New Series from The Kitchen Sisters: The Keepers
The series chronicles keepers of our culture and the collections they keep
The Kitchen Sisters Present’s 100th episode kicks off a new series, The Keepers— stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians. The series chronicles keepers of our culture and the cultures and collections they keep; guardians of history, large and small, protectors of the free flow of information and ideas and eccentric individuals who take it upon themselves to preserve some aspect of our cultural heritage. It tells striking and surprising stories of preservation and civic life.
Along with the podcast, the project includes a year-long daily feature called Keeper of the Day — short stories and imagery for social media and web highlighting groundbreaking archivists, community keepers and passionate collectors through photographs, graphics, short videos, recordings, powerful quotes and vignettes. #Keeperoftheday will draw on a vast array of intriguing archiving communities, large and small, across the globe.
The Kitchen Sisters want to know: What do you keep? And why? Who are keepers we need to know about? Who is protecting, collecting and preserving in your world? The team is looking for stories, images, ideas and recordings. Share yours by calling The Keeper hotline: 415–496–9049.
Episode 1, out now, focuses on the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard University.
“Hiphop IS an archive,” the students of Marcyliena Morgan, Professor of Linguistic Anthropology, told her in the 1990s — and she listened. Today the Hiphop Archive and Research Center is part of Harvard University where DJs, scholars, hiphop artists, professors, & students are chronicling the history, art and social impact of hiphop. Along with gathering everything about the culture for preservation and study (boomboxes, turntables, Adidas, the spray paint used for grafiti), the Archive has created the Nasir Jones Fellowship for scholarly research in the field, and the “Classic Crates,” Project which is archiving and creating a family tree for 200 seminal hip-hop albums. The story features hiphop artist and Nasir Jones Fellow Patrick Douthit, aka 9th Wonder, Professor Marcliena Morgan, Professor Henry Louis Gates and more.
Future Episodes
Episode 2- The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky
During the Depression, those horrible years after 1929, the Appalachians were hit hard. Coal mines were being shut down. Many people were living in dire poverty with no hope. In 1936, as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Kentucky WPA began to hire pack horse libraians, mostly women, to carry books to isolated cabins, rural school houses, homebound miners. The routes were rugged and treacherous. The “bookwomen followed creek beds and fence routes through summer heat and frozen winters — their saddlebags and pillowcases stuffed with Robinson Crusoe, Women’s Home Companion, Popular Mechanics. Many people were illiterate and the women often stayed and read to them. The pay was $28 a month. Each woman was required to supply her own horse or mule, their food and boarding. When the program closed in 1943 as America entered World War II, nearly one thousand pack horse librarians had served 1.5 million people in 48 Kentucky counties.
Epsiode 3- Archive Fever — Henri Langlois and the Cinémathéque Francais
Henri Langlois is one of the most important figures in the history of filmmaking, though he himself never made a single film. Possessed by what French philosopher Jacques Derrida called “archive fever,” Langlois begin obsessively collecting films in the 1930’s and by the outset of WWII had one of the largest film collections in the world. During the Nazi Occupation, Langlois saved thousands of “forbidden” films from being destroyed, hiding them away in remote castles and secret places throughout France. After the war Langlois’ Cinémathéque Francais inspired a whole new generation of film makers — The French New Wave — Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci and others from around the world began flocking to the Cinémathéque to learn the language and craft of film from this astounding collection. The archive’s impact on the history of French cinema is legendary, as is the legacy of its controversial keeper, whose political ousting from The Cinémathéque caused riots in Paris and the cancellation of the Cannes Film Festival of 1968. When Langlois received an honorary Academy Award in 1974 he was described as a “savior of film.This man stood guard when no one else was there because he was committed to the belief that art cannot be explained, it is felt.”
Episode 4- The Lenny Bruce Archive
One of the most controversial, outspoken men of the last century, comedian Lenny Bruce spent much of his life in court defending his freedom of speech and First Amendment rights. His provocative social commentary and “verbal jazz” offended mainstream culture and resulted in countless arrests on obscenity and other charges. Over the decades, since his death from a heroin overdose in1966, Lenny’s only child Kitty Bruce, became his keeper, gathering and preserving everything related to her father’s life. We follow the saga of this collection from daughter Kitty’s attic, where her father’s papers, tapes and photographs sat in boxes “languishing with the cats” — to archivist, Sarah Shoemaker, who drove a van to Kitty’s house in Pennsylvania to gather this historic collection to take to Brandeis University. With the help of an endowment from Bruce’s long time friend and supporter Hugh Hefner, creator of Playboy Magazine, and his daughter Christie Heffner, the collection is now cataloged and open for use by all. The archive comes alive in the story of this brilliant, pioneering, complicated man who paved the way for comedians like George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Lewis Black.
