With the internet down, he faxed the poem to a Cairo newspaper, copies of which were distributed in Tahrir Square.  Then Al-Jazeera asked him to record it. The video of his reading was projected in the Square every couple of hours on makeshift screens, helping to fuel the protests in real time.

Al-Barghouti did all this from the United States, where he teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. This isn’t the first time his poetry has gotten him a lot of attention. Al-Barghouti’s poems opposing the Iraq War led to a temporary expulsion from Egypt; he could only return once the war ended. And in 2007 his poem “In Jerusalem” became a viral YouTube sensation after he performed it in an American Idol-style competition called “Prince of Poets.”

Studio 360 host Kurt Andersen reached Tamim Al-Barghouti this week at his home in Washington, DC. He said that under Mubarak, freedom of expression wasn’t exactly forbidden — but people never knew when the government was going to crack down. “Mubarak had this motto: ‘you say what you want and we do what we want.’” Now the poet whose words helped provoke the uprising is optimistic for Egypt’s democratic future: “This is one of the very rare moments where our hopes and expectations are not so far apart in the Middle East.”

Listen to Kurt’s entire interview with Al-Barghouti here.

–Michele Siegel

This week, Kurt talks with Julie Burstein, the show’s former executive producer, about a subject that’s meat and potatoes in the interview biz: childhood. We hear about Chuck Close painting from a nude model at age eight, “which made me the envy of everyone in my neighborhood” and helped him get past a severe learning disability.  Richard Ford tells us that his childhood memories are cans stored in his mental “pantry,” waiting till he has the right recipe.  One such memory, Ford explains, was an untimely end of the family cat under the family station wagon — which found its way into one of Ford’s celebrated Frank Bascombe novels.

You can hear Kurt’s full, original conversations with the artists below.

[Amazon] [Barnes & Noble] [IndieBound]

***

Chuck Close, painter

(Originally broadcast January 19, 2002)

For over 30 years, Chuck Close has been making huge, meticulous paintings of faces — 9 foot, looming images of himself, and of friends such as the composer Philip Glass and the late painter Robert Rauschenberg. He is one of today’s most famous and seriously regarded portraitists — particularly impressive since Close suffers from prosopagnosia, face blindness.  Kurt visits Close at his New York studio.

Richard Ford, novelist

(Originally broadcast November 10, 2006)

He’s not the type of novelist who cranks out a new book every year. Ideas marinate in Richard Ford’s mind for years – sometimes fifty years – before they surface in his stories. Ford spent so much time gathering material and reworking the manuscript of his latest novel, The Lay of the Land (2006), he kept the pages in his freezer for safekeeping. Ford talks with Kurt about the challenges of aging a character in real time.

Mira Nair, filmmaker

(Originally broadcast March 16, 2007)

Mira Nair’s films take place all over the Indian diaspora – from the rough city streets of Salaam Bombay! (1988) to the American Deep South in Mississippi Masala (1991). The Namesake (2006) spanned the distance from Calcutta to New York: a young Indian couple who makes a life together in the US, and the struggles of their American-born son. Nair tells Kurt why unconventional love stories have inspired so many of her films. And how an encounter with a band of street performers set her on the path to becoming a filmmaker.

Richard Serra, sculptor

(Originally broadcast May 25, 2007)

Richard Serra began working with steel as a teenager, on a summer job in a steel mill. He went on to become one of America’s greatest sculptors. Serra’s recent pieces are massive, 12-foot-tall steel walls that curve and lean together to form fascinating spaces you can enter and walk around. Serra walks Kurt through a major retrospective of his work at New York’s MoMA as he finishes up its installation.

After a lot of angst, Baitz got a one-way ticket back to New York where he wrote his new play “Other Desert Cities” (now playing at New York City’s Lincoln Center to great praise). It’s the story of Brooke, a writer who comes home for Christmas and reveals to her family that she’s publishing a tell-all memoir — about them.

But Baitz admitted to Kurt that breaking up with TV was messy:

You can hear more of Kurt’s conversation with Jon Robin Baitz on this weekend’s show.

- Dory Carr-Harris

Anyone else feeling a little political déjà vu?  Fifteen years ago this month a salacious political novel called Primary Colors was published.  It offered a thinly veiled account of President Bill Clinton’s election campaign and was written by…well, no one knew. In spite of this, or perhaps, because of it Primary Colors became a huge bestseller and eventually a movie starring John Travolta.  Now, as if on cue, we get O: a Presidential Novel, a juicy bit of speculative fiction that purports to be about  President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. The book features cartoonishly large ears on the cover and another “Anonymous” author.

