Everybody spreads holiday cheer in their own way. On Christmas Day 1976, the eccentric jazz composer and bandleader did it by appearing on Blue Genesis, a show on the University of Pennsylvania’s radio station WXPN, reading his poetry with music. “The choice of poems and their sequencing offers what Sun Ra thought was most important in his writing,” writes John Szwed in Space is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra. “Here are key words like ‘cosmos,’ ‘truth,’ ‘bad,’ ‘myth,’ and ‘the impossible’; attention to phonetic equivalence; the universality of the music and its metaphysical status; allusions to black fraternal orders and secret societies; biblical passages and their interpretation; and even a few autobiographical glimpses.”
Part 1
Part 2
Though read on Christmas, these poems have no particular religious slant — nothing, that is, but Sun Ra’s usual mixture of the Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, numerology, Freemasonry, ancient Egyptian mysticism, Gnosticism, and black nationalism.
Fans of Sun Ra would expect no less. But those more recently acquainted with the jazzman born Herman Poole Blount may find this an unusual half-hour of listening, for the holidays or otherwise. “A pioneer of ‘Afrofuturism,’ Sun Ra emerged from a traditional swing scene in Alabama, touring the country in his teens as a member of his high school biology teacher’s big band,” wrote Open Culture’s own Josh Jones earlier this year. “While attending Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University, he had an out-of-body experience during which he was transported into outer space.”
In that post on Sun Ra’s 1971 UC Berkeley Course “The Black Man in the Cosmos,” you can learn more about the numerous nonstandard experiences and philosophies that went into the production of his words and his music, which converge in this special broadcast you can hear at the top of the post or on Ubuweb. It’ll make you regret that Sun Ra and his free-jazz “Arkestra” never produced a full-length Christmas album — though maybe, on whichever distant planet his immortal spirit reached after the end of his Earth-life two decades ago, he’s recording it as we speak.
On December 8, 1980, the New England Patriots-Miami Dolphins game was winding down, the end of another Monday Night Football game. Then, Howard Cosell, America’s legendary sportscaster, broke the news to unsuspecting viewers: “An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all of The Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival.” Soon enough, more formal news reports followed on the BBC and ABC’s Nightline, and you can still hear what New Yorkers heard on the radio that night (below). The sound file was originally posted by WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, and like Howard says, it puts a lot of things in perspective for us.
A longer montage can be heard here:
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The American Public Media show, “Wits,” asked its listeners to write their “poorest imitations of Neil Gaiman’s writing.” And then they got Gaiman himself to read the best/worst submissions. You can watch the results above, and hear the complete radio show here.
To watch/listen to Gaiman reading stories that he actually wrote, see this collection where Neil reads eight works, including the entirety of The Graveyard Book.
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If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
We are, it appears, in the midst of a “podcasting renaissance,” as Colin Marshall has recently pointed out. And yet, like him, I too was unaware that “podcasting had gone into a dark age.” Nevertheless, its current popularity—in an age of ubiquitous screen technology and perpetual visual spectacle—speaks to something deep within us, I think. Oral storytelling, as old as human speech, will never go out of style. Only the medium changes, and even then, seemingly not all that much.
But the differences between this golden age of podcasting and the golden age of radio are still significant. Where the podcast is often off-the-cuff, and often very intimate and personal—sometimes seen as “too personal,” as Colin writes—radio programs were almost always carefully scripted and featured professional talent. Even those programs with man-on-the street features or interviews with ordinary folks were carefully orchestrated and mediated by producers, actors, and presenters. And the business of scoring music and sound effects for radio programs was a very serious one indeed. All of these formalities—in addition to the limited frequency range of old analog recording technology—contribute to what we immediately recognize as the sound of “old time radio.” It is a quaint sound, but also one with a certain gravitas, an echo of a bygone age.
That golden age waned as television came into its own in the mid-fifties, but near its end, some broadcast companies made every effort to put together the highest quality radio programming they could in order to retain their audience. One such program, the CBS Radio Workshop, which ran from January, 1956 to September, 1957, may have been “too little too late”—as radio preservationist site Digital Deli writes—but it nonetheless was “every bit as innovative and cutting edge” as the programs that came before it. The first two episodes, right below, were dramatizations of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, read by the author himself. (Find it also on Spotify here.) The series’ remaining 84 programs drew from the work of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, James Thurber, H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Robert Heinlein, Eugene O’Neil, Balzac, Carl Sandburg, and so many more. It also featured original comedy, drama, music, and This American Life-style profiles and storytelling.
