Amanda Palmer in Boston, Otis Redding in Jamaica, and the Future of Food on Earth
Don’t miss this, and don’t wait til the last minute when you’re in a turkey stupor to get tickets. Once in a lifetime: Chris and the cabaret singer and heart-throb Amanda Palmer on the Monday after Thanksgiving in Harvard Square, not far from where they first met, talking songs, art and life. With any luck, she’ll play “the song,” the tune she wrote about calling in to our talk show that made radio history back in the 90’s in Boston.
Chris Lydon: “I’ll never forget the first sight of Amanda, a painted-white statue on a bright summer day, stock-still in front of Nini’s newsstand in Harvard Square. Subliminally I must have seen one or all three of my daughters and asked: ‘what in the world are you doing here?’ But I watched, and kept watching, an expressive artist trying out for herself. Then she sent me a most touching letter about a song she’d written. When I heard it finally, I was smitten by something pure-hearted, brave, funny, mischievous, accomplished, tender. We have been good friends, usually at a vast distance, ever since. My first grand-daughter, then about 13, got Amanda at first blush. And Amanda got Miranda. ‘Make art every day,’ she said.”
Amanda Palmer: “My relationship with the so-called ‘media’ has always been a difficult one. Many journalists go out of their way to misunderstand and misinterpret my art; but there are a few who stand out as those who fully comprehend my artistic and personal journey, and Chris is one of them.”
“I was a hardcore, devoted listener to Chris’s NPR show, The Connection, when I was living in Boston in the early 2000s,” she continues. “His interviews and thoughtful, challenging-yet-gentle, and considered manner of communicating were a beacon of hope to me. In the world of loud-mouthed megaphone radio DJs, Chris was a person who had a massive and loving intellect and a curiosity about life and people that was infectious and addictive. Listening to Chris used to make me feel less alone on the world, no different from the way certain songs or bands offered me an inexplicable kinship with the universe.”
“Now that I’ve been at this job for twenty years, I so deeply appreciate the people in the media, like Chris, who have followed my entire path and ‘get’ the bigger picture about what I’m trying to do. This evening isn’t just about gabbing on and on about my story and career, it’s about celebrating our massive respect for one another and the long, strange trips we’ve both been on.”
The Dresden Dolls’ song “Christopher Lydon” appears on their A Is For Accident album (2009), recorded live at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, MA in 2002.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM2IrTbWJxY
WTF: What the Food?!
Food for thought this week, just ahead of Thanksgiving, with Caleb Harper, Dr. Walter Willett, Raj Patel, Carolyn Johnson, Julie Guthman and Jaques Pepin. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
We threw a pot luck dinner this week with a technologist, a nutrition scientist, a chef, a research scientist and an international activist. The subject was food and how to feed a planet that’s both overfed and under-nourished which will have 10 billion people at its global table in the year 2050.
We’d turned into digital skeptics after our recent series of tech shows, so we were wary of Caleb Harper’s vision of a digital food utopia. But we were completely smitten by him and his Open Agriculture lab at MIT.
Caleb and his team use open source software and “food computers” to grow food at scale in warehouses using recipes of climate and flavor data, biology, and agricultural science they hope a billion farmers in the world can use and then tweak and modify.
Dr. Walter Willett brought his nutrition experience (and some home grown peaches) to our table. You can thank him, by the way, for his 30 year effort to get the trans fat out of your french fries. Julie Guthman brought a short course on the California strawberry and the global activist Raj Patel brought one about the Chicken McNugget. At the center of the global and local food problem is the impulse to make it cheaper and last as long as possible on the store shelf, all at the expense of workers and the environment, not to mention the taste of it.
For desert, we served a delicious helping with the French master chef Jacques Pépin, the former right-hand man to Julia Child.
In conversation with Jacques Pépin this week, Christopher Lydon asked him how he and Julia Child, his dear friend and longtime collaborator, would be planning for this Thanksgiving. Jacques softly chuckled and said, “Well, we’d probably be arguing a lot. And then certainly end up doing what she wants — which is what we did on one of our shows when she wanted me to bone out a turkey for Thanksgiving and bone out the leg, stuff them and do the breasts separate, and I really didn’t want to do it. But she wanted to do it. We did it. And it was one of the best shows we ever did.”
