Artists are supposed to live the single life in Paris, New York, the South Seas, or even Giverny to cultivate their genius. But Esther and Michael Eder have done just the opposite.

Esther Eder stopped painting to get married and raise seven children and then ultimately was inspired by her son Michael to pick up her brushes again. She uses exuberant colors to paint landscapes and portraits that look like a kind of cross between Matisse and Cezanne.

Michael spends several days a week teaching art to children and learning from their enthusiasm and frankness. His work tends to the abstract, and he draws on unlikely sources like Boston’s Big Dig construction project for inspiration.

Over the years, Esther has marked her son with her self-confidence and her daring use of color; and Michael has challenged his mother to play with perspective.

A mother-son artistic collaboration is on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Esther and Michael Eder, artists.

John McCain’s denunciation of Pat Robertson yesterday could remind you of candidate Bill Clinton’s anathema 8 years ago on Sister Souljah. It’s the same singling out of a sacred cow for symbolic shaming and a signal that this Republican presidential race is not just a personal contest.
It’s an embattled shuffling of the deck of party interests, and godfathers; and it’s going to remake the GOP, much as Bill Clinton redesigned the “New” Democrats.

Conservative Christian preachers sat at the head table of the Republican party that George W. Bush meant to inherit from his father’s friends and Ronald Reagan’s. Going to Bob Jones University to court them may have been one step too far.

John McCain’s revealed another conservative base for what could be a bigger Republican party – unchurched patriots who see the big ministers and their money more as problem than solution.

The holy war for the soul of GOP – in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

The public service entrepreneur Marc Freedman says retirement means more than Florida or Phoenix, bridge clubs, shuffleboard, tennis or aquatic aerobics, more even than golf.

Forget the big ship cruises and the God-given right to revert to a migratory existence, bouncing from one temperate clime to another – retirement is about legacy and contribution and service.

Years ago retirement was a much needed rest, then it became a second childhood, and now, if you poll those approaching 65, it’s going to become a continuation of mid-life. Boomers don’t want to leave the working world, but they might welcome a new kind of challenge.

Freedman says we should tap into that enthusiasm and experience and use it to change the world. He’s started up a kind of Americorp for the elderly, a place where people can take all the accumulated knowledge of their lives and use it to make a difference – and the idea is catching on.

Transmuting the Golden Years is on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Marc Freedman, president of Civic Ventures and author of “Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America.”

Iran is the last place America expected to see a burgeoning democracy. But two decades after Ayatollah Komeini’s Islamic revolution, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people seems to be taking hold.

Iranian voters turned out in record numbers to reject the theocracy of Mullahs. Pro-democracy reformers – some of whom stormed the American embassy 20 years ago – have already won a majority in Iran’s parliament and, by the time the last votes are counted, they may take two thirds of the seats.

This latest turn of the Iranian revolution isn’t necessarily pro-American. Iranians and their newly chosen leaders are as deeply rooted in Islam as ever, and they may just be leading the Middle East into a new era where liberal democracy and traditional Islam aren’t mutually exclusive.

The evolution of the Iranian Revolution, in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

John Burns, New York Times Correspondent, Gary Sick, professor of international relations at Columbia University and author of “All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran” and “October Surprise,” and Houchang Chehabi, professor of international affairs at Boston University

In the contentious debate over button pushing issues like industrial pollution, bio-engineered foodstuffs and health care the expert is always a welcome sight on the battlefield of public opinion.

Whether it be a professor or a pediatrician, a watch dog group or a think tank we are always ready and willing to put the public trust in the hands of the so called experts who speak the language of scientific authority and unbiased neutrality. But if you look past the lab coats you’ll discover that more often than not the credentials are bogus and the bias is bought and paid for.

Its all part of an industry that prides itself on its expertise in manipulating science, managing public outrage and engineering public policy. Its an industry that subverts the principles of democracy. We’re following the trails of blood money and slime through the bowels of the public relations industry.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Sheldon Rampton, co-author of “Trust Us We’re Experts” and editor of PR Watch: Public Interest Reporting on the PR/Public Affairs Industry

Peter Sandman, PR Consultant.

In Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas, one of the most noted performers of our time, Russell Sherman, finds music that cannot be mastered, only addressed.

He says: it is like wrestling in the great sandbox of childhood and heaven with the ultimate Sumo soldier of humanity-an irresistible opportunity, Russell Sherman says, no matter how many times “I get flattened.”

On subjects like the meaning of that mountain of Beethoven piano music, words always fail. But Sherman, undaunted, is as inventive talking about Beethoven as he is playing him: Opus 10, Sherman says, should have some of the humorous chemistry of Charlie Chaplin between elegance and blunder, grace and pratfall.

We are confronting a grumpy, ribald, kindly composer who can seem to the performer like an implacable God, with Russell Sherman, in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Russell Sherman

People call John Perry Barlow a cyber cowboy, but that isn’t the half of it.

He is, or has been, a hard-drinking, motorcycle riding, jack mormon, an environmentalist, a draft dodging hippy, and a registered Republican. He wrote songs for the Grateful Dead, spent a year in India, and ran his family’s Wyoming cattle ranch for 17-years.

What the world knows Barlow best for, though, is the laissez faire Electronic Frontier Foundation he cofounded and his 1996 “Declaration of Independence (from the Realm of Cyberspace)” – a libertarian manifesto that’s made him the digital Thomas Paine.

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel,” he begins, “I come to you from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

Netizens Unite! John Perry Barlow is on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

John Perry Barlow

Three key words that help open up African-American poetry have been adopt, adapt and adept: adopt the high classic forms of English poetry, as the slave child Phillis Wheatley began doing in Boston in the 18th Century.

Adapt modern forms from Hardy and Yeats, later Auden and Stevens to distinctly black meditations on slavery, justice and race heroes like Crispus Attucks and Frederick Douglas.

And then keep pushing toward the adept creation of an entirely new sound and style, using folk speech and blues forms. In celebration and imitation of musicians like John Coltrane and Muddy Waters. In mourning for innocent victims like Emmett Till.

Or in memory of stars like Thelonious Monk – until the feelings and the effects are both familiar and entirely distinctive in the oft-quoted voices of Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden, Amiri Baraka and the U. S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove.

A fresh take on African-American poetry-in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Michael Harper, poet and professor at Brown University, and Anthony Walton, poet and professor at Bowdoin College and both editors of “The Vintage Book of African American Poetry.”

In the summer of 1966, 3 white men were shot in a tavern in Patterson, NJ – a city plagued by racial tension. Three months later, the killings were pinned on Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a rising star in the boxing world.

Carter was a black man who had already spent four years in prison and who was well-known for his incendiary voice in the civil rights movement. His temperament, his background, and the color of his skin made him the perfect scapegoat.

Police convinced two witnesses, petty criminals both, to place Carter at the scene of the crime, and an all-white jury took only two hours to come to a guilty verdict. In prison Carter remained defiant, refusing to give up his watch and his civilian clothes, poring over his court transcripts, preparing a second defense.

19 years, a second trial and numerous appeals, and finally set him free. Rubin Carter’s prison odyssey, in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

It’s supposed to be a time for role-changing – when President Clinton steps offstage to remake himself into the young elder-statesman – America’s newest honored icon… but it seems he just can’t shake the spotlight.

Here – a full month past the inauguration of George W. – Bill continues to accumulate scandal and dominate headlines… From expensive executive offices to rickety furniture acquisitions and problematic pardons – the ex-president and his Senator wife are suffering the slings and arrows of public outrage and family misfortune.

And it’s not just the Clintons who are suffering – fellow Democrats are chafing in the hot sun of negative attention.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

John Harris, reporter for the Washington Post

Francine Keefer, reporter for the Christian Science Moniter

Robert Dalleck, professor of History at Boston University.