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Martin Bandyke Under Covers for March 2021: Martin interviews Reuben Jonathan Miller, author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration.
Each year, more than half a million Americans are released from prison and join a population of twenty million people who live with a felony record.
Reuben Miller, a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and now a sociologist studying mass incarceration, spent years alongside prisoners, ex-prisoners, their friends, and their families to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work revealed is a simple, if overlooked truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison. The idea that one can serve their debt and return to life as a full-fledge member of society is one of America’s most nefarious myths. Recently released individuals are faced with jobs that are off-limits, apartments that cannot be occupied and votes that cannot be cast.
Halfway Home shows that the American justice system was not created to rehabilitate, and that parole is structured to keep classes of Americans impoverished, unstable, and disenfranchised long after they’ve paid their debt to society.
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Presenting Alfred Hitchcock Presents #30 - Never Again
Presenting Alfred Hitchcock Presents is a podcast dedicated to examining each episode of the original "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" television series, show by show in chronological order. In this installment, Karen wakes up, hungover, in a strange bed. Her memory vague, she tries to piece things together only for reality to be far worse than she ever imagined. A harrowing tale of alcohol and excess with a nasty kick of an ending.
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Martin Bandyke Under Covers for February 2021: Martin interviews Sandra B. Tooze, author of Levon: From Down in the Delta to the Birth of The Band and Beyond.
Levon is a dazzling, epic biography of Levon Helm––the beloved, legendary drummer and singer of The Band. He sang the anthems of a generation: "The Weight," "Up on Cripple Creek," and "Life Is a Carnival." Levon Helm's story––told here through sweeping research and interviews with close friends and fellow musicians––is the rollicking story of American popular music itself.
In the Arkansas Delta, a young Levon witnessed "blues, country, and gospel hit in a head-on collision," as he put it. The result was rock 'n' roll. As a teenager, he joined the raucous Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, then helped merge a hard-driving electric sound with Bob Dylan's folk roots, and revolutionized American rock with the Band. Helm not only provided perfect "in the pocket" rhythm and unforgettable vocals, he was The Band's soul.
Levon traces a rebellious life on the road, from being booed with Bob Dylan to the creative cauldron of Big Pink, the Woodstock Festival, world tours, The Last Waltz, and beyond with the man Dylan called "one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation."
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Presenting Alfred Hitchcock Presents #29 - The Orderly World of Mr. Appleby
Presenting Alfred Hitchcock Presents is a podcast dedicated to examining each episode of the original "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" television series, show by show in chronological order. In this installment, Robert H. Harris, after playing a man committed to preventing murder in #18 "Shopping for Death," plays a man committed to committing murder, all in the name of his "old curios." Meg Mundy thinks she can stop him but doesn't take into account that "The Postman Always Rings Twice."
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Martin Bandyke Under Covers for January 2021: Martin interviews Ken McNab, author of And in the End: The Last Days of The Beatles.
Ken McNab's in-depth look at The Beatles' acrimonious final year is a detailed account of the breakup featuring the perspectives of all four band members and their roles. A must to add to the collection of Beatles fans, And In the End is full of fascinating information available for the first time.
A lifelong Beatles fan and well-respected journalist with Scotland's Evening Times, McNab reconstructs for the first time the seismic events of 1969, when The Beatles reached new highs of creativity and new lows of the internal strife that would destroy them. Between the pressure of being filmed during rehearsals and writing sessions for the documentary Get Back, their company Apple Corps facing bankruptcy, Lennon's heroin use, and musical disagreements, the group was arguing more than ever before and their formerly close friendship began to disintegrate.
In the midst of this rancor, however, emerged the disharmony of Let It Be and the genius of Abbey Road, their incredible farewell love letter to the world.
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Martin Bandyke Under Covers for December 2020: Martin interviews Graydon M. Meints, author of Pere Marquette: A Michigan Railroad System Before 1900.
The Pere Marquette Railroad has not one but two histories—one for the twentieth century and one for the nineteenth. While the twentieth-century record of the Pere Marquette Railroad has been well studied and preserved, the nineteenth century has not been so well served. Pere Marquette: A Michigan Railroad System Before 1900 is the latest book by railroad aficionado Graydon M. Meints which aims to correct that oversight by focusing on the nineteenth-century part of the company’s past, including the men who formed and directed these early roads, and the development of the system.
The Pere Marquette Railroad was formed in 1900 by a merger of three Michigan railroad companies and lasted forty-seven years, disappearing in June 1947 by merger into the maw of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad. Prior to the 1900 merger, the Pere Marquette Railroad’s predecessors made up a motley collection of disconnected and unaffiliated short, local rail lines. After the financial panic of 1893, and with some commonality of ownership, the companies worked together more closely. Before the end of the decade, the three main railroads—the Flint & Pere Marquette; the Detroit, Lansing & Northern; and the Chicago & West Michigan—had decided that the only way to maintain solvency was to merge.
Using a plethora of primary sources including railway timetables and maps, this work lends insight into the little-known corporate business history of the Pere Marquette Railroad.
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Presenting Alfred Hitchcock Presents #28 - Portrait of Jocelyn
Presenting Alfred Hitchcock Presents is a podcast dedicated to examining each episode of the original "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" television series, show by show in chronological order. In this installment, Mark Halliday buys a painting for his wife that somehow is replaced with a portrait of his first wife. The obsession with a woman's portrait recalls Otto Preminger's "Laura" and the new wife's feelings of not measuring up to the first wife bring to mind Hitchcock's own "Rebecca," but the secret of the "Portrait of Jocelyn" is mostly like the Humphrey Bogart film "Conflict." All worth watching and all available at AADL.
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Behind The Marquee: Episode 44 - Mitchell Kezin of ‘Jingle Bell Rocks!’
Nick speaks with Mitchell Kezin, director of the film Jingle Bell Rocks!, about his “obsession” with collecting obscure Christmas records, the digital age of music, modern Christmas music, his projects since releasing the documentary in 2014 and a whole lot more.
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The Gayest Generation Ep. 5 - Carol E. Anderson
Welcome to The Gayest Generation, where we hear LGBTQ Elders speak for themselves. Every episode, we sit down with a different member of the LGBTQ community who laid the foundation for the freedoms we have today. Stories—their stories—make noise where there is silence and that silence has lived for far too long. It is time we let their voices fill the room.
In this episode, we get to know Ann Arbor's own Carol E. Anderson. You will hear about her experiences growing up in a fundamentalist Baptist home, what it was like to live in Ann Arbor during the freewheeling 70's , and how to make your relationship last. Due to adult situations and language, viewer discretion is advised. This is the Gayest Generation.
We want to give a special thank you to Carol for speaking with us. Be sure to check out her memoir, "You Can't Buy Love Like That: Growing Up Gay in the Sixties."
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Presenting Alfred Hitchcock Presents #27 - Help Wanted
Presenting Alfred Hitchcock Presents is a podcast dedicated to examining each episode of the original "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" television series, show by show in chronological order. In this installment, John Qualen makes his final AHP appearance, playing a man so desperate for a job that he accepts a position with an anonymous employer. Surely, nothing good will come of that. Or will it?
