Podcasts about Los Angeles City College

Rico Omarr Harris had once seemed destined for a life in basketball. Standing 6-foot-9, Rico was a standout player who attracted attention from college scouts, led Los Angeles City College to a state championship, and eventually played briefly for the Harlem Globetrotters. But years after his basketball career had taken an unexpected turn, Rico was preparing for a new chapter of his life. On October 10, 2014, 37-year-old Rico Omarr Harris left his mother's home in Alhambra, California, and began driving north toward Seattle, where he planned to reunite with his longtime girlfriend and start a new life. He spoke with his mother while driving through the Sacramento area and later left a voicemail for his girlfriend. Then, he vanished. Three days later, Rico's black Nissan was discovered abandoned at a remote Yolo County Regional Parks location along State Route 16. His vehicle was there, but Rico was nowhere to be found. Extensive searches of the surrounding area produced no trace of him, and despite the passage of more than a decade, Rico Harris remains missing. What happened to the former basketball star in Yolo County? Why did he leave his vehicle behind? And how does a man who stood nearly seven feet tall seemingly disappear without a trace? Anyone with information about the disappearance of Rico Harris can contact: Yolo County Sheriff's Department at (530) 666-8282 The case number to reference is 14-2964 Connect with us on Social Media!You can find us at:Instagram: @bookofthedeadpodX: @bkofthedeadpodFacebook: The Book of the Dead PodcastTikTok: BookofthedeadpodOr visit our website at www.botdpod.com Join hosts CJ and Carmita as they set out to cover cases of grizzly serial killers who have brought their nefarious crimes to our beautiful area of the PNW for many years.  Listen Here Fenno, N. (2017, March 18). His dreams of basketball stardom vanished first. Now his mother says, ‘I am not giving up on finding my son' - Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times. Mertz, A. (2014, October 22). Seattle girlfriend of missing former Harlem Globetrotter confident he will “come home.” FOX 13 Seattle.  MISSING IN AMERICA: Rico Omarr Harris. (2015, June 11). NBC News.  Rico Harris College Stats | College basketball at Sports-Reference.com. (n.d.). College Basketball at Sports-Reference.com.  Rico Omarr Harris. (2017, July 21). State of California - Department of Justice - Office of the Attorney General. The disappearance of Rico Harris. (2019, June 27). Stories of the Unsolved.  Vanishing Man: The Disappearance of Rico Harris. (n.d.). FOX Sports.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's YOUR time to #EdUp with Jerell Hill, Dean of Student Services, Los Angeles City CollegeIn this episode, sponsored by EdUp Leadership, the ​HigherEd PodCon​ II happening July 16 & 17, & the 2026 AcOps Conference July 29-31 by CoursedogYOUR host is Dr. Jodi BlincoHow does conscious gratitude become the interior architecture that transforms circumstances when it does not deny the wound but refuses to let the wound have the last word?Why does the counselor who has held students through financial crisis, housing instability & grief sit quietly in the meeting because she knows why the numbers dropped but doesn't have the language that will survive?What makes identity, urgency & direction the 3 pillars that keep students from shrinking to survive when you are not your circumstances, not your zip code & not your poverty?Listen in to #EdUpThank YOU so much for tuning in. Join us on the next episode for YOUR time to EdUp!Connect with YOUR EdUp Team - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠Elvin Freytes⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Dr. Joe Sallustio⁠⁠⁠⁠● Join YOUR EdUp community at The EdUp ExperienceWe make education YOUR business!P.S. Want access to the only intelligence platform built exclusively from presidential conversations in higher ed? Well, we have an app for that!Join EdUp Leadership!

For Mental Health Awareness Month, we continue our ‘Campus Care Collective' series with Dr. Jerell Hill, Dean of Counseling and Guided Pathways at Los Angeles City College. This Education Leader, author, and international speaker feels privileged to transform student struggles into strength. From full academic scholarship recipient to administrative healer, Dr. Hill shares lived wisdom from his new book, "Developing Conscious Gratitude in Schools.” He teaches aspiring educators how to shift students from burdens to brilliance and recognize that "the wound is the data," not the problem. Find out how to use your struggle as the beginning of progress while Dr. Hill demonstrates how he loves students into their purpose. ⁠ Dr. Hill completed his Doctorate of Education at William Howard Taft University in Denver, Colorado, and he received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science at University of California, Irvine. His work sits at the intersection of educational justice, trauma-informed leadership, and conscious leadership development. Dr. Hill's research spans teacher preparation, student motivation, Adverse Childhood Experiences, and urban education. He is a passionate advocate for equity and excellence and brings that conviction to every stage, classroom, and community he enters. To learn more about Dr. Hill, visit his website at JerellHill.com and LACC.edu/student-services/counseling or connect with him on LinkedIn.

In today's episode, I speak with Coach Javier from the Los Angeles City College Men's Program in California. We talk about how he uses free clinics in the area as a recruiting tool. Coach also shares about their school schedule that includes a condensed amount of games. Plus, we discuss his good staff that helps across all facets of the team. See all our interviews. Check out college soccer ID camp listings. Get valuable free college recruiting resources, all at https://discovercollegesoccer.com/  Join the Discover College Soccer Study Table! Get all the resources you need to manage the college recruiting process! https://discovercollegesoccer.com/stu... --- DON'T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE! Be sure you subscribe so you can stay up-to-date with our latest videos. --- Follow us here: TWITTER -   / discover_cs   FACEBOOK -   / discovercollegesoccer   INSTAGRAM -   / discover_cs   TIKTOK -   / discover_cs

Send us a textIsrael López Reyes swung by the studio before the opening of his recent commission to discuss his background leading up to it and his success as an Angeleno playwright. We discuss his journey from actor to playwright, how he fell into theatre and his discovery to figuring out story and telling stories that matter. We unpack the evolution of emerging playwrights, the process and approach to character, the elements of structure, learning from the Greats, mastering the craft as well as tricks and tools, and the equation and formula to playwriting. We also touch on community as a market, raising stakes, receiving commissions, the purpose of a mentor, and writing for your "species." It's an impactful conversation that every playwright can benefit from. Enjoy!Israel López Reyes is a playwright and actor born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. He is currently a commissioned writer with the Latino Theater Company as part of the Circle of Imaginistas. In addition to The Little King of Norwalk other worka includes Queen of Califas, South Gate and The Rehabilitation of Walter. His plays have been developed with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Black Swan Lab/Latinx Play Project, the Latinx Theatre Alliance Los Angeles, Company of Angels, LA City College New Visions New Voices, and the Latino Theater Company at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. He received his B.A. in English from Southern Methodist University and his M.F.A. in Acting from UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television. He has also taught courses in theater at UCLA School of Theater Film & Television and Los Angeles City College.For tickets to The Little King of Norwalk at the Latino Theater Company, September 25th - November 2nd, visit -  https://purchase.latinotheaterco.org/EventAvailability?EventId=345&ref=bookNow&scroll=timeAndDatesTo watch the video format of this episode, visit - https://youtu.be/IgzoQwjQ7r0Website and Socials for Israel López Reyes -IG -  ⁨@IsraelLopezreyes⁩  Websites and socials for James Elden, Punk Monkey Productions and Playwright's SpotlightPunk Monkey Productions - www.punkmonkeyproductions.comPLAY Noir -www.playnoir.comPLAY Noir Anthology –www.punkmonkeyproductions.com/contact.htmlJames Elden -Twitter - @jameseldensauerIG - @alakardrakeFB - fb.com/jameseldensauerPunk Monkey Productions and PLAY Noir - Twitter - @punkmonkeyprods              - @playnoirla IG - @punkmonkeyprods      - @playnoir_la FB - fb.com/playnoir      - fb.com/punkmonkeyproductionsPlaywright's Spotlight -Twitter - @wrightlightpod IG - @playwrights_spotlightPlaywriting services through LACPFest - www.lacpfest.comSupport the show

Lane Igoudin, Ph.D., is the author of A Family, Maybe, a journey through foster adoptions to fatherhood (Ooligan Press, Portland State University, 2024). He has written extensively on foster adoption, parenting, and LGBTQ families for Adoption.com, Forward, Jewish Journal, LGBTQ Nation, and Parabola and spoken about his book on NBC's “Daytime” show, syndicated radio shows, literary and parenting podcasts, as well as to live audiences on his 12-stop 2024 book tour. A Family, Maybe received endorsements from US Congressman Alan Lowenthal, California Senator Sheila Kuehl, Rita Soronen, President & CEO of Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, bestselling writers like Janet Fitch and Greta Boris, parenting experts, and social work professionals. Lane is professor of English and linguistics at Los Angeles City College. For more information about Lane's foster adoptive memoir A Family, Maybe, please visit https://laneigoudin.com/afm/. Want to be a guest on Unconditioning: Discovering the Voice Within? Send Whitney Ann Jenkins a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1631293280445x277643368444412160

Outside in Theatre presents: World Premiere: California Story @ Los Angeles City College - 8 out of 10! Good Show! LA Theatre Bites Recommended! May 9 - June 3, 2025. www.latheatrebites.com

