The Organist

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The Blindfold Challenge Oct 04, 2018

Show notes

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

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

The Secret Life of Plants Sep 20, 2018

Show notes

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

Bingeing Texas Aug 23, 2018

Show notes

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

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

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

Borderlands Aug 09, 2018

Show notes

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

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

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

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

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

Two Years With Franz Jul 26, 2018

Show notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Voice of God Jul 12, 2018

Show notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Organist returns Thursday Jul 10, 2018

Show notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus: Neighborhood Secret Apr 26, 2018

Show notes

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

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

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

How to Be in Two Places at Once: The Firesign Theatre in the US and Vietnam Dec 14, 2017

Show notes

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

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

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

Antigonick Nov 30, 2017

Show notes

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

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

Produced by Angela Shackel Image credit: Braden Labonté

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