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Episode 56: Evelyn McDonnell on Joan Didion
THE INTERVIEW
In Evelyn McDonnell’s The World According to Joan Didion, readers will find an intimate exploration of the life, craft, and legacy of the revered and influential writer Joan Didion.
As a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist, and screenwriter, Didion was a writer’s writer—a keen observer of life’s telling little details. Her insights continue to influence creatives and admirers, encouraging a close observation of the world by unsentimental critics and meticulous stylists.
McDonnell is an acclaimed journalist, essayist, and critic herself. A native Californian, feminist, and university professor, she regularly teaches Didion’s work and thus is well positioned to interpret her legacy for readers today.
Inspired by Didion’s own words—from both published and unpublished sources—and informed by the people who knew Didion and whose lives she helped shape, The World According to Joan Didion traces the path she carved from Sacramento, Portuguese Bend, Los Angeles, and Malibu to Manhattan, Miami, and Hawaii. McDonnell reveals the world as seen through Didion’s eyes and explores her work in chapters keyed to the singular physical motifs of her writing: Snake. Typewriter. Hotel. Notebook. Girl. Etc.
Hat & Beard editor and fellow traveler Vivien Goldman introduced me to McDonnell’s work a decade ago. Being a big Didion head myself, I couldn’t wait to talk to McDonnell about this smart, elegant, and undeniably readable biography—the first published since Joan’s death in December of 2021.
MUSIC
Yusef Lateef
Episode 51: Lost Objects with Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker
THE INTERVIEW
For Big Table episode 51, editors Joshua Glenn & Rob Walker discuss their latest book, Lost Objects: 50 Stories About the Things We Miss and Why They Matter.
Is there a “Rosebud” object in your past? A long-vanished thing that lingers in your memory—whether you want it to or not? As much as we may treasure the stuff we own, perhaps just as significant are the objects we have, in one way or another, lost. What is it about these bygone objects? Why do they continue to haunt us long after they’ve vanished from our lives?
In Lost Objects, editors Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker have gathered answers to those questions in the form of 50 true stories from a dazzling roster of writers, artists, thinkers, and storytellers, including Lucy Sante, Ben Katchor, Lydia Millet, Neil LaBute, Laura Lippman, Geoff Manaugh, Paola Antonelli, and Margaret Wertheim to name just a few. Each spins a unique narrative that tells a personal tale, and dives into the meaning of objects that remain present to us emotionally, even after they have physically disappeared.
While we may never recover this Rosebud, Lost Objects will teach us something new about why it mattered in the first place—and matters still.
For the readings this episode, two authors read their essays from the book: First up, Lucy Sante discusses her long lost club chair; and Mandy Keifez recounts her lost Orgone Accumulator.
MUSIC
By Languis
Episode 50: dublab
Live at NeueHouse
THE INTERVIEW
We are on episode 50! Thank you for listening along, everyone. This one is special as it involves a book published by Hat & Beard Press, one of Big Table’s main partners in cultural pursuits.
dublab: Future Roots Radio is the long-awaited book telling the story of the pioneering online radio station through interviews, photos, art, and more.
The dublab universe springs to life from these pages, unveiling the ethos that has guided the storied station since 1999.
We celebrated the release of the book with a live event at NeueHouse in downtown Los Angeles this past winter. The evening featured a panel moderated by DJ Mamabear with dublab DJ and founder Frosty, DJs Rachel Day, Hoseh, and Langosta.
dublab: Future Roots Radio, out now on Hat & Beard Press, is an ode to the boundless power of creative music and community building in Los Angeles and beyond.
Listen to an excerpt from the conversation recorded at NeueHouse earlier this year and order a copy below.
MUSIC
By Pharaohs
Episode 49: Tim Carpenter
THE INTERVIEW
To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die: An Essay with Digressions (The Ice Plant, 2022) by Tim Carpenter is a book-length essay about photography’s unique ability to ease the ache of human mortality. It’s also a book about photography theory, literary criticism, art history, and philosophy.
Drawing on writings and poems by Wallace Stevens, Marilynne Robinson, Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Valery, Virginia Wolff, and other artists, musicians, and thinkers, Brooklyn-based photographer Tim Carpenter argues passionately―in one main essay and a series of lively digressions―that photography is unique among the arts in its capacity for easing the fundamental ache of our mortality; for managing the breach that separates the self from all that is not the self; for enriching one’s sense of freedom and personhood; and for cultivating meaning in an otherwise meaningless reality.
Printed in three colors that reflect the various “voices” of the book, the text design, provided by publisher and editor Mike Slack, follows several channels of thought, inviting various approaches to reading.
To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die is a unique and instructive contribution to the literature on photography, and is as enthralling as other genre-melding photography books, The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer, Robert Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography, and more recently, Stephen Shore’s book Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography, among others.
Carpenter’s research offers both a timely polemic and a timeless resource for those who use a camera.
Tim and JC caught up recently to discuss this fascinating book, now in its second printing.
THE READING
Carpenter reads from To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die.
MUSIC
By Talk Talk
Episode 48: Steven Heller
THE INTERVIEW
After 100 books on design, Steven Heller has given us a coming-of-age memoir. The award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times has included 100 color photographs in Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York (Princeton Architectural Press, 2022), a 224-page visually inspired tour of the center of New York City’s 1960s and ’70s youth culture.
Steven Heller's memoir is not simply a chronological trek through the hills and valleys of his comparatively normal life, but rather a tale of growing up, whereby with luck and circumstance, he found himself in curious and remarkable places at critical times during the 1960s and ’70s in New York City.
Heller's delightful account of his life between the ages of 16 and 26 depicts his ambitious journey from the very beginning of his illustrious career as a graphic designer, cartoonist, and writer. Follow his path as he moves from stints at the New York Review of Sex, to Screw, and the New York Free Press, on to the East Village Other, Grove Press, and Interview until becoming the youngest art director (and occasional illustrator) for the New York Times Op-Ed page at the of age 23.
Having followed his work for years, JC Gabel was glad to sit down and talk with him about his start.
THE READING
Heller reads from Growing Up Underground.
MUSIC
By Cluster
Episode 47: You’re With Stupid by Bruce Adams
THE INTERVIEW
It is fitting that Bruce Adams’ new book, the sardonically-titled You’re with Stupid: kranky, Chicago and the Reinvention of Indie Music, begins at Jim’s Grill off Irving Park Road in the Ravenswood neighborhood on the North Side of the city: It was the first place I remember seeing a promotional poster for this new band, The Smashing Pumpkins, who were regular customers of Bill Choi’s Korean-inspired restaurant when they were first starting out.
After attending college at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, in the mid-1980s, Adams worked at a record shop and wrote for the fanzine Your Flesh. He caught the indie rock bug, inspired by the then burgeoning independent music industry that had grown out of labels like Dischord in Washington, DC, Sub Pop in Seattle, and Touch & Go in Chicago, who all presented a more artist-friendly path for bands to make a living selling their records, CDs, and cassettes
Adams found his way to Chicago, where, by the mid-1990s, a golden age of independent businesses was thriving: records labels (Drag City, Thrill Jockey, Atavistic, Bloodshot, Carrot Top), distributors (Ajax, Cargo, Southern), records shops (Reckless, Dusty Groove, Wax Trax, The Quaker Goes Deaf), underground press (the Chicago Reader and New City, but also Lumpen and Stop Smiling), and venues (Cabaret Metro, Lounge Ax, the Empty Bottle, and Double Door). As Adams documents, it was a near-perfect eco-system for creativity and experimentation in a pre-digital age.
