Podcasts about bigger thomas

Today's guest really brings me back. Welcome central Jersey's finest, Kevin Shields of Detention and Bigger Thomas. Kevin was a founding member of the central New Jersey punk scene that birthed bands like Bouncing Souls and Vision. He talks about what the scene was like, how it developed, and how it changed. He also talks about life before punk. He was in the Coast Guard and traveled all over; which is how he discovered punk rock in San Francisco in 1979. After an honorable discharge, he moved back to Jersey, picked up a bass, and formed Detention. Their first gig was an eviction party that was shut down by the cops. Their second gig resulted in a ban. Despite, or maybe because of, that, they were championed by none other than Matt Pinfield. Detention was, and really still is, a DIY affair in the truest punk sense. They were working class and wanted to have some fun. Now Left For Dead Records is releasing a compilation of some of Detention's material and it really is a time capsule. Check out Dead Rock ‘n Rollers on Left For Dead Records. Go to leftfordeadrecords.com or follow @leftfordeadrecs on Instagram. Follow us @performanceanx on socials. Merch is at performanceanx.threadless.com. Send us coffee money at ko-fi.com/performanceanxiety. And check us out on the Gigaverse @theperformanceanxietypod. Now let's have some fun with Kevin Shields of Detention on Performance Anxiety on the Pantheon Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this third part of four exploring the powerful novel NATIVE SON by Richard Wright, we witness the capture of Bigger Thomas and the way the media presented a black defendant, ignored black victims, and jumped to racist assumptions, all the while trying to expose the Communist Party for its anti-racist work.

In this episode I look at most of part two of Richard Wright's NATIVE SON, called "Flight". Here the narrative focuses on Bigger Thomas' efforts at survival after his murder of Mary Dalton, but also look more into the perspectives of mainstream white society on communists and African-Americans. 

In this episode I take on the first 100 pages of NATIVE SON by Richard Wright. It is a brilliant novel and I can only scratch the surface, but it is required reading for understanding America. I focus on the major characters and their motivations, knowing we can only begin to understand Bigger Thomas in the early stages of the novel.

Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra (TSPO, or Skapara) has been making records since 1990, but their music has been hard to come by in the US for much of their career. However, after their Supernova debut, and the availability of their entire back catalog for streaming, TSPO is finally getting the recognition they deserve. JJ and Matt have decided to become experts on the legendary band, and with the help of Chris Malone from The Pandamics, The Pilfers, and Bigger Thomas, they will take you through the history of TSPO.

Host Junor Francis and producer Eric Kohler talk with two veterans on the east coast ska scene - singer/multi-instrumentalist Roger Apollon Jr. and bassist Marc Wasserman - both of Bigger Thomas, Rude Boy George, and now, The Phensic. Marc is also author of Ska Boom! An American Ska & Reggae Oral History and Roger is founder of Copper Son Brewing.

It's the 1981 documentary that captured the energy and excitement of the ska scene during the height of the 2 Tone movement in Britain. Featuring electrifying live performances by bands like The Specials, Madness, and The Selecter, it remains a cult classic, one that played a key role in kickstarting the third wave in the US.  Recently remastered, remixed and rereleased by the British Film Institute, we are finally given the chance to see it restored to it's original glory… it's DANCE CRAZE and the latest episode of the Hornpod Film Club! Our special guest is Marc Wasserman, he's the author of Ska Boom: An American Ska & Reggae Oral History; host of Ska Boom podcast and bassist for Rude Boy George & Bigger Thomas

Actor John Ross Bowie is best known for playing Barry Kripke on the hit TV show Big Bang Theory as well as Jimmy DiMeo on Speechless. But when he sat down to write his memoir, No Job For A Man (released in 2022), he focused a lot more pages to his formative shows going to punk, hardcore and ska bands in New York's vibrant live music scene than he did being on the set of these hit shows. Today, we speak with John and he surprises us with quite a few details about New York's ska scene in the 80s. We talk about seeing CBGB ska matinees, The Toasters, New York Citizens, The Boilers, Second Step and Bigger Thomas. And John also tells us about going to college in Ithaca in the early 90s, where he interviewed several musicians on his radio show, including Joe Gittleman of The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Marc Wasserman and Robert Apollon Jr. of Bigger Thomas. We also talk about his band, Egghead meeting One Eye Open on the road, his love for The Ramones, The Dickies and The Toy Dolls, the hyper-specific and bizarre hardcore subgenre known as Krishnacore, and why Chris Gethard insists that John is his comedy mentor. And most importantly, John gives me advice on how to record the audio book for In Defense of Ska. Thanks for the pointers, John!  Support the show

The Chris Gethard Show was supposed to start like normal, but the audience had their own idea. They shouted "Eat More Butts" at Chris to a degree that he couldn't start his show. The musical guest, Jeff Rosenstock, even gave them a musical accompaniment. For 15 minutes, the show descended into madness. But Chris also didn't fight it because he knew that this would be great TV. Having grown up in the DIY punk scene, he was aware that this type of chaos was where a show's best moments would be. Today, we speak to Chris Gethard about his punk roots. His first show ever was in a Jersey church basement with all local bands. His 2nd was in a friend's backyard. A young, Less Than Jake was also on the bill. Less Than Jake became Chris's favorite band for a while. During this time, he also saw Slapstick, Skankin' Pickle, Mephiskapheles, Catch 22, and was a fan of other ska bands like Mustard Plug and MU330. We also talk about Chris's recent experience hitching a ride with Catbite. He also talks about bringing on Take Today to play his live "New Jersey is the World" show a few times. (He loves, "Do You Still Hate Me?," their Jawbreaker cover and their ska song, SKAdiving.). He talks about his recent interview with Bigger Thomas singer Roger Apollon. And we also talk about his passion for all things New Jersey...he tells us where we can get REAL Italian Ice! Plus Chris tells us how surreal it was recently to see Jeff Rosenstock play a huge show opening for Gaslight Anthem.  Support the show

In this episode, Miles and Jan talk about a book that Miles read recently: Native Son by Richard Wright. It's a crazy and complex book that has an even more important legacy. We talk about why the book had such a big impact, what's relatable and realistic about Bigger Thomas, dive into what it really means to understand other people's emotions and our own. CW: In discussing Native Son, we talk about the novel's depictions of sexual violence. 3:04 Books that Native Son influenced 6:00 Non-Fiction Writers who are great novelists 6:45 Richard Wright's writing about Africa 7:00 Talk about Native Son's Impact Culturally 9:45 The Difference Between Bigger Thomas and Richard Wright 11:45 Why was Native Son written? 13:10 What did you take away from the book? 16:00 Comparing Native Son and Get Out 19:14 What it means to be understood 21:20 What being self-conscious even means 24:20 The link between masculinity and violence 29:50 James Baldwin's Here Be Dragons: Freaks and the Ideal of American Manhood 33:15 “Emotions are bigger than people” 36:30 Good writers are masters of emotion 38:37 Does Miles recommend Native Son? 42:00 Fight Club author's take on internal dialogue 45:30 Miles thinks of stupid literary experiment haha --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/realballersread/support

