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FunkZone Podcast

FunkZone Podcast

Interviews with Artists and Creatives straight from Santa Barbara's FunkZone and Beyond!

Episode #052: Mitchell Kriegman

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Mitchell_Kriegman_headshot_medium

Creator of Clarissa Explains it All, writer, director, and producer.

It was Mitchell who reached out to me a few months ago, reminding me that in 2013 he had reviewed an art show I had curated at the Arts Fund of Santa Barbara. He had a book he had published and it was then I realized this was the man who ruled many a ’90s teens’ life with the show he created, Clarissa Explains It All on Nickelodeon.

Continue Reading …

Episode #028: Sojourner Kincaid Rolle

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Sojourner Kincaid Rolle

Santa Barbara’s Poet Laureate

Just over a decade ago, the Santa Barbara Arts Commission decided to create its own Poet Laureate position, where one of our city’s many poets gets to serve for two years, being called on to create poems for official city functions. Past laureates have included Barry Spacks, Perie Longo, David Starkey, Paul Willis and Chryss Yost. Although she helped create the position, initially Sojourner Kincaid Rolle had no desire to accept the title, but this year, the thirty year citizen of SB decided, what the hey.

This being National Poetry Month, I reached out to Sojourner and asked her to be on the podcast. We found a quiet room at the library and sat down for a freewheeling chat, about her life, her influences, and her work. Oh, and we get her to read four of her poems, including her epic “Black Street.” This is a chat full of references, and I’ve tried to link to as many as possible below.

Topics Discussed include:
What happens in Santa Barbara when you become a Poet Laureate
Working with youth in Santa Barbara
How rap has helped poetry
Tupak Shakur’s The Rose that Grew from Concrete
A theory of creeks and young people
TalentOnly
Her job at the New York Public Library and getting involved in the Civil Rights Movement
Where she was when MLK was assassinated and the play that came out of it
Where she learned poetry and what it took to get her to write her first mature poem
Nikki Giovanni
Her activist lineage
Her problems with Allen Ginsberg and her answer to Howl: “Black Street”
Her influences
William Stafford, her mentor
Quincy Troupe
Langston Hughes “A Negro Speaks of Rivers”
Her routines and how she writes

You can find some of her books here
And her Facebook is here
If you can’t see the embedded podcast above, here are other ways to listen:

Listen to it on iTunes
Download this episode here

You can also follow me on Twitter
Or read my arts writing at http://www.tedmills.com
Or check out my art here (warning NSFW): http://tedmillsart.tumblr.com/

Subscribe to our show on iTunes. Please take a moment to like us on iTunes and rate us!!!

Or for non-iTunes people out there, subscribe to our RSS Feed

Lastly, our theme tune is brought to you by Raw Vegan.

Episode #020: Bruce Wagner

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bruce wagner
Novelist and screenwriter of David Cronenberg’s new film Maps to the Stars

(Photo by Ricardo DeAratanha from the LA Times)

Howdy folks, our last interview from our time at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival was with screenwriter Bruce Wagner, who was up in SB to talk after a screening of “Maps to the Stars,” the new David Cronenberg film.

Icy and disturbing (but also with a hilarious audacity), the film stars John Cusack, Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, and Robert Pattison in a story of troubled and famous families in Hollywood. And it all comes from a script Mr. Wagner wrote many years ago.

Bruce Wagner has written novels, directed films, and was responsible for the ABC series “Wild Palms,” but as you’ll hear, he calls this film the apotheosis of everything he’s done. The film comes out February 27, so ya better go check it. Here’s a trailer:

Topics discussed include:
Maps to the Stars festival path
Bruce’s relationship with David Cronenberg
How the movie is not a satire on Hollywood
Fire and water as symbols in the film
“My books are all about extremes.”
Looking for love in all the wrong places
Buddhism and the problem of fame
Amending Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes” quote
ISIS, pride and terrorism
How Cronenberg is a “writer’s dream”
What Cronenberg added to the script and the amazing casting
The history of the Paul Eluard poem used in the film
How writers can’t escape certain ideas through their career

The film has an unofficial website. (I could not find an official one.)

If you can’t see the embedded podcast above, here are other ways to listen:

Listen to it on iTunes
Download this episode here

You can also follow me on Twitter
Or read my arts writing at http://www.tedmills.com
Or check out my art here (warning NSFW): http://tedmillsart.tumblr.com/

Subscribe to our show on iTunes. Please take a moment to like us on iTunes and rate us!!!

Or for non-iTunes people out there, subscribe to our RSS Feed

Lastly, our theme tune is brought to you by Raw Vegan.

Today’s podcast is brought to you by Restaurant Roy at 7 W. Carrillo St. in Santa Barbara. One of the few places where you can find fine and eclectic dining and cocktails until midnight every day! Tell Roy I sent ya!!