S2E9: Beautiful Abstractions with Josh Kornbluth
Notebook on Cities and Culture
English - September 24, 2012 22:08 - 1 hour - 22.8 MB - ★★★★★ - 124 ratingsPlaces & Travel Society & Culture Arts comedy business entrepreneurship interview culture news music finance fitness design Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Colin Marshall sits down at downtown San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum with monologist Josh Kornbluth. They discuss the proper pronunciation of the word "monologist"; his simultaneous return to the practice of oboe-playing and late entry into things Jewish; the question of whether Andy Warhol is "good for the Jews," and how he spun it into a monologue; the qualities of faith shared by Judaism and the communism of his childhood, which still releases endorphins when he thinks about it; the difficulty of dragging beautiful, pure abstractions of any kind into the concrete human sphere; Haiku Tunnel, the "FUBU of office workers"; the implicit premise of perhaps most monologues that everything ultimately connects to everything; how to show you've put in the hours on a performance by presenting its artifice just right; building a career in the San Francisco Bay Area, and how the place ratchets the average New York Jew's stress level down from eleven to ten; New York as his own personal primordial ooze; how San Francisco tends to push out its aspirers, especially where theater is concerned; the outsider's longing to understand music, Judaism, or both, and how he's come to experience both as practices; and the wonder of trying, failing, and trying again at one's craft within a community.