Are you curious about the emotional rollercoaster of fostering and adopting as an out gay family? Merry Elkins and Cathy Worthington sit down with Lane Igoudin, author of "A Family, Maybe." Lane shares his poignant journey of fostering and adopting multicultural children, diving deep into the complexities faced by LGBTQ families. Hear Lane read the first chapter of his memoir, capturing the heart-stopping moment he and his partner Jonathan welcomed a newborn with a complex background into their lives. Discover why they chose fostering over other options and how it impacted their relationship. Lane candidly discusses the cultural dynamics within their family and the broader social and political challenges surrounding adoption rights. This episode is a heartfelt exploration of love, resilience, and advocacy. Tune in for insights and inspiration!Lane's BioLane Igoudin, Ph.D., is the author of A Family, Maybe, a life-changing journey through foster adoptions to fatherhood (Ooligan Press, Portland State University, 2024). He has written extensively on adoption, parenting, and other issues for Adoption.com, Forward, Jewish Journal, and Parabola and spoken about his book on NBC's “Daytime” show, syndicated radio shows, literary and parenting podcasts, as well as live audiences on his 12-stop book tour. A Family, Maybe received endorsements from US Congressman Alan Lowenthal, California Senator Sheila Kuehl, bestselling writers like Janet Fitch and Greta Boris, parenting experts and social work professionals. Lane is professor of English and linguistics at Los Angeles City College.Connect with LaneWebsite: www.laneigoudin.comEmail: laneigoudin@gmail.comFacebook: www.facebook.com/lane.igoudin/Instagram: @laneigoudin

In his memoir, The Problem with Men: Insights on Overcoming a Traumatic Childhood from a World-Renowned Psychologist (Koehler Books; September 2024; Hardcover; ISBN: 979-8-88824-432-6), Dr. Ronald F. Levant, a prominent psychologist and former president of the American Psychological Association, reflects on his challenging childhood, which was marked by his father's abuse and the fear it instilled in him, nearly leading him toward delinquency. A pivotal moment in his life occurred when he discovered his talent for mathematics at Los Angeles City College. He later transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, and earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology and Public Practice from Harvard University. Dr. Levant is recognized as one of the key professionals responsible for establishing a new field in psychology—the psychology of men and masculinity. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-unplugged-totally-uncut--994165/support.

In his memoir, The Problem with Men: Insights on Overcoming a Traumatic Childhood from a World-Renowned Psychologist, Dr. Ronald F. Levant, a prominent psychologist and former president of the American Psychological Association, reflects on his challenging childhood, which was marked by his father's abuse and the fear it instilled in him, nearly leading him toward delinquency. A pivotal moment in his life occurred when he discovered his talent for mathematics at Los Angeles City College. He later transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, and earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology and Public Practice from Harvard University. Dr. Levant is recognized as one of the key professionals responsible for establishing a new field in psychology—the psychology of men and masculinity.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-like-it-s-live--4113802/support.

Panelists will offer a wide array of perspectives on acting, scenic design, playwriting, diversity in theatre, theatrical institutions, and possibilities for a more equitable and inclusive theatre world. Sharon Marie Carnicke, author of Dynamic Acting through Active Analysis and Stanislavsky in Focus, is an internationally acclaimed expert on acting for stage and screen. Her award-winning translations of Chekhov’s plays have been produced nationally. Her other books include Checking out Chekhov and Reframing Screen Performance. She is a professor of Dramatic Arts and Slavic Languages and Literatures at USC and founder of the Stanislavsky Institute for the 21st Century. Snehal Desai is the artistic director of Center Theatre Group, one of the largest theatre companies in the nation. Previously, he was producing artistic director of East West Players. A Soros Fellow and the recipient of a Tanne Award, Snehal was the Inaugural Recipient of the Drama League’s Classical Directing Fellowship. He has served on the boards of the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists, Theatre Communications Group, and currently serves on the board of the National Alliance for Musical Theatre. Snehal was on the faculty of USC’s graduate program in Arts Leadership and is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama. Rena Heinrich is an associate professor of Theatre Practice at USC. Her book, Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama, traces the shifting identities of multiracial Asian figures in theater from the late-nineteenth century to the present day and exposes the absurd tenacity with which society clings to a tenuous racial scaffolding. She is a contributor to Shape Shifters: Journeys Across Terrains of Race and Identity and The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century. Maureen Weiss is a performance designer and scenic investigator who has worked in all aspects of theatre, design, and art for the past 25 years. Her work has been seen internationally, and was honored at the Prague Quadrennial in 2023. As a designer, her work has been seen nationally, as well as locally in Los Angeles at The Getty Villa, The Latino Theater Company, The International City Theatre, and 18th Street Arts Center. Maureen is the co-author of Scene Shift: U.S. Set Designers in Conversation, with Sibyl Wickersheimer, which inspired an exhibition at the USC Fisher Museum of Art. She was an associate professor of Performance Design at Alfred University before coming to Los Angeles City College in Fall 2023.  Moderator: Luis Alfaro is a Chicano playwright born and raised in downtown Los Angeles and an associate professor of Dramatic Writing and director of the MFA Dramatic Writing Program at USC. His fellowships include the MacArthur Foundation; United States Artists; Ford Foundation; Joyce Foundation; Mellon Foundation & the PEN America Award for a Master Dramatist. His plays, including The Travelers, Electricidad, Oedipus El Rey, and Mojada, have been seen throughout the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Europe. 

The group Kylmaxx is an ALL female band from California. The group became famous for their hits "Meeting in the Ladies Room", "I miss you", "The Men all Pause" and more. Group member, Cheryl Cooley started guitar lessons at the age of 11. She went onto learning music composition, orchestration & arranging at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles, then onto earning a degree in commercial music at Los Angeles City College.  

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The Leftscape 2024 Season 1 begins with special guest, Robert Brooks Cohen! Cohen is a writer, content creator, and life coach living in Los Angeles. He spent seven seasons writing and producing for Law & Order: SVU, and in 2019, he created Two Bi Guys, a podcast about sexual fluidity, masculinity, and the gender spectrum. His first book, Bisexual Married Men: Stories of Relationships, Acceptance, and Authenticity, was published by Routledge in 2023. In this featured conversation, he shares about his personal journey, the making of the book, questions of identity in the current political climate, and future creative possibilities. Co-hosts Wendy Sheridan and Robin Renée catch up at the beginning of the show after the long winter break. News highlights include Sweden's successful bid to join NATO, the Alabama Supreme Court's ruling that embryos are children, SCOTUS hearing arguments on whether social media companies have the right to censor, the tragic death of nonbinary student Nex Benedict, scientists isolated in Antarctica develop their own, unique accent, the various Trump trials, and more. Wendy introduces a new mini-segment of the show with her nomination of John Oliver for a Lefty Award. In Why Is This Awesome?, Robin is excited about having checked out a recent concert by Young Gun Silver Fox. Things to do: Keep up with Robert Brooks Cohen and get your copy of Bisexual Married Men: Stories of Relationships, Acceptance, and Authenticity. Listen to the Two Bi Guys podcast. Attend B+ WELL: A Wellness Conference for the Bisexual, Pansexual & Fluid Community, Saturday, March 2nd, 9am - 2:30pm, Los Angeles City College, 855 North Vermont Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90029 Check out community-based support and discussion group, BiRequest. Watch I May Destroy You. Remember the lives and the tireless bi advocacy of Sheela Lambert and ABilly Jones Hennin. Listen to Leftscape Episode 33 featuring John Cecil Price. Rest in Peace, Johnnycakes. Follow the GoFundMe in memory of Nex Benedict and give if you are so moved. Listen to the Saved By Zero show by DJ Andrew Genus (aka Robin Renée). Jam out to Young Gun Silver Fox. Watch "Supreme Court Ethics: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE-VJrdHMug  

Lane Igoudin, Author, A Family, Maybe: Two Dads, Two Babies, and the Court Cases that Brought Us Together. Lane Igoudin, Ph.D., is a writer, blogger, and professor of English and linguistics at Los Angeles City College. He has written extensively on foster adoption, parenting, LGBTQ families, and spiritual growth for publications such as Adoption.com, FamilyEquality.org.

Lane Igoudin, Author, A Family, Maybe: Two Dads, Two Babies, and the Court Cases that Brought Us Together. Lane Igoudin, Ph.D., is a writer, blogger, and professor of English and linguistics at Los Angeles City College. He has written extensively on foster adoption, parenting, LGBTQ families, and spiritual growth for publications such as Adoption.com, FamilyEquality.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode Notes S4E41 -- Join us as we dive into the mind of legendary actress and dancer Rta Lee.. She'll take us on her journey from her family being deported to Siberia to a star on the hollywood walk of fame.. Ruta Lee (born Ruta Mary Kilmonis; May 30, 1935) is a Canadian-American actress and dancer who appeared as one of the brides in the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. She had roles in films including Billy Wilder's crime drama Witness for the Prosecution and Stanley Donen's musical comedy Funny Face, and also is remembered for her guest appearance in a 1963 episode of Rod Serling's sci-fi series The Twilight Zone called "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain". Lee guest-starred on many television series, and was also featured on a number of game shows, including Hollywood Squares, What's My Line?, and Match Game, and as Alex Trebek's co-host on High Rollers. NEWS FLASH You can now purchase Toking with the Dead full novel here https://a.co/d/7uypgZo https://www.barnesandnoble.com/.../toking.../1143414656... You can see all your past favorite episodes now streaming on https://redcoraluniverse.com/ OR Show your support by purchasing FB stars. Send stars to the stars fb.com/stars ————————————————— Toking with the Dead: https://www.stilltoking.com/ https://www.facebook.com/TokingwiththeDead?tn=-]C-R https://www.instagram.com/stilltokingwith/?hl=en https://twitter.com/thetoking?lang=en https://pinecast.com/feed/still-toking-with Check out Toking with the Dead Episode 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awhL5FyW_j4 Check out Toking with the Dead Episode 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaUai58ua6o Buy awesome Merchandise! https://www.stilltoking.com/toking-with-the-dead-train https://teespring.com/stores/still-toking-with Sponsorship Opportunities https://www.stilltoking.com/become-a-sponsor or email us at bartlett52108@gmail.com thetokingdead@gmail.com ————————————— Follow our guest http://www.rutalee.com/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0498181/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruta_Lee https://walkoffame.com/ruta-lee/ https://twitter.com/therutalee?lang=en https://m.facebook.com/.../Ruta-Lee-211169892312931/photos/ ———————— Follow Still Toking With and their friends! https://smartpa.ge/5zv1 https://thedorkeningpodcastnetwork.com/ ————————————— Produced by Leo Pond and The Dorkening Podcast Network https://TheDorkening.com Facebook.com/TheDorkening Youtube.com/TheDorkening Twitter.com/TheDorkening Dead Dork Radio https://live365.com/station/Dead-Dork-Radio-a68071 More about our guest: Ruta Lee was born on May 30, 1935, in Montreal, Quebec, the only child of Lithuanian Roman Catholic immigrants. Her father was a tailor and her mother a homemaker. On March 1, 1948, her family moved to the United States and ended up settling in Los Angeles, where she graduated in 1952 from Hollywood High School and began studying acting and appearing in school plays. She attended both Los Angeles City College and the University of California at Los Angeles. She worked as a cashier, usherette, and candy girl at Grauman's Chinese Theater, but when she was $40 short in her cash account at the end of her shift one night, she was fired Lee then got a break as a guest on two episodes of CBS's The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show She soon found an agent, who landed her a job in an episode of The Roy Rogers Show, followed by a spot in 1953 on the series Adventures of Superman. That same year, while acting in a small theater production of On the Town she landed a role as bride Ruth in the Academy Award-nominated musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, while still billed as Ruta Kilmonis. In 1964, Lee called then-Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, asking him to pardon her grandmother Ludvise Kamandulis, who had been in an internment camp in Siberia since World War II. The pardon was granted, and Lee's grandmother came to live with her in California in 1964.Kamandulis died two years later. Lee again rescued a relative from the former Soviet Union when she secured custody of her 18-year-old cousin, Maryte Kaseta, from Lithuania in 1987. Lee has been involved with the charitable organization The Thalians for over 50 years. In addition to raising money and providing services for troubled youth and mental-health organizations, Lee, who is also the board chairman, co-produced the annual Ball of the Thalians with the late Debbie Reynolds throughout these five decades. In 2011, after 55 years of involvement with The Thalians, she stepped down and is now a member emerita.

This week's guest is Tina Raymond. Tina is an accomplished drummer, composer, bandleader, and educator based in Los Angeles, CA and is the director of Jazz Studies at California State University Northridge. She presented globally and her teaching credits include Los Angeles City College, The Herbie Hancock Institute, University of Michigan, Bard College and Idyllwild Arts. She's toured all over the world as a both a leader and sideman. Her upcoming releases include “Divinations” featuring 6 of her own compositions  and Rachel Eckroth's Live at Sam First. She's incredibly talented and an expert at relaying information in a fun way. I really hope you learn something from this one; she goes over A LOT. I hope you enjoy the 5 records that shaped Tina Raymond into the drummer she is today. Cheers!  SUBMIT YOUR LISTENER PICKS HERE TINA'S BIG FAT FIVE

Keith Coogan was born Keith Eric Mitchell on January 13, 1970 in Palm Springs, California. The grandson of legendary character actor Jackie Coogan, Keith began his acting career doing TV commercials -- his first gig was as a stand-in in a McDonald's TV spot -- as well various TV shows and made-for-TV movies. Coogan did the voice of Young Tod for the charming animated Disney picture "The Fox and the Hound." His first on-screen role was the smitten Brad Anderson in the delightful teen comedy cult favorite "Adventures in Babysitting." Keith gave a very funny and engaging performance as Christina Applegate's stoner layabout brother Kenny in the equally enjoyable "Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead" and was impressive as Jonathan "Snuffy" Bradberry in "Toy Soldiers." Among the television programs Coogan has made guest appearances on are "The Love Boat," "Eight Is Enough," "Mork & Mindy," "Knight Rider," "CHiPS," "Starman," "21 Jump Street," and "Tales from the Crypt." Keith graduated from Santa Monica High School and attended Santa Monica College, where he majored in Drama and minored in English Literature. He also attended Los Angeles City College, where he majored in Java Programming. Coogan resides in Los Angeles, California and continues to act with pleasing regularity. In his spare time he runs a couple of blogs.Support the show

Mr. Bukowski exhaled more conspiratorial humanity within three minutes then most alleged philosophers emanated in a life span. Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, on August 16, 1920, the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. At the age of three, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. His lack of publishing success at this time caused him to give up writing in 1946 and spurred a ten-year stint of heavy drinking. After he developed a bleeding ulcer, he decided to take up writing again. He worked a wide range of jobs to support his writing, including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, post office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator. He also worked in a dog biscuit factory, a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and he hung posters in New York City subways.Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His writing often featured a depraved metropolitan environment, downtrodden members of American society, direct language, violence, and sexual imagery, and many of his works center around a roughly autobiographical figure named Henry Chinaski. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including Pulp (Black Sparrow, 1994), Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992). He died of leukemia in San Pedro on March 9, 1994.

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground.  The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to  get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret".  It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David  Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them),  and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New

This weeks guest is Rob Thompson. For the last twelve years Rob has been demonstrating his extraordinary Mediumship abilities on the TV show ‘The Ghost Finders' on ParaFliXx, AppleTV and Amazon Prime.  Rob attends events around the world and teaches paranormal research at Los Angeles City College.  In addition to The Ghost Finders Rob has appeared on The Travel Channel show ‘Paranormal 911' and is in the new season of ‘A Haunting‘ on Discovery+. Rob's life objective is helping reconcile spirit with loved ones in order to find mutual peace, comfort and closure on both sides of the veil.  All that plus Lisa Morton's Ghost Report this week on Ghost Magnet with Bridget Marquardt.  #GhostFinders #GhostMagnet #GirlsNextLevel #Paranormal #GhostHunting

Graventowner Beancounters: get off the abacus and on to the graven bus. Welcome back for another episode of Season Two to warm your intellectual biscuits. If you were anything like me, you spent a lot of the 80's and 90's glued to a screen and enthralled in the vast array of television and cinematic gold that helped us all grow up. The legendary Hollywood actor Keith Coogan played some major roles in that story in my life, and I had the pleasure to speak with the epic dude himself tonight. Keith Coogan was born Keith Eric Mitchell on January 13, 1970 in Palm Springs, California. The grandson of legendary character actor Jackie Coogan, Keith began his acting career doing TV commercials and his first gig was as a stand-in in a McDonald's TV spot -- as well as various TV shows and made-for-TV movies. Coogan did the voice of Young Tod for the charming animated Disney picture "The Fox and the Hound." His first on-screen role was the smitten Brad Anderson in the delightful teen comedy cult favorite "Adventures in Babysitting." Keith gave a very funny and engaging performance as Christina Applegate's stoner layabout brother Kenny in the equally enjoyable cult classic "Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead" and was impressive as Jonathan "Snuffy" Bradberry in "Toy Soldiers." Among the television programs Coogan has made guest appearances on "The Love Boat," "Eight Is Enough," "Mork & Mindy," "Knight Rider," "CHiPS," "Starman," "21 Jump Street," and "Tales from the Crypt." Keith graduated from Santa Monica High School and attended Santa Monica College, where he majored in Drama and minored in English Literature. He also attended Los Angeles City College, where he majored in Java Programming. Coogan resides in Los Angeles, California and also had a hilarious and timely cameo in Kevin Smith's star-studded 2019 comedy "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot". UPCOMING SHOWS: NOV 18 - RED BIRD LIVEBank St South - Ottawa, ON(w Alexandra Sullivan)Find tickets for either show at http://gravencanada.com#KeithCoogan#GraventownPodcast#GravencanadaUPCOMING SHOWS:FRIDAY NOV 18 - Red Bird LiveCatch me in a town near you by visting my website to see where I'm playing. If people can hate for no reason, I can love for no reason - and I love you. Thanks for stopping by Graventown. Yer always welcome here. As a full time independent artist, you can support me by joining my SUPER RAD subscription service at https://ko-fi.com/gravencanada

"Well, I got the idea in 2013 when I was a wee young 23-year-old activist, and I had been studying history at Los Angeles City College, and I took this class on genocide that had a huge impact on me, and it also coincided, just the timing, with the Occupy Wall Street movement. So then two years later in 2013, I was reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and the book is about how mass incarceration is like a modern-day racial caste system. And I just heavily related to the book. I grew up around some impacted people. I had a mentor who was formerly incarcerated named Alexander, who was actually Muhammad Ali's bodyguard.And I just got the idea to do an album, because I was listening to a lot of concept albums like Pink Floyd, The Wall. And it started from there, just a little seed and a spark of just this idea for this one album. And then over time, it just evolved into an EP, and then a record label and a nonprofit. And here we are."Fury Young and BL Shirelle are the powerhouse team behind Die Jim Crow Records, the first non-profit record label in United States history for currently and formerly incarcerated musicians. DJC Records' mission is to dismantle stereotypes around race and prison in America by amplifying the voices of our artists. As a pair, Fury Young and BL Shirelle form a perhaps unlikely, but unstoppable duo. Young is a Jewish New Yorker who has not experienced incarceration. Shirelle is a queer, Black woman from Philadelphia who has been heavily impacted by police violence and incarceration. The two formed an inseparable bond. As friends, musical collaborators and now Co-Executive Directors of Die Jim Crow Records, their leadership and commitment to values of representation, fairness, passion for the cause, and a love for art, are at the core of DJC.www.diejimcrow.comhttp://www.blshirelle.comhttp://www.furyyoung.comwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Fury Young and BL Shirelle are the powerhouse team behind Die Jim Crow Records, the first non-profit record label in United States history for currently and formerly incarcerated musicians. DJC Records' mission is to dismantle stereotypes around race and prison in America by amplifying the voices of our artists. As a pair, Fury Young and BL Shirelle form a perhaps unlikely, but unstoppable duo. Young is a Jewish New Yorker who has not experienced incarceration. Shirelle is a queer, Black woman from Philadelphia who has been heavily impacted by police violence and incarceration. The two formed an inseparable bond. As friends, musical collaborators and now Co-Executive Directors of Die Jim Crow Records, their leadership and commitment to values of representation, fairness, passion for the cause, and a love for art, are at the core of DJC."Well, I got the idea in 2013 when I was a wee young 23-year-old activist, and I had been studying history at Los Angeles City College, and I took this class on genocide that had a huge impact on me, and it also coincided, just the timing, with the Occupy Wall Street movement. So then two years later in 2013, I was reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and the book is about how mass incarceration is like a modern-day racial caste system. And I just heavily related to the book. I grew up around some impacted people. I had a mentor who was formerly incarcerated named Alexander, who was actually Muhammad Ali's bodyguard.And I just got the idea to do an album, because I was listening to a lot of concept albums like Pink Floyd, The Wall. And it started from there, just a little seed and a spark of just this idea for this one album. And then over time, it just evolved into an EP, and then a record label and a nonprofit. And here we are."www.diejimcrow.comhttp://www.blshirelle.comhttp://www.furyyoung.comwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org

"Well, I got the idea in 2013 when I was a wee young 23-year-old activist, and I had been studying history at Los Angeles City College, and I took this class on genocide that had a huge impact on me, and it also coincided, just the timing, with the Occupy Wall Street movement. So then two years later in 2013, I was reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and the book is about how mass incarceration is like a modern-day racial caste system. And I just heavily related to the book. I grew up around some impacted people. I had a mentor who was formerly incarcerated named Alexander, who was actually Muhammad Ali's bodyguard.And I just got the idea to do an album, because I was listening to a lot of concept albums like Pink Floyd, The Wall. And it started from there, just a little seed and a spark of just this idea for this one album. And then over time, it just evolved into an EP, and then a record label and a nonprofit. And here we are."Fury Young and BL Shirelle are the powerhouse team behind Die Jim Crow Records, the first non-profit record label in United States history for currently and formerly incarcerated musicians. DJC Records' mission is to dismantle stereotypes around race and prison in America by amplifying the voices of our artists. As a pair, Fury Young and BL Shirelle form a perhaps unlikely, but unstoppable duo. Young is a Jewish New Yorker who has not experienced incarceration. Shirelle is a queer, Black woman from Philadelphia who has been heavily impacted by police violence and incarceration. The two formed an inseparable bond. As friends, musical collaborators and now Co-Executive Directors of Die Jim Crow Records, their leadership and commitment to values of representation, fairness, passion for the cause, and a love for art, are at the core of DJC.www.diejimcrow.comhttp://www.blshirelle.comhttp://www.furyyoung.comwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Fury Young and BL Shirelle are the powerhouse team behind Die Jim Crow Records, the first non-profit record label in United States history for currently and formerly incarcerated musicians. DJC Records' mission is to dismantle stereotypes around race and prison in America by amplifying the voices of our artists. As a pair, Fury Young and BL Shirelle form a perhaps unlikely, but unstoppable duo. Young is a Jewish New Yorker who has not experienced incarceration. Shirelle is a queer, Black woman from Philadelphia who has been heavily impacted by police violence and incarceration. The two formed an inseparable bond. As friends, musical collaborators and now Co-Executive Directors of Die Jim Crow Records, their leadership and commitment to values of representation, fairness, passion for the cause, and a love for art, are at the core of DJC."Well, I got the idea in 2013 when I was a wee young 23-year-old activist, and I had been studying history at Los Angeles City College, and I took this class on genocide that had a huge impact on me, and it also coincided, just the timing, with the Occupy Wall Street movement. So then two years later in 2013, I was reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and the book is about how mass incarceration is like a modern-day racial caste system. And I just heavily related to the book. I grew up around some impacted people. I had a mentor who was formerly incarcerated named Alexander, who was actually Muhammad Ali's bodyguard.And I just got the idea to do an album, because I was listening to a lot of concept albums like Pink Floyd, The Wall. And it started from there, just a little seed and a spark of just this idea for this one album. And then over time, it just evolved into an EP, and then a record label and a nonprofit. And here we are."www.diejimcrow.comhttp://www.blshirelle.comhttp://www.furyyoung.comwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org

"Well, I got the idea in 2013 when I was a wee young 23-year-old activist, and I had been studying history at Los Angeles City College, and I took this class on genocide that had a huge impact on me, and it also coincided, just the timing, with the Occupy Wall Street movement. So then two years later in 2013, I was reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and the book is about how mass incarceration is like a modern-day racial caste system. And I just heavily related to the book. I grew up around some impacted people. I had a mentor who was formerly incarcerated named Alexander, who was actually Muhammad Ali's bodyguard.And I just got the idea to do an album, because I was listening to a lot of concept albums like Pink Floyd, The Wall. And it started from there, just a little seed and a spark of just this idea for this one album. And then over time, it just evolved into an EP, and then a record label and a nonprofit. And here we are."Fury Young and BL Shirelle are the powerhouse team behind Die Jim Crow Records, the first non-profit record label in United States history for currently and formerly incarcerated musicians. DJC Records' mission is to dismantle stereotypes around race and prison in America by amplifying the voices of our artists. As a pair, Fury Young and BL Shirelle form a perhaps unlikely, but unstoppable duo. Young is a Jewish New Yorker who has not experienced incarceration. Shirelle is a queer, Black woman from Philadelphia who has been heavily impacted by police violence and incarceration. The two formed an inseparable bond. As friends, musical collaborators and now Co-Executive Directors of Die Jim Crow Records, their leadership and commitment to values of representation, fairness, passion for the cause, and a love for art, are at the core of DJC.www.diejimcrow.comhttp://www.blshirelle.comhttp://www.furyyoung.comwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Invest In Her host Catherine Gray talks with Cheryl Melendez who is the Associate Director for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses (10KSB) Programs in the Southern California area at Long Beach City College and Los Angeles City College. This business and management education program is funded by the Goldman Sachs Foundation, using a curriculum designed by Babson College, a leader in entrepreneurial education, to help small business owners develop a growth plan with the goal of increasing their revenues and hiring more employees.   www.sheangelinvestors.com  https://10ksbapply.com/   Follow Us On Social Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn

Episode 336."Adventures in Babysitting"Actor: Keith Coogan.Born into Hollywood, Keith picked up the acting bug while watching "Sesame Street" when he was five years old.  After securing a talent agent, he featured in over 100 national television commercials, then over the course of four decades he performed in 3 series including The Waltons, 3 after-school specials, 4 pilots, 4 MOWs, numerous guest appearances on your favorite TV shows, sang and danced live on The Oscars, performed stand-up comedy, voiced "Tod" the young fox in the last "Classic" Disney animated film ever produced, "The Fox and the Hound", and starred in dozens of feature films, including "Adventures in Babysitting", "Hiding Out", "Book of Love", "Cheetah", "Cousins", "Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead", and "Toy Soldiers". Recent credits include the feature films, "Beautiful Garden", "Dawn Patrol", "Cats Dancing on Jupiter", "Limelight", and a creepy turn in Lifetime Television's "A Tale of Two Coreys".  Among the television programs Coogan has made guest appearances on are "The Love Boat," "Eight Is Enough," "Mork & Mindy," "Knight Rider," "CHiPS," "Starman," "21 Jumpstreet," and "Tales from the Crypt." Keith graduated from Santa Monica High School and attended Santa Monica College, where he majored in Drama and minored in English Literature. Moreover, he also attended Los Angeles City College, where he majored in Java Programming. Coogan resides in Los Angeles, California and continues to act with pleasing regularity.Welcome, Keith Coogan.Instagram: Monday Morning Critic Podcast.Facebook: Monday Morning Critic Podcast.Twitter:@mdmcriticEmail: Mondaymorningcritic@gmail.comYouTube: Monday Morning Critic Podcastwww.mmcpodcast.com