You’re with Stupid is both a cultural history of the Chicago music world at that time, as told through the record labels and distributors that Adams worked for, but also a roadmap for founding a DIY operation. This is my conversation with Bruce Adams about his book and those times.
THE READING
Bruce Adams reads from You’re With Stupid.
MUSIC
By Labradford
Episode 46: Darryl Pinckney’s Literary Education
THE INTERVIEW
Darryl Pinckney arrived at Columbia University in New York City in the early 1970s and had the opportunity to enroll in Elizabeth Hardwick’s creative writing class at Barnard. It changed his life. When the semester was over, he continued to visit her, and he became close to both Hardwick and Barbara Epstein, Hardwick’s best friend, neighbor, and fellow founder of The New York Review of Books. Pinckney was drawn into a New York literary world where he encountered Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, and Mary McCarthy, among many others. Yet the intellectual and artistic freedom that Pinckney observed on West 67th Street were in conflict with the demands of his politically minded family and their sense of the unavoidable lessons of black history. Pinckney’s education in Hardwick’s orbit took place amidst the cultural movements then sweeping New York. In addition, through his peers and former classmates—Felice Rosser, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lucy Sante, Howard Brookner, and Nan Goldin—Pinckney witnessed the coming together of the New Wave scene in the East Village. He experienced the avant-garde life while discovering the sexual freedom brought by gay liberation. It was his time for hope.
In Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West 67th Street, Manhattan (FSG, 2022), Pinckney recalls his introduction to New York and to the writing life. The critic and novelist intimately captures this revolutionary, brilliant, and troubled period in American letters. Elizabeth Hardwick was not only his link to the intellectual heart of New York but also a source of continuous support and of inspiration—in the way she worked, her artistry, and in the beauty of her voice. Through his memories of the city and of Hardwick, we see the emergence and evolution of Pinckney as a writer himself. J.C. Gabel spoke with Pinckney last fall to discuss his literary beginnings and the influence of Elizabeth Hardwick and her circle on his life and work.
THE READING
Darryl Pinckney discusses James Baldwin.
MUSIC
By The Joubert Singers
Remix by Larry Levan
Episode 45: Nicole Rudick on Niki de Saint Phalle
THE INTERVIEW
Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works celebrating the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination, and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance―a process connecting life to art. In this unconventional, illuminated biography, Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle’s visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches, and writings—many previously unpublished or long unavailable–that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy.
Born in France, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) was raised in New York and began making art at age 23. Along with her celebrated large-scale projects―including the Stravinsky Fountain at the Centre Pompidou, Golem in Jerusalem, and the Tarot Garden in Tuscany―Saint Phalle also produced writing and works on paper that delve into her own biography: childhood and her break with family, marriage to novelist Harry Mathews, motherhood, a long collaborative relationship with artist Jean Tinguely, and her productive years in Southern California.
Nicole Rudick is a critic and an editor. Her writing on art, literature, and comics has been published in The New York Review of Books, the New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, and elsewhere. She was managing editor of The Paris Review for nearly a decade. She is the editor, most recently, of a new edition of Gary Panter’s legendary comic Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise. Her latest book is What is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined.
In the interviewer’s chair this episode is writer and curator Yann Perreau, who organized some exhibitions of works by Saint Phalle. Originally from Paris, Yann now lives in Los Angeles.
Here’s Yann Perreau discussing the life and work of Saint Phalle with writer, critic, and biographer Nicole Rudick.
THE READING
Nicole Rudick reads from her latest, What is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined.
MUSIC
By Grace Jones
Episode 44: Ingrid Rojas Contreras
THE INTERVIEW
For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political turmoil and violence of 1980s and ’90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, not much surprised her as a child. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero–a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”, or the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. As the first woman to inherit those secrets, Rojas Contreras’ mother was just as powerful.
This legacy had always felt like it belonged to them, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that resulted in amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family told her that this had happened before. Decades ago, her mother had suffered a fall that left her with amnesia too. When she recovered, she had gained access to the secrets.
Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, as well as resurrected Colombian history and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the seemingly incomprehensible. The Man Who Could Move Clouds is a testament to the healing power of storytelling and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.
Here’s my conversation with Ingrid, discussing her new memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds (Doubleday, 2022).
THE READING
Ingrid Rojas Contreras reads from The Man Who Could Move Clouds.
MUSIC
By Ennio Morricone
Episode 43: Stay True by Hua Hsu
THE INTERVIEW
In the eyes of 18-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—a passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream. For Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them.
But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.
Determined to hold on to his memories—all that was left of one of his closest friends—Hua turned to writing. Stay True (Doubleday, 2022) is the book he’s been working on ever since—over 20 years by Hua’s estimation. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging. It is also a book about friendship, race, grieving and recovery.
I first came to know Hua’s work through his music writing—first in the hip-hop column he wrote for The Wire, the British experimental music magazine, and more recently, in The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer. Hua teaches at Bard College, and lives in Brooklyn. He grew up in the Bay Area, where most of the book takes place while he is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.
Hua and I have known each other loosely for many years—we have many mutual friends and are roughly the same age. I’ve always admired his work, and his beautifully written second book is a highpoint, jam-packed as it is with descriptive detail, a light and easy spare prose, and a meaningful account of an unlikely friendship.
Here’s my conversation with Hua Hsu discussing his new memoir, Stay True.
THE READING
Hua Hsu reads from Stay True, which was part of an audio ‘zine he made to accompany the book’s release.
MUSIC
By Mobb Deep
Audio ‘zine reading by Hua Hsu
Episode 42: Nick Drnaso’s Acting Class
THE INTERVIEW
Nick Drnaso, acclaimed author of Sabrina, is back with Acting Class, his third book on Drawn & Quarterly. A tapestry of disconnect, distrust, and manipulation, Acting Class brings together 10 strangers under the tutelage of John Smith, a mysterious and morally questionable leader. The group of social misfits and restless searchers have one thing in common: They are all out of step with their surroundings and desperate for a change.
With mounting unease, the class sinks deeper into Smith’s lessons, even as he demands increasing devotion. When the line between real life and imagination begins to blur, the group’s fears and desires are laid bare. Exploring the tension between who we are and how we present, Drnaso cracks open his characters’ masks and takes us through an unsettling American journey.
Like Sabrina—the first graphic novel short-listed for the Man Booker Prize—Drnaso’s latest offering is an extremely sharp study of our everyday existence and how we live. His minimalist comic-drawing style is nevertheless awash in a cinematic haze of melancholy and the color palette is hued in a realism that is uniquely his.
A friend handed me Sabrina, several years ago, knowing I was somewhat of an outsider in the realm of underground comic culture, telling me, “You will love the book in the same way you love certain novels.” And he was right.
While Drnaso is revered all over the world for his bleak honestness and sly, dark humor, he grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. Although we are of different generations, the subtlety of his style is familiar to me as a fellow Midwesterner and Chicagoan.
Notably, this is Big Table’s first episode centered around a graphic novel. It’s certainly a change from our focus on nonfiction books, but Drnaso’s storytelling pulls so effortlessly from real life that one feels his characters are meta comics versions of people encountered in our everyday lives.
Here's my conversation with Nick Drnaso discussing his new book, Acting Class.
