The Napping Wizard Sessions

In this conversation, recorded on March 16, 2024, which is a follow-up to my previous podcast, philosopher Gloria Origgi elaborates the ideas in her book, Reputation: What it is and Why it Matters. In Part 1, I played her lecture on that subject from the Night of Philosophy 2019. Here we discuss the ideas and specific cases since that time in which reputation impacts our global lives. Gloria Origg...

In 2019, I was invited to participate in the Night of the Philosophy at the New School for Social Research to record and then make art with the various lectures I attended from 7pm-7am. I posted some of these already, but since that night, one lecture I never got to always stuck with me. It’s on Reputation by Gloria Origgi, a philosopher who works in the interdisciplinary fields of social epistemo...

In this conversation, I speak with Brussels-based artist Erwan Mahéo. The conversation took place on May 25, 2023, as we were setting up a project in and around La Sirene de Belle-ile in France. Erwan Mahéo's art practice moves freely between the categories of sculpture, painting, video, photography, collage, ceramics, and textiles but finds its home in eclectic mixes of genre-fluid forms, ideas,...

In this Napping Wizard Session, I met up with Seattle-based artist Gretchen Frances Bennett in Bratislava Slovakia on 12 June 2023. In 2021-2022 she completed a Fulbright Core Scholar research grant to retrace a family trip she made to the city in the 1970s. Time travel, memory, family archives, we circle a literary work she has in progress that stretches the then and now of impressions she has fr...

Premise Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On April 02, 2021 I spoke with Farideh Sakhaeifar about her exhibition You are in the War Zone at Trotter and Sholer in New York’s Lower East Side and her residency at Koda Lab in Brooklyn. The presentations introduce several of her visual experiments from the last decade as a kind of survey. Her work explores various themes from the Middle East and her native Iran, and the differences and complex...

The following is a transcript from a lecture I delivered at A Night of Philosophy, a free event that hosted 62 international philosophers and 12 artists on April 24, 2015 from 7pm to 7am simultaneously at the French Embassy and The Ukrainian Institute on New York City’s Upper East Side. I was invited as an artist, and I chose the subject of the shape-shifting character Leshonkii, of Ukrainian, Rus...

In this reading from The Night of Philosophy in 2019 on October 06 at 03:00 am at the New School for Social Research in New York City, Cia Rinne was listed on the program with a presentation titled softly The Usage of Words. Listening to Cia Rinne’s poems is like channel flipping through international TV stations with the desire to reduce the mass of verbal waste by limiting each channel to just a...

In this lecture from The Night of Philosophy in 2019 at 05:00 am on October 06 at the New School for Social Research in New York City, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Nicolas de Warren, discusses our debt of plastic and nuclear waste. While many of us dream about augmented technology and the possibility of becoming cyborgs in the future, Dr. de Warren considers a different transformation of hom...

In this lecture from The Night of Philosophy in 2019 on October 06 at 01:00 am at the New School for Social Research in New York City, professor of philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center Charles W. Mills spoke on the topic of Racial Justice. Dr. Mills charges the conceptions of T-justice (over-arching theories of Justice) by the Western European male canon of analytic philosophy with not accommodating...

On October 05-06 from 7pm to 7am at The New School of Social Research, I was invited to participate in The Night of Philosophy. Rather than do something live, I chose to record the 12-hour evening. The night hosted 50 philosophers and 50 artists in multiple venues at the New School scheduled in half-hour shifts. I couldn’t be everywhere at once, so the Field Recordings I play are of what I was abl...

Even a Fool Learns to Love, now that’s a David Bowie song that most people haven’t heard of. We also didn’t know there was a link between Life On Mars? and My Way. What? Frank Sinatra and David Bowie? Or is it Paul Anka and Claude Francois? Or maybe it’s Barbara Streisand and Sid Vicious. It gets confusing. In this episode I unravel how David Bowie made Life on Mars? as a parody and a revenge song...

