The Kitchen Sisters Present

The Archive House, The Listening House, The Stony Island Arts Bank, The Dorchester Projects. Theaster Gates is a keeper of Greater Grand Crossing, his neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He first encountered creativity in the music of Black churches on his journey to becoming an urban planner, potter, and artist. Gates creates sculptures with clay, tar, and renovated buildings, transforming the raw material of urban neighborhoods into radically reimagined vessels of opportunity for and of the community. Gates resurrects old dilapidated neighborhood buildings, transforming them into living archives, institutes of music, culture, film and gathering, preserving and renewing neighborhoods that have been ignored, overlooked and underserved. The proceeds of these unusual, imaginative endeavors are used to finance the rehabilitation of entire city blocks and the communities that inhabit them. This story was produced by Alyia Renee Yates in collaboration with The Kitchen Sisters.

For five years Davia’s father, Lenny Nelson, asked her to go to Rattlesden, England, to visit the Air Force base where he was stationed during WWII and to find an old photograph hanging in the town pub honoring his 8th Air Force squadron. It was still there, over 50 years later, he told her. Finally, one fine Sunday, Davia headed out in search of the pub and a piece of her father’s past—the piece he was proudest of. Lenny died on Christmas Eve 2015. In his honor, we share the journey with you. Samuel Shelton Robinson helped produce this story with The Kitchen Sisters. He’s from London. It seemed only right.

Since we started our intern and mentoring program in 2000, over 100 young people, ranging from age 15 to 35, have come through our doors at Kitchen Sisters Central in the historic Zoetrope building in San Francisco to work on the art and craft of audio storytelling. Many have stayed long enough to helm their own pieces and produce their first ever stories in collaboration with us. They never fail to shock and amaze. Their takes are varied, their styles singular, their voices original and provocative. About 8 years ago we had an especially eccentric group. They somehow all found their way to us in the same moment — Matt Beagle who was a stand-up comic, Patty Fung, Tess Kenner, Caroline Bins, Anne Wootton, Madalyn Fernandez, Julia DeWitt… the place was on fire. Matt was doing stand-up at the Purple Onion, the revered comedy club across the street from our North Beach office that once hosted Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Phyllis Diller, Richard Pryor… and everyone was going to see him. We began to envision a night of all these talented, funny, emerging producers and storytellers live onstage in an evening we would call “The Kitchen Sisters Present… Night of the Living Intern.” It happened. But only in our minds. The Purple Onion closed, the interns moved on to their first jobs and places on the staffs of some of the major news and story organizations in the country, and the evening remained a dream. Until today. This past year Josh Gross, a high school senior, took our workshop and then started showing up one, two, three times a week after school. Watching Josh and the group of interns in the room with him kicked up Night of the Living Intern once again and as Josh’s internship drew to a close we asked him to dig through some of the stories Kitchen Sisters interns had produced in the past and create a podcast. Today’s piece features excerpts from "The Queen’s Beekeeper," produced by Justine Thieriot; "21 Collections" and "Agnes Varda: Keep Faith in Art" produced in collaboration with Selene Ross; "Jason Scott: Free Range Archivist" by Juliet Gelfman Randazzo; a piece about the Israeli artist/archivist, Hadassa Goldvicht and a story called "The Other F Word" by Josh Gross.

They say the average woman dies with a pound of lipstick in her stomach. “I have a feeling when I go they’ll find five,” says Davia Nelson of The Kitchen Sisters. Along with radio and podcasting, lipstick is a bit of an obsession. Over the years of producing and fundraising for our stories, we began to merge the two and started thinking that an intriguing way to raise money for public media storytelling might just be our own line of lipstick. The Kitchen Sisters are Dreaming in Public of starting a line of lipstick, partnering with the right makeup company to raise new monies for podcast and public radio producers for stories coming from new and exciting lips. And they are dreaming of chronicling the creation of this line in a podcast series called — Lipstick Traces. Sort of a StartUp for Makeup. Ours will be a sound and story themed line of lipsticks—Sonic Boom, Phantom Power, The Truth, Room Tone, The Allusionist… Lipstick Traces—Dreaming in Public of the power of a lipstick to seed new stories from new rouged lips. Dreaming in Public is the theme of this year’s Radiotopia Fundraiser mini features. All of the podcast creators in Radiotopia’s Network are producing works about the kinds of stories we might do with enough story-making funds—funds that allow us to to go deeper and further, out on the next limb with our stories. Your support for Radiotopia, a network of 18 fiercely independent shows, makes realizing those dreams possible. Take a listen to all of the Dreaming in Public stories at radiotopia.fm. Make your mark. Support The Kitchen Sisters Present and all of your favorite Radiotopia shows. Donate at radiotopia.fm

