Jan. 23: A very liberal arts college, the election becomes electric, and three podcasts you'll like
An issue of the Open Source newsletter
Ted Dreier is a man in his eighties, very much at home in Belmont, Massachusetts, where we met him this week.
At four and a half years old, though, he was extraordinarily placed. His enterprising father (also Ted) brought the family down to Asheville, N.C. to the site of a educational experiment that he was helping bring to life. They called it Black Mountain College.
Over the next two decades, Dreier would live, on-and-off, at the center of that incredible node of 20th-century American culture.
Robert Rauschenberg put white paint on a canvas, and John Cage would responded with the idea for an entirely silent musical composition.
And it was there that European and American art most profoundly cross-pollinated, with Josef and Anni Albers bringing Bauhaus thinking, color theory, artistic wonder and German rigor here, and ended up sending triumphal American waves of abstraction, concept and pop back there.
Plus Harlem Renaissance cubist Jacob Lawrence, Japanese-American sculptor Ruth Asawa, choreographer Merce Cunningham: the list goes on and on.
Our show this week has tons of that kinetic energy coiled up in it, with cultural history from Louis Menand, all-star gossip, and a caution against romanticizing, from the Globe’s wonderful critic Sebastian Smee, and thoughts on arts and education from working artists Taylor Davis and Bill Flynn.
Ted Dreier read us a short, and sweet, poem to start the show — in a spirit of perfect, childlike openness:
This I learned from Albers at B.M.C.:
be aware,
be aware,
yes, be aware now!
and Begin to See.
We spent more than a week with Black Mountain College, and the utopian, naïve beauty of the place did start to get to me, at least — fragile youth, daily weeping, faculty tantrums and all. It’s the tumbledown college I wish I went to.
Check out a tour of the ICA/Boston exhibition that inspired this show with curator Ruth Erickson:
Read more from Pat Tomaino here. And listen to the show anytime on our website.
coming up: season of the which?
It’s on, it’s on: the search for the 45th and Possibly Final President of the United States (45P.F.P.O.T.U.S.) is on!
And the shadowy powers that rig our democracy (just kidding?) have sure cooked up an interesting one this time around.
The Iowa-caucus premiere is in one short week. Our Massachusetts readers have an extra month to ponder (March 1st, register now!).
And it does have a distinctive televisual energy this time around, doesn’t it? Donald Trump is a creature of T.V.: he was firing KISS’s Gene Simmons and hocking steaks for the Sharper Image long before he was sort of obliged to learn about the nuclear triad. (This week, Trump crowed that he could shoot people in the street and stay peachy in the polls.)
But there are other plots, too: a Democratic underdog oncometh, Simon and Garfunkel in his heart. The Bush family are ready for a fall — and Trump’s still chuckling like a bully. Meanwhile, yet another New York megalomaniac/billionaire mounts the stage. (Producer Pat Tomaino has a good thought on the subject.)
So next week, we’ll be discussing the peculiar entertainments of 2016 politics with screen-culture mainstays: David Simon, creator ofThe Wire and Show Me A Hero, Frank Rich, onetime theater critic, columnist, and producer of HBO’s Veep. And rapper (and Bernie Sanders proxy!) Killer Mike may join, too.
Competitive counter-programming to whatever Netflix is offering, at least.
to listen
Criminal, “Pen and Paper”:
Phoebe Judge, host of Criminal, rises above because of the bearable lightness she brings to her grim and grisly topics. She finds a fellow-traveller this week: the perfectly charming courtroom-sketch artist Andy Austin, who detected the bright points even in serial killer John Wayne Gacy — mainly, his devoted mother (above).
The Untold, “Strictly Come Langport”:
The story of a Dancing With The Stars competition set in a small English town, with a 70-year-old stunner named Mo at its center. The thing is made inside-out — the plot to find a “bad guy” for the broadcast end up turning a perfectly charming video technician named Ferg.
Open Source, C.D. Wright, RIP:
The Arkansan poet C.D. Wright has passed away. Amid accolades, we’ve resurfaced a conversation with her from 2011, on the eve of her receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award for One With Others, a book of poetry filled with the world of the civil-rights fight. It captures her charm, her sound, and the joy she took in poetic life.
song of the week:
“If I Needed Someone,” Hugh Masekela. From an album of ’60s covers, this is the one where the South African trumpeter really belts it out. It comes to inhabit some part of my brain on snowy nights.
to read: the leisure of the theory class
Get to know Corey Robin this week. He’s the public intellectual I read most, thanks to his stylish blog and regular updates. His latest letter — 16 points on the ongoing campaign — makes for fascinating reading, especially for those puzzling over the edgy Clinton feeling.
And then he’s published a much longer lecture about the very idea of the public intellectual — from Cass Sunstein to Ta-Nehisi Coates — of interest to anyone in the thinking business, and to readers of reviews of books the world around.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week,
Max.
