“Like quilting, archiving employs the obsessive stitching together of many small found pieces into a larger vision, a personal attempt at ordering a chaotic world. It’s not such a far leap from the quiltmaker to the stamp collector or book collector.”
-Kenneth Goldsmith from his essay Archiving is the New Folk Art. Read the entire piece at poetryfoundation.org
#KeeperoftheDay – Janis Joplin, who worked at her local library when she was a teen.
In this clipping from the Port Arthur News, she stands in front of a poster on display at the Gates Memorial Library, one of several she designed for the library. (As the paper notes, she was “named one of the top artists in the ninth grade.”)
On working in the library she says, “It gives me a chance to practice art and at the same time to do something worthwhile for the community.”
Daniel Lofredo Rota wrote to tell us about a project he is undertaking to revive his grandfather’s Ecuadorian music record label from the 1950s…
Hello Kitchen Sisters,
I am very pleased to have heard of your podcast. as a keeper myself, i feel that maintaining archives is extremely important work, and I am quite happy to have found a place where i can find others.
4 years ago when my grandfather passed away, i found 200 reel to reel tapes hidden under a hoarder’s stash of 3600 Kg of newspaper. The reel to reel tapes turned out to be the pristinely kept catalog of a record label my grandfather had started in the 1950s. The label had specialized in an extremely special point of Ecuadorian Music history; a sort of golden era, where brilliant players had been recorded in the most high fidelity media.
This find threw me on a course of deep exploration of the Ecuadorian musical landscape, the nature of memory in the times of the internet, and brought me into a deeply rich underground scene of keepers, who passionately keep and reconstruct the stories of our past using only the available clues.
I am now working part time as an archivist and will be launching my very own record label dedicated to the repressing (on vinyl) of some of the most influential and powerful records that i have come across.
all the best,
Daniel Lofredo Rota
Listen to some of the musical gems that Daniel uncovered below. And learn more on his blog.
Listener RJ Ramey called The Keepers Hotline to tell us about Monroe Work (1866-1945), who was hired by Book Washington as Director of Research and Records at Tuskegee Institute and worked to document every known lynching in the United States. Ramey created a website, monroeworktoday.org, to share Work’s story.
Do you have someone in mind for Keeper of the Day? Call The Keeper Hotline: 415-496-9049.
#KeeperoftheDay #KeeperoftheCheeks – Free The Cheeks: Twerk Church.
On KALW’s Crosscurrents, Alyia Renee Yates takes us to Twerk Church.
“Twerking and empowerment, they kind of go hand in hand.”
Listen here.
“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.” -T.S. Eliot
#KeeperoftheDay – Le Musée de f.p.c.
“We just started collecting slowly, not intentionally and we wake up 30 years later and we have this beautiful collection…”
Listen to Beverly McKenna, who co-founded McKenna Museums with her husband Dr. Dwight McKenna, talk about Le Musée de f.p.c., the historic house museum honoring the legacy of New Orleans’ free people of color.
#KeeperoftheDay – Wim Wenders: The Entire Caboodle.
Just in time for the Academy Awards. On the latest episode of The Kitchen Sisters Present… filmmaker Wim Wenders talks about his early influences — the Cinémathèque Française, Henri Langlois, Lotte Eisner — and tells stories of Werner Herzog, the films that have impacted his work and how he built his archive.
Dear Friends,
The Kitchen Sisters and Heritage Radio Network are teaming up to present our Interviewing, Recording & Podcasting Workshop in NY {Bushwick} Monday night, March 4 at HRN HQ! A few seats are still available and we’d love to see you there. You don’t have to be doing food stories, all kinds of stories will be brainstormed around the table. Though let’s admit it, food is in the air that night, including delicious snacks and drinks.
***We’re coming to town to be part of On Air Fest along with Jad Abumrad, Roxanne Gay, Nick Quah and more at the Wythe Hotel on Friday night, March 1 with Radiotopia and Saturday, March 2 at 5:30, for an hour of The Kitchen Sisters Live with Prince’s recording engineer Susan Rogers, lap steel guitar wizard Cindy Cashdollar and podcast surprises***
The two-hour Workshop session is designed for those who want to acquire and hone their skills for podcasts, radio and documentaries.
The Workshop covers how to prepare & conduct interviews for produced radio segments, finding your voice as a host, interviewing and miking techniques, how to make interviewees comfortable, how to frame evocative questions that make for compelling storytelling, sound gathering, archival audio, field recording, equipment, how to build a story and how to listen (which is harder than it looks).
Lots of talk about getting your podcast going and giving it a real sound.
The Workshop is customized to fit the projects you are working on. People who have attended in the past have come from radio, film, multimedia, detective agencies, newspapers, journalism, photography, oral history, historical societies, farms, music, ophthalmology, writing, libraries, archives, beer brewing, web design, restaurants, health care organizations, film, cheese-making and beyond.
When: Monday night, March 4 – 5:30 – 7:30
Where: Heritage Radio Network HQ at 100 Bogart in Bushwick.
Cost: $100.00
Tickets available through Eventbrite
Expand your skills, buff your podcast, meet new people.
See you there,
The Kitchen Sisters & Heritage Radio Network
#KeeperoftheDay – Karl Lagerfeld, 1933-2019
RIP Karl Lagerfeld. This legendary clothing designer was also an extraordinary keeper. As the New York Times wrote for his obituary:
“He also started collecting: furniture, books, magazines — even apartments. He would delve deep into decades and their aesthetic movements, from Art Deco to Memphis, the Bauhaus to the space age, and then discard them, auctioning off his carefully curated acquisitions without nostalgia or emotion. (It was a characteristic of his personal relationships too, according to those who knew him.)”