This week on From the Vault we showcase a great example of creative genius recently rediscovered within Pacifica Radio Archives: a beautiful 1969 radio adaptation of James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks. Produced by WBAI production superstars Charles Potter and David Rapkin, Thurber’s 1950’s fantasy tale comes to life with delightful special effects – an arduous test of endurance and ingenuity using the equipment and techniques of the late 1960’s: reel to reel tape machines, multiple overdub and splicing, and hours and hours of painstaking setup. Over forty years after the original production and broadcast, we had the opportunity to speak with sound engineer David Rapkin, who explained the challenges he faced while making this important sound recording – now being shared again for the first time in over three decades.

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.

PURCHASE a copy of this program or learn more about the historic recordings used within this episode. To purchase a CD copy of this program by phone, please call Pacifica Radio Archives at 800.735.0230 x 262.

Click here to send an email to From the Vault.

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Today on From the Vault we share compelling interviews with two actors of stage and screen, both at critical times in their career, focusing on live theater and particularly the New York Broadway stage. First, WBAI host David Rothenberg talks with Charles S. Dutton, starring at the time (1984) in the hit play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, about Dutton’s evolution into acting while locked up in prison, among other things. Then, we move to an interview with the incomparable Harvey Fierstein, again with Rothenberg, conducted shortly after Fierstein had won Tony awards for both writing and performance in Torch Song Trilogy (1982), a potent work that also introduced to the world a young Matthew Broderick.

These recordings are two of the 150 hours of our recorded history that have been released on our website for you to browse, listen, and study as a result of a year-long preservation and access project funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and our loyal Pacifica station listeners.

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.

PURCHASE a copy of this program or learn more about the historic recordings used within this episode. To purchase a CD copy of this program by phone, please call Pacifica Radio Archives at 800.735.0230 x 262.

Click here to send an email to From the Vault.

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From the Vault this week is a ten-year retrospective of Pacifica’s 9/11 coverage, as it happened, and the pacific and progressive voices subsequently given safe harbor on Pacifica Stations in the time after the attacks. We begin with a montage produced by Pacifica Radio Archives one year after 9/11 – voices include Bertrand Russell, Howard Zinn, Dennis Kucinich, Gore Vidal, June Jordan, Michael Moore, Angela Davis, Thich Nhat Hanh, Mumia Abu Jamal, Cornel West, to name a few. Then, WBAI producer Michael Haskins recalls his journey to WBAI studios in the heart of the financial district in the midst of the attack, and former Pacifica producer and author Laurie Garrett muses on the events and consequences of 9/11, along with Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy, and others.

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.

PURCHASE a copy of this program or learn more about the historic recordings used within this episode. To purchase a CD copy of this program by phone, please call Pacifica Radio Archives at 800.735.0230 x 262.

Click here to send an email to From the Vault.

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In this edition of From the Vault we present a newly-discovered recording of the extraordinary Audre Lorde, a black feminist and lesbian writer, poet and activist who died of breast cancer in 1992. This rare recording, made on December 12, 1980 at Barnard College in New York City, includes an early reading from Lorde’s book The Cancer Journals as well as selected poetry, laced together with Lorde’s perspective on racism, sexism, and the general lack of humanity in the world. Eileen Zelisk, host of the WBAI series The Velvet Sledgehammer (a production of the WBAI Women’s Department), introduces Audre Lorde to the audience.

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.

PURCHASE a copy of this program or learn more about the historic recordings used within this episode. To purchase a CD copy of this program by phone, please call Pacifica Radio Archives at 800.735.0230 x 262.

Click here to send an email to From the Vault.

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Today on From the Vault we present a short story that has stood the test of time, The Dead, from James Joyce’s classic 1914 book The Dubliners. This short story is read by the classic Irish American actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, whose Hollywood work included a starring role opposite Bette Davis in Dark Victory (1939), alongside Sir Lawrence Oliver in Wuthering Heights (1939), and Watch on the Rhine (1943).

Then we present an excerpt from Pacifica Radio’s 30th Anniversary Bloomsday broadcast featuring actor Alec Baldwin reading from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s take on Ulysses.

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.

PURCHASE a copy of this program or learn more about the historic recordings used within this episode. To purchase a CD copy of this program by phone, please call Pacifica Radio Archives at 800.735.0230 x 262.

Click here to send an email to From the Vault.

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Today on From the Vault we visit with one of the great American authors, essayists, historians, playwrights, screenwriters, political analysts, and activists, Mr. Gore Vidal. Vidal, besides being a prolific artist of the written word, is also an eloquent speaker, and uses his gift of oration and encyclopedic knowledge of American history to educate and entertainment. In this March 18, 2003 recording, broadcast in its entirety for the first time here, Gore Vidal and Laura Flanders discuss the implications of invading Iraq just one night before the start of America’s ‘shock and awe’ campaign. We present Gore Vidal’s On the Eve of War

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.

PURCHASE a copy of this program or learn more about the historic recordings used within this episode. To purchase a CD copy of this program by phone, please call Pacifica Radio Archives at 800.735.0230 x 262.

Click here to send an email to From the Vault.

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This week on From the Vault we present American poet Jack Spicer, one of the main drivers behind the San Francisco Renaissance, an art and literature boom that happened in around San Francisco in the 1950′s. Thanks to the efforts of poets like Jack Spicer, Kenneth Rexroth, Madelaine Glaser, Robert Duncan, Robert Creely, philosopher Alan Watts, and Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac, San Francisco became the epicenter of a creative and intellectual explosion that would influence generations of artists and scholars.

In 1954, Jack Spicer co-founded the famous Six Gallery. The birth of the Beat Poetry movement can be traced to a October 1955 poetry reading at the Six Gallery organized by Kenneth Rexroth and featuring poetry readings by Gary Snyder, Phillip Whalen, Michael McClure – as well as the debut of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. This reading would signal the emergence of San Francisco Renaissance into the public consciousness and helped establish the city as a center for counterculture activity.

Jack Spicer died young in 1965 at the age of 40, but his legacy as an important creative force in the Beat Poetry Movement and Gay poetry movement lives on. Today on From the Vault, we present this rare classroom recording of Jack Spicer reading and teaching from his 1962 poetry book, The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether. This program was recorded on June 13th 1965, just a few months from Jack’s death.

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.

PURCHASE a copy of this program or learn more about the historic recordings used within this episode. To purchase a CD copy of this program by phone, please call Pacifica Radio Archives at 800.735.0230 x 262.

Click here to send an email to From the Vault.

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“Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.”
~Jim Morrison (1943-1971)

This week we’ll get a little better acquainted with the short life of rock star, poet, and icon Jim Morrison with the help of a beautiful radio documentary called Artist in Hell, produced by Clare Spark in 1971. Of course, it would be easy to focus on Morrison’s wild antics and excess, as that kind of behavior always leaves a high water mark on someone’s life for the ages to see, but instead, we’ll hear his closest friends describe the life of a tortured genius, a man with not nearly enough names for all of the colors he wished to paint. The Doors band members Robbie Krieger and Ray Manzarek speak candidly about their close friend, as do producer Paul Rothchild; while David Birnie, Digby Deal, Harvey Purr and others read from Morrison’s poetry and his Lord’s Notes On Vision.

In the second half of From the Vault, we’ll hear The Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek speaking at The Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica on September 12, 1998. Manzarek speaks on The Doors and Morrison, reading selections of Morrison’s poetry, and sharing his insights and recollections on the transformation of four normal guys who met in Venice, hung out on the beach, and became one of the most legendary rock-n-roll bands the genre has yet seen.

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.

PURCHASE a copy of this program or learn more about the historic recordings used within this episode. To purchase a CD copy of this program by phone, please call Pacifica Radio Archives at 800.735.0230 x 262.

Click here to send an email to From the Vault.

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This week on From the Vault we feature poet Robert Duncan. As a contemporary of Charles Olson, Robert Creely, Denise Levertov, and Jack Spicer, Duncan wrote poetry that became the artistic bridge spanning between the generation of artists like Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Dylan Thomas to the generation of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, DiPrima, Keroac, and the Beat Poets. We present this October 28, 1960 recording of Robert Duncan reading dozens of his classic poems at the University of California, Berkeley with the excitement and reverence commanded by this rare and important document of 20th Century writing.

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.

PURCHASE a copy of this program or learn more about and purchase copies of the historic archival recordings used within this episode. To purchase a CD copy of this program by phone, please call Pacifica Radio Archives at 800.735.0230 x 262.

Click here to send an email to From the Vault.