Joe Klein

During Primary Colors run atop the bestseller list Studio 360 host Kurt Andersen was editor of New York Magazine at the time.  Aided by professor Don Foster, a Shakespeare scholar who analyzed writing styles, Kurt publicly outed TIME journalist Joe Klein.  Now that there’s a new mystery author, Kurt is back on the case, this time with the help of New York political writer John Heilemann.  Heilemann has a terrific Obama cover story out this week and is working on the sequel to his dishy 2008 (nonfiction) campaign book Game Change.

He told Kurt that the biggest clue to the author of O is hiding in plain sight, on page two no less.  It involves a specific real-life anecdote in the text that, according to Heilemann, was never reported in the press.  Apparently the story could only be known by a senior strategist to John McCain, and since only one of McCain’s advisers has any real writing experience, Heilemann has narrowed the list to one probable suspect.

Mark Salter.

Mark Salter

Salter is a McCain confidant and former ghostwriter whose name has come up before.  But as far as we know no one, until now, has pointed out the revelatory passage on Page 2.  We’ve yet to reach Salter directly, but he recently told the New York Post, “I’ve been asked by the publisher, as apparently many other people have, not to comment. So, no comment.”

Hmm… did we mention that back in 1996 after Joe Klein spent months vehemently denying writing Primary Colors he eventually came clean, proving Kurt right?  But don’t take our word for it.  We’re relying on the wisdom of the crowd for this one.  If you do a little sleuthing and come up with a better guess, by all means add it to the comments below.  We’ll keep an open case file until the mystery is solved.

-Derek L. John

UPDATE: Salter has been revealed as the mystery author.  Gold star, Heilemann.

Spark: How Creativity Works will hit bookshelves on February 15.  Written by Studio 360′s long-time executive producer Julie Burstein, it’s a how-to guide for summoning your inner artist – with advice drawn from Kurt’s decade of interviews with some of the greatest creative minds of our time: including Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Isabel Allende, and Patti Lupone, among many others.

To get you in the mood, we’ve got a sneak-preview: Kurt Andersen’s foreword.

[Amazon] [Barnes & Noble] [IndieBound]

***

I graduated from college with no job in the offing and no desire to return home to Nebraska. All I knew for sure was that I wanted to live in New York City, hang out with people doing creative work, and get paid for doing creative work myself, but that I didn’t know how to act or sing or dance or play an instrument or draw. When I was twenty-one, that was the extent of my career plan. And oddly enough, I’ve executed it in all its half-assed, unkempt glory for the last thirty-five years: I’m a New Yorker; my friends are mostly writers and artists and filmmakers and musicians and designers, and I’ve earned my living in pretty much every creative field that doesn’t require me to make music or draw. Or dance.

But it was just a decade ago that I had two back-to-back aha moments that finally explained my zigzagging professional path to myself and also made me understand the prerequisites for creativity.

The first lightbulb went off when I read an essay called “The Amateur Spirit” by the great scholar and writer Daniel Boorstin. The main obstacle to progress is not ignorance, Boorstin wrote, but “pretensions to knowledge. . . . The amateur is not afraid to do something for the first time. . . . the rewards and refreshments of thought and the arts come from the courage to try something, all sorts of things, for the first time. . . . An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.”

Here was a supremely credentialed prince of the Establishment, the ultimate professional intellectual—Rhodes Scholar, Ph.D., professor at the University of Chicago and Cambridge University, museum director, Librarian of Congress—arguing in his seventies that while professionalism of the good kind (knowledge, competence, reliability) has its place, it is the curious, excited, slightly reckless passion of the amateur that we need to nurture in our professional lives, especially if we aspire to creativity in the work we do.

A few months later I found myself interviewing my funny, brilliant friend Tibor Kalman, the graphic designer and multifarious auteur. A transcript of our conversation would appear in a monograph about his work. He was forty-nine and when we talked he knew he had only months to live. Tibor had always been smart about the nature of creative work, but now the wisdom was pouring out.

“You don’t want to do too many projects of a similar type,” he told me. “I did two of a number of things. The first one, you fuck it up in an interesting way. The second one, you get it right. And then you’re out of there. I have sought to move into as many other fields as possible, anything that could be a step away from ‘graphic design,’ just to keep from getting bored. As long as I don’t completely know how to do something, I can do it well. And as soon as I have [completely] learned how to do something, I will do it less well, because what I do will become more obvious.”

I realized my entire professional and creative life so far had been conducted in a similar way, by indulging the amateur spirit: I’d repeatedly, presumptuously barged into jobs for which I had no credentials or much specific training and then worked extra hard, hoping that my rank inexperience might somehow be transmuted into interesting innovation. I’d had no experience writing radio and TV news scripts (for NBC, my first job), or about politics or crime (for Time, my second job), or about architecture and design (also for Time), and when I cofounded Spy magazine (my fourth job), I had never edited anyone’s writing but my own, or run a business. Ditto when I wrote and produced prime-time network comedy specials (for NBC), wrote an off-Broadway revue, wrote a screenplay (for Disney), and sold my first novel (to Random House). Professor Boorstin and my friend Tibor had convinced me retroactively that what I’d done by accident, going from interesting gig to interesting gig with no real strategy, had a philosophical basis.