MUSIC
By Japan
Episode 41: Ada Calhoun on Peter Schjeldahl and Frank O’Hara
THE INTERVIEW
In her latest book, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove Atlantic, 2022), Ada Calhoun traces her fraught relationship with her father, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, and their shared obsession with the poet Frank O’Hara. The book features exclusive material from archival recordings of literary and art world legends, living and dead.
Having stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father had conducted for his never-completed biography of O’Hara, Calhoun set out to finish the book he had started 40 years earlier.
As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, she thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more difficult it became: Calhoun had to confront not only O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s and her own.
The result is a kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with the moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. In reckoning with her unique heritage, as well as providing new insights into the life of one of our most important poets, Calhoun has offered a brave and hopeful meditation on parents and children, artistic ambition, and the complexities of what we leave behind.
Here’s Episode 41: The Big Table conversation with Ada Calhoun.
THE READING
Ada Calhoun reads from Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me.
MUSIC
By Ryuichi Sakamoto
Frank O’Hara reads “Ode to Joy”: Frank O'Hara Reads His Poems
Episode 40: Alexandra Lange on America’s Malls
THE INTERVIEW
In The Design of Childhood, acclaimed writer, architecture critic, and historian Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. Lange now turns her sharp eye to another subject we thought we knew. Chronicling the invention of the mall by postwar architects and merchants, Lange reveals how the design of these market places played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Meet Me By the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall (Bloomsbury, 2022) is Lange’s perceptive account of how these shopping centers became strange and rich with contradiction. In it, Lange describes America’s malls as places of freedom and exclusion—but also as places of undeniable community, and rampant consumerism.
Few places have been as nostalgized, or as maligned, as shopping malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce. In their prime, they proved a powerful draw for creative thinkers such as Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, and George Romero, who all understood the mall’s appeal as critics and consumers. Yet today, amid the aftershocks of financial crises and a global pandemic, as well as the rise of online retail, the dystopian husk of an abandoned shopping center has become one of our era’s defining images. Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, anyway? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated?
Here’s Episode 40: The Big Table conversation with architecture critic, writer, and historian Alexandra Lange, discussing Meet My by the Fountain.
THE READING
Alexandra Lange reads from Meet Me by the Fountain.
MUSIC
OMD
Episode 39: Ben Shattuck on Henry David Thoreau
THE INTERVIEW
170-plus years ago, Henry David Thoreau began his legendary hermit walks in New England. Thoreau published many of his most cherished works as a naturalist about some of these walks: Walden, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod.
Artist, writer, and New England native Ben Shattuck does his own walking in Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau (Tin House Books, 2022), which charts six journeys taken by Shattuck, each one inspired by a walk once taken by Thoreau.
With little more than a loaf of bread, a brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau’s path through the Cape’s outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertip.
After the Cape, Shattuck walks down the coastline of his hometown, and then through the Allagash. Along the way, he encounters unexpected characters, landscapes, and stories, seeing for himself the restorative effects walking can have on a dampened spirit.
Shattuck finds himself uncovering new insights about family, love, friendship, and fatherhood, and understanding more deeply the lessons walking can offer through life’s changing seasons.
Shattuck splits his time between Los Angeles and Coastal Massachusetts, where he also runs Davoll’s General Store in Dartmouth.
We caught up during the Spring to discuss his first book, Thoreau, and the therapeutic nature of walking.
THE READING
Ben Shattuck reads from Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau.
MUSIC
Jürgen Müller
Episode 38: Paul Morley on Tony Wilson
THE INTERVIEW
To write about Tony Wilson, aka Anthony H. Wilson, is to write about a number of public and private characters and personalities—a clique of unreliable narrators—constantly changing shape and form. At the helm of Factory Records and the Hacienda, Wilson unleashed landmark acts such as Joy Division and New Order into the world, while pursuing a myriad of other creative endeavors and appointing himself a custodian of Manchester’s cultural legacy, one of innovation and change.
To writer, broadcaster, and cultural critic Paul Morley, he was this and much more: bullshitting hustler, flashy showman, aesthetic adventurer, mean factory boss, self-deprecating chancer, intellectual celebrity, loyal friend, shrewd mentor, and insatiable publicity seeker. It was Morley to whom Wilson left a daunting final request: to write this book.
From Manchester with Love: The Life and Opinions of Tony Wilson, then, is the biography of a man who became one with his hometown of Manchester, England—the music he championed and the myths he made, of love and hate, of life and death. In the cultural theater of that storied city, Tony Wilson broke in and took centerstage.
Morley has written about music, art, and entertainment since the 1970s. He wrote for the New Musical Express from 1976 to 1983. A founding member of the Art of Noise and a staff member at the Royal Academy of Music, he collaborated with Grace Jones on her memoirs and is the author of a number of books about music, including The Age of Bowie, his history of classical music A Sound Mind, and a biography of Bob Dylan, You Lose Yourself, You Reappear.
Our man in London, Dermot McPartland, handled interviewing duties again this episode, helping Morley unpack the many minds and lives of Tony Wilson.
THE READING
Paul Morley reads an excerpt from From Manchester With Love.
MUSIC
Joy Division
Episode 37: Mark Rozzo on Dennis Hopper & Brooke Hayward
THE INTERVIEW
Mark Rozzo’s astute and engaging new book Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles (Ecco Press, 2021) documents the lives of Hopper and Hayward as New Hollywood’s It couple but also paints a panoramic landscape of 1960s Los Angeles.
Rozzo captures the vivacity of those heady early ’60s days, just as the underground culture of the Beat Generation was about to explode into the mainstream counterculture of the latter part of the decade—the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll mantra of the decade was not born until the late 1960s.
Sixties Los Angeles was a new center of gravity; there was a new consciousness, a West Coast emergence of art, underground cinema, music and civil rights that had never happened before, and has not happened since.
Hopper and Hayward were not only up-and-coming actors at the time, they were also cross-cultural connectors who brought together the best of underground Los Angeles art, music and politics, under one roof—literally—1712 N. Crescent Heights in the Hollywood Hills. This modest Spanish Colonial was the meeting ground, as Rozzo illustrates, for a who’s who of the time: Jane Fonda, Andy Warhol, Joan Didion, Jasper Johns, Tina Turner, Ed Ruscha, The Byrds, and the Black Panthers.
Their art collection, showcased at the Crescent Heights house, and the house itself, is the backdrop of Everybody Thought We Were Crazy. Rozzo tells the story in a straight-forward dual narrative that helps fill in large parts of Hayward’s story, which compared to Hopper’s, hasn’t been as well documented or explored in other books. Rozzo finds the right balance.
As a decade-ending benchmark, Hopper’s directorial debut Easy Rider became the emblematic proto-New Hollywood independent film, alongside Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool. These films help illustrate the promise and loss of that generation and that era. There isn’t a happy ending in those films or in Hopper’s marriage to Hayward, unfortunately—the couple divorced in 1969 just at Easy Rider was about to make cinematic history.
After the divorce, Hayward eventually sold the house, broke up the art collection and moved back to New York, where she still resides. Hopper died in 2010.
Rozzo’s wide view of 1960s Los Angeles is essential reading for anyone interested in the unvarnished history of that period.
Here’s my conversation with Mark Rozzo discussing the life and times of Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward.
THE READING
Mark Rozzo reads from his new book Everybody Thought We Were Crazy.
MUSIC
Love
Episode 36: Dilla Time by Dan Charnas
THE INTERVIEW
J Dilla—aka James Dewitt Yancey or Jaydee as he was previously known—was a musical genius who was hardly known to mainstream audiences during his brief life.
