Our Lenny

WNYC has been presenting Our Lenny "A 13-day Exploration and Celebration of Leonard Bernstein’s Enduring New York Legacy". It is all finishing up tonight but can be heard online.

Part of the presentation is the wonderful 11 part documentary,
Leonard Bernstein: An American Life. If you care at all about the musical and general cultural scene in the USA in the last part of the 20th Century, or if you are simply interested in listening to a great audio documentary, this one is not to be missed. Fortunately it is available in audio stream form here. I don't know how long they intend to keep it there, so give it a listen while you can.

There are other programs within Our Lenny that focus on particular works with guests commenting. I particularly enjoyed the West Side Story hour with Sport Murphy and host David Garland, because it is, well, it's West Side Story and that music has always made a major impression on me.

Speaking of Faith

Speaking of Faith is a program distributed by American Public Media. It plays on Saturday mornings at seven on WNYC-FM and is repeated in the afternoon at three on their AM station. The program deals with issues of faith, religion, spiritual matters, and how these interface with human sociology. This is a very good program that is on occasion, dependant on the subject, vital.

Play, Spirit, + Character is this week's repeat offering on Speaking of Faith. This played last year. It is an interview with Stuart Brown, a physician and director of the National Institute for Play. I would like to put this interview in the "vital", "must hear" file.
I would also recommend going to the site and listening to the extended unedited version of the interview.

Brown and charming host Krista Tippett discuss the function of play in human development and what can happen if play is absent or restricted.
There seems to be two directions play is currently going. There is the cram-them-full-of-info crowd that want to give children a leg up against the competition of all the other children and demands that there is really no time for something as silly as play. This is the notion that gives us things like No Child Left Behind. (Work, work, work, no recess, take your meds and get to work.) But then there are others in a growing movement that says the WORK of a child is PLAY. It is essential to the growth of a healthy human.
This is an excellent program. Please don't miss it.

When I was a child I could take off in the moring on my bike and my parents didn't really know where I was and what I was up to. It was wonderful; summertime, freedom!
Then school would begin in the fall.

Hunting and Gathering Our Fast Food

So there was Deirdre Barrett on the radio this morning telling me that the hunter gatherers only had to work, like, three hours a day.
What the hell is wrong with us? How come we have to work so much even while we have all these labour saving machines?
And these hunter-gatherers, what do they do the rest of the time? PLAY!
Then she said something about the bonobos.
Yeah, PLAY.
Right. We've heard how the bonobos play.

Despite all that,
I want to be a hunter gather when I grow up.

Here is a pretty interesting interview from today's Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC.