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We're joined by four professional actors who will appear courtesy of the Actors' Equity Association in these two productions which are running on alternating nights from July 8 through the 23rd. They are David Kortemeier, Amanda Catania, Grant Goodman, and Jenny McKnight.

I’ll warn you that the conversation is very fluid, alternating focus from Midsummer to Sense. Consistent throughout though is an attempt to show the way stage performances can bring the thinking we do about works of art into a collaborative space between plays, among actors, and into the theater and its seated guests.

The actors introduce themselves and initially there’s a kind of round robin of commentary by each--and this should help you keep their voices straight throughout. But if you can’t well, these productions do have something of a “crossed communications” aspect to them.

One interesting thing we discover is that being an actor is the template employment for the “gig” economy that we all now seem to be facing in the country’s “jobless” recovery.

Our show music tonight comes from Van Morrison because I just couldn’t get him out of my head today and now I am doing a kind of audio hand-off to you. Enjoy!

Yes, Van Morrison is Irish and our subject tonight is IU Summer Theater's production of two pieces coming out of England, Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility. Perhaps this is my response to Brexit, who knows?

RELATED

The 2016 IU Summer Theatre Season

"These are the forgeries of jealousy," My Own Shakespeare, Radio 4 (YouTube)

MUSIC by Van Morrison

"The Way That Young Lovers Do"

"Astral Weeks"

"Fair Play"

"Cul de Sac"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Editor: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jonathan Richardson

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

Tonight in lieu of Interchange we’re going to share another special episode of the local podcast The Hijabi Diaries. This one is called Redneck Muslim and explores one woman’s lifelong attraction to organized Religion.

Host Aubrey Seader offers the life story of one woman, her name is Dawn, a member of the Bloomington Muslim community, who has practiced three very different religions, and lived a life full of adventure.

The music used in this episode of The Hijabi Diaries comes from Joe Pug, Pearls of Islam, and Baraka Blue.

The Hijabi Diaries is produced by Anna Maidi and Aubrey Seader in association with the Islamic Center of Bloomington and The OpenHearted Campaign.

To listen to or download the full 63 minutes of Redneck Muslim got to the show’s own website. Here is the episode description:

On this hour-long special episode of the Hijabi Diaries, we ask the questions "What does religion bring to us as humans?" "Why do those of us who are religious dedicate so much time to practicing traditions, attending worship services, growing in our faith, and aligning our lives with the commands of our faith?" In a sense we are asking "This religion thing... what's it all about? Why?" We're going to explore these questions through the life story of one woman, a woman named Dawn, who has been a member of three very distinct religions, suffered abuse and trauma throughout her life, was separated and then reunited with her beloved daughter, and found who found herself a few years ago in Islam.

INTERCHANGE MUSIC

"Spiritual Eternal" by Alice Coltraine off of the 1976 album Eternity

CREDITS

Producer: Doug Storm

Editing: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jonathan Richardson

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

For today’s Interchange we bring you a special anthology episode of the local podcast "The Hijabi Diaries" which is a joint production of the Islamic Center of Bloomington and friends Aubrey Seader and Anna Maidi.

Seader writes of the project on her website that she and Maidi,

started hearing more and more anti-Muslim rhetoric coming out of the mouths of politicians and ordinary Americans, and as we stood in the wake of a violent attack on a member of the Bloomington Muslim community, we knew we had to do something to reach out to ordinary, non-Muslim, Americans and help them understand Islam, and American Muslims who practice.

That references the attack on a Muslim woman outside of Sofra Cafe last October by IU student Travis Bickford who is said to have shouted “white power” and “kill them all” as well as ethnic slurs. He also attempted to remove her hijab.

One way Seader and Maidi decided to reach out is this podcast, "The Hijabi Diaries." In it Muslim women speak about their lives, their faith, why they choose to cover, or wear hijab, and their thoughts about anti-Muslim prejudice in the U.S.

RELATED

The Hijabi Diaries

Muslims of Bloomington (blog)

Openhearted Campaign

Two women begin project for Muslim understanding and tolerance

Bloomington community shows support for Muslim woman who was attacked outside cafe (Video)

The Forgotten History of Islam in America

Music heard in this episode of "The Hijabi Diaries" by Baraka Blue and Pearls of Islam.

PHOTO CREDIT

By Tae-Gyun Kim for the Indiana Daily Student. The presence of this photo does not indicate an IDS endorsement of this program or of The Hijabi Diaries.

MUSIC

Intro: "Lord Help Me To Be" (A Monastic Trio, Alice Coltrane)

Break: "I Want To See You" (A Monastic Trio, Alice Coltrane)

Outro: "Living Space" (Infinity, John Coltrane with overdubs by Alice Coltrane)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Board Engineer: Jonathan Richardson

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

Our music tonight, at the suggestion of our guest, comes from The Fugs, formed in 1963 by the poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg and Ken Weaver. And we open with, "Here Comes the Levellers," which is from the Reagan Era release No More Slavery.

