, Exactly, Gets to Do It",
"headTitle": "On ‘How To Do Nothing’—And Who, Exactly, Gets to Do It | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">F\u003c/span>or two weeks after \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/artschool/578/mining-the-internet-with-jenny-odell\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jenny Odell\u003c/a>’s new book \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em> arrived in the mail, I was too busy to pick it up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13856338\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 160px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-13856338\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/How-To-Do-Nothing_BookCover-160x242.jpg\" alt=\"Jenny Odell's 'How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.'\" width=\"160\" height=\"242\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/How-To-Do-Nothing_BookCover-160x242.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/How-To-Do-Nothing_BookCover.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 160px) 100vw, 160px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jenny Odell’s ‘How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Melville House)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>That feels ridiculous to write, since I’d been looking forward to reading it since well before publication. As the artist behind projects like the ‘\u003ca href=\"https://www.suspended-objects.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bureau of Suspended Objects\u003c/a>’ at the San Francisco dump and the mind-expanding essay \u003ca href=\"http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">There’s No Such Thing As a Free Watch\u003c/a>, Odell has long been one of those people whose grocery lists, even, I feel certain I would find scintillating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I was slammed: I had deadlines to meet, emails to send, and social obligations and/or networking events that all had a way of bleeding over into my downtime. As a full-time freelance writer, I always know exactly what’s in my checking account. And even on the best days, this knowledge forms a sort of cloud overhead, casting a guilty shadow of understanding that, at any given time, I really \u003cem>should\u003c/em> be working.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I also have to keep up on the news, be on Twitter, promote my own work if I want anyone to see it. I’ve grown accustomed to the fact that a good deal of my work is simply selling myself—sorry, “branding”—and also to the nonexistent line between my professional and personal lives. It all adds up to a sense of always being busy. Also, the new season of \u003cem>Queer Eye\u003c/em> had just arrived on Netflix.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856327\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Near the end of the second week of Odell’s book sitting on my shelf unopened, after a particularly unproductive day—the kind where the guilt over how little you’ve accomplished becomes an activity in and of itself—I went to a Mission District bar to see a friend’s band play. A typical Thursday night for me, except that I was 26 weeks pregnant, and looked it, and it turned out this show meant seeing a handful of people I hadn’t seen in a while, people who were not expecting to find me in such a state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a great show, and I stayed until the last band had played the last note, generally behaving the way I always do at shows (minus a beer or two). At some point before I split for home, a musician friend who’d just been on stage gave me a hug and, eyeing my belly, said with innocent admiration that it was great to see me “out.” He seemed amused that I had even danced a little.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He meant nothing by it, yet the defensiveness that rose up in my throat was immediate. I was still me. Why wouldn’t I be out?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the next day, as I bristled at his implication—\u003cem>I’m pregnant, I don’t have polio\u003c/em>, I said to a friend over brunch—I also couldn’t ignore the hatch door of possibility that had just swung open before me. People’s expectations for me had changed shape overnight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was pregnant, and with this fact came coded privileges. I had an excuse to go home early. I had an excuse to stay home in the first place. Because I was visibly “working” to create a human being, and doing it around the clock, I realized I had a limited-time-only pass—for a strange, temporal period—to do nothing else at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856328\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">“A\u003c/span>t some point, I began to think of this as an activist book disguised as a self-help book,” writes Odell in \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em>’s introduction, a disclaimer that becomes unnecessary midway through the first chapter. Despite the book’s title, anyone hoping for Wikihow-style bullet points about how to achieve enlightenment via inaction should look elsewhere. (Perhaps to Wikihow. \u003ca href=\"https://www.wikihow.com/Appreciate-Black-Metal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Those illustrations!\u003c/a>).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What Odell delivers instead, over the course of six chapter-length essays, is a labyrinth of questions about the usefulness of a life focused on “usefulness”—and what gets overlooked in a culture obsessed with productivity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a reason, Odell suggests, that so many of us increasingly spend our days feeling like our brains are occupied by tiny wind-up monkeys playing cymbals—\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/well/mind/putting-down-your-phone-may-help-you-live-longer.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">overstimulated but unfocused\u003c/a>, lonely while supposedly more connected than ever. \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em> is a call to arms about the fractured state of human attention (a commodity Odell paints as our most precious resource), and what’s at stake for society when we allow it to be bought and sold by companies whose profits depend on our willingness to stay addicted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To do this, Odell finds inspiration in the bioregionalism movement; touches on organized labor and the political potential of work stoppage; traces the history of communes and other forms of physical escape from the rat race and their through-line to modern “digital detox programs,” noting the pitfalls of each; looks to trees as role models for passive resistance; and outlines the bubble effect of online communities like Nextdoor (in contrast with, literally, having dinner with one’s neighbor next door).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856329\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Odell has a historian’s obsessiveness for the provenance of her ideas, and she pulls from a broad swath of teachers, including Plato, Audre Lorde, the third-century hermit St. Anthony, the fourth-century philosopher Epicurus, the technology ethicist James Williams, Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, a slew of 20th and 21st century performance artists, Rebecca Solnit, and Tom Green (who, it turns out, invented \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planking_(fad)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">planking\u003c/a> back in 1994).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A hundred different trend stories can tell you \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/well/mind/putting-down-your-phone-may-help-you-live-longer.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">too much screentime is bad for your brain.\u003c/a> Intellectually rigorous and quietly radical, Odell’s book extrapolates those studies outward to argue that what’s detrimental for one’s personal health is, potentially, fatal for one’s community. When we forfeit our ability to interact meaningfully with our environment and with other human beings, she argues, we lose the very fabric of society: the means to truly connect and support one another, to organize, to make meaningful social and political change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The antidote she suggests is both simple and challenging: a reclaiming and redirecting of attention to our literal surroundings. The book forces some practice on this; at times, the reader is made to slow down to the pace and character of a physical space, and the reading itself becomes a trust fall of observation. We have to believe that the description of a dam or a type of bird will not only “pay off” in terms of a larger point. It \u003cem>is\u003c/em>, in fact, the larger point—to notice how the world opens up when you step back from the “financially incentivized proliferation of chatter” that makes up the digital age, and simply see what’s around you as worthy of attention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856330\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To that end, we go birdwatching in the Oakland hills, sit in the Morcom Rose Garden, and explore the topography of Odell’s native Cupertino via its creeks and office parks. In one example of an attention “exercise,” Odell recalls going to see the San Francisco Symphony perform John Cage’s \u003cem>Song Books,\u003c/em> an experimental piece made up of ambient sound, in which the musicians dress in plain clothes and futz around with everyday, noise-making props like a typewriter, a set of cards, and a blender.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the absence of music, the audience’s uncomfortable throat-clearing and chair sounds all build tension, becoming part of the score, until conductor Michael Tilson Thomas uses the blender to make a smoothie—then takes a sip and makes a satisfied face. “After that, all bets were off, with laughter tumbling down from the seats toward the stage and integrating itself into the piece,” writes Odell. Then:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>More than just the conventions of the symphony hall were broken open that night. I walked out of the symphony hall down Grove Street to catch the MUNI, and heard every sound with a new clarity—the cars, the footsteps, the wind, the electric buses. Actually, it wasn’t so much that I heard these clearly as that I heard them at all. How was it, I wondered that I could have lived in a city for four years already… and never have actually heard anything? For months after this, I was a different person. At times, it was enough to make me laugh out loud.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>The type of heightened awareness she’s describing—not just of her surroundings but of her own everyday reality as a construction, something malleable—is a state I mostly hear people talk about as the result of either psychedelics or a disciplined meditation practice, or both. The suggestion that each of us already has what we need for this in our brains—that such a shift in perception might be possible through simply, consciously taking back our attention from the corporate forces working to drain it—is nothing short of exhilarating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I mean: You’re telling me that if I retrain myself not to look at Twitter 32 times a day, I might be able to go on a walk and look at trees and hear birds and notice the hum of the ecosystem and tap into the fact that everything in the world has a secret life and pulse that’s always there and that everything’s connected and technically I’m part of it? And that it’s simply up to me to remember and keep that front and center (instead of thinking about who shared my latest story on Facebook or what Ariana Grande said about Jim Carrey or whether or not I should cancel my ClassPass membership) and that in so doing I would actually be fighting back against the creep of technofascism and resisting capitalism’s hold on the most vital and wild aspects of humanity—and that all of that is possible \u003cem>without drugs\u003c/em>?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s hard to put into a hashtag. But it sure beats anything I ever learned from \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Abuse_Resistance_Education\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">D.A.R.E\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856332\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">A\u003c/span>s I write this, I’m well into my third trimester, and I’m just getting used to the ways it’s changed how I move through the world: walking down 16th street, I’m met with a warm, protective nod from the older man smoking outside a bar at 1pm on a Tuesday, as opposed to a lecherous comment. Women with babies offer me conspiratorial smiles. In the past 48 hours I’ve had two different groups of people make a fuss about insisting I sit down on the bus. (I’ve chosen to take this as reassurance that chivalry is alive and well, and not as “You look like you might go into labor any minute and I’d prefer you not be standing next to me when you do.”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, more surprising (to me) are the changes in how I treat myself: basic tenets of “self-care” that have always eluded me became unavoidable overnight. My needs and responses to them have become animal-like, elemental: when I’m tired, I sleep. When I’m hungry, I eat. I have to work, so I work, and I love my friends and family, so I see my friends and family. I show up for my community when I want or need to. But there’s very little striving. I want to say I don’t feel tethered to notifications the way I’m used to. When I don’t want to do anything, I really \u003cem>don’t do anything\u003c/em>. And I don’t feel guilty about it. It’s very new and it’s very, very weird.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s surely no coincidence that this newfound ability to “listen to my body,” to use more terminology that grosses me out, arrived at the same time I stopped being able to bulldoze over physiological instincts with quick fixes: tired=more caffeine, stressed out at the end of the day=have some whiskey, and so on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it also occurs to me that I’ve truly never felt \u003cem>allowed\u003c/em> to indulge in the possibility of non-productivity before. It definitely occurs to me that I only feel this way because it’s temporary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856331\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The thing about refusal to participate as a method of resistance, of course—whether mentally, from the news cycle, via quitting social media, or physically, from urban society, by splitting for a cabin in the woods—is that it necessitates a certain level of privilege. (Thoreau only spent one night in jail, after all, because some rich aunt paid his back taxes.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once you start seeing rest as a luxury good, it’s everywhere; most recently, I loved \u003ca href=\"https://archinect.com/news/article/150133249/sunlight-was-weaponized-how-shade-has-been-an-index-of-inequality-in-la-s-urban-design\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this piece on shade in Los Angeles as an index of inequality\u003c/a>. And when it comes to mental rest, we all reflexively know the prerequisites: in the first months of the Trump administration, when people mentioned in an offhand way that they just “couldn’t read the news anymore,” those people were generally not undocumented immigrants or Muslims or trans women—members of groups for whom the stakes of inattention are life and death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Odell knows this, too, and she owns, among others, the privileges that made it possible for her to even write this book. Yet in so doing, she winds up back at the labor movement—perhaps the last tangible win for the working class in America—and reminds us that the “eight hours of work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” was a campaign “about a demarcation of time”:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries… so that we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>It’s not an answer to the privilege question, to be sure. But I took a photo of this passage, and since finishing the book, these words have haunted me. They bite at my ankles when I compulsively check Twitter before bed. They raise their eyebrows when I click on a shoe ad on Instagram, and for the next week, the app seemingly chases me around my own home, asking: are you sure you don’t want those shoes? How about \u003cem>these? \u003c/em>(\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIFLtNYI3Ls\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Insert Radiohead lyrics here\u003c/a>.