Douglas A. Martin
February 19, 2023

1. Bedtime Story, Tammy Wynette, 1971
2. Pony Ride, Olivia Newton-John, 1976
3. Cha Cha Cha, MC Lyte, 1989
4. Shoot, Sonic Youth, 1992
5. Fire and Ice, Pat Benetar, 1981
6. Here in My Head: Live from Colston Hall, Bristol, UK, 3/7/1994; Tori Amos, 1994
7. Manic Monday, Prince, 1984
8. Super Hero Vibe, Anni Rossi, 2020
9. Cicada, Ajax Caravan, 2018
10. The Showstopper, Salt-N-Pepa, 1985
11. Red, Belly, 1995
12. My Side of the Bed, Susanna Hoffs, 1991
13. Star Me Kitten, R. E. M., 1992
14. Wolf, Veruca Salt, 1994
15. Little Digger, Liz Phair, 2003
16. Community of Hope, PJ Harvey, 2016
17. Mr. Bojangles, Nina Simone, 1971
18. Can You Feel the Beat? Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, 1985
19. The Voice of Love, Julee Cruse, 1993

“How can you continue to live if you look directly at what is happening to you?”

Poet, novelist, and short story writer Douglas A. Martin joins the show with a selection of songs by artists who have been formative to him and his work, even if some of them are slightly embarrassing. We learn about his early dance routines, entering the Sonic Youth music video contest, and his many, many attempts to become a member of MTV’s The Real World. Martin's early life has provided fertile source material for his work, and we consider how complicated it is to talk openly and honestly about childhood experiences.

Martin describes the development of his unusual, impressionistic prose style and “the new ennui” he was trying to embody as a young queer writer in a turn-of-the-century college town. He shares a poem and an excerpt from his novel Outline of My Lover, and we discuss his novels, Branwell and Wolf. The former is about the doomed brother of the legendary Brontë sisters, and the latter is about two abused brothers who murdered their father in Florida a few weeks after 9/11.

He also introduces the astonishing 1973 collection of Tammy Wynette songs called Kids Say the Darndest Things, which features such crowd pleasers as "I Wish I Had a Mommy Like You", "Don’t Make Me Go to School", and one we can all relate too, "Buy Me a Daddy."

Douglas A. Martin is the author of books of poetry and prose, including: Once You Go Back, Your Body Figured, In The Time of Assignments, Branwell, and They Change the Subject. Martin’s first novel, Outline of My Lover, was selected by Colm Tóibín as an International Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement and adapted in part by the Forsythe Company for their multimedia ballet/live film, Kammer/Kammer. Martin lives in Brooklyn and Callicoon, New York.

Emily Mae Smith
February 5, 2023



Pictured above: Poetry (Toy in Blood), 2022, oil on linen, 67 x 51 inches & Painters Quarry, 2022,  oil on linen, 90 x 67 inches both courtesy the artist and Petzel gallery; photo credit: Charles Benton. Portrait photo credit: Steve Benisty; nature portrait credit: Nate Heiges.

1. Summer Breeze - Type O Negative
2. Lay Lady Lay - Ministry
3. Worlock - Skinny Puppy
4. Israel - Siouxsie & The Banshees
5. Lucretia My Reflection - The Sisters of Mercy
6. Cuts You Up - Peter Murphy
7. A Forest - The Cure
8. Until Death (Us Do Part) - Front 242
9. Hot on the Heels of Love - Throbbing Gristle
10. Head Like a Hole - Nine Inch Nails
11. Warm Leatherette - The Normal
12. Collapsing New People - Fad Gadget
13. Sensoria - Cabaret Voltaire
14. He's a Liquid - John Foxx
15. Paranoid - Black Sabbath
16. Sistinas - Danzig
17. We Believe - Ministry

One of my oldest friends, painter Emily Mae Smith GOES HARD on this episode of the Selection Committee Radio Show. Bringing in a mixtape of goth and industrial songs that she listens to in the studio when on a deadline, Smith gets us in the mood for productive violence, talking about her predilection for groups with dangerous performances and connections to avant-garde art movements.
Like a good goth song, Emily’s meticulously rendered paintings reference both high art and cheap culture to create shimmering tableaux of ludic nihilism. Reflecting on her work’s references to art history, Smith talks about the way the female figure is used as a formal cipher for male artists, the rage and alienation this engenders, and how she’s using her work to paint her own place in history.
We discuss the ethical implications of taking on violent and/or charged subject matter in art and the return of the Satanic panic. We also talk about the importance of community in the development of ourselves and our work—and reminisce about our shared youth at the turn of the century in central Texas!
You can see her exhibition "Heretic Lace" and our panel discussion about her new monograph here.
The monograph is focused on the last decade of her work is now available wherever you like to buy books or from the Petzel bookstore.
Follow Emily Mae Smith on instagram!
Emily's limited edition cover for Nine Inch Nails for Interscope is here.