IT CAME FROM AQUARIUS RECORDS is a feature-length documentary about the SF-based independent record store, Aquarius Records. Having closed in 2016 after 47 years, this small apartment-sized store championed local, underground, independent, and challenging music to the masses - most memorably with their infamous bi-weekly, college essay-length, new-release lists.This doc has interviews with the aQ owners dating back to 1970, other record store owners from around the world, musicians, label heads, music journalists, and INTENSE music collectors. Interviewees include Matt Groening (The Simpsons), Wayne Coyne (Flaming Lips), Bruce Ackley, John Darnielle (The Mountain Goats), Ty Segall, and Liz Harris (Grouper).Aquarius Records influenced and enriched countless peoples' musical tastes with their curated selections - but this film also shows the realities of an indie record store trying to survive in an increasingly difficult market of brick-and-mortar music shops, especially in the ever-changing and price-gouging Mission District of SF. Six years in the making, the film has a very personal angle, with lots of behind-the-scenes footage (and drama) that shows both the joy and excruciating stress that comes with running — and closing — a store like this.Upcoming screenings:Oct 4th 6 pm Los Angeles City College w Howie KleinOct 6th Tucson Film and Music FestivalNovember 1st, 7pm Nitehawk Cinema, Williamsburg BrooklynFilm screening, followed by a moderated Q+A, with:Kenneth ThomasBrian Turner (The Brian Turner Show, WFMU)Jeremy DeVine (Founder / President of Temporary Residence Records)Jon Fine (Bitch Magnet, Author of Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock's Failed Revolution (but Can No Longer Hear))Emil Amos (Grails, Om, Holy Sons)Moderated by Anna Lopez (Temporary Residence Records, Union Pool)Nov 4th & 5th Doc Utah St. George, UtahKenneth Thomas is a teacher and filmmaker from Arcata, California. He has consistently worked in some aspect of news or documentary production. After graduating with his Bachelor's Degree in 16mm Film Production from Boston University, he moved back to his hometown to work at the local CBS television station, where he quickly became the Technical Director, and then the Live News Director. He also served as their News Videographer, documenting stories on the front lines, like Earth First's controversial fight to save the old-growth redwood forests.After receiving his MFA in Film at San Francisco Art Institute, Kenneth completed his 5-year long film project, a feature-length music documentary called Blood, Sweat + Vinyl: DIY in the 21st Century. Featuring over a dozen multi-camera live concert shoots and 20 interviews about independent heavy metal music culture, the film has screened in over two dozen film and music festivals on every continent (except Antarctica) and is currently being independently distributed. This documentary led to him directing two music videos for bands in the film, one of which aired on MTV's Headbanger's Ball.Kenneth currently teaches Live TV Production and Audio Production at Los Angeles City College, with occasional freelance stints as a key camera operator for live multi-camera streams of LA Philharmonic concerts, and directing live multi-camera streams of heavy metal concerts in Boston and Los Angeles.Artist Windy Chien is best known for her 2016 work, The Year of Knots, in which she learned a new knot every day for a year. Her work ranges in size from a knot that can fit in the palm of a child's hand to room-sized installations that are sought after by private collectors. Following long careers at Apple and as owner of legendary music shop Aquarius Records, she launched her studio in 2015. Select clients include the National Geographic Society, the De Young Museum, Nobu Hotels, Google, and the Kering Group, and her work has been covered by Wired, The New York Times and Martha Stewart. Windy's book about her work was published by Abrams in 2019.Andee Connors is a drummer, musician, artist, DJ, music curator, photographer, former record store owner, former record label owner. He ran a record store called aQuarius recOrds in San Francisco from 1994 - 2016. He also ran tUMULt, a record label that existed for close to 20 years, with more than 50 releases. He's been playing drums since 9 years old, touring and recording since 19. Bands included math rock / post rock band called A Minor Forest, a grind pop / noise-pop band called P.E.E., a SF punk band called J-Church, a stoner metal band called High Tone Son Of A Bitch, and an experimental post rock band called Lumen. He played drums in two Boadrum performances with Japanese experimental outfit The Boredoms: with 77 drummers in 2007 in Brooklyn, NY, and then 88 drummers in 2008 in Los Angeles as well as extra drums with noise rock outfit Shit And Shine.Currently in Common Eider, King Eider, a ritualistic doom/drone duo, and My Heart, An Inverted Flame, another duo, heavy, droney, repetitive and shoegazey - only synths and drums!He has radio shows on Gimmeradio.com called Battleflutes & Sideways Skulls, and Castle Weather on Repeater Radio in the UK. He shares his house (and life) with three cats called Tony Harrison, Lugburz and Tungsten.Allan Horrocks did not get us a bio in time.https://battleflutesandsidewaysskulls.comBy This Wax I Rulehttps://www.instagram.com/aquariusrecordsrip/Bill Kopp's book on 415 Records, Disturbing the Peace.George's new podcast https://pi-cast.simplecast.com/Follow:Instagram: @aquariusdocInstagram: @mool_systemsInstagram: @windychienInstagram: @mbibendumFollow Sup Doc on:Twitter: @supdocpodcastInstagram: @supdocpodcastFacebook: @supdocpodcastsign up for our mailing listAnd you can show your support to Sup Doc by donating on Patreon.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What's up y'all of little faith and welcome to episode 14 of season 2 of TFP!I'm your hostess, not your Moses, Mat Hayes, and if I'm still giving you episodes, it means that I'm still looking for answers!A couple weeks ago, I met Christian Cintron on the queer streets of West Hollywood. And here we are today with him being a guest on the show! Christian is a writer, comedian, actor, psychic, jack-of-all-trades, and master of fun.His unique perspective has been informed by being a proud  Puerto Rican, Catholic school boy, marketing executive, addiction and abuse survivor, and even a drag queen!The first stand-up teacher at the Rodney Dangerfield Institute at Los Angeles City College, Christian is a graduate of Vassar College, Second City: Hollywood, and iO West theater.His television appearances include The Wendy Williams Show and on TruTV's Fameless.Christian created Stand Up 4 Your Power, an intersectional, spiritual, self-improvement comedy class. It unites stand-up, psychology, diversity, equity, inclusion, and even a little magic to help students pivot their perspective, shift limiting beliefs, and roll with the punchlines. He is also a spiritual counselor, a Reiki practitioner, and a coach, helping people use humor and spirituality to integrate their trauma and reclaim their narrative. He offers shadow readings to help clients see where their light is not shining, so they can become the most powerful versions of themselves. His mission is to help people have the uncomfortable but vital conversations with levity, empathy, and grace.Welcome to the show Christian! https://linktr.ee/standup4yourpowerhttps://www.theauthenticgay.com/healing-religious-trauma/https://shadowscans.carrd.co/https://standup4yourpower.carrd.co/https://standup4yourpower.medium.com/healing-religious-trauma-c84062b0592a

Paul Olden is the current public address announcer for the New York Yankees at Yankees Stadium. He has been the announcer since the Yankees moved to their new ballpark in 2009. Born in Chicago, Olden moved with his family to Los Angeles as a child. He attended Dorsey High school and Los Angeles City College. Olden was formerly a radio and television play-by-play announcer for the Yankees, Tamps Bay Devil Rays, California Angels, Cleveland Indians, Philadelphia Eagles, UCLA Bruins, Los Angels Rams, New York Jets, New York Nets and ESPN. Olden was the target of Los Angels Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda's infamous and profanity laden "Dave Kingman tirade" in 1978, in which Lasorda ranted at Olden (who worked at Los Angels radio station KLAC at the time) when he asked him about Kingman having hit three home runs against the Dodgers that day. He was also the PA announcer for 13 consecutive Super Bowls from 1993 to 2005.Olden replaced Jim Hill, the successor to Bob Sheppard, who had been the Yankees announcer since 1951. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/matt-brown57/support

Today you'll meet Daughter of Change, Dr. Tammy Robinson, Vice President of Instruction at Canada College,Vice President of the California Community College Chief Instructional Officers Executive Board, and President of the National Council on Black American Affairs. She also serves on the Workforce Development Commission for the American Association of Community Colleges and remains active in hosting community, statewide and national events that affect both students and future leaders in education. Tammy has over twenty-five years of experience as a community college administrator and faculty member. Before her current role at Canada College, she served as the Dean of Global Learning Programs and Services and Dean for Social Science and Creative Arts at Skyline College in San Bruno, California.  She also served as interim Vice President of Academic Services Services/Athletic Director/CIO at Lassen Community College in Susanville, California. Tammy is also a former English Professor and served as the Department Chair of the English/ESL/Linguistics Department at Los Angeles City College in Los Angeles, California. She holds a Doctorate in Education with an emphasis in Community College Administration from the University of Southern California, a Master of Arts degree in English with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Composition from California State University, Dominguez Hills, a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an Associate of Arts degree in Social Science from Cerritos College. Tammy says that “higher education must be radically re-imagined. Colleges are working feverously to assist students in learning how to adjust to a world where their skills are needed more than ever.  We must assist our students by continuing to provide them with the access they need to programs that help them upskill or retrain. Colleges need to listen to students, employers, and our communities”.We Discuss:How Tammy is re-imagining educationWhat she means by thatWhy it's importantHow she's doing itHow and why she sees this concept creating positive change and new leaders in the futureLinks to Check Out:Tammy's LinkedInCommunity Colleges United StatesCanada CollegeMesa Community CollegeNational Council on Black American AffairsFollow Daughters of Change:Website:Facebook:InstagramLinkedInMarie's LinkedIn:Daughters of Change Podcast Editor:  Sarah StaceySarah's LinkedIn Profile