In Dilla Time—equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history—hip hop historian and NYU professor Dan Charnas chronicles this musical outlier who changed popular music behind the scenes, working with renowned acts like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu and influencing the music of superstars like Michael and Janet Jackson.
Dilla died at the age of 32, and in his lifetime never had a pop hit. Since his death, however, he has become a demigod of sorts: revered by jazz musicians and rap icons from Robert Glasper to Kendrick Lamar; memorialized in symphonies and taught at universities. And at the core of this adulation is innovation: a new kind of musical time-feel he created on a drum machine, one that changed the way “traditional” musicians play.
Charnas echoes the life of James DeWitt Yancey from his gifted childhood in Detroit, to his rise as a Grammy-nominated hip-hop producer, to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death. Charnas also rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of soul in Dilla’s own “Motown,” to funk, techno, and disco.
Dilla Time (MCD/FSG, 2022) is a different kind of book about music, a visual experience with graphics that build those concepts step by step for fans and novices alike, teaching us to “see” and feel rhythm in a unique and enjoyable way. It’s the story of the man and his machines, his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators. Culled from more than 150 interviews about one of the most important and influential musical figures in generations, Dilla Time is a book as delightfully detail-oriented and unique as J Dilla’s music itself.
Filling in for interviewing duties this episode is Charnas’ NYU professor colleague and Hat & Beard Press editor Vivien Goldman, who is the author, most recently, of Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot.
Here is Vivien’s conversation with Dan Charnas, discussing the life and times of J Dilla.
THE READING
Dan Charnas reads from his new book Dilla Time.
MUSIC
J Dilla
Episode 35: The
Steve Keene Art Book
THE INTERVIEW
It’s not hyperbole to say that Steve Keene has produced more original artwork than most (if not all) American artists, having painted more than 300,000 works in the last 30 years.
Raised and educated in Charlottesville, Virginia, he first came to my attention in the mid-1990s, when I was working for the indie record label Drag City. Keene had done the cover art for the Silver Jews’ Arizona Record as well as Pavement’s Wowee Zowee on Matador. He had gone to college with David Berman (Silver Jews) and Stephen Malkmus (Pavement) in the 1980s, and they remained friends and collaborators afterward.
Although he is known to many for his indie rock album covers, he has a much bigger audience today outside of the music scene of downtown NY from another era. Not only is he now collected in museums but he is still lovingly known for making affordable art: most of Keene’s work retails for under $70; in the 1990s heyday, it was only $5 or $10 a piece. Steve continues to crank out 50 paintings at a time, day-in and day-out, from his converted auto body shop home/studio in Brooklyn, where he has lived and worked with his architect wife and family for decades.
The Steve Keene Art Book—originally conceived during his sold out show at Shepard Fairey’s LA Gallery Subliminal Projects in 2016—is the first art book dedicated exclusively to his work as a fine artist. For this episode, I spoke with the book’s editor Daniel Efram, a photographer, producer, and long-time manager of the Apples in Stereo—for whom Keene also created the cover art on Fun Trick Noise Maker 25 years ago—about Steve Keene and his lifelong artistic journey.
I’ve been a long-time fan and collector of Keene’s work. Twenty years ago, I spent a day with him, profiling him in the pages of Stop Smiling, “The Magazine for High-Minded Lowlifes,” which I published from 1995 to 2009 from Chicago and New York. Hence, this was a nice circle of life moment.
The Steve Keene Art Book is published through Hat & Beard Press and Tractor Beam, Efram's New York City-based press.
THE READING
Editor Daniel Efram reads from his essay in The Steve Keene Art Book.
MUSIC
The Apples in Stereo
Episode 34:
The Elephant 6 Collective
THE INTERVIEW
Adam Clair was barely out of undergrad when he began the manuscript for Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery (Hachette Books, 2022).
The book is a definitive history of the 1990s underground musical movement known as the Elephant 6 Collective. Founded by Robert Schneider, Bill Doss, Will Cullen Hart, and Jeff Mangum, who grew up as friends in the small town of Ruston, Louisiana, the Elephant 6 was initially centered around three bands—the Apples in Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Olivia Tremor Control—whose records were expertly produced in home studios in Denver and Athens, Georgia, by Robert Schneider, an engineer extraordinaire who wouldn’t mind being referred to as the Brian Wilson-like character of the collective. (Schneider is currently a professor of math in Georgia, having earned a PhD in his post-rocker years.)
By the late-1990s, the Elephant 6 had exploded onto the musical scene in a way that hasn’t really been felt since—their ’60s psychedelia-inspired, almost utopian mindset of a better world with their music as the soundtrack was as intoxicating then as it is now. Rock ‘n’ Roll stardom was something that seemed to frighten and elude the collective’s founders, however. The group was focused more on the art of the music than on the business side.
By the turn of the century, relentless touring and recording schedules led Neutral Milk Hotel’s front man Jeff Mangum to retreat from performing—and even from doing interviews. The Olivia’s disbanded for a time, the Apples changed line ups, and the second-generation bands, like Of Montreal and Beulah, began to build their own audiences. In 2013, the original members of Neutral Milk Hotel reunited for a year or two of touring. Then Bill Doss from Olivia Tremor Control passed away suddenly, thwarting their comeback.
All the while, Adam Clair was gathering his reportage. He conducted over 100 interviews over 13 years to complete Endless Endless. Although the reclusive Jeff Mangum did not speak to him for the book, Clair was able to carve in Mangum’s voice from past interviews (there were more than I remember taking place, having been around to see it unfold in real time the first time around).
Clair and I spoke recently about Endless Endless and how it came to be. Listen below or wherever you find your podcasts.
THE READING
For the Reading this episode, Clair reads from his introduction to Endless Endless.
MUSIC
The Olivia Tremor Control
Episode 33:
José Vadi on California
THE INTERVIEW
Jose Vadi grew up in California’s Inland Empire, but his roots go back to Puerto Rico and Mexico. His abuelo, or grandfather, was an Okie who hopped freight trains west to Nebraska and then on to California, the promised land.
Like many immigrants, he worked for a time as a migrant worker in the salad bowl of California’s agriculturally rich central valley, before settling down in the San Bernardino Valley to raise a family.
Vadi’s second book, Inter State: Essays from California (Soft Skull Press), is an innovative collection of interconnected essays. Each piece appeared elsewhere previously, in slightly different form, but together, they create a prismatic picture of California’s sprawling nooks and crannies—from the agricultural lands to the gentrifying urban culture of the bay area.
Vadi’s routines, including commuting to his old job in San Francisco, are a common thread that weave these essays together. Although they were all written between 2015 and early 2020, as Vadi notes in the afterword, “connecting California, then the COVID-19 pandemic, police violence, and 2020’s record-breaking fire season grabbed and pulled at the seams as hard, quickly and destructively as possible.”
Inter State is a valuable book in understanding the California of today, a state rife with stubborn issues: neo-liberal fantasy-land economics, a housing crisis, an ill-prepared bureaucracy for managing climate change and natural disasters, and largely tone-deaf leaders who may say the right things but who are just as compromised as some of the swamp creatures in Washington, DC.
And yet… Vadi’s book is hopeful. He left the Bay Area for Sacramento and now has more time to write poems, essays, plays, take photos, and skateboard (another undercurrent in the book). He seems to have successfully removed late capitalism as a hinderance to his life, at least for now. His new surroundings in Sacramento have renewed his creativity and purpose. We caught up recently to discuss Inter State and what he’s up to next.