Huxley returned in program #12, with a story called “Jacob’s Hands,” written in collaboration with and read by Christopher Isherwood. The great Ray Bradbury made an appearance, in program #4, introducing his stories “Season of Disbelief” and “Hail and Farewell,” read by John Dehner and Stacy Harris, and scored by future film and TV composer Jerry Goldsmith. Other programs, like #10, “The Exurbanites,” narrated by famous war correspondent Eric Sevareid, conducted probing investigations of modern life—in this case the growth of suburbia and its relationship to the advertising industry. The above is but a tiny sampling of the wealth of quality programming the CBS Radio Workshop produced, and you can hear all of it—all 86 episodes—courtesy of the Internet Archive.
Sample streaming episodes in the player above, or download individual programs as MP3s and enjoy them at your leisure, almost like, well, a podcast. See Digital Deli for a complete rundown of each program’s content and cast, as well as an extensive history of the series. This is the swan song of golden age radio, which, it seems, maybe never really left, given the incredible number of listening experiences we still have at our disposal. Yes, someday our podcasts will sound quaint and curious to the ears of more advanced listeners, but even then, I’d bet, people will still be telling and recording stories, and the sound of human voices will continue to captivate us as it always has.
Before Ira Glass, before Terry Gross, before any number of NPR personalities and internet podcasters who these days bring us interview after fascinating interview with the great minds of our time, there was Studs Terkel. In addition to his almost superhuman achievements as an oral historian, film and TV actor, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Terkel pioneered the radio interview with his Chicago radio show, which ran for over four decades. “With no written questions,” an NPR eulogy tells us, Terkel would “pick up a riff and improvise.” In 1960, he brought his jazz-like improvisational style to Paris, to the apartment of existentialist philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir.
You can hear their conversation, which spans nearly half-an-hour, just below. De Beauvoir talks about her middle-class upbringing, student days at the Sorbonne, and development as a teacher and writer. She narrates her life history in part because the first book of her three-volume autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, had just been published, and the second, The Prime of Life, was near completion. Already well-known for her philosophical and political work with her partner Jean-Paul Sartre and fellow existentialists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Albert Camus, and her groundbreaking feminist study The Second Sex, de Beauvoir was entering a later phase in her career, a very reflective one. Suitably, Terkel opens the interview by observing that “listeners would very much like to know how you got this way.”
“This way” refers to de Beauvoir’s fierce commitments to philosophy, and to feminism. Terkel compares her to transcendentalist and feminist pioneer Margaret Fuller, “of Boston, a century ago,” who “too traveled to various parts of the world and saw what she wanted to see, what she intended to see, the truth.” Accordingly, their conversation turns from personal reminisces to de Beauvoir’s belief that the writer must be “involved,” or—as she clarifies, “committed”—ethically, philosophically, and politically. What this means for her is “not ignoring the rest of the world.” As she puts it, “there is no possible neutrality… you have to commit yourself… and not to just be picked by people, pretending you are picked by nobody.” She goes on, in a vein reminiscent of Howard Zinn’s remark that one “can’t be neutral on a moving train”:
You are always picked one way or another way. You always help this one or this other: the poor against the wealthy or the wealthy against the poor—you have no choice. And if you pretend just to stay and do nothing, even staying and doing nothing means something and it goes to one of the camp or the other.
Intrigued, Terkel asks “I’m doing nothing, this too is a matter of choice, you say?” De Beauvoir explains: “there is only one thing: is to begin to speak yourself, your own way. You have to say ‘I am against it,’ ‘I am for it’ because if you say nothing, your silence is used by the one you are for or against.” It’s a fascinating interview first because de Beauvoir is such an engaging speaker and secondly because Terkel is such an excellent listener.
Many novelists and poets—from Oscar Wilde to Neil Gaiman—have excelled at reaching adults as well as kids, but it’s incredibly rare to find an academic who can do so. Two of the few exceptions that come to mind are the ever popular C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, both well-respected Oxford scholars and more-than-able children’s authors. We can add to that short list a rather unexpected name—that of Walter Benjamin: apocalyptic Marxist theorist and literary critic, student of mystical Judaism and Kabbalah, mentor and friend to Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, and Herman Hesse, and children’s radio host. During the years 1927 and 1933, while working on his monumental, and unfinished, Arcades Project and teaching at the University of Heidelberg, Benjamin also maintained a lively presence as a broadcaster, where “he found himself,” Critical Theory tells us, “writing on a variety of topics for… all ages, including children and adolescents.”
