Ravi Shankar has died. The great sitar player and composer brought eastern music west. Here he is in 1967 on the Dick Cavett show. At the beginning of the clip you’ll see George Harrison, who studied for a time with Shankar.

Essentially poetry, if it is poetry, does not lend itself to simple readings, to oversimplifications — though people may try to read it that way. It seems to me that the essential nature of a poem is that there is ambivalence and ambiguity quivering underneath.

— Adrienne Rich: The 1989 Fresh Air interview

Remembering Peter Bergman, one of the founding members of the four-man surrealist comedy troupe The Firesign Theatre.

Just one more thing…Audio for Terry’s 1995 conversation with Peter Falk is now up. Enjoy!

rebbylau:

So I just finished playing this my family seriously has the weirdest board game collection ever… Also R.I.P. Peter falk

Just One More Thing About Peter Falk, TV’s Columbo: The Fresh Air Interview and Remembrance

badlands:

Sidney Lumet on the set of Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

It would be negligent to finish up this series of posts without acknowledging the director’s death this past weekend.

(The photo is from a New York interview with Lumet from 2007, which, awkwardly, begins with the quote: “It’s strange, because I’m not dead yet.”)

Tomorrow: ATTICA ATTICA ATTICA. We will remember director Sidney Lumet with excerpts from a 1988 interview. 

washingtonpoststyle:

Harry Wesley Coover, the inventor of super glue, is dead.

Obit here. Photo by David Grace (AP/The Kingsport Times-News)

He stuck around for 94 years. 

Remembering playwright Lanford Wilson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1980 play, “Talley’s Folly.” He also co-founded the New York Circle Repertory Company.

Fresh Air remembers dialect coach Sam Chwat, who helped celebrities like Julia Roberts and Robert DeNiro lose and gain accents for film roles, including DeNiro’s1991 film Cape Fear: “We worked very hard and long on that one, and [De Niro] did beautifully. What you’re hearing [in Cape Fear] is mostly vowels that are changed. For example, instead of family, you’re hearing a more nasal sound in the ‘a.’ Instead of the vowel ‘i,’ which never exists in any part of the South, you have [the sound] ‘ah.’” These are some of the changes that we went through, word for word, in the script and all through the shooting.”

Jazz Pianist George Shearing, on writing the standard “Lullaby of Birdland” — “I wrote it in 10 minutes — I always say 10 minutes and 35 years in the business — over a steak in my dining room when I lived in New Jersey. I went back to that same butcher a thousand times trying to get that same steak again.” Excerpts from a 1986 interview with Shearing, who died yesterday at the age of 91.

John Barry, on composing the music for Goldfinger’s theme song: “Originally, it just started off with a chorus, ‘De dum.’ And there was no ‘By ya ya ya ya.’ That wasn’t there then. And we had a break, they went up for their 10-minute tea break, and in the tea break I just found it. What we were playing, it was empty, so I sat down at the piano and I came up with ‘Da ya na na da.’ And did it on wah-wah trumpets.”

Friday: We remember composer John Barry with highlights from a 1999 interview. Barry composed the music for eleven Bond songs, as well as the the theme songs for “Thunderball” and “Goldfinger.”

Before there was power yoga and Tae-Bo, there was LaLanne.

Writer Wilfrid Sheed, on why he stopped writing reviews later in life: “As a novelist, you really don’t need any more enemies than the course of life is going to send you,” he told Terry Gross in a 1988 Fresh Air interview. “On humane grounds, I think that you lose the killer instinct as you go along. I think criticism can be a blood sport, really to be indulged by the young. As you get old, you imagine that perhaps the person is ill or you imagine all the situations that have happened to yourself at one time or another and you really can’t go on giving [criticism] because you know how much it hurts.”

Allan Gurganus on writer Reynolds Price: “He started out with a voice, a lyric gift and a sense of humor. And an insight about how people lived and what they’ll do to get along.”