Though disrupted by a sniffly, coldy voice, RLA substitutes for his intended show this triad of three relatively long pieces this week: Carnival of the Animals, with comic verses by Ogden Nash, spoken by Noel Coward; the Firesign Theater’s “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him”; and an alternate version of “Desolation Row”. You’re invited to attend.
Walt Whitman comes to us “disorderly fleshly and sensual … eating drinking and breeding”, with many other interesting and outrageous assertions this week: “copulation is no more rank to me than death is”, or “the scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer”, and the sumptuous new word “omnifutuant” – tune in to find out what this word means. And it’s all supported with music from the Waterboys, Russian Orthodox liturgy, John Lennon, Lou Reed, the Four Clefs, the Kinks, and Leonard Cohen. You’re invited to attend.
First telephone connections, with Lou Reed, The Band, Dr Hook, then spending time with Leonard Cohen’s “Alexandra Leaving” and finally Walt Whitman and our connections expanding “much farther, and then farther and farther”. You are invited to attend.
Adam connected to God
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You are invited to our exploration of Wabi-Sabi, a Japanese approach to life and art especially suited to this time of the year. We have music from Japan, America (Otis Redding, Robert Johnson, and more), Britain (inc. a tribute to Jack Bruce), poetry from Ryokan, William Carlos Williams, Rumi, and Stevenson, RLA’s Autumn meditation from Journey through the Seasons, and finally a famous passage from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: a lonely woman’s fantasy about romping naked in the water with twenty-eight men, of whom “the homeliest of them is beautiful to her”.
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Journey through the Seasons
Here is an old 209Radio show, about Winter – that stage of the Cyclical Journey.
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Here is an archived Evening under Lamplight show from February, 2009, with a forty-minute reading of Joyce Carol Oates’ wonderful story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Attend to the story as a kind of modern version of Little Red Riding Hood – with a modern-day wolf who apparently is out to destroy the girl, but perhaps, on another level, he is leading her out from the Wasteland of her vapid suburban world into the sublime possibilities waiting for her, “the vast, sunlit reaches” of a new land.
