Tue, 30 December 2014
For over forty years, with career, family and various natural disasters intervening, Jim Ragen has been at work on a five-volume novel spanning generations of life in the Dakotas. He turned down an offer to publish his writing in his mid-twenties because he knew he needed a lifetime of experience to best tell his story, which centers around the devastating 1972 flood in Rapid City, South Dakota that changed his life. |
Tue, 16 December 2014
Host Scott Pinkmountain facilitates a conversation between four artists—Fiona Connor; her brother, Jamie Connor, a web developer; artist and writer Brigitte Nicole Grice; and artist Catherine Davis, who works as the manager at the Eames House in the Pacific Palisades. Their conversation veers from Marx and labor power to the difference between honesty and truth in art, to public vs. private practices, to Scott's ignorance about New Zealand, as well as Moondog and a whole passel of other stuff. |
Tue, 2 December 2014
Katherine Ball’s work happens at the intersection of anti-capitalism, environmental issues, and social justice issues. For Ball, this has translated to a broad spectrum of projects ranging from making inflatable barricades for climate change demonstrations to helping turn a squatted Greek military base into a sustainable farm. |
Tue, 11 November 2014
Guitarist and songwriter Mick (who has requested anonymity due to the nature of the discussion) speaks frankly about his childhood abuse and drug use, and the crucial need for alternatives to Katy Perry.
Direct download: Episode202220Mick20Darling20Freakhead.mp3
Category:Make/Work -- posted at: 9:00pm PDT |
Tue, 28 October 2014
Mona Tian grew up in Shanghai and started playing violin at age 3. She made her major solo debut at age 8, then moved to the US to further her studies when she was 12. She speaks with Scott Pinkmountain about her lost childhood, the pressure she felt as her parents invested everything into her musical education, and how she eventually had to discover her own reasons and motivations to continue playing music as an adult. |
Tue, 30 September 2014
Documentarian Angela C. Villa and musician Thollem McDonas have been living on the road on perpetual tour for the past eight years. Villa has captured Thollem in improvised performance with the likes of Nels Cline, Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Pauline Oliveros, and countless others.
Direct download: Episode201920Thollem20Macdonas202620Angela20Villa2028129.mp3
Category:Make/Work -- posted at: 9:00pm PDT |
Tue, 16 September 2014
An artist and architect, Lisa Ward also has an extensive background in theater, and speaks about her work with the Brooklyn Pageant Project bringing performances to the streets of New York on a wagon that folded out into a theater. More recently, she's focused on visual work—sculpture that blends her interest in architecture and the American West, and in her own words, "exploring symbols of human habitation and infrastructure and their relationship to the surrounding landscape." |
Tue, 2 September 2014
Brett Fletcher Lauer is mainly known for his work as a poet. His debut book, A Hotel in Belgium, has recently been published by Four Way Books, and his work has also been published in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Fence, Harper's, and Tin House. He is the deputy director at the Poetry Society of America.
Direct download: Episode201720Brett20Fletcher20Lauer.mp3
Category:Make/Work -- posted at: 9:00pm PDT |
Tue, 19 August 2014
Composer, performer, and instrument builder Cheryl E. Leonard is known for creating compositions using materials she finds in the natural world—things like stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells and feathers. She’s travelled as far as the Arctic and Antarctica in search of new sounds like calving glaciers and her set of penguin bone instruments. Leonard talks about some of the challenges of making her microscopically quiet music while living in a city, like having to wake at 3 a.m. and climb into her closet to record. She also discusses the benefits she gets from her other two serious passions, Aikido and mountaineering, and how making art doesn’t necessarily trump those things. |
Tue, 15 July 2014
Trumpet player/composer Nate Wooley’s playing has been widely praised by everyone from the New York Times and DownBeat to trumpet icon Dave Douglass who called him “one of the most interesting and unusual trumpet players living today.” He’s constantly performing and recording internationally with such folks as John Zorn, Thurston Moore, and pretty much every one playing contemporary free jazz and improvised music. For his day job, Wooley is the curator of the Database of Recorded American Music and the editor-in-chief of their online quarterly journal, Sound American.
