Jim Duzak | Live on Sound Authors

February 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! Today on the show as always I have three author guests and one musician and as a little preview I’ll tell you about the upcoming guests. The third guest on the show will be Nina Burleigh and she’s got a book called Unholy Business: A true tale of faith greed and forgery in the holy land, that will be an exciting one talking about the ossuaries in Jerusalem and things like that. The second guest on the show I’m very excited to chat with Garen Thomas who is the author of Yes We Can: A biography of Barack Obama, and of course that’s a great book to look at these days with our new president in office for about three weeks and at the end of the show we’re going to chat with Snowblink, a great duo out of Canada. Right now, my first guest on the show is Jim Duzak. He’s the Attorney at Love, and of course this is the week of love, its valentine’s week and the book is called Midlife Divorce and the Rebirth of Commitment. Welcome to the show Jim Duzak.

Jim Duzak: Well thank you very much Dr. Kent, its great to be on.

Dr. Kent: So tell me a little bit; you’ve been dealing with marriage and divorce and all that and all the issues surrounding relationships for quite a while.

Jim Duzak: Well that’s right I guess you could say both personally and professionally as a 28 year husband and father and I worked at a fairly young age also and a single father afterwards. Meanwhile I was in law school and married my second wife as a result of meeting through a personal ad. I’ve been a divorce lawyer, a divorce mediator and it’s been a lot of different ways of approaching men and women relationships.

Dr. Kent: So tell me about this book Midlife Divorce and the Rebirth of Commitment. Of course we all know a lot of people that hit middle age and say this isn’t it for me anymore and they get divorced, so what does this mean rebirth of commitment?

Jim Duzak: Well the commitment part I think is crucial to the book and what I’m saying is that they don’t necessarily have to get divorced in order to make a commitment nor do they just have to stay in their marriage and make a blind commitment to their marriage no matter how unsatisfying that marriage may be. What I’m saying is that people need to make a commitment to themselves to live what I call an authentic life. A life that’s true to your own core values, whatever those values might be. I don’t try to tell people what they should believe and what everyone should do but what I found over the years is that so many people lose their sense of identity when they get married. They’d be less married to a partnership and so forth but it’s, you don’t stop being yourself, or at least you shouldn’t stop being yourself.

Dr. Kent: So Valentines Day is coming up so speaking of not stopping being yourself, it is a confusing day for most men. What exactly do those fellows go out a do? Do you go buy the proverbial flowers, the necklace; do you just be a nice guy for a day and then go back to normal life? What’s this thing about Valentines Day in our culture?

Jim Duzak: Well here’s what I have to say. There’s no question that Valentines Day with all the hype associated with it and needing attention, it puts a lot of pressure on both men and women for different reasons and I can certainly sympathize with men feeling they’re being manipulated and so forth but I have two things to say. If you have a woman in your life and she means something to you, chances are that she does look at Valentines Day as something that’s important. For one day go along with it and make her happy and take her to a nice place. If she’s worth being in your life, she’s worth splurging on. But the other thing is though that I feel Valentines Day should be the once a year event.

I mean literally it is but any more than say mothers day or fathers day should just be a once a year you know paying attention to mom and then forgetting about her. I think to make the spirit of valentines day to come through people, both men and women need to do little things every day to keep it going and you said before just go back to your old habits and that’s precisely what people should NOT do. Its true you don’t have to go out necessarily and spend a fortune 365 nights a year and I don’t recommend that but if you do little things that you just work into your daily routine that will enhance the romance in your life without breaking the bank.

Dr. Kent: So what is the working relationship and what’s the difference between I guess in this book you talk about midlife divorce. What’s the difference between young people falling in love, middle age people falling in love? The first time, the second time the twelfth time?

Jim Duzak: Well, you would like to think that people learn from their mistakes and middle aged people would be maybe a little more careful, a little more discerning and that probably is the case. The flip side of that though I think is that when people who have gone through a tough divorce or they’re in their 40s or 50s or 60s, and they’re starting out all over again in the dating world, oftentimes they try too hard to especially very early in the relationship I mean as early as the first date to make sure that everything is right this time.

