fishkofiles-blog

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Newsflash: It is very hot in NYC today. Care to cool off with some Gershwin? 

With temperatures in New York soaring to 90 degrees today, we figure it is a good time for a re-hearing of a favorite Fishko Files - “Summertime.” WNYC’s Sara Fishko explores the masterful Gershwin tune, and the many ways its interpreters say “summer.”

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"I didn’t know what to do with myself! I didn’t know such music existed in the world!"

-Leonard Bernstein on first hearing The Rite of Spring

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Liberace was my babysitter. I have a foggy memory of my mother sitting my sister and me in front of the television so we could watch his program while she did housework. At least I think it's a valid memory and not a nightmare.

-From a commenter on the new Fishko Files, "Liberace's Very Extreme Makeover" 

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This happened last night. 

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Yesterday was the Woolworth Building's 100th b-day. Hope it had a great night on the town last night. It was born in our favorite year, after all - 1913. http://www.wnyc.org/shows/fishko/2012/dec/05/

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“Do you know I’m beginning to think you are a very ordinary fellow. You are vain, dishonest, morally lax, you are proud, you are lazy and self-indulgent. Aren’t you really sinking deeper every week into the feather bed of a successful career? Read this again in a week. In another week, again.”

-Playwright Clifford Odets, from a February 1940 journal entry. Odets already had a Broadway hit (Awake and Sing!), a Hollywood screen credit (The General Died at Dawn) and his face on the cover of Time Magazine when he wrote this entry.

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"Costume Designers are magicians... "

Edith head, legendary costume designer

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THE JAZZ LOFT ANTHOLOGY

From 1957 to 1965, the master photographer W. Eugene Smith had a studio and darkroom in a dilapidated building on 6th Avenue north of 28th street in Manhattan.  The Jazz Loft, as it became known, had already become a favored spot for jam sessions by hundreds of jazz players of the day.  During his years there, Smith became obsessed with the goings-on in the building, musical and otherwise, and he taped and photographed them with an unimaginable thoroughness, capturing thousands of hours of sound as well as tens of thousands of images.  The sounds and stories that emerged from those years are the basis for The Jazz Loft Anthology, a ten-part radio series now heard across four one-hour programs.

Hear the whole story of the Jazz Loft years in The Jazz Loft Anthology.

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Fifty one years ago, in the simpler days of television, all three networks aired a tour of the White House led by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. As WNYC’s Sara Fishko tells us, a stunning number of Americans tuned in and took notice.

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"Blue jeans! Sure, the French admire Americans' blue jeans - that's easy to do and still patronize us. But not fashion with a capital F."

- Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology

WNYC's Sara Fishko looks at the First New York Fashion week, which eventually helped American fashions hit a global stage.

#NYFW was created by Eleanor Lambert, a savvy publicist with a passion for - ahem - fashion, during the Second World War. Listen to the full story, below.

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"There was a whole new wave of culture forming, and we wanted our music to be part of it."

Philip Glass, from An Hour with Philip Glass on WNYC

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Happy birthday, Philip Glass.

Listen to Fishko Files' 2006 hour-long special: "An Hour with Philip Glass"

In "An Hour With Philip Glass," the star-composer reflects on the goals and aspirations of his generation of composers. "We felt left out," says Glass; "there was a whole new wave of culture forming, and we wanted our music to be part of it." Glass talks with Sara Fishko about his early New York days playing for tiny audiences; his apprenticeship to Ravi Shankar; and about the origins of the style of music that created what he calls a "commotion."

http://www.wnyc.org/articles/music/2006/jun/01/an-hour-with-philip-glass/

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Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky would have been 90 this week.  As WNYC’s Sara Fishko tells us, the multiple-Oscar-winning Chayefsky fought to the death for every fierce and furious word he wrote.  Here is the next Fishko Files…

From Paddy Chayefsky's film "Network"

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CLICK THE LINK TO LISTEN TO THE FULL HOUR-LONG SPECIAL!

Premieres on WNYC, 93.9 FM at 8 PM. The hour is available for streaming and download at the link.

What a year was 1913!  In an exhibition in a  New York Armory, Cubism and abstraction were revealed to the American public for the first time.  In Vienna, audience members at a concert of atonal music by Schoenberg and others broke out into a near-riot.  And in Paris, Stravinsky and Nijinsky’s new ballet The Rite of Spring burst on stage with famously inflammatory results.

Culture Shock 1913 tells the stories behind these and other ground-breaking events that year, and goes back to consider the years leading up to this mad, Modernist moment.  WNYC’s Sara Fishko speaks with thinkers, authors, musicians, art curators and historians about this unsettling, shocking era of sweeping change –and the not-so-subtle ways in which it mirrors our own uncertain age.

Premiere: December 6th at 8PM on WNYC 93.9 FM. Click here for additional airdates

Host/Executive Producer: Sara Fishko Associate Producer: Laura Mayer Editor: Karen Frillmann Mix Engineer: Wayne Shulmister, with additional mixing from Edward Haber   

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CULTURE SHOCK 1913, our radio special on the landmark year 1913, starts airing December 6th, with other dates to follow. Our related four-part podcast series continues today with its third installment: "The Ascent of Poetry." 1913 marked a moment when a new type of verse emerged and set off a poetry fad in the United States.

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“1913 is the moment where Modernism really comes into the open. This is where it all bubbles to the surface, and the great public adventure of 20th century music and art really begins.”

Alex Ross, New Yorker music critic

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WNYC's Sara Fishko gets a private tour of some of the paintings and sculptures from 1913 in MoMA's collection, some on display and others unearthed from a storage closet. Her guide is Ann Temkin, the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.