Shortly after that double epiphany, executives from Public Radio International and WNYC called me out of the blue and asked if I might be interested in hosting a new program they wanted to create about the arts and entertainment and creativity. Really? Me? My total on-air experience consisted of having been interviewed a few times about books and articles I’d written. Host a weekly show on public radio? Were they serious? I’d done plenty of things I had no standing to do, but no one before had ever invited me to do something I had no standing to do.

That’s not completely true. Twenty years earlier, a theater director had called me out of the blue and asked if I might be interested in playing the lead in his upcoming production of Othello. Really? Me? My total acting experience consisted of playing Captain Hook in a grade school production of Peter Pan. And also, I am, um, er, Caucasian. Was he serious? Well, as it turned out, um, er, uh, no: he’d meant to call an (African American) actor named Curt Anderson. Wrong number.

But this time, it turned out, the public radio grown-ups really had intended to call me, and not the veteran radio personalities Curtis Andreessen or Karl Andrews or Carter Andrazs. They were serious. And that’s how I came to help invent and host Studio 360.

What we do every week on Studio 360 is try to show how creativity works by means of individual case studies, by talking at length and in depth to some of the world’s most talented people about how and why they do what they do. And for this book we’ve distilled the most relevant wisdom from my hundreds of conversations to create a kind of plain-English master class about the difficult, exhilarating process of pursuing one’s creative passions. It’s Creativity 101 featuring guest lectures by visual artists and designers Chuck Close, Denise Scott Brown, and Robert Venturi; filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow, Ang Lee, Mira Nair, and Kevin Bacon; writers Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, John Irving, and Tony Kushner; musicians Patti LuPone, Rosanne Cash, Robert Plant, Yo-Yo Ma; and many other artests. Maybe you’re an artist or would-be artist yourself; maybe you’re an amateur singer or painter or writer. If so, consider this a collegial primer on how some supremely talented and successful people unleashed their talents and achieved their successes. But I’m also convinced that there are plenty of valuable, hard-won lessons about living and working creatively that can be applied to almost any life and any job. Or maybe you simply want to enjoy an unbuttoned, intimate look at the life and times of a few dozen cultural superstars. If so, enjoy.

What I’ve realized after talking to this remarkable pantheon of creative people for our five hundred shows is that what I learned from Daniel Boorstin and Tibor Kalman a decade ago is true of pretty much all work worth doing, especially creative work: the prerequisite for doing exciting work is to be excited about it yourself, reaching to do or make something that you haven’t done or made before and which seems at least a little scary, just beyond your comfort zone. E. B. White famously wrote that “no one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” The same goes for people who want to do any kind of creative work.

As soon as I adopted this paradigm of the amateur spirit just over a decade ago, taking risks to try new things, staying out of ruts, refusing to be paralyzed by the fear of imperfection or even failure, opening myself to luck—that is, once it became my conscious MO rather than simply the way I’d unthinkingly stumbled through life—I began spotting other members of the club, such as Danny Boyle, the director who made 127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting, and eight other feature films. “Everything after the first one,” he told the New York Times, “is business. There’s something about that innocence and joy when you don’t quite know what you’re doing.” And Steve Jobs, talking about the unexpected upside of being purged from Apple nine years after he founded the company. “The heaviness of being successful,” he says, “was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” A period during which, among other things, he founded the amazing animation studio Pixar.

I’m not much of a religious person, but if forced to choose I’d probably go with Buddhism, because its practitioners write and say paradoxical things, such as this line by the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” That’s what Tibor was getting at, and Boorstin and Boyle and Jobs. And Richard Serra, as he explained a few years ago in a conversation on Studio 360, which we’ve included in Chapter 2. “I’m just going to start playing around,” Serra told me about his decision to abandon painting as a young man, “without the faintest idea of what I was doing.”
I learned how to make a national radio show by making a national radio show in the company of people who knew lots more about radio than I did, especially Julie Burstein, my executive producer from 2000 through 2009. Having written for TV and radio and the movies, I knew how to write sentences for the voice and ear rather than the eye, and I knew how to tell stories. But I learned how to have a new kind of conversation, in which I uttered sentences that parsed and contained a minimum of ums and uhs and you knows, conversations in which I seldom interrupted but nevertheless took the lead.

Moreover, in creating Studio 360 with Julie and the rest of our team of producers, I had the same goal as when I’d created magazines and websites and produced TV shows and written novels—to make a thing that I would want to read or see or hear even if I’d had nothing to do with it, and that was unlike anything extant. For me, that’s also how creativity works, when it works. In this sense, creativity is selfish—but it derives from what I call “good selfishness,” something like good cholesterol.

