Episode #1329
Breaking Bad & Black Sabbath
Friday, July 20, 2012
Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman and Bryan Cranston as Walter White in Breaking Bad
(Frank Ockenfels/AMC)
The creator of Breaking Bad explains how his feel-bad television series (about a meth-dealing high school teacher with cancer) can inspire so much love from audiences and critics. The pioneering indie rocker John Darnielle, of the Mountain Goats, reveals his soft spot for Black Sabbath. And we visit The Clock, a mash-up film comprising more than a thousand clips about time. It's 24 hours long, and we wouldn’t cut a minute.
(Segments in this week’s episode aired previously.)
Vince Gilligan on Breaking Bad
"I am amazed that this show is on the air — constantly amazed — because on paper this show shouldn't work," Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan tells Kurt Andersen. It’s the story of Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston), an underachieving high school chemistry teacher ...
The Clock: A 24-Hour Movie
Directed by Christian Marclay, The Clock is a mash-up of more than a thousand movie clips. Each shows characters discussing the time, or a clock in the frame, so that the film itself functions as a timekeeping device. Last summer, four thousand people showed up for a ...
Suzan-Lori Parks' Porgy and Bess
Porgy and Bess was groundbreaking: an opera about poor African-Americans in South Carolina, starring a cripple, a tramp, and a drug dealer. There’s a new production on Broadway now entitled The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, but it’s not the one George and Ira presented in 1935 ...
Aha Moment: John Darnielle and Black Sabbath
Twenty years ago John Darnielle formed one of indie rock's great bands: The Mountain Goats. The New Yorker called Darnielle "America's best non-hip hop lyricist”; his songs are moody, literary, maybe a bit navel-gazey. But Darnielle's biggest influence isn't Leonard Cohen ...
Featured Comments
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Really difficult to convey this as a "sound story" and it was done beautifully. Really compelling.
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I just bought this album from Amazon and listened to it while my wife, baby son, and I had supper. ...
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Live in-Studio: Dom La Nena
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Here Lies Love & Deaf Theater
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Isabella Rossellini's Mammas
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Lois Lowry Confirms Jeff Bridges to Film The Giver
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American Icons: The Great Gatsby
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Measure Twice, Cut Once
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Deaf Actors Play Tribute to Oliver Sacks
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Alex Timbers and Here Lies Love
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Making Portraits Out of DNA
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When In Rome, Hairdo as the Romans Do
Comments [7]
The best Amazing Grace was the one that the Dead did after Jerry died...hands down. On the flip side, I could go without ever hearing Touch of Grey again.
Free Bird, and classic rock and roll in general, is off my playlist. I make one exception for the Cars.
@Marianne The song at the end of the Suzan-Lori Parks interview is "Love" by Air. You can find an Amazon link for the album on the segment page: http://www.studio360.org/2012/jul/20/suzan-lori-parks-porgy-and-bess/
Just scroll all the way down until you see "Music Playlist." Thanks for listening!
Encyclopedia Brown, zomg...memory lane. He and Danny Dunn were two of the only geeks in kid lit when I was a kid. (Please don't tell me that the girl detectives were geeks, they weren't -- I was a girl and I thought they were sell-outs to the girly expectations -- we had no Hermione to hang on to.)
I am so glad that my son grew up with the idea that it is cool to be a nerd or geek, with those labels not being instant vitriol and segregation. Where my momentary twinge when he and his best friend calling me "the human Google" when they were ten was replaced nearly instantly with pride when I remembered I was living in the 21st century.
These books had something to do with that. Public television and public radio had something to do with that too.
Now if we could only make our body politic a bit less anti-intellectual as a whole, in substance rather than as a sort of tolerant lip-service, maybe the world would transform more fully?
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee ~ Growing up in the South in the 1970s, I realized that it was still de facto segregated. Miss Lee’s book has informed my entire life, who I became, and the major life choices I have made.
What is the title of the song that is played at the end of the interview with Suzan-Lori Parks and her version of Porgy and Bess? There is one recognizable word - "Love" in the song. What is the group who performs the song? All this aired on July 21st,2012. Thank youfor your help.
Hi Kurt,
Hearing this weekend's show a second time, again I heard you say that this is Breaking Bad's last season; but last week, Bryan Cranston told David Letterman that there will be two more seasons (5 & 6).
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