The Organist
Take a weird, thoughtful and pleasurable journey into literature, music, art, philosophy, the internet, language, and history with McSweeney's and KCRW. This unconventional arts-and-culture magazine features contributors and guests like Miranda July, George Saunders, Lena Dunham, Tig Notaro, and Sarah Silverman.
Borderlands This week, two stories from the U.S. borders. The first, from Javier Zamora, who crossed into the U.S. without his parents when he was nine years old. The other comes from our border with Canada, which Porter Fox navigated from end to end, by canoe, freighter, and rental car, encountering an increasingly policed border, Native American uprisings, and the unmistakable impact of climate change.
Two Years With Franz The poet and Pulitzer Prize–winner Franz Wright recorded 546 audio tapes in the two years of his life after a terminal cancer diagnosis. The tapes show incredible vitality in the face of death. Over two years, Bianca Giaever listened to all 546 tapes, emerging with this hour-long story of poetry and mental illness and love.
How to Be in Two Places at Once: The Firesign Theatre in the US and Vietnam As four comedians trained in poetry and psy-ops, Firesign Theatre created dense, album-length art-objects that could take multiple spins to understand. Their comedy took the form of inscrutable and often abrasive soundscapes that reviewers were as likely to call “frightening” as “funny.” This week, we explore how these albums were listened to collectively: in groups, teenage house parties, poet John Ashbery’s pot smoke-filled living room, and military bases in Vietnam.
Antigonick Antigone is one of the most widely performed plays in the world. Poet Anne Carson’s experimental translation of Sophocles’ tragedy incorporates 2,500 years of its performance and interpretation. The play’s emotional core persists even as we view Antigone through all of the ways she has been viewed and used throughout her history.
The Gospel of Ndegeocello Meshell Ndegeocello’s debut album kicked off the era of neo-soul, inspiring Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, and D’Angelo. Twenty-three years later, Ndegeocello is still making art, but she’s expanded her medium with a new project that’s part theater, part church revival, with an unexpected saint at its center.
A 700-Foot Mountain of Whipped Cream From in utero to the studio, Clive Desmond gives us a history of the golden age of radio ads, featuring Frank Zappa, Ken Nordine, Linda Ronstadt, and Randy Newman. While the 1960s shift in print and TV advertising has been heavily documented and mythologized by Mad Men, Madison Avenue’s radiophonic collision with the counterculture is less well known. Here, in Clive’s private tour, each jingle becomes a Proustian madeleine.