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem is, of course, we’re all busy, and concepts like the ones conveyed in \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em> are hard to keep in focus. As I write this, I’m staring down three other deadlines and an overgrown swamp of an inbox, and I need to get groceries, and have I mentioned freelance writers don’t exactly get paid maternity leave? I am staggeringly privileged compared to many people in America, but like many people in America, I cannot afford to stop working around the clock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Odell also makes a compelling case that we can’t afford not to. I am curious to see if and how this argument lands differently for me when I stop being a person with a highly visible hall-pass-to-do-nothing and instead become a Working Mother, a category of human I have come to understand is not exactly pampered by the infrastructure of American capitalism, nor encouraged to go on long, reflective nature walks alone. Similarly, I find myself wondering how this book would read if I were a person whose work involved 10 hours of daily manual labor, as opposed to sitting in front of the internet all day, and then wondering why my leisure time felt so familiar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But for me, for now—and, I suspect, for many of us—it’s a huge shift to even ask some of these questions in the first place. After reading \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em>, I have a newly heightened vigilance about what counts as work, and about whom we’re working for, exactly, when we open up Instagram for the 10th time that day. And a new awareness of the lessons that dwell in the realm of negative possibility—of doing nothing—which are, of course, always there waiting. They require only that we be still.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Jenny Odell speaks about ‘How To Do Nothing’ with East Bay Yesterday host Liam O’Donoghue on Thursday, May 2, at Wolfman Books in Oakland. \u003ca href=\"http://wolfmanhomerepair.com/event/2019/5/2/how-to-do-nothing-in-oakland-with-jenny-odell-and-liam-odonoghue\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details here\u003c/a>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Jenny Odell's new book is a salve for the guilty shadow of understanding that, at any given time, we really should be working.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">F\u003c/span>or two weeks after \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/artschool/578/mining-the-internet-with-jenny-odell\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jenny Odell\u003c/a>’s new book \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em> arrived in the mail, I was too busy to pick it up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13856338\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 160px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-13856338\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/How-To-Do-Nothing_BookCover-160x242.jpg\" alt=\"Jenny Odell's 'How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.'\" width=\"160\" height=\"242\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/How-To-Do-Nothing_BookCover-160x242.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/How-To-Do-Nothing_BookCover.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 160px) 100vw, 160px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jenny Odell’s ‘How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Melville House)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>That feels ridiculous to write, since I’d been looking forward to reading it since well before publication. As the artist behind projects like the ‘\u003ca href=\"https://www.suspended-objects.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bureau of Suspended Objects\u003c/a>’ at the San Francisco dump and the mind-expanding essay \u003ca href=\"http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">There’s No Such Thing As a Free Watch\u003c/a>, Odell has long been one of those people whose grocery lists, even, I feel certain I would find scintillating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I was slammed: I had deadlines to meet, emails to send, and social obligations and/or networking events that all had a way of bleeding over into my downtime. As a full-time freelance writer, I always know exactly what’s in my checking account. And even on the best days, this knowledge forms a sort of cloud overhead, casting a guilty shadow of understanding that, at any given time, I really \u003cem>should\u003c/em> be working.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I also have to keep up on the news, be on Twitter, promote my own work if I want anyone to see it. I’ve grown accustomed to the fact that a good deal of my work is simply selling myself—sorry, “branding”—and also to the nonexistent line between my professional and personal lives. It all adds up to a sense of always being busy. Also, the new season of \u003cem>Queer Eye\u003c/em> had just arrived on Netflix.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856327\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1132298668-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Near the end of the second week of Odell’s book sitting on my shelf unopened, after a particularly unproductive day—the kind where the guilt over how little you’ve accomplished becomes an activity in and of itself—I went to a Mission District bar to see a friend’s band play. A typical Thursday night for me, except that I was 26 weeks pregnant, and looked it, and it turned out this show meant seeing a handful of people I hadn’t seen in a while, people who were not expecting to find me in such a state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a great show, and I stayed until the last band had played the last note, generally behaving the way I always do at shows (minus a beer or two). At some point before I split for home, a musician friend who’d just been on stage gave me a hug and, eyeing my belly, said with innocent admiration that it was great to see me “out.” He seemed amused that I had even danced a little.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He meant nothing by it, yet the defensiveness that rose up in my throat was immediate. I was still me. Why wouldn’t I be out?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the next day, as I bristled at his implication—\u003cem>I’m pregnant, I don’t have polio\u003c/em>, I said to a friend over brunch—I also couldn’t ignore the hatch door of possibility that had just swung open before me. People’s expectations for me had changed shape overnight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was pregnant, and with this fact came coded privileges. I had an excuse to go home early. I had an excuse to stay home in the first place. Because I was visibly “working” to create a human being, and doing it around the clock, I realized I had a limited-time-only pass—for a strange, temporal period—to do nothing else at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856328\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1073164374-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">“A\u003c/span>t some point, I began to think of this as an activist book disguised as a self-help book,” writes Odell in \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em>’s introduction, a disclaimer that becomes unnecessary midway through the first chapter. Despite the book’s title, anyone hoping for Wikihow-style bullet points about how to achieve enlightenment via inaction should look elsewhere. (Perhaps to Wikihow. \u003ca href=\"https://www.wikihow.com/Appreciate-Black-Metal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Those illustrations!\u003c/a>).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What Odell delivers instead, over the course of six chapter-length essays, is a labyrinth of questions about the usefulness of a life focused on “usefulness”—and what gets overlooked in a culture obsessed with productivity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a reason, Odell suggests, that so many of us increasingly spend our days feeling like our brains are occupied by tiny wind-up monkeys playing cymbals—\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/well/mind/putting-down-your-phone-may-help-you-live-longer.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">overstimulated but unfocused\u003c/a>, lonely while supposedly more connected than ever. \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em> is a call to arms about the fractured state of human attention (a commodity Odell paints as our most precious resource), and what’s at stake for society when we allow it to be bought and sold by companies whose profits depend on our willingness to stay addicted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To do this, Odell finds inspiration in the bioregionalism movement; touches on organized labor and the political potential of work stoppage; traces the history of communes and other forms of physical escape from the rat race and their through-line to modern “digital detox programs,” noting the pitfalls of each; looks to trees as role models for passive resistance; and outlines the bubble effect of online communities like Nextdoor (in contrast with, literally, having dinner with one’s neighbor next door).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856329\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1056361772-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Odell has a historian’s obsessiveness for the provenance of her ideas, and she pulls from a broad swath of teachers, including Plato, Audre Lorde, the third-century hermit St. Anthony, the fourth-century philosopher Epicurus, the technology ethicist James Williams, Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, a slew of 20th and 21st century performance artists, Rebecca Solnit, and Tom Green (who, it turns out, invented \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planking_(fad)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">planking\u003c/a> back in 1994).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A hundred different trend stories can tell you \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/well/mind/putting-down-your-phone-may-help-you-live-longer.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">too much screentime is bad for your brain.\u003c/a> Intellectually rigorous and quietly radical, Odell’s book extrapolates those studies outward to argue that what’s detrimental for one’s personal health is, potentially, fatal for one’s community. When we forfeit our ability to interact meaningfully with our environment and with other human beings, she argues, we lose the very fabric of society: the means to truly connect and support one another, to organize, to make meaningful social and political change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The antidote she suggests is both simple and challenging: a reclaiming and redirecting of attention to our literal surroundings. The book forces some practice on this; at times, the reader is made to slow down to the pace and character of a physical space, and the reading itself becomes a trust fall of observation. We have to believe that the description of a dam or a type of bird will not only “pay off” in terms of a larger point. It \u003cem>is\u003c/em>, in fact, the larger point—to notice how the world opens up when you step back from the “financially incentivized proliferation of chatter” that makes up the digital age, and simply see what’s around you as worthy of attention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856330\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1097906334-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To that end, we go birdwatching in the Oakland hills, sit in the Morcom Rose Garden, and explore the topography of Odell’s native Cupertino via its creeks and office parks. In one example of an attention “exercise,” Odell recalls going to see the San Francisco Symphony perform John Cage’s \u003cem>Song Books,\u003c/em> an experimental piece made up of ambient sound, in which the musicians dress in plain clothes and futz around with everyday, noise-making props like a typewriter, a set of cards, and a blender.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the absence of music, the audience’s uncomfortable throat-clearing and chair sounds all build tension, becoming part of the score, until conductor Michael Tilson Thomas uses the blender to make a smoothie—then takes a sip and makes a satisfied face. “After that, all bets were off, with laughter tumbling down from the seats toward the stage and integrating itself into the piece,” writes Odell. Then:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>More than just the conventions of the symphony hall were broken open that night. I walked out of the symphony hall down Grove Street to catch the MUNI, and heard every sound with a new clarity—the cars, the footsteps, the wind, the electric buses. Actually, it wasn’t so much that I heard these clearly as that I heard them at all. How was it, I wondered that I could have lived in a city for four years already… and never have actually heard anything? For months after this, I was a different person. At times, it was enough to make me laugh out loud.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>The type of heightened awareness she’s describing—not just of her surroundings but of her own everyday reality as a construction, something malleable—is a state I mostly hear people talk about as the result of either psychedelics or a disciplined meditation practice, or both. The suggestion that each of us already has what we need for this in our brains—that such a shift in perception might be possible through simply, consciously taking back our attention from the corporate forces working to drain it—is nothing short of exhilarating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I mean: You’re telling me that if I retrain myself not to look at Twitter 32 times a day, I might be able to go on a walk and look at trees and hear birds and notice the hum of the ecosystem and tap into the fact that everything in the world has a secret life and pulse that’s always there and that everything’s connected and technically I’m part of it? And that it’s simply up to me to remember and keep that front and center (instead of thinking about who shared my latest story on Facebook or what Ariana Grande said about Jim Carrey or whether or not I should cancel my ClassPass membership) and that in so doing I would actually be fighting back against the creep of technofascism and resisting capitalism’s hold on the most vital and wild aspects of humanity—and that all of that is possible \u003cem>without drugs\u003c/em>?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s hard to put into a hashtag. But it sure beats anything I ever learned from \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Abuse_Resistance_Education\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">D.A.R.E\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856332\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1081464418-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">A\u003c/span>s I write this, I’m well into my third trimester, and I’m just getting used to the ways it’s changed how I move through the world: walking down 16th street, I’m met with a warm, protective nod from the older man smoking outside a bar at 1pm on a Tuesday, as opposed to a lecherous comment. Women with babies offer me conspiratorial smiles. In the past 48 hours I’ve had two different groups of people make a fuss about insisting I sit down on the bus. (I’ve chosen to take this as reassurance that chivalry is alive and well, and not as “You look like you might go into labor any minute and I’d prefer you not be standing next to me when you do.”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, more surprising (to me) are the changes in how I treat myself: basic tenets of “self-care” that have always eluded me became unavoidable overnight. My needs and responses to them have become animal-like, elemental: when I’m tired, I sleep. When I’m hungry, I eat. I have to work, so I work, and I love my friends and family, so I see my friends and family. I show up for my community when I want or need to. But there’s very little striving. I want to say I don’t feel tethered to notifications the way I’m used to. When I don’t want to do anything, I really \u003cem>don’t do anything\u003c/em>. And I don’t feel guilty about it. It’s very new and it’s very, very weird.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s surely no coincidence that this newfound ability to “listen to my body,” to use more terminology that grosses me out, arrived at the same time I stopped being able to bulldoze over physiological instincts with quick fixes: tired=more caffeine, stressed out at the end of the day=have some whiskey, and so on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it also occurs to me that I’ve truly never felt \u003cem>allowed\u003c/em> to indulge in the possibility of non-productivity before. It definitely occurs to me that I only feel this way because it’s temporary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856331\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1732\" height=\"1732\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389.jpg 1732w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/iStock-1124477389-1200x1200.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1732px) 100vw, 1732px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The thing about refusal to participate as a method of resistance, of course—whether mentally, from the news cycle, via quitting social media, or physically, from urban society, by splitting for a cabin in the woods—is that it necessitates a certain level of privilege. (Thoreau only spent one night in jail, after all, because some rich aunt paid his back taxes.