Marcel Marceau became a great institution in all the world’s theater without ever saying a word. But oh, what he could say without words.

Alone in white face on an otherwise dark and empty stage, Marcel Marceau as a seasick passenger at the rail of an ocean liner can make you think it’s the theater that’s tipping in the storm, not him. When his hands flutter in his bird-keeper bit, you could swear there were doves in his act. And when he tells the story of a trial — playing the parts of judge, prosecutor, defendant, wife, defense lawyer, and hangman — we feel we’ve met a whole cast of characters from Dickens or Balzac.

Marcel Marceau’s first American audience was 3000 GIs in France with General Patton’s 6th Army, in 1945. With suppleness and story-telling magic that seem undiminished at 77, the voice of silence, the poet of gesture is a hot-ticket in America again this summer. And on radio, he talks!
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Marcel Marceau

Charlie Hunter sounds like a musician with four hands. The young jazz guitarist plays an 8-string guitar of his own design, plucking bass lines at the same time he’s fingering complex chords and melodic solos. Growing up as a Gen X fan of rock, funk, and soul, Charlie Hunter is a latecomer to jazz by some standards. If there’s any lack of experience, he makes up with sheer virtuosity and a deep respect for his jazz forebears.

Yet Charlie Hunter is no revivalist. He infuses his playing with eclectic pop influences; he’s covered songs from bop god Thelonius Monk to the grunge hero Kurt Cobain. Throughout the 90s Charlie Hunter rose among the top-selling and top-drawing jazz acts. While he is comfortable playing for genteel Lincoln Center jazz connoisseurs, his preferred venue is sweatier and smokier, where the next generation audience is on their feet and moving to the music.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Charlie Hunter, jazz musician.

Chef Anthony Bourdain went into the fancy restaurant business for the company of the kitchen: “the drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths.”

This is the good news, the sheer weirdness of the three-star strangers fondling your food, blanching your asparagus and searing your steak. They will suffer and steal to please you, or sometimes cheat to fool you with pork sauce on your veal — anything to get the boss and the band of brothers through another night of battle.

Anthony Bourdain started leaking the dirty secrets of high cookery in the New Yorker last year: Fish on a Monday menu is probably four days old. Bread, and butter, get recycled. Chefs save their suspicious and tough cuts of meat for people who want it “well done.” But now in hard covers he’s let us all in on the raging theater of the kitchen, where people with bad pasts find a new family and cook the very best food.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Anthony Bourdain, Chef, Les Halles Brasserie, author of Kitchen Confidential.

The British artist Cornelia Parker likes to take every day objects — coins, teaspoons, feathers — and force us to take a fresh look at them and what they stand for. She does this by crushing and stretching items, blowing them up and presenting them in new contexts.

She has flattened coins under the wheels of passing trains, steamrolled over silverware, exploded a garden shed, thrown things off the Cliffs of Dover and cut up a loaf of bread and a necktie using Marie Antoinette’s guillotine. She then takes the debris and gives it new life in beautiful and arresting arrangements.

She’s the kind of person who saw potential in a Texas church destroyed by lightning and exposed its irony and poignancy by making a mobile out of the charred remains. Her art, she says, is about destruction, resurrection and reconfiguration. After a violent death, there’s rebirth in the calm of her installations.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Cornelia Parker, Artist.

To adapt or not to adapt Hamlet — that is the question. Director Michael Almareyda may have just answered the question with his hi-tech 21st century remake.

Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet is an uptown slacker who loves hanging out with his funky East-village Ophelia. Bill Murray is hanger-on Polonius. Kyle MacLachlan is King Claudius, CEO of the Denmark Corporation. The court of Elsinore has become a city of luxurious penthouses, lush corporate offices and sleek limousines.

This Hamlet is a meditation on a world flooded with images, media, surveillance cameras and listening devices. Technology haunts Hamlet; Manhattan alienates him. There have been at least 43 silver-screen Hamlets, one for every generation and then some. The story is familiar, the dilemma is timeless. The play’s the thing.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Marjorie Garber, Professor of English at Harvard University.