Richard Wright's famous novel has been adapted multiple times, the most recent version being modified to take place in todays day. Can any of these movies really compare to the book which goes so in depth into the character of Bigger Thomas and what led his to make the choices he did? Get a free audiobook by signing up for audible! https://www.audibletrial.com/whythebookwins https://www.youtube.com/c/whythebookwins https://whythebookwins.com/

**SKA NATION RADIO - FOR YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE ** The Ska Nation Festival is on 27th & 28th November 2022 at The Ti Tree Hotel in Warrion, Victoria, Australia. Headlined by Catbite, Mephiskapheles and The Resignators, with more bands to be announced. The debut show features awesome tracks from: The Vyo, Catbite, Mephiskapheles, Weng, Out Of Control Army, Bigger Thomas, The Skarntz, Commissioner Gordon, Port Royal, The Hardbeats, Bazzookas, Space Monkey Mafia, Cheap Suits, Small Town Get Up, Chupaskabra, Coquettish, Rhoda Dakar, The Burial, Hjalmar B Allstars, Australian Ska Collective, Inigo Evans, Cartoon Violence, The Bodysnatchers, The Cherry Pies, The Deltones, John Holt, The Paragons, The Beat, Reel Big Fish & & of course Bluey brings down the final curtain. Thank you to all the bands and all the listeners that made this happen. I couldn't have made these phenomenal shows without your support. To anyone that bought me a coffee or one of the albums - it means absolutrely everything to me, so thank you for that! We need a Sponsor for the show - Naming Rights Going Cheap if you're interested!!!! or just buy me a coffee here - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/Beefyskashow Broadcast live from Melbourne to Australia and the rest of the world on 88.3 Southern FM. The World's NUMBER 1 Ska Show on the planet is all over (https://blog.feedspot.com/ska_podcasts/) Beefy made this little corner of the Ska Universe his very own playing the best Ska music from everywhere and anywhere. No other ska show boasts the diversity or the innovation of what Beefy brings to the Ska party! The Big Beef Man continues to make sure life is more SkaMaggedon than Armageddon! Only Beefy does Ska Radio like you've never heard before! **THE SAVE THE SKA SHOW COMPILATION (VOL. 2) IS STILL AVAILABLE VIA OUR BANDCAMP PAGE**

Hey you! Don't listen to that, listen to THIS!   In our Season 3 premiere, we get even ruder and skankier than usual...and we totally mean that in the ska way, because we kick off the new year by counting down our Top 5 Ska Songs of the O3L era.   Our guest Lad this week is musician, author, blogger and podcaster Marc Wasserman. Wasserman's new book *SKA BOOM! An American Ska & Reggae Oral History* is the definitive chronicle of the history of ska and reggae in the U.S., as told through extensive interviews with some of the pivotal figures of the scene. It's an essential document for ska fans and alternative music buffs, available at https://www.diwulf.com.   Not only that, but Wasserman was an active participant in the history that he writes about, as the bassist and co-founder of the long-standing ska band Bigger Thomas and more recent projects such as Rude Boy George and Heavensbee. Marc knows his stuff, and we learned a ton from him.   So here's a message to you: Rudie can't fail...as long as he listens to O3L.  SKABOOM!

A recent poll found that only 42 per cent of registered voters in Texas say Republican Governor Gregg Abbott deserves to be re-elected in 2022. Biden lost Texas by only 630,000 votes, and millions of young people and people of color didn't vote. John Nichols reports on how the biggest Republican state could elect a Democratic governor next year.Also: Richard Wright was America's most famous Black writer in the 1940s and 50s – with his novel ‘Native Son' and his character Bigger Thomas. But his place on the throne was shakier than he imagined. Adam Shatz talks Black American writing, and Black America, at mid-century.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to Ska Boom Interviews, which is the audio companion to my new book Ska Boom: An American Ska & Reggae Oral History now available through DiWulf Publishing.   Click here to order: http://www.diwulf.com/booksIn this episode, I'm speaking with my Rude Boy George bandmate Jenny Whiskey about her American ska story.  I've known Jenny since the mid 90s when her band Professor Plum opened for my band Bigger Thomas at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, NJ.  She was just 16 and decked out in giant pair of JNCO Jeans – remember them – but boy could she play sax and should could sing too! I've always been impressed with her musicianship, her amazing singing voice and her witty observations about the ska scene and here sense of humor.  I count myself to lucky to have been her bandmate for the last three years in Rude Boy George where I've had a front row seat to watch her grow as a musician, singer and front person.  I'm continually impressed with Jenny's musical instincts in the studio as well as live on stage and she can hold her own with our other singer Roger Apollon Jr.  Its clear that despite a “girls just want to have fun” vibe that she cultivated earlier in her musical life – witness the Whiskey” surname she goes by – she is a consummate professional and always seeks to serve the song we are playing.  She and her husband musician Rob George who joins her in Hub City Stompers and Rude Boy George -- are a dynamic duo who have added tremendous depth to our recordings and live shows.  I'm grateful to call them both friends and bandmates. Please note: The music clips included in this podcast fall under the “Fair Use Doctrine” as defined by Section 107 of the Copyright Act. The law allows for use of music clips for purposes of criticism, comment, and news reporting.

Welcome to Ska Boom! Stories, which is the audio companion to my new book Ska Boom: An American Ska & Reggae Oral History now available through DiWulf Publishing.   Click here to order: http://www.diwulf.com/books Though my band Bigger Thomas –originally called Panic! -- is not featured in Ska Boom, our 80s American ska story contains a lot of the same trials and tribulations experienced by the 18 bands whose stories I've documented. That is to say, the human condition set to a ska and reggae soundtrack. In this episode, I'm speaking with my long-time bandmate and close friend Roger Apollon Jr about his memories of the early days of the band.  Though we missed out on the ska boom of the mid 90s – the original line-up broke up in 1991 – our story is one you should know. We were the very first ska band from New Jersey.  Please note: The music clips included in this podcast fall under the “Fair Use Doctrine” as defined by Section 107 of the Copyright Act. The law allows for use of music clips for purposes of criticism, comment, and news reporting.

Recently Made Famous TV sat down with Jackson, Mississippi artist Corey Montana. In this interview, the artist – who's also made his imprint as an emcee – discussed his musical journey which includes adjusting back to society from prison, then transitioning back to his roots for rapping.  He also talked about working with Bigger Thomas, his producer and engineer. Also he speaks on his mixtape Day II Day and his single "Hustle" with DJ Tony H. Now the CEO of his own record label Executive Elite , Corey Montana is focused on promoting his brand and has signed his own enterprise.  Watch this full, in-depth interview on Made Famous TV available on YouTube. Listen here on Spotify.