INTRODUCTION Bwejua Fachano is a lot of things; he's a talented musician, a cancer survivor, and an international student - but more than that, he's a dreamer. Through his journey from Abuja, Nigeria to being months away from graduating from Los Angeles City College, Bwejua's experiences reflect that of a man who dares to dream. Bwejua and Simon explore topics of friendship, family, spirituality, and love, in part one of their two-part podcast! EPISODE SUMMARY02:50 - Live Performance of ‘Back to LA' by Bwejua Fachano. 06:30 - Bwejua shares the foods that he'd most want visitors of his home country to experience.11:10 - Bwejua speaks of the struggles of being an international student away from home. 11:37 - How did Bwejua's parents influence him to pursue music? 12:27 - How did Bwejua transition from dancing to creating music, and how did his early music career start? 13:56 - What was Bwejua's main language growing up in Abuja, Nigeria?16:04 - Bwejua speaks on being part of the Jukun Tribe and the values of his people. 19:35 - ‘Pen Pal' by Bwejua Fachano.22:55 - Bwejua speaks on his ‘dream' - the dream of coming to the U.S., and his greater dream of…25:00 - Bwejua reflects on some of the biggest surprises he faced in the U.S.26:41 - Bwejua speaks of his experiences being racially profiled, and what he'd change about the U.S. 28:49 - The topic of ‘love' is a big theme in Bwejua's music. Where does that come from?31:46 - ‘The News' by Bwejua Fachano. 35:13 - Bwejua outlines the struggles we faced during isolation. 36:43 - Bwejua speaks on the work that went into producing his album. LINKS Los Angeles City College Abuja, NigeriaJollof RiceHausaJukun TribeCalifornia College of MusicBwejua's First AlbumGUEST INFORMATIONInstagramRESOURCESDealing with HomesicknessCONNECT WITH USInstagramFacebook Twitter Tumblr Find our Podcasts here

FROM BLACK TO BLUE by Ed CookWithin these pages of "FROM BLACK TO BLUE", you will see through the eyes of a young boy, death up close and personal. Also you will understand southern law in action causing absolute fear to the bones. As he move forward leaving the south, traveling to Chicago at a very young age, caused this young fellow to grow up at a fast paste. The life style of the residents in this town by far was as different as day and night from his southern up brining. The law, excuse me, the police in Chicago was as different as day and night from the law in Arkansas. Moving to Los Angeles was and is the life changing experience. Pay close attention, you'll enjoy this fast trip you are about to take. From Pine Bluff to serving on one of the most fierce police agencies in America, LAPD SWAT.A spellbinding, deeply emotional account of my plight to overcome disappointment and accomplish that particular success sought after.Ed Louis Cook was born July 1942 in Pine Bluff Arkansas. He is the second of eight children born to Essie & Charley Cook. He had a fascination with law enforcement long before entering public school. It is believed this interest in law enforcement was caused by a very large picture of his great uncle Dennis Wilson who was a Chicago Policeman. Ed attended a segregated public school. During his school years he became interested in music and became very good with the woodwind instruments, especially the clarinet. Upon graduation from Merrill High School, he received a four year music scholarship to attend A. M. & N. College. Ed attended for one year only, due to marriage at age of eighteen. Getting married at an early age and moving to Chicago was the start of an entirely new way of life. Four years later was the move to Los Angeles and that is the real true beginning of the great story you are about to receive. While living in Los Angeles and attending Los Angeles City College and California State University at Los Angeles, He entered the field of Law enforcement and subsequently became the first black officer to work LAPD SWAT.https://www.writersrepublic.com/bookshop/black-bluehttps://edcooktheauthor.com/http://www.bluefunkbroadcasting.com/root/twia/ecookwr.mp3  

Subscribe to Quotomania on Simplecast or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, on August 16, 1920, the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. At the age of three, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. His lack of publishing success at this time caused him to give up writing in 1946 and spurred a ten-year stint of heavy drinking. After he developed a bleeding ulcer, he decided to take up writing again. He worked a wide range of jobs to support his writing, including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, post office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator. He also worked in a dog biscuit factory, a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and he hung posters in New York City subways.Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His writing often featured a depraved metropolitan environment, downtrodden members of American society, direct language, violence, and sexual imagery, and many of his works center around a roughly autobiographical figure named Henry Chinaski. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including Pulp (Black Sparrow, 1994), Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992). He died of leukemia in San Pedro on March 9, 1994.From https://poets.org/poet/charles-bukowskiFor more information about Charles Bukowski:“Bukowski at 100: Remembering a Literary Icon”: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/14/902456145/bukowski-at-100-remembering-a-literary-icon

Higher Education with Esteemed Guest Dr Henan Joof Dean of Los Angeles City College

Johnny Nezha is the founder and CEO of a tech start-up, Khleon, an active contributor on the Vocal Media blog, and is currently attending Los Angeles City College in pursuit of his goals. Johnny was born in Albania but grew up in the suburbs of Venice, Italy. His travels have helped cultivate an interest in subjects such as astronomy and space travel, as well as more pressing topics including student visa issues and the human psyche. Join us as we explore Johnny's unique interests, ambitions, and adventures - this is his student story.SUMMARY02:53 - What was life like growing up in Venice?04:22 - If someone were to visit the suburbs you grew up in, what would you want them to experience?04:51 - The origin of Johnny's name07:08 - How did your parents' businesses impact you, and what influence did your parents have on your life?09:20 - Where did your ambition come from?10:50 - Of all the pictures you currently have in your home, what is your favorite?12:19 - Was astronomy, thinking bigger, and being a dreamer an interest for you as a child?13:22 - Would you jump on the rocketship with Jeff Bezos if you could?14:41 - A private jet is waiting to take you anywhere in the world - where are you telling the pilot to go?15:48 - What are you most grateful for?17:03 - What are the things that keep you awake at night?18:38 - What puts you at peace?20:13 - How did Khleon come about, how do you find it, and what do you do?25:46 - Who are some ENTJ personalities?28:28 - What does OPT refer to?32:33 - What were some of the biggest surprises when you first came to the U.S.?35:34 - Why do you think Europe doesn't feel as hospitable in your eyes as the U.S.?38:24 - What were some of the misconceptions you had about the U.S. before you came here?39:42 - What are some of the misconceptions people from the U.S. might have about international students?40:24 - Are there any customs in the U.S. that you'd like to see become customs in other countries?41:59 - Are there any traditions from Italy that you'd like to see brought to the U.S.?45:31 - With all your experiences in the U.S., do you think Khleon could have come about if you didn't come to the U.S.?47:25 - You walk into a room for your 75th birthday, what would you hope they're saying?50:37 - How has the visa process affected the life of international students? Immigration Reform55:51 - What is your favorite English slang word?55:52 - What are your favorite Italian slang words?58:35 - When will Study in the USA ask me to blog for them? Johnny's BlogGUEST INFORMATIONInstagram / Twitter @johnnynezhaLinkedIn @johnny-nezhaFind our Podcasts here

BJ McDonnell is a motion picture camera operator and director. In 2000 McDonnell graduated from Los Angeles City College with his degree in Cinema and quickly became a grip and then a union camera / Steadicam operator in I.A.T.S.E 600. He is also a member of SAG / AFTRA. McDonnell has shot such features as "Jack Reacher", "Battle: Los Angeles", "The Interview", "Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter", "Neighbors", and many more.McDonnell also served as an operator on such television shows as "Heroes" and "Standoff".In 2008, McDonnell won a Telly award for cinematography and camera operation.IN 2012, after shooting the first two entries in the "Hatchet" horror film series, McDonnell took the directing chair for the third installment franchise; "Hatchet III". McDonnell also directed the critically lauded live-action rendition of the "Dead Island" commercial which received over 1 million hits in the first week of its release on Youtube.In 2015, McDonnell directed a music video for the band SLAYER for the song "Repentless". It has gained 5 million views on youtube in a matter of two months. The music video also won the "Loudwire 5th Annual Music Awards" for best metal video of 2015.Connect with BJ McDonnell:https://www.instagram.com/bjmcdonnell/?hl=en

In this episode, Eric speaks with artist Mark Steven Greenfield; about his journey and education in the arts and the great artists who mentored him. They discuss his experience of growing up and living in the Philippines and Germany and how that shaped his outlook on life and ideas of racism and oppression. They discuss his body of work that deals with themes such as  African American stereotypes, spiritual practices, social justice, meditative practices and  abstraction. The life of an artist, the importance of craft, the need to find a way to support their passion and the delicate balance of making a living and staying true to one's artistic integrity. Greenfield's thought-provoking and controversial series "Blackatcha" and his intention of 'reappropriating the appropriated' in order to neutralize the effects of racist stereotypes, his most recent work focuses on the mystery surrounding “The Black Madonna”. They discuss the role of the artist in society and the power of art to make an impact for generations to come.  For more visit: www.ericsperspective.comGuest Bio: A native Angeleno, Mark Steven Greenfield studied under Charles White and John Riddle at Otis Art Institute in a program sponsored by the Golden State Life Insurance Company. He went on to receive his Bachelor's degree in Art Education in 1973 from California State University, Long Beach.  To support his ability to make his art, he held various positions as a visual display artist, a park director, a graphic design instructor and a police artist before returning to school, graduating with Master of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing from California State University, Los Angeles in 1987. From 1993 through 2010 he was an arts administrator for the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs; first as the director of the Watts Towers Arts Center and the Towers of Simon Rodia and later as the director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. In 1998 he served as the Head of the U. S. delegation to the World Cup Cultural Festival in Paris, France and in 2002 he was part of the Getty Visiting Scholars program. He has served on the boards of the Downtown Arts Development Association, the Korean American Museum, and The Armory Center for the Arts , and was past president of the Los Angeles Art Association/Gallery 825. He currently serves on the boards of Side Street Projects, The Harpo Foundation and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Greenfield's work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States most notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art and the California African American Museum.  Internationally he has exhibited in Thailand at the Chiang Mai Art Museum, in Naples, Italy at Art 1307, Villa Donato , the Gang Dong Art Center in Seoul, South Korea and the Blue Roof Museum in Chengdu, PRC.  He is represented by the Ricco Maresca Gallery in New York and the William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica, California. His work deals primarily with the African American experience and in recent years has focused on the effects of stereotypes on American culture stimulating much-needed and long overdue dialog on issues of race. He is a recipient of the L.A. Artcore Crystal Award (2006), Los Angeles Artist Laboratory Fellowship Grant (2011), the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (COLA 2012), The California Community Foundation Artist Fellowship (2012),  the Instituto Sacatar Artist Residency in Salvador, Brazil (2013), the McColl Center for Art + Innovation Residency in 2016 and the Loghaven Artist Residency (2021). He was a visiting professor at the California Institute of the Arts in 2013 ,  and was artist-in-residence at California State University, Los Angeles in 2016. He currently teaches at Los Angeles City College.

