Dear Friends,
The last time we sent you Notes From The Kitchen Sisterhood we were urging you to vote. It’s a whole new ballgame now with arts, culture, climate, healthcare, immigrants all threatened and the mother of all bombs bursting in air. All around us storytellers, artists, organizers, teachers, librarians, athletes, scientists are stepping up, rising to this moment. We wanted to share a few things from our world and the world of those we admire.
On the homefront, The Kitchen Sisters have a bit of a Trifecta at the moment and now we need to ask for your vote.
Our podcast, The Kitchen Sisters Present (until recently known as Fugitive Waves), was just nominated for a Webby Award for best documentary podcast. Please help us claim the title. Vote here, vote now!
We are also thrilled to say that we have been nominated for a 2017 James Beard Award for our latest season of NPR stories, Hidden Kitchens: Kimchi Diplomacy: War and Peace and Food.
And our TED Talk about Wall Street, the self-schooled San Quentin inmate and stock market savant is now online. Take a look.
Forward ever,
The Kitchen Sisters
Davia & Nikki
Events we are going to / wish we were going to:
The Unplugged Soul: A Conference on the Podcast. The Kitchen Sisters, Benjamen Walker, Christopher Lydon, Jeff Emtman and a slew of other podcasters. April 14-15, Heyman Center, Columbia University.
Here and Home: A retrospective of the work of California photographer Larry Sultan. April 15-July 23, SFMOMA
Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind person to summit of Mount Everest and kayak the Grand Canyon, in conversation with Davia about his book, No Barriers, May 2, Lighthouse for the Blind, SF
Fake News Room: A response to Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s 1983 exhibition “Newsroom.” Artists include Jason Fulford, Jim Goldberg and Dru Donovan, as well as The Kitchen Sisters. Open now through April 29 at the Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco
What we’re watching:
Mifune, directed by Stephen Okazaki
I Called Him Morgan, directed by Kasper Collin. The jazz tragedy of Lee Morgan, exquisitely rendered.
An Inconvenient Sequel. Al Gore’s climate change sequel. Truth to Power.
Century of Self, Adam Curtis’ 2002 BBC documentary.
Dave Chappelle’s Block Party
What we’re making:
This year, we are embarking on a new NPR/podcast series called The Keepers–activist archivists, rogue librarians, collectors, curators, historians–keepers of the culture and the cultures and collections that they keep. Guardians of history, large and small. Protectors of the free flow of ideas and information. People afflicted with what French philosopher Jacques Derrida called “Archive Fever.”
We welcome your tips and suggestions for who and what needs chronicling.
What we’re reading:
Black Panther by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A Really Good Day by Ayelet Waldman
True South by Jon Else
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, edited by Manjula Martin
Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari
What we’re cooking:
Potlikker Papers by John T. Edge. A people’s history of the modern South set on farms, in kitchens and at tables.
King Solomon’s Table by Joan Nathan.
The President’s Kitchen Cabinet by Adrian Miller. African Americans who fed the First Families, from Washington to Obama.
Tartine All Day: Modern Recipes for the Home Cook by Elisabeth Prueitt
Music we’re spinning:
Save the Country by Laura Nyro.
We recently attended the SF Symphony Pride concert, a staggering night of LGBTQ music from Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Stephen Sondheim and more. What got us most was was when conductor Michael Tilson Thomas accompanied Audra McDonald singing Laura Nyro’s barnburner Save the Country. It is our new national anthem.
Podcasts we’re pumping:
RadioPublic podcast app. Free podcasts!
S-Town from Serial and This American Life. You know you wanna hear it.
The many splendored podcasts from the Radiotopia collective
Citizens we’re admiring:
Russ Kick, investigative archivist from Arizona and founder of the Memory Hole. Russ finds and preserves documents the government tries to keep hidden. A keeper.
Magnus Toren runs the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur that has been closed since mid-February after Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge into Big Sur was damaged due to relentless winter rains. They’re now raising funds to open The Henry Miller Library in the Barnyard in Carmel, bringing Big Sur to “town.” They could use your support.
Years ago we recorded Brian Eno talking about the weekly Tuesday “Sing” he holds with his friends–not professional musicians, just pals, gathered standing around a table, singing a capella for a few hours. Times like these call for communal singing. As Brian says, “Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call ‘civilizational benefits.’ When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community.”
Graffiti artists in Ho Chi Minh City Pushing Back Against Official Censorship. “For many in Vietnam, the spray can is a tool of rebellion—illicit spray-painting is a way of defying restrictions in an authoritarian country where artists must have their work approved before exhibitions, shows are routinely shut down, and works deemed controversial are replaced by a black ‘X’ on gallery walls.”
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