Conor Gillies | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

This Week's Show •

Documenting Democracy: Fred Wiseman’s ‘City Hall’

What Fred Wiseman found in Boston City Hall is not what he was looking for. The master of documentary film is famous for his almost innocent camera eye that unlocks visual drama in big institutions ...

What Fred Wiseman found in Boston City Hall is not what he was looking for. The master of documentary film is famous for his almost innocent camera eye that unlocks visual drama in big institutions — the New York Public Library, the Paris Opera, or in his early days: Bridgewater State Mental Hospital in 1960s Massachusetts. So why not finally get inside the modern brick and concrete fortress of official life in his hometown, and see what’s going on in the faces, the meeting rooms, the tone of voice in local affairs. What he found was simpler than all that. It was the un-Trump in the un-Washington. An almost astonishing civility, good humor, what looks like good faith in the hundreds of negotiations every day that keep a community going, and growing.

The concrete-and-brick interior of Boston’s City Hall building

Fred Wiseman shot his film “City Hall” in Boston toward the end of 2018—before COVID, before the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, before the vote that elected Joe Biden president. It was 10 weeks in the shooting in the nooks and crannies of city services. Then it was 10 months in the alchemy of editing and shaping what the legendary Wiseman eye has seen. It is now a four-and-a-half hour movie — between limited release in theaters and national exposure on public television. And already it is a field day for reviewers far and wide: an artist’s impression of local politics and public conversation that seem to have turned upside down and are not settled yet. To my eye and ear, Fred Wiseman’s “City Hall” feels like a classic that dates itself before the flood, so to speak, but is not at all frozen in time.

This hour, we’re in conversation with Fred Wiseman, speaking to us from Paris, where he distilled hundreds of hours of film into a movie. Lydia Edwards, city councilor from East Boston, also joins us.

Featured image by Adrien Toubiana, courtesy of Zipporah Films. The full Open Source panel event at City Hall, excerpted in this hour, can be found here. Our 2018 conversation with Fred Wiseman can be found at this link.

Podcast • November 16, 2020

Open Source is hiring a new Producer

Radio Open Source is seeking a sound producer to oversee recording, editing, and mixing of the weekly show. Primary responsibilities of this part-time role include: Coordinating the recording of interviews both on the guest’s end ...

Radio Open Source is seeking a sound producer to oversee recording, editing, and mixing of the weekly show.

Primary responsibilities of this part-time role include: Coordinating the recording of interviews both on the guest’s end (making sure they know how to record themselves) and the host’s end; editing two-way interviews, with the help of our team, to segment length; and, on occasion, producing more involved audio (hour-long shows with music, vox pop segments and montages, three- or four-way group interviews, and segments with archival and news actuality). The producer will help think through the flow and sound of the hour as a whole, assist in recording and timing the host script, and work with the WBUR engineer on final production tasks.

While this technical role is not primarily an editorial position, the producer is expected to contribute to story meetings, brainstorm possible guests, and help refine angles and host questions. So, engagement with pop culture, passion for reading, and a critical approach to the news is a plus.

Experience required: at least 2-3 years sound editing on DAW software (Hindenburg [preferred], ProTools, Audition, Reaper, or similar) in a radio or podcast setting; some experience recording in the field (two-way interviews, field recording).

Hours: Monday-Wednesday, about 3 days a week or 24-30 hours depending on availability.

Salary: flexible

Location: Boston (Beacon Hill area), but remote to start

If this job interests you, please send a cover letter and resume to info@radioopensource.org with the subject line: “[NAME] producer application.” Please include any links to any relevant audio work you have produced. In your letter, or in a separate document, please answer two of the following three questions:

(1) What is an example of a favorite radio show or podcast episode (from any non-Open Source show) and why, from the standpoint of a producer and listener?

(2) Tell us about one of your favorite artists, musicians, or works of art (album, painting, book, play, etc). How might you imagine a produced hour-long radio discussion about them (or it)—in any format?

(3) Pitch us a show on a human story, political issue, or historical episode that matters to you. Consider a round-table Zoom conversation with a mix of voices in discussion or debate; or three segments with three separate voices and angles.

(We will respect your intellectual property and privacy. This is just to get a sense about you and your interests!)

Deadline: December 1

Podcast • November 12, 2020

Election Disconnection

Call it a four-year try-out we’ve just been through of strong-man, one-man politics. The election put it to a vote, and the country said: enough for now, but not quite No. The USA didn’t so much split down the middle as declare itself two states, of mind and geography, red and blue, or maybe three: Atlantic, Pacific and Farmland, with the next round in doubt. We feel saved, in some sense, but not cured or redeemed.