Harvey Brownstone conducts an in-depth interview with Florence LaRue, Star of Legendary Music Group, “The 5th Dimension” and Author About Harvey's guestFlorence LaRue was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, but moved to Glenside, Pennsylvania, when she was young. She began her musical education studying dance and violin. Her family moved to Los Angeles, California, where she earned an Associate's Degree in Music from Los Angeles City College. She later received a Bachelor of Arts in Elementary Education from California State University.In 1966, Ms. LaRue was approached by Lamonte McLemore and Marilyn McCoo to join their recently formed group the 5th Dimension. LaRue nearly always sang female lead on one song per album, with McCoo taking the lead on one song as well; otherwise she sang the alto voice parts along with McCoo's soprano, being featured prominently on Stoned Soul Picnic, or shared the lead with McCoo on songs including "Blowing Away", "Puppet Man", "Save the Country", and "Sweet Blindness". After McCoo's departure, LaRue was lead singer on hit songs including "Love Hangover" (1976). As a member of the 5th Dimension, LaRue received six Grammy Awards, including Grammy Award for Record of the Year for "Up, Up and Away" (1968) and "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" (1969).She appeared in the CBS movie of the week Happy with Dom DeLuise. She also performed in the national tour of Broadway's Tony Award winning musical Ain't Misbehavin, and starred in the Toronto and Calgary productions of Mo' Magic.LaRue co-hosted the Arthritis Telethon with Jane Wyman, judged two segments of Puttin' on the Hits, appeared as a celebrity guest on Star Search, and been a special guest on numerous television shows, including several appearances on The Dale Evans Show, The Today Show, The Carol Lawrence Show, and numerous other Christian and secular programs.As of April 2009, the group was touring as "Florence LaRue & The Fifth Dimension" led by LaRue with Willie Williams, Leonard Tucker, Patrice Morris, and Floyd Smith.  She is married to Laurence P. Kantor. In June 2016, LaRue and the group performed in The Villages, Florida, just days after the Orlando nightclub shooting. LaRue took the opportunity to share her thoughts on the events: "We will not be terrorized. We know what's happening in the world, but this is a song about good health, love, peace and happiness. We still believe in those things today," she stated before performing one of the band's hit singles, "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In".For more interviews and podcasts go to: https://www.harveybrownstoneinterviews.com https://www.florencelarue.com/https://www.facebook.com/Florence-LaRue-1419454508346282/https://www.linkedin.com/in/florence-larue-922b8511https://www.facebook.com/5thDimensionFansPage#florencelarue  #harveybrownstoneinterviews

We continue our conversation with percussionist Luis Conte about his incredible life and experiences as a percussionist for some of the worlds most beloved and well known artists.  Growing up in Cuba, Luis began his musical odyssey playing the guitar however he soon switched to percussion and that has remained his primary instrument ever since.  Moving to Los Angeles in 1967 Luis attended Hollywood High School and Los Angeles City College.  By the 1970's he quickly became a busy studio musician.  Touring and playing with James Taylor, Madonna, Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton,  Phil Collins, Rod Stewart and Shakira. Luis built a successful career as a percussionist including composing for and playing in ABC's Dancing with The Stars Band among hundreds of other tv and film projects. What you will hear Luis's parents and grandmother leave Cuba. Early exposure to music and rhythm. The biggest lesson learned. Pandemic activities.  Practicing, remote recording, teaching and exercise. Family Drummer vs percussionist two different worlds. Phil Collins Royal Albert Hall. Luis's introduction to and love for the Beatles. The radio being Luis's early connection to the world. Songwriting Quotes “En la vida lo que hace falta es, hay que siempre caer bien.” “The only drag about the music business is the word business.” Mentioned En Casa De Luis Celia Cruz Benny Moré Orquesta Aragón Pello el Afrokan Y Su Ritmo Mozambique Patá drum Acheré (maracas) --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/iammusicgrouppodcast/support (https://anchor.fm/iammusicgrouppodcast/support)

Cuban born, world class percussionist Luis Conte joins us for a candid conversation about his incredible life and experiences as a young cuban refugee growing up in Hollywood.  Growing up in Cuba, Luis began his musical odyssey playing the guitar however he soon switched to percussion and that has remained his primary instrument ever since.  Moving to Los Angeles in 1967 Luis attended Hollywood High School and Los Angeles City College.  By the 1970's he quickly became a busy studio musician.  Touring and playing with James Taylor, Madonna, Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton,  Phil Collins, Rod Stewart and Shakira Luis built a successful career including composing and playing in ABS's Dancing with The Stars Band among hundreds of other tv and film projects. What you will hear Luis's upbringing in Cuba Early musical influences Luis leaving Cuba alone at the age of 14 From Spain to Hollywood The sacrifice it took to flee Cuba Culture shock Learning English High School and LA City College Transition from guitar to percussion Gigs and the musicians union First tour and tour life Songwriting Quotes “The drums call you.” “God has always had me like a marionette Quotes Mongo Santamaria Carlos “Patato” Valdez Francisco Aguabella Armando Peraza Tata Güines Ricardo Abreu aka Papin Los Papines Walfredo De los Reyes Sr. The Beatles Aretha Franklin Motown Four Tops The Temptation Ramon Stagnaro --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/iammusicgrouppodcast/support (https://anchor.fm/iammusicgrouppodcast/support)

Show Notes and Links to Daniel Ruiz's Work and Allusions/Texts from Episode On Episode 36, Pete welcomes the well-read author of Coconut Versus and professor extraordinaire at Los Angeles City College, Daniel José Ruiz. The conversation is rich, as the two discuss Daniel's transitory childhood, code-switching, masculinity, Octavia Butler's greatness, teaching literature, Daniel's gripping Coconut Versus,  and much more.   Daniel's Website Buy Coconut Versus! Through Amazon  Buy Coconut Versus through Floricanto Press! Daniel talks about mentors and the origin of his children's unique and stellar names-at about 2:00   Daniel talks about his upcoming novel, which is currently in galley form-at about 5:10   Daniel talks about his childhood in which he moved often-at about 5:40   Daniel talks about CA's Central Valley as a bedrock for him and a formative location in his development-at about 8:50   Daniel talks about always being the “new kid” and how that affected his development, a tendency to be proficient at “code-switching” and how being an observer helped his writing-at about 10:30   Daniel talks about his interesting approach to writing strong dialogue-at about 12:30   Daniel talks about language and literacy in his youth-at about 14:00   Daniel talks about childhood reading choices-at about 17:30   Daniel discusses some stalwarts of his adult reading, starts like Luis Rodriguez, Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison-at about 19:20   Daniel discusses Octavia Butler as his #1 favorite and how she was “incredibly prescient” in writing about power-at about 19:45   Pete and Daniel discuss sci-fi and fantasy as escapism, a refuge for people who consider themselves “outsiders” in some way-at about 21:30   Daniel quotes Butler's Kindred and a line from Pablo Neruda as chill-inducing for him-at about 23:50   Daniel talks about The Autobiography of Malcolm X as a “seminal text” in his life-at about 25:50   Daniel discusses art and his particular writing and reading as “always [inherently] political”-at about 27:40   Daniel discusses his wife's art and art's place in the couple's life-at about 31:00   Daniel talks about his recent appearance at the open mic night at Mi Espresso Cultura-at about 36:00   Daniel talks about the state of “publish or perish” in 2021 academia-at about 38:35   Daniel discusses the impact of Common Core as he sees it in his classroom-at about 40:22   Pete and Daniel discuss “engag[ing] the word on the page” with difficult-at about 44:00   Daniel and Pete discuss texts that energize and interest his students, including V for Vendetta, 1984,  World War Z and Octavia Butler's trilogy which leads to rich discussion with their realistic depictions of race, climate change, pandemic, and the vagaries of power-at about 46:20   Shout out to the LACC student favorite, Daniel's friend Scott Creley, and his Digging a Hole to the Moon-at about 50:30   Pete and Daniel discuss The Inland Empire, described adroitly by Daniel as a “collection of contradictions”-at about 52:25   Pete and Daniel discuss the latter's book, Coconut Versus, and its seeds, including a professor who inspired him to put his thoughts on Chicanismo on paper-at about 53:35   Daniel talks about the epigraph's importance and his want of writing about his unique culture(s)-at about 57:00   Pete talks about his love of the book Pocho, and how Daniel sees the term “pocho,” including its connection to W.E.B. Dubois' “double consciousness”-at about 57:55   Daniel talks about how peers often saw a need to act in a certain way as “Latino” or “Mexican”-at about 1:00:00   Daniel and Pete discuss masculinity as seen in Coconut Versus, and in society in general-at about 1:02:20   Daniel discusses the “coming-of-age- qualities of Coconut Versus-at about 1:08:30   Daniel and Pete discuss the cultural markers that make Coconut Versus authentic-at about 1:09:45   Daniel reads from Coconut Versus-at about 1:10:50   Daniel discusses the significance of the book's title-at 1:14:45 You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Spotify and on Amazon Music. Follow me on IG, where I'm @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where I'm @chillsatwillpo1. This is a passion project of mine, a DIY operation, and I'd love for your help in promoting what I'm convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form. The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com.

