ESOPUS PODCASTS

Over the course of several years, I produced a series of podcasts that related to Esopus issues and editions. These included interviews with contributors to a particular issue, as well as clips from themed CDs and other audio projects.

This podcast’s subject is Esopus 22: Medicine, published in the spring of 2015. It includes my interviews with three contributors to the issue: Thomas Juncher Jensen, an interior designer who designed "the perfect waiting room" based on subscribers' suggestions; artist Melissa Meyer, who created one of the 6 artists' projects for the issue; and Anne Watts, the founder and lead singer of Baltimore-based band Boister, which contributed a track to the issue's included CD, featuring songs inspired by bodily organs.

Each fall, Esopus creates a limited-edition artwork for Premium subscribers. Our Fall 2015 edition was a multidisciplinary collaboration between musician Charles Bissell (The Wrens) and contemporary artist Beth Campbell. A layered reflection on the differing meanings of “original” and “copy” in the visual arts and music, it included a custom-designed audio cassette, a 17 x 30" archival print, and a foldout poster. For this podcast, I spoke with Beth and Charles about this fascinating collaboration.

Each issue of Esopus features an audio CD with brand-new music inspired by a particular theme. The Esopus 23 CD explored the subject of "Close Calls." For it, we invited 13 musical acts to pick a close-call moment from their lives—ranging from near-death experiences to romantic misfires—for inspiration. I spoke with four contributors to the CD—Anthony LaMarca (The War on Drugs), Darren Solomon, Jo Lawry, and The Kickstand Band—about the songs they created and the near-miss moments that inspired them.

Much of the content in Esopus 24 concerns itself with boundaries—between cultures, languages, genders, and more—and with using creativity as a way to breach them. This podcast features my interviews with four contributors to the issue—translator Ann Goldstein, photographer Clayton Patterson, and artists Hayden Dunham and Marco Maggi—and also includes clips from 5 songs from the issue’s CD, "Pioneer Sessions," featuring songs created in the recording studio of the Brooklyn nonprofit Pioneer Works.

ESOPUS DIALOGUES

Esopus regularly partnered with institutions in New York City and beyond to present exhibitions, launches, screenings, concerts, and—one of my favorite activities—dialogues with fascinating people from a wide range of creative disciplines who also happen to be Esopus contributors. A few of these public conversations have been recorded and are featured here.

On February 23, 2011, Esopus inaugurated a collaborative series at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, with a screening and in-person appearance by actress Lisa Kudrow and her producing partner Dan Bucatinsky. In 2005, Kudrow and Michael Patrick King co-created The Comeback, a penetrating brutal satire of reality TV, sitcoms, and show business in general, which aired on HBO for one season (and which was featured in Esopus 15: Television). The program opened with a screening of the series’ first episode, after which Kudrow, who was nominated for an Emmy for her brilliant portrayal of the show’s protagonist, Valerie Cherish, discussed the conception, execution, and untimely demise of the critically lauded series (which was ultimately resurrected by HBO in 2015 for another acclaimed season).

In front of a packed house at Brooklyn’s BookCourt on May 21, 2016, the celebrated Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard (My Struggle) spoke with me about “On the Value of Literature,” his 5,000-word essay that appeared in Esopus 23 as a removable booklet. Knausgaard also took questions from the audience about his writing process, and the evening ended with a book-signing.