NPR Fresh Air

So to reference a tradition begun by the illustrious Melody...

Fri, 24 May 2013 16:12:22 -0400

So to reference a tradition begun by the illustrious Melody Kramer when she was in this hot seat, our #bestthingallweek was — without question — the arrival of our new intern, Molly Seavy-Nesper. In chorus, all together now: Hi, Molly.

We asked Molly to find a way to bid you all a lovely Memorial Day Weekend and here this very useful (and educational!) chart of literary and cinematic cocktails was her pleasure because, well, cocktails! Movies! Literature!

Drink up. We’re out.

via Pop Chart Lab

Our week was great because we

Julianne Moore talks to Dave Davies about what she learned while...

Fri, 24 May 2013 11:23:23 -0400

Julianne Moore talks to Dave Davies about what she learned while working on the soap opera As The World Turns for three years at the beginning of her career:

I learned to be a professional. You might have, as a character, 30 pages of dialogue a day if you’re what they call a ‘front-burner story.’ So you go home, you learn your lines for the next day, you get up, you’re there at 7 in the morning, you do a quick rehearsal, you’re on camera, you might leave, you know, at 7 at night and start the whole thing over again. And you have to do it. Everyone’s working very, very quickly. There’s not a lot of time to help anybody, you know, and they have to get it down, too. Unless somebody really blows a line that’s going to be the take they use. That’s just how it is. So you sometimes don’t give the kind of performance you want to give and there’s just not enough time and you go home and you watch it and you’re like, ‘Wow, I was terrible and so you think how can I make this better?’

Above, Julianne Moore in As the World Turns

Julianne Moore talks to Dave Davies about playing Sarah Palin in...

Thu, 23 May 2013 16:05:04 -0400

Julianne Moore talks to Dave Davies about playing Sarah Palin in the 2012 film Game Change:

You don’t usually get the opportunity to kind of obliterate your physiognomy when you’re acting. And that was really fun and kind of welcome because we’re always trying to effect some kind of transformation in our heads and then it’s disappointing when you finally see the movie and you still see yourself there. But in this case, because I had so much physical help turning into something else. You know, it really … make me feel like I was able to look at someone else, which I loved.

Image via The Film Experience

Let’s all go live in lovely-lit pods in the forest,...

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:56:18 -0400

Let’s all go live in lovely-lit pods in the forest, yes?

via Mental Floss

David Bianculli on Steven Soderbergh’s new HBO film about...

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:29:12 -0400

David Bianculli on Steven Soderbergh’s new HBO film about Liberace, Behind the Candelabra, starring Matt Damon and Michael Douglas:

Damon’s Scott is all aw-shucks innocence — and when a friend takes him to Las Vegas to see a Liberace show, it’s like taking a trip to Oz. They walk into the Hilton showroom while the performance is in full swing. And so do we — hit immediately, and viscerally, by the excessive glitz of it all: the gold, glass-topped grand piano. Liberace’s silver-sequined suit and heavily teased hair. And, of course, his carefully rehearsed casual stage patter, with which he entertains the audience while playing piano, sometimes with only one hand. You start the scene watching Michael Douglas but in seconds, you’re carried away, or at least dumbfounded, by Liberace.

Image courtesy of HBO

Novelist and adoptive parent Jennifer Gilmore talks to Terry...

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:41:00 -0400

Novelist and adoptive parent Jennifer Gilmore talks to Terry Gross about whether motherhood is different than what she thought it would be:

This idea of what is hypothetical, for my protagonist and me as well, what does it mean to be a mother? What does it mean to carry on the generations? How will motherhood be? ‘I’ve been taken away or not included in all these aspects of society’: that’s more the protagonist’s feeling than [mine], but when you actually get the child, you have no luxury to have this kind of imagining. You’re attending to his physical needs, the eating, the sleeping, the pooping, the singing, and so it’s much more physical. There’s love there. It becomes much less hypothetical. I know his color, I know his family. He’s just become our baby.

Image via Wikipedia

From the Department of Well-Deserved, Lydia Davis won the Man...

