Read by Alex Randall
“I’m excited to share the recording of last night Literary Café event at the Centre for Modern Aging Princeton. In this session, you’ll find me reading ‘A New Year’s Tale’ by Vladimir Dudintsev. Dive into the enchanting world of storytelling and let the narrative take you on a journey. Here is a link to the audio file: https://fb.watch/pMbROkJ0K
#CenterForModernAgingPrinceton #LiteraryCafe #VladimirDudintsev #StorytellingMagic
See it in full on YouTube with sound
A movie from my High School era. It is 1967. I am struggling with alienation, individualism and conformity. Ruth and I spend a lot of phone time talking about how we don’t feel like we fit in. So we made a movie. The media teacher, Dusty Stiles, does the camera work. Ruth runs around our school where everyone is a conformist. I have no idea how we talked so many people into wearing bags. The story is so poignant and reminds me of the struggles of LGBTQ people and anyone who struggles with who we are. Are we our own people or just puppets dancing to the crowds tune. “Let me be to think like I want to…” The songs by the Turtles were hits in 1965. The words ring now too.
Opening the Doors – A Witness to Madness- Download
This is a radio documentary on the experience of being insane, with text drawn from the autobiographies of schizophrenics. The music showcases the hallucinations and delusions of madness as the speakers describe the world of insanity – from the inside out. This was Alex Randall’s undergraduate thesis at Princeton University in 1973.
Who invented the first computer? No question that chief engineer Presper Eckert was the “sparkplug” of the ENIAC project. This is a 5 hour conversation with Eckert about his childhood inventions, his early work with counting circuits and the steps that led to the development of ENIAC. It was the first all electronic computing machine. (1991)
Listen to what he has to say about who took what ideas from whom.
Kenneth Boulding was a Quaker Economist and general Systems Theorist. For me this was a trifecta. Three reasons to go to his home and talk. This is a recording of our discussion about the Economics of peace and Love.
Alex Randall reading the Book of Q – download
This is for people who don’t like church religion but are interested in what Jesus said. Remove all the arguments about how he arrived and how he left, and take away all the things people said about him, and the stories about miracles, remove the Greek myhts that got woven into Christianity and what’s left is JUST what Jesus SAID. Just the words. It is wonderfully refreshing. Like meeting a very wise man. Listen to what he said.
Aldous Huxley – Reading Stories and Poems – download
Aldous is reading from his poems and stories from Folio Two – recorded in 1949
Ages ago I bought an LP of electronic music by Henk Badings and Dick Raaijamakers. It was weird and new and I liked it. This is before synthesizers and modern gagets – froma time when the musician to build his own electronic contraptions. I played that LP a lot, back then. This week, I was pawing through my old LP’s and found a copy of the album which had never been opened. Ages ago I must have bought a second copy and left the plastic on the outside – waiting for a day when the original was worn out and I could open the new one.
I opened it today, removing the sealed plastic bag and revealing a LP disk that was more than 50 years old and yet brand new. I immediately played it – once – into my computer and digitized the whole thing. It is still weird and interesting.
Alex Randall on Voice of America – from Russia and Ukraine – download
This is a live report – from Moscow. Alex had just been to visit ANI – the Agency for News and Information – a tiny news enterprise, the first free media business in the new Commonwealth of Independent States. The Soviet Union had ended and the giant TASS news agency was still delivering the “official” news to millions of people in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the nations that were part of the Soviet Empire. ANI was tiny – a handful of people, operating with dial-up 300 baud modems, cassette recorders and they were facing down TASS – armed only with news and information that did not have the government’s official imprint. ANI was the first breath of freedom of information in the former Soviet Union. “This is Alex Randall reporting on the freedom technologies on the Voice of America.”
Buckminster Fuller – Talk over Lunch – November 20 -1975 – Download
Margaret Mead answered my question about creativity by saying, “You need to talk to Bucky.”
“But I don’t know him…” I responded.
“Just call him and tell him you want to have lunch. Ask his secretary to send ‘one-of-everything’ in his reprint room, read it all, and read all of his books before you go… Just tell him I said so.”
This was how Margaret organized my education… Call up a wizard, ask for an appointment, then read all their stuff, then have lunch, or stay for a week or camp out at their office. This recording is my conversation lunch with Bucky – November 20, 1975.
“How do you feel when you find out that someone else is developing one of your ideas?”
“Intense relief!” he answered.
Edmund Carpenter – Beyond Translatability ZBS Media – Download
Edmund Carpenter talks to ZBS Media about ideas in culture that are beyond translatability.
Albert Hofmann talking about LSD – Download
Alex Randall traveled with Nina Randall and Pam Wesson to interview Albert Hofmann at his home outside Basle Switzerland in 1973.
Timothy Leary at the Boston Computer Society – October 22 1986
No, he is not talking about drugs. Timothy Leary was also a computer maven and this is a lecture about the social impacts of computers… Before the Internet was popular. The Monastary as the mainframe of the Middle Ages and the democratization of technology. Delivered to the Boston Computer Society October 22, 1986
Margaret Mead – The World of Sleep and Alex Randall talking about Dreams – Download
She had opinions on almost everything and she had done research, studied and thought about it all too. This is Margaret Mead talking about sleep and how cultures around the world deal with the universal experience – we all sleep every night.
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