So we do what you do: enlist the soundest of our friends and keep talking. With people like Citizen Ralph Nader; Masha Gessen with a Russian twist, Green New Dealer Saikat Chakrabarti; historian Rick Perlstein; letter-writer Heather Cox Richardson, the noisy Scotsman Mark Blyth; Chris Hedges, preaching doom; and the only pundit we truly love, the cranky Caribbean-American patriot Amber.

You thought a presidential election could be an exit ramp out of polluted stuck traffic and already you know we’re in the same old breakdown lane — with ingenious fresh touches of absurdity. President Trump lost the popular vote and the electoral college, prompting his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to assure us this week that we are in a peaceful transition to a second Trump administration. What can you do in the breakdown lane but call out for help or at least for company, or judgment with a jolt? And that’s what we’re doing this hour with the Open Source family of historians, preachers, politicians old and young, foreign and domestic.

Podcast • September 30, 2019

The CIA’s Covert Chemist

We’re at home with Stephen Kinzer, the longtime reporter of secret U.S. operations in books like Overthrow and All the Shah’s Men. In a new book, Poisoner in Chief, Kinzer looks at a scientist named Sidney Gottlieb and the notorious “mind ...

We’re at home with Stephen Kinzer, the longtime reporter of secret U.S. operations in books like Overthrow and All the Shah’s Men. In a new book, Poisoner in Chief, Kinzer looks at a scientist named Sidney Gottlieb and the notorious “mind control” CIA program he led, MK-ULTRA.

Kinzer’s portrait induces the feeling of a bad trip: We’ve been to a completely different zone we know is there, but we can’t believe. He’s introducing us to the man who brought LSD into this world. Gottlieb’s experiments may have been responsible in part for Billie Holiday’s death, and putting Whitey Bulger on a two-year LSD regimen. At the CIA, Gottlieb was involved with assassination attempts of Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. There are resonances of James Bond and Doctor Strangelove. Or maybe Josef Mengele.

Stephen Kinzer

“This is the first time I’ve been shocked by something I discovered in writing a book. I’m still getting over my shock from the process of learning who this Sidney Gottlieb was,” Kinzer told us. “I now conclude he was the most powerful unknown American of the twentieth century.”

You can catch our last episode with Kinzer, “America’s Empire State of Mind,” here.

And if you can, give us a tip over on Patreon—and thanks!

Photo illustration by Conor Gillies, photo courtesy of the author.

This Week's Show •

Amazing Aretha

Aretha Franklin made you believe you were hearing both heaven and earth. Her voice was not of this world: it was “a gift of God,” people have said. She was the reason women want to ...

Aretha Franklin made you believe you were hearing both heaven and earth. Her voice was not of this world: it was “a gift of God,” people have said. She was the reason women want to sing, said Mary J. Blige, who covered Aretha hits. James Baldwin said the way Aretha sings is “the way I want to write.” Our guest Ed Pavlić calls her voice a Hubble telescope, taking us back to the origin of time and truth.

She stands in an improvised church in Watts, Los Angeles in the troubled time of 1972, a shy woman with the blessed assurance that her people—which could mean all of us—needed a song, and a singer. Amazing Grace became the album of her lifetime (and the most popular gospel album ever)—reborn this year, on film, in a new documentary.

Aretha Franklin and the Southern California Community Choir. Courtesy of Neon.

Franklin was an institution through five decades, one of that handful of mega-stars we thought we knew. But we were wrong. We knew the rights-minded daughter of the radio preacher from Detroit who walked the fine line between church gospel and secular soul music and had a hundred danceable hits on both sides of the line. She sang opera, too, subbing for Pavarotti, no less, on a moment’s notice. And she sang “My country, ‘tis of thee” at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

But now, in the year after her death, the new movie feels like revelation: it’s Aretha at age 29, live with a church choir, coming home to the songs of her girlhood. But we’re hearing her differently because we can see her: a performing artist looking more like a prophet in her own right.

We’re joined by Reverend William Barber, Shana Redmond, and Wesley Morris.

Podcast • April 17, 2018

Barbara Ehrenreich on the Cult of Wellness

This is an unlocked, bonus segment of Open Source. You can hear weekly conversations and extended interviews like this one by subscribing and supporting our work on Patreon. In her new book, Natural Causes: An ...

This is an unlocked, bonus segment of Open Source. You can hear weekly conversations and extended interviews like this one by subscribing and supporting our work on Patreon.

