COVER STORY
West
Kurt Andersen and the historian Rebecca Solnit get seduced by the cultural landscape of the American West.

Pedal Steel
You've heard the plaintive cry of the steel guitar. The sound comes from lightly gliding a steel bar along a set of guitar strings, and it's the signature note of country music from Jimmie Rogers the Singing Brakeman to Shania Twain.  Studio 360's David Krasnow traces the birth of the instrument that put the west in country and western.
Go to Scotty's Music, Inc.
Go to the Steel Guitar Forum
Go to the Pedal Steel Guitar Association

Spaghetti Westerns
There's no art form more western than … a western. A western movie, that is, like The Magnificent Seven, Johnny Guitar, or Red River. Not just Americans love these movies. In the 1960s, Italian filmmakers proved their devotion by churning out B-grade western movies, and amazingly they found an audience right ba ck in the United States. Sir Christopher Frayling, the biographer of Sergio Leone, and film collector Ally Lamage explain the mystique of the so-called “spaghetti western.” Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.
Go to a website on Sergio Leone
Go to a spaghetti western website
Go to the Spaghetti Western Web Board

Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State, and he's written novels, movies, poetry and essays exploring modern Native American life. He called his first collection of stories “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.”  We asked Alexie to read a poem he'd written that, to him, summed up something he cared about in the West. He chose one he's yet to publish – called “My Architect.” Produced Kerrie Hillman and Leital Molad.
Go to the official Sherman Alexie website
Go to the Sherman Alexie Unofficial Fan Club

Sun Tunnels
Going west has always meant reinventing yourself, and building something new.  In the 1960s, a group of New York sculptors decided they'd build their work right into and out of the deserts and mountains of the West.  It can be hard to go see these Earthwork sculptures – tu ck ed away in their remote landscapes. Jenny Brundin of radio station KUER in Salt Lake City journeyed up to a high basin near the ghost town of Lucin , Utah to visit four giant concrete tubes:  Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels.
Go to a website on the Sun Tunnels
Go to the Utah public art website
Go to directions to the Sun Tunnelss

SPECIAL GUEST
Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit has dedicated her career to the American landscape.  She helped re-photograph the sites made famous by Ansel Adams, to see how the Western vistas have changed.  As a writer, art critic, curator, and political activist, she's explored land from Yosemite National Park to Nevada 's nuclear test sites. Solnit is the author of Savage Dreams : A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, as well as Wanderlust and Hollow City.
Go to books by Rebecca Solnit

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Commentary:
Don’t Let Subtitles Scare You
Supposedly Americans don’t like to go see any movie with subtitles. But Studio 360’s Kurt Andersen says that our best window into the rest of the world right now is in the movie theater.
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