Journey of an Aesthete Podcasthttps://www.jouneyofanaesthetepodcast.com/

Hello listeners! We have a special bonus episode for you, a recent concert by your host, Mitch Hampton and his Trio.  A little more about this wonderful evening of music, here: " The Spring Fling Living Room Show" featuring   Zack Page on bass and Justin Watt on drums. We played a couple of brand new compositions written in the past couple of months by yours truly, including The Spring F...

The reason for Aryeh Cohen-Wade’s presence on our show is at least twofold. I fell into being a regular listener to his show Culturally Determined which for at least a year was a show on the bloggingheads site. I am always, as an aesthete, and some other identities as well looking for culture that reflects or at least is congenial to my sensibility. The usually young guests he would have on did di...

I first met our current guest, Alexandra Carter, when she was 19 years old and an intern in a place in Boston called the Mills Gallery . That period of my life was interesting for a couple of reasons - both of which are related to this podcast. For one I was becoming intensely interested in contemporary visual and installation art at that time because I was starting to see a spiritual connection b...

Hi folks, In case you missed it, here is our first, "Book Lunch"!   More on the new series from Mitch:   "In this,  I believe my very fist “Book Lunch”, I discuss the door stop sized biography of Andy Warhol (just under 1000 pages!) by art critic and journalist Blake Gopnik .   I will have some additional comments on the hit Netflix series based on the Warhol Diaries as were ed...

On this Funky Friday at 5 , which we feature every month on our show Facebook page here : https://www.facebook.com/journeyofanaesthetepodcast   Your host, Mitch Hampton , talked with returning guest Tyler Bejoian on his newest album, The Bullfrog's Lamentation by Tyler & the Names !   Please visit our You Tube channel and like share and subscribe, here: https://www.youtube.com/channe...

I believe it was Jon Jost , our very first guest on this podcast who first put me in touch with Beth Levin .  I am most happy he did because Levin is an ideal guest if you want to hear about the world of the piano as instrument and classical music more generally. Many decades ago - in the middle 1980s to be exact - I was exciting a period in which I was strictly trained in what is called the...

This particular episode started, as so many of our episodes do, with a particular work of art or singular human instance of the aesthetic. The work in question happens to be a photograph that Deborah Turbeville took for Vogue Magazine in 1975. Indeed I was so taken with it enough to acquire one signed by Turbeville . A couple of years later, as I find myself with a podcast, I had many ideas as to...

“ Robert Pippin is one of the precious few thinkers, writers and teachers who stands out in the worlds of philosophy and the humanities for his devotion and attention to the arts most broadly construed.  While others in his field might want to write on Hegel alone (about whom Pippin writes better anybody - see his Hegel's Prac- tical Philosophy - for but one example) Pippin has been pro- lifi...

“I could never fail to marvel at guests like our current one in February Anastasia Rose. Like some or many of our guests she exhibits enormous talent and ability not only in more than one endeavor but seems to do so while possessed of integrity, an engaging temperament, and thus an ideal guest for our podcast as well as inspiration to others. Like me she is both a musician and neurodivergent but q...

“ I came upon the guests in this particular episode, Reza and Luke Nasserbakht of The Hop , custom shirt makers , in much the same way as I have come across people in my daily life: responding to my immediate environment in the moment with as little prior prejudice or planning as is possible. Much as I found our producer, Laurie Strickland simply by the ritual of getting a coffee in a coffee shop,...

This particular episode is unlike any of the previous ones to date as far as I am aware.  Of course every guest is unique and special but what stands our on this one is the response of the host - me. Lou Beach cracks me up so much and you can certainly hear more laughter coming from me than is usual on this podcast.  I am talking rolling, falling off a chair laughter. (Which I almost did...

“As I have said probably too many times in these posts our guests include people I have met personally and those whom I have never met not really only the artworks that are their creations in the widest sense of both art and creation. I knew Skip Elsheimer because he was a man that traveled with 16 millimeter cans of ephemeral type movies to do live shows of such material. Back in the early 00s I...

