Arts & Culture
Coverage of the Arts by Weekend America.
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Urban Cowboys
New York City and cowboys. They have nothing in common, right? Different landscapes, different characters, different values. Well, a group of New Yorkers have figured out a way to live the cowboy lifestyle in the most urban environment. The Federation of Black Cowboys' stable sits just feet away from the noisy Belt Parkway near JFK airport.
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Jadis: Santa Monica Prop Shop
Need a huge, double-pole, triple-throw knife switch? Well, if you're trying to create a new life form out of a bunch of left over body parts, you really can't do without one. It's the thing you pull before the thunder crack. You can find a knife switch and other curiosities at a very unusual antique store and prop shop along Main Street in Santa Monica. It specializes in odd laboratory equipment.
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"Get Ready for Love"
It's time to listen to your weekend soundtrack: The songs that bridge the gap from Friday to Monday. Our latest story comes from Kevin Bunten, an addiction counselor in St. Louis, Mo. On the weekend, he likes to listen to a track by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds called "Get Ready for Love."
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An Office with a Spinning View
Out in San Francisco this weekend, families will be crowding the downtown waterfront to watch pilots flip, roll and tumble during the annual Fleet Week air show. Every year, more than 20 million people attend air shows across the country. But not every family is watching from the ground. For one pilot, going into the family business is leading to a very unique father-son relationship.
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Everyday Sidewalk Poetry
A street party is getting underway here in St. Paul to celebrate a collection of poems by local residents that's been published on paper - and in cement. For the last few months the city has been implanting poems penned by St. Paulites in freshly poured sidewalks all over town. The public art project is designed to engage residents' artistic impulses and bring more poetry into everyday life. Chris Roberts of Minnesota Public Radio has the story.
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This Weekend in 1968: Night of the Living Dead
In movie theaters across the country 40 years ago, terror took a new form: The flesh-eating zombie. "Night of the Living Dead" unearthed an army of ghouls to scare children and adults off their seats. The filmmakers who created the film say the tumultuous events of 1968 have made people read much more into "Night of the Living Dead" than the horror they wanted to create.
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Letters: Black Hebrews and Google Bets
It's time to open the Weekend America mailbag and hear your responses to recent shows. This week we hear listener reactions to a difficult childhood as a Black Hebrew in Israel; how we settled bets in the days before Google; and we wonder why nobody admits that listening to the radio is part of weekend fun.
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Economic Meltdown Music
Television news networks have figured out exactly what sort of musical arrangements work for a war on terror. But what about an economic meltdown? We talk to Peter Fish, a composer who is scoring our country's financial collapse. Fish has been crafting TV news themes for over two decades.
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John Henry vs. Book Shovel
Every once in a while a piece of technology changes an industry completely. Imagine what it would have been like to be a scribe when the printing press came out in 1439. Well, booksellers have gone through a similar experience recently. They've spent their whole lives gathering arcane information about the books they sell - and now an invention has come along and made all that studying completely unnecessary.
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The Diplomat of Dobro
Around Nashville and pretty much everywhere else, Jerry Douglas's name is synonymous with the Dobro. It's an instrument with a distinctive look: An acoustic guitar with a shiny metal plate on the front, played face-up in your lap with a metal slide, like a steel guitar. Douglas took up the instrument in the early 1970s. He's to the Dobro what Hendrix was to the electric guitar and Tiger is to the seven-iron.
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10-4, Good Buddy
On 10-4, we take a look at the all but forgotten home of the phrase "10-4": The CB radio. Before the internet, cell phones, texting and IM, it was a way to chat with strangers and strange truckers, to invent new names, to use coded slang, to do all the things we do on computers today. Weekend America host John Moe remembers the CB boom of the 1970s and wonders why we're so hooked on blathering to strangers.
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The Marfa Sessions
Marfa, Texas is no stranger to the arts. Sculptor Donald Judd moved there in the 1970s, bringing a flock of artists with him. This weekend the folks at Ballroom Marfa, a local gallery, open a series of sound installations that artists have created and installed all over town. We've gathered a few of the artists to tell you about how their projects relay the sounds of Marfa.