On this episode, I focus on the story behind the 1990 live compilation album NYC SKA LIVE.   It's hard to believe its been 30 years since it was recorded and released. The NYC SKA LIVE concert was originally organized by Moon Records so that the crop of bands then on the NYC ska scene could be filmed by director Joe Massot for New York City Ska Craze, a planned sequel to his 2 Tone era film Dance Craze released in 1981.  The show was taped live at the Cat Club, which was located on 13th Street and Fourth Avenue in Manhattan on March 26th, 1990.  The dawn of the 90s NYC ska scene was marked by the release of the Toasters third full-length album 'This Gun For Hire' -- the first without co-front men Sean Dinsmore and Lionel Bernard who had left and signed a record deal as The Unity 2 -- and the New York Citizen's seminal 'Stranger Things Have Happened' EP which it can be argued was the first American ska album to feature ska core.  Don't believe me? Give “Hell Town” a listen. Nearly five years on from the release of the N.Y. Beat: Hit & Run compilation which captured the sound of mid-80's New York City ska, NYC SKA LIVE documents the evolution of New York City ska into a diverse, post-2-Tone mix of sounds with more of an emphasis on roots reggae, traditional ska, rocksteady and dancehall reggae. While The Toasters and The New York Citizens are evolving sound wise, newer bands including my band Bigger Thomas, King Django's post-Boilers band Skinnerbox, The Steadys, Skadanks and Long Island's Scofflaws all offer their unique takes on American ska at the start of the 1990's.Please note: The music clips included in this podcast fall under the “Fair Use Doctrine” as defined by Section 107 of the Copyright Act. The law allows for use of music clips for purposes of criticism, comment, and news reporting.

In this episode of Ska Boom I speak to Wayne Lothian, who is a musician and producer and has played bass for the Special Beat, General Public and Dave Wakeling's version of The English Beat.I've been lucky to know Wayne for 25 years.  I first met him when we both lived in New Brunswick, NJ and he gave me bass lessons! He would also occasionally came to shows my band Bigger Thomas played in the 90s.  At the shows, I would hand my bass to Wayne and the band would play songs by The Specials and English Beat.Wayne was born and raised in Coventry in the U.K. and came of age during the height of 2 Tone.  He met Lynval Golding as a young teen and that relationship has guided Wayne's professional career in music.  In this episode, Wayne discusses his life in ska and what it was like to serve as the bassist for the Special Beat on the iconic Skavoovee Tour of 1993, which was the first ska package tour of the U.S.

Episode 56 of the ReadJunk Podcast is with Marc Wasserman of Rude Boy George, Heavensbee, Bigger Thomas and the author of the upcoming book: Ska Boom: An Oral History About the Birth of American Ska & Reggae. I'm joined by co-founder of ReadJunk, Adam Coozer, who also is RBG's merch guy. We talk about pandemic life, Heavensbee's new album, Rude Boy George's new EP, 80s music, picking the songs to record, Morrissey / The Smith discussion, a discussion about Sonseed's "Jesus Is A Friend Of Mine," Marc's awesome sounding upcoming ska oral history book, Scars from Mars and we finish things up talking movies & TV.  The transition track is done by Heavensbee and it's called "Baby Sister" featuring Rob Tierney. You can purchase the new album at their bandcamp here: https://heavensbee.bandcamp.com. Yes, we got permission to use this song. You can also buy Rude Boy George's new EP 'Lies & Alibis' here: https://rudeboygeorge.bandcamp.com Subscribe to the ReadJunk Podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Podbean, Youtube or you can even listen to the episodes on ReadJunk.com!  Follow The Marc's projects here: Ska Boom Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/AmericanSkaOralHistory Marco on the Bass Blog: http://marcoonthebass.blogspot.com/ Rude Boy George Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RudeBoyGeorgeBand Heavensbee Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/HeavensbeeBand Scars from Mars Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ScarsFromMars Bigger Thomas Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/BiggerThomasband Site Links: ReadJunk: http://www.readjunk.com ReadJunk on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/readjunk ReadJunk on Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/readjunk Bryan Kremkau Art on Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/bryankremkauart Bryan Kremkau Art on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BryanKremkauArt/ Buy ReadJunk and Pop Culture T-Shirts at my Teepublic page: https://www.teepublic.com/user/bryankremkau

Dallas and Lee turn their attention to Native Son and welcome Brianna Zigler to review Under The Silver Lake and the films composer Disasterpeace to take us behind the scenes of David Robert Mitchell's film. In A24 Hour News we discuss the Under the Skin tv series, the A24 auction and preview next weeks interview with Midsommar's Rebecka Johnston. Native Son stars Moonlight's Ashton Sanders as a young African-American man named Bigger Thomas takes a job working for a highly influential Chicago family, a decision that will change the course of his life forever. Under The Silver features Andrew Garfield, as the young and disenchanted Sam who meets a mysterious and beautiful woman who's swimming in his building's pool one night. When she suddenly vanishes the next morning, Sam embarks on a surreal quest across Los Angeles to decode the secret behind her disappearance, leading him into the murkiest depths of mystery, scandal and conspiracy.

Dallas and Lee turn their attention to Native Son and welcome Brianna Zigler to review Under The Silver Lake and the films composer Disasterpeace to take us behind the scenes of David Robert Mitchell's film. In A24 Hour News we discuss the Under the Skin tv series, the A24 auction and preview next weeks interview with Midsommar's Rebecka Johnston.Native Son stars Moonlight's Ashton Sanders as a young African-American man named Bigger Thomas takes a job working for a highly influential Chicago family, a decision that will change the course of his life forever.Under The Silver features Andrew Garfield, as the young and disenchanted Sam who meets a mysterious and beautiful woman who’s swimming in his building’s pool one night. When she suddenly vanishes the next morning, Sam embarks on a surreal quest across Los Angeles to decode the secret behind her disappearance, leading him into the murkiest depths of mystery, scandal and conspiracy.