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once you start seeing rest as a luxury good, it’s everywhere; most recently, I loved \u003ca href=\"https://archinect.com/news/article/150133249/sunlight-was-weaponized-how-shade-has-been-an-index-of-inequality-in-la-s-urban-design\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this piece on shade in Los Angeles as an index of inequality\u003c/a>. And when it comes to mental rest, we all reflexively know the prerequisites: in the first months of the Trump administration, when people mentioned in an offhand way that they just “couldn’t read the news anymore,” those people were generally not undocumented immigrants or Muslims or trans women—members of groups for whom the stakes of inattention are life and death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Odell knows this, too, and she owns, among others, the privileges that made it possible for her to even write this book. Yet in so doing, she winds up back at the labor movement—perhaps the last tangible win for the working class in America—and reminds us that the “eight hours of work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” was a campaign “about a demarcation of time”:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries… so that we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>It’s not an answer to the privilege question, to be sure. But I took a photo of this passage, and since finishing the book, these words have haunted me. They bite at my ankles when I compulsively check Twitter before bed. They raise their eyebrows when I click on a shoe ad on Instagram, and for the next week, the app seemingly chases me around my own home, asking: are you sure you don’t want those shoes? How about \u003cem>these? \u003c/em>(\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIFLtNYI3Ls\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Insert Radiohead lyrics here\u003c/a>.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem is, of course, we’re all busy, and concepts like the ones conveyed in \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em> are hard to keep in focus. As I write this, I’m staring down three other deadlines and an overgrown swamp of an inbox, and I need to get groceries, and have I mentioned freelance writers don’t exactly get paid maternity leave? I am staggeringly privileged compared to many people in America, but like many people in America, I cannot afford to stop working around the clock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Odell also makes a compelling case that we can’t afford not to. I am curious to see if and how this argument lands differently for me when I stop being a person with a highly visible hall-pass-to-do-nothing and instead become a Working Mother, a category of human I have come to understand is not exactly pampered by the infrastructure of American capitalism, nor encouraged to go on long, reflective nature walks alone. Similarly, I find myself wondering how this book would read if I were a person whose work involved 10 hours of daily manual labor, as opposed to sitting in front of the internet all day, and then wondering why my leisure time felt so familiar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But for me, for now—and, I suspect, for many of us—it’s a huge shift to even ask some of these questions in the first place. After reading \u003cem>How To Do Nothing\u003c/em>, I have a newly heightened vigilance about what counts as work, and about whom we’re working for, exactly, when we open up Instagram for the 10th time that day. And a new awareness of the lessons that dwell in the realm of negative possibility—of doing nothing—which are, of course, always there waiting. They require only that we be still.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Jenny Odell speaks about ‘How To Do Nothing’ with East Bay Yesterday host Liam O’Donoghue on Thursday, May 2, at Wolfman Books in Oakland. \u003ca href=\"http://wolfmanhomerepair.com/event/2019/5/2/how-to-do-nothing-in-oakland-with-jenny-odell-and-liam-odonoghue\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Details here\u003c/a>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "In McEwan's Latest, the 'Machine' Is Too Much Like You",
"headTitle": "In McEwan’s Latest, the ‘Machine’ Is Too Much Like You | KQED",
"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13856047\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13856047\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/machines-like-me-800x1185.jpg\" alt=\"'Machines Like Me,' Ian McEwan.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1185\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/machines-like-me.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/machines-like-me-160x237.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/machines-like-me-768x1138.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Machines Like Me,’ Ian McEwan.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>There are certain authors I read no matter what they write. Ian McEwan is one of them. Over the course of more than 40 years and some dozen and a half books—including \u003cem>Amsterdam, Atonement, \u003c/em>and \u003cem>The Children Act—\u003c/em>his generally realist, propulsive work reveals an abiding preoccupation with both the repercussions of deceit and how life can change in an instant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His most recent novel, \u003cem>Nutshell \u003c/em>(2016), a clever twist on \u003cem>Hamlet\u003c/em> narrated by a near-full-term baby still in utero\u003cem>, \u003c/em>pushed the borders of possibility. Now, with his latest, \u003cem>Machines Like Me,\u003c/em> he ventures into science fiction and alternate history territory to explore the moral ramifications of AI and the creation of machines that can outsmart humans. His story involves a man “cuckolded by an artefact,” which leads to a newfangled ménage-à-trois.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McEwan is not the first to broach these issues, and his dismissal of “conventional science fiction” \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/14/ian-mcewan-interview-machines-like-me-artificial-intelligence\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in a recent \u003cem>Guardian\u003c/em> interview\u003c/a>—coupled with a failure to acknowledge his many sci-fi forerunners—has raised hackles among some sci-fi aficionados.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But what McEwan brings to the table is crossover appeal to readers who don’t usually gravitate toward sci-fi. \u003cem>Machines Like Me, \u003c/em>like his other novels, is a thought-provoking, well-oiled literary machine. It is set in an alternate 1982 London which has already surpassed us technologically. Its streets are crowded with self-driving electric cars, and the first batch of pricy, eerily life-like artificial humans—12 Adams and 13 Eves—have just been sold to private buyers. McEwan’s narrator, a 32-year-old electronics and robotics buff named Charlie Friend, decides to sink his recent inheritance into one of the Adams. (He misses out on the Eves, seven of which land in Riyadh—one of many wry editorial comments embedded in the book.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charlie is, he confesses, a “culturally undernourished” wash-out who, after running afoul of the law for tax fraud, has decided that full-time employment is not for him. After various losing “schemes,” he currently plays the stock and currency markets (on his ancient 1960s computer!) from the “genteel ruin” of his two-room, ground floor flat in south London.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charlie’s impulsive purchase is a 170-pound walking, talking, peeing, and yes, fornicating, “intellectual sparring partner.” Adam is a technological breakthrough with access to all the wisdom of the internet and a fixed notion of right and wrong. He’s creepy, but fascinating. One of the many ironies of this novel is that its human characters, Charlie and his inamorata—Miranda, a 22-year-old doctoral student who lives above him—are interesting mainly in the context of their fraught, shifting relationships with Adam.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why 1982? Yes, it coincides with the Falklands War, an alternate account of which factors into the novel. But perhaps more significantly—although unacknowledged by McEwan—1982 also happens to be the year \u003cem>Blade Runner \u003c/em>was released. Based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel \u003cem>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,\u003c/em> Ridley Scott’s cult classic explores the alarming effects of technology and “replicant” humans on society.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McEwan has fun with counterfactuals, many of which involve wishful historical rewrites: John F. Kennedy survives “near-death in Dallas”; Jimmy Carter wins a second term instead of losing to Ronald Reagan; John Lennon isn’t assassinated, and the Beatles regroup; Margaret Thatcher is vilified after \u003cem>losing \u003c/em>the Falklands War.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most notably, in McEwan’s alternate world, Alan Turing didn’t die in 1954 or opt for chemical castration in lieu of prison after his conviction for homosexuality. Instead, he is alive and knighted, a driving force behind AI and computational biology. He plays a pivotal role in making Charlie realize that Adam is far more than just an “ambulant laptop,” arguing that he has a good mind and a conscious existence, although he’s admittedly “ill-equipped to understand human decision-making.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McEwan certainly has a flair for unusual points of view. Adam, like the baby-in-waiting who narrates \u003cem>Nutshell, \u003c/em>is an extraordinarily smart, well-informed, and unorthodox character who catches his supposed caretakers off-guard with his perspicacity. Charlie drops clues that he is telling this tale decades after the fact: He relays the “well-known” (counter-factual to us) history of the Falklands war “for the benefit of younger readers who won’t be aware of its emotional impact,” and notes a resemblance between Turing in 1982 and the painter Lucian Freud in his later years. (Freud died in 2011 at age 88.) This time-lapse explains the lack of youthfulness of Charlie’s narrative voice, but only hints about how his personal future and that of technology will unfold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Machines Like Me\u003c/em> involves a couple of dubious subplots, one concerning Miranda’s highly questionable judgement call involving vengeance for a violently wronged friend, and another her fierce attachment to a troubled foster child—which seems meant to show that she’s a fundamentally good person. But we’re distrustful of Miranda from early on, after Adam warns Charlie that she’s possibly a “systematic, malicious liar.” Interestingly, even after we learn that Adam has been inflexibly programmed to insist that “truth is everything” and a lie is a lie regardless of extenuating circumstances, it’s hard to override our earlier prejudices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are some decisions, even moral ones, that are formed in regions below conscious thought,” McEwan writes at one intense turning point. \u003cem>Machines Like Me \u003c/em>explores some of those decisions. It also manages to flesh out—literally and grippingly—questions about what constitutes a person, and the troubling future of humans if the smart machines we create can overtake us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12935470\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-800x42.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-160x8.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-768x40.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-240x13.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-375x20.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-520x27.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2019 \u003ca href=\"http://npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13856047\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13856047\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/machines-like-me-800x1185.jpg\" alt=\"'Machines Like Me,' Ian McEwan.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1185\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/machines-like-me.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/machines-like-me-160x237.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/machines-like-me-768x1138.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Machines Like Me,’ Ian McEwan.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>There are certain authors I read no matter what they write. Ian McEwan is one of them. Over the course of more than 40 years and some dozen and a half books—including \u003cem>Amsterdam, Atonement, \u003c/em>and \u003cem>The Children Act—\u003c/em>his generally realist, propulsive work reveals an abiding preoccupation with both the repercussions of deceit and how life can change in an instant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His most recent novel, \u003cem>Nutshell \u003c/em>(2016), a clever twist on \u003cem>Hamlet\u003c/em> narrated by a near-full-term baby still in utero\u003cem>, \u003c/em>pushed the borders of possibility. Now, with his latest, \u003cem>Machines Like Me,\u003c/em> he ventures into science fiction and alternate history territory to explore the moral ramifications of AI and the creation of machines that can outsmart humans. His story involves a man “cuckolded by an artefact,” which leads to a newfangled ménage-à-trois.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McEwan is not the first to broach these issues, and his dismissal of “conventional science fiction” \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/14/ian-mcewan-interview-machines-like-me-artificial-intelligence\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in a recent \u003cem>Guardian\u003c/em> interview\u003c/a>—coupled with a failure to acknowledge his many sci-fi forerunners—has raised hackles among some sci-fi aficionados.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But what McEwan brings to the table is crossover appeal to readers who don’t usually gravitate toward sci-fi. \u003cem>Machines Like Me, \u003c/em>like his other novels, is a thought-provoking, well-oiled literary machine. It is set in an alternate 1982 London which has already surpassed us technologically. Its streets are crowded with self-driving electric cars, and the first batch of pricy, eerily life-like artificial humans—12 Adams and 13 Eves—have just been sold to private buyers. McEwan’s narrator, a 32-year-old electronics and robotics buff named Charlie Friend, decides to sink his recent inheritance into one of the Adams. (He misses out on the Eves, seven of which land in Riyadh—one of many wry editorial comments embedded in the book.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charlie is, he confesses, a “culturally undernourished” wash-out who, after running afoul of the law for tax fraud, has decided that full-time employment is not for him. After various losing “schemes,” he currently plays the stock and currency markets (on his ancient 1960s computer!) from the “genteel ruin” of his two-room, ground floor flat in south London.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charlie’s impulsive purchase is a 170-pound walking, talking, peeing, and yes, fornicating, “intellectual sparring partner.” Adam is a technological breakthrough with access to all the wisdom of the internet and a fixed notion of right and wrong. He’s creepy, but fascinating. One of the many ironies of this novel is that its human characters, Charlie and his inamorata—Miranda, a 22-year-old doctoral student who lives above him—are interesting mainly in the context of their fraught, shifting relationships with Adam.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why 1982? Yes, it coincides with the Falklands War, an alternate account of which factors into the novel. But perhaps more significantly—although unacknowledged by McEwan—1982 also happens to be the year \u003cem>Blade Runner \u003c/em>was released. Based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel \u003cem>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,\u003c/em> Ridley Scott’s cult classic explores the alarming effects of technology and “replicant” humans on society.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McEwan has fun with counterfactuals, many of which involve wishful historical rewrites: John F. Kennedy survives “near-death in Dallas”; Jimmy Carter wins a second term instead of losing to Ronald Reagan; John Lennon isn’t assassinated, and the Beatles regroup; Margaret Thatcher is vilified after \u003cem>losing \u003c/em>the Falklands War.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most notably, in McEwan’s alternate world, Alan Turing didn’t die in 1954 or opt for chemical castration in lieu of prison after his conviction for homosexuality. Instead, he is alive and knighted, a driving force behind AI and computational biology. He plays a pivotal role in making Charlie realize that Adam is far more than just an “ambulant laptop,” arguing that he has a good mind and a conscious existence, although he’s admittedly “ill-equipped to understand human decision-making.