July 7, 2009
An Interview with Barney Hoskyns author of Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits.

With his trademark growl, carnival-madman persona, haunting music, and unforgettable lyrics, Tom Waits is one of the most revered and critically acclaimed singer-songwriters alive today. After beginning his career on the margins of the 1970s Los Angeles rock scene, Waits has spent the last thirty years carving out a place for himself among such greats as Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Like them, he is a chameleonic survivor who has achieved long-term success while retaining cult credibility and outsider mystique. But although his songs can seem deeply personal and somewhat autobiographical, fans still know very little about the man himself. Notoriously private, Waits has consistently and deliberately blurred the line between fact and fiction, public and private personas, until it has become impossible to delineate between truth and self-fabricated legend.

Lowside of the Road is the first serious biography to cut through the myths and make sense of the life and career of this beloved icon. Barney Hoskyns has gained unprecedented access to Waits’s inner circle and also draws on interviews he has done with Waits over the years. Spanning his extraordinary forty-year career from Closing Time to Orphans, from his perilous “jazzbo” years in 1970s LA to such shape-shifting albums as Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs to the Grammy Award winners of recent years, this definitive biography charts Waits’s life and art step by step, album by album.

Barney Hoskyns (born 1959) is a British music critic and editor of the online music journalism archive Rock's Backpages.

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July 14, 2009
An interview with Steve Early the author of Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home.

Collected for the first time, the essays that comprise Embedded With Organized Labor present a unique and informed perspective on the class war at home from a longtime organizer and “participatory labor journalist.” Steve Early tackles the most pressing issues facing unions today and describes how workers have organized successfully, on the job and in the community, in the face of employer opposition now and in the past.

This wide–ranging collection deals with the dilemmas of union radicalism, the obstacles to institutional change within organized labor, and strategies for securing workers’ rights in the new global economy. It also addresses questions hotly debated among union activists and friends of labor, including workers’ rights as human rights, new forms of worker organization such as worker centers, union democracy, cross–border solidarity, race, gender, and ethnic divisions in the working class, and the lessons of labor history.

Steve Early is a labor journalist and lawyer based in Boston.

July 21, 2009
An interview with Ellen Ruppel Shell the author of Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.

From the shuttered factories of the rust belt to the look-alike strip malls of the sun belt — and almost everywhere in between — America has been transformed by its relentless fixation on low price. This pervasive yet little examined obsession is arguably the most powerful and devastating market force of our time—the engine of globalization, outsourcing, planned obsolescence, and economic instability in an increasingly unsettled world.

Low price is so alluring that we may have forgotten how thoroughly we once distrusted it. Ellen Ruppel Shell traces the birth of the bargain as we know it from the Industrial Revolution to the assembly line and beyond, homing in on a number of colorful characters, such as Gene Verkauf (his name is Yiddish for “to sell”), founder of E. J. Korvette, the discount chain that helped wean customers off traditional notions of value. The rise of the chain store in post–Depression America led to the extolling of convenience over quality, and big-box retailers completed the reeducation of the American consumer by making them prize low price in the way they once prized durability and craftsmanship.

Ellen Ruppel Shell is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly magazine and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Time, Discover, Seed, and dozens of other national publications. She is the author, most recently, of The Hungry Gene, which was published in six languages. She is a professor of journalism at Boston University, where she codirects the graduate program in science journalism.

 

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KUCI is a free-form alternative
non-profit radio station owned and operated by the University of California, and broadcasting at 88.9 FM from a 200-watt transmitter at the campus of UC Irvine in Orange County, California. KUCI broadcasts into the heart of Orange County reaching a population of nearly 500,000. With more than 25,000 students, 1,800 faculty and 8,600 staff, UCI is Orange County’s second largest employer and generates an annual economic impact of $3.7 billion.

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For more program information, a history of the station, a photo gallery and much more visit KUCI.org. More information regarding public affairs guests and topics can be found at KUCItalk.org.