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After the Empire: Must Reading from Parag Khanna
Click to listen to Chris’s classroom conversation with Parag Khanna here (60 minutes, 27 mb mp3) Everybody’s homework assignment this week is, first, to absorb Parag Khanna‘s breathtaking revisioning...
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Master Class: the Global Beethoven
Hung-Kuan Chen, Multi-polar Pianist The sublime pianist Hung-Kuan Chen is playing for keeps at what I think of as the great three-way intersection of our time. His passport says: USA. His stock in...
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What’s Coming in Cuba (I) Patrick Symmes
Is Cuba, after Fidel Castro, in for a Velvet Revolution? or a civil war? or more of the same? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Patrick Symmes here (52 minutes, 24 mb mp3) The marvelous...
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Cuba in Our Ears (IV): Ned Sublette
And then — deeper than the Revolution, coming and going — there’s the music of Cuba. Our brilliant, besotted, utterly persuasive authority Ned Sublette drives head-on into Alex Ross’s theme in The Rest...
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Pico Iyer: the "Transcendentalist" Dalai Lama
In Tibet the Dalai Lama was an embodiment of an old culture that, cut off from the world, spoke for an ancient, even lost traditionalism; now, in exile, he is an avatar of the new, as if having...
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Israel at 60: the Etgar Keret Version
The writer Etgar Keret was our Open Source witness in Israel two years ago to a general (local, global, existential) disbelief and alienation from the war on Lebanon. And now we have the pleasure of...
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Open Source Storytelling: Ben Haggarty
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ben Haggarty & Company (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Ben Haggerty, open sorcerer Ben Haggarty picks up on the question “where do stories come from?” at...
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Calabash ’08: First, the fireworks…
“It’s going to be nasty,” Derek Walcott said, prefacing his war on V. S. Naipaul with a warning. “The Mongoose” was the last of Walcott’s new poems at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica last...
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Soviet Posters: The Art of Polarization
Click here for slideshow Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tom Gleason (21 minutes, 10 mb mp3) We’re on a digressive walk and talk here through a master collection of those Soviet posters...
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Poster Art Then and Now: RISD’s John Maeda
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with John Maeda (20 minutes, 9 mb mp3) Call this Take 2 on the show of Soviet poster art, through the eyes of a 40-year-old Japanese American graphic artist who...
View ArticleAmitav Ghosh and his Sea of Poppies
The Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh brings the British Empire to life again — the other side of the story, so to speak, from the other side of the world. If we’d had his wondrous new novel, Sea of...
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The Indispensable Musician: Barenboim Backstage
Daniel Barenboim‘s conversation starts high as a kite on the fumes of the Wagner he’s been rehearsing, then lands with both feet on the Middle East. “The situation in the Middle East has never been so...
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Our Music Man in Havana: Bobby Carcasses
The polite name for it was folklore, but it was the daily stuff of peoples’ lives. Dancing and music were never very far away, It didn’t mean people were happy. It meant that — not for all Cubans, but...
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Enchantment and Ruin: Mario Coyula’s Havana
Havana by now can be imagined as one city in two countries. The fiery splendor of Old Havana has emptied money and momentum and much of its future into Miami. But the magic and mystique in the name are...
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Music as a civic "conspiracy": George Mathew
George Mathew‘s extraordinary musical project unfolds anew tonight at Carnegie Hall. On the bill is the longest symphony in the standard repertoire, Mahler’s Third, with a couple of hundred star...
View ArticleOne Man’s Mix of Cuban Music: Roberto Zurbano
I asked Roberto Zurbano for the impossible: a short course on Cuban music. Say, a flight across the 60 years since Chano Pozo met Dizzy Gillespie… in something less than 60 minutes. Teacher, critic,...
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The Palestinian Who Knows (or Knew) the President
Rashid Khalidi‘s most promising remembrance of his friend Barack Obama is only obliquely political. On a University of Chicago tennis court about a decade ago, when Khalidi’s regular game didn’t show,...
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"Waltz with Bashir": the Art Director’s Cut at War
Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with David Polonsky, James Der Derian, Amy Kravitz and Keith Brown about “Waltz with Bashir” (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) David Polonsky: “Waltz with Bashir” is the...
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Carlos Fuentes: FDR to BHO: the New Deal Revisited
“What a pleasure,” Carlos Fuentes was saying, “to speak praises of the United States again.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Carlos Fuentes (22 minutes, 10 mb mp3) Mexico’s statuesque...
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Amitav Ghosh & Robert Coover: Speaking of Burma
Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Amitav Ghosh and Robert Coover (17 minutes, 8 mb mp3) Amitav Ghosh & Robert Coover Our conversation draws on the novelist Robert Coover’s exercise of...
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