In her new book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, the veteran reporter Barbara Ehrenreich takes aim at a host of maladies in the world of modern medicine: bloated hospital and insurance industries, Silicon Valley charlatans preaching everlasting life, and especially wellness and self-help gurus. Against the fitness entrepreneurs and “positive thinkers,” Ehrenreich (who has a PhD in cellular immunology) is putting forward a “dystopian view of the body.” She writes: “The body is not a smooth-running machine in which each part obediently performs its tasks for the benefit of the common good. It is at best a confederation of parts—cells, tissues, even thought patterns—that may seek to advance their own agendas, whether or not they are destructive of the whole.”

Ehrenreich argues that a delusion of Control pervades the culture, and good or bad health is increasingly pinned on “individual responsbility.” Dying is not a crime, she says, neither a sign of weakness. In conversation here, she’s expanding on these themes, as well as the ironies of “successful aging,” and what exactly is wrong with the Ray Kurzweil view of the human body.

Produced by Homa Sarabi-Daunais and Conor Gillies. Photo by Reed Young for The Guardian, 2014.

Podcast • October 3, 2017

Karl Ove Knausgaard on Art and Loneliness

Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote a 6-volume selfie that a lot of us can’t stop reading. My Struggle he called it, looking inward and talking to himself for thousands of pages. Autumn, his new book, is ...

Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote a 6-volume selfie that a lot of us can’t stop reading. My Struggle he called it, looking inward and talking to himself for thousands of pages. Autumn, his new book, is a relief for him and us: It looks outward, in short pieces, letters to a new daughter before she was born, about Stubble Fields, Telephones, Wellington boots, chimneys, the painter Vincent Van Gogh. You name it, he’ll write it, a theme a day as in the college course we wish we’d taken.

In conversation it’s not one guy introspecting, it’s two guys groping for a connection, sitting in the back of my house in Boston for most of an hour in the storm season of 2017. What’s the difference, I’m asking, between his narcissism and President Trump’s?

We’re jumping from Russian novels to gene editing to the experience of loneliness, and I’m finding him wide open to engagement. He’s generous, transparent, in effect: innocent. Here’s an excerpt of the interview below:

Karl Ove Knausgaard: The books I’d been writing before were so introspective and so analytic and so self-analyzing. That’s very much about relations, very much about psychology, and it’s basically all about the interior life. And this book is the opposite. I’m looking at something outside of myself, and it is the things themselves that should be in the center, basically yes removed from myself. But from thing to me was to see what happens if you write, you know in your own style personally, about something objective that happens with an encyclopedia thought of the world, you know. Everything becomes, in the end, very personal anyway somehow. It’s impossible to remove yourself. You never think of quality of writing in an encyclopedic text, you know, in a dictionary. It’s just like it’s a matter of fact: this is the world. But what you discover when you write about it that’s just not true. The objective world just doesn’t exist. It’s all a relationship between me and the world and you and the world. There is nothing else.

Christopher Lydon: So why get out of yourself after so long inside? Was it for relief?

KOK: Yeah, very much a relief. It was joyful to write this book, and it wasn’t joyful to write My Struggle, as my previous book was called. But a joyful part is, you know, because I am writing about joyful things. I’m writing about being alive in this world, which is joyful. We do forget it all the time, but it is. And this book is mainly set in a garden and a house, and that’s it. That’s where the world is. I mean, even when there are hurricanes and, you know, climate change and all the wars and hunger and all of this, this is still true. It does exist.

Video: On Van Gogh and the Life of an Artist

Video by Zach Goldhammer. Illustrations by Susan Coyne.

Podcast • February 28, 2017

George Saunders in the Afterlife

The story master George Saunders is widely revered as the nicest guy in the writing game, but it’s sweeter and deeper than that. I met him in the Boston Public Library the other day to gab about ...

The story master George Saunders is widely revered as the nicest guy in the writing game, but it’s sweeter and deeper than that. I met him in the Boston Public Library the other day to gab about his spooky transcendental first novel — about Abraham Lincoln in limbo with the son that died in the White House; immediately I was reminded of what Maxim Gorki noticed about Anton Chekhov, a Saunders idol: “In Anton Chekhov’s presence,” Gorki said, “every one involuntarily felt in himself a desire to be simpler, more truthful, more one’s self…”

And so it went for us with George Saunders. He’s famous for writing: “Stay open, forever, so open it hurts,” and he talks that way about everything – about his and his wife’s version of Tibetan Buddhism, for example; about his very complicated feelings inside Trump campaign rallies; about the notion he teaches that “if death is in the room,” as it is in throughout his new novel, the writing and the reading get pretty interesting. The book in question is titled Lincoln in the Bardo – using the Tibetan word for a mysterious space underground for lost souls after death, but not quite dead. He gave me a feeling it’s a zone we all might well get to know better.