An onstage conversation with this master filmmaker about his extraordinary documentary work. Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore… to name but a few. The films of Martin Scorsese are astounding. As is his effort to preserve and save the history and heritage of American cinema through The Film Foundation. Martin Scorsese is a Keeper. A steward of American and global cinema.  One of our heroes and inspirations. Beloved for his epic fiction features, Martin Scorsese’s non-fiction films are also some of his best work. Whether depicting tales of American life, illuminating the history of cinema, or capturing the exuberant spirit of contemporary music, his documentaries are insightful and often playful, revealing his curiosity and passion. And then there are his documentaries. His non-fiction films, starting with Italianamerican, a portrait of his own parents and family. The Last Waltz, Rolling Stones Shine a Light, Living in the Material World, his ode to George Harrison, My Voyage to Italy, Il Mio Viaggio a Italia, and his most recent documentary, but not quite documentary, Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review. The San Francisco Film Society invited Mr. Scorsese to San Francisco to honor his non-fiction film work and premier his latest feature, The Irishman. We were so taken with Scorsese’s onstage interview with Rachel Rosen, Director of Programming for the Festival, that we asked The Festival if we could share it on the Kitchen Sisters Present podcast. They were kind enough to say yes. Thanks to The San Francisco Film Society, to Rachel Rosen, and most of all to Martin Scorsese, film master and film keeper. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of PRX’s Radiotopia, a network of some of the most creative independent producers and podcasts out there. Make your mark. Go to radiotopia.fm to donate today.

November 14, 1960 — Four six-year-old girls, flanked by Federal Marshals, walked through screaming crowds and policemen on horseback as they approached their new schools for the first time. Leona Tate thought it must be Mardi Gras. Gail thought they were going to kill her. Four years after the Supreme Court ruled to desegregate schools in Brown v Board of Education, schools in the south were dragging their feet. Finally, in 1960, the NAACP and a daring judge selected two schools in New Orleans to push forward with integration — McDonogh No.19 Elementary and William Frantz. An application was put in the paper. From 135 families, four girls were selected. They were given psychological tests. Their families were prepared. Members of the Louisiana Legislature took out paid advertisements in the local paper encouraging parents to boycott the schools. There were threats of violence. When the girls going to McDonogh No.19 arrived in their classroom, the white children began to disappear. One by one their parents took them out of school. For a year and a half the girls were the only children in the school. Guarded night and day, they were not allowed to play outdoors. The windows were covered with brown paper. The story of integrating the New Orleans Public schools in 1960 told by Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost Williams, and Gail Etienne Stripling, who integrated McDonogh No.19 Elementary School, and retired Deputy U.S. Marshals Herschel Garner, Al Butler, and Charlie Burks who assisted with the integration efforts at the schools. We produced this story a few years back. We want to put it out there again as part of our Keepers Series because it seems critical, particularly now, to remember and pay tribute to the many Keepers of the archives, the stories, the truth about our past and the long fight for what is fair and just.

Award winning producer Robert Krulwich talks about storytelling techniques and his early career in radio and television as part of Talking Story, a panel hosted by The Kitchen Sisters at the first Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago in 2001. Robert Krulwich tells the improbable story of how he first got into radio covering one of the biggest stories of the decade — the Nixon impeachment. He deconstructs one of his early pieces — Kraslansky, and talks about the danger of creating radio Part of The Keepers series, this recording is part of the Third Coast Audio Festival Archive a vast — and ever-growing — collection containing thousands of carefully curated audio stories and Third Coast Conference sessions featuring work by makers from all over the world. Robert Krulwich, co-host of the Peabody Award winning show Radiolab, serves as a science correspondent for NPR. He has worked in television and radio at ABC, CBS, NPR and Pacifica. He has created pieces for ABC’s Nightline, World News Tonight, PBS’s Frontline, NOVA and NOW with Bill Moyers. Robert won an Emmy Award for his investigative work on privacy and the Internet, as well as for his ABC special on Barbie. He lives in New York with his wife, Tamar Lewin, a national reporter forThe New York Times.

As part of The Keepers, The Kitchen Sisters series about activist archivists, rogue librarians and keepers of the truth and the free flow of information, we query Lawrence Weschler, archivist of "the odd, the marvelous, the passionate and slightly askew.” Lawrence Weschler leads us into the world of pronged ants, horned humans, mice on toast and other marvels of the mind of David Wilson and his “cabinet of wonder,” the Museum of Jurassic Technology. We take a deep dive into the discovery of a cache of thousands of reels of nitrate film stock buried under the permafrost in Dawson City, the heart of the gold rush in the Klondike, and the making of Bill Morrison’s film Frozen Time. Weschler weaves stories of memory palaces, archives of misery, the early history of museums, obsessed collectors and more. Lawrence Weschler was a staff writer for the New Yorker for 20 years. He is a contributing editor to McSweeney’s, The Threepenny Review and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He is the author of numerous books including Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged ants, Horned humans, Mice on Toast and other Marvels of Jurassic Technology. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin. True to Life: Twenty Five Years of Conversation with David Hockney. Waves Passing in the Night: Water Murch in the Land of Astrophysicists. And his most recent book, How Are You, Dr. Sacks?: a Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks. The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson, with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. Special thanks to our Kitchen Sisters’ production intern Grant MacHamer, for his work on this story. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of PRX’s Radiotopia, a curated network of some of the best podcasts around. Visit kitchensisters.org for more.

Chris Strachwitz is a man possessed. “El Fanatico,” Ry Cooder calls him. A song catcher, dedicated to recording the traditional, regional, down home music of America, his adopted home after his family left Germany at the close of WWII. Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Big Mama Thornton, Clifton Chenier, Rose Maddox, Flaco Jimenez… the list is long and mighty. Chris Strachwitz is a keeper. His vault is jam-packed with 78s, 33s, 45s, reel-to-reels, cassettes, videos, photographs — an archive of all manner of recordings. And an avalanche of lifetime achievement awards — from the Grammy’s, The Blues Hall of Fame, The National Endowment for the Arts – for some 60 years of recording and preserving the musical cultural heritage of this nation through his label, Arhoolie Records. Featuring interviews with Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt. “The Passion of Chris Strachwitz” was produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell, mixed by Jim McKee. For The Goethe Institute’s Big Pond series.

PBS is going to be juiced this year with two remarkable projects from The Brothers Burns — Ken and Ric. The Kitchen Sisters Present an onstage conversation with the two on Labor Day at The Telluride Film Festival. Both were there to screen their new works. On September 15, Ken comes with a new American epic, Country Music, the latest in his expansive exploration of the tangled history of this nation. Eight episodes, sixteen hours, the series covers the evolution of country music over the course of the 20th Century and the rugged, eccentric trailblazers who shaped it. The Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, DeFord Bailey, Patsy Cline,Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Charley Pride, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton and so many more. Jammed with intimate interviews and astonishing archival footage that spans the history of this American art form. Produced over the course of ten years, as Ken and his collaborators also created The Vietnam War and The Roosevelts, Burns continues to grapple with who we are as Americans.  Eleven months younger, a filmmaker as well, Ric Burns has also been chronicling the country for decades. He too is no stranger to monumental filmmaking. Ric was in university when Ken asked him to come join him in the making of The Civil War in 1985.  He did, and they have never worked together since. On the heels of that experience Ric knew that filmmaking was his path as well. Perhaps known best for his eight-part, seventeen and a half hour series, New York: A Documentary Film and his documentaries on Coney Island, Andy Warhol, and Ansel Adams, Ric came to Telluride to screen his riveting new documentary, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, about the renowned writer, neurologist and storyteller, whose pioneering books, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and an Anthropologist on Mars broke ground in the study of human beings in their most extreme neurological conditions. Sacks devoted his life to people who seemed as hard to reach as a human being can be, and as Ric Burns said, “He showed, God Damn it, that there’s somebody in there. You think nobody’s home, but the light’s on.” Filmed over the course of the last year of Dr. Sacks' life after he received word that he only had a few months to live, the film is also a transcendent masterclass on dying. The story of a man trying to spill his heart before the clock runs out. Ken and Ric rarely come together onstage, so this Telluride conversation is a bit of a rare gem.