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Despite her profound influence on generations of writers, acclaimed poet Bernadette Mayer has lived in poverty, making only $17,000 last year. This episode delves into her financial life, highlighting how economic precarity shapes artistic innovation and resistance to commercialism. It uses Mayer's story to advocate for Universal Basic Income, positing that a minimal allowance could free artists and everyone else from financial ruin, allowing them to pursue their work and contribute to social happiness.
What happens when the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves turn out to be wrong? And what if the attempt to shape our life stories to fit some formulaic narrative arc fundamentally distorts them? Could different narrative forms tell more honest stories? Or do all narratives falsify reality in their own way? Three artists suggest new ways forward for narrative storytelling and making sense of the world. Maggie Nelson seeks to write stories that, in place of a traditional plot, instead reflec...
Buck Gooter is quite possibly the hardest-working band you’ve never heard of. Since forming in 2005, the band has logged 18 albums and 531 live shows. Their latest, Finer Thorns , just came out. But they’ve never had a hit, never been reviewed by Pitchfork. A punk duo from Harrisonburg, Virginia, Buck Gooter is Billy Brett, 33, and Terry Turtle, 66. On paper, they’re an odd couple, separated as they are by a generation and change. But on stage, they’ve formed a tight and incredibly productive mu...
[Explicit language] In 2017, David Lynch’s metaphysical detective soap opera Twin Peaks returned to cable television screens 26 years after its network cancellation. Most of the original characters resurfaced, but in several cases, either those characters or the actors playing them—or both—were dying. Over its 18 new episodes, this specter of commingled on- and off-screen mortality became as much the substance of the show as the narrative of mysteries, disappearances, violence, slapstick, romanc...
On this week’s Organist, two stories about the surprising intimacy of anonymity. In the first, thousands of people sign up for a service , created by artist and programmer Max Hawkins, which wakes up thousands strangers with a phone call in the middle of the night then pairs them up at random and records their conversations. The vulnerability of that moment, and the anonymity of having a sleepy and total stranger on the end of the line, leads to recordings of astonishing intimacy. One night, a f...
If you’ve lived in L.A. anytime in the last thirty years, you know Angelyne. She’s the blonde bombshell on the billboards that used to be studded like rhinestones all over the city. Angelyne rose to prominence in the ‘80s, and she was a mashup of elements from the pantheon of Hollywood starlets: platinum hair, an hourglass figure, and a breathy, cooing voice. But Instead of a movie or a TV show or an album, Angelyne’s billboards just advertised herself. A ninth-grader named Kate Wolf interviewed...
This week we bring you dogs, many of them. So many dogs that you can’t possibly scratch the soft fur behind all of their ears or gently caress the scruff of all of their necks or pat all of their bellies when they climb onto your lap and roll over prone for your affection. To investigate the connection between humans and canis familiaris, we talk with acclaimed character actor Bob Balaban, who you’ve seen in dozens of movies and TV shows including Best in Show, Close Encounters of the Third Kind...
Recalling the experimental films of David Lynch or Andrei Tarkovsky, Chris Reynolds’s comic books, newly anthologized as The New World , confound his readers’ expectations at every turn. In these dream-like narratives, Reynolds twists the trope of a space-helmeted comic-book hero into an uncanny figure. Comic-book plotlines, including kidnappings and interplanetary travel, dissipate as the story shifts to focus instead on ominous silences, images of weirdly depopulated cityscapes, and the myster...
Temple Grandin, an animal scientist and autism advocate, describes how she uses sound to make cattle slaughterhouses more humane. Journalist Bella Bathurst describes how she lost her hearing while conducting interviews with the last generation of Scottish lighthouse keepers and then how it felt, twelve years later, to regain it. Along the way, we’ll listen deeply to ABBA and the Beach Boys and hear an excerpt from Alexander Provan’s experimental essay/soundscape/bildungsroman Measuring Device wi...
This week we visit the shady glen where language and music make out with each other, in a field surrounded by phonemes, intonation, and the throw-away vocables of human expression. What’s important here isn’t what we say, but how we say it. We talk with artists working at the boundary between language and music: the composer Kate Soper, the poet Jeremy Sigler, and the drummer Milford Graves.
This week, we explore how artists navigate disease, how disease can be both a stigma and an identity, and how artists both resist and embrace that identity even as it comes to define their work. We’ll listen to the audio diaries of multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992. We’ll also hear from author Sandy Allen, whose uncle Bob, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, mailed them a manuscript of the “true story” of his life, which Sandy has translated into a new book, A Kind of...
This week we explore two beliefs that persist in the absence of proof. In a recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel, Donald Glover made comments linking him to a community known as “Stevie truthers,” conspiracy theorists who believe that Stevie Wonder is faking his own blindness. When Glover asks Wonder for permission to use one of his songs on his TV show Atlanta , he wonders how Stevie will be able to watch the episode—but Wonder’s work in soundtracks goes back to 1979, when he scored the New Age do...
Wendy Davis’s epic thirteen-hour filibuster made the Texas legislature’s livestream into a viral sensation. But Jen Rice, our producer in Austin, argues that beyond these viral scenes, its season-length, character-driven plot arcs make the Texas legislature—or as die-hard fans call it, “the Lege”—every bit the equal of prestige-television staples like Game of Thrones or Mad Men . In her recap of the 85th Texas legislative session, Jen brings us the escalating rivalries, tearful monologues, fight...
This week, two stories from the borderlands of the U.S. First, the story of poet Javier Zamora. When he was nine, he crossed the Sonoran Desert into the U.S. to reunite with his family, who had left home before him in order to escape the political violence in El Salvador. Years later, Zamora found a way to process this childhood trauma by writing furious, luminous poetry. In this interview, he describes indelible images from his border-crossing—guns, dogs, crawling through tunnels, conflicted bo...
After the death of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Franz Wright in 2015, his wife Beth gave producer Bianca Giaever 546 audio tapes that he made as he was dying. Unable to type because of pain in his wrists, Franz used an audio recorder to dictate his poetry, but it picked up much more: Franz talked with his wife, made phone calls, cursed at his cat, and fantasized about the first human to ever speak. Franz was known in the poetry world as a genius and a lunatic. His father was James Wright, who won...
This week we bring you voices from heaven, hell, and everywhere in between. In documentary films, the authoritative “Voice of God” style of narration presents a seemingly omniscient, impartial, deep-voiced male narrator. No one has had more practice with the role than Peter Coyote , best known as the narrator of Ken Burns’ documentaries ( The West, The Roosevelts, The National Parks ). Here, Coyote gives a master class on the major differences in meaning that arise from tiny shifts in register, ...
From KCRW and McSweeney’s, the Organist returns with its fifth season on July 12! We’ll be drilling down into pop culture to reveal its dark, beautiful, pulsating inner-core to bring you funny, sad, and surprising stories about the complex ideas and feelings behind the artists and thinkers that we adore. We’ll visit gutter punks and Pulitzer Prize–winners, we’ll talk to a poet who crossed the Sonoran Desert into the U.S. at nine years old, and a writer who traveled the entirety of the US-Canada ...
The Organist is still in off-season hibernation, but we emerge for a moment in order to showcase KCRW’s newest podcast: Lost Notes . In this episode, writer Donnell Alexander examines the racial politics of a strange chapter of early 80s pop-music history. To white America, Boston’s music scene was synonymous with the hard rock of Aerosmith and J. Geils Band. But alongside rock and roll was a vital tradition of talent shows in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood which birthed the careers of Donn...
Between 1967 and 1975, the Firesign Theatre put out nine albums that carved out a new space somewhere between comedy, sound art, literature, and rock and roll. The music critic Robert Christgau called them “a comedy group that uses the recording studio at least as brilliantly as any rock group.” In this episode, we focus not on how those albums were made, but how they were heard. From teenage house parties to soldiers’ barracks in Vietnam, the Firesign Theatre infiltrated thousands of American h...
After King Kreon condemns her brother, a traitor, to rot on the battlefield, Antigone defies him, risking her own life, to give her brother a proper burial. This week, we present poet Anne Carson’s experimental translation of Sophocles’ play, an adaptation that incorporates within it 2,500 years of the play’s reception history, its performances (from Brecht to Vichy France), its interpretations (from Hegel to Judith Butler), and starring artist Margaux Williamson as Antigone. Many thanks to Anne...