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McEwan certainly has a flair for unusual points of view. Adam, like the baby-in-waiting who narrates \u003cem>Nutshell, \u003c/em>is an extraordinarily smart, well-informed, and unorthodox character who catches his supposed caretakers off-guard with his perspicacity. Charlie drops clues that he is telling this tale decades after the fact: He relays the “well-known” (counter-factual to us) history of the Falklands war “for the benefit of younger readers who won’t be aware of its emotional impact,” and notes a resemblance between Turing in 1982 and the painter Lucian Freud in his later years. (Freud died in 2011 at age 88.) This time-lapse explains the lack of youthfulness of Charlie’s narrative voice, but only hints about how his personal future and that of technology will unfold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Machines Like Me\u003c/em> involves a couple of dubious subplots, one concerning Miranda’s highly questionable judgement call involving vengeance for a violently wronged friend, and another her fierce attachment to a troubled foster child—which seems meant to show that she’s a fundamentally good person. But we’re distrustful of Miranda from early on, after Adam warns Charlie that she’s possibly a “systematic, malicious liar.” Interestingly, even after we learn that Adam has been inflexibly programmed to insist that “truth is everything” and a lie is a lie regardless of extenuating circumstances, it’s hard to override our earlier prejudices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are some decisions, even moral ones, that are formed in regions below conscious thought,” McEwan writes at one intense turning point. \u003cem>Machines Like Me \u003c/em>explores some of those decisions. It also manages to flesh out—literally and grippingly—questions about what constitutes a person, and the troubling future of humans if the smart machines we create can overtake us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12935470\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-800x42.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-160x8.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-768x40.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-240x13.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-375x20.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-520x27.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2019 \u003ca href=\"http://npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>In 1972, Albert Woodfox was wrongly accused of killing a white prison guard and sentenced to life in solitary confinement. In his memoir, \u003cem>Solitary\u003c/em>, published after the courts overturned his conviction and he was released in 2016, the Black Panther Party member recounted his political awakening while incarcerated in a prison built on the former site of a slave plantation, Angola. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fast-forward to 2018, when Shane Bauer, a reporter with \u003cem>Mother Jones\u003c/em>, explores the connection between slavery and for-profit incarceration in his book \u003cem>American Prison\u003c/em>, based in part on his experience embedded as a corrections officer. Bauer, who was confined himself in Iran, details a quintessentially American story “wherein white people continue to reinvent ways to cash in on captive human beings.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bauer will interview Woodfox on Sunday, May 5 during the Bay Area Book Festival, one of the event’s many author conversations and panels centered on incarceration in the United States. On Saturday evening, Woodfox joins activist Tony Platt and professor Lara Bazelon to imagine alternatives to imprisonment, while Bauer discusses \u003cem>American Prison\u003c/em> earlier in the day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s nearly 500 speakers and exhibitors at the Bay Area Book Festival, and other programming themes include immigration, children and women’s and black interest. There’s a new “Writer to Writer” series, pairing mutual admirers such as Ishmael Reed and Morgan Parkers in conversation, special events including tributes to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and \u003cem>The Paris Review\u003c/em> and a screening of \u003cem>The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin\u003c/em> followed by discussion. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The fifth annual Bay Area Book Festival takes place on Saturday and Sunday, May 4 and 5, in downtown Berkeley. Expected to draw 35,000 people, the festival recommends public transportation. Find details including venues, ticketing options, accessibility and a full list of talks and vendors \u003ca href=\"https://www.baybookfest.org/\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In 1972, Albert Woodfox was wrongly accused of killing a white prison guard and sentenced to life in solitary confinement. In his memoir, \u003cem>Solitary\u003c/em>, published after the courts overturned his conviction and he was released in 2016, the Black Panther Party member recounted his political awakening while incarcerated in a prison built on the former site of a slave plantation, Angola. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fast-forward to 2018, when Shane Bauer, a reporter with \u003cem>Mother Jones\u003c/em>, explores the connection between slavery and for-profit incarceration in his book \u003cem>American Prison\u003c/em>, based in part on his experience embedded as a corrections officer. Bauer, who was confined himself in Iran, details a quintessentially American story “wherein white people continue to reinvent ways to cash in on captive human beings.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bauer will interview Woodfox on Sunday, May 5 during the Bay Area Book Festival, one of the event’s many author conversations and panels centered on incarceration in the United States. On Saturday evening, Woodfox joins activist Tony Platt and professor Lara Bazelon to imagine alternatives to imprisonment, while Bauer discusses \u003cem>American Prison\u003c/em> earlier in the day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s nearly 500 speakers and exhibitors at the Bay Area Book Festival, and other programming themes include immigration, children and women’s and black interest. There’s a new “Writer to Writer” series, pairing mutual admirers such as Ishmael Reed and Morgan Parkers in conversation, special events including tributes to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and \u003cem>The Paris Review\u003c/em> and a screening of \u003cem>The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin\u003c/em> followed by discussion. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The fifth annual Bay Area Book Festival takes place on Saturday and Sunday, May 4 and 5, in downtown Berkeley. Expected to draw 35,000 people, the festival recommends public transportation. Find details including venues, ticketing options, accessibility and a full list of talks and vendors \u003ca href=\"https://www.baybookfest.org/\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "How It 'Fell Apart': Moby Talks New Memoir, Addiction and Trauma",
"headTitle": "How It ‘Fell Apart’: Moby Talks New Memoir, Addiction and Trauma | KQED",
"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13855612\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13855612\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/ThenItFellApart.Moby_.FinalCover-800x1224.jpg\" alt=\"Moby, 'Then It Fell Apart.'\" width=\"800\" height=\"1224\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/ThenItFellApart.Moby_.FinalCover-800x1224.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/ThenItFellApart.Moby_.FinalCover-160x245.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/ThenItFellApart.Moby_.FinalCover-768x1175.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/ThenItFellApart.Moby_.FinalCover-1020x1560.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/ThenItFellApart.Moby_.FinalCover-785x1200.jpg 785w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/ThenItFellApart.Moby_.FinalCover.jpg 1339w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Moby, ‘Then It Fell Apart.’ \u003ccite>(Faber & Faber)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In the early 2000s, a shy, nerdy, underground producer named Moby joined the ranks of the mega-rich and mega-famous: gold- and platinum-certified records lined his hallways, he spent his days hanging out with movie stars and models and lived across the way from his childhood hero, David Bowie. One of the decade’s most popular rappers, Eminem, even had beef with him—meaning he’d finally made it into the pop culture pantheon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But as Moby reveals in his new memoir, he felt perpetually out-of-place and lonely, and was suffering regular panic attacks. In the music video for his 2002 hit “We Are All Made of Stars,” Moby sings, expressionless and wearing a space suit, while \u003cem>TRL-\u003c/em>era celebrities party around him—a not-so-subtle metaphor for his mental state at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moby’s way of coping? Near-constant binge-drinking, party drugs and risky sex, which eventually became unsustainable and destructive. He’s been sober for 11 years now, and looks back on the highs and lows of his substance abuse in \u003ca href=\"http://moby.com/book/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003ci>Then It Fell Apart\u003c/i>\u003c/a> (on shelves May 2), which picks up where his 2016 book about the 1990s rave scene, \u003cem>Porcelain\u003c/em>, left off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The elevator pitch for the book would be fixing childhood trauma with clueless adult decisions, or \u003cem>trying\u003c/em> to fix childhood trauma with egregiously bad and clueless adult decisions,” Moby says in a recent phone interview ahead of his appearance at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.baybookfest.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bay Area Book Festival\u003c/a> on May 4, where he’ll be \u003ca href=\"https://www.baybookfest.org/session/then-it-fell-apart-an-interview-with-moby/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in conversation\u003c/a> with \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em> critic Peter Hartlaub. “Not surprisingly, it doesn’t work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://youtu.be/x1rFAaAKpVc\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moby acknowledges that writing about addiction in a non-cliché way is a tricky proposition: people know, on an intellectual level, that drugs, money and sex don’t bring long-term happiness. But as difficulties befall us throughout our lives, we look for short-term relief that steers us away from the hard work of healing our traumas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rather than taking a didactic approach, Moby conveys these hard-won life lessons by laying bare his painful childhood memories (including his father’s suicide, his shame at growing up poor and the sexual abuse he experienced at a daycare in San Francisco). Flashing forward into his adulthood, he delves into his trauma-related mental-health symptoms and the ways he attempted to alleviate his pain with the trappings of celebrity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13855614\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13855614\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/Moby.THENITFELLAPART.AuthorPhoto2-800x800.jpg\" alt=\"Now 11 years sober, Moby looks back on the ways his childhood traumas contributed to substance abuse at the peak of his fame.\" width=\"800\" height=\"800\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/Moby.THENITFELLAPART.AuthorPhoto2-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/Moby.THENITFELLAPART.AuthorPhoto2-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/Moby.THENITFELLAPART.AuthorPhoto2-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/Moby.THENITFELLAPART.AuthorPhoto2-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/Moby.THENITFELLAPART.AuthorPhoto2-1200x1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/Moby.THENITFELLAPART.AuthorPhoto2.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Now 11 years sober, Moby looks back on the ways his childhood traumas contributed to substance abuse at the peak of his fame. \u003ccite>(Jonathan Nesvadba)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“My belief, before I got sober, was that fame was going to fix my feelings of inadequacy; that degeneracy was going to fix my depression; and promiscuity was going fix my childhood trauma,” says Moby. “I longed for things to work in that way. I wanted to be fixed by these unhealthy external things. Part of sobriety—and a degree of spiritual fitness—is that we can’t, in adulthood, hold on to crazy, magical thinking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fast-paced, conversational vignettes that weave between his childhood and music-industry heyday, Moby navigates these nuanced themes with great care. He divulges juicy stories involving the biggest celebrities of the 2000s, but even during the glamorous parties and ecstasy-fueled sex, the shadows of Moby’s childhood traumas lurk near. Without glorifying or self-flagellating, Moby offers a candid look at his triumphs and mistakes. The memoir reads as heartfelt rather than preachy, and his attitude is one of compassion and understanding towards himself and, by extension, readers who see themselves in his struggles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s plenty of comic relief in \u003cem>Then It Fell Apart\u003c/em>. Like when Moby, new to the Hollywood scene, goes out with Natalie Portman wearing an oversized, gold-lamé Elvis suit because he doesn’t yet own celebrity-worthy attire. Or when he realizes Eminem \u003cem>actually\u003c/em> hates him (the two meet for the first time at the VMAs and the rapper threatens Moby on stage).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition, the book contains touching triumphs, like when Moby finds himself in disbelief at the surreal experience of performing with his idols, New Order, as well as crushing lows (including suicidal ideation) that happen more and more frequently as Moby’s celebrity starts to fade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://youtu.be/qc_39aTxsP0\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Surprisingly, within nearly 400 pages, \u003cem>Then It Fell Apart\u003c/em> doesn’t delve into Moby’s journey of recovery, instead ending on the day the self-described “alcohol enthusiast” admitted he had a problem and decided to seek treatment. He’s saving what came after for his next book, which he says won’t be about recovery per se, but about a larger theme of spirituality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m not a Christian but my life is geared towards God, understanding God, trying to do God’s will,” says Moby. “Keeping in mind, I have no idea who or what God might be.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since getting clean, Moby has released several albums, enjoyed lucrative music-licensing deals and opened a \u003ca href=\"https://www.littlepinerestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">nonprofit vegan restaurant\u003c/a> that raises money for animal rights causes. But he no longer cares about being cool, focusing on his spiritual well-being instead—which has been liberating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s really nice to just accept age, accept hair loss, accept diminishing commercial viability,” he says. “Accepting these things and trying to learn from them is a lot more enjoyable and a lot healthier than angrily fighting entropy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12935470\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-800x42.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-160x8.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-768x40.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-240x13.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-375x20.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-520x27.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Moby appears at the Bay Area Book Festival on May 4. Details \u003ca href=\"https://www.baybookfest.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here\u003c/a>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13855612\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13855612\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/ThenItFellApart.Moby_.FinalCover-800x1224.jpg\" alt=\"Moby, 'Then It Fell Apart.'\" width=\"800\" height=\"1224\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/ThenItFellApart.Moby_.FinalCover-800x1224.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/ThenItFellApart.Moby_.FinalCover-160x245.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/ThenItFellApart.Moby_.FinalCover-768x1175.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/ThenItFellApart.Moby_.FinalCover-1020x1560.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/ThenItFellApart.Moby_.FinalCover-785x1200.jpg 785w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/ThenItFellApart.Moby_.FinalCover.jpg 1339w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Moby, ‘Then It Fell Apart.’ \u003ccite>(Faber & Faber)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In the early 2000s, a shy, nerdy, underground producer named Moby joined the ranks of the mega-rich and mega-famous: gold- and platinum-certified records lined his hallways, he spent his days hanging out with movie stars and models and lived across the way from his childhood hero, David Bowie. One of the decade’s most popular rappers, Eminem, even had beef with him—meaning he’d finally made it into the pop culture pantheon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But as Moby reveals in his new memoir, he felt perpetually out-of-place and lonely, and was suffering regular panic attacks. In the music video for his 2002 hit “We Are All Made of Stars,” Moby sings, expressionless and wearing a space suit, while \u003cem>TRL-\u003c/em>era celebrities party around him—a not-so-subtle metaphor for his mental state at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moby’s way of coping? Near-constant binge-drinking, party drugs and risky sex, which eventually became unsustainable and destructive. He’s been sober for 11 years now, and looks back on the highs and lows of his substance abuse in \u003ca href=\"http://moby.com/book/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003ci>Then It Fell Apart\u003c/i>\u003c/a> (on shelves May 2), which picks up where his 2016 book about the 1990s rave scene, \u003cem>Porcelain\u003c/em>, left off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The elevator pitch for the book would be fixing childhood trauma with clueless adult decisions, or \u003cem>trying\u003c/em> to fix childhood trauma with egregiously bad and clueless adult decisions,” Moby says in a recent phone interview ahead of his appearance at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.baybookfest.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bay Area Book Festival\u003c/a> on May 4, where he’ll be \u003ca href=\"https://www.baybookfest.org/session/then-it-fell-apart-an-interview-with-moby/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in conversation\u003c/a> with \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em> critic Peter Hartlaub. “Not surprisingly, it doesn’t work.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/x1rFAaAKpVc'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/x1rFAaAKpVc'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moby acknowledges that writing about addiction in a non-cliché way is a tricky proposition: people know, on an intellectual level, that drugs, money and sex don’t bring long-term happiness. But as difficulties befall us throughout our lives, we look for short-term relief that steers us away from the hard work of healing our traumas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rather than taking a didactic approach, Moby conveys these hard-won life lessons by laying bare his painful childhood memories (including his father’s suicide, his shame at growing up poor and the sexual abuse he experienced at a daycare in San Francisco). Flashing forward into his adulthood, he delves into his trauma-related mental-health symptoms and the ways he attempted to alleviate his pain with the trappings of celebrity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13855614\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13855614\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/Moby.THENITFELLAPART.AuthorPhoto2-800x800.jpg\" alt=\"Now 11 years sober, Moby looks back on the ways his childhood traumas contributed to substance abuse at the peak of his fame.\" width=\"800\" height=\"800\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/Moby.THENITFELLAPART.AuthorPhoto2-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/Moby.THENITFELLAPART.AuthorPhoto2-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/Moby.THENITFELLAPART.AuthorPhoto2-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/Moby.THENITFELLAPART.AuthorPhoto2-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/Moby.THENITFELLAPART.AuthorPhoto2-1200x1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/Moby.THENITFELLAPART.AuthorPhoto2.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Now 11 years sober, Moby looks back on the ways his childhood traumas contributed to substance abuse at the peak of his fame. \u003ccite>(Jonathan Nesvadba)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“My belief, before I got sober, was that fame was going to fix my feelings of inadequacy; that degeneracy was going to fix my depression; and promiscuity was going fix my childhood trauma,” says Moby. “I longed for things to work in that way. I wanted to be fixed by these unhealthy external things. Part of sobriety—and a degree of spiritual fitness—is that we can’t, in adulthood, hold on to crazy, magical thinking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fast-paced, conversational vignettes that weave between his childhood and music-industry heyday, Moby navigates these nuanced themes with great care. He divulges juicy stories involving the biggest celebrities of the 2000s, but even during the glamorous parties and ecstasy-fueled sex, the shadows of Moby’s childhood traumas lurk near. Without glorifying or self-flagellating, Moby offers a candid look at his triumphs and mistakes. The memoir reads as heartfelt rather than preachy, and his attitude is one of compassion and understanding towards himself and, by extension, readers who see themselves in his struggles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s plenty of comic relief in \u003cem>Then It Fell Apart\u003c/em>. Like when Moby, new to the Hollywood scene, goes out with Natalie Portman wearing an oversized, gold-lamé Elvis suit because he doesn’t yet own celebrity-worthy attire. Or when he realizes Eminem \u003cem>actually\u003c/em> hates him (the two meet for the first time at the VMAs and the rapper threatens Moby on stage).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition, the book contains touching triumphs, like when Moby finds himself in disbelief at the surreal experience of performing with his idols, New Order, as well as crushing lows (including suicidal ideation) that happen more and more frequently as Moby’s celebrity starts to fade.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/qc_39aTxsP0'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/qc_39aTxsP0'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Surprisingly, within nearly 400 pages, \u003cem>Then It Fell Apart\u003c/em> doesn’t delve into Moby’s journey of recovery, instead ending on the day the self-described “alcohol enthusiast” admitted he had a problem and decided to seek treatment. He’s saving what came after for his next book, which he says won’t be about recovery per se, but about a larger theme of spirituality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m not a Christian but my life is geared towards God, understanding God, trying to do God’s will,” says Moby. “Keeping in mind, I have no idea who or what God might be.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since getting clean, Moby has released several albums, enjoyed lucrative music-licensing deals and opened a \u003ca href=\"https://www.littlepinerestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">nonprofit vegan restaurant\u003c/a> that raises money for animal rights causes. But he no longer cares about being cool, focusing on his spiritual well-being instead—which has been liberating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s really nice to just accept age, accept hair loss, accept diminishing commercial viability,” he says. “Accepting these things and trying to learn from them is a lot more enjoyable and a lot healthier than angrily fighting entropy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12935470\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-800x42.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-160x8.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-768x40.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-240x13.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-375x20.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-520x27.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Moby appears at the Bay Area Book Festival on May 4. Details \u003ca href=\"https://www.baybookfest.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here\u003c/a>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Donté Clark is a poet and thespian from North Richmond, you can tell by the way he talks. His southern drawl on certain words shows his family roots, while his proper pronunciation of other terms is evidence of his upbringing in Northern California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Clark combines both, while speaking passionately about social issues, community empowerment and the things he’s seen. His new book \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/KnowFreedom-1-Donte-D-Clark/dp/1727349059\">\u003cem>KnowFreedom\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, a collection of his poetry and writing, exemplifies this work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13855455\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13855455\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/DonteClark.Inline-800x535.jpg\" alt=\"Donté Clark in Richmond's Nichol Park.\" width=\"800\" height=\"535\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/DonteClark.Inline-800x535.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/DonteClark.Inline-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/DonteClark.Inline-768x513.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/DonteClark.Inline-1020x682.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/DonteClark.Inline-1200x802.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/DonteClark.Inline.jpg 1616w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Donté Clark in Richmond’s Nicholl Park. \u003ccite>(Pendarvis Harshaw/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Clark’s craft has taken him to stages for \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh8TzfnySFI&t=58s\">Youth Speaks\u003c/a> and a role in the film \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE6m_05dQfw\">\u003cem>Romeo is Bleeding\u003c/em>\u003c/a>—which led to an appearance on \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6705w7WcJY\">\u003cem>Sway’s Universe\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, where Clark was introduced by none other than Russell Simmons. Recently he landed a role in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13808042/the-north-pole-i-feel-you\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">web series about gentrification and global warming, \u003cem>The North Pole\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, which just wrapped shooting for its second season.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I caught up with Clark at Nicholl Park in Richmond, not too far from where he went to school. He told me how his experiences in Richmond helped him to find his voice—both in the sense of what to talk about, and how to say it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Donté Clark performs as part of ‘Word of Resilience’ on Thursday, April 25 at the Oakland Public Library Main Branch. The 6pm event is free and open to all ages. \u003ca href=\"http://www.oaklandlibrary.org/events/main-library/national-poetry-month-celebration-words-resilience\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Donté Clark is a poet and thespian from North Richmond, you can tell by the way he talks. His southern drawl on certain words shows his family roots, while his proper pronunciation of other terms is evidence of his upbringing in Northern California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Clark combines both, while speaking passionately about social issues, community empowerment and the things he’s seen. His new book \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/KnowFreedom-1-Donte-D-Clark/dp/1727349059\">\u003cem>KnowFreedom\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, a collection of his poetry and writing, exemplifies this work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13855455\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13855455\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/DonteClark.Inline-800x535.jpg\" alt=\"Donté Clark in Richmond's Nichol Park.\" width=\"800\" height=\"535\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/DonteClark.Inline-800x535.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/DonteClark.Inline-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/DonteClark.Inline-768x513.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/DonteClark.Inline-1020x682.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/DonteClark.Inline-1200x802.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/DonteClark.Inline.jpg 1616w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Donté Clark in Richmond’s Nicholl Park. \u003ccite>(Pendarvis Harshaw/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Clark’s craft has taken him to stages for \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh8TzfnySFI&t=58s\">Youth Speaks\u003c/a> and a role in the film \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE6m_05dQfw\">\u003cem>Romeo is Bleeding\u003c/em>\u003c/a>—which led to an appearance on \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6705w7WcJY\">\u003cem>Sway’s Universe\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, where Clark was introduced by none other than Russell Simmons. Recently he landed a role in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13808042/the-north-pole-i-feel-you\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">web series about gentrification and global warming, \u003cem>The North Pole\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, which just wrapped shooting for its second season.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I caught up with Clark at Nicholl Park in Richmond, not too far from where he went to school. He told me how his experiences in Richmond helped him to find his voice—both in the sense of what to talk about, and how to say it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>While profiles of the gun-toting, Confederate flag-waving Trump-voter-next-door practically became a literary genre following the 2016 election, journalist \u003ca href=\"http://www.samanthaleighallen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Samantha Allen\u003c/a> embarked on a mission to demystify what’s \u003cem>actually\u003c/em> happening in the heart of the country for her new book, \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Real-Queer-America-Stories-States/dp/0316516031/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Real Queer America: LGBT Stories From Red States\u003c/em>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A reporter covering LGBTQ+ issues for \u003ca href=\"https://www.thedailybeast.com/author/samantha-allen\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the Daily Beast\u003c/a>, Allen grew up in Southern California and New Jersey, went to college in Utah and came out as a queer, transgender woman during graduate school in Georgia. She knows a thing or two, then, about the way coastal cities are perceived as safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community while the Midwest and South are stereotyped as universally hostile. When Allen took a cross-country road trip to visit places like Provo, Utah, the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and Johnson City, Tennessee, she was surprised to find burgeoning, tightly knit LGBTQ+ enclaves united by a sense of urgency to fight against their state legislatures’ conservative agendas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13855400\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 331px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13855400\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/real-queer-america.jpg\" alt=\"'Real Queer America' by Samantha Allen.\" width=\"331\" height=\"500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/real-queer-america.jpg 331w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/real-queer-america-160x242.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 331px) 100vw, 331px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Real Queer America’ by Samantha Allen.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Indeed, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/04/04/709601295/lgbt-people-are-a-fundamental-part-of-the-fabric-of-rural-communities\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">recent studies\u003c/a> confirm Allen’s observations: according to the Movement Advancement Project, 20 percent of the LGBTQ+ community lives in rural areas, and the majority of same-sex parents reside in those regions as well. Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ people, especially those of color, are increasingly priced out of places like San Francisco, where numerous queer and trans havens \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/style/article/Last-dance-at-Divas-13733084.