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© Tchula Junction 2018
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Douglas Kennedy and Matthew D'Abate discuss current artistic, cultural, and news-worthy trends in these weekly micro-discussions.
74 Episodes
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This Sunday, Matthew D’Abate and Douglas Kennedy discuss their city of
choice, New York. Kennedy, a Manhattan kid by birth, and D’Abate, a
transplant of over 15 years, critique the gentrification that has
permanently altered the face of NYC.
This week, we’re delving deeper into Kennedy’s next project “Isabelle In
the Afternoon” set for a French and English release in early 2020. Sitting
down with Kennedy in his home in the center of Manhattan, we discuss some
of the more relevant literary themes in this new torrid love story, which I
had the pleasure to read in full just recently. He contemplates how short
life is, and how the worries and concerns of our quotidian existence pale
in comparison to how quickly it can all disappear.
This week, we’re discussing a piece of extraordinary theater Douglas
Kennedy and I had recently viewed, Sam Shepard’s American classic “The
Curse of The Starving Class”. Not only is the “Starving Class” one of
Shepard’s fantastic additions to his ‘family’ trilogy – it was directed
this spring by the brilliant Terry Kinney, and like some artistic kismet,
was performed at the fantastic Signature Theater in Manhattan. I sat down
with Kennedy to discuss this deliriously genius piece of modern theater.
This week we’re discussing our divided times, both culturally and
politically. I decided to approach the issue head on, and ask Kennedy,
always the purveyor of free speech and the pursuit of rational thinking,
just what he thought about certain controversial figures being banned from
social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
From the bird’s eye view in his home in Midtown Manhattan, Douglas Kennedy
gives us an inside look on how he creates stories - and how the New York
landscape, and the artists it has created, inspires him.
Douglas Kennedy and Matthew D’Abate discuss Douglas’s newest project,
“Isabelle In The Afternoon”, set for release in English in 2020.
This week we’re discussing that infamous classic film from the post-World
War II period: “Kiss Me Deadly”. Released in the theaters in 1955, and
adapted from the novel released in 1952, both the cinematic piece and its
inspired counterpart represent a time of nuclear paranoia and ‘tough guy’
machismo, sometimes jarring to our modern ears.
I sat down with Douglas Kennedy in one of the most poetic cities in the
history of music, Paris, France, to discuss the current state of classical
music. In a world full of candy pop beats and auto-tuned charlatans, the
aural intoxication of classical music remains the pinnacle of what the
human ear can experience. Douglas Kennedy explains:
Kennedy finds himself paired with France’s preeminent illustrator, Johan
Sfar. I got a chance to sit down with Douglas Kennedy in Paris, France to
discuss his brilliant new release.
Talk about output. Already in the first quarter of the 2019, Douglas
Kennedy has witnessed the release of “The Great Wide Open” in January,
completed his next novel “Isabelle in The Afternoon”, and, just this week,
published his new graphic novel “Aurore’s Amazing Adventures” in which
Kennedy finds himself paired with France’s preeminent illustrator, Joann
Sfar.
No one can argue that most of the western world has befallen to corporate
and monocultural tastes; opting for efficiency over aesthetic, and the
bottom line over creative expansion. There is a general lack of care and
concern that the artist of our cities are being priced out at a rampant
rate. What will these centers of artistic energy do when they only left
with chain stores, mini-malls, and gas stations? Cinemas are closing
rapidly – book stores are nearly extinct. Places of cultural interest are
empty. What’s next for the culture of art in the 21st century?
Everybody knows that the world of the literary novel has been significantly
diminished. Since the advent of the Internet, the colossal power of Amazon,
and the almost daily shuttering of your local independent bookstore,
reading levels are at an all-time low. According to a new study by the
National Endowment of the Arts, the percentage of adults who read books
fell to 52 percent in 2017, compared with 54 percent in 2012 and 56 percent
in 2002. The percentage of adults reading fiction has dropped from 45
percent in 2012 to 41 percent in 2017.
This week we’re discussing the seismic tremors and tectonic shifts coursing
through our culture in the last century – so much so that any knowledgeable
person with any historic interest can hardly catch their breath.
As the great Lenny Bruce once said: “The 'what should be' never did exist,
but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,'
there is only what is.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “There comes a time when one must
take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must
take it because conscience tells him it is right.” We take this Sunday to
discuss the political mind.
This week we’re discussing the ritualistic habits and ornamental traditions
of the literary life. Every writer has a specific pattern to which they
construction their literary tomes, and Douglas Kennedy is no different.
Some hide from the world. Some seek inspiration through travel. Kennedy
found himself immersed in “The Great Wide Open” a novel that to nearly
three years to hit the book shelves. I got a chance to sit down with
Douglas Kennedy in Manhattan to ask him how this novel came to fruition.
Just in the last two months – America has experienced a great shift to the
left. For the last two years, the Republican House and Senate have
entrenched our culture in retrograde policies and astoundingly isolationist
behavior. From the border wall, to the travel ban, to the hostile Grand
Guignol theatrics of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation proceedings, the
country is more divided than ever.
All works of literature possess a river of thematic concern flowing beneath
the written word. Some philosophers have expounded that authors themselves
work to uncover and discover their own well-hidden secrets and foibles
layered deep within the narrative structure of their work.
The writer Alexei Panshin writes: “A book isn't a single, static thing with
one unarguable meaning. Each reader who comes to it brings his own special
knowledge, habits and attitudes. Each reader reads a different book. Each
reader imagines a different story.”
This week, we’re continuing our two-part series titled, aptly, How To Write
Novel. Brave title I know. But I’d put my good money on listening to those
that have crossed that literary line. To try is noble. To do it once is
heroic. To sustain a career – That’s something I’ll turn over to someone
who has published over 21 books during the length of their career. Our
dialogue with Douglas Kennedy continues.
The Pulitzer Prize winning author Eudora Welty wrote this about the craft
of a novel: “The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists,
not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished
work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The
essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is
not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never
was before and will not be again.”
The great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote: “The partition separating life
from death is so tenuous. The unbelievable fragility of our organism
suggests a vision on a screen: a kind of mist condenses itself into a human
shape, lasts a moment and then scatters.”
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