You can watch this special Thanksgiving episode here:
Listen: Jacob Miller — “Dock of the Bay”
Zach Goldhammer: We’re still cranking away on our afterlife of Otis Redding show. This week, we interviewed the Twenty Feet from Stardom star Janice Pendarvis. Among other things, Janice talked about her love of Otis’s signature song, “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay”, which she once sang in an audition for the reggae legend Max Romeo in Jamaica. Janice’s discussion of why Jamaican artists loved Redding’s soul style led me to revisit some of the great reggae covers of Otis’s music. My favorite is Jacob Miller’s own, brilliant re-interpretation of “Dock of the Bay”, which alters some of the geographical and metaphorical lyrics in the song to match classic reggae themes:
“Left my home in Trenchtown / headed for the dock of the bay / I ain’t got nothing to live for / Ethiopia’s got to come my way / where else can our children really play… / I won’t do what the Babylon tell I to do / so I guess I remain the same…”
Many people discuss the ways in which gospel pronouns were altered to become secular subjects in soul songs. Few, however, talk about this second great transformation: when those same subjects were re-christened as Rastafarian figures. Anyone who’s interested in this history should check out the Blood & Fire labels excellent compilation of soul music’s migration into Jamaica, Darker Than Blue: Soul from Jamdown 1973–1977.
Listen: Al Green — The Belle Album
Also worth checking out this week is the most recent episode of WBEZ’s Sound Opinions, which explores another great spiritual shift: Al Green’s momentous return to gospel music. The episode revisits Al Green’s 1977 Belle album, which was intended as renunciation of his life as a secular pop star and an introduction new career as Reverend Green. Like Otis, Al Green grew up singing gospel before he made it big as a soul star in one of the Memphis record studios. Green also signed onto Hi Records shortly after Otis’s death in the late ’60s. His softer, more sensual sound—as opposed to Otis’s loud, hyper masculine style—would later become the template for neo-soul performers like D’Angelo, as Emily Lordi reminded us this week. Through Green grew up in Arkansas, his Belle album track “Georgia Boy” sounds almost like a reversal of Otis’s narrative in “Dock of the Bay”—returning the sound of soul to Redding’s original home:
Just because I’m from the country
I’ve been a miner too
Just because I’m thinking about New York City
Just ’cause I am it don’t mean
I ain’t thinking ‘bout Georgia too
You can read Sound Opinions’s host Greg Kot’s full review of The Belle Album’s 40 year legacy in the Chicago Tribune.
Listen/Read: “The Uncounted”
Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal from the New York Times investigate deaths of Iraqi civilians by U.S. led forces in Iraq — in what the U.S. calls “the most precise air campaign in history.”
The Time’s Daily Podcast host Michael Barbaro interviews Basim Razzo who survived an airstrike on his home in Mosul, Iraq in 2015 that killed his wife, daughter, brother and nephew.
Watch: Blue Planet II
Conor Gillies: The Wagnerian BBC nature documentary series “Blue Planet” is back — episodes from season 2 have been coming out Sundays, so there should be a new episode tonight. Highly recommend getting caught up with the episode on coral reefs, which you will learn are far more intelligent and interesting than human beings. If you have trouble downloading a VPN to see the series on BBC iPlayer, or catching an episode or two on Dailymotion, at least read the funny and touching Amber A’Lee Frost in Current Affairs on the general concern of watching Attenborough-style wildlife documentaries.
From the Art Desk:
Susan Coyne: I went to see Michael Ondaatje at Memorial Church at Harvard on Monday afternoon. He read from his work for a full hour before the Q&A, and I kept losing track as his low murmur got carried away in the church’s bouncing acoustics. His conversation with Claire Messud afterwards was much more prodding and funny. She brought up the idea that any writer will have all of his life’s material by age ten. “Unfortunately, I don’t remember anything before the age of ten,” he said. He also joked that he doesn’t visualize characters’ appearances, only what sort of “presence” they have. He said he once tucked in his first visual description of a character two hundred pages into a book and then was told by an editor that that’s “much too late.”
Happy Thanksgiving everyone. We’re thankful to all of you for your support and to WBUR and to our generous donors. Please think of us in your end of the year giving. We survived 2017 together, and we have big plans for 2018!
Have a good feast!
The OS gourmands
