Joan of Art

Molly Crabapple, the illustrator and journalist, has written a vital book about the creation of the first labor movement in the Pale of settlement by Jewish intellectual and activists in 1897. She makes the disputes of the early socialists read like a thriller. ‘Here where we live is our country’ is brilliant, cool, astonishing, rational, and also moving. The idealism of the anti -Zionist men and...

Joan Juliet Buck in enlightening conversation with professor , writer, and public intellectual Ian Buruma, whose new book explains what it was to be every kind of German living in Berlin while Hitler sent his armies into Western Europe and then the Soviet Union. HIs father did forced labor in a Berlin factory in Berlin during the war. The book is European history, personal history, and vital readi...

Joan Juliet Buck dismisses 'One Battle After Another,' praises movies that face death: 'The Voice of Hind Rajab' , 'The Secret Agent', and two from 2024: 'The Life of Chuck', 'The Uninvited'. The old story lines don't work when the world s exploding. Only the heart of the matter counts. Produced and edited by Matty Rosenberg, co-produced by Jennifer Hammoud, and Joan Juliet Buck @ radiofreerhinecl...

A month before Gary Lippman's new novel, 'I Wish, Therefore I Am' comes out, he discusses his book of one-sentence stories, 'We Loved The World But Could Not Stay' with Joan Juliet Buck, who reads the one about the deer with one antler, the one about scared actor, and the one about the public scribe in Saigon. Gary Lippman reads the one about the suicidal cab driver. Produced and edited by Matty R...

Laura Day, a down-to-earth intuitive who spent her youth being lab-tested by academic researchers into ESP, tells Joan Juliet Buck how she turned her neurodiversity into an excellent career-- predicting the future for large companies and private clients, and training more intuitives . In a long, fizzy interview, she claims it’s her severe ADHD that keeps her away from the pitfalls of interpretatio...

This Joan of Art is taken from my Substack ‘Every Day Until I Die’, in which I wrote about Ruth Zaporah, who died on May 12. What this dancer who wanted to use words discovered , devised, and taught about direct expression, about the stage, about improvisation, influenced generations of performers and changed the way I wrote. Buddhist, shaman, breaker of conventions, she ushered us all to another...

Walter Salles' 'I'm Still Here', about an engineer disappeared from his home by an oppressive regime in 1971, won the Oscar for best not-American film. Mohammad Rasoulof's 'The Seed of the Sacred Fig', is about a judge in Iran's Revolutionary Court during the 2022 protests that followed the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, arrested for not wearing her hijab correctly. Brazil: how to survive as a h...

Joan Juliet Buck interviews Renée Martin-Nagle, who after being the US counsel for french aerospace companies, became an environmental lawyer, founded and runs A Ripple Effect , and is the freshwater expert at Accenture. Produced and edited by Matty Rosenberg, co-produced by Jennifer Hammoud, and Joan Juliet Buck @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Graphics by Joseph Maresca Send comments to comments@radiof...

Juan Juliet Buck reviews Jacques Audiard’s violent musical masterpiece and explains how a drama about a drug lord who changes sex brings the shock of the new. Produced and edited by Matty Rosenberg, co-produced by Jennifer Hammoud, and Joan Juliet Buck @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Graphics by Joseph Maresca Send comments to comments@radiofreerhinecliff.org or call (845) 307-7446‬

Do grievances constitute an ideology? No one can get a handle on today, except maybe Nick Quested, producer, director, and maker of documentaries, who embedded with the Proud Boys in the summer of 2020 and followed the plot to the storming of the capitol. We saw him testify before the January 6 committee . With his film '64 Days' just out, he gives a wide ranging interview to Joan Juliet Buck. Pro...

The actor Griffin Dunne, born rich and fame-adjacent in Hollywood, tells a family story wilder than any miniseries. His mother was an heiress, his aunt was Joan Didion , his uncle John’s Gregory Dunne. After his sister Dominique was murdered, his fatherr Dominick Dunne— a failed and alcoholic producer— wrote about the trial and was launched as a world famous chronicler of true crimes. In a wildly...

Michael J Gelb teaches normal humans how to walk, CEOs how to access genius levels of creativity, and also juggles. He began studying the Alexander Technique in London 43 years ago , became a teacher, expanded the mind-body connection to encompass the higher reaches of creativity. His new book 'Walking Well ', written with Bruce Fertman, another Alexander Technique alumnus and teacher, come out Se...