They want to be absolutely sure that whatever the problems were last time around won’t be a problem this time and I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to want to avoid making the mistakes of the past. You certainly want to do that but I think most people put too much pressure on the first couple of dates. They are so concerned about is this person right for me for the long term that they don’t even have any fun and unfortunately a lot of people that might otherwise have been a perfectly good match for them might get scared off. A lot of first dates these days between middle age people feel more like a legal deposition than a date. There’s all these questions and you can tell that the questions are there to try to exclude you or get rid of you from the list as you answer them wrong. It’s not much fun.

Dr. Kent: So you talk about also strategies for improving a marriage, how to be different, you’ve got a workshop entitled Marital Boot camp for Men. What is the key to a successful marriage?

Jim Duzak: Its sort of a variation of what I said before. My philosophy of life really is little things repeated often and for men in particular, those little things start with simply paying attention. So many women complain that “he’s always got his face in the computer screen when I try to talk to him” or there’s the guy who never compliments his wife. Before you can compliment her you have to notice, you have to pay attention that she got her hair cut today or that she’s wearing something you’ve never seen before. You have to get in the habit of noticing and then not just relying on the fact that well she knows I love her or she knows I think she’s beautiful, just say it. Say it once in awhile. Yes, she may at some level know that you care but we all like these little reminders that it really is still true and that’s typically the problem with men. That they don’t pay attention to the little things and if they would just do that, in most cases the big things will take care of themselves.

Dr. Kent: What kind of big things are we talking about?

Jim Duzak: The big things could be for example the fantasy about having an affair. I’m absolutely convinced that particularly for women, when women have affairs nine times out of ten its not she’s in search of better sex, she’s in search of somebody who will pay attention to her and appreciate her and treat her nice, treat her with respect. Most of the time, the kind of woman who has an affair is not really waking up someday and saying I want to have an affair but she meets somebody who seems to treat her the way that she feels she should be treated and quite frankly most people that have affairs would rather not be looking elsewhere.

I’m not trying to justify people who have affairs, I’m not saying just because there’s justification for it but I understand the motivation and other big issues might be money problems. Getting into big arguments over your spending habits and so forth and a lot of times if you had just expressed yourself over little things that come up in this area you wouldn’t get to the point where you’re $30,000 in debt on your credit cards but a lot of people just try to avoid conflict and they say well you know this is a problem but maybe it’ll go away and maybe it’ll get better, but usually it doesn’t.

Dr. Kent: I’ve heard a couple situations that just pop to mind that are timely right now. One is that a lot of soldiers that have been deployed for a long time will come back and their marriages will fall apart. The suicide rate is actually very high based on part of that and then there’s these economic times, most put serious strains on relationships. Are there ways to get through that? It’s interesting to think about that on Valentines Day.

Jim Duzak: Yeah I mean its not a pleasant thought but there’s no question that military marriages in particular are very high stress situations and because your combining a number of things that are in and of themselves high stress. The fact that most military people is a in some sense a predictor of divorce. Generally speaking the younger you are when you get married the more likely it is that your marriage will end in divorce and a lot of couples are people that got married in their late teens, early 20s, late 20s and the couples are used to being separated for a long time and certainly separation can be a huge stress if people aren’t properly prepared for it. Not to mention all the temptations that go with it.

The wife whose left behind who’s trying to raise kids without the father and all that kind of thing. There’s no easy answer to that; all I can say is I know there are a lot of military spouse support groups out there and I would say to anybody listening who is a member of the military, I would just urge them first of all you’re not alone. What you’re going through, thousands and thousands of other military families are going through so try to find support within your peer group.

Dr. Kent: Then there’s another thing happening now. My next guest of course is a biographer of Barack Obama and the new president and first lady really love each other and set such a beautiful example for African American communities that really need like an infusion of some of that positivity as well as all of us in these times.