Podcast • February 7, 2017

Stephen Kinzer: America’s Empire State of Mind

Why are we everywhere in the world, so often with guns drawn? The provocative reporter Stephen Kinzer has covered a number of our “regime-change” interventions in the world, from Guatemala to the Middle East. And ...

Why are we everywhere in the world, so often with guns drawn? The provocative reporter Stephen Kinzer has covered a number of our “regime-change” interventions in the world, from Guatemala to the Middle East. And in book after book, he’s sharpened the question: how did our country that was born in proud rebellion against the British Empire become the mightiest empire of them all — taking on the sorrows and burdens and expenses that come with most of a thousand military bases around the world. And how has the instinct to intervene persisted through so many bitter mistakes and losses, from the first de-stabilization of democratic Iran in the 1950s to Vietnam in the 60s to Iraq yesterday and Afghanistan today?

In Kinzer’s new book, called The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire, the short answer to the big question is a conflict in our blood: We are isolationists to the bone, and incurably drawn to trouble, both. Once upon a time, the biggest names in the country — President Teddy Roosevelt and his arch enemy Mark Twain — argued the difference at the top of their lungs. Steve Kinzer surfaces their argument again.

Podcast • January 26, 2017

Just Say No!

Millions of people marched over the weekend, showing the outlines of a global, feminist, anti-racist, anti-Trump resistance… maybe. The question on our minds this week is whether the protesters can sustain and direct their dissent to create real ...

Nobody can predict exactly how Trump’s agenda will play out, and the first days haven’t been good — the non-stop volley of tweets, executive orders, appointments, and headlines. Attention has been paid, Mr President. Now what? Without the institutional structures of old — party, unions, media, and churches — what’s the path of most resistance?

Our guest L.A. Kauffman helped organize the New York anti-war protests in 2003 and 2004, and has written a new book for Verso called Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism. She traces U.S. movements after the 1960s, from Earth First to ACT UP to the Seattle WTO protests to Occupy and beyond. She is euphoric about the possibilities of “upbeat unruliness” to transform our current, dismal political reality.

Protesters in in D.C., where an estimated 500,000 people marched, and New York, where 400,000 people came out. Hundreds of thousands more marched around the world, including at least 750,000 in Los Angeles. Photos by Zach Goldhammer and Conor Gillies.

Still, we wonder how a huge array of ordinary folks, of every political stripe — from Hillary Clinton fans to the antifa Black Bloc (a.k.a. the folks burning limos and punching Nazis) — with nothing more in common than their dislike of Trump, can mobilize within the current structure of electoral politics (and a Democratic party already failing to “present a united front to defend human rights and civil liberties in the Trump era”). Some wonder if it’s even worthwhile working within institutions that have brought us continued war, poverty, and inequality.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Princeton professor, socialist organizer, and author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, offers a broad-tent vision of grassroots resistance mixed with a healthy dose of cynicism about traditional political leadership. In a widely-shared statement this week, Taylor encouraged Americans to build social movements outside of existing party politics. She disregards the Democrats as revisionists, who throughout the 20th century have worked to absorb, contain, and de-radicalize social movements (black liberation movements in particular). But Prof. Taylor critiques are aimed primarily at the ruling political class; she discourages organizers from harping on whether whether or not the street-level marchers were too white, too liberal, or too #StillWithHer: “The women’s marches were the beginning, not the end. …There are literally millions of people in this country who are now questioning everything. We need to open up our organizations, planning meetings, marches, and much more to them.”

Mark Greif, founding editor of the magazine n+1 and author of a new essay collection, Against Everything, takes the position of a born contrarian when it comes to the new administration: “No President” — not “not my president” — has been his motto since the election and civil disobedience remains his default stance. Greif, like us, is deeply influenced by the New England transcendentalists, and forces us to ask, WWTD (what would Thoreau do)? The answer may lie in Thoreau’s own question: “The laws are there. Do they really represent you? What would it take for them to represent you?” Cultivate inefficiency, and don’t be afraid to be a crank, Greif says. “Be yourself friction, inside the machine.” Hear a longer interview with Greif below:

We’re joined in the studio by minister-activist Mariama White-Hammond and The Tea Party chronicler Vanessa Williamson.

Watch producer Zach Goldhammer’s interviews from the Women’s March below:

illustration by Susan Coyne