Jackson Bliss is an assistant professor of creative writing at BGSU. His genre-bending fiction focuses on being mixed-race in a global world. This episode features a conversation about exploring identity through writing and a reading from his forthcoming novel, The Amnesia of June Bugs.   Transcript: Intro: This podcast features instances of explicit language. If you are listening with children, you may want to save this conversation for later. Intro: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas. Musical Intro: I'm going to show you this. It's a wonderful experiment. Jolie Sheffer: Welcome to the Big Ideas Podcast, brought to you by the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Dr. Jolie Sheffer, associate professor of English and American culture studies and the director of ICS. Jolie Sheffer: Today I'm joined by Dr. Jackson Kanahashi Bliss. Bliss is an assistant professor in the creative writing program here at BGSU. He's published in The New York Times, The Boston Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, and many other publications. He earned his MFA from the University of Notre Dame and his PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. Today we have the pleasure of hearing him read from his new work, Amnesia of Junebugs. Thanks for joining me today, Jackson. Jackson  Bliss: Happy to be here. Jolie Sheffer: You are both a creative writer and a literary scholar. How do you think of your creative writing as being shaped by scholarship on Asian American literature? Are there other ways in which you see your work as interdisciplinary? Jackson  Bliss: Yeah, it's a funny marriage, actually, and I think it's an accidental one, because, in the beginning, I wrote most experimentally, and then when I started studying Asian American studies, I realized there was a sort of strong bent towards experimentalism and activism and how it connects to ethnic nationalism, ethnic studies, academic studies, and academic centers and universities. So this was completely accidental. I didn't intentionally sort of imitate the preferred genre of activist-minded APIA literature. It just sort of happened that way. But the more I studied Asian American studies, particularly works like Immigrant Acts by Lisa ... What's her last name? Jolie Sheffer: Lowe. Jackson  Bliss: Lisa Lowe. Yeah. It sort of made me realize there's a strong sort of push against the stylistics of the empire, which tends to be connected to linear narratives and coming-of-age stories. That made me want to write that story, particularly because I found it a little bit both historically informed, but also generically arbitrary that a particular sub-genre of fiction would supposedly work so well, right, in something that we are actively trying to deconstruct. Jackson  Bliss: I feel like writers like Viet Thanh Nguyen are perfect examples of people who said, "No, you can have a narrative arc and do a lot of important work instead of deconstructing standardized, sort of imposed European models of narrative." Jackson  Bliss: So I think all of those things appealed to me a lot. So it became much more conscious the more I wrote fiction, I think. Yeah. But in the beginning, it was totally accidental and organic. Jolie Sheffer: Your peace Dukkha, My Love is an experimental hypertext novella, created for the web. Can you describe our audience, what that term means? What is an electronic novella, and what can people expect when encountering a text like that? What were you hoping to explore, both formally and thematically? Jackson  Bliss: I think part of it is that there is a very tiny archive of electronic writing, just in general. If you go to the standard places that catalog experimental writing, for example, they're really small. They're highly limited. A lot of writers that write experimentally or create online hypertext don't even publish through them. They just publish on their website. So it's highly decentralized in a way that can be really frustrating for, for example, scholars in new media, because there is no clearinghouse for someone to find all the works. Jackson  Bliss: I think the thing that new readers of hypertext, which is online experimental writing, have to sort of keep in mind is a lot of it is about the ability to create your own narrative, sort of on your own terms. This is sort of the burden, but the beauty of reading. In Dukkha, My Love, essentially, readers click on hypertext, not knowing where it takes them. So they have control, but they're doing it blindly, right? So there's a lot of that going on. It's highly immersive, but it's also indeterminate in terms of where your freedom and control as a reader will take you. Jackson  Bliss: Eventually, as readers start reading more and more, they sort of participate in the cyclicity of the three intersecting narratives, which is absolutely part of the point of reading it, which is the ways in which there is a historical cycle that would repeat, the ways in which we repeat sort of certain cultural modalities of xenophobia and fear against the other, the ways in which our own understanding of reality sort of goes in these continuous cycles of knowledge and awareness and denial, and the proof of this as well is on the first page, when readers click on one of the destinations, where you can basically pick where you want the story to go. It'll even say, "My life is a circle," right, sort of reinscribing this idea in the reader that they are participating in it, but they are not necessarily aware of where they're going, which I think is kind of a fitting cultural analogy of sort of our own conceptualization of history, right? So we sort of have an idea of where it's going, but we're sort of blind as to where exactly it lands. Jackson  Bliss: So yeah, it took me about probably four years of doing research and writing the excerpts and about four months of teaching myself how to code enough to learn how to strip audio files off of YouTube videos and then basically take my own music and sort of record it and then time it and cut it in such a way where it worked with the videos, which I basically ripped off from the Learning Channel and someone else. God bless all of you. Thank you for your fine work. Jackson  Bliss: Yeah. But I was learning as I was creating. That particular genre was something I had never done before, and that's why I wanted to contribute to the discourse, because I felt like it's pretty emaciated, in terms of a genre, right, but also highly accessible. Those two things really appealed to me. Jolie Sheffer: That project in particular, you set yourself a set of hurdles that were challenges you had to then work within, right? So you make something that is, by nature, through coding, deeply linear and kind of limit certain pathways. It is not an endlessly, right? You have to create a set of possibilities, which means foreclosing others, and yet your work itself and the things that interest you are all about the chaotic, the unpredictable, the messy. So how did you kind of respond to the challenge that you set for yourself? Did you feel like you'd handcuffed yourself, or was it liberating, in some sense, to have to work within these limitations? Jackson  Bliss: To be honest, I thought the limitations were there to keep me sane, because I think I would have lost my (beep) mind if I had literally created a work of infinity, because, originally, the idea was I was going to create [inaudible 00:06:50] Book of Sand, right? You could almost make that argument, but if you read Dukkha, My Love enough, you will eventually hit the same narrative strand. So you do sort of touch on finitude at some point. It's impossible to avoid that textual finitude. Jackson  Bliss: But the constraints ended up being lifesavers for me, because this project otherwise could have gone on forever. Let me give you an example. When I was trying to keep track of all the three separate narrative strands and then create a separate stub for each one on my website, this required a level of organization that, frankly, I don't like to have in my art. That goes against my entire ethos as a multimodal, mixed-race, experimentalist-leaning, voice-driven, stylized writer. Yet here we were, where I basically had to control my choices, one, so that I could finish this product before the next semester started and, two, to sort of create a bottleneck, I guess, a narrative bottleneck, where, at some point, everything does have to go through certain sort of narrative choices. Jackson  Bliss: That's both because of the limitation in my coding skills, frankly, but also because there are certain sort of narrative strands I want readers to go through, and I don't want them to necessarily be negotiable. So, for that reason, the index page is, in and of itself, a sort of delimitation of the narrative choices, right? Readers only have basically 10 to 15 places to choose, and then they only have 4 to 10 actionable links on that page. So it sort of starts and ends with finitude. Jackson  Bliss: There is, believe it or not, those of you that have read this, a goodbye page, an acknowledgement page, but, as it turns out, it's incredibly (beep) difficult to find. I mean, I can't even find it, and there's other details that I put that I think were just a little too [inaudible 00:08:41] for themselves. There was an asterisk next to certain narrative strands, letting readers know, "Hey, this is it. This is about to take you to the final page," and I hope that readers would note that this was connected to the theme of the star colonies. That's why the asterisk's there. But you have to scroll down, and if you don't scroll down, you don't see it, and then it doesn't take you to the final page. Jackson  Bliss: But I'm not upset about this. I don't hate myself. I have accepted that there are limitations to reading, and you really can't predict, unless you're into analytics, what your readers are going to do. To me, that's the beauty of it, is that it gives readers, essentially, some blind power to decide how the story is told, which, frankly, isn't done very often in speculative fiction. So that's why it appealed to me. Jolie Sheffer: Much of your work deals with being hapa, or mixed race. How do you see your identity playing a role in your creative work, or, conversely, how has your fiction played a role in your understanding of your own identity? Jackson  Bliss: It's interesting you ask me that, because, in the beginning, when I look back to my earliest fiction, all my characters were white, and this is for a couple of reasons. One, because, at that point, I was definitely passing as white. Two, it's just simply easier for me and my mom, who's hapa as well, my brother, who's also hapa, to just not push the mixed-race button. I was born in Northern Michigan. I didn't live in a community where we celebrated, right, sort of any sort of multicultural, multiracial identity. Jackson  Bliss: There was a lot of survival going on. I mean, even my obachan would not speak to me in Japanese unless I begged her. This was partially because she had a sort of assimilationist paradigm, when it came to living in America. So she thought she was helping me by just making me only speak English. Jackson  Bliss: So, ironically, as I got older and started realizing I have two very different racial and cultural modalities, I mean, I'm literally the son of Japanese immigrants on my mom's side, and that's how close that side of the genealogy is. It's insane I'm never writing about that. It's bizarre that I don't talk about that. I think part of it's because I didn't know how to. There's a lot of things I love about growing up in the Midwest, but it's culturally not the most progressive place to examine your racial hybridity, and I think if I had grown up in SF or New York City, a place where there are strong multicultural identities as the centering of the urban ethos, I probably would have found myself a lot earlier. So it took me a long time. Jackson  Bliss: So I realized at one point that my racial hybridity, in a lot of ways, sort of mimicked my generic hybridity, right, where I like to write in a lot of different genres. I sort of pick and choose. I don't feel like I should be pigeonholed. I sort of embrace this idea that I can almost pick the concept of the neutral, in terms of what it means and [inaudible 00:11:35]'s notion of you don't have to pick one side or other. You can choose to not pick between two options, especially when they're highly binary and deeply delimiting, existentially. Jackson  Bliss: So these things sort of coincided. My desire to sort of subvert genre conventions and just find whatever's the right genre and voice for me coincided with my realization that I had a lot I wanted to understand and investigate about my own mixed-race identity, as someone who's French, British, and Japanese. So it's really my PhD years where I really started fully embracing this and really interrogating it. Jolie Sheffer: What kinds of research do you do for your creative work? You alluded to some of that. What scholars or authors have shaped your work and worldview? Jackson  Bliss: The first people to influence my voice, Junot Diaz and then JD Salinger, and the third one is Zadie Smith. These three writers really informed my whole conception of voice and textual and racial hybridity. So the thing I liked about JD Salinger as a teenage boy was the authenticity of someone questioning authenticity, right? That sort of self blindness, I found really compelling, right? Jolie Sheffer: All his talk of phoneys, right? Jackson  Bliss: Yeah, phoneys. Right. Jolie Sheffer: Yeah. Jackson  Bliss: In many ways, he's [Salinger] the phoniest of all. But, on the other hand, there's a tender side to him that often gets ignored, where he's deeply concerned about preventing trauma to people, because he himself appears to be traumatized, in a way that Holden Caulfield was incapable of sort of working out. So that was powerful to me, and the stylization of the voice was really powerful. Jackson  Bliss: But then when I read White Teeth by Zadie Smith and then Drown by Junot Diaz, I suddenly realized that there was space for my voice, this sort of multicultural urban realism combining with almost sort of Creole sort of language, patois, right, in English. I didn't know that you could do that. I didn't know we were allowed to put the language of our other identity into English. It sounds really crazy when I hear it, but yeah, it was sort of a revelation to me that we could have a stylized voice that sort of embraced and sort of interrogated and was a product of a multicultural identity. Jackson  Bliss: With White Teeth, I think I was just so invested in the ways in which she sort of did these portraitures of different racial and historical and cultural communities and gave each of them a sort of majesty and humanity and an interrogation that I found really amazing and actually rare and then combine it with a sort of these moments of maximization, where the language just explodes off the page, right? Jackson  Bliss: I realized these writers were doing a lot of important work that I myself wanted to do, that I needed to understand better and also, at the same time, that they were giving me permission to sort of figure out my own narrative modality, my own stylized voice, because it's easy to feel like you have to basically come off as neutral, which is code for sounding white. A lot of writers of color I'm friends with feel the same way. They feel this invisible constraint all the time to write in a way where Ivy League-educated, East Coast white readers will understand and connect with. Jackson  Bliss: The problem is there's things that that demographic cannot connect with, and if we write for this imagined, embodied, universal voice, we can give up a lot of the most vital parts of our own sort of unique lyricism and our own techniques for storytelling. So that was a huge revelation for me. Jolie Sheffer: You recently published an essay in TriQuarterly called The Cult of Likability, or Why You Should Kill Your Literary Friendships. In it, you talk about how readers frequently criticize characters for their likeability, or lack thereof. Do you see this as a racialized or gendered criticism, and what qualities do you think are important to make characters compelling? Jackson  Bliss: I do think it's heavily racialized, and I think it's heavily gendered. I think it works in a really sort of sinister, unconscious way for a lot of people. There's still this notion of universal literary merit. When something's amazing, it has this broad appeal. But universality in literature, at least in the 21st century, is mostly code for literature that appeals to a massive white readership. What I've noticed in my workshops, but also in a lot of book reviews, is that works that are written with characters of color or by authors of color or both, especially when they're women, are much more heavily criticized than when they are, for example, white narrators or white female narrators, right? Jolie Sheffer: Yeah. You don't hear people complaining that Humbert Humbert wasn't likable enough in Lolita. Jackson  Bliss: Right. Exactly. Yeah. Jolie Sheffer: That's not the criticism, or that Rabbit Angstrom isn't likable. Jackson  Bliss: Right. That's right. So one of the arguments I made in this essay is, first of all, some of the most important works that I think have shaped, in a positive way, a sort of expanding sort of foundational text canon in America comes from books that weren't necessarily fun to read, with characters who we didn't necessarily like at all, who are important. I mean, Native Son has Bigger Thomas, I think his name is, and that's a crucial character, right? To say, "I don't like this, because I didn't get him" or "I didn't like him" or "He didn't appeal to me" is so essentially irrelevant to the importance, both culturally and historically and racially, that that voice sort of incarnates. Jackson  Bliss: I'm noticing a tendency now where liter agents and now MFA students and a lot of readers are using love and infatuation as this sort of literary metric for determining the value of something. "I