Myself With Others Adam Shatz

Arto Lindsay is a singer-songwriter who divides his time between Sao Paolo and New York City, and one of the most influential figures in the New York Downtown scene that emerged in the early 1980s. A member of the “No Wave” band DNA and of the avant-pop group Ambitious Lovers, Lindsay went on to become an almost romantic crooner of samba, on albums like Mundo Civilizado – even as he continues to make deliberately disruptive noises on his guitar, an instrument he’s deliberately never learned to play. This combination of pop intuition and brash experimentalism has made him a darling of the art world. In our conversation, Lindsay spoke to me about his youth in Brazil as the son of progressive American missionaries; about living under the military dictatorship and about his early years in New York City and his friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat. He also explained why religion, like music, is all about sex, and why he still refuses to take music lessons.

Arto Lindsay is a singer-songwriter who divides his time between Sao Paolo and New York City, and one of the most influential figures in the New York Downtown scene that emerged in the early 1980s. A member of the “No Wave” band DNA and of the avant-pop group Ambitious Lovers, Lindsay went on to become an almost romantic crooner of samba, on albums like Mundo Civilizado – even as he continues to make deliberately disruptive noises on his guitar, an instrument he’s deliberately never learned to play. This combination of pop intuition and brash experimentalism has made him a darling of the art world. In our conversation, Lindsay spoke to me about his youth in Brazil as the son of progressive American missionaries; about living under the military dictatorship and about his early years in New York City and his friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat. He also explained why religion, like music, is all about sex, and why he still refuses to take music lessons.
Links and References:
Downtown 81 - Kino Lorber
Ambitious Lovers / Envy
Mundo Civilizado
Crossing Music’s Borders in Search of Identity - New York Times
Heiner Goebbels: The Man in the Elevator - ECM

A novelist, memoirist, critic, poet and screenwriter, James Lasdun has created a memorable body of work exploring the themes of existential dread, reputational damage and surveillance. The son of a well-known British architect, Lasdun is perhaps best known for his 2013 memoir about being stalked by one of his writing students, Give Me Everything You Have. In our conversation, James spoke to me about his childhood in London, as the son of Jews who had converted to Anglicanism without ever quite managing to become Christians; about his love of mythology; and about the dark fears and obsessions that run through his fiction and his non-fiction.

This episode is a co-presented with the London Review of Books

Alain Gresh, a French journalist, was the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique and is now the director of Orient XXI, an online journal about Middle East affairs. Gresh’s writing on Israel-Palestine and on the battles over Islam and secularism have made him one of the most important voices on the left in France. Born in Cairo in 1948, Gresh learned in his late 20s that a man he knew in Paris as a family friend, the Egyptian-Jewish revolutionary exile Henri Curiel, was his biological father. In 1978, Curiel was assassinated in his apartment building – a crime that remains unresolved to this day. In our conversation, Gresh talked to me about his trajectory as a radical commentator on the Middle East, his upbringing in Egypt on the eve of decolonization, his relationship to Curiel, and his ongoing search for the truth about Curiel’s murder.

The bassist, composer and poet William Parker is the soul of the Lower East Side free jazz scene. A veteran of ensembles led by Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Billy Bang and David S. Ware, Parker is also remarkable leader in his own right. In 2021 he released a ten-disc boxed set, The Music of William Parker: Migration of Silence into and out of the Tone World, Volumes 1-10, featuring compositions in a dizzying range of styles. With his wife and collaborator, the dancer Patricia Nicholson Parker, Parker has turned the annual Vision Festival into one of the defining events in New York creative music. In our conversation, William spoke to me about his early years in the Bronx, how he rose up in the “Loft scene” of the 1970s, his experiences with Cecil Taylor, and his understanding of music as a force of revolutionary social transformation.

The bassist, composer and poet William Parker is the soul of the Lower East Side free jazz scene. A veteran of ensembles led by Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Billy Bang and David S. Ware, Parker is also remarkable leader in his own right. In 2021 he released a ten-disc boxed set, The Music of William Parker: Migration of Silence into and out of the Tone World, Volumes 1-10, featuring compositions in a dizzying range of styles. With his wife and collaborator, the dancer Patricia Nicholson Parker, Parker has turned the annual Vision Festival into one of the defining events in New York creative music. In our conversation, William spoke to me about his early years in the Bronx, how he rose up in the “Loft scene” of the 1970s, his experiences with Cecil Taylor, and his understanding of music as a force of revolutionary social transformation.