Tuesday, July 28, 2009

July Notes from The Kitchen Sisterhood

Dear Friends,

So much crosses our desks and our microphones. Only so much of it makes it to the air. Here are some collaborations and projects that have recently caught our attention we thought you'd want to know about.

Keep the faith,

The Kitchen Sisters

Archives we're visiting
Free Music Archive. "It's not just free music, it's good music."

Rock'n'Roll Public Library: A five-week free archival "civic endeavor" of The Clash's Mick Jones. "These 10,000 items are relics of the last century. A part of British musical history." London, July 16-August 25
Books in our pile
Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around by Cheryl Wagner

Farm City by Novella Carpenter

I-5 by Summer Brenner

Hunger for Freedom: The Story of Food in the Life of Nelson Mandela
by Anna Trapido

Elizabeth Street by Laurie Fabiano

How to Play the Harmonica: and Other Life Lessons by Sam Barry

Mirrors by Eduardo Galeano

Labor Day by Joyce Maynard
Events on our Calendar
Puckerbrush Potluck, Iowa State Fair, August 19

Eat Real Festival in downtown Oakland, August 28-30. A tribal gathering of taco trucks, hot dog stands, and mobile food vendors all using locally sourced sustainable ingredients.

Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Santa Cruz, CA, August 2-16. Marin Alsop conducts.
Movies to see
Tetro

Corner Store: A work-in-progress documentary feature

Away We Go, written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida of 826 Valencia
Websites we're browsing
Obama Foodorama

Irresistible Fleet of Bicycles

Mapping Main Street: A collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets.

Yes, We Can: A community canning project
Music on our turntable
Lura, a singer from Portugal and Cape Verde

Orquestra Imperial from Brazil. A Samba big band fronted by Caetano Veloso's son Moreno and his friends Alexandre Kassin and Domênico Lancelotti

High Wide and Handsome. Loudon Wainwright III's tribute to Charlie Poole

Darling Just Walk by Tess Dunn

Dai Lam Linh. Our friend Nguyen Qui Duc sent us this startling new music from Vietnam.
Organizations we're tracking
Share Our Strength's Operation Frontline in Los Angeles

Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment

Carecen: Central American Resource Center Cuerpo Sano/Healthy Bodies Program

CCROPP: Central California Regional Obesity Prevention Program

Music National Service Initiative, a new social enterprise that supports and expands the use of music to meet important civic and social goals.
Rest In Peace
Artist, David Ireland

Activist, Luke Cole

Actor, Luis Saguar
"People need stories in hard times. We’ve had an enormous moral, spiritual, and economic collapse. People go to storytellers when times are like that." -Bruce Springsteen

"The Kitchen Sisters have done some of the best radio stories ever broadcast" -Ira Glass

Radio producers we hope you'll support
The Kitchen Sisters. Click here to donate.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Mark Arax

For our most recent Hidden Kitchens piece, The Breadbasket Blues: A Central Valley Kitchen Story, we interviewed former Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Arax, author of the new book West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State. Take a listen to this web exclusive audio clip of Mark talking about family, food, and farms of the Central Valley: Listen.

Friday, July 10, 2009

The Breadbasket Blues: A Central Valley Kitchen Story

In this latest Hidden Kitchens story, we travel to California's Central Valley, the nation's breadbasket, to look at what is feeding the epidemic of juvenile obesity and type 2 diabetes, and talk to some of the local kitchen visionaries grappling with these issues. The story looks at some of the unexpected factors that impact the health of a community: no sidewalks, no streetlights, drugs, gangs, wild dogs, lack of local grocery stores with fresh produce, and fast food. It was the wild dogs that got the Kitchen Sisters thinking Hidden Kitchens. Listen to the story here.