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KunstlerCast #202: Live Audience Podcast – Part 1
JHK & Duncan at Union College Humanities Seminar
Released: April 19, 2012
James Howard Kunstler and Duncan Crary record a podcast before a live student audience at Union College, in Schenectady, N.Y. As part of a Humanities Super Seminar on liberal arts and activism, the students read The KunstlerCast book. During the podcast Jim and Duncan riff on college architecture and the Union campus before opening up the discussion to questions from the class. Topics include: the value of a liberal arts education in The Long Emergency, monocultures concentrating poverty in the built environment, the prospects for restoring passenger rail in North America and more. Along the way Jim also delivers a call to millennial students to renounce their student loans.
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KunstlerCast_202.mp3
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“The Heirloom,” by Richard Davies, explores a post peak world where a group of Native Americans comes to terms with a dangerous and chaotic world. Guy McPherson, of Nature Bats Last, says, “Ultimately, The Heirloom is a wide-ranging tale about the human experience. It is about life, love, death, honor, and people struggling to make their way in a world not of their choosing.”
Part one of a trilogy, “The Heirloom” is available through Amazon in both paperback and eBook. The second book in the trilogy will be available late Summer 2012. Visit: http://theheirloom.blogspot.com/
In this rebroadcast of one of our very first podcasts, we revisit JHK’s adventures in landscape paiting. JHK’s paintings are currently hanging in two group exhibitions this sunner. Description: When James Howard Kunstler isn’t railing against suburban sprawl, he’s painting it. Vincent van Gogh painted the peasant sleeping by the haystack because he was living in a landscape populated by people. Our landscape is populated by cars. So, as a sur le motif painter of our time, Jim’s subjects include cars on the road, gas stations and the industrial ruins of America’s manufacturing past. Making this landscape legible on the canvas is a challenge, but it’s also dangerous! An angry manager once told Jim that painting the Burger King is not allowed.
In this enhanced podcast, JHK & Duncan explore North Central Troy, NY with Billie-Jean Greene, a KunstlerCast listener who recently purchased a home in this area. This once wealthy neighborhood on the Hudson River has suffered from urban blight for many years. But a group of neighbors, known as The Uptown Initiative, are committed to helping turn their neighborhood around. Billie-Jean leads this tour and introduces us to some of the neighborhood residents, including a bed & breakfast owner, another homeowner, and some urban chickens named Ruby and June. Also along the route is a Hells Angels clubhouse.
“A Saints Christmas”
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JHK explores a mostly abandoned low-income housing project in Duncan’s neighborhood. Two of the three 9-story brick “vertical slums” are boarded up and abandoned. They come complete with their own “rape-o-matic” tunnel for pedestrians to travel under the bridge ramp that separates them. Kunstler says these “towers in a park” are based on the ideas of Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect/planner whose “Radiant City” plans envisioned turning the right bank of Paris into a series of high rise towers connected by highways. Corbu’s plans were not implemented in Paris, but his ideas didn’t die. In fact they morphed into what are commonly known as “the projects,” low-income high rise towers all around the U.S. and indeed the world. Taking inspiration by the housing projects in Troy, Kunstler explains the history of this style of low-income housing and its detrimental side effects.
Support for the KunstlerCast comes from The Law Office of Paul C. Rapp … Specializing in intellectual property law including copyright, trademark, Internet, art and entertainment matters. Paul Rapp is licensed in New York and Massachusetts. For information visit: 
Released: Jan. 21, 2010.
Planetizen, an urban planning website and book publisher, recently conducted a poll about the 
James Howard Kunstler says one reason why American cities are so dirty is because we do not have a firm agreement about how to treat the public realm in this country. He believes that people will literally trash a place that they don’t like or respect. And a lot of American space is difficult to respect. On a larger scale, many corporations treat the American landscape with a similar disregard. While Kunstler believes that large scale pollution from mega corporations may taper off with the cheap oil supply, he thinks local manufacturing in the future might reintroduce forms of pollution that haven’t been seen in the U.S. for a while.
