Bob Edwards Weekend Highlights – November 7-8, 2009
HOUR ONE
Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, is a conceptual artist, spoken word artist, writer and musician whose work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, the Andy Warhol Museum and the Village Voice. His video, “Rebirth of a Nation,” ran at the Lincoln Center Festival and the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Last year he traveled to Antarctica for a new, large-scale multimedia performance piece. Miller discusses those projects, including his book titled Sound Unbound, and his most recent album, “The Secret Song,” which he describes as “meditation on hip-hop and electronic music’s relationship to philosophy, economics and the science of sound.”
In this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, Bob talks with executive director Dan Gediman about the essay from General Lucius D. Clay. During World War II, Gen. Clay was Director of Material for the Army and then Deputy Director for War Mobilization and Reconversion. After the war he was U.S. Military Governor of Germany. Clay ordered and organized the massive air-lift to feed people in Soviet-blockaded Berlin.
HOUR TWO
For three years, director Joe Berlinger gathered the footage for his new documentary Crude. In the classic battle between the haves and the have-nots, Crude examines both sides of the legal case known as the “Amazon Chernobyl.” 30,000 residents of the jungles of Ecuador claimed that the American oil giant Chevron contaminated an area roughly the size of Rhode Island, resulting in high levels of cancer, birth defects, and other health problems. Crude was an official selection at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
Salon.com book critic Laura Miller shares her favorite new books for fall.
Jonathan Lethem describes his new novel this way: “It’s set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it’s strongly influenced by Saul Bellow, Philip K. Dick, Charles G. Finney and Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” and it concerns a circle of friends including a faded child-star actor, a cultural critic, a hack ghost-writer of autobiographies, and a city official. And it’s long and strange.” Chronic City is Lethem’s seventh novel. His previous novels include the best-sellers, Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn.