COVER STORY Death
This week in Studio 360, Kurt Andersen and poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch talk about artists, writers, and moviemakers who deal with the dead.
Our Town
The popular imagination associates Compton, California with gang violence and gangsta rap, but a few years ago, a high school there staged a production of Our Town, Thornton Wilder's play set in a New England village in 1904. It's a drama-class chestnut that people tend to think of as wistful Americana, even though the entire third act is told from the perspective of the dead. Eric Molinsky has the story of the students in Compton who discovered that Our Town was their town.
Listen to an interview on WNYC with Catherine Borek and Scott Hamilton Kennedy Buy OT: Our Town DVD
Disney & Death
For many children, Disney movies are their first introduction to death, from Bambi’s mother to Old Yeller. Jake Warga remembers the shots heard throughout his childhood and how Disney taught him that dealing with death is part of being an adult.
Buy Old Yeller
Morgue Photographer
Artist Thomas Condon got permission from officials in Cincinnati to take pictures of corpses at the morgue for a personal project. It never occurred to him to get permission from the surviving families of the dead. In the town still shaken by the Robert Mapplethorpe controversy over a decade ago, Condon found himself on trial and eventually in jail. Produced by Tamar Brott.
More on the film documentary that tells Thomas Condon's story
SPECIAL
GUEST Thomas Lynch
Thomas Lynch lives the real Six Feet Under. A poet and a professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, Lynch runs his family's funeral home in Milford, Michigan. He's written several volumes of poetry and his collections of essays include The Undertaking, for which he was a National Book Award finalist, and Bodies in Motion and at Rest, which explores the relationship between the literary and mortuary arts. His newest book is called Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans.
More about Thomas Lynch Buy Books by Thomas Lynch
A Conversation with Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard has just come out with his 40th novel, called The Hot Kid. Unlike most of his books where the action takes place over a few crazed weeks, the Hot Kid spans the 1920s and 30s in Oklahoma. It's filled with lawmen and bank robbers, jazz musicians and oil workers. Kurt Andersen talks to Leonard about what inspired him to set his mystery in that period. Read the full text More about Elmore Leonard Buy Elmore Leonard's The Hot Kid
Studio 360 is a co-production of Public Radio International and WNYC New York
Public Radio, and is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts,
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation
and
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Our Town
Listen to an interview on WNYC with Catherine Borek and Scott Hamilton Kennedy