Our guest is Paul Buhle, one of the foremost historians of American Radicalism and the American Left having authored or edited over 30 books, including works such as Images of American Radicalism, Marxism in the United States, The Encyclopedia of the American Left, and Radical Hollywood. He is also the editor of 12 comic art books that are wide-ranging yet consistent in Socialist and Radical perspective: There are books on Jesus, Lincoln, The Beats, Bohemians, The Wobblies, Rosa Luxemburg and most recently on the Irish martyr James Connolly who was executed by the British for his role in the Easter Uprising of 1916. He’s also done a comic adaptation of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, titled A People’s History of American Empire.

Paul Buhle is also the editor of the project, Bernie Sanders Comics.

After becoming involved in Students for a Democratic Society’s antiwar movement in the 60’s, he founded the journal Radical America and served as editor until the early 70’s, later founding a journal of popular culture studies called Cultural Correspondence, as well as founding and directing the Oral History of the American Left archive at New York University. In 2006, he also helped found the rebirth of SDS, also called Students for a Democratic Society.

In this show we cover a lot of ground--leap over it really--but in the process touch on many continuities in the history of the Radical Left, and consequently in its opposition to the dehumanizing and alienating organizing principles of capitalist economies. There is life in this Radical Left still and according to Buhle it’s the massive support for Bernie Sanders that has made this clear.

One thing I should share, our sound quality tonight is not ideal, but if your patient you’ll find your ears for it. I wish I could say I did it on purpose for, as assistant producer Rob Schoon says, it seems like the audio equivalent of Buhle's hand-published editions of the SDS journal Radical America: legible, a little rough around the edges, but it's the content that counts anyway.

RELATED

Red Rosa: Eagle of the Revolution

Bernie Sanders' 1979 Eugene Debs Documentary (YouTube)

Radical America (online full text)

Anarchism and American Labor by Paul Buhle (a pdf is available on this page)

The Crash of Democratic Values by Paul Buhle

An Interview with Paul Buhle by Derek Seidman

This Feminist is #Still Sanders by Mari Jo Buhle

MUSIC by the Fugs

"Here Come the Levellers"

"If You Want to Be the President"

"Morning, Morning"

"Life Is Strange"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jonathan Richardson

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

What may seem surprising as you listen is the way in which Thoreau’s understanding of death and life can inform our own considerations of what it means to live by an ethics of inclusion and acceptance of differences and to eschew what is given to us politically and socially as measured, hierarchical, and standardized forms of “knowing.” All this is revealed in Branka Arsić’s latest book, Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau which takes the death of Thoreau’s brother as its entry point into the radical nature of Thoreau’s thinking. Because of this she focuses primarily on his neglected first book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which was a kind of memorialization of the Thoreau’s brotherly relationship. Bird Relics discusses the radical way in which Thoreau related mourning practices to biological life by articulating a complex theory of decay, and proposing a new understanding of the pathological.

Part One: We jump in by considering the notion that Thoreau was a misanthropic egoist who faked his so-called self-reliant stay in a cabin on Walden Pond.

Part Two: We closed the previous segment thinking about anonymous life that Thoreau memorializes in his journal by writing obituaries about ordinary people of which he had no personal knowledge, but he also wrote an obituary for an elm tree.

I have attended the felling and, so to speak, the funeral of this old citizen of the town, — I who commonly do not attend funerals, — as it became me to do. I was the chief if not the only mourner there. I have taken the measure of his grandeur; have spoken a few words of eulogy at his grave...How have the mighty fallen! Its history extends back over more than half the whole history of the town. Since its kindred could not conveniently attend, I attended. Methinks its fall marks an epoch in the history of the town. It has passed away together with the clergy of the old school and the stage-coach which used to rattle beneath it. Its virtue was that it steadily grew and expanded from year to year to the very last. How much of old Concord falls with it! The town clerk will not chronicle its fall. But I will…

Part Three:

We close the show with Arsić’s assertion that Thoreau’s understanding of life stands in opposition to any conception of “disability” and that it absolutely negates any conception of eugenics. But first I asked Arsic to consider of one of Thoreau’s most often repeated opinions:

I hate museums. There is nothing so weighs upon my spirits. They are the catacombs of nature. One green bud of spring, one willow catkin, one faint trill from a migrating sparrow would set the world on its legs again. The life that is in a single green weed is of more worth than all this death. They are dead nature collected by dead men.

GUEST

Branka Arsić is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Professor Arsić specializes in literatures of the 19th century Americas and their scientific, philosophical and religious contexts. She is the author, most recently, of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Harvard University Press, 2016); On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Harvard UP, 2010); and a book on Melville entitled Passive Constitutions or 7½ Times Bartleby (Stanford UP, 2007). She is currently co-editing (with Kim Evans) a collection of essays on Melville, entitled Melville’s Philosophies (Bloomsbury, 2017).

RELATED

Henry David Thoreau’s Magical Thinking by Branka Arsić

http://wfhb.org/news/christoph-irmscher-against-complacency-thoreaus-civil-disobedience/

MUSIC

Six Melodies by John Cage, performed by Annelie Gahl (violin) and Klaus Lang (Electric Piano)

CREDITS

What are we to make of a president who appears on Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis?

