All Your Days James O'Brien

Lynn Gilbert returns to the podcast for part two of a career-spanning conversation about her photography, finding her path with a camera on the Silk Road, iconic moments for her work at the 2022 Venice Biennale, and an 8-acre garden that has revealed something profound as she’s photographed its expanse. And we talk about the anxiety of creation, no matter the years or decades of experience, and what it takes to make peace with our art. 

Our guest is Lynn Gilbert, a massive contributor to 20th-century portrait photography — her photos of sculptor Louise Nevelson became the face of the Venice Biennale in 2022 — whose 1981 book of photos and essays, ‘Particular Passions,’ became a significant document of second-wave feminism. Lynn, with virtually no professional portfolio at the time, somehow brought together luminaries and unknowns to create her monumental book, cataloging some of the most important well-known — and unknown — persons of the time and movement. Her subjects included Gloria Steinem, Margaret Mead, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Julia Child, Lillian Hellman, Barbara Walters, and more. A beautiful and generous figure in my own small story, it is my sincere pleasure to bring part one of this wide-ranging conversation with Lynn to you this Tuesday, a deep look at a life lived behind the lens.

It’s part two of our conversation with Lach, who oversaw, curated and cared for The Fort, a little stage at the back of a bar that made an outsize impact on New York and the world in the 1990s and 2000s, fostering and keeping alive the flame of anti-folk and helping launch the careers of luminaries. Our second episode with Lach goes deeper into his life as a songwriter in his own right, and now a radio host and a storyteller, a novelist, and soon to be a memoirist. We cover wins and deep losses, returns and reunions and reinventions. This is always the heart of our show. Please welcome Lach back to your ears on 'All Your Days.'

Please welcome the legendary Lach to your ears. Lower East Side/Edinburgh artist and producer and presenter, novelist, BBC radio host — you name it, he's probably done it. We go super deep into the history of anti-folk in NYC and the world, but that's just the surface of the thing. Memory, dreams, visions, heartbreak and triumph, life and death, love and letdowns — it's the very DNA of this little podcast, and few guests have hit so many of the notes. You're in for it.
Clips in this episode:
Crazy House (1988 version) - Lach, NYC's Fortunes 13 (2015)Holy Days - Lach, Lach Live at ABC No Rio, NYC, 1980's (2017)The Edie Effect - Lach, Contender (2015)Effect A Change - Lach (2015)New York ≈ Hoboken - Lach (2017)

I get to take you into the studio with painter Annie Leist, where she is creating, crafting, coaxing, and evolving. Her new paintings are stunning, and hopefully, in our words you will hear some of what we see together while we’re talking about them. Her show opens on November 19 at the Union Gallery at Wagner College in New York. It couldn’t be a better moment to catch up with Annie, for her story is moving forward at a fantastic pace and, as can be expected, is packed with all the emotions that birthing new art must bring.  

Sam Shaber is in the middle of a resurrection. For years, if you found Sam’s work, you found it via storytelling or her podcast focusing on in-vitro fertilization and women’s health and just and accurate information and access to both. Or you knew her power-pop-punk bands. These were the points of contact. This week we pick up the story, the rest of the story, how she came out of a landmark moment in her career recording an album named ‘Eighty Numbered Streets’ with a Grammy-nominated artist and what happened after that. We also come back to family, talking about her father, who in his lifetime wrote the screenplay of ‘The Warriors’ — a milestone film in several ways. And we at last come to the story of Sam’s mother, whose passing in 2022 changed what had been our plan to have an interview on this show shortly after we’d recorded it. That’s the only “lost” episode, and in this installment, we restore the ideas and central truths of that original conversation. And I’m glad to have it. 
Clips in this episode:
Eldorado - Sam Shaber, Eighty Numbered Streets (2003)Happy Happy Happy - The Happy Problem (2008)IVFU with Sam Shaber Silver Linings - Sam Shaber, The Moth StorySLAM (2018)Solitaire - Eighty Numbered Streets (2003)