COVER STORY
The Grid
Kurt Andersen and painter Chuck Close talk about art on and off the grid.

Living Inside the Grid
Producer Simon Rentner explores how the grid has served artists throughout history.

Go to the New Museum's "Living Inside the Grid" site

Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman was a composer who decided graph paper could set his music free. He created a whole new way of notating music in the 1960's. It included a lot of scribbled marks in rows of little boxes. The music scholar David Bernstein and percussionist Jan Williams describe how Feldman's graph music worked. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.
Go to a biographical page on Morton Feldman
See the score for "King of Denmark"

The Urban Grid
Kurt Andersen walks the streets of Lower Manhattan with Marilyn Taylor. She is the chairman of the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill -- and heads its urban design and planning practice. Her firm is rebuilding 7 World Trade Center, one of the buildings destroyed alongside the towers. On a late spring afternoon, they walked around those blocks toward the empty World Trade Center site, and Kurt asked her why the grid is so central to the process of making cities. Produced by Leital Molad.
See World Trade Center site plans at the LMDC
See an aerial view of Houston's grid
See photos of the city from WTC in 1997
Go to Skidmore Owings and Merrill architecture firm

SPECIAL GUEST
Chuck Close
In the 1970's painter Chuck Close helped spur a renaissance of portraiture. His huge photorealist canvasses of family and friends were created with the help of - the grid. Close's recent paintings explode with pixelated blobs of color. His work has been the subject of major retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Go to Chuck Close on Artcyclopedia
Go to MOMA's page on Chuck Close

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Commentary
Power to the Puppets
Read the full text

Now Playing
Ben Katchor is best known for his comic strips about eccentric characters, like Julius Knipel, Real Estate Photographer. Katchor has now transformed one of his strips into a stage musical. It's called "The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island or the Friends of Dr. Rushower." It's a romance and the tale of a philanthropist who brings the modern poetry of instructional pamphlets to a group of exploited workers on Kayrol Island. Amanda Aronczyk spoke to Ben Katchor.
Go to Ben Katchor's website
Go to the Kitchen website

Mama Songs
"You'd sell more books if you wrote more poems about your mama," Tennessee's poet laureate Maggie Vaughn once told an aspiring fellow poet. We hear Vaughn recite some of her "Mama Songs." Produced by Andy Scheinman and Hal Humphries.
View Maggi Vaughn's poem "Who We Are"
Read about Maggi Vaughn's CD

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