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Tue, 3 June 2014
Dan Nelson and Lexa Walsh are both interdisciplinary artists with too many different pursuits to list in full. Nelson is perhaps best known for his book, All Known Metal Bands, but he’s also made a lot of visual work and he records music under the name Boron. Much of Walsh’s work is socially-rooted and based around fostering community and, as she says, “working to create a hospitable democracy.” She’s also a musician and plays in the band Toychestra, as well as in The Pleasure Class with Nelson.
Direct download: MakeWork20Ep201420Dan20Nelson202620Lexa20Walsh.mp3
Category:Make/Work -- posted at: 9:00pm PDT |
Tue, 20 May 2014
Artist Vanesa Zendejas has recently been dealing primarily with Modernist sculpture and her habit to decorate, perfect, and balance, which she says may or may not be related to being a woman. Zendejas speaks about the value that value she gets from totally immersing herself in a community of artists and blurring the lines between her domestic and creative life. She also talks about growing up with a strong awareness of her Mexican-American heritage taught to her from her father who is a traditional communist painter, and her successful mother who expects her to “be smart” about the choices she makes. |
Tue, 6 May 2014
Writer Diane Cook was a producer at This American Life for years until she quit to pursue her own fiction writing. She’s since had work published or forthcoming in places like Harper's, Granta, and Zoetrope, and in 2012 she won the Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction. Cook speaks about what she learned from her time at This American Life, how she ultimately had to leave the job to develop her own identity as a writer, and her need to focus exclusively on her writing for the last couple of years. Check out Diane Cook's story, "Moving On", in the latest issue of Tin House. Preorder her debut collection, Man V. Nature, here. |
Tue, 22 April 2014
Aaron Siegel is one of the co-founders of the New York-based organization Experiments in Opera, and his own opera, “Brother Brother,” has its full-length premiere coming up in New York City on May 2nd and 3rd at the Playhouse at Abrons Art Center. |
Tue, 8 April 2014
John Colpitts, aka Kid Millions, is a founding member of the band Oneida, but he’s toured and recorded with tons of bands including Yo La Tengo, Spiritualized, Akron/Family, Marnie Stern, The Boredoms, and the Rumpus’s own Rick Moody. More recently, he’s focused on his solo percussion project, Man Forever. Man Forever is currently on tour, and the new album, Ryonen, which is a collaboration with the So Percussion ensemble, comes out this month on Thrill Jockey.
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Tue, 25 March 2014
Musician Jon Bernson performs mainly with his groups THEMAYS and Exray’s and actor/director Jennifer Welch runs the Tides Theater, located in the heart of Downtown San Francisco’s theater district. |
Tue, 25 February 2014
Nate Query plays bass for both The Decemberists and Black Prarie, and has made playing music with nationally touring bands his main job for around twenty years. You can check out Query playing live with Black Prairie on KEXP here. Their new album, "Fortune," comes out April 22 on Sugar Hill Records. |
Tue, 11 February 2014
Writer LuLing Osofsky’s work ranges from intimately personal lyric essays about her love and sex life, to investigative journalism and researched history, which she also manages to approach with a personal, revealing perspective.
You can read LuLing's essay "Chop City," published in Orion Magazine and mentioned at the end of the episode, here.
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Fri, 24 January 2014
Emily Chenoweth is the author of the novel Hello Goodbye, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She’s also a highly prolific ghostwriter. Jon Raymond has written The Half-Life, Rain Dragon, and the short story collection, Livability. His screenwriting credits include Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce, and several other films.
Direct download: 01_Make_Work_Episode_5_Chenoweth__Raymond_FINAL.small.mp3
Category:Make/Work -- posted at: 3:50pm PDT |
Tue, 14 January 2014
Italian musician Jacopo Andreini is mainly known as a drummer and composer in bands like Squarcicatrici and L’Enfance Rouge, but that only makes up a small fraction of the work that he does.
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Tue, 31 December 2013
Katie Bachler is an artist/educator based in Southern California and her work is centered on our connections to place and to each other. She recently created a Map of Home or the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and is currently working on building the Women’s Center for Creative Work in Los Angeles. |