“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
With that disorienting, opening sentence, Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis begins its dreadful spiral into insanity. But to photographer Marc Paeps, and Air, a Brussels ad agency tasked with getting readers into local Filigranes Bookstores, Kakfa’s text inspires this image, above: That of a despondent, six-legged Samsa, cut off from the world in a sleazy motel, wasting his few remaining days and dollars on booze, hookers, and coke. (Click on the picture to see the much larger version’s sordid details.) The campaign’s theme is, “Make your own movie: Read a book.” Man, if that’s what’s inside books, I’m just gonna keep on watching American Idol.
Charlotte, NC public relations consultant Charla Muller had a problem.
Her husband, Brad, was about to turn 40, and she needed to appropriately commemorate the date. She wanted to give him something unique and original, something that nobody else would think of giving him, “something so dramatic and different that Brad would never ever pause to remember what I gave him for his fortieth birthday.”
She thought, and thought, and strategized, and when she finally told her husband what she wanted to give him, “he literally fell over”:
Sex. Every Day. For a Year.
Her story of their experience, 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy, tells how gettin’ it on every 24 hours “transformed a marriage.” But as opposed to being a diary of Charla and Brad’s technique, “it’s a book about the ups and downs of married life, trying to have it all (and failing) and figuring out how to get back to the basics of a grounded, faith-based marriage,” Charla says on her web site.
Charla Muller is the guest today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, January 16, at 2 pm ET.
Following my conversation with Charla, I’ll also be talking with Jackie Salloum, director of the documentary Slingshot Hip-Hop, right, and Ora Wise, education director / associate producer of the project.
Given the logarithmic escalation over the past three weeks of the ongoing atrocities in the region, I’m thrilled to have these brave activists on my program.
You can hear their ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.
Blessed, or cursed, with a bustline out of proportion to her diminutive frame, author Susan Seligson joined the “Lemons? Make Lemonade!” brigade and wrote a book about America’s fascination with breasts.
Stacked: A 32DDD Reports from the Front chronicles the writer’s travels everywhere from the offices of a plastic surgeon specializing in breast enhancement, to New York’s best bra shop, to a Las Vegas convention of exotic dancers. There, Seligson waits to meet the cantilevered Maxi Mounds, right, whose 42M brassiere cups each hold one 20-pound ta-ta stuffed to capacity with polypropylene string.
Susan Seligson is the guest today on a repeat edition of my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, January 9, at 2 pm ET.
We’re also joined in the conversation by photographer Jordan Matter, whose “Uncovered” project depicts New York City women in public places—at street crossings, on park benches, by bridges—completely topless. He photographed Susan for “Uncovered,” and she documents the experience in Stacked.
You can hear their ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.
The piece begins by quoting J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first working atomic bomb. As the Times reports, Oppenheimer thought the technology would soon be held by every nation.
“They are not too hard to make,” he told his colleagues on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M. “They will be universal if people wish to make them universal.”
The piece then, in some detail, looks at the spread of weapons, and the forces that both grew atomic arsenals and forbade them. Certainly, the area of highest concern on the graphic, to proliferation experts, remains the far right section of nuclear aspirants, any and all of them, but particularly those without warm feelings for our country IRAN. Before closing, the piece adds this pointed summary.
The take-home message of both books is quite the reverse of Oppenheimer’s grim forecast. But both caution that the situation has reached a delicate stage — with a second age of nuclear proliferation close at hand — and that missteps now could hurt terribly in the future.
You Negroes have got to stop making up holidays. In this short, author Carleen Brice (Orange Mint and Honey, right), creator of the “National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give it to Somebody Not Black Month,” half-dryly outlines her philosophy; invites white and Asian readers to try “new” Black writers in that happy corner of the bookstore where we’re typically segregated (for our own good, of course); and briefly wrestles with the presumptions of a prospective client, above. There’s even a blog.
While her YouTube’s tone is just a tad too gleefully “post-racial,” quote-unquote-unquote-unquote, for my tastes, Brice’s underlying point is eminently sensible, and, no, white people, Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope don’t count.
In writing his book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Dr. Atul Gawande says, “I’m trying to examine all the gaps involved in what we do. I wanted to show how situations of risk really work, how people in different situations grapple with that.”
Questions like, why do so many people in a hospital die, not from their ailments, but from infections acquired at the medical facility? Or, how does one measure excellence as a physician, when the currency is human life?
Or, as he states, “The paradox at the heart of medical care is that it works so well, and yet never well enough.”
Dr. Gawande is the guest on this repeat edition of my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, November 21, at 2 pm ET.
You can hear his ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, you can check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, check out our archive for up to 90 days after broadcast.
Today’s edition of NONFICTION, my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, is a rebroadcast of my conversation with author Trey Ellis, discussing his latest book, Bedtime Stories. It takes place this afternoon, Friday, October 10, at 2 pm ET.
If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, you can check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, check out our archive for up to two weeks after broadcast.
Infinity and beyond: Buzz Lightyear sketch from Toy Story (1995)
Pixar, the computer animation powerhouse behind such works as Toy Story, above, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, and, currently, the number one movie in the country, Wall•E, has created one of the strongest, most dominant brands in entertainment. But, in its early days, the company stumbled and faltered repeatedly, staying in business by the sheer dint of its tenacious founders.
So says David A. Price in his new book, The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. David Price is today’s guest on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, July 4th, 2 pm ET.
“Heh, heh…keep laffin’, lil’ white chillun…”: Uncle Remus and friends
You probably know that Disney, global makers of fine family entertainment, has a rich history of racist characters in its long legacy of films, TV shows, and other properties. But any list of the company’s nine most offensive creations, like this one from Cracked.com, that merely ranks Song of the South‘s “Uncle Remus,” above, at number 2 has got to be a doozy.
Today’s edition of NONFICTION, my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, is a rebroadcast of 