THE READING
For the Reading this episode, Vadi reads from his title essay, “Inter State”.
MUSIC
Pharaohs
Episode 32:
Carole Angier on W.G. Sebald
THE INTERVIEW
Although he did experience some fanfare in his lifetime, German writer, academic, and novelist W.G. Sebald—Max to his friends and colleagues—died 20 years ago in a car crash near his adoptive home in Norwich, England. He was only 58.
His postmodern novels—Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz—were written in quick succession in a period of less than 10 years, and they were all published in English translations in less than five years, making him one of Germany’s biggest authors, almost overnight.
Before his death, Sebald had taught in the British university system for decades, mainly at the University of East Anglia, where he helped found the literary translation department. He really did not begin writing in his signature style—a mix of travelogue, memoir, historical fiction with embedded pictures and ephemera—until middle age, however. Walter Benjamin famously opined that any great writer creates their own genre; Sebald accomplished this with just a brief collection of books.
Through his unique, poetic prose style of writing, his books grab hold and immerse readers in a world of memory and loss like no other novelist. Trauma runs through his work and his characters seem so real because, like most fictional creations—at least in part—they are based on real people. Sebald’s distinctive style got him into trouble, both when he was alive and certainly posthumously. Some readers take issue with his re-purposing of the true-life stories of Jewish people. He has been accused of exploiting these stories for personal gain through novelization.
When I first began to read his work, shortly after his death in 2001, I interpreted it as an homage to the Jewish lives he chronicled, written by a German who grew up in the shadow, silence, and shame of the horrors of WWII. Sebald’s father was a military man—a Nazi officer during the war and a member of the re-constituted German army in the post-war years. Sebald grew up in the beatific surroundings of Bavaria in Germany and had a deep hatred for the Nazi regime and his own family’s complicity. The fate of the Jews—and other minorities targeted by the Nazi war machine—is a mournful thread that Sebald tears at throughout all of his novels. He also wrote a nonfiction study of the bombings of German cities, entitled On the Natural History of Destruction.
Enter biographer Carole Angier, whose previous books include studies of novelist Jean Rhys and Italian physicist and writer Primo Levi. Of Viennese descent, Angier grew up in Canada before returning to the UK. She is also Jewish and roughly the same age Sebald would have been had he lived. It took her seven years to finish Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald (Bloomsbury, 2021). The title, of course, a nod to Nabokov’s famous memoir, Speak, Memory, one of Sebald’s favorite books.
Angier and I caught up recently to discuss her 600-plus-page doorstopper of a book. One of the reasons I wanted to talk with her about it—apart from my longtime love of Sebald—was to ask for her thoughts on the controversy his work still seems to generate, even 20 years after his death. A great deal of the reviews of Speak, Silence, in the States at least, were hyper-critical of Sebald playing fast and loose with some facts in his fiction. But all great fiction writers pluck characteristics and facts to shape their fictional worlds and, so, while Sebald’s use of real photographs and ephemera in his work for visual effect made his narrative style offensive to some, it also made it more potent for others. In this interview, Angier speaks to this subject, and many more.
THE READING
For the Reading this episode, we have audio from a 2001 event at the 92nd Street Y, where Sebald read from his then newest novel Austerlitz. He was tragically killed in a car crash later that year.
MUSIC
Music Tangerine Dream
92nd Street Y reading
Episode 31:
Robert Gottlieb on Greta Garbo
THE INTERVIEW
Robert Gottlieb has lived a charmed life as one of the most influential book editors of his generation—first at Simon & Shuster and then, for many years, at Knopf and Random House.
In the ’90s, he was also one of the few storied editors of The New Yorker.
Gottlieb’s other two passions are modern dance and cinema. From his editor’s desk, he helped program the George Balanchine Theatre for decades, all while acquiring and editing myriad film books over those years.
And now, at 90, he has written a film biography himself: a definitive portrait of Swedish actress Greta Garbo, whose elusiveness was something she always carried with her, as he illustrates, from her peasant-girl days in Stockholm in the early 20th century to her Hollywood years to her reclusive life in New York for five decades after retreating from Hollywood and acting in the early 1940s, just as the US entered WWII.
Garbo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) is a gorgeously illustrated hybrid book with dozens of images throughout to help define the enigma that Garbo created onscreen. After his main narrative, the book features a Garbo Reader of sorts, with other published work and images about her life and times, illuminating the life of this mysterious yet trailblazing woman, whose own privacy was essential for her happiness and very existence.
Gottlieb, a child of the depression years, was always aware of Garbo as a young kid going to see films in New York. Here, his wonderful prose writing captures this complicated woman who became one of the most famous people in the world, almost overnight. And yet, she was retired by age 35, after acting in only 28 films.
Garbo is an invaluable book for anyone interested in her work and film history; from the silent era to the Golden Age of cinema.
THE READING
For the Reading this episode, we have an excerpt from the audiobook version of Garbo, read by the actress Maria Tucci, Gottlieb's wife.
MUSIC
Music composed by William Grant Still
Performed by Mark Boozer
Episode 30:
Emily Rapp Black on Frida Kahlo
THE INTERVIEW
After seeing Frida Kahlo’s painting “The Two Fridas,” writer and professor Emily Rapp Black felt an intense connection with the famous Mexican artist—maybe one of the most recognized faces in the world.
Rapp Black has been an amputee since childhood. She grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs, and learned to hide her disability from the world.
Kahlo, too, was an amputee, having sustained lifelong injuries after a horrific bus crash during her teenage years, eventually leading to her right leg being amputated.
In Kahlo's life and art, Rapp Black saw her own life, from numerous operations to the compulsion to create pain silences.
Rapp Black—an award-winning memoirist—tells the story of losing her infant son to Tay-Sachs disease, giving birth to her healthy daughter, and learning to accept her body—and how along her path in life, Frida inspired her to find a way forward when all else seemed lost.
Frida is the subject of Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg (Notting Hill Editions, 2021), Rapp Black’s fourth and most recent book. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she also teaches medical narratives at the School of Medicine.
THE READING
Emily Rapp Black reads from Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Stereolab
Episode 29:
Black Ivy’s Jason Jules
THE INTERVIEW
Jason Jules is a writer, blogger, stylist, brand consultant, and devotee of the Ivy look, albeit in a quite subverted form.
The face of Drakes of London and writer of the John Simons documentary film A Modernist, Jules is widely recognized as the most stylish man in London media and culture.
Described by Complex magazine as having a style akin to a “living, breathing jazz song,” he is also the creator of the online and real-world style brand Garmsville.
His latest book, Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style (Reel Art Press), charts a period in American history when Black men across the country adopted a clothing style seen largely as the preserve of a privileged elite, and remade it for themselves. The Oxford button-down shirt, the hand-stitched loafer, the repp ties—these otherwise conventional clothes are donned with an approach so revolutionary, you won’t be able to see them the same way again.
Black Ivy is an art book about clothes, but it’s also about freedom—both individual and collective. From the most avant-garde jazz musicians, visual artists, and poets to the more influential architects, philosophers, political leaders, and writers, Black Ivy explores, for the first time, the major role this period of aspiration—and upheaval—played, and what these clothes said about the people who wore them.
Dermot McPartland, our Man in London, handled interviewing duties for this episode.