Thu, 23 May 2013 09:12:00 -0400

From the Department of Well-Deserved, Lydia Davis won the Man Booker Prize for fiction yesterday.

Los Angeles Times:

Lydia Davis’ writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind. Just how to categorize them?” Sir Christopher Ricks, the chair of the judging panel, said while giving the award. “Should we simply concur with the official title and dub them stories? Or perhaps miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts? Aphorisms, or even apophthegms? Prayers, or perhaps wisdom literature? Or might we settle for observations?”

Above, an animation from Electric Literature of Davis’ story “The Cows”

Steven Soderbergh talks to Terry Gross about making Behind the...

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:40:07 -0400

Steven Soderbergh talks to Terry Gross about making Behind the Candelabra, his new Liberace biopic for HBO:

It’s a very intimate movie. It’s a very emotionally intimate movie and there are scenes between them that are almost uncomfortable in their intimacy and would be if it was a man and a woman involved. … I always felt that if we did our jobs correctly, that halfway through the movie you’d forget that it was Michael and Matt and just feel as though you’re watching a relationship.

Image courtesy of HBO

Hey, Wednesday afternoon, we’re trying.

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:13:27 -0400

Hey, Wednesday afternoon, we’re trying.

Ken Tucker reviews the new album from Daft Punk, Random Access...

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:07:08 -0400

Ken Tucker reviews the new album from Daft Punk, Random Access Memories:

I freely admit that, until the new Random Access Memories, I wasn’t much of a fan. I could appreciate the craft and imagination that went into creating the French duo’s mixture of electronic genres — techno, house, disco — but the mechanical repetitions and heavily filtered vocals didn’t turn me on in any other way. But now, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have come up with an album that exposes the human side of their musical impulses. It’s the equivalent of removing the helmet-masks the pair invariably wears in public performances. Random Access Memories is a collection filled with music that suggests mad romance, heartache and an embrace of the past that’s never merely nostalgic or sentimental.

Image courtesy of Sony Music

Novelist Jennifer Gilmore, whose new book — The Mothers...

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:19:08 -0400

Novelist Jennifer Gilmore, whose new book — The Mothers — is based on her own experiences of trying to adopt a baby, talks to Terry Gross about the necessity of ‘selling’ oneself in order to appeal to a birth mother:

Of course, we thought, ‘These babies need homes. And we’re helping these babies have happy homes.’ That didn’t turn out to be the case. There are not as many babies as there are parents who want them. So you realize it is quite competitive. You join a pool of people, and it’s sort of a business out there now, a booming one. And there are more people who want babies than can be satisfied.

So what happens is, whatever route you take, whether you write this profile, you put it online, whether you do it privately, you’re sort of saying, ‘This is who we are as a couple’ or ‘We have this big ranch house’ or ‘We love museums’ or ‘We love soccer, we love children, we have nieces and nephews, and here are pictures of us with children.’ My husband and I made a pact when we started this that we were never going to misrepresent ourselves or lie about who we were. We live in New York; we live in a fourth-floor walk-up, so the rest of the country is confused by that.”

"Matched, as we know from the dating world alone, is a coded word. My spouse and I were matched with..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:05:10 -0400

“Matched, as we know from the dating world alone, is a coded word. My spouse and I were matched with birthmothers not once, not twice, not three times, but a total of five times. The most horrible things kept happening: Birthmothers and those posing as birthmothers, birthfathers and those posing as birthfathers lied to us. Birthmothers are doing a very selfless and generous thing when they decide they are unable to parent and place their child with wanting parents. It is a decision made out of big, big love for that child. Adoption, when it is successful, is a wonderful thing. But everyone coming to it is grieving in some way. It would be wrong not to acknowledge this.”

- from “The Dark, Sad Side of Domestic Adoption” by today’s guest, Jennifer Gilmore. Gilmore’s new novel about a couple trying to adopt, The Mothers, is largely autobiographical.

