On Demand
WNYC's Coverage of the Democratic National Convention
Live performances in Soundcheck's studios
Studio 360: How Animals Communicate with Each Other
Selected Shorts featuring "The Trouble of Marcie Flint," by John Cheever
Radio Rookies: Brooklyn Broadcast Workshop
On the Media: Challenging Convention
Street Shots Challenge
Survival Kit Archive
January 2003
Laurie Anderson
Sunday, January 26, 2003
Laurie Anderson claims to have hitchhiked to the North Pole, and lived to tell about it. She’s a keen observer of the human condition and has a knack for turning her experiences into riveting multi-media performances, combining visual arts, music, storytelling, film, video, and electronic media into an artform uniquely her own. I suspect that this retreat might become fodder for her next work; let’s find out what she’s put into her survival kit for the journey.
Julia Stiles
Sunday, January 19, 2003
Julia Stiles has probably not spent very much time alone in her life. She grew up in a Soho loft with not only her parents, brother and sister, but also her parents' busy pottery business. At the age of 11, she joined the LaMama experimental theater troupe. Recently a dorm at Columbia University has been her home, at least when she's not on a movie set, starring in films like Save the Last Dance, Hamlet, O, 10 Things I Hate About You, The Business of Strangers, State and Main and The Bourne Identity. Her idea of a retreat has been to go to Costa Rica with Habitat for Humanity to build houses for people there. Let's see what she's put in her Survival Kit for a period of enforced isolation.
Dr. Oliver Sacks
Sunday, January 12, 2003
Dr. Oliver Sacks has travelled to remote islands to study the unusual neurological conditions that can be found in isolated populations, and he has said that the patients he sees in his practice seem like travellers to unimaginable lands. In books like Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and An Anthropologist on Mars, he has provided us with glimpses into the outer boundaries of human experience. Now I’ve asked him to imagine a trip to an uninhabited island, or a remote cabin in the woods, and the 8 items he would not want to be without.
Elmore Leonard
Sunday, January 05, 2003
Elmore Leonard has written over 3 dozen crime novels (Glitz, Get Shorty, Cuba Libre, Out of Sight, Pagan Babies and Tishomingo Blues to name just a few) which examine, in meticulous detail, the seamy underside of American cities like Los Angeles, Miami and Detroit. They’re peopled with offbeat characters: cops, millionaires, stuntmen, cowboys, loan sharks, drug dealers, pimps and hookers. It makes me wonder what kind of underworld he’ll discover in the wilds of Montana, or on a desert island. Let’s see what he’s packed in his survival kit to protect him from the treacherous wildlife he’ll undoubtedly encounter there.