didn't love it. I didn't love the voice. I didn't love the character," as if we are now given permission to not consider the literary value of the work, the importance of the marginalized voice, for example, because we realize we don't like the character. Jackson  Bliss: I think it's connected, partially, to cancel culture. But I also think it's partially connected to reality TV, because, with reality television, when we saw a character we didn't like, we would vote them off. So, essentially, likability had consequences, right? Jackson  Bliss: What I think is happening now is people are reading texts that decenter them or ask them to do work or research. Suddenly, they will just decide, "I don't like this character," and that's the end of it. Jolie Sheffer: It also seems to me, though, related to what you were talking about before, which is that if you don't recognize, if you're encountering a new voice, a new perspective, that is not one that you have been taught to recognize because of literature and because of established kind of genres of reading, that first impulse might be, "I don't like this person," and it takes time to actually get used to new voices. Jackson  Bliss: That's right. Yeah, and I think that sort of discomfort maybe at being de-centered is a completely understandable, very normal one. Everyone feels that way. The problem is communities of color and marginalized communities have felt this their entire lives. They go into any room, they go into any white space, and they are always de-centered, all the time. I think this is something that, in general, white readers are a lot less capable and patient and willing to deal with, in part because they've never had to, right? Jackson  Bliss: So for this to happen in the sort of sacred American pastime of reading I think rubs people the wrong way, but I feel there is a silver lining, which is these readers can sit in that lack of comfort and know, at the end of the day, that it's going to be okay and that they will work it out and they will start to slowly understand these characters and potentially empathize with them. But that takes time, and if we don't learn to learn about people and sort of enter into their space, we will never get there. Jackson  Bliss: That's actually one of the arguments I make in this essay, which is not only would we erase some of the greatest literature written by writers of color if we decide we don't like the characters, but, more importantly, we lose our critical thinking skills and our empathetic ones, because this requires us to learn from the other, whoever the other is for us. Jackson  Bliss: I think that's my issue with likability, is it's become this eroticized literary metric, as if infatuation is actually a legitimate metric to analyze the literary value of a work. Frankly, I don't give a (beep) whether someone loves a book of mine or not. What I care about is if they can enter into it, if they can learn from it, if they can go someplace new, from the end of the book to when they started. To me, that's, in some ways, almost more important. Jackson  Bliss: Whether I'm friends with a character, whether we're besties or not is ... I could give two (beep) about that. But it's becoming a sort of standard comment to make in workshop, and I do my best to sort of interrogate that a little bit. But I feel like we have now reached a point in our culture where not liking something, in our eyes, gives us permission to essentially dismiss it. Jolie Sheffer: We're going to take a quick break. Thanks for listening to the Big Ideas Podcast. Intro: If you are passionate about big ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu. Jolie Sheffer: Hello, and welcome back to the Big Ideas Podcast. Today I'm talking to Dr. Jackson Bliss about fiction, form, and mixed-race identity. You prepared a reading for us called The Amnesia of Junebugs. Can you tell us a bit about the piece you're going to read and where it fits into the work as a whole? Jackson  Bliss: Sure. So this is a tiny excerpt from one of four principal characters. This character's name is Winnie Yu, and he's essentially a culture jammer. So he creates political graffiti, and/or he takes ads from companies and essentially turns the ads against themselves by adding different color, texture to essentially make the ad self-indict itself. It's a very sort of critical novel, as a whole, on capitalism and sort of begs for the role that public art plays in a sort of taking back of streets that are essentially corporatized, in a lot of ways. Jackson  Bliss: So this tiny part here is just a tiny sort of backstory of Winnie describing the first time he realized he did not live in Asia, but that he actually lived in New York City, a tiny secret he didn't realize at the time because he had never taken a train to another borough. So that's sort of like the context for this work. Jackson  Bliss: Winnie had lived off of the Bowery his whole life. Didn't even know that New York was in America until he was six. His parents spoke Cantonese, Taiwanese. Everyone in his fam did. The market signs on Grand Street, where his mom bought her groceries, were written in simplified Chinese characters. His neighbors watched Cantonese soap operas in the afternoon. Old men hung out at Mr. Chang's corner store at night, playing dominoes and drinking ginseng tea and Viper Whiskey, cracking jokes in Wu. His super was Fujian, the cheapest mother (beep) he'd ever seen, who tried to fix everything with duct tape, tinfoil, and DAP. Jackson  Bliss: For the longest time, Winnie believed he lived in Asia. He thought white people were the tourists. But in one day, Mama changed the rules of his storytelling. By taking the subway together for the first time to Brooklyn, she thought it would be cool for them to go over the Manhattan Bridge, and it kind of was. He'd never ridden over a bridge before, didn't understand that New York City had islands or that they were connected together by bridges, the vertebrae of the urban body. It took him a long time to see that subway lines are veins; the major subways, arteries; the streets, capillaries. Jackson  Bliss: Until that fateful and transformative day, Winnie didn't know he lived in a fractal world, in a city of billboards, insects, damaged vascular systems and wandering spirits. He didn't know that New York is an ethnographic sponge, silently absorbing the screenplay of immigration. He didn't know that New York is a megapolis, its streets, highways, and bridges resembling the human nervous system. NYC is an urban hive imploding with refugee stories, diasporic longing, bustling multiculturalism, and inherited fortune, a collapsing urban space where culture dances between neighborhoods and history intersects ethnicity, creating abstract forms that interact, but don't touch each other, like a kaleidoscope. Jackson  Bliss: Until that day, Winnie thought New York was only ten blocks, from Mr. Chang's bodega all the way to Good Times Dry Cleaners. He thought New York was the unofficial capital of Taiwan, a nation and an island and a freaky global village. He was half right, actually. Jackson  Bliss: The straight (beep) is that the day they took the train over the Manhattan Bridge, Mama was showing him the way to St. Ursula's School, were Asian, Latino, and black kids wore unforgiving white polo shirts with stiff colors that dug into their necks like plow yokes and old man pants with creases running down their legs like highway meetings that resisted wrinkles and clumps and refused to be rolled up at the ankles at a school were Asian, Latino, and black girls were forced to wear skimpy plaid skirts, even in the spring, where poor students of color pretended they were rich, rich white students pretended they were gangsta, and all the teachers spoke Midtown English. It was an academy of impersonations and a theater of the restless mind. Jackson  Bliss: The day Mama enrolled Winnie in Catholic school and filled out the paperwork for a St. Martin de Porres Scholarship for Immigrant Students, a detail and a reference he wouldn't even understand until he was in high school, when he realized his mom had accidentally taken away his fixed identity and shoved him into a chrysalis of his own making. As they passed over the Manhattan Bridge again, he didn't understand how the whole world he'd seen that day could all be one city, didn't understand why all the Asian people disappeared, or so it seemed, why no one spoke his family's languages anymore. Jackson  Bliss: Even now, as a 30 something, he still couldn't figure out how his parents had managed to sequester him from the class struggle, the racial conflict, and the spatial tension of inner-city life for as long as they did. What he did know is that after Mama had enrolled him for classes, smoothed his hair back for a school ID, bribed him with feng li su cakes from a Taiwanese Baker he'd never seen before to celebrate his enrollment, and then led his (beep) back to their apartment, pineapple paste caramelized in his teeth, Winnie realized that he didn't know (beep) about his American life anymore, except he wasn't living in Asia, and he certainly wasn't Catholic. Jackson  Bliss: As far as birthdays went, turning six (beep) sucked, the worst thing to happen to him, at least until explosive acne in 10th grade, at least until his Ba peaced out of his life for good too soon. Jolie Sheffer: You really set the scene of this world within a world, where a child could grow up in New York's Chinatown without realizing they were even in the US. You've lived in the Midwest, on the West Coast, in Japan, Argentina, and Burkina Faso. How do you approach the idea of setting a sense of place, in this story in particular and generally in your work? Jackson  Bliss: One thing is that I think places are characters. I have felt this way pretty much ever since, I think, I watched my first Bertolucci film. It's something I learned very early on, and I feel, as a writer who considers himself to be a sort of stylized urban maximalist, it's impossible for me to define or construct characters without understanding the sort of cultural context in which they grew up and evolve, because that's true for me, and that tends to be true for them. So, for me, setting and place are interconnected with voice and identity. Jolie Sheffer: What kind of research did you do for that piece? Jackson  Bliss: Mostly just walked around Chinatown a million times. I wrote a lot of this novel when I had an editorial internship at Hachette Books in New York City. I also visited in the fall of 2006. So I spent a lot of time just walking around New York City, taking the subway, looking for sort of famous graffiti that people were talking about. I spent a lot of time eating vegan dim sum in Chinatown. I feel like sometimes the best way to do research for cities is simply live in the city and see how it breathes. So a lot of it, yeah, was simply walking around, observing, taking notes, talking to my New York friends, asking them questions, asking my Chinese American friends questions. But most of it was just walking, breathing, living, eating in those places. Jolie Sheffer: Your characters always have very distinctive voices. You were just talking about character, but in the characters in your stories, how do you think about approaching developing their particular patterns of speech? Jackson  Bliss: I feel like, a lot of times, the verbal tics, they take time, because who I think a character is in the beginning when I write them is almost never who they are at the end, and then it's sort of up to me to go back and sort of reconcile the voice, so to speak, because there's this implicit rule in fiction where a character's voice has to actually be more consistent than people's voices in real life, right? Because in real life, we, for example, especially people I know who work in different sort of social, professional, racial, and cultural spheres, they code switch all the time, and this can seem inauthentic to people, but it's very normal. But in fiction, you actually have to have a more sort of reconciled voice that readers won't see as too contradictory. Otherwise, they won't think it's the same person. Jackson  Bliss: So this is one of those sort of secret constraints that most fiction writers I know struggle with. How do I keep a voice? How do I construct it, and then how do I maintain it? So I think a lot of times, I will read my dialogue out loud, and I'll just basically understand the character through their orality first, right? How do they sound? How do they feel? Jackson  Bliss: Then, I think, from there, I make modifications, especially when these characters make important sort of plot decisions that might alter their voice or their modulation in some way. For example, I once wrote a character, and then I realized halfway through, "Oh, this character isn't going to be Portuguese-Japanese. They're going to be" ... I don't know. I don't know what I decided, French-Japanese or something, and that changed some of the vocabulary, right? That changed some of the sort of place names and cultural references. Jackson  Bliss: I have another novella that's actually interconnected with this novel, and, for the longest time, it was written from a Senegalese American point of view, because I had spent a decent amount of time in West Africa. Then I realized I was interested to see what would happen if I changed the character and made him mixed-race and made him Japanese Senegalese American. I did that, and it suddenly transformed his voice. There were certain beats that didn't work anymore, right? There's certain slang that doesn't make sense anymore, and there are other things that had to sort of have a presence. Otherwise, it was just a whitewashed mixed-race character. Jackson  Bliss: I think that's the general process, but it always begins and, I think, ends with me simply speaking, because I need to literally hear the voice to understand it on the page. Jolie Sheffer: Lots of creative writers read their work in public, right? That is a kind of professional part of the job. You have a very particular kind of performative approach. How do you think about preparing what you're going to read, how you read, and how do you think that shapes your readers' or listeners' perception of the work? Jackson  Bliss: Yeah, I'll confess right now I'm a speech and debate geek, so in high school and even college, I was a debater, and I was one of those extemporaneous speakers. So I have a long history of sort of seeing the value that public speaking makes. Jackson  Bliss: But I also think that most of my important characters, the ones I'm really invested in emotionally, almost always have some level of identification with their language. So that's where the voice will end up being so sort of important and sort of fleshed out, and I've noticed in the past couple of years that when I give readings, I tend to read either the character or passages from a longer work that allows me to sort of take a very performative, language-driven sort of role in my reading. Jackson  Bliss: For that reason, if I've written a really difficult extemporaneous-feeling work that's actually highly edited and revised, that is really prolix, I guess, and heavily language-driven, I may not read it, especially if, for example, I can't find space to breathe. I have certain work that was pretty much meant to be read, even though I didn't realize it. Jackson  Bliss: So, for me, I think a lot about reading as performance, I think a lot about performance as text, and I think one of my big complaints with a lot of readings I go to is they tend to fall in a couple camps, which is, one, either they just read in this really monotone voice and they have this kind of arrogant idea that work should speak for itself. But the problem with that is what if you suck? What if you're awful? What if everyone's falling asleep? In that case, shouldn't they just stay home and read the book? Why did they waste their time to go out to this reading, where you became the greatest American sleep aid? But on the flip side, I've also seen people who sort of take it really far, and they act like they're basically unpaid beatniks. Jackson  Bliss: So I feel like every writer who ends up becoming a sort of social public figure on some level, which is inevitable once you start publishing, they have to negotiate the sort of reading ethos. For me, it's always been really important. I want readers and listeners to hear the rhythm, because musicality informs a lot of my writing, and that's from my music days. But I also want them to be transported, on some level, by my reading. I want them to feel the language and the cadence and the emotion. Jackson  Bliss: I used to get shamed when I was younger for my performances. People would be like, "Yeah, that was really something." Then you would go to their reading, and half the people were on their iPhones, fiddling away. So, for me, I see my readings as a performance, and I think that to ignore the audience is to be incredibly deceitful and to be delusional. You aren't reading to yourself. You're not reading to your partner. You're not reading to your little Shitzu. You're reading to people, and their experience should be something you think about, because that process is dialectical. It's not just about you, and it's not just about them, but there's an interplay that I honor and that I love. Jackson  Bliss: So yeah, I think a lot about how to read, when to read, and I always practice my readings because of that. Jolie Sheffer: Thank you so much, Jackson, for joining me today and sharing your work. Jackson  Bliss: Oh, it was my pleasure. Jolie Sheffer: You can find Dukkha, My Love and more of Jackson's work at his website, jacksonbliss.com. Jolie Sheffer: Our producers for this podcast are Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza, with sound engineering by Jackson Williams. Research assistance for this podcast was provided by ICS intern Taylor Stagner, with editing by Stevie Scheurich. This conversation was recorded in the Stanton Audio Recording Studio in the Michael and Sara Kuhlin Center at Bowling Green State University.  