The Mother Warns the Tornado

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:01:37 -0400

I know I’ve already had more than I deserve.
These lungs that rise and fall without effort,
the husband who sets free house lizards,
this red-doored ranch, my mother on the phone,
the fact that I can eat anything—gouda, popcorn,
massaman curry—without worry. Sometimes
I feel like I’ve been overlooked. Checks
and balances, and I wait for the tally to be evened.
But I am a greedy son of a bitch, and there
I know we are kin. Tornado, this is my child.
Tornado, I won’t say I built him, but I am
his shelter. For months I buoyed him
in the ocean, on the highway; on crowded streets
I learned to walk with my elbows out.
And now he is here, and he is new, and he
is a small moon, an open face, a heart.
Tornado, I want more. Nothing is enough.
Nothing ever is. I will heed the warning
protocol, I will cover him with my body, I will
wait with mattress and flashlight,
but know this: If you come down here—
if you splinter your way through our pines,
if you suck the roof off this red-doored ranch,
if you reach out a smoky arm for my child—
I will turn hacksaw. I will turn grenade.
I will invent for you a throat and choke you.
I will find your stupid wicked whirling
head and cut it off. Do not test me.
If you come down here, I will teach you about
greed and hunger. I will slice you into palm-
sized gusts. Then I will feed you to yourself.

-Catherine Pierce in The Kenyon Review.

Good morning. Do you have a face? Do you have a cat? Perhaps...

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:52:35 -0400

Good morning. Do you have a face? Do you have a cat? Perhaps you’d like to give yourself a catbeard and take a selfie?

via @MyModernMet

Smithsonian: In the 1960s, Jerry Uelsmann revolutionized the...

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:33:39 -0400

Smithsonian:

In the 1960s, Jerry Uelsmann revolutionized the art of photography by manually blending negatives to produce dreamlike landscapes. “The primary creative gesture for most photographers used to be when they clicked the shutter,” Uelsmann says. “But I realized that the darkroom was a visual research lab where the creative process could continue.” Though we’re now in the era of Photoshop, he continues to forsake digital manipulation, as with the 2006 untitled image made from three photos, one including his wife’s hands. “It is an incredible leap of faith to think maybe this tree could blend into these hands,” Uelsmann says. “But the camera is a license to explore.” Uelsmann’s creations are showcased in a traveling exhibit, “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” at the National Gallery of Art through May 5.

Steven Soderbergh, who directed the new HBO Liberace biopic,...

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:47:24 -0400

Steven Soderbergh, who directed the new HBO Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra, talks to Terry Gross about the significance of the flamboyant performer’s style:

You could make an argument that Liberace really invented the idea of ‘bling.’ mean, nobody was dressing themselves like this. When you look at the people that have followed him — whether it’s Elvis or Elton john or Cher or Madonna or Lady Gaga — you know, all these people are sort of building on something that he began.”

Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist for The Doors, has died. Here is...

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:03:00 -0400

Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist for The Doors, has died.

Here is an interview we did with him in 2006.

Image via Rolling Stone

Mel Brooks tells David Bianculli about the late Madeline...

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:57:17 -0400

Mel Brooks tells David Bianculli about the late Madeline Kahn:

I’m in tears thinking about Madeline. And what an incredibly gifted gift from god, Madeline Kahn. The funniest and most talented comedienne I think, including people like Carol Burnett who are great, you know, and Gilda Radner who was magnificent, but nobody — listen to me, David Bianculli — nobody could approach the magnificence and wonder of Madeline Kahn. She was really a great gift to us all. … I saw art [in her], not just funny. But I saw a person who was gifted with art. She’s the only one who actually could have worked in opera as an opera singer, as a coloratura. She was that talented or I think she could have worked as a longshoreman in New Jersey. I don’t think there’s anything that Madeline Kahn couldn’t do.”

GIF of Madeline Kahn in Young Frankenstein (1974) via trixiedelight:

How to Help Oklahoma Tornado Victims.

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:12:58 -0400

How to Help Oklahoma Tornado Victims.

Summer Cottage, Spain National Geographic: This shot was taken...

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:34:26 -0400

Summer Cottage, Spain

National Geographic:

This shot was taken in Villa Luisita, a 19th-century house on the outskirts of Cortegana near Huelva in southern Spain. We were spending a few days in the countryside. At the end of the day, the summer light changes continuously and the activities around the house get a different significance every minute.