Pheasants should have arms. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I stage a reenactment of the introduction to Harry Mathews' novel Tlooth. I produced this in a podcasting seminar at BRIC in 2016 with my fellow participants lending their voices. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this session I go back to the ONE SONG format with a flip. I still take a deep dive into one, well, riff, it just happens to be repeated in several songs. This one song has consistently found its place on top of the pop music charts for over four decades crossing genres and under different guises. Young musicians looking for a breakout hit and seasoned musicians looking to make a comeback need...

In this session, I talk with Nicholas Fraser about his text-based artworks. We focus on Left Hanging, a project where re-purposes his unrequited dating app. intros into ephemeral objects. Love letters like hanging chads cast shadows of conversations that were never properly counted. He spent a great deal of effort crafting these letters, and though they never captured their intended recipient, he...

An incantation, a moan, a breath. This is my digital collection of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s music - a mere fraction of their enormous output over 6+ decades: all 154 tracks from the following recordings play simultaneously spread out at random as one song, 14.5 hours of music packed into 28 minutes. I had been a fan of their music since 1990 and then in 2015, along with 12 others, I spent severa...

In this episode I talk with multi-media artist Moo Kwon Han about his recent exhibition, DRUM, at the Gyeongin Art Museum in Seoul, Korea. To make this work, he was granted access to multiple power facilities, many of them nuclear, all in South Korea. In our conversation we unravel the works in the exhibition, from the initial inspirational image of a detail of yellow drums containing radioactivel...

I found John Giorno’s recordings in 1989. In this tribute I share a personal experience with his work and how it influenced me during my time in Los Angeles. I follow that with four of John’s long poems. I was fortunate to meet him in 2010 and tell him an extremely abbreviated version of this, but I never knew him. Included are samples from many of John’s recordings. Other samples are from William...

This just might be the most difficult-to-listen-to show I’ve made yet. You know those hidden songs at the end of some CDs: you hear the last one and then there’s acres of space and, wham, there’s a weird clip? Well that’s what this show is about. You have to have patience for this show, and with me, but this is the best way I could do a show about silence and surprise, and methods of exploiting ne...

This is a listening show. In a traditional radio format, I collect recordings where Iggy Pop reads from books. Sit back and let Iggy tell you a story or send you to sleep.   CLIP LIST (in order of appearance) 01. (clip Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, 2007) 02. (clip: Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman, recording from EP, Leaves of Grass, 2016, with Alva Noto and Tarwater) 03. (c...

This episode is just the music of the Variations Kervilahouen by Marie Duprat. For my commentary, informed by discussions with Marie, check out Part 1 of this episode. But if you’re here, you just want to enjoy the music uninterrupted. So here are the ten Variations Kervilahouen by Marie Duprat, inspired by a trip to the island of Belle-Ile-en-mer in France in 2006, and recorded in 2007 at Gennevi...

In this show, I’ll walk you through the piano compositions of a friend of mine, Marie Duprat. She composed Variations Kervilahouen after a two-week visit to Belle-ile-en-mer in France in 2006. I’m playing versions mainly from a recording she made at Gennevilliers Conservatory in 2007, but I also mixed in a few – under my narration and the main one from La Pointe du Talut – from a recent concert at...

In this series on The Napping Wizard Sessions called ONE SONG I’m taking deep dives into single songs. In this episode, I take The Clash’s WRONG 'EM BOYO and chart the history behind it that connects late 1800s America through the true story and legend of Stagger Lee with the Jim Crow American south, reggae and the Jamaican Rude Boys, the Black Panthers, John Sinclair, the mods, skinheads and the...

In this episode, Jimmy Raskin puts the cliché under the microscope through a process he calls Slapstick Enlightenment. Always obsessed with profound moments of failure, Jimmy discusses his love of two quotes by seminal figures of his work for the past several decades, Arthur Rimbaud: “If brass wakes as a bugle, it’s not its fault,” and Frederick Nietzsche, the subtitle to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “...