Fabric’s been used, produced, and altered through human history. We’ve engineered textiles to allow us to survive in space and Antarctica. Fabric has clothed our best athletes and withstood ocean winds on sailboats.
Author Kassia St Clair researched fabric in her second book The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History, and joins me for this conversation. As aired on wortfm.org.
My obsession with glass crept back in a three-part show about the magical world of neon signs.
I spoke with Luis de Miranda, a philosopher and author of Being and Neonness, a cultural history of neon published by MIT Press.
I spoke with Tom Zickuhr, a commercial neon signmaker in Madison. His neon signs light up businesses all across the city. We spoke at his east-side studio.
And I spoke with Meryl Pataky, an Oakland-based sculptor and artist, and curator of She Bends– a national exhibition of work by women neon benders.
Listen to the show on wortfm.org.
A bill passed in 2017 allowed Wisconsin farmers the opportunity to grow hemp for the first time in nearly fifty years.
Whilden Hughes, of Hughes Farms in Rock County, was just one two farmers in Rock County, and one of only 184 operations in the state, who were registered and licensed to grow hemp for the first time.
He joined me on the phone after his harvest in September 2018.
Vivian Maier was a street photographer in the latter half of the 20th century, capturing intricacies of daily life at a time when camera culture and street photography was on the rise. Though Maier was extremely prolific as a photographer, she worked professionally as a nanny, often carrying several cameras around while she was working. A private person, she was largely unknown and undiscovered during most of her lifetime, but beginning close to her death in 2009, her archive was picked up by collectors in Chicago and her work quickly scattered online.
Pamela Bannos, Professor of Photography at Northwestern University, became interested in Maier’s life and work after a local public television station asked her to comment on the photographer’s work. Her biography is Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life And Afterlife (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
As recorded for wortfm.org and Tone Madison.
Squeaky doors, the hum of traffic, overlapping conversations — they’re all a part of the soundscape of the Madison bus system. Also a part of that soundscape is the voice of Ward Paxton, who has been the literal voice of the transit system for more than a dozen years. My interview for wortfm.org.
Squeaky doors, the hum of traffic, overlapping conversations — they’re all a part of the soundscape of the Madison bus system. Also a part of that soundscape is the voice of Ward Paxton, who has been the literal voice of the transit system for more than a dozen years.
In this interview from 2018, I spoke with Ward Paxton about how he came to be heard on every bus in the city.
A view of a tree inside the old Garver Feed Mill, taken during a college photography course. 2016.