Jim Duzak: Absolutely and all politics aside, one of the things I remember reading something Mrs. Obama said a few months ago when she was interviewed for a magazine. She said they have always considered their date nights to be something inviolatable. In other words, whether it’s Saturday night, Friday night or whatever it is, I don’t know if they’re still doing it in the Whitehouse.

Dr. Kent: They are, I heard on the news they had taken a valentines date night.

Jim Duzak: And that’s a wonderful thing! They insist on nothing interfering with it and it’s a matter of importance to them and their little girls are growing up in that kind of environment where they can see that there’s nothing more important to daddy or mommy than the two of them and these are wonderful things to see. Again, all politics aside, you may or not agree with him politically but I think he’s a wonderful example for all of this.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely. So let’s talk about this book for one minute; Midlife Divorce and the Rebirth of Commitment. Why did you decide to write a book? Where can we find it? What else can we find and all that?

Jim Duzak: The easiest ways is to go to any of the major online booksellers like Amazon, or you can go on my website, which is www.attorneyatlove.com and you can read excerpts from all seventeen chapters of my book on my website as well as get direct links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and all the rest. So that would be the easiest way to learn about it.

Dr. Kent: What inspired you to write the book in the first place?

Jim Duzak: As I said earlier almost 40 years or so of dealing with men and women relationships from just about every angle but particularly in the last few years especially when I was doing a lot of divorce mediation as a full time mediator for the divorce court in phoenix. I just have seen so many couples who had given up on their marriage prematurely in my opinion. My job was not to try to bring them back together per se although there were many cases where I sort of hinted that they might’ve been a little bit rash in filing for divorce after only being married a month or two and I had cases like that.

But I really do feel that a lot of people didn’t know how to deal with conflict or were just uncomfortable with all the accommodations you have to make when you live with someone else and a lot of them had unrealistic ideas about what marriage would be and so forth and I just felt that I tried to reach people who maybe hadn’t given marriage a try. Maybe hadn’t tried a lot of suggestions that I make about how to find the satisfaction you’re looking for within their marriage without settling for less. I don’t believe in that either. I don’t think you should stay in a horrible marriage; oh this is my fate in life. I honestly believe that most divorces are unnecessary. Not all but most could probably have been worked out to the mutual satisfaction of the couple.

Dr. Kent: So we’ve been speaking with the attorney at love, his website is attorneyatlove.com and his book is Midlife Divorce: The Rebirth of Commitment. It’s been such a pleasure chatting with Jim Duzak.

Jim Duzak: Well thank you Dr. Kent, I really enjoyed it.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show as I mentioned earlier is Garen Thomas. She’s the author of Yes We Can: A biography of Barack Obama so come on back for that and we’ll enjoy chatting with her.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Holidays, Dating, History, TRANSCRIPTS, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Inspiration, PODCAST

Garen Thomas | Live on Sound Authors

February 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! My next guest on the show is Garen Thomas. She’s written a beautiful book called Yes We Can: A Biography of Barack Obama. It’s full of pictures beautifully laid out and it’s done very well recently for obvious reasons. We now have President Barack Obama and he’s been doing some incredible things over the past few weeks. So welcome to the show Garen Thomas.

Garen Thomas: Thank you, thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Kent: So it must’ve been a great last few weeks, last couple of months for you talking about this book and having been part of this historical moment.

Garen Thomas: Well I was really happy to have provided for kids a glimpse into the life of this candidate and now the president of the United States. I thought that his story was really interesting. It’s unique but it’s also one to which many children can relate so I was really proud that turned out to be the case.

Dr. Kent: Of course all of us this is the kind of book that kids bring home and then their parents see laying on the table and say that book looks great and they pick it up and read it themselves.

