Popcast

Episodes

1. 12

   The Case of the Missing Checks

   "High is a different thing for different folks. I don’t smoke pot but I’m awful high tonight." Community organizer Elsie Easley said this about the state of welfare to students at University of Illinois in 1972. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, welfare recipients who relied on government aid to feed...

   Nov 2, 2015

   5m
2. 11

   Zero Mostel and the truth of the absurd

   When Zero Mostel was under trial by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1955, the committee asked what he was doing at an anti-HUAC meeting. Mostel replied: "What if I did an imitation of a butterfly at rest? There is no crime in making anybody laugh." In this Popcast, hear about…

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   Oct 2, 2015

   9m
3. 10

   When the Negro was in vogue

   At the Cotton Club, Harlem's premier nightclub of the 1920s and 30s, 16-year-old Lena Horne performed as a chorus girl alongside legends like Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington. The only catch? The audience was whites-only. In Popcast, hear Horne talk with mixed emotions about her time at the…

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   Sep 15, 2015

   9m
4. 9

   Seamus Heaney and the Long Dead

   How do you write a love poem to a 2,000 year old stranger? On Popcast, hear about Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney's obsession with "bog bodies." These centuries-old human remains were found in boglands of Northern Europe, and were often killed in violent, ritualistic ways – something that...

   Aug 24, 2015

   7m
5. 8

   Welcome to Womanhouse

   The rooms were full of menstrual blood and Kotex, rubber breasts and stumbling brides, fragmented bodies in linen closets and simulacra of babies being born. It was 1972, and this was Womanhouse: a rickety Victorian house turned into a home for radical feminist installations by the students of…

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   Aug 10, 2015

   7m
6. 7

   The Freedom Singers, and the three simple words that gave strength to a movement

   It was the early days of the civil rights movement. Across the South, black students staged sit-ins, marches, demonstrations and protests that were violently repressed. In this podcast, two voices from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) talk about the song “We Shall Overcome” –...

   Jul 21, 2015

   5m
7. 6

   Freud in the Night Kitchen

   When Maurice Sendak’s now classic children’s book In the Night Kitchen was released in 1970, it caused a scandal. Its protagonist, a young boy, is bare naked throughout the book, amidst a landscape phallic milk bottles and free-flowing liquids. Parents cried pornography. Armchair psychologists...

   May 7, 2015

   4m
8. 5

   The Song Banned by NASA

   Astronauts don’t have days and nights like we do on earth, so they need some help regulating their sleep. Turns out, it takes a whole team of engineers down on earth to rouse NASA’s elite from their slumbers. In this Popcast, hear about the NASA tradition of "wake up songs" from Mission Control,...

   Apr 15, 2015

   5m
9. 4

   Bob Hope and Atomic Bill

   It was 1950, just five years after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviet Union had just built their own bomb. And what did Americans, huddled around their radios, most want to hear? Comedian Bob Hope, joking about the world "blowing itself up." In this Popcast, Eliza...

   Mar 31, 2015

   6m
10. 3

    Folksong and Potboilers

    In the early 1900s, journalist and renaissance man Charles Lummis set out to capture and preserve the Spanish folk songs of California, including the voice of one talent in particular: Manuela García. Listen to the story behind the Charles Fletcher Lummis wax cylinder collection at the Autry...

    Mar 19, 2015

    5m
11. 2

    And of course, she was a Scorpio

    Describing Sylvia Plath in 1972, Plath's editor Fran McCullough says: "instances of her bitchiness and snobbery [were] quite astonishing. And of course she was a Scorpio." Jumping off from there, host Eliza Smith uses the lens of astrology to understand Plath's work, asking Bay Area astrologer...

    Mar 4, 2015

    4m
12. 1

    O my Homunculus: The proto-podcast about Sylvia Plath

    With all the talk of a "golden age" of audio, it can be easy to forget that producers have been putting together intimate, conversational audio pieces for decades. In this Popcast, hear about the surprising podcast-like feel of a 1972 radio documentary about Sylvia Plath.Listen on Pop Up Archive,...

    Feb 14, 2015

    4m