July 10, 2022
Dave King
Writer Dave King begins our show with four different versions of the indelible Disney classic “Some Day My Prince Will Come.” We talk about the path from childhood to becoming an artist, how the idea of the “cover” relates to King’s youthful fear of being derivative, and how artists have conversations with each other through shared texts of all kinds. One text we discuss at length is Frank O’Hara’s poem “Autobiographia Literaria,” which forms the structure for a writing exercise Dave often uses in his classes, and which somehow manages to be sentimental without being mawkish. We get to hear a few examples of his students’ (variously moving and hilarious) efforts, which King shares with avuncular charm and pride.
Dave’s warmth, sense of humor, and stories of being a nude model are the perfect complement to his song selection. Mind your apples and keep on dreaming.
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Complete playlist below; tracks in yellow were cut for time.
- Some Day My Prince Will Come, Adriana Caselotti
- Some Day My Prince Will Come, Etta Jones
- Some Day My Prince Will Come, Herbie Hancock
- Some Day My Prince Will Come, Miles Davus with John Coltrane, Hank Mobley, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb
- I’ll Be Seeing You, Sarah Vaughn
- You Are The Sunshine of My Lifem Dorothy Donegan
- A Ticket to Ride; Cathy Barberian--John Lennon & Paul McCarthy
- Everybody Wants to Rule the World, The Bad Plus
- The Message, Andy Pratt
- It Ain’t Necessarily So, Bronski Beat
- Frank Mills, The Lemonheads
- A Modo Mio, Patty Pravo
- Songs to Aging Children Come, Carol Lipnik & Rachelle Garniez
- She’s a Rainbow, The Ordinaires
- Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Ludwig von Beethoven
Dave King is a former painter who studied with Jim Dine and Robert Breer, among others. Of his debut novel, the New York Times Book Review wrote, “The Ha-Ha is full of emotional truth and establishes King as a writer of consequence.” The Ha-Ha was a national bestseller and was named one of the best books of 2005 by the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Amazon.com, and a film version is in development with Tod Williams slated to direct. In addition, The Ha-Ha earned the 2006-07 John Guare Writers Fund Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Dave’s poems, stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Village Voice and Conjunctions and in the Italian literary journal Nuovi Argomenti, among other venues; the story “The Stamp Collector,” which appeared first in Fence, was included in the 2018 edition of The O. Henry Prize Stories. He teaches at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and has served on juries for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Lexi Rudnitzky Prize, the Ferro-Grumley Prize and other awards. A new novel, The Beast and Beauty, is in the bag, as is a memoir, Bad Dog. Dave’s current project is a pair of novellas tentatively titled Childhood / Maturity. He lives in Brooklyn and Columbia County, NY with his husband, the painter Franklin Tartaglione.
http://www.davekingwriter.com
https://cargocollective.com/franklintartaglione