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">have closed\u003c/a> in recent years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moving to gay-friendly places like the Bay Area, West Hollywood or Brooklyn may no longer be accessible to 18-year-olds from other parts of the country—but it may not need to be, as attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people continue to evolve in their home states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Real Queer America\u003c/em> tells the stories of these demographic shifts through Allen’s conversational travel diary, which is equal parts autobiographical and research-driven, and with heartwarming anecdotes and meticulous citations galore. While Allen—now based in the Seattle area—was in San Francisco during yet another road trip, we met up to chat about \u003cem>Real Queer America\u003c/em> and her views on America’s changing landscape.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>With the way that California’s demographics are changing, themes from your book resonate with what’s going on here. Before, LGBTQ people would move to places like San Francisco and West Hollywood to be themselves, but now with urban centers in California becoming unaffordable, the queer and trans community is shifting. What are your thoughts on this changing landscape?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I hear stories from older LGBT people about what San Francisco and the Bay Area meant to them in the ’70s especially, and I just wonder if it’s possible to reclaim that or if that history is gone forever. [aside postid='arts_13854639']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s the bright side of the fact that urban gay bars in megalopolises like San Francisco and New York are closing, which could mean that people just feel more comfortable in a mainstream club or bar environment. But then also, these places have this rich history. For folks who are just coming out, those places could be especially meaningful for them. The fact is a lot of them don’t want to close and it’s just the rising rent that shuts them down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the flip side, your book shows that in somewhere like Provo, Utah, the young queer kids don’t necessarily have to leave. They can embrace where they were raised and who they are, which is cool too.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I was hanging out with the LGBTQ kids in Provo, Utah, a lot of them were excited to talk with me. They were like, “You’re a writer and you’ve been to New York and Los Angeles. Those are the places we want to go.” I was sitting there thinking, “Gosh, I would like to spend more time in a place like this, where the community feels more tight-knit, and where the community spaces take on this special importance and urgency because of the political environment of the state.” I feel like there’s a bit of “the grass is always greener on the other side,” but I also feel like LGBT spaces in a place like Provo or Jackson, Mississippi have that feeling that LGBT spaces in San Francisco or New York might have had in the ’70s for instance. It’s the place to go where you feel safe, it feels like a shelter against the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>I think the more enclaves like that across the country, the better.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book is full of them. I was surprised that everywhere I went, people would tell me, ‘Oh, here’s this place you’ve never heard of but a lot of LGBT people went there.’ Traveling through Arkansas, people would tell me I had to go to Eureka Springs. I had planned out my road trip pretty thoroughly and I thought I wouldn’t miss any landmarks, yet I encountered new ones along the way. Every state has these tiny pockets and bubbles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13855401\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13855401\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/WOpSnKJY-800x1001.jpg\" alt=\"Samantha Allen (left) and her friend Justin Mitchell in Dollywood.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1001\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/WOpSnKJY-800x1001.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/WOpSnKJY-160x200.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/WOpSnKJY-768x961.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/WOpSnKJY.jpg 818w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Samantha Allen (left) and her friend Justin Mitchell in Dollywood. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Samantha Allen)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Which community surprised you the most?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most surprising to me was Provo, honestly. I attended school [at Brigham Young University] in Provo from roughly 2005–2007, and I was a closeted transgender woman. I was terrified to be there. To go back and see this amazing LGBT community center was eye-opening, life-giving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I felt so under the shadow of the Mormon church when I was in Provo, and to go back 10 years later and see Mormon kids and supportive Mormon parents meant so much to me personally. Even though I knew that this center had been built there, I didn’t know what to expect. I thought maybe this will just be a tiny little two-person operation with a single room and a few offices or something like that. And there was this beautiful remodeled Victorian house that was constantly filled with kids and supportive parents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>In that chapter, it really struck me how a few of the people that you interviewed didn’t feel the pressure to leave their church or start a whole new life somewhere else. Like the story of Emmett, the trans guy who wants to have a big Mormon family.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think you are still seeing LGBT people make little migrations to be who they are, but the difference now is you don’t have to go as far. It used to be people felt like they had to get a to coastal city. They had to get to L.A. or San Francisco or New York. Now you can go to St. Louis or you can go to Salt Lake City or that sort of thing. It’s refreshing to see people do that because it changes the culture of those places. Salt Lake City has an amazing, vibrant LGBT population now. [aside postid='arts_13854644']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think if you’ve been on the coast for the last two decades, you can be surprised when you go to a place like Salt Lake and be like, “Whoa, there are a lot of gay bars here and queer-friendly businesses.” But it’s just what the people who stayed have been doing for the last two decades. They’ve built that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why do you think that is so surprising to people? Is it because media is concentrated in these big coastal cities?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yeah, 100 percent. It’s a turbulent time to be in media. When you already have media that’s largely concentrated in coastal cities, and then you factor in limited resources and layoffs, especially limited resources for LGBT reporting, a lot of the stuff gets missed. Something like North Carolina passing a bathroom bill will become a major story because it is nationally captivating, but a lot of these little changes that have been happening in the middle of the country just fly under the radar, or get a quick blurb in AP here and there, or only really get noticed by LGBT-specific websites.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I also think there’s a lot of reductive approaches to what people derisively refer to as flyover states, or a lot of guilt by association with what can come out of the state legislatures. I think every presidential election, when we see a map of the U.S. where each state is just shaded in solid red or solid blue, it really does a disservice to our conception of the politics of the country. In reality, the country is red in rural areas and blue in urban areas and that’s true whatever state you’re in. It just so happens that in the middle of the country the red rural areas can outvote the blue ones sometimes. But the country is pretty purple.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the flip side, San Francisco has this reputation as this very liberal city, but there are so many things that are actually surprisingly conservative about it, especially with the drastic income inequality. \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When you have skyrocketing income inequality, it can hollow out the culture of the place. It comes for people with fewer resources first, LGBT people among them. I mean, from everything I’ve seen that’s been happening to San Francisco, that’s hard to watch. Most of the people I know who lived in San Francisco have now moved out to Oakland, and even in Oakland, rents are rising. It just pushes people further and further out. We’ve seen that happen in Manhattan, it’s alarming to watch it happen to other hubs of LGBT culture. But the good news is there are more hubs available.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13855402\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 768px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13855402\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/AfczjQVk.jpg\" alt=\"Samantha Allen in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah.\" width=\"768\" height=\"1024\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/AfczjQVk.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/AfczjQVk-160x213.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Samantha Allen in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Samantha Allen)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>All that grassroots organizing that you write about in the book is so inspiring too. Do you think that the changing attitudes in conservative states are a product of local organizing, as well as the internet educating people on different gender and sexuality issues?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think there’s certainly more media awareness and people have more ready access to information on the internet, but I think that primary factor driving social change in the heart of the country is just people talking to each other. LGBT people are coming out to their friends, family and co-workers. When someone that you know and love comes out to you, whatever anti-LGBT ideology you have in your heart at least has to get challenged because you’re presented with, “I love this person and they’re something that I’ve been told to hate.” I spoke with many people while writing the book who told me they’d had an experience like that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Do you have any predictions for 10 years, 20 years down the line? What will the country’s relationship to LGBTQ issues look like?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I write in the end of the book that I can’t wait for the book to be antiquated; I can’t wait for the book to seem outdated. I think it will still be close to 20 years before we see sexual orientation and gender identity covered in federal civil rights legislation. I could be surprised by that. It could happen in eight years with a new president and a different congress, but anti-LGBT legislators have enough of a presence in state legislatures and enough of a presence in D.C. that progress can still be really delayed. [aside postid='arts_13854867']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another really worrisome thing is the number of anti-LGBT judicial nominees that the Trump administration has been quietly appointing while attention is diverted elsewhere. Things like Mueller, or whatever is captivating political media right now. Those judges are going to have an impact that stretches on for decades. I think culturally, we’re going to get to a really amazing, accepting place maybe 10 years before legal protections follow. I think we saw the same thing with same-sex marriage where public opinion reached a certain tipping point, and then there was this agonizing period of trying to get it legalized everywhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I would say cultural acceptance will be in a pretty positive place in 10 years and legal acceptance to follow a decade after that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>While profiles of the gun-toting, Confederate flag-waving Trump-voter-next-door practically became a literary genre following the 2016 election, journalist \u003ca href=\"http://www.samanthaleighallen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Samantha Allen\u003c/a> embarked on a mission to demystify what’s \u003cem>actually\u003c/em> happening in the heart of the country for her new book, \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Real-Queer-America-Stories-States/dp/0316516031/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Real Queer America: LGBT Stories From Red States\u003c/em>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A reporter covering LGBTQ+ issues for \u003ca href=\"https://www.thedailybeast.com/author/samantha-allen\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the Daily Beast\u003c/a>, Allen grew up in Southern California and New Jersey, went to college in Utah and came out as a queer, transgender woman during graduate school in Georgia. She knows a thing or two, then, about the way coastal cities are perceived as safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community while the Midwest and South are stereotyped as universally hostile. When Allen took a cross-country road trip to visit places like Provo, Utah, the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and Johnson City, Tennessee, she was surprised to find burgeoning, tightly knit LGBTQ+ enclaves united by a sense of urgency to fight against their state legislatures’ conservative agendas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13855400\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 331px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13855400\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/real-queer-america.jpg\" alt=\"'Real Queer America' by Samantha Allen.\" width=\"331\" height=\"500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/real-queer-america.jpg 331w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/real-queer-america-160x242.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 331px) 100vw, 331px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Real Queer America’ by Samantha Allen.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Indeed, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/04/04/709601295/lgbt-people-are-a-fundamental-part-of-the-fabric-of-rural-communities\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">recent studies\u003c/a> confirm Allen’s observations: according to the Movement Advancement Project, 20 percent of the LGBTQ+ community lives in rural areas, and the majority of same-sex parents reside in those regions as well. Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ people, especially those of color, are increasingly priced out of places like San Francisco, where numerous queer and trans havens \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/style/article/Last-dance-at-Divas-13733084.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">have closed\u003c/a> in recent years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moving to gay-friendly places like the Bay Area, West Hollywood or Brooklyn may no longer be accessible to 18-year-olds from other parts of the country—but it may not need to be, as attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people continue to evolve in their home states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Real Queer America\u003c/em> tells the stories of these demographic shifts through Allen’s conversational travel diary, which is equal parts autobiographical and research-driven, and with heartwarming anecdotes and meticulous citations galore. While Allen—now based in the Seattle area—was in San Francisco during yet another road trip, we met up to chat about \u003cem>Real Queer America\u003c/em> and her views on America’s changing landscape.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>With the way that California’s demographics are changing, themes from your book resonate with what’s going on here. Before, LGBTQ people would move to places like San Francisco and West Hollywood to be themselves, but now with urban centers in California becoming unaffordable, the queer and trans community is shifting. What are your thoughts on this changing landscape?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I hear stories from older LGBT people about what San Francisco and the Bay Area meant to them in the ’70s especially, and I just wonder if it’s possible to reclaim that or if that history is gone forever. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s the bright side of the fact that urban gay bars in megalopolises like San Francisco and New York are closing, which could mean that people just feel more comfortable in a mainstream club or bar environment. But then also, these places have this rich history. For folks who are just coming out, those places could be especially meaningful for them. The fact is a lot of them don’t want to close and it’s just the rising rent that shuts them down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the flip side, your book shows that in somewhere like Provo, Utah, the young queer kids don’t necessarily have to leave. They can embrace where they were raised and who they are, which is cool too.