THE READING:
Jason Jules reads from the introduction to Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Pharoah Sanders
Episode 28:
Rosecrans Baldwin on the City-State of Los Angeles
THE INTERVIEW
Los Angeles is a hundred suburbs in search of a city, or so it’s been said.
In his new book about Los Angeles, novelist and nonfiction writer Rosecrans Baldwin—a somewhat recent transplant to the city from the East Coast—tackles the famous quip and expands on it. His premise in Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles (MCD/FSG, 2021) is spot-on: “Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, it is an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny—this is the city-state of Los Angeles.”
Baldwin spent years reporting on this book before finally finishing it during the pandemic last year. He looks at the city through so many prisms and angles, it’s impossible to finish reading Everything Now without acquiring a deep (or deeper) fondness for L.A.
The book is an exploration of the city, its people, and its culture. And as stated on the sell copy of the book, in Los Angeles, “you have no better plan that exists to watch the United States’ past, and its possible futures play themselves out.”
Like Thom Andersen’s magnum opus, the documentary film Los Angeles Plays Itself, Everything Now is a deeply researched, and well-argued street-level view of the city—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Baldwin and I caught up this past fall to discuss how his latest book came to be.
THE READING:
Rosecrans Baldwin reads from his latest book, Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Flying Lotus
Episode 27:
Daniel Oppenheimer on Dave Hickey
THE INTERVIEW
Dave Hickey was an inspirational character—a writer of essays and songs, an astute art and literary critic, a one-time gallerist and, certainly, an art-world provocateur.
Hickey published his two most famous books in the 1990s, The Invisible Dragon—a call to reconsider beauty in art—and Air Guitar, a cult classic essay collection that exposed the more personal and venerable style of cultural criticism.
Dave passed away at the age of 82, a few weeks after we recorded this interview with his biographer, Daniel Oppenheimer. Hickey's pariah status had by then waned, but he was the last of a certain school of rebel writers of the 1960s and 1970s who could still churn out consistently good work.
Based in Austin, Texas, where Dave got his start as a gallerist—having opened A Clean, Well-Lighted Place in 1967—writer and now biographer Daniel Oppenheimer charts Hickey’s life and times in Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, a smart, compact biography published by the University of Texas Press.
Drawing from first-person interviews with Hickey, his wife and friends, comrades and critics, Oppenheimer helps explain Why Dave Hickey Matters and why we should read him, particularly his essay collections Air Guitar and Pirates and Farmers.
With Hickey’s passing, this episode has become a tribute to the great Dave Hickey, as much as it was a good conversation with his biographer. He will be missed. But his writing will live on.
THE READING:
Artist and professor Joel Ross reads a part of “Dealing” from Dave Hickey’s essay collection Air Guitar.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno
Episode 26:
The Bohemians by Norman Ohler
THE INTERVIEW
Like many readers in the States, I first became aware of Norman Ohler’s work after reading Blitzed (2015), his epic history of drug use in the Third Reich.
The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Ohler’s follow up—which came out in paperback in the States last year—was born from some of the research he was doing for Blitzed. The book is a page-turning historical thriller I couldn’t put down. It’s essential reading for anyone interested in WWII history and specifically subterfuge.
Ohler, who lives in Berlin, and I spoke last year while he was vacationing with his family on the island of Jersey.
We started in on how he discovered the untold story of Harro and Libertas, two free-love provocateurs who ran an underground circuit of anti-Nazi propaganda campaigns, as well as formal espionage activities, from the heart of Berlin during the height of the Third Reich’s power, and how their love story and largely unknown work to fight against fascism in their home country need to be better-known to the world.
THE READING:
Scholar and author Jeffrey H. Jackson reads from his kindred spirit WWII resistance book, Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis (Algonquin Books), which follows the lives of two French women artists and lovers on the island of Jersey who defied the Nazis much the way Harro and Libertas did in Berlin.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Kurt Weill
Performed by Westchester Symphony Orchestra & conducted by Siegfried Landau
Episode 25:
Warren Ellis on Nina Simone’s Gum
THE INTERVIEW
Musician Warren Ellis’ first book, Nina Simone’s Gum (Faber & Faber, 2021), is a magical journal mixing memoir, cultural history, reportage, and travelogue. The memorable title comes from the Meltdown Festival, a concert series his regular collaborator, Nick Cave, curated in London in 1999 that featured a rare live performance by Nina Simone herself.
After her set, Ellis rushed to the stage—not for a coveted set list, but for a piece of chewing gum Simone had discarded atop her piano, which he then preserved in a rolled-up hand towel. Ellis’ memento lived in a crumpled Tower Records bag for the next 20 years.
Two decades after that 1999 performance, Cave curated “Stranger than Kindness,” an exhibition at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, where he included Simone’s gum as a piece of sculpture cast in silver. Cave called it a “religious artifact.”
In Nina Simone’s Gum, Ellis brings you along as he tracks the artifact for posterity. The book is a meditation on life, musicianship, and the importance of bestowing meaning to objects and experiences; it is also a tome about friendship, the artistic process, and human connection.
To mix things up this episode—and because Ellis was on tour—Dermot McPartland, our man in London, took over interviewing duties.
THE READING:
For the reading, Warren Ellis reads from Nina Simone’s Gum, his latest book.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Dirty Three
Episode 24:
David Ulin on Joan Didion
THE INTERVIEW
For over 50 years, Joan Didion, a daughter of California, has been in a league all her own, as a writer and novelist. Unlike many critics, she is capable of writing memorable fiction that, although not as widely read as her reportage and singular essays, stands the test of time.
The Library of America Series recently published its second Joan Didion volume featuring the novels Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, as well as nonfiction works Salvador, Miami and After Henry, her third major essay collection.
Edited by former LA Times book editor, author, and critic David Ulin, the collection is brimming with her enduring legacy and highlights her work from the 1980s and 1990s, which are not as well known.
In this episode, Ulin helps JC Gabel unpack why Didion’s later work and overall influence cannot be underestimated.
THE READING:
For the reading this episode, journalist and author Steffie Nelson reads “A Trip to Xanadu” from the recently published collection of odds and ends by Didion, entitled Let Me Tell You What I Mean (Knopf). Nelson is the author of Slouching Toward Los Angeles (Rare Bird Books), a collection of essays about Didion and the City of Angels.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Yusef Lateef
Episode 23:
Matthew Specktor
THE INTERVIEW
Matthew Specktor grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a talent agent and screenwriter. One of his childhood heroes was the doomed writer F. Scott Fitzgerald who arrived in Hollywood in the late 1930s to eke out a living as a screenwriter while he labored on what ended up being his fourth and final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. A few months shy of his 40th birthday, Specktor moved back to L.A. and into a crumbling building across the street from where Fitzgerald lived out his last years. Flailing professionally and reeling from his mother's cancer diagnosis, he became unmoored. Instead of cracking up, as Fitz had done after the Roaring Twenties ended and he struggled to complete his post-Gatsby masterpiece Tender is the Night, Specktor embarked on a journey of self-discovery, re-evaluating ideas of success and failure in general, but especially as they apply to Los Angeles, his home town.
What followed is part cultural memoir, part cultural history, part portrait of a place, as the dust jacket declares in Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis & Los Angeles, California (Tin House Books, 2021). Specktor tells his own narrative alongside some known and lesser-known players of the New Hollywood era of his youth: you meet Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, Hal Ashby, and Michael Cimino.
