Okay, this one might start off a little strange, but we’re getting toward the bottom of the Holding Tanks and it’s getting time to reload ’em. Back half of this one is a trip to the library. You like the library, right? (There’s even one of those artists…) Off we go!
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Solon, who was elected archon or chief magistrate of Athens in 594 BC: some see him as the father of Athenian democracy. In the first years of the 6th century BC, the city state of Athens was in crisis. The lower orders of society were ravaged by debt, to the point where some were being forced into slavery. An oppressive law code mandated the death penalty for everything from murder to petty theft. There was a real danger that the city could fall into either tyranny or civil war. Solon instituted a programme of reforms that transformed Athens’ political and legal systems, its society and economy, so that later generations referred to him as Solon the Lawgiver. With Melissa Lane Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University Hans van Wees Grote Professor of Ancient History at University College London and William Allan Professor of Greek and McConnell Laing Tutorial Fellow in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature at University College, University of Oxford Producer Luke Mulhall
This autumn is getting off to a strange start, as here in the Mojave High Desert there are carpets of little yellow wildflowers thanks to the hurricane, old Hurricane Hilary which soaked us all pretty good a month ago. Never seen so many weeds in late September. Happy Equinox from Desert Oracle Radio, celebrating 200 episodes with tonight’s show. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/desertoracleSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
From the TOO TIRED TO SAY ANYTHING podcast, a superb 30-minute piece of music that I listened to and loved over this morning’s coffee: THE REUNION OF BROKEN PARTS.
If you want to cool off in this brutal desert summer, you need to get up someplace higher, around 7,000 feet — the high-desert plateau around Los Alamos is real nice, at an elevation of 7,320′.
Lots of people have fallen in love with the climate and clean dry air up there, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer & Gore Vidal & William S. Burroughs. Burroughs was supposed to be a War Captain, following orders, but it never quite worked out that way. Instead, he would go to war with Human Language . . . using the weapon of the oppressor.
Not sure this will work, but let’s give it a shot:
For this guest mix I present you, the listener, with an absolutely stellar outing from an ambient DJ that hails from Hungary. Not only that, but the only female ambient DJ in Hungary. How cool is that? Beyond a measurable scale of incredibly cool.
Lepque started out as a radio DJ, but got the bug for digging into ambient via Peter Namlook and Jonn Serrie, and has been fighting for the pure ambient style for over 10 years now. The name ‘Lepque’ is a play on the word ‘Lepke’, which means butterfly in Hungarian. She claims that it comes from the moth symbol. Just as a moth seeks the light, but dies when reaching it, Lepque also prefers to stay in the background, within the cool and soothing darkness.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what we know about ancient stones placed in the landscape and stone monuments, which are often visually striking and can be up to 6,000 years old.
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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss megaliths – huge stones placed in the landscape, often visually striking and highly prominent.
Such stone monuments in Britain and Ireland mostly date from the Neolithic period, and the most ancient are up to 6,000 years old. In recent decades, scientific advances have enabled archaeologists to learn a large amount about megalithic structures and the people who built them, but much about these stones remains unknown and mysterious.
With
Vicki Cummings Professor of Neolithic Archaeology at the University of Central Lancashire
Julian Thomas Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester
and
Susan Greaney Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Exeter.
Catching up on my podcast queue. I’ll always stop for a talk about megaliths.
Kate Molleson explores the life of György Ligeti with guest, Danny Driver
Not entirely sure this will work – BBC tends to resist any kind of embed – but I have to make a start on logging the podcasts I want to remember somewhere, so I’ll start here, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. This one showed up on my feed right after rewatching a chunk of 2001 the previous night, oddly enough. Somewhere, I have the 5CD box set of THE LIGETI PROJECT, which somehow never got logged here.
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