Virtual Memories Show:
Richard Gehr – I Was A Teenage Structuralist!
“I’ve read enough Roland Barthes and Foucault to know it’s all fiction, man.”
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More
Richard Gehr’s new book, I Only Read It for the Cartoons: The New Yorker’s Most Brilliantly Twisted Artists
“I love New Yorker cartoons, but they might be the whitest form of art ever conceived.”
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:
Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Richard Gehr has been writing about music, culture, and travel for quite a while. He has been an editor for the Los Angeles Reader, Spin, and Sonicnet/MTV Interactive. He currently writes for Rolling Stone, Spin, The Village Voice, Relix, AARP: The Magazine, and other publications. He was a senior writer for the book Alt. Culture: An A-To-Z Guide to the ’90S – Underground, Online, and Over-The-Counter
Credits: This episode’s music is Homesickness by Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou (because I’m on the road for a week). The conversation was recorded at Mr. Gehr’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
, and why he thinks Thomas Pynchon understood things about the world that people are only now coming to grips with. (BONUS: I clean up some loose ends from last week’s podcast with Merrill Markoe)
, 
and 
— between 1990 and 2002. He’s written songs for plenty of acts you know, and he wrote many of the songs on 
, which is a story he gets into in our conversation. He’s also done a lot of work in movies and TV, both scoring music and writing songs. David’s 
. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Mr. Baerwald by me.
, and has produced translations of Plato’s Timaeus and Statesman for Focus Philosophical Library. He is also author of two texts that have been used in the St. John’s music program, On the Measurement of Tones and Elements: A Workbook for Freshman Music.
(Counterpoint), but we talked about a lot more in our hour! Listen in to learn how she and her husband began recording literary readings by authors like James Baldwin, Philip Roth, John Updike, William Styron in the ’60s, and how they’ve 
, was nominated for a National Book Award and the PEN/Hemingway First Novel Award. Her other novels include 
; 
; 
; and 
, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She and her husband Harry have launched 
. The intro and outro were recorded on 
(Atlantic Monthly Press), joins the Virtual Memories Show to show to talk about the many notions of “home” for black people. Along the way, we talk about the many notions of what constitutes a black person. As Ms. Raboteau discovered in the travels chronicled in her book — encompassing Israel, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana and America’s deep south — there are a lot of ideas about who’s black and what blackness means.
(Henry Holt, Picador), and a work of creative nonfiction, 
, the blurring of fact and fiction, the differences between songwriting and prose-writing (and album vs. book launches), the transformation of the music industry, her favorite authors and the books that sustained her through her first novel, and more! It’s a great conversation with one of my favorite musical artists. (5/28/13) 
, 
, 
, and 
. He is also a composer and jazz clarinetist, and he has nine CDs out under his own name, including 
, named one of the top ten CDs by Jazziz Magazine in 1995. He lives in the Hudson Valley, New York.
and 
. It’s a really fun talk about the blurring of fact and fiction, the differences between songwriting and prose-writing (and album vs. book launches), how the music industry changed over the course of her career, her favorite authors and the books that sustained her through her first novel, why she made this life-jump from music to books, and more!
Lori Carson
, 
, 
, 
and 
. A former member of the seminal band 
, Kathryn Bigelow’s 
, Keith Gordon’s 
, and others. 
, feeding into a 
into Audacity. All editing and processing was done in Garage Band. Photo by Lauren Cook (thanks, Lauren!). There are a few more pix of us up at the