KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

Wil Haygood, author of Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky.

Colorization looks at the history of Hollywood from the perspective of the African American community, from protests over the showing of the racist silent film, “Birth of a Nation,” to the first great Black director, Oscar Micheaux, through the forties and the rise of black actors such as Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge, to so-called Blaxploitation films and up to the present, all the while putting the films in context of the larger society and race in America.

In the interview, he discusses the origins of the book, the careers of some of the Black pioneers in Hollywood film, and the way television and streaming has changed the race equation in our culture.

Wil Haygood is a journalist who spent several years with the Washington Post before writing a series of biographies. He is also known for an essay in the Post which became the source for the successful film, Lee Daniels’ The Butler.

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Janis Ian, singer/songwriter, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded June 14, 2008 in the KPFA studios while she was on tour for her memoir, “Society’s Child.”

Janis Ian achieved success as a teenager with “Society’s Child,” but was known as a one-hit wonder until her twenties with “At Seventeen” and the album Between the Lines in the mid-1970s. She later went on to write science fiction short stories, became a columnist for The Advocate, and continued her music career as a composer (“Stars”) and performer. All told there have been 24 albums — she now says her latest, The Light at the End of the Line, released in January 2022, will be her last studio solo album.

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Joseph Hansen (1923-2004) was a pioneer of private eye fiction, whose main character, Dave Brandstetter, an insurance investigator, was the first gay protagonist in the detective field published by a mainstream house. The first Brandstetter novel, Fadeout, was published in 1970. At the time of publication, being gay was illegal in 49 of the 50 states.

Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff had a chance to interview Joseph Hansen on June 14th, 1990 following the publication of the eleventh novel, The Boy Who Was Buried This Morning. It turned into a career retrospective.

There were twelve Brandstetter novels in all, culminating in 1991’s A Country of Old Men. Successful at the time, they’d fallen out of print since Hansen’s death, and are now being reissued by Syndicate Books and distributed by Soho Press. The first three books in the series, Fadeout, Death Claims and Troublemaker, were published on January 8th, 2022, with each succeeding book published on the eighth day of each succeeding month.

Priot to  the Brandstetter books, Joseph Hansen published gay-centric novels in various small presses under a pseudonym. Two gothic novels under the pseudonym Rose Brock. There were also autobiographical novels and short story collections among his output. Despite the acclaim his books received, none of Joseph Hansen’s work has ever been adapted for film or television.

This interview has not been heard since its initial airing thirty years ago, and has never seen the light of day in its entirety. It was digitized, remastered, and re-edited in February 2022 by Richard Wolinsky.

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Art Spiegelman, co-editorr of the series “Little Lit,” and author of “MAUS” and “MAUS II”, in conversation with  Richard A. Lupoff, aired originally on December 7, 2000.

On the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day, the McMinn County Board of Education voted 10-0 to ban Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel memoir of his father’s experiences during the Holocaust, MAUS, from county classrooms.

One of the most important records of the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II, MAUS, by virtue of his graphic nature — as well as its use of mice as Jews and cats as Nazis, has been a necessary history book since its publication in 1980.

In this interview aired on December 7, 2000 on Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff’s Cover to Cover program (the forerunner to Bookwaves) while Richard Wolinsky was on vacation, Spiegelman mostly discusses “Little Lit,” which translates fairy tales into comic book form. He also talks about the history of comics, about underground comics, and about MAUS. Richard A. Lupoff (1935-2020), along with co-hosting Probabilities and Cover to Cover with Richard Wolinsky, was a noted science fiction and mystery writer, and the author of a history of comic books, All In Color for A Dime.

This interview has not aired in over twenty years, and was digitized and edited in 2022 by Richard Wolinsky.

Image from Art Spiegelman’s inscription on Richard Wolinsky’s copy of MAUS II.

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Kathy Geritz, film curator at Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, discusses the films of Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety with host Richard Wolinsky. A series of films by and about the director run from Friday, January 21st through Sunday February 6th.

Djibril Diop Mambety (1945-1998) directed two features, Touki Bouki and Hyenas, and a handful of short subjects, but despite his limited output, his singular style and bold looks at Senegalese life and the divisions between wealthy and poor, and the legacy of colonialism make him a major figure in world cinema and, of course, African cinema.

These films, plus documentaries about the life and work of Mambety, are being shown on different nights at BAM/PFA.

Touki Bouki and his first short, Contras City, can be found on the Criterion app. Hyenas, two of his shorts, Le Franc and The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun, along with a documentary, A Thousand Suns, are on the free Kanopy app from local libraries. A look at the making of Touki Bouki, The Prince of Colobane, is available on YouTube.

Mambety Wikipedia page.

Cover photo from Touki Bouki.

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