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I was hanging out with the LGBTQ kids in Provo, Utah, a lot of them were excited to talk with me. They were like, “You’re a writer and you’ve been to New York and Los Angeles. Those are the places we want to go.” I was sitting there thinking, “Gosh, I would like to spend more time in a place like this, where the community feels more tight-knit, and where the community spaces take on this special importance and urgency because of the political environment of the state.” I feel like there’s a bit of “the grass is always greener on the other side,” but I also feel like LGBT spaces in a place like Provo or Jackson, Mississippi have that feeling that LGBT spaces in San Francisco or New York might have had in the ’70s for instance. It’s the place to go where you feel safe, it feels like a shelter against the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>I think the more enclaves like that across the country, the better.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book is full of them. I was surprised that everywhere I went, people would tell me, ‘Oh, here’s this place you’ve never heard of but a lot of LGBT people went there.’ Traveling through Arkansas, people would tell me I had to go to Eureka Springs. I had planned out my road trip pretty thoroughly and I thought I wouldn’t miss any landmarks, yet I encountered new ones along the way. Every state has these tiny pockets and bubbles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13855401\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13855401\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/WOpSnKJY-800x1001.jpg\" alt=\"Samantha Allen (left) and her friend Justin Mitchell in Dollywood.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1001\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/WOpSnKJY-800x1001.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/WOpSnKJY-160x200.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/WOpSnKJY-768x961.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/WOpSnKJY.jpg 818w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Samantha Allen (left) and her friend Justin Mitchell in Dollywood. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Samantha Allen)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Which community surprised you the most?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most surprising to me was Provo, honestly. I attended school [at Brigham Young University] in Provo from roughly 2005–2007, and I was a closeted transgender woman. I was terrified to be there. To go back and see this amazing LGBT community center was eye-opening, life-giving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I felt so under the shadow of the Mormon church when I was in Provo, and to go back 10 years later and see Mormon kids and supportive Mormon parents meant so much to me personally. Even though I knew that this center had been built there, I didn’t know what to expect. I thought maybe this will just be a tiny little two-person operation with a single room and a few offices or something like that. And there was this beautiful remodeled Victorian house that was constantly filled with kids and supportive parents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>In that chapter, it really struck me how a few of the people that you interviewed didn’t feel the pressure to leave their church or start a whole new life somewhere else. Like the story of Emmett, the trans guy who wants to have a big Mormon family.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think you are still seeing LGBT people make little migrations to be who they are, but the difference now is you don’t have to go as far. It used to be people felt like they had to get a to coastal city. They had to get to L.A. or San Francisco or New York. Now you can go to St. Louis or you can go to Salt Lake City or that sort of thing. It’s refreshing to see people do that because it changes the culture of those places. Salt Lake City has an amazing, vibrant LGBT population now. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think if you’ve been on the coast for the last two decades, you can be surprised when you go to a place like Salt Lake and be like, “Whoa, there are a lot of gay bars here and queer-friendly businesses.” But it’s just what the people who stayed have been doing for the last two decades. They’ve built that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why do you think that is so surprising to people? Is it because media is concentrated in these big coastal cities?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yeah, 100 percent. It’s a turbulent time to be in media. When you already have media that’s largely concentrated in coastal cities, and then you factor in limited resources and layoffs, especially limited resources for LGBT reporting, a lot of the stuff gets missed. Something like North Carolina passing a bathroom bill will become a major story because it is nationally captivating, but a lot of these little changes that have been happening in the middle of the country just fly under the radar, or get a quick blurb in AP here and there, or only really get noticed by LGBT-specific websites.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I also think there’s a lot of reductive approaches to what people derisively refer to as flyover states, or a lot of guilt by association with what can come out of the state legislatures. I think every presidential election, when we see a map of the U.S. where each state is just shaded in solid red or solid blue, it really does a disservice to our conception of the politics of the country. In reality, the country is red in rural areas and blue in urban areas and that’s true whatever state you’re in. It just so happens that in the middle of the country the red rural areas can outvote the blue ones sometimes. But the country is pretty purple.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the flip side, San Francisco has this reputation as this very liberal city, but there are so many things that are actually surprisingly conservative about it, especially with the drastic income inequality. \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When you have skyrocketing income inequality, it can hollow out the culture of the place. It comes for people with fewer resources first, LGBT people among them. I mean, from everything I’ve seen that’s been happening to San Francisco, that’s hard to watch. Most of the people I know who lived in San Francisco have now moved out to Oakland, and even in Oakland, rents are rising. It just pushes people further and further out. We’ve seen that happen in Manhattan, it’s alarming to watch it happen to other hubs of LGBT culture. But the good news is there are more hubs available.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13855402\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 768px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13855402\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/AfczjQVk.jpg\" alt=\"Samantha Allen in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah.\" width=\"768\" height=\"1024\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/AfczjQVk.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/04/AfczjQVk-160x213.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Samantha Allen in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Samantha Allen)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>All that grassroots organizing that you write about in the book is so inspiring too. Do you think that the changing attitudes in conservative states are a product of local organizing, as well as the internet educating people on different gender and sexuality issues?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think there’s certainly more media awareness and people have more ready access to information on the internet, but I think that primary factor driving social change in the heart of the country is just people talking to each other. LGBT people are coming out to their friends, family and co-workers. When someone that you know and love comes out to you, whatever anti-LGBT ideology you have in your heart at least has to get challenged because you’re presented with, “I love this person and they’re something that I’ve been told to hate.” I spoke with many people while writing the book who told me they’d had an experience like that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Do you have any predictions for 10 years, 20 years down the line? What will the country’s relationship to LGBTQ issues look like?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I write in the end of the book that I can’t wait for the book to be antiquated; I can’t wait for the book to seem outdated. I think it will still be close to 20 years before we see sexual orientation and gender identity covered in federal civil rights legislation. I could be surprised by that. It could happen in eight years with a new president and a different congress, but anti-LGBT legislators have enough of a presence in state legislatures and enough of a presence in D.C. that progress can still be really delayed. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another really worrisome thing is the number of anti-LGBT judicial nominees that the Trump administration has been quietly appointing while attention is diverted elsewhere. Things like Mueller, or whatever is captivating political media right now. Those judges are going to have an impact that stretches on for decades. I think culturally, we’re going to get to a really amazing, accepting place maybe 10 years before legal protections follow. I think we saw the same thing with same-sex marriage where public opinion reached a certain tipping point, and then there was this agonizing period of trying to get it legalized everywhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I would say cultural acceptance will be in a pretty positive place in 10 years and legal acceptance to follow a decade after that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Think you know the suburbs? Well, it might be time to revisit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At least, that’s what Amanda Kolson Hurley, a senior editor at urban news site CityLab, wants you to do. Kolson Hurley is well-acquainted with suburbia’s numerous negative stereotypes—some of them, such as racial segregation and ecological threat, all too valid. But in Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City, Kolson Hurley sets out to reveal a different side of the vast patchwork of not-quite-urban, not-quite-rural zones in which more than half of Americans live.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Writing with brisk, upbeat directness, Kolson Hurley urges the reader to envision a very different kind of suburb: one that’s a mix of ethnic groups and income levels, where you can buy or rent a starter home for a reasonable price. One where you can walk or take public transit to most of the places you need to go. One with a flourishing sense of community, where you participate in your neighborhood association and know the people on your street. [aside postID='pop_110543']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She makes a great case that such a vision is vitally necessary. “Rising social inequality and demographic shifts—and above all climate change—make it imperative to rethink who and what our suburbs are for,” she writes. With unapologetic idealism, she looks forward buoyantly to the results of that rethinking, anticipating changes such as creative tax breaks to encourage diversity, improved enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, and an increase in co-housing and other unorthodox—but equitable and eco-friendly—living arrangements. When she knowledgeably describes workable solutions, her enthusiasm is contagious. “Simple design changes to connect [suburban apartment] developments to nearby commercial areas [have] made residents more than 60 percent more likely to walk rather than drive there,” she notes. “Rather than slavishly pursuing new construction … forward-thinking suburbs could redevelop … ‘grayfields’ instead: dead malls, aging strip malls and high-vacancy office parks.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kolson Hurley’s visions are compelling, but it’s less clear whether they’re actually achievable. By way of proof, she shows that diverse, sustainable suburbs have been built before. Combing through the history of housing development all over the U.S., she’s found a handful of places where political fervor, artistic audacity, social idealism or a combination of the three have fostered vibrantly unique suburban communities. Today, few of those communities still fulfill their original ideals. Even so, their illustrations of what’s possible are inspiring, leading the reader to overlook (at least for a while) the implications of their decline. [aside postID='arts_13851390']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Trevose, Pa., there’s Concord Park, built by socialists and Quakers in 1954 to challenge housing segregation. Its mix of black and white families—as well as several interracial ones—gave the country a model integrated community at a time when such a thing seemed utterly unimaginable. In Lexington, Mass., there’s Five Fields, designed in the early 1950s by proteges of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. Its layout harmonizes with existing natural features and promotes neighborly bonding by providing ample common land. And there’s Stelton, N.J., founded by anarchists in 1915. In its heyday, collective matters were decided by vote—children included—husbands and wives weren’t always legally married and the locals “sometimes refuse[d] to stand for the national anthem at the movie theater in New Brunswick.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s also Economy, Pa., Greenbelt, Md. and Reston, Va.—all places where high ideals were allowed to triumph, however fleetingly, producing ways of life that residents would remember as uniquely stimulating, communal and humane. “Humane” is Kolson Hurley’s word, an inspired adjective to evoke a sense of what, ultimately, we really need our living spaces to be. Her stories demonstrate what the unfettered human spirit can achieve when it’s at its best. [aside postID='arts_13853974']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the overall history of housing in America isn’t about the unfettered human spirit at its best; it’s about greed and fear and short-sightedness. Those forces have had their way with the little communities Kolson Hurley chronicles. Some have all but vanished, while others have evolved beyond recognition. Meanwhile, she admits, the vast majority of America’s suburbs are as inhumane as ever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that makes this little book all the more necessary. The communities Kolson Hurley chronicles are welcome reminders that any place, even a suburb, can be radical if you approach it the right way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-800x42.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12935470\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-160x8.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-768x40.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-240x13.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-375x20.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-520x27.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Etelka Lehoczky has written about books for The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times and other publications. She tweets at @EtelkaL.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2019 \u003ca href=\"http://npr.org\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Trevose, Pa., there’s Concord Park, built by socialists and Quakers in 1954 to challenge housing segregation. Its mix of black and white families—as well as several interracial ones—gave the country a model integrated community at a time when such a thing seemed utterly unimaginable. In Lexington, Mass., there’s Five Fields, designed in the early 1950s by proteges of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. Its layout harmonizes with existing natural features and promotes neighborly bonding by providing ample common land. And there’s Stelton, N.J., founded by anarchists in 1915. In its heyday, collective matters were decided by vote—children included—husbands and wives weren’t always legally married and the locals “sometimes refuse[d] to stand for the national anthem at the movie theater in New Brunswick.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s also Economy, Pa., Greenbelt, Md. and Reston, Va.—all places where high ideals were allowed to triumph, however fleetingly, producing ways of life that residents would remember as uniquely stimulating, communal and humane. “Humane” is Kolson Hurley’s word, an inspired adjective to evoke a sense of what, ultimately, we really need our living spaces to be. Her stories demonstrate what the unfettered human spirit can achieve when it’s at its best. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the overall history of housing in America isn’t about the unfettered human spirit at its best; it’s about greed and fear and short-sightedness. Those forces have had their way with the little communities Kolson Hurley chronicles. Some have all but vanished, while others have evolved beyond recognition. Meanwhile, she admits, the vast majority of America’s suburbs are as inhumane as ever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that makes this little book all the more necessary. The communities Kolson Hurley chronicles are welcome reminders that any place, even a suburb, can be radical if you approach it the right way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-800x42.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12935470\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-160x8.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-768x40.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-240x13.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-375x20.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/Spine-1-520x27.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Etelka Lehoczky has written about books for The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times and other publications. She tweets at @EtelkaL.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2019 \u003ca href=\"http://npr.org\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "'Giraffes on Horseback Salad' Tells the Lost Story of Harpo Marx and Salvador Dalí",