In the early 90s, when Meshell Ndegeocello released Plantation Lullabies , her first album, she helped to usher in the era of neo-soul. Her debut inspired a slew of artists such as Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, and Lauryn Hill. On later albums, Ndegeocello went on to experiment with silky jazz ballads, staccato rapping, quiet meditations—all of it led by the fat, undeniable groove of her bass playing. But even as she began to work with the energy of rock and the introspection of folk, her sound remaine...
This week, we’re sharing a highly subjective journey through one narrow, eccentric, corridor of radio advertising, as heard through the ears of one man. His name is Clive Desmond . Clive is a radio advertising producer, writer, and composer. He’s been doing it for more than thirty years, and he’s won some of the industry’s top awards. Through those years he’s been sort of a zelig figure: you can find his face somewhere in the margins of every one of the medium’s key aesthetic revolut...
This week, we pull out the stops and go full-Organist with an episode about Ákos Rózmann, an organist serving a Catholic church in Stockholm who played hymns during the day and by night invented unearthly electronic music in the recording studio he’d built in the church basement (where he often slept). It was there that he composed his roiling experimental six-hour-long composition 12 Stations —a sonic journey from hell to heaven, which emerged from the personal trauma of his childhood in Nazi-o...
As an artist, Martine Syms says she’s interested in how her experience—in particular, her experience as a young black woman—gets shaped and determined by various forms of media—especially digital media. She’s interested in the power of that media—not just the obvious power of those who produce it, but the ways in which reading and consuming can also be acts of power. One of Syms’s best-known projects is a critique of Afrofuturism, the artistic movement that explores and imagines the intersection...
Warm yourself beneath an underpass of the information superhighway! Brian McMullen reads all one thousand of his epic catalog of unclaimed URLs in this special appendix to our recent episode, magnificentwebsite.com , which explored the disassembly of one’s public persona and internet-induced bewilderment. Brian has worked as an editor, art director, and designer for McSweeney’s , BOMB , Grantland , Cabinet , and Lucky Peach . With his wife Katie, he operates a small clothing company called Panta...
Has the internet documented everything? This week we explore its lacunae and unmoderated chat rooms and the ways we might slip away from the public identities we create online and in the media. Joshua Cohen , author of Moving Kings and Book of Numbers , writes a novel live online, each word as he types it visible to the spectators of a raucous unmoderated chatroom funneling Reddit-grade hate speech into the margins of the author’s screen as he types, completing the novel in just five days. MF Do...
Caveh Zahedi conflates reality TV, experimental documentary, and discomfort comedy in unsettling high-stakes films about his own life. In each episode of his TV project The Show about the Show , the actors and crew recreate the conflicts, interpersonal dramas, and unwittingly shared secrets that occurred during the filming of the previous episode. Each level takes us further behind the performance, landing the viewer deep inside the eccentric mind of Caveh himself. With an oddly life-affirming h...
Note: this episode contains salty and/or strong language. Listener discretion is advised. Anne Thompson rented a billboard along Interstate 70 in Missouri to put up an artwork that says “Keep Abortion Legal.” Anne runs the I-70 Sign Show , a project that, since 2014, has displayed the work of artists including Ed Ruscha, Marilyn Minter, and Mickalene Thomas along a stretch of highway that runs across the state of Missouri. Though Anne wasn’t initially interested in addressing politics through th...
This week we talk to two artists who see themselves as detectives. Trevor Paglen has designed sculptures for the Fukushima Exclusion Zone, as well as art that’s been launched into geostationary orbit. His photographs of secret military bases (taken at long range, using equipment made for astronomers) appeared in the Academy Award–winning documentary Citizenfour . We spoke with him about how to care for one’s personal digital hygiene in the age of surveillance. To document torture, mass execution...
Horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, best known for Cthulhu, an octopus-faced cosmic entity, has long inspired obsessive fandom and his short stories, in the hundred years since they were first published, have influenced a wide range of figures, including William Burroughs, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, the makers of the Alien movies and the game Dungeons & Dragons, to name but a few. In Lovecraft’s cosmology, the human mind is incapable of comprehending the full psychic horror of reality and either ...
