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JCC Conversations | Rich Retyi, Author of The Book of Ann Arbor: An Extremely Serious History Book
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!
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JCC Conversations | Andrew Nagy
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.
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JCC Conversations | Jennifer Mendelsohn – Genealogist and Journalist
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.
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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.
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.
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Martin Bandyke Under Covers for November 2022: Martin interviews Lesley-Ann Jones, author of The Stone Age: Sixty Years of The Rolling Stones.
On 12th July 1962, the Rollin’ Stones performed their first-ever gig at London’s Marquee jazz club. Down the line, a ‘g’ was added, a spark was lit and their destiny was sealed. No going back.
These five white British kids set out to play the music of black America. They honed a style that bled bluesy undertones into dark insinuations of women, sex, and drugs. Denounced as ‘corruptors of youth’ and ‘messengers of the devil,’ they created some of the most thrilling music ever recorded.
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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
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.