"headTitle": "‘Giraffes on Horseback Salad’ Tells the Lost Story of Harpo Marx and Salvador Dalí | KQED",
"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13854078\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13854078\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/giraffes-on-horseback-salad-800x1016.jpg\" alt=\"'Giraffes on Horseback Salad' by Josh Frank.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1016\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/giraffes-on-horseback-salad.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/giraffes-on-horseback-salad-160x203.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/giraffes-on-horseback-salad-768x975.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Giraffes on Horseback Salad’ by Josh Frank.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When Harpo Marx met Salvador Dalí, it was kismet, as Josh Frank reports in \u003cem>Giraffes on Horseback Salad\u003c/em>, his diverting graphic novel about the pair’s 1937 attempt to collaborate on a movie of the same name. While it’s not too surprising that the troublemaking artist and the seditious comedian would be simpatico, their bond went deeper than that. They painted each other, and Dalí sent his new friend a full-size harp strung with barbed wire. Harpo replied with a photo of himself pretending to play the lethal harp, all his fingers wrapped in bandages. (It’s included in this book, courtesy of his son Bill.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the two men, Dalí seems to have been the most infatuated. He wrote to André Breton, “I’m in Hollywood, where I’ve made contact with the three American surrealists: Harpo Marx, Disney and Cecil B. DeMille.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So overcome was Dalí with Harpo’s genius that he wrote a treatment, and later an abbreviated screenplay, for a Marx Brothers movie to be called \u003cem>Giraffes on Horseback Salad\u003c/em>. He and Harpo even pitched it to Louis B. Mayer. But as Frank puts it, “The meeting did not go well.” Among Dalí’s ideas: “Harpo opens an umbrella and a chicken explodes on all the onlookers. He … puts each piece [of chicken] carefully on a saddle that he uses as a plate, a saddle not for a horse, but for a giraffe!” The surrealist script fell flat even with Groucho Marx, who said simply, “It won’t play.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eighty years later, Dalí’s idea still won’t play. Even jazzed up with jokes by Tim Heidecker (a modern Marx Brother if there ever was one), \u003cem>Giraffes on Horseback Salad\u003c/em> — the movie, not the book — is a baffling mess. Neither Dalí or Harpo seems to have realized that their approaches to humor were vastly different. The Marx Brothers’ work was acutely conscious of, and responsive to, established structures: They subverted the social order using its own rules. Groucho and Chico’s wordplay exemplifies this, and even Harpo’s silent antics acknowledged conventions in order to upend them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dalí, more often than not, simply headed off in a direction orthogonal to accepted reality. As a result, he’s not generally particularly funny at all. Some of his creations have a lightness — the spindly-legged elephants, his collaborations with designer Elsa Schiaparelli, his own kooky image — but usually his surrealism is deadly serious. That funk of portent permeates \u003cem>Giraffes on Horseback Salad\u003c/em> like a vapor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dalí’s movie doesn’t really have a plot. One bizarre set piece gives way to another, all heavily symbolic and none eliciting mirth. Dalí even manages to make Harpo unfunny, casting the other man as … Dalí. “Harpo will be Jimmy, a young Spanish aristocrat who lives in the U.S. as a consequence of political circumstances in his country,” Dalí wrote. The artist even meant Harpo to spend much of the film in a tux, his fuzzy mane tamed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">All this would make for a terrible book but for the power of comics — and the virtuosity of Spanish artist Manuela Pertega. Her approach is classical, with only moderate reliance on cartoony distortion. It’s a good style for reproducing the visions of a rigorous draftsman like Dalí. Pertega infuses Dalí’s elaborate tableaux with all the glamour and mystery he could have wished for. Two-page spreads of overflowing images — a white silk tunnel, flaming giraffes, clusters of disembodied hands, swans, floating fried eggs and a few inevitable lobsters — are improbably harmonious. Pertega’s color sense is controlled. Snatching hues from all over the spectrum, she doles them out sparingly for maximum impact. Much of the book is in black and white — a nod to the 1930s setting — making pages with over-the-top color explode more powerfully.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">It may not be a good story, but \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Giraffes on Horseback Salad\u003c/em>\u003c/i> makes a good book. Frank’s tale of how he found Dalí’s script and organized the project — enlisting the help of Heidecker and the Pixies’ Black Francis, whom Frank worked with previously — is entertaining cultural history. His descriptions of Dalí striving to make his mark in Hollywood are funny, too. The great artist may not have “gotten” humor like he thought he did, but in this book he’s comical in spite of himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca style=\"font-style: inherit;font-weight: inherit\" href=\"https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__etelkawrites.com&d=DwMFaQ&c=E2nBno7hEddFhl23N5nD1Q&r=eDR3RhrQF9JBI8Rzx0SRPw&m=vR6dskFG6Pki76w8marL327xnaWSpIVAqnkFp2Pm3ak&s=JUbZuVGcudZcgORe1Tg8pNLoUkGn74HD8lH9PQjh1vM&e=\">Etelka Lehoczky\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\"> has written about comics for\u003c/em>\u003c/i> The Atlantic and The Los Angeles Review of Books. \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">She tweets at\u003c/em>\u003c/i> \u003ca style=\"font-style: inherit;font-weight: inherit\" href=\"https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__twitter.com_EtelkaL&d=DwMFaQ&c=E2nBno7hEddFhl23N5nD1Q&r=eDR3RhrQF9JBI8Rzx0SRPw&m=vR6dskFG6Pki76w8marL327xnaWSpIVAqnkFp2Pm3ak&s=Mdo8__hjawldjbQthelAboNsxAd-9SFUx24643NrlUM&e=\">@EtelkaL\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "An unlikely collaboration between two oddball artists is now the subject of a gripping graphic novel. ",
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"headline": "'Giraffes on Horseback Salad' Tells the Lost Story of Harpo Marx and Salvador Dalí",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13854078\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13854078\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/giraffes-on-horseback-salad-800x1016.jpg\" alt=\"'Giraffes on Horseback Salad' by Josh Frank.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1016\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/giraffes-on-horseback-salad.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/giraffes-on-horseback-salad-160x203.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/giraffes-on-horseback-salad-768x975.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Giraffes on Horseback Salad’ by Josh Frank.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When Harpo Marx met Salvador Dalí, it was kismet, as Josh Frank reports in \u003cem>Giraffes on Horseback Salad\u003c/em>, his diverting graphic novel about the pair’s 1937 attempt to collaborate on a movie of the same name. While it’s not too surprising that the troublemaking artist and the seditious comedian would be simpatico, their bond went deeper than that. They painted each other, and Dalí sent his new friend a full-size harp strung with barbed wire. Harpo replied with a photo of himself pretending to play the lethal harp, all his fingers wrapped in bandages. (It’s included in this book, courtesy of his son Bill.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the two men, Dalí seems to have been the most infatuated. He wrote to André Breton, “I’m in Hollywood, where I’ve made contact with the three American surrealists: Harpo Marx, Disney and Cecil B. DeMille.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So overcome was Dalí with Harpo’s genius that he wrote a treatment, and later an abbreviated screenplay, for a Marx Brothers movie to be called \u003cem>Giraffes on Horseback Salad\u003c/em>. He and Harpo even pitched it to Louis B. Mayer. But as Frank puts it, “The meeting did not go well.” Among Dalí’s ideas: “Harpo opens an umbrella and a chicken explodes on all the onlookers. He … puts each piece [of chicken] carefully on a saddle that he uses as a plate, a saddle not for a horse, but for a giraffe!” The surrealist script fell flat even with Groucho Marx, who said simply, “It won’t play.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eighty years later, Dalí’s idea still won’t play. Even jazzed up with jokes by Tim Heidecker (a modern Marx Brother if there ever was one), \u003cem>Giraffes on Horseback Salad\u003c/em> — the movie, not the book — is a baffling mess. Neither Dalí or Harpo seems to have realized that their approaches to humor were vastly different. The Marx Brothers’ work was acutely conscious of, and responsive to, established structures: They subverted the social order using its own rules. Groucho and Chico’s wordplay exemplifies this, and even Harpo’s silent antics acknowledged conventions in order to upend them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dalí, more often than not, simply headed off in a direction orthogonal to accepted reality. As a result, he’s not generally particularly funny at all. Some of his creations have a lightness — the spindly-legged elephants, his collaborations with designer Elsa Schiaparelli, his own kooky image — but usually his surrealism is deadly serious. That funk of portent permeates \u003cem>Giraffes on Horseback Salad\u003c/em> like a vapor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dalí’s movie doesn’t really have a plot. One bizarre set piece gives way to another, all heavily symbolic and none eliciting mirth. Dalí even manages to make Harpo unfunny, casting the other man as … Dalí. “Harpo will be Jimmy, a young Spanish aristocrat who lives in the U.S. as a consequence of political circumstances in his country,” Dalí wrote. The artist even meant Harpo to spend much of the film in a tux, his fuzzy mane tamed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">All this would make for a terrible book but for the power of comics — and the virtuosity of Spanish artist Manuela Pertega. Her approach is classical, with only moderate reliance on cartoony distortion. It’s a good style for reproducing the visions of a rigorous draftsman like Dalí. Pertega infuses Dalí’s elaborate tableaux with all the glamour and mystery he could have wished for. Two-page spreads of overflowing images — a white silk tunnel, flaming giraffes, clusters of disembodied hands, swans, floating fried eggs and a few inevitable lobsters — are improbably harmonious. Pertega’s color sense is controlled. Snatching hues from all over the spectrum, she doles them out sparingly for maximum impact. Much of the book is in black and white — a nod to the 1930s setting — making pages with over-the-top color explode more powerfully.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">It may not be a good story, but \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">Giraffes on Horseback Salad\u003c/em>\u003c/i> makes a good book. Frank’s tale of how he found Dalí’s script and organized the project — enlisting the help of Heidecker and the Pixies’ Black Francis, whom Frank worked with previously — is entertaining cultural history. His descriptions of Dalí striving to make his mark in Hollywood are funny, too. The great artist may not have “gotten” humor like he thought he did, but in this book he’s comical in spite of himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca style=\"font-style: inherit;font-weight: inherit\" href=\"https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__etelkawrites.com&d=DwMFaQ&c=E2nBno7hEddFhl23N5nD1Q&r=eDR3RhrQF9JBI8Rzx0SRPw&m=vR6dskFG6Pki76w8marL327xnaWSpIVAqnkFp2Pm3ak&s=JUbZuVGcudZcgORe1Tg8pNLoUkGn74HD8lH9PQjh1vM&e=\">Etelka Lehoczky\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\"> has written about comics for\u003c/em>\u003c/i> The Atlantic and The Los Angeles Review of Books. \u003ci>\u003cem style=\"font-weight: inherit\">She tweets at\u003c/em>\u003c/i> \u003ca style=\"font-style: inherit;font-weight: inherit\" href=\"https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__twitter.com_EtelkaL&d=DwMFaQ&c=E2nBno7hEddFhl23N5nD1Q&r=eDR3RhrQF9JBI8Rzx0SRPw&m=vR6dskFG6Pki76w8marL327xnaWSpIVAqnkFp2Pm3ak&s=Mdo8__hjawldjbQthelAboNsxAd-9SFUx24643NrlUM&e=\">@EtelkaL\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"id": "code-switch-life-kit",
"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"meta": {
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"order": 9
},
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"id": "freakonomics-radio",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
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},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"hidden-brain": {
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"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
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"how-i-built-this": {
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"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"order": 15
},
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
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},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1567098962",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
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},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/otm",
"meta": {
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"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-the-Media-p69/",
"rss": "http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia"
}
},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
"title": "PBS NewsHour",
"info": "Analysis, background reports and updates from the PBS NewsHour putting today's news in context.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/PBS-News-Hour-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/",
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"source": "pbs"
},
"link": "/radio/program/pbs-newshour",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pbs-newshour-full-show/id394432287?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
"rss": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/show"
}
},
"perspectives": {
"id": "perspectives",
"title": "Perspectives",
"tagline": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991",
"info": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Perspectives_Tile_Final.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Perspectives",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/perspectives/",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 14
},
"link": "/perspectives",
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"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/432309616/perspectives",
"rss": "https://ww2.kqed.org/perspectives/category/perspectives/feed/",
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},
"planet-money": {
"id": "planet-money",
"title": "Planet Money",
"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
"airtime": "SUN 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/planetmoney.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/sections/money/",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/planet-money",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id290783428?mt=2",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510289/podcast.xml"
}
},
"politicalbreakdown": {
"id": "politicalbreakdown",
"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Political-Breakdown-2024-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 5
},
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