August 17, 2007
The film The Hottest State -- written and directed by actor Ethan Hawke -- opens next weekend. It’s based on a novel Hawke wrote in 1996, about an aspiring actor (not unlike himself) who finds love, loses it, then tries to pick up the pieces. But in the movie, the young actor isn’t played by Hawke –- he plays the guy’s dad. He told Kurt that the idea for the story started with a girl.
In the mid ‘90s, Talib Kweli started the duo Black Star with another young New York rapper, Mos Def -- and he's been a strong voice in underground hip-hop ever since. Kweli weighs in on the controversies coursing through the scene.
"Country Cousins" from Talib Kweli's Ear Drum, to be released August 21. (Warner Bros / Wea)
For nearly 100 years, Yale University’s Peabody Museum has been the keeper of thousands of relics found at Machu Picchu -- the “lost city of the Incas,” perched 8-thousand feet up in the Peruvian Andes. About 5 years ago, Peru’s government started asking Yale to return the artifacts. Mary Stucky recently went to Machu Picchu to look into the controversy.
You might know the band Wall of Voodoo from their oddball hit music video "Mexican Radio." The group's lead singer, Stan Ridgway, says that silly bit of 80s pop was inspired by Eraserhead, David Lynch’s totally creepy experimental movie. Produced by Michael May.
This summer’s bridge collapse in Minneapolis shook us in a deeper way than other failures of infrastructure. Guest host Julie Burstein talks with structural engineer Guy Nordenson and cultural historian Judith Dupre about why bridges resonate in our collective imagination.
Judith Dupre talks about the innovative Penobscot Narrows Bridge in Maine.
Check out a 1940 newsreel documenting the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge:
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