Carolyn Pfeiffer's unerring flair took her from North Carolina to Rome at 21 with a one way boat ticket, and straight into La Dolce Vita. As the assistant to Claudia Cardinale, she watched two masterpieces being made-- Fellini's 8 1/2 and Visconti 's The Leopard, and two movie stars later, went to England to become the best PR in--and for--Swinging London. She returned to America to produce such f...

Joan Juliet Buck interviews Howard Korder, co-writer and co-producer of “Franklin”, the 8-part marvel from the team that brought you "The Sopranos". “Franklin”, streaming on Apple TV+ , is as lavish and candlelit as “Barry Lyndon” but more fun, and explodes the myth of fundamental American purity. Watch Benjamin Franklin manipulate to steer bewigged and rouged French aristos into funding the Ameri...

Joan Juliet Buck explains two terrific, upsetting, unconventional, genre-defying new series , one from the brilliant Lulu Wang and set in Hong Kong, the other a satire written by and starring the provocative Benny Safdie and the cringe-master Nathan Fielder, who directed and also plays Emma Stone's husband Produced and edited by Matty Rosenberg, co-produced by Jennifer Hammoud, and Joan Juliet Buc...

The inside story of how, back in 1997, George Dawes Green founded The Moth, the storytelling entity that gave you-- and you and you-- permission to get up on stage and tell your story. The author of bestselling, award-winning thrillers (The Juror, Ravens, The Kingdoms of Savannah), George Green is candid, charming, and full of stories. Produced and edited by Matty Rosenberg, co-produced by Jennife...

This winter John Patrick Shanley had three plays running simultaneously in New York; the newest, Brooklyn Laundry, is a wrenching and ecstatic 80 minute ride through attraction, grief, love, giddiness, reality check, responsibility, to adulthood. He talks to Joan Juliet Buck about life, death, the meaning of both, and invokes the possibilities of a blonde wig. Produced and edited by Matty Rosenber...

Words that hurt: It's 1975 and Truman Capote , one of the most famous writers in the world, publishes an extract of his unfinished novel in Esquire. It's the dirty secrets his beloved rich lady friends have been telling him for years. Shit ensues. Produced and edited by Matty Rosenberg, co-produced by Jennifer Hammoud, and Joan Juliet Buck @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Graphics by Joseph Maresca Send...

If truth, emotion and love counted with the academy, this film would be nominated for best actor, (Andrew Scott) best supporting actor (Paul Mescal) , best adapted screenplay, best director, (Andrew Haigh) and best film. Andrew Haigh brings the dead back to life, and explores the truth of intimacy , desire, comfort, and love. He tells the impossible story with such ease and confidence that you bel...

Afraid of losing your story? The great screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury, who wrote Altman's game-changing masterpiece 'Nashville', is also a director who has been teaching at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute Labs since 1992. Sundance is where she evolved the way for filmmakers to get at the truth of the story they are trying to tell. She explains to Joan Juliet Buck how to dive deep into the seemin...

Here’s why Maestro, Bradley, Cooper’s second movie set in the world of ShowBusiness, is both deeply affecting and insufficient Produced and edited by Matty Rosenberg, co-produced by Jennifer Hammoud, and Joan Juliet Buck @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Graphics by Joseph Maresca Send comments to comments@radiofreerhinecliff.org or call (845) 307-7446‬

Why is Martin Scorsese's masterful epic so deliberately lacking in color , so uninflected? It's a choice to reflect the spirit of the main character, a greedy doughboy returned to America, living on his rich uncle's ranch, who becomes a pawn in the uncle's play for control of the oil money that belongs to the Osage. Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, William Belleau, Leonardo Di Caprio meet at the in...

Peter Morgan's series The CROWN , now in its 6th and final season, gives us a Lady Di we can relate to in escapist surroundings that turn to hell. Elizabeth Debicki (who was compelling in the 2016 series The Night Manager, stunning in the film Widows in 2018) makes Diana come alive . It's great acting, a wonderful cast, a lapidary script that makes sense of the madness, and you cry. Produced and e...

How do you give voice to your late mother, how do you turn your grandmother’s secret words into music? Music is the universal language , our first art. In a vivid conversation that mirrors the creative process, Claire Chase and Winsome Brown bring the listener into the work they are performing November 3 and 4– next Friday and next Saturday - at Chatham’s PS21. It’s called FROM BEING WHERE YOU WER...

The great garden designer Edwina von Gal shares some of her exceptional insights about what happens in the earth, and on the earth. She's a force of nature who grew up in the Hudson Valley. She applies what the plants themselves have told her over her forty years of creating inspired and beautiful gardens for artists, titans of industry, kings and queens of fashion. It was while working to restore...