Voice actors needed for radio theater... The Ubu Hour will be pre-recording scripts this week so if you are interested in participating, come down to KBOO and join in. No experience necessary... just an ability to read and a desire to perform in a radio theater show and have fun ... We will be recording in Studio 2 at KBOO on 9/26 at 1 pm and on 9/27 at 11 am and 7 pm, so show up at any one of those times... It shouldn't take more than an hour for each session, but again, if you can only stay for half an hour we can work with that too...  

Whole World Music of September 21, 2007 included a song entitled Only, performed by Joan La Barbara and written by American composer Morton Feldman. The composer based his song on a translation of a poem from Sonnets to Orpheus Part I, No. 23 (Feb. 1922) by Rainer Maria Rilke. Here is the translation from Rilke's original German text.

  
Only when flight shall soar
not for its own sake only
up into heaven’s lonely
silence, and be no more

Last year, Penguin Books issued a new edition of Jack London’s 1908 novel The Iron Heel. Probably London’s fullest fictional presentation of his socialist views, it’s a book that Leon Trotsky, some thirty years later, called a “prophetic vision” of “fascism, of its economy, of its governmental technique, its political psychology. . . . Jack London foresaw and described the fascist regime as the inevitable result of the defeat of the proletarian revolution.” The book has its flaws, as Trotsky acknowledged, though I would include that sense of inevitability as one of them.

The Ubu Hour's The Tragedy of MacBUSH (originally aired a couple years ago) is now available for download. A chilling tale of madness and power, witches and neocons, imperialism and fear. This is a hilarious one-hour radio theater satire that blends Shakespeare's classic  with the idiocies and sinister acts of the Bush administration. Starring Bill Dodge, Kathy Fors, SW Conch, Joe Scofflaw, Pat, Emily Young, Talon, Ken Enslow, Rolf Semprebon, Lee Rice, Aunt Joan, and Liam Delta, and written by Bill Shakespeare and Rolf Fakespeare.

As part of the Whole Whole Music program of September 7, 2007, I played a song by Elliott Carter based on a poem by Emily Dickinson. Here is that poem.

Musicians wrestle everywhere
(Emily Dickinson, c. 1860)

September UBU HOUR (9/03/07) is now available for download... There's THE FIVE WHITE GUYS AT CITY HALL (2 parts), THE DARKNESS (3 parts) and THE LOBOTOMY OF DUBYA TUSH... for anyone who missed them or couldn't stay up until 11 pm...

Material used in part for 9-6-07; loose nukes, the draft

Well, look at that, we’re coming up on the anniversary of September 11^th,the day we all mourn the 200,000 people who have been lost since that day to alcohol poisoning.  No, it’s the 250,000 who have died in car accidents.  No that can’t be right, it must be the 300,000 who died of Alzheimer’s or the 3.6 million that died of heart attacks.  Oh I’m forgetting, it’s the THREE thousand that died in the buildings that are more dead than anyone else.

Craig Burk hosts Tribute to Great Jewish-American Songwriters, September 2, 2007

On September 2, I presented a Tribute to the Great Jewish-American Songwriters as an alternate program to the Yiddish Hour. The playlist for that program may be found by clicking here

During my program, I gave a short overview on  composer Harold Arlen, drawing mostly from a New Yorker article written by John Lahr. 

The entirety of that article may be read by clicking here

Craig Burk hosts the Italian Hour, September 2, 2007

I was guest host on the Italian Hour on September 2, 2007.  To see my  playlist, click here

During his program, I singled out the great singer-songwriter Fabrizio De Andre for special praise. To learn more about this legendary artist,  click here

                                          Five minutes sweetness

                             An hour poked in the eye---

                                  Ahh-- Television!                      B.L.