Hi. This is Marc Wasserman. I’m writing an oral history about the birth of American ska and reggae called Ska Boom that will be published by DiWulf Publishing in 2020. I've created this podcast to document the book writing process and share some of the amazing stories I’m capturing in the interviews I’m conducting After taking the summer off from so I could tour with Rude Boy George and write and record music for the Heavensbee project that I’m a part of, I’m back hard at work on the book. I’ve completed 14 chapters and now have just five more chapters to go. I can finally see light at the end of the tunnel. The next few weeks will be spent working on a chapter about Boston’s Bim Skala Bim. I recently conducted a 3 hour interview with the band’s lead singer and co-founder Dan Vitale. It’s hard to explain how influential Dan and Bim Skala Bim were to me and my Bigger Thomas band mates when we were just starting out. In fact one of the earliest shows we ever played was opening for them at City Gardens in Trenton 30 years ago in the spring of 1989. They were kind to us and encouraging and Dan and Jackie Star actually took time after the show to share feedback with us on what were doing well and what we could do better. That was really special to us as a young band just starting out. Beyond that, their music was everything I aspired to in being in a ska band. Influenced by 2-Tone, they played a unique mix of ska, reggae and Caribbean sounds and they wrote memorable songs about the ups and downs of life with amazing hooks. In many ways, their story is the story of American ska. I wanted to share some excerpts from my interview with Dan. I asked him about the band’s look, or lack of one. Back then, most bands were taking cues from The Specials and other 2-Tone bands Rude Boy look of suits, pork pie hats and black and white clothing. What I learned is that Bim’s lack of a look was driven by the fact that band were literally starving musicians and the money they earned touring nearly full time was spent on recording their music in professional studios. For them, the music always came first.