David Bromwich opens his Harper’s Magazine piece, “What Went Wrong: Assessing Obama’s Legacy” with the claim “Any summing-up of the Obama presidency is sure to find a major obstacle in the elusiveness of the man.” He seeks to define the man and his presidency in article after article, and essay after essay.

Guest

David Bromwich is the Sterling Professor of Literature at Yale University. He’s written on civil liberties and America’s Wars for the New York Review of Books. He also publishes essays on politics in the Huffington Post, the London Review of Books and Harper’s Magazine. His most recent books are Moral Imagination which is a collection of essays and The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke.

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: President Barack Obama

Of Interest

“Strip Search Nation” by David Bromwich

Music

“You Dropped a Bomb On Me” by The Gap Band

“Funky President” by James Brown

“The Wake-up Bomb” by R.E.M.

Credits

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Board Engineer: Jonathan Richardson

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

Host Doug Storm is joined by Myke Luurtsema, the Hoosier Forest Watch Coordinator for the Indiana Forest Alliance (IFA), and Ron Kerner, a mushroom expert who runs the website Indiana Mushrooms.

This is Part II of our discussion about commercial logging and forest health in the Indiana state forests. Part I was a conversation that took place on September 9th with the Director of the Division of Forestry, John Seifert.

The discussion centers on the assertion that the Forestry Division treats the forest as a kind of agricultural crop and chooses to implement methods that value the tree by its harvest value (silviculture). We also discuss the ways that clear cutting or "regenerative openings" disturb habitat and disrupt ecosystem health. One feature of this is the vital symbiotic role that healthy fungi play in the growth of forests. A final topic is the IFA's campaign to create State Wild Areas in our state forests.

Where John Seifert makes claims for the benefit of introducing sunlight to enhance diversity (through "regenerative openings")--"sunlight drives the system"--Luurtsema claims "sunlight drives the crop tree while mortality drives the ecosystem."

Credits:

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Board Engineer: Carissa Barrett

Executive Producer: Alycin Bektesh

Hosts Doug Storm and Trish Kerle' are joined by historian Jim Madison to discuss the Hoosier through history. Madison has just published a new book, Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana, published by Indiana University Press.

Our three segments cover the origin and cultural identity embodied in the very word "Hoosier," the geographical make-up of the state and attendant migration patterns for settlers from the East and the Upland South; the "contradictions" of an anti-slavery state that is also deeply troubled with racism; the development of the state as an industrial "mecca."

Credits:

Host: Doug Storm

Co-Host: Trish Kerle'

Board Engineer: Jonathan Richardson

Executive Producer: Alycin Bektesh

 

Host Doug Storm is joined by William Morris and Joe Varga to discuss the genesis of the Moral Mondays Movement in North Carolina and how it has begun to form a broad coalition here in Indiana.

A Mother Jones article from April, 2014 describes the impetus for Moral Mondays as being political action against a Republican agenda in North Carolina. The Republicans "who in November 2012 took control of the state Legislature and the governor's mansion for the first time in more than a century. Among their top priorities—along with blocking Medicaid expansion and cutting unemployment benefits and higher-education spending—was pushing through a raft of changes to election laws, including reducing the number of early voting days, ending same-day voter registration, and requiring ID at the polls."

But perhaps deeper than this "fusion politics" is an engagement with an ethics of care.

The Indiana Moral Mondays Mission Statement:

We, the people, coalitions and faith communities of Indiana hereby form Indiana Moral Mondays Movement in order to promote a just society in which every person is valued, and resources are used for the common good.

In doing so, we seek to embrace the moral values and the enduring qualities of love found in the secular and spiritual communities from which we come.

Find out about this weekend's event in Indianapolis, "Forward Together with Reverend Dr. William Barber II"  at the group's website, Indiana Moral Mondays.

Guests:

William Morris is an attorney with Indiana Legal Services where he works on low-income housing and homelessness prevention. Prior to that he was a civil rights lawyer for a dozen years in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Morris is a member of the Indiana Moral Mondays Steering Committee.

Joe Varga is an Assistant Professor of Labor Studies at Indiana University. He is a former Teamster shop steward and long time labor activist, having worked for the IBEW and the New York State Working Families Party. He is currently working on a project detailing the spatial history of de-industrialization in Southern Indiana. Joe is also active in Jobs with Justice, and numerous other activist causes.

Credits:

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Board Engineer: Jonathan Richardson

Executive Producer: Alycin Bektesh

Host Doug Storm is joined by John Seifert, Indiana’s State Forester. We discuss logging in Yellowwood State Forest and the management of public forest lands. Other topics include the marked increase in commercial logging since 2002; invasive plant species in clear-cut land; the science of carbon sequestration; and the politics of resource management.

Credits:

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Board Engineer: Jonathan Richardson with assistance from Carissa Barrett

Executive Producer: Alycin Bektesh