January 22
Peter Duchan

“Advancing art is easy…Financing it is not!”—from “Putting It Together”

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1. Putting It Together, Barbra Streisand, 1985
2. Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Eurythmics, 1983
3. Love Revolution, I Love My Wife Cast Album, 1977
4. Make Someone Happy, Jimmy Durante, 1964
5. I Don’t Want to Be Alone, Billy Joel, 1980
6. If I Ever Lose My Faith in You, Sting, 1993
7. And You Would Lie/I Will Give—from Marie Christine Original Cast Album, Andrea Frierson-Toney, Jennifer Leigh Warren, Mary Bond Davis, Audra McDonald, 1999
8. Wherever He Ain’t—from Mack & Mabel Original Cast Album, Jerry Herman & Bernadette Peters, 1974
9. Nobodys Side—from Chess Original Cast Album, 1984
   
10. When I Was A Freeport And You Were the Main Drag, Laura Nyro, 1970
    
11. Dedicated To The One I Love, The Mamas & The Papas, 1967
12. Care Of Cell 44, The Zombies, 1967
    
13. My Way, Nina Simone, 1971
    
14. Katie Cruel, Karen Dalton, 1971
    
15. Oh, Pierre! Breedlove, 2017
    
16. Loving You Sometimes, The Outcasts, 1968
17. (Theme From) Valley of the Dolls, Dionne Warwick, 1967
18. Love Me - Two Gentlemen Of Verona, Galt MacDermot, John Guare, Mel Shapiro, 1971
    
19. Lo Dudo, Los Panchos, 1954
    
20. Don't Bring Me Down, PREP, 2018
21. Two for the Road, Henry Mancini, 1967

From the very start, playwright and screenwriter Peter Duchan throws down a gauntlet: “In case you were feeling like this show was getting ‘too cool,’ I came here to change everything!” Barbra Streisand’s “Putting It Together,” from The Broadway Album, really sets the tone as Peter takes us on a driving tour of a lifetime in musical theater. We begin with childhood trips in the family minivan listening to his mother’s favorites (Streisand, various and sundry ’70s-era sex comedies, the Sleepless in Seattle soundtrack) but soon segue into his period of teenage rebellion, when his insistence on Michael John LaChiusa and Adam Guettel musicals resulted in a full revocation of tape-playing privileges in the car. As Peter grows up, his love and dedication to the musical as a form only deepens, in large part because of his attraction to music that is rooted in storytelling and drama.      In discussing his award-winning musical Dogfight, for which he wrote the book, Duchan talks in depth about his process, how he came to adapt the 1991 film for the stage, and his collaboration with songwriters and lyricists Justin Paul and Benj Pasek. We discuss adaptation and interpretation and what it’s like to watch and listen to your show as it’s performed in languages you don’t understand.      But this episode isn’t just a deep discussion of process and some delightful samples from lesser-known musicals. It also courts controversy: Best rock-and-roll album of all time? Odyssey and Oracle by the Zombies. Most authentic folk singer? Karen Dalton over Bob Dylan. Britney Spears’ vocal fry coach? Child voice actor Peter Duchan. “I gotta give my life some sparkle and fizz…!”—from “Wherever He Ain’t”      Peter Duchan wrote the book of the musical Dogfight, which premiered at Second Stage (director, Joe Mantello). Dogfight won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical and was nominated for five Outer Critics Circle Awards, including Off-Broadway Musical and Book of a Musical. The subsequent London production was nominated for two Evening Standard Awards, including Best Musical. Dogfight has since been performed in Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, Amsterdam, and all over the world. Other theater credits include writing books for the musicals The Illusionist (Nissay Theatre, Tokyo) and Stu for Silverton (Intiman, Seattle), as well as co-creating (with Warren Carlyle) the revue Carefree: Dancing with Fred and Ginger. He served as Script Consultant for the long-running Broadway musical Waitress and the Broadway bound musical Lempicka. Film credits include co-writing the screenplays for the feature Breaking Upwards (IFC Films) and the short Unlocked (Tribeca Film Festival). Honors: Richard Rodgers Award (for Dogfight), Robert Chesley Playwriting Award (for his play Lavender Scare), Dramatists Guild Fellowship. Graduate, Northwestern University.

