Correct me if I'm Norm

This week’s guest is a musician, a music lover and a Jack Benny enthusiast. He’s the host of a new show on RadioFreeRhinecliff.org called It All Comes ‘Round Again: Mr. Paul Kovit.

Paul was the first student to spend all four years on the air at Vassar’s radio station, and he hasn’t been behind a mic since 1975. He tells Norm why he’s coming back now and how he plans his “genre fluid” show, which airs monthly on Sundays at 9 PM. Paul looks back on shooting cel animation on an Oxberry stand with fellow Vassar film grad David Hoffman, his switch to video editing, and playing Irish bars in Manhattan. We hear “Mood Vertigo,” his tune for the Celtic jazz band Whirligig, which featured future Klezmatics Lisa Gutkin and Matt Darriau. Paul also explains how a pandemic-era Jack Benny fan club convention led to No Soap Radio, his group’s recreations of classic radio shows, and we hear a clip from “This Is Jack’s Life.”

Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org

Send comments to [email protected]

Norm's guest is a dad, a tennis enthusiast, a prolific painter, and an owner of the wonderful Rhinebeck Artist's Shop stores, Mr. Doug Shippee.

Doug tells Norm about driving to New York with $400 and his best friend, sheetrocking a ceiling with no idea which side was up, and working at the legendary David Davis art supply store during the heyday of downtown art stores. Doug remembers a $650 Williamsburg loft above a sweatshop, meeting his wife Lynn with a "Hey, Staten Island," and his "dark years" hauling mattresses in a Montgomery Ward warehouse. He also talks about why the real problem-solving in painting happens with the brush in hand, his very creative family, becoming a grandpa, and the 52-year-old shop at the end of Market Street. See his work at douglasshippee.com.

Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org

Send comments to [email protected]

rom Manhattan, Kansas to Manhattan, NYC, and now Rhinebeck, this week's guests have been pursuing their dreams, one in designing the "scientific workplace" & the other as a designer turned painter: Camille Warmington and Paul Wilhelms.

They met in architecture school at K-State and reconnected decades later over coffee (which turned into a margarita) in Houston. Norm talks with them about labs built so still that electron microscopes can see atoms, and about Camille's "stitch-like" paintings inspired by her mother's needlepoint and the garden she's constantly weeding. There is also the farmhouse they designed for family in Hamden, their own Hütte 2 going up in Milan, and the Golden Rock cocktail they reverse-engineered from The Corner in Tivoli. See Camille's work at camillewarmington.com.

Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org

Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits with artist, curator, and arts administrator: founder of WomensWork.Art, a past board member of the National Association of Women Artists, and an incredibly thoughtful creative soul who works in asemic writing, Nansi Lent.

Norm and Nansi talk through what asemic writing actually is (non-semantic, illegible-on-purpose mark-making with roots in Dada and a global following since the '60s and '90s), and how Nansi backed into it in 2018 through journaling before "discovering" she'd invented her own visual vocabulary of scrolls and sigils. She talks about her wildly busy fall: 19 new pieces on fragile Japanese tea and gampi paper for a show at Cornell Creative Center for the Arts timed to Kingston Arts Week, ten pieces at Bank Street Newburgh, her annual Art Studio Views open house over Labor Day weekend, and a solo show, "A Thread of Longing," opening in October at BAU that spans five decades of her work. Along the way: her early career as a documentary and darkroom photographer printing for Martha Swope, a formative (and brutal) run through Ivan Karp's gallery world, a rocky stint in an MFA program at SUNY New Paltz, adopting her two children as a single woman, and how she met her husband while stalling in a laundromat on the Upper West Side.

Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org

Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits down with bestselling presidential historian Alexis Coe, author of You Never Forget Your First, a New York Times history columnist, and Substack writer, for a wide-ranging conversation. Alexis talks about her path from NYPL curator to public historian, her move to the Hudson Valley during the pandemic, and what it was like testifying before Congress on JFK records alongside conspiracy theorists and a very unhappy Nancy Mace. She digs into George Washington's complicated legacy around emancipation, the myth-making of early presidential biography, and gives a preview of her forthcoming book on young JFK. Plus: a study/marry/kill round with Karoline Leavitt, Beto O'Rourke, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Pete Buttigieg.

Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org

Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits down with Carla Melucci Ardito, a self-taught healer who's spent over 40 years studying trauma, emotion, and the body. They dig into her "dysfunction scale," the difference between real emotion and reactive frustration, how unresolved grief gets passed down through families (and even genetics), and why apologies only heal when they're truly felt. Along the way: her son's move to Paris for a PhD at the Sorbonne, her side gig fronting Brooklyn Bossa Nova, and an impromptu aria from Verdi's Falstaff.

Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org

Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits down with Rhinebeck artist William T. Ayton, known professionally as William T., to talk about his shift from traditional painting and ink drawing to AI-generated art. Ayton walks through how he prompts and edits images using Leonardo AI and defends the medium against critics who dismiss it as "AI slop." He discusses his augmented reality installation New Babel, a ten story virtual Tower of Babel built for Union Square Park to mark The New School's centennial, and a possible upcoming show at Tsinghua University in Beijing tied to a journal published by Leonardo, the arts and science organization run by his wife, Diana Ayton-Shenker.

They trace Ayton's path from a working class upbringing in England, through art school in Edinburgh and years teaching English in Madrid, where he met Diana, to the move upstate to Rhinebeck twenty five years ago, where he raised three children and now works out of a home studio.

Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org

Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits down with historian Gerry Protheroe — a Welsh-born, NYU-affiliated professor and longtime private school teacher — for a conversation that ranges from his working-class childhood in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales,to experiencing the impact of the 1966 Aberfan disaster as a child, to his path through Jesus College, Oxford and eventually to New York City. Protheroe, author of The Crisis of Security: Global Politics from the End of the Cold War to the Present, weighs in on Brexit's economic toll, NATO's fragility under Trump, the fallout from the Iran conflict, and echoes of the Vietnam-era counterinsurgency debates in today's foreign policy. Along the way: Manhattans, Manchester United, dual citizenship debates, and a surprise Churchill impression.

Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org

Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits down with Cathy and Roy Naor, the couple behind Rhinebeck's Aba's Falafel, just two months after they sold the business to a cousin. Roy talks about his path from Israeli Air Force fighter pilot training to squadron commander to captain at El Al, and the private jet charter company he now manages remotely from Rhinebeck. Cathy traces her own route from Austin, Texas to a philosophy of mind PhD she never finished to a farmers market falafel stand that became a full restaurant. They talk through how they went vegan, the environmental change Roy has watched firsthand over decades of transatlantic flights and Cozumel dives, raising kids in Rhinebeck, becoming grandparents, and how the town has responded to them as Israelis living in the Hudson Valley.

Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org

Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits down with campaign strategist John Rossi, the operative behind Debbie Hecht's landslide win in the Rhinebeck Town Supervisor Democratic primary. Rossi walks through the mechanics of a winning local campaign: his "three Ms" of money, messaging, and mobilization, why door-knocking beats social media every time, and the numbers that told his team early on they had a landslide on their hands. He addresses the more contentious parts of the race too, including the doxing controversy and Republicans who switched parties to vote in the primary, and gives credit to The Daily Catch for driving turnout. Rossi also traces his own path into politics, from a hazing scandal that pushed him onto a Long Island school board to his move to the Hudson Valley and his growing track record running campaigns for women candidates including Cara Gary and Lisa Cole.

Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org

Send comments to [email protected]