Garen Thomas: I’ve found that a lot of adults actually have read this book. It turns out it can work at a primer for people who don’t know much about the president and many people, many adults have told me that they read the book and then passed it along to their kids or the kids read it and then they read it so its wonderful that it actually crossed over from the children’s market to the adult market.

Dr. Kent: You’ve been in the New York Times book review and major newspapers everywhere. How has that felt for you?

Garen Thomas: That was actually really wonderful. It was nice to be recognized that way, it was nice to have that attention; however, for me the most important thing was getting the book in the hands of children and to be on the bestseller list is a case that where kids were getting it and adults were getting it and that’s what it means to me.

Dr. Kent: So where did this start for you? When did you look at this guy? I mean for me I didn’t know about him until 2004 and I watched that speech and said oh wow, who is this guy? I wonder if we could have this guy for our president one day. Then I thought no, that’ll never happen. But when did it start for you?

Garen Thomas: It started for me around the same time. I was actually working as a children’s book editor and was looking for positive role models in the African American community and then this person who I had never heard of came out and made this passionate speech and I had my eye on him right at that time. I wanted to have him actually write a children’s book for us and we approached him but it turned out he went with his adult book publisher to publish a children’s book. I kept my eye on him and was very excited to see him enter the race. Oh gosh, how many years ago has it been now and thrilled to have been able to write a part of this historical moment.

Dr. Kent: And that’s so interesting. We have for me as an artist, as someone who has devoted their life to the arts, its so wonderful I heard on the Grammy’s last night, sorry a few nights ago that this is a Grammy award wining president; how neat is that?

Garen Thomas: Yeah, I believe he’s one who grabs you now!

Dr. Kent: For his writing, how he read it of course, but.

Garen Thomas: Absolutely; I think it speaks largely to his writing ability and the message he’s able to convey. That it resonates with people; granted he did explore the spoken award that he won at the Grammy’s, but I don’t think you can win a Grammy without having the meat of material behind it.

Dr. Kent: So tell me, there’s a lot of people out there that are collecting things; this is clearly the president of the last couple hundred years for people to look at and say wow, this is a unique character, in my opinion. What’s your personal sort of relationship to the whole okay now he’s president, how do I look at this now? Earlier you said this is a great primer about the president. How did things change for you when he actually won?

Garen Thomas: Wow; I think similar to you I actually couldn’t believe it. For me it was like magic, it was like the world slightly changed a little bit, something shifted in American history and perhaps world history. It definitely felt that way and I also was, I couldn’t enjoy the moment right at the time because I was writing the final chapters to the updated version of the book.

Dr. Kent: The thing for me, we’re on internet radio so I can be pretty free with my opinions and I was very excited about the candidate Obama and when he gave the acceptance speech I was anticipating that I would be overjoyed and jumping around and excited and actually I sort of joined half of the legions of people across the country that were crying. I was thinking and I don’t know why I was but it was like this is a moment that I was sort of waiting for, for a long time.

Garen Thomas: At the time of the inauguration, it was you know I was still holding my breath after he won the election but for me I still was waiting for that inaugural date to come; anything could’ve happened between the election and the inauguration. I don’t know if I would consider myself a pessimist or just extremely cautious but I definitely wanted to take it slow and make sure that everything went according to plan and during the inauguration at his inaugural speech I was definitely moved and wasn’t blogging it live but was writing down pieces of his speech that really moved me.

Dr. Kent: I remember there was a moment where I was at home for the holidays with my parents and we were watching some speeches and I guess Obama gave his now famous speech in Iowa and I remember just sitting there actually giving responses and this will kind of bring up another question. I didn’t grow up in a church or in a community that sort of responds freely to a speaker but I’ve heard a lot of it of course in both music and different speakers, but when Obama speaks, people evoke responses involuntarily. When he gave that speech in Iowa I was talking to the television. He would say things and I would go mmm, he’d say something else and I’d go yeah. What does it mean to have an African American man in the white house who studied how to do that honestly? He’s so well studied and developed that his style of connecting to people.