January 8, 2023
Robert Buck


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1. Little Room, The White Stripes, 2001
2. Strange, Galaxie 500, 1989
3. One More Cup of Coffee, Bob Dylan, 1976
4. Hurt, Johnny Cash, 2002
5. Afraid of Everyone, The National, 2010
6. The Rip Tide, Beirut, 2011
7. Sun, Caribou, 2010
8. Ghost Dance, Patti Smith, 1978
9. Video Games, Lana Del Rey, 2012
10. Holy Roller Novacaine, 2003
11. Counting Stars, OneRepublic, 2014
12. Neon Pattern Drum, Jon Hopkins, 2018
13. 2000 Miles, Pretenders, 1984
14. Song for Zula, Phosphorescent, 2013
15. St Jude, Florence + The Machine, 2015
16. The Beautiful Dream, George Ezra
17. Shallow, Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper, 2018
18. Both Sides Now, Joni Mitchell, 2000

     Cross-disciplinary artist Robert Buck’s Thirteen Shooters series from 2001 was a meditation on media coverage of young school shooters when they first began to appear in the 1990s. His video work, too, explores the relationships between image-making, violence, desire, and indentity formation. Much of Buck’s conceptual framework is based in psychoanalysis (Buck is the Art Editor of The Lacanian Review), particularly the ideas surrounding the concept of the Name of the Father which is a metonym for the patriarchy, the law, and hierarchically organized society. But as traditional institutions are eroded by changing technology, social mores, and ideals, how do we go about forming an understanding of the world and our place in it? One way is to make a pilgrimage to the desert!
     For Buck songs have always had very strong associations with place, and he wanted to take us on a road trip through the American West, traversing the land from Zion National Park in Utah, to his own small plot near the US-Mexico border in Texas. We discuss Bob Dylan and Pattie Smith, the complicated legacy of settler-colonialism in our conception of the American West, and white wine margaritas. It’s a journey that starts in a stifling suburb of Baltimore in the late 70s and ends with a remarkable epiphany in a white-out blizzard just beyond Truth or Consequences New Mexico.
www.robertbuck.net
www.instagram.com/robertbuckstudio

Morning

To find the Western path
Right thro' the Gates of Wrath
I urge my way;
Sweet Mercy leads me on:
With soft repentant moan 5
I see the break of day.

The war of swords & spears
Melted by dewy tears
Exhales on high;
The Sun is freed from fears 10
And with soft grateful tears
Ascends the sky.

-William Blake

Robert Beck was born in Baltimore and moved to New York City in 1978 to learn filmmaking and cinema studies at New York University. In 1993, he attended the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is a cross-disciplinary artist recognized for his precise use of materials, ranging from traditional art supplies to such non-art materials as mortician’s wax, industrial reflective paint, latent fingerprint powder and gunpowder. Trained as a filmmaker, he works in a montage-like metonymical manner, a ‘horizontal’ approach that allows him to utilize the associative power of adjacent images and artworks. The crux of his art is subjectivity, with violence, sexuation, loss, and America as recurring themes. In 1995, Beck was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists’ Books, as well as an Art Matters, Inc. grant. He received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 1999. In 2007, Beck had a solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH. In 2008, Beck changed his given, or father’s, name as a work of art by a single vowel to Buck. His practice is oriented by a constellation of influences, including artists Marcel Duchamp, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, and Cady Noland, filmmakers Robert Bresson and David Lynch, novelist Cormac McCarthy, forensic science, Buddhism, the teachings of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and the American southwest. In 2009, Buck bought a small off-grid property along the U.S.-Mexico border south of Marfa, Texas, which he refers to as his extimate studio. Since 2018, he has been an art editor of The Lacanian Review. His work is included in museum and private collections internationally. His moving image works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York. He is represented in New York by Ulterior Gallery and Von Ammon Co. in Washington, DC., where he had an exhibition in November, Robert Buck: Wound Filler. In 2019, Buck received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. Buck lives and works in New York City and far West Texas.