Arts Roundup: Podcasts–Birthdays, Neon Bible and Nazi Films
June 5th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker
Today’s roundup includes two Writer’s Almanac references and two NPR Fresh Air ones.
Keillor points out two birthdays: British playwright David Hare, who wrote “[In England,] people lead shallow lives because they don’t believe in anything anymore. [In Israel,] in a single day I experience events and emotions that would keep a Swede going for a year.”
And Jewish writer Alfred Kazin, who said, “We were the children of the immigrants who had camped at the city’s back door… a place that measured all success by our skill in getting away from it.”
On NPR, Terry Gross interviews Win Butler and Regine Chassagne (husband and wife) of the band Arcade Fire about their album Neon Bible, which they performed at Judson Memorial Church (NY).
Also included is an interview with Steven Bach on his book Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, “the filmmaker who celebrated the Nazi ideal and created the Third Reich’s iconic images in Triumph of the Will and Olympiad.” Bach’s most interesting argument: Leni would not have been interesting only as Hitler’s filmmaker. She is interesting, he argues, since she made “great films” which showed Hitler “as charismatic.”