The result is a masterwork of genre-bending nonfiction, an unvarnished view of Tinseltown and its demons, but also its undeniable magic and charm. In the end, after much loss, optimism wins. And that is how we know we have a good book on our hands: When it helps us navigate through the "beautiful ruins that await us all."
J.C. Gabel spoke with Skecktor earlier this fall about his latest book and the creative process.
THE READING:
Matthew Specktor reads from Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis & Los Angeles, California.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by David Bowie
Episode 22: Kyle Beachy
THE INTERVIEW
Kyle Beachy has been skateboarding for as long as he’s been creating stories. For him, the two have always been intertwined. After releasing the coming-of-age novel The Slide in 2009, he began to write more seriously about skateboarding, as aficionado, critic, and essayist. A decade’s worth of this material is now included in The Most Fun Thing (Grand Central Publishing, 2021), his second, book-length collection. The Most Fun Thing delves deep into skateboarding's origins and ethos. What is skateboarding? What does it mean to continue skateboarding after the age of 40, four decades after the kickflip was invented? How does one live authentically as an adult while staying true to a passion hatched in childhood? How does skateboarding shape one's understanding of contemporary American life? Contemplating these questions and more, Beachy offers a deep exploration of a pastime—often overlooked, regularly maligned—whose seeming simplicity conceals universal truths.
Beachy is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Roosevelt University in Chicago, where he has taught for more than a decade. He sat down with J.C. Gabel earlier this fall to discuss the new book, nonfiction vs. fiction writing, and how exactly skateboarding has shaped his life.
THE READING:
Kyle Beachy reads from his latest collection, The Most Fun Thing.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Hieroglyphics
Episode 21: Nathaniel Rich
THE INTERVIEW
With the world leaders of the G20 having met about climate change last week and the upcoming United Nations climate summit happening in Scotland this week, we’re airing our conversation from a few months back with journalist and novelist Nathaniel Rich, who began to more steadily research and write about the environment after moving with his wife to New Orleans a few years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. His sprawling cover story for The New York Times Magazine, “Losing Earth,” told about how American scientists had figured out the solutions to what is now the climate crisis in the late 1970s. The Reagan Revolution in 1980, however, and America's swing to the right, led to a suppression of sober conversations aimed at reducing fossil fuel use and human-driven environmental harm. Deregulation and rampant lobbying and corruption by the energy companies have plagued us for the four decades since. Nothing was done then, and nothing has really been done since, as Greta Thunberg noted the other day in her blah-blah-blah, all-talk-and-no-action commentary after the G20 summit, highlighting the inability of our world leaders to act in meaningful ways—or act at all!
Rich's most recent book, Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade (MCD/FSG) recollects and reworks for book publication, a large part of his journalism from the past decade. Rich has also published three novels (including one about climate change, Odds Against Tomorrow) and has a natural ear for dialogue. His research and writing chops are put to good use in this first nonfiction collection, covering everything from DuPont poisoning the waterways (one of the stories in the book became the Todd Haynes film Dark Water) to kamikaze starfish to late-20th Century glow-in-the-dark rabbit experiments. Second Nature is essential reading for anyone who cares about the ecology (and the future) of the earth.
THE READING:
Nathaniel Rich reads from his latest collection, Second Nature (MCD/FSG 2021).
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Thomas Leer & Robert Rental
Episode 20:
Peter Mendelsund
THE INTERVIEW
Peter Mendelsund began his career as a concert pianist, and reinvented himself as a graphic designer, now creative director, almost by accident. He came to book design—first as a reader, then as an independent bookstore employee, and ultimately, as a book cover designer, which he practiced full time at PenguinRandom House. He is presently the Creative Director of The Atlantic, and in his spare time, he writes novels, the second of which, The Delivery, is currently out on hardcover from FSG.
For the Interview this episode, J.C. Gabel talks with Mendelsund about his last nonfiction book, The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers & Art at the Edges of Literature (Ten Speed Press, 2020), which he co-authored with literary scholar David Alworth. What began as a Harvard lecture has become a gorgeous coffee table book examining the artwork of book cover design through the modern age; it is an overview of trends, insights, and back stories, many told through other voices from the literary and design worlds. It is also an invaluable tool for anyone interested in book jacket design and its rich and colorful history.
THE READING:
Peter Mendelsund reads from his latest novel, The Delivery (FSG, 2021).
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Laurie Spiegel
Episode 19: Jona Frank
THE INTERVIEW
On this episode of Big Table, artist and photographer Jona Frank talks with J.C. Gabel about her visual memoir, Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined (Monacelli Press), which documents, in elaborately staged sets, her troubled childhood growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey. Frank’s mother suffered from mental illness, as did her brother, who was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. In the photographs, three different actors portray Frank at various stages of her adolescence, with actress Laura Dern cast as her mother. Frank’s writing, produced in vignettes, augments the original photography in Cherry Hill, a beautifully packaged book, designed by Alex Kalman. As Arthur Lubow pointed out earlier this year in a New York Times feature about Frank's latest book, Jona Frank has “recreated non-Kodak moments, the kind that were hidden rather than commemorated.”
THE READING:
Jona Frank reads from her new visual memoir, Cherry Hill.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Raymond Guiot
Episode 18: The Future of the Internet with Damian Bradfield
THE INTERVIEW
On this episode of Big Table, J.C. Gabel talks with WeTransfer co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Damian Bradfield about his first book, The Trust Manifesto: What You Need to Do to Create a Better Internet (Penguin Press). In it, Bradfield imagines and outlines a path toward a better internet experience than the one that exists today. Bradfield knows that most of the big data being compiled online is misused and deceptively collected using legalese, “accept terms,” and disclaimers that no one reads. The Trust Manifesto unpacks what many of us users assume is going on behind the scenes of surveillance capitalism. Bradfield is right: To regain some credibility in an age of tech monopoly normalcy, the industry needs to build a bridge of trust with its users again. Not a month goes by without another revelation by a former employee of one of these tech behemoths, exposing profit-over-safety, profit-over-common-sense, and (of late) profit-over-democracy itself. The Trust Manifesto is a wake-up call, and a road map to a better internet, and, one hopes, a better post-digital-age future.
THE READING:
Technology writer and critic, Joanne McNeil reads from her debut, Lurking: How a Person Became a User (MCD/FSG Books), a concise but wide-ranging history of the internet from—for the first time—the point of view of the user.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Vangelis
Episode 17:
Sun Ra’s Chicago
THE INTERVIEW
In Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City, William Sites brings the cosmic musician back to earth—specifically to the city’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961, he lived and relaunched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold “dream-book bibles,” and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica—to construct a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans.
On this episode, William Sites, the Associate Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago, talks with J.C. Gabel about the mid-century history of Chicago’s South Side via the visionary Sun Ra.
THE READING:
Musician, artist, and poet Damon Locks reads from Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Sun Ra and His Arkestra
Episode 16: Lucy Sante
THE INTERVIEW
Since her debut book, Lowlife: Lures and Snares of Old New York, Lucy Sante has charted her own path, not only as a writer of distinction, but as a writer who has created a genre all her own in the process. Her books include The Other Paris, a sequel of sorts to Lowlife; a memoir, A Factory of Facts; a book on Folk Photography and Evidence, about crime scene photography. Her first essay collection, Kill All Your Darlings, was released 14 years ago by Verse Chorus Press in Portland. Her second essay collection, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, also published by Verse Chorus Press, was released last year in the midst of the pandemic and was like a comfort food for me while we were on lockdown. Maybe the People is an autobiographical deep dive into Sante's youth in New York City's Lower East Side in the 1970s and 1980s and how it shaped her writing over the last three decades.