The question put to Socrates was: what good does it do us to do the right thing? And what harm to do the wrong? Only the right thing will make you happy, Socrates answered; the wrong thing will harm your soul, and make you wretched.

Do subway fare jumpers feel this harm to their souls? Or tax cheats? Or adulterers? Or polluters? Or serial killers, for that matter? And are those the sorts of sins you think of when words like “ethics” and “morality” pop up? If, as Socrates said, “no one does wrong willingly” — from his own perspective, anyway — how is it that we all see so much of other people’s wrongdoing in the world? What is that impulse to do the right thing? And what does it impel you to do — at church, for your family, in your life’s work, for Rwandan refugees?

In the third week of a summer series on philosophy, the questions are right and wrong, and living with the line you draw between them.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Thomas Scanlon, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University
Ralph Wedgwood, Professor of Philosophy, MIT

Marriage is a great institution, we say, to which millions of marriageable moderns respond: but who wants to live in an institution?

Men don’t need marriage, since the moral revolution of the 60s, to get sex. Women don’t need marriage, since Murphy Brown, to have children. Feminism makes it doctrine that women in their twenties should be thinking about careers, not their “MRS.” degree. And sex education makes it doctrine that safety’s the big thing, not real intimacy, much less commitment.

So who needs marriage, the question goes. Leon and Amy Kass, after 30-plus rich years of it, say: we do! Together they teach the University of Chicago course on courtship, on the history and the literature of love and marriage. They do it, they say, for students, women especially, who seem “sad, lonely and confused” in their liberation, and clueless about the prospects of “love-filled lasting union.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Leon and Amy Kass, Professors at the University of Chicago.

In 1936, strapped to the open door of a small plane circling in subzero temperatures, Bradford Washburn took the first aerial photographs of Alaska’s Mt. McKinley. In 1999, his research added seven feet to the estimated elevation of Mt Everest.

For the better part of the 20th century, Brad Washburn, who turned 90 this year, has been a National Geographic icon, an explorer and mountaineer, a geologist, a photographer, a cartographer, and long-time director of Boston’s Museum of Science. Although most of Washburn’s 10,000 photographs were intended to help geological study and map-making, they are much more than that. Ansel Adams described them as “perfectly composed”, “the first of their kind and the finest ever made.”

A pioneer in a 20th century quest to explore, understand, and explain the sublime spaces of our world…
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Bradford Washburn

Anchee Min was a poster child for the Cultural Revolution. She was handpicked for her proletarian good looks by Mao Tse-Tung’s wife, who wanted Anchee Min to star in propaganda films.

But after Mao died and Madame Mao was denounced for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Anchee Min became a pariah, sent to a labor camp for eight years. It was an opportunity to spend time with Madame Mao’s friends and enemies and learn everything about her.

The official version of Chinese history now is that Madame Mao was evil personified; she’s known as the “white-boned demon.” Anchee Min puts flesh and blood on that image. She sees in Madame Mao an early feminist, a woman motivated by ambition, fueled by revenge and tortured by her unrequited love for Chairman Mao.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Anchee Min, author of Becoming Madame Mao.

When the Big Dig idea first surfaced 20 years ago — the plan to put Boston’s ugly old elevated highway underground — the soon-to-be Congressman Barney Frank said: rather than lower the expressway, wouldn’t it be cheaper to raise the city? It seemed expensive at the original $3-billion dollars budget: now approaching 12 or 15, on the way to 20-billion dollars, Boston’s Big Dig is among the most complex and surely the costliest highway projects in the history of the world.

The men who built the Panama Canal had mudslides and malaria to contend with. The builders of the trans-Alaska pipeline faced vast distances and bitter cold. But the highway engineers who’ve threaded Boston’s big artery 12-stories deep under subways and sewer lines met the monster of Massachusetts politics, and cost overruns that won’t quit. A construction marvel on the scale of the pyramids, or maybe the Vietnam of highways?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Michael Dukakis, former governor of Massachusetts

Tom Palmer, reporter for The Boston Globe

Jane Jacobs, author of Life and Death of the American City

Michael Kelley, Project Director of the Big Dig.