AADL Talks To: Bill Zirinsky and Ruth Schekter of Crazy Wisdom

Mon, 04/03/2023 - 9:48am

In this episode of AADL Talks To, we interview Bill Zirinsky and Ruth Schekter. Bill and Ruth discuss their history running the Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and the Crazy Wisdom Journal. They also talk about their time in Ann Arbor, including some of the city’s changes over the years. They discuss their experience as a unique “new age” bookstore in a town known for its book shops.

Arwulf Arwulf At WCBN

Fri, 02/10/2023 - 1:37pm

Video extra from the feature-length documentary Welcome to Commie High from 7 Cylinders Studio.

JCC Conversations | Ritchie Boy – Guy Stern

Wed, 02/01/2023 - 2:47pm

Guy Stern escaped Nazi Germany in 1937 and subsequently joined the U.S. army where he served as an interrogator of captured German soldiers. Guy and his life story are amazing. This might be our last best chance to hear what life was like in pre war Germany and WWII from someone who was there.

JCC Conversations | Rich Retyi, Author of The Book of Ann Arbor: An Extremely Serious History Book

Wed, 02/01/2023 - 2:35pm

The 41 stories in the book include a suicide submarine parade. Ann Arbor’s top 10 astronauts. Shakey Jake, The Embassy Hotel, and stories of trains crashing into buildings. The birth of Iggy Pop. Punching Nazis. The day the dictator came to town. The music mobile, the naked mile, and a brief history of poop. Rich and his book are truly fun!

JCC Conversations | Andrew Nagy

Wed, 02/01/2023 - 1:35pm

Little did they know that the Nazi’s would soon invade Hungary and how desperate their fight for survival would be. Join Chuck Newman and hear the amazing story of how Andrew Nagy survived WWII in Budapest in significant part due to the heroic efforts of University of Michigan graduate Raul Wallenberg.

He subsequently escaped Communist Hungary and eventually immigrated to the United States where he became a distinguished Professor of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences at the University of Michigan. He still consults for NASA at the age of 89.

JCC Conversations | Jennifer Mendelsohn – Genealogist and Journalist

Wed, 02/01/2023 - 11:33am

Chuck Newman interviews Jennifer Mendelsohn, renown genealogist and journalist, who shares fascinating stories of how she finds relatives of holocaust survivors that they didn’t know existed.

Martin Bandyke Under Covers for December 2022: Martin interviews Mitchell Cohen, author of Looking for the Magic: New York City, the ‘70s and the Rise of Arista Records.

Thu, 12/01/2022 - 10:18am

Looking for the Magic is a cultural-historical remix, a fresh perspective on how Arista Records reflected its place and time, New York in the 1970s and early 1980s. Through interviews with dozens of artists and executives, music journalist Mitchell Cohen goes inside the business of making and marketing music during this vibrant and diverse period. Under Clive Davis, rock, pop, punk, jazz, R&B, disco, cabaret and Broadway were all represented on Arista. The label sounded like the city it was at the geographical center of.

From its inception as a new entity built on the pop and soul foundation of Bell Records, to groundbreaking artists like Gil Scott-Heron and Patti Smith, to revitalized legends like the Kinks and Aretha Franklin, up to its launching of its biggest star, Whitney Houston, Arista Records’ story has never been told like this. Looking for the Magic covers the wide scope of the label’s roster: its giant pop successes (Barry Manilow), its dedication to cutting-edge jazz (Anthony Braxton) and its embrace of rock royalty (Lou Reed, the Grateful Dead).

Mitchell Cohen has written about music and film for Creem, High Fidelity, Film Comment, the Village Voice, Musician and Phonograph Record. He began working at Arista Records in the late ‘70s as a publicity and advertising copywriter and then as one of the label’s A&R executives.

Martin Bandyke Under Covers for October 2022: Martin interviews Dennis Duncan, author of Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age, by Dennis Duncan

Tue, 10/04/2022 - 3:21pm

Most of us give little thought to the back of the book―it’s just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history -- a New York Times Editors' Choice Book -- hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In Index, A History of the, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.

Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Duncan uncovers how it has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists’ living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and―of course―indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart―and we have been for eight hundred years.

Martin’s interview with Dennis Duncan was recorded on March 10th, 2022.

Intergenerational Dialogue on the Great Migration: Highlights

Sat, 10/01/2022 - 3:32pm

Intergenerational Dialogue on the Great Migration: Alvesta Smith

Sat, 10/01/2022 - 3:24pm