THE READING:
Lucy Sante reads from her latest collection, Maybe the People Would Be the Times.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by the Velvet Underground
Episode 14:
Dora Maar
THE INTERVIEW
Brigitte Benkemoun, an investigative reporter in France, buys a vintage address book online for her partner, and soon discovers that it belonged to artist/photographer Dora Maar, Picasso’s mistress, infamous “weeping woman,” and unsung hero of the surrealist movement. Finding Dora Maar: An Artist, An Address Book, A Life is Benkemoun’s study of Maar’s legacy and later years.
THE READING:
Hat & Beard editor Sybil Perez reads from Reading Dora Maar (Getty Publications).
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Yellow Music Orchestra
Episode 13:
Yuval Taylor on
Zora Neale Hurston & Langston Hughes
THE INTERVIEW
Yuval Taylor’s dual biography Zora & Langston (Norton), documents the lives, times, and work of novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston and poet and writer Langston Hughes, two towering pillars of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s. Taylor writes about their intimate (and productive) friendship, their falling out with one another (and their patron), and the regret they both lived with until their deaths for not reconciling with one another.
THE READING:
Artist and musician Senon Williams reads selections from Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues, Hughes' first poetry collection published by Knopf in 1927.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music composed by Florence Price
Performed by Fort Smith Symphony and John Jeter
Other audio:
Zora clips
From a session with Alan Lomax / Library of Congress (YouTube)
Langston clips
Langston Hughes reads Langston Hughes (YouTube)
The Weary Blues with Langston Hughes, Charles Mingus, and Leonard Feather (YouTube)
Episode 12:
Cey Adams & Janette Beckman
THE INTERVIEW
Photographer Janette Beckman and artist/art director Cey Adams (who helmed the art department at the legendary hip-hop label Def Jam Records in its 1980s and 1990s heyday) discuss their graffiti art and photography collaboration The Mash Up: Hip-Hop Photos Remixed by Iconic Graffiti Artists, which was staged as an exhibition at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles a few years ago and collected in the book companion, co-published by Hat & Beard Press and Fahey/Klein Gallery, seen here.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Arthur Russell
*Interview clips from Style Wars (sourced from YouTube)
Episode 11:
Mariella Guzzoni on
Vincent Van Gogh
THE INTERVIEW
In Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him (University of Chicago Press), Italian curator Mariella Guzzoni unpacks her year’s long research into the books that Vincent Van Gogh read throughout his life and how they influenced and inspired his painting and drawing, letters, and purpose in life.
THE READING
Guzzoni reads from The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh (Penguin).
MUSIC CREDIT
Music composed by Igor Stravinsky
Performed by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Episode 10:
William Deresiewicz
THE INTERVIEW
For the interview this episode, William Deresiewicz documents “how creators are struggling to survive in the age of billionaires and big tech,” which is the subtitle of his masterful new book, The Death of the Artist (Henry Holt). This book is a well-written examination of the creative economy, and how it has been hollowed out and de-monetized by tech spin and greed; the toxic nonsense otherwise known as “the gig economy”. Unlike most takedowns of these 21st century post-digital-age doldrums, The Death of the Artist has some prescriptive advice and is rooted in reality-bites pragmatism.
THE READING
For the reading this episode, Deresiewicz reads an excerpt from The Death of the Artist.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Languis.
Episode 9:
Geoff Dyer
THE INTERVIEW
Geoff Dyer discusses “Broadsword Calling Danny Boy”: Watching ‘Where Eagles Dare’, published by Pantheon/Vintage, his study of the 1969 action film featuring a young Clint Eastwood—alongside Richard Burton—in one of his first starring roles.
THE READING
Dyer reads from his latest book See/Saw: Looking at Photographs, his collection of writings over the last two decades on and about photography, published by Graywolf Press.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Jonathan Knight.
Episode 8:
George Orwell
THE INTERVIEW
Two distinguished Orwell scholars—John Rodden and D.J. Taylor—unpack the Orwell enigma: fact, fiction, myth, and the most enduring legacy of any writer in the English language since Shakespeare. Rodden’s most recent Orwell book is Becoming George Orwell (Princeton University Press) and Mr. Taylor’s is a study of Orwell’s most famous book, On Nineteen Eighty-Four (Abrams Books).
THE READING
D.J. Taylor reads the first chapter of On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Terry Riley
Episode 7:
Ninth Street Women
THE INTERVIEW
Journalist, author, and biographer Mary Gabriel discusses Ninth Street Women, her five-part biography of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler—postwar abstract expressionists all. This door-stopper of a volume is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand modern American art.
THE READING
For the reading this episode, painter Celia Paul reads from her memoir Self-Portrait, published by NYRB Classics, which recounts the period after WWII to today, including her relationship with fellow painter Lucian Freud.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Dorothy Ashby
Episode 6: Nelson Algren
THE INTERVIEW
Biographer Colin Asher discusses the legacy of one of the greatest unknown American writers, Nelson Algren, a pre-Beat Generation realist who took the Underground Man to new heights from the 1930s to the 1970s, writing from the working man and woman’s perspective in Chicago and elsewhere. Here, Asher discusses his definitive biography of Algren, Never a Lovely So Real (Norton).
THE READING
Original compositions by Aaron Copland with Algren reading from The Man with the Golden Arm in the 1970s, a recording unearthed by Mr. Asher.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Ken Vandermark
Episode 5: Eve Babitz
THE INTERVIEW
Lili Anolik, whose 2014 Vanity Fair profile of the reclusive writer jump-started the Eve Babitz revival, discusses her biography, Hollywood’s Eve (Scribner), and—as its subtitle suggests—“the Secret History of L.A.”
THE READING
For our reading this episode, writer and critic Molly Lambert reads from the latest collection of Eve’s unpublished later work, I Used to Be Charming (NYRB).
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Mike Melvoin
Episode 4: Carson McCullers
THE INTERVIEW
Jenn Shapland discusses her National Book Award-nominated memoir My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Tin House), a brilliantly rendered hybrid which wrestles with identity, sexuality, and creativity.
THE READING
Carson in her own words. Courtesy of the NEA’s Big Read, actress Holly Hunter reads from Carson’s most famous novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou
Episode 3: Nick Ebeling
THE INTERVIEW
Along for the Ride director Nick Ebeling unpacks the enigma of Dennis Hopper and his blacklisted years as seen through the eyes of the film’s star, Satya de la Manitou, Hopper’s decades-long “right-hand man".
THE READING
Director Nick Ebeling reads Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If,” a Hopper favorite.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music from The Last Movie trailer
Episode 2: Eddie Glaude, Jr.
THE INTERVIEW
Professor and critic Eddie Glaude, Jr. discusses his latest book Begin Again (Crown), an intellectual look at James Baldwin’s most potent political writing from The Fire Next Time to No Name in the Street.
THE READING
James Baldwin in his own words throughout the episode courtesy of YouTube.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Beverly Glenn-Copland
Episode 1: Tosh Berman
THE INTERVIEW
Tosh Berman—poet, publisher, bookstore buyer, record store clerk, son of artists Wallace and Shirley Berman—discusses his memoir, entitled simply Tosh (City Lights). The subtitle says it all: “Growing up in Wallace Berman’s world.”
THE READING
Tosh reads from Tosh, his memoir.
MUSIC CREDIT
Music by Thelonious Monk