My betrothed, Beto Gonsalves, recently alerted me to a new series of NPR podcasts by the Kitchen Sisters: The Keepers — stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians.
“Keepers of the culture and the cultures and collections they keep. Guardians of history, large and small, protectors of the free flow of information and ideas, eccentric individuals who take it upon themselves to preserve some part of our cultural heritage,” the website says.
Hello! I contacted them and invited them to come to Burning Man Headquarters to view our archives. I spent a couple of hours giving them a tour of the office and sitting with them in the Archive Room, talking about our history and culture. I grabbed Coyote, Black Rock City’s Superintendent, who was at HQ that day; he joined us and talked about how BRC is surveyed and laid out in the desert each year.
The Kitchen Sisters were so intrigued by our stories they contacted Stuart Mangrum, Burning Man Project’s Education Director, to assist them in getting audio clips for their podcast, including quotes from Larry and sounds from the playa. They did quite a bit of research and their final podcast is duly impressive and beautifully put together; I couldn’t be more pleased with it!
The podcast was released on August 21, and it aired on KQED Morning Editon on Labor Day. You can listen to it here.
Because someone erased it from the archive memory… but who, and why?
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I’m not sure to what you’re referring – the podcast is linked in the last sentence of my article. ” You can listen to it here.” Click on “here.”
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Proud to have participated in this piece — they did a terrific job weaving the story and voices into a cohesive mini-history of Burning Man. Thanks for making the connection to them, Ladybee!
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I loved listening to this on my drive from Reno to the playa.
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See also: https://www.kqed.org/news/11770991/burning-man-archiving-the-ephemeral and also http://www.kitchensisters.org/2019/08/22/burning-man-archive-keeperoftheday/. We made Keeper of the Day in their blog!
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