The nation appears to be on the brink of civil war, if not already in it. With polarization as bad as at any time in our nation's history, how can we stop the violence? Discussions about “law and order” ordinarily end up promoting division and triggering historical trauma. Is there a way to stop the cycle of violence and heal victims and perpetrators alike? Can the truth set us free? If so, how do we go about telling the story? And who gets to tell it? As challenging as this time is, with the underbelly of America exposed, there is also an opportunity to see America as it really is. The first step in changing anything is to see it for what it is and then to create a new story that acknowledges the truth and envisions a better future.   One obstacle to change is that systemic racism is not always easy to see, or understand. It is both complicated and deeply enmeshed in the American psyche. It is not a black and white issue (in more ways than one). Structural racism affects everyone, and prevents America from achieving its sacred purpose: unity in diversity. This purpose is enshrined in our Great Seal: E Pluribus Unum, “Out of the many, one”—a beautiful idea, but one that has yet to be realized. There is some good news today. More and more people of all colors are coming together to speak out against racism. The other good news is that white Americans are beginning to change their thinking, and in a compressed time frame. Just months ago, two-thirds of white Americans thought that police mistreatment of people of color was only “a few bad apples.” Now, more than half of white Americans recognize that there is systemic racism in police enforcement. As volatile and ugly as today is, more people see the need for change.  Many unanswered questions remain. Now that white America is beginning to see the extent of systemic racism, how many will act for change and how many will seek to hold onto their  privilege? Who will win the next election and how much effect will that have? In a representational republic, politicians are always a reflection of the people. Is this the time we finally make real progress? Join us as we delve into all of this with our guests Oscar Edwards and David Boje. “When we share all our stories, they are all stories, it's like water, it's one, and it can flow like water. Right now we lack the collective wisdom to do that. Even though (our stories) come from different streams, it is one source.” ~ Oscar Edwards “Why are we doing true storytelling? Because I discovered I grew up in a false history, a false narrative, of what is going on in America, and in the world” ~ David Boje Glenn Aparicio Parry, PhD, of Basque, Aragon Spanish, and Jewish descent, is the author of Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again (SelectBooks, 2020) and the Nautilus award-winning Original Thinking: A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature (North Atlantic Books, 2015). Parry is an educator, ecopsychologist, and political philosopher whose passion is to reform thinking and society into a coherent, cohesive, whole. The founder and past president of the SEED Institute, Parry is currently the director of a grass-roots think tank, the Circle for Original Thinking. He has lived in northern New Mexico since 1994. www.originalpolitics.us Oscar Edwards is the Managing Member/CEO of Higher Growth Strategies, LLC (HGS) and also an acclaimed speaker, consultant, trainer, advisor, and business coach with the ability to make complex subjects understandable and fun. In other words, he is a good storyteller.  Oscar goes way back with fellow guest David Boje to their days in the early 80s at the UCLA Anderson School of Management (where Oscar received his BA in Economics and an MBA in Finance & Marketing). They worked together first at the Joint Center for Community Studies with Dr. C.Z. Wilson and they also worked with the late Leroy Wells on the development of a university student quality of life index Oscar has hands-on experience in management, business modeling, strategic planning, managerial accounting, and finance for a host of industries, including construction, sports & entertainment, media, telecom, public works, public transportation, public safety, and public health industries. He is on the finance faculty for Los Angeles City College.  He is also a curriculum designer and instructor for a number of other entrepreneurial eco-learning systems focused on women, minorities, and veterans in Southern California. Oscar has been recognized for his work with small businesses and his community volunteerism by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, California State Assembly and Senate, the United States Congress, United Way of Los Angeles, and many other civic and community organizations. He received recognition early, winning the Outstanding Young Man in America award in 1984, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Black Business and Professional Association in 2000. Oscar is currently working with many community based organizations to enhance their organization capacity, including cultural centers, churches, financial, and educational institutions. He strives to empower communities of color to be self-reliant and yet embrace the intercultural dynamic that is the norm in today's families and households. David Boje is what Michel Foucault calls a ‘specific intellectual', an international scholar confronting and deconstructing the ‘regimes of truth' with his own storytelling paradigm. He has written 16 books as well as a myriad of book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles and been cited in over 5000 books and articles. His most recent books are: True Storytelling (Routledge, Francis & Taylor) with Jens Larsen and Lena Bruun, Doing Conversational Storytelling Interviewing for Your Dissertation ( Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.) with Grace Ann Rosile. He created the field of “ante-narrative” research, which analyzes all that is antecedent to the creation of western narratives and indigenous living stories.  David Bojeearned his Ph.D. from University of Illinois in 1978, and became assistant professor at Anderson School of Management, UCLA, then became full professor at Loyola Marymount University, earning six teacher of the year awards. He retired in 2018 from New Mexico State University, as Regents Professor and is currently Professor Emeritus. He also teaches qualitative storytelling science methods at Cabrini University in Philadelphia. He helped form the ‘True storytelling' rock band which teaches a loyal fan base of global participants on ‘true storytelling ethics, ensemble leadership and sustainability. Their newest seminar theme (with Oscar Edwards, co-hosting) is “Intercultural Conversations: A Community-Centered Storytelling Experience to Re-story Narratives on Racism.”  Their hope is for a more cooperative, equitable, and just society: find out more on https://true-storytelling.com; https:truestorytelling.org He also convenes the annual “Quantum Storytelling Conference” each December in Las Cruces New Mexico with NMSU Emeritus Professor Grace Ann Rosile.  David is editor-in-chief of the 16 volume Business Storytelling Encyclopedia,  which focuses on topics such as race, gender, ethics, and indigenous studies. He gives invited keynote presentations on storytelling science, water crises, racial capitalism, and the global climate crisis, all around the world. Boje is Winner of the New Mexico State University Distinguished Career Award, and currently holds NMSU's highest rank as Regents Professor. He also was awarded an honorary doctorate from Aalborg University in Denmark, where he is considered the “godfather” of their Material Storytelling Lab. _______________________________________________________________ Traditional native flute music by Orlando Secatero from Pathways CD.Liberty song by Ron Crowder, Jim Casey and Danny Casey Feature image credit: Charmain Hurlbut, CCO Public Domain The post True Storytelling and the Legacy of Law and Order appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

Christine Gengaro is a Professor of Voice and Music Literature at Los Angeles City College, and the author of Listening to Stanley Kubrick: The Music in His Films. Support this podcast

Ep #47 - In this week's episode, I welcome Los Angeles City College's First-Year Experience program director Jessica Cerda to the show. We discuss how to manage your time, handle the stressors college inevitably heaps upon you, and how, no matter the campus, there is help and assistance in the form of: counselors, therapists, advisors, etc. available to guide you through the maze that is the college experience. While this was recorded before the novel coronavirus and subsequent quarantine took over our society, I still think what Jessica talks about is relevant as there are tens of thousands of high school students about to embark on the amazing journey that is college. There are equally as many students that have had their first year experiences halted as it was just gaining momentum - and I think all of you in the early stages of your university life will have some massive catching up to do when the schools reopen in the fall (fingers-crossed.) Here's my best wishes that all of you make it through this healthy and without the loss of a loved one. Be ready for next semester because things will return to some semblance of normalcy at some point and you want to have momentum in hand rather than starting from a stand still. Thank you so much for listening and being a part of this community. I truly appreciate your support. Also, please subscribe, rate and review the show to help us spread the word about this awesome free content. Your simple action of rating and reviewing does wonders in helping others find the show. If you have questions you'd like addressed on the show, want to book me to speak at an event, or want to recommend or be a guest on this show, please contact me through any of the social media links below or via email. Feel free to contact me here for any other reason as well: Facebook: https://facebook.com/jessemogle Twitter: https://twitter.com/jessemogle Instagram: https://instagram.com/jessemogle LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessemogle/ Email: jesseisinteresting@gmail.com  

In our 11th episode, we sit down with Gregory Larson, local instructor at Los Angeles City College, pastor at Kairos Community Church and avid advocate for East Hollywood. We discuss everything from our cultural isolation while growing up to the socioeconomic environment surrounding LACC, as well as our meeting for the first time at EastContinue reading EPISODE 11 – KAIROS CHURCH →

In our 11th episode, we sit down with Gregory Larson, local instructor at Los Angeles City College, pastor at Kairos Community Church and avid advocate for East Hollywood. We discuss everything from our cultural isolation while growing up to the socioeconomic environment surrounding LACC, as well as our meeting for the first time at EastContinue reading EPISODE 11 – KAIROS CHURCH →