“I am sure it would come as little surprise to know that of all the variety of musical styles the one that has had the most influence on my own musicianship is what has gone by the name of jazz. Still, even within the majestic mansion that is African-American classical and popular music there are so many rooms and hallways. One of the most important is the contribution of Latin and Afro-Cuban and...

“I feel that our podcast might be unusual, perhaps even fairly original, in our inclusive attitude and sensibility. It is easy enough to understand that a painting, a television show, a comedy show, and a record album are works of art, not identical with the reality of daily life: they are, in a most useful word, representational. Yet at the same time in language about culture we often say there i...

“The first and perhaps major reason that Avery Lucas is one of our guests is that I love clothes and I've loved them for the longest time, at least since I was a teenager. Writing this now at the age of fifty-three I had a rather short window of time during which I was able to order a few bespoke clothes. Although our guest was unfortunately not a man who made any of those bespoke clothes, his nam...

"The presence of Stevo Bortz on our show can be traced more or less directly to my love of jazz music as well as big band typed music.  Over the years I have been able to listen to his plentiful uploads of the Hank Levy Towson State University Ensemble ; this is most interesting to me for more than one reason. Firstly, Hank Levy wrote all of these charts, some fo which I would not be able to...

"I am not able to introduce properly our guest Elizabeth Anderson without first being candid about my love for a certain kind of philosophizing and I don't mean "popular" philosophy" but the rather unpopular work that is ensconced in the academy. Indeed had I not gone into music and artistic practice more generally I most would surely have loved or ended up with some kind of career in an academic...

Deb/Madame B statement: I am an American who left America. (Frankly that will probably be the most interesting thing about me to most of your listeners). I am a teacher a pastry chef a cat lover a FOREVER Chicage girl and Bob Newhart lover. Links to Madame B: @madame.b.in.paris Inside the Episode with Mitch "The connections between any two individuals are ultimately matters of mystery and should r...

“Anything humans make of an artistic nature has to be literally brought into some kind of physical existence. Even if it is a lone person talking outside there has to be some kind of preparation of sorts, both the internal preparation of the one speaking, as well as how the physical setting is to be negotiated, the question of audience, if that is to be planned at all, the start and stop times of...

"From the outset of our episode with Ellen Burstyn you will hear her beloved puppy make their presence known and would continue to "chime in" a couple of times for the duration. In many respects this was more welcome than not, if only because it is in the very nature of the podcast form itself to be at least partially intimate and homey. In a podcast you get to experience a person discuss their ac...

"Robin Mahaffey comes to as guest courtesy of our producer, Laurie Strickland . I must say that every time Laurie has recommended someone she knows personally for a guest, whether Kerry Lilly or Joey Romer , it has turned out to be a most memorable episode experience.  Robin is no exception. Also, like some of our other guests, she has lived several lives, artistically and otherwise. I was in...

“Of course there are many learnings that are little else but a mechanical skill, and in such cases there may well be a best way. But to become a different person because of something you have learned - to appropriate an insight, a concept, a vision, so that your world is altered - that is a different matter. For that to happen you need a reason. And this is the metaphysical problem I speak of.” &n...

Colman Reaboi , like Dmitri Matheny, is one of the people I have known since my Interlochen High School days. I am fifty-three now and since so much time has gone by it only makes sense that somebody of Colman's enormous talent and, above all, work ethic, would have done as many things with his abilities as he has as the decades have progressed.  When last I checked in with him I was mostly f...

"My first encounter with Bruce Schulman was, of course, through his book on The Seventies .  This would have been in 2003, just a couple of years after September 11th in fact, and I think I first saw the book and was compelled to gaze at its cover on account of its title. I may have bought it at one of those mass market bookstores then in abundance at the time, possibly at a Barnes And No- bl...

" Sanifu Hall never does things in a predictable way.  When last we met him it was in the very beginning stages of our podcast, in 2019, in fact. ( click to listen to that episode). Since then he has composed a great body of music. Not only that, but he has assembled world class musicians who happen to be in his home base of Jacksonville, Florida , to perform it and, most of all, a gem of a r...