Episode 41 of the ReadJunk Podcast is with Chris Malone of the NY ska band The Pandemics, formerly of Rudie Crew, Bigger Thomas, Spider Nick and the Mad Dogs and loads of other bands.  We talked about The Pandemics Going Viral tour, touring in general, visiting Tokyo, Chris playing in Spider Nick and the Mad Dogs, The Rudie Crew, Pilfers and Bigger Thomas, as well as his current band The Pandemics. We briefly talk about him playing as a backing band for Pete Porker of the Porkers and Roddy & Lynval of the Specials as well. At the end, I play a game of Goldblum Trivia with him.  Be sure to subscribe and download the episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever else you can get podcasts. Spread the word about the podcast and site. Also, follow ReadJunk on social media as well and visit readjunk.com or news and all that stuff. 

Actor Jerod Haynes discusses a sign he received that was clear as day and also one that led him to an old email that served as confirmation he was on the right path.  Also discussed: the effects of PTSD and the benefits of therapy; how he reconciled conflicting feelings about playing a police officer and how he brought his own experiences to the role; how fatherhood can be a complicated relationship and a two-way street.  Jerod Haynes played police officer Ben Jones on NBC's The Village. He also co-wrote and co-produced Blueprint, a film about racial injustice and coping with the aftermath of tragedy. He has also appeared in the Sundance film Southside With You, as well as on stage in Native Son for which he won The Jeff Award for his performance as Bigger Thomas. His short film about fatherhood will be released soon. The companion 7 minute documentary film can be viewed here.  You can follow Jerod Haynes on Instagram @JerodJHaynes and on Twitter @MrJerodHaynes.  Learn more about Blueprint here.   ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ For more stories about Signs from the Other Side, be sure to rate, review, subscribe and share.  To learn more about host Fern Ronay, visit FernRonay.com