In the ten years that I’ve hosted the show, I’ve had more than a thousand conversations with some of the most creative and interesting people on earth. Many of them have surprised me. Before I met Susan Sontag, for instance, I was terrified. She’d been a hero of mine for decades, and her assistant had informed my producer that “Ms. Sontag does not suffer fools,” just in case I happened to be one. But our hour-long talk turned out to be one of the best I’ve ever had—and the only one for Studio 360 that generated a handwritten thank-you note. I was very differently surprised by the novelist and journalist Nick Tosches, who did his best to offend me and then, failing to do so, left the studio for a smoke halfway through the show and never returned. I was surprised when Gore Vidal remembered he had once threatened to sue me for an article I’d published about him, surprised when Twyla Tharp started crying, surprised when Rosanne Cash became a close friend, and surprised when Neil Gaiman asked me, years after he’d appeared on the show, if I would write a piece of short fiction for an anthology he was editing—and thus last summer I published my first science fiction story. Once again, I’d never done it, didn’t know for sure if I could do it, but did it anyway, and was pleased with the result. Such is the terror and delight of trusting one’s amateur spirit, being willing to be lucky and seeing where creativity takes you.

– Kurt Andersen
August 6, 2010

On Thursday, January 27, Shara Worden will bring her synergetic mix of classical music, cabaret, and punk to Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series — and we’re thrilled that she’s given us  an exclusive sneak preview of a song she wrote for the event.

Worden is probably best known for her classical/rock project My Brightest Diamond and her collaborations with The Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, and David Byrne.

Last Friday, she and the yMusic ensemble stopped by Studio 360 and premiered “We Added It Up”:

It’s a performance that showcases Worden’s syncretic style.  She told Kurt the song was inspired by President Obama’s recent “shellacking” speech, in which he conceded midterm election losses, saying we need to “learn to disagree without being disagreeable.”  The song draws that premise wide, picking up on its productive friction and extending it from politics to include lovers, atoms, and the idea that the world, itself, is held together by opposites.

Listen to Studio 360 this weekend to hear Kurt’s full interview with Worden and another live performance.

-Michael Guerriero

From Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury (with permission from Andrews McMeel Publishing)

Garry Trudeau – author of the landmark comic strip Doonesbury – stopped by the studio recently to talk with Kurt about 40 years of penning the ever-expanding Doonesbury universe.  He offered some great insight into the history of the Doonesbury characters, including B.D.’s service in Vietnam and Iraq, and on his own, real-life relationship with military veterans, as well.

It’s a challenge to cover comics (or really anything visual) on the radio, so Studio 360’s Eric Molinsky made dramatized versions of a few key strips.  And when it came to the website, we thought “Why not sync up the sound with the original strips on which they were based?”  With a little cropping and some video-editing software, we were able to give voices to some of Trudeau’s amazing characters.

Listen to Kurt’s conversation with Garry Trudeau here:

- Michael Guerriero

As events unfolded, Kirn’s tweets stood out. By Sunday night, Kirn realized the uncanny similarities alleged shooter Jared Loughner shared with Kent Selkirk, the socially-inept-loner-on-the-internet protagonist of Kirn’s novel, The Unbinding.

“It was a sense of recognition,” Kirn told Kurt Andersen. “The forces that created this Loughner may be spawning more of him.”

Kurt reached Walter Kirn in Montana to talk about how a confusing violent tragedy has spurred such an  intense cultural moment. Kirn explained, “If we look at this story as a story, and not as a basis of issue oriented argument, we see all sorts of characters who defy stereotypes and partisan description.”

–Michele Siegel

Damon told Kurt how he got the gig.

Damon’s full conversation with Kurt airs this weekend — listen online here.

- Julia Botero

There’s no doubt that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is filled with regional dialect, often expressed in offensive, racist language.  It’s a vernacular that reflects the cultural racism of the time, and Twain uses it to fire off satirical charges against the old South.  But it can also make the book uncomfortable for many modern readers, and as a result fewer schools are assigning the work.

The man responsible for the changes, Auburn University professor Alan Gribben, says that’s exactly why he’s stripping out the controversial language.  But should the text of a classic work be altered simply because it makes readers uncomfortable?  Studio 360’s Kurt Andersen spoke with Gribben earlier today and cited Twain’s own words:  “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”  As Kurt told Gribben, “I guess what you’re doing here is cutting up the steak for the babies.”  Hear Gribben’s response and the rest of the interview here:

Gribben says his version of Huckleberry Finn is only one of several editions that are already available. The milder text is intended to keep the book in classrooms and open it up to readers who might otherwise be turned off because of censorship or personal taste.  But is a wider readership really worth such a re-write?  What is lost when we no longer confront the complicated ugliness of our own past?  Tell us what you think.

-Derek John & Michael Guerriero