Benjamin’s youth and adult programming has been collected by Verso press in a new book entitled Radio Benjamin, which “brings together some of his most accessible” thinking. “Fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture,” writes Verso, Benjamin “wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio.” Between 1929 and 1932, he delivered around 30 broadcasts he called “Enlightenment for Children” (Aufklärung für Kinder), many of which you can hear read in the original German by Harald Wiesner at Ubuweb (German speakers, listen to an episode above). These, Ubuweb informs us, focused on “introducing the youth to various, some of them classical, natural catastrophes, for instance the Lisbon earthquake of the 1750’s that so shook the optimism of Voltaire and the century.”
Another of Benjamin’s subjects was “various episodes of lawlessness, fraud and deceit, much of it recent.” During one such broadcast, “The Bootleggers,” Benjamin wonders aloud rhetorically, “should children even hear these kinds of stories? Stories of swindlers and miscreants who break the law trying to make a pile of dough, and often succeed?” He admits, “It’s a legitimate question.” He then goes on to elucidate “the laws and grand intentions that create the backdrop for the stories in which alcohol smugglers are heroes” and tells, in fascinating detail, a few “little tales” of said heroes.
Benjamin, writes Critical Theory, played the role of “a German Ira Glass for teens,” with a kind of pop sociology that also taught lessons about language, philosophy, and class prejudice. In another episode, “Berlin Dialect,” he “celebrates ‘Berlinish,” a crude dialect of the working class that was ditched as Berliners sought to become more ‘refined.’” “Berlinish is a language that comes from work,” he explained, “It developed not from writers or scholars, but rather from the locker room and the card table, on the bus and at the pawn shop, at sporting arenas and in factories.”
The typescripts of Benjamin’s radio plays for children were seized by the Gestapo after his suicide in 1940 and “only escaped destruction by bureaucratic error.” They were only published in German in 1985. The high theorist himself apparently looked down upon this work but, Verso writes, these “plays, readings, book reviews, and fiction reveal Benjamin in a creative, rather than critical, mode… channeling his sophisticated thinking to a wide audience.” As such, these radio broadcasts may—as Jeffrey Mehlman argues in Walter Benjamin for Children—help us better understand “one of this century’s most suggestive and perplexing critics.”
Antonin Artaud had his first mental breakdown at the age of 16 and, from there on out, spent much of his life in and out of asylums. Diagnosed with “incurable paranoid delirium,” Artaud suffered from hallucinations, glossolalia, and bouts of violent rage. And his treatment probably did about as much harm as it did good. He was prescribed laudanum, which gave him a lifelong addiction to opiates. He endured some truly horrific procedures like electric shock treatment along with the highly dubious insulin therapy, which put him in a coma for a while.
In spite of this, Artaud proved to be a hugely influential theorist and playwright, famous for coining the term, “Theater of Cruelty.” His performances were designed to assault the senses and sensibilities of the audience and awaken them to the base realities of life — sex, torture, murder and bodily fluids. Artaud wanted to break down the boundary between actor and audience and create an event that was ecstatic, uncontained and even dangerous. His ideas revolutionized the stage. As the late great Susan Sontag once wrote, “no one who works in the theater now is untouched by the impact of Artaud’s specific ideas.”
But generally speaking, his ideas about theater were more popular than his actual productions. One of his most famous plays, first staged in 1935, was Les Cenci, about a father who rapes his daughter and then gets brutally killed by his daughter’s hired thugs. The play was a flop when it debuted, running for a mere 17 performances. Even Sontag conceded that Les Cenci was “not a very good play.”
Artaud’s last work was an audio piece called To Have Done With The Judgment Of God (Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu), and it proved to be equally unpopular, at least with some very important people. Commissioned by Ferdinand Pouey, head of the dramatic and literary broadcasts for French Radio in 1947, the work was written by Artaud after he spent the better part of WWII interned in an asylum where he endured the worst of his treatment. The piece is as raw and emotionally naked as you might expect –an anguished rant against society. A raving screed filled with scatological imagery, screams, nonsense words, anti-American invectives and anti-Catholic pronouncements.
The piece (above) was slated to air on January 2, 1948 but station director Vladimir Porché yanked it at the last moment. Apparently, he wasn’t terribly fond of the copious references to poop and semen nor the anti-American vitriol. Porché’s rejection caused a cause célèbre among Parisian intellectuals. René Clair, Jean Cocteau and Paul Éluard among others loudly protested the decision, and Pouey even resigned from his job in protest, but to no avail. It never aired. Artaud, who reportedly took the rejection very personally, died a month later. You can listen to the broadcast above. And, in case your French isn’t up to snuff, you can still appreciate its theatrical elements, maybe while reading an English translation of the radio play script here.
If you can’t get enough of Artaud’s final work, you can watch this staged version of To Have Done With the Judgment of Godbelow starring Billy Barnum and John Voigt (no, not Angelina Jolie’s father, the avant-garde musician).
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.
A comparison between the invention of radio and that of the Internet need not be a strained or superfical exercise. Parallels abound. The communication tool that first drew the world together with news, drama, and music took shape in a small but crowded field of amateur enthusiasts, engineers and physicists, military strategists, and competing corporate interests. In 1920, the technology emerged fully into the consumer sector with the first commercial broadcast by Westinghouse’s KDKA station in Pittsburgh on November 2, Election Day. By 1924, the U.S. had 600 commercial stations around the country, and in 1927, the model spread across the Atlantic when the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC) succeeded the British Broadcasting Company, formerly an extension of the Post Office.
Unlike the Wild West frontier of U.S. radio, since its 1922 inception the BBC operated under a centralized command structure that, paradoxically, fostered some very egalitarian attitudes to broadcasting—in certain respects. In others, however, the BBC, led by “conscientious founder” Lord John Reith, took on the task of providing its listeners with “elevating and educative” material, particularly avant garde music like the work of Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. The BBC, writes David Stubbs in Fear of Music, “were prepared to be quite bold in their broadcasting policy, making a point of including ‘futurist’ or ‘art music,’ as they termed it.” As you might imagine, “listeners proved a little recalcitrant in the face of this highbrow policy.”
In response to the volume of listener complaints, the BBC began a PR campaign in 1927 that sought to train audiences in how to listen to challenging and unfamiliar broadcasts. One statement released by the BBC stresses responsible, “correct,” listening practices: “If there be an art of broadcasting there is equally an art of listening… there can be no excuse for the listener who tunes in to a programme, willy nilly, and complains that he does not care for it.” The next year, the BBC Handbook 1928 included the following castigation of listener antipathy and restlessness.
Every new invention that brings desirable things more easily within our reach thereby to some extent cheapens them… We seem to be entering upon a kind of arm-chair period of civilisation, when everything that goes to make up adventure is dealt with wholesale, and delivered, as it were, to the individual at his own door.
It’s as if Amazon were right around the corner, and, in a certain sense, it was. Like personal computing technology, the wireless revolutionized communications and offered instant access to information, if not yet goods, and not yet on an “on-demand” basis. Unlike Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, however, British commercial radio strove mightily to control the ethics and aesthetics of its content. The handbook goes on to elaborate its proposed remedy for the potential cheapening of culture it identifies above:
The listener, in other words, should be an epicure and not a glutton; he should choose his broadcast fare with discrimination, and when the time comes give himself deliberately to the enjoyment of it… To sum up, I would urge upon those who use wireless to cultivate the art of listening; to discriminate in what they listen to, and to listen with their mind as well as their ears. In that way they will not only increase their pleasure, but actually contribute their part to the improvement and perfection of an art which is yet in its childhood.
It seems that these lengthy prose prescriptions did not convey the message as efficiently as they might. In 1930, BBC administrators published a handbook that took a much more direct approach, which you can see above. Titled “Good Listening,” the list of instructions, transcribed below, proceeds under the assumption that any dissatisfaction with BBC programming should be blamed solely on impatient, slothful listeners. As BBC program advisor Filson Young wrote that year in a Radio Times article, “Good listeners will produce good programmes more surely and more certainly than anything else… Many of you have not even begun to master the art of listening. The arch-fault of the average listener is that he does not select.”
GOOD LISTENING
Make sure that your set is working properly before you settle down to listen.
Choose your programmes as carefully as you choose which theatre to go to. It is just as important to you to enjoy yourself at home as at the theatre.
Listen as carefully at home as you do in a theatre or concert hall. You can’t get the best out of a programme if your mind is wandering, or if you are playing bridge or reading. Give it your full attention. Try turning out the lights so that your eye is not caught by familiar objects in the room. Your imagination will be twice as vivid.
If you only listen with half an ear you haven’t a quarter of a right to criticise.
Think of your favourite occupation. Don’t you like a change sometimes? Give the wireless a rest now and then.
All maybe more than a little condescending, perhaps, but that last bit of advice now seems eternal.
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