An afro-punk oriented young man, Bigger Thomas, is given a chance to upgrade his life by working for a wealthy white family as their driver. Upon taking the job, things spiral out of control and he's forced to make decisions that may define his path permanently. The film is a modern take on the classic Richard Wright novel of the same name.

Richard Wright's Native Son has been called a "pamphlet" or "protest novel" by writers like James Baldwin, and while there are sections of the book that justify the label, Bigger Thomas and his deeds and motivations defy easy summation.

Richard Wright's Native Son has been called a "pamphlet" or "protest novel" by writers like James Baldwin, and while there are sections of the book that justify the label, Bigger Thomas and his deeds and motivations defy easy summation.

My first guest on the ReadJunk Podcast (episode #8) is Roger Apollon, Jr. of Rude Boy George, Bigger Thomas, and Heavensbee. We had a great chat after having some food in Jersey City. We talked about Rude Boy George's new album and the band, Bigger Thomas, Supernova Ska Fest, the ska scene, a little bit about The World Cup, and Roger's new venture, Four City Brewing Company. At 2 points in the conversation, my damn phone rang twice (robocalls of course), but I left those parts in because it was funny I thought. At the end of the episode, I have Roger play a quick game of Goldblum Trivia.  Be sure to visit http://www.readjunk.com for updates, as well as visit us on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/readjunk and http://www.twitter.com/readjunk

April 12 - June 3rd. 9 out of 10 - An Exceptional Show. www.latheatrebites.com Set in 1930s Chicago, where opportunities for African-American men like Bigger Thomas are elusive, writer Nambi E. Kelley's adaptation focuses on the inner workings of the protagonist's mind as events violently and irrevocably seal his fate. Paetreon: https://www.patreon.com/latheatrebites1

Beauty, one could argue, isn’t always very pretty. Especially in the case of great literature. Richard Wright’s 1940 masterpiece Native Son—considered one of the most important and powerful American novels ever published— is one great example. A bestseller upon publication, the novel has been alternately praised and condemned over the years since, often drawing kudos and criticism for the very same things—mainly, the brutal honesty, stark realism, and shocking violence of Wright’s supremely crafted work, a stark depiction of life as a poor, under-educated black man in America in the early 1940s. And yet, as written from within the conflicted mind of one such man, it’s also a beautiful piece of writing, insightful and raw and full of gorgeously well-written passages. Which brings us to ‘Native Son,’ the play. Powered by a poetic, elegant script by Nambi E. Kelley, Marin Theatre Company, in Mill Valley, has finally brought Wright’s explosive novel to the stage. Under the steady guidance of director Seret Scott, an extraordinary cast gives perfectly tuned performances, resulting in a remarkable theatrical experience that is at once astonishing, beautiful, visceral, vibrant and, because of the reality it describes, often inescapably ugly. Kelley, succeeding where countless adapters have fallen short, strips Wright’s epic-length novel to its bones, dressing it back up again with brilliant theatrical ideas, enhancing, rather than diminishing the power of Wright’s ingeniously built, emotionally rich ethical puzzle box of a story. The conflicted protagonist is Bigger Thomas — played superbly by Jerod Haynes. Bigger is barely scraping by, living in a rat-infested Chicago slum with his mother (C. Kelley Wright), sister Vera (Ryan Nicole Austin) and borderline criminal brother Buddy (Dane Troy). Bigger, for understandable reasons, is a combustible blend of anger, hopelessness and fear. He dreams of flying airplanes, but knows the system will never give him the opportunity. Bigger’s violent internal struggles are brilliantly illustrated through his conversations with The Black Rat (played by William Hartfield), the playwright’s nattily dressed depiction of Bigger’s conflicted inner battles. The Rat represents Bigger’s claim that the way society sees him is often in opposition to how he sees himself. Which one is which is never made clear, adding extra meat to chew on in already chewy storyline. For Bigger, even the possibility of a decent job, chauffeuring for a wealthy, liberal white woman (Courtney Walsh), is rife with danger. Her daughter Mary (Rosie Hallett) and Mary’s communist boyfriend Jan (Adam Magill) attempt to show Bigger how open-minded they are, but are cluelessly indifferent as to how their public shows of “equality” and familiarity with Bigger actually put him in danger. When disaster strikes early on, Bigger ends up on the run, his clumsy act of accidental violence leading quickly to another, less defensible one. As the story plummets ahead with ferocious speed—told in a single, 90-minute act—Bigger literally steps back and forth from his present to his past, vivid flashbacks underscoring his rising fear and fury with heartbreaking power. The story may be set in the 1940s, but that so little has changed since then is abundantly clear. That — along with the graceful energy of his storytelling — is why Wright’s brutal masterpiece continues to have such resonance after more than 75 years, and why Marin Theatre Company’s gorgeously ugly adaptation is the first must see of 2017. ‘Native Son’ runs Tuesday–Sunday through February 12 at Marin Theatre Company. www.marintheatre.org

PUNKCAST#90819 Bigger Thomas, from New Brunswick, NJ, have been rocking the tri-state area with their high energy brand of ska for over 15 years. Here we see them in Jan 2006 climaxing their opening spot for The English Beat at NYC's Canal Room with their hit 'Ska In My Pocket'. More info on http://punkcast.com/908