Garen Thomas: I think what it means is that he’s connected with, he’s able to connect with our core emotions, he gets people from the core. I think that sort of call on response is or when you feel compelled to talk back to the TV because somebody said something that really ignites a passion in you or a fire in you and you want to respond, you want to say yes or whatever. I think it’s amazing that style that he’s got translates so well across all of America and it looks like globally.

Dr. Kent: So let’s go back to the book itself. Now he has such an interesting story and you know it’s not often that any character in public life had that deep of a story. We’ve all been sort of in love with this fellow Sully who saved all these people in New York and he’s a wonderful story and we sort of cling to characters. Barack Obama is an especially sticky character. When we hear his story we’re drawn to it, even before he was president, he was selling millions of books. Why is he so sticky and why is he so important to us?

Garen Thomas: When he initially published his first book it did okay but it didn’t sort of take off until he became senator. That was a momentous thing as well and people revisited his initial story and found a unique person behind it, somebody who was able to live in several worlds literally and figuratively and find a place for himself to fit. I think it was amazing.

Dr. Kent: In your book what I love about the book especially and what obviously all of the press loves about it is that it is for children but I find myself really drawn to it because of the pictures in it and it’s such a neat thing when you write books for younger people, you’re allowed to put pictures in.

Garen Thomas: Yes it’s true. I don’t know when we decide that we’re too adult to have images in our books but I feel like they help tell the story. We’re still drawn to pictures and movies and I don’t know why we can’t still have something like that in our books for adults but the pictures help tell his story. He’s got an amazing life story and there are bits and pieces of it that probably we wouldn’t have a full sense of unless we actually saw him, like in Hawaii with his grandparents or saw him graduating from Harvard or Columbia. It has a real, you’re able to connect more I think with him as a human being when you have those pictures to hold onto.

Dr. Kent: So, I have kind of two questions. What surprised you about Barack Obama’s story and the second question is what has surprised you since you published this book since Obama has become president and you’re getting reactions from readers? Has anything surprised you?

Garen Thomas: I think I didn’t realize how close he was with his grandparents and his mother and how interesting and exceptional a woman his mother was. She basically I think she gave him the tools to be president at a very young age. She instilled in him a desire to learn and the necessity to learn and to not have excuses for things that you feel are unfair but to find a way to make changes happen. as far as what surprises me since the book and the inauguration when he became president; I think I ran into an article online about a woman who read the book with her daughter and then went to her school and told the teacher there that she wanted the book as part of the curriculum and apparently its become a part of the curriculum and they got hundreds of copies and the kids are reading it. That means so much to me, the fact that the mother saw that and saw the value in it and I think she actually said that she wanted the children to see if he could do it they could do. That means more to me than any best seller list or anything like that.

Dr. Kent: And that really has been surprising to me and many people is this shift that happened on January 20. People said wow, I could really be somebody and that’s really wonderful. Let me ask you this. One of Obama’s biographers David Mendell who I chatted with just before Obama was elected actually. The beginning to his book, the quote before the book begins was I’m Lebron’s baby.” And I was really amused by that because this was what Obama said as he went on stage in 2004. He had this confidence and I wanted to ask you about that and then the beginning of your book, which you talk about the quote he said “In the end that is God’s greatest gift to us, a belief in things not seen.” And then your first line of the introduction, “His father was a legend, like John Henry.” There’s this real mystery and a sense of forward thinking, future thinking in Obama and he says these really wonderful lofty things.

Garen Thomas: I also believe that comes across that he has that. I guess people don’t expect it. It’s a surprise to them that he can be conscious of that, that he can fill himself with enough knowledge to be confident and get out there and put form and to convey his message that’s going to connect with people. It turns out that it relates to the Lebron James comment. When I chose the quote about Gods greatest gift to us is the belief in things not seen, I was thinking about his father. The fact that he grew up without his dad and that yet he had to somehow believe in his dad and believe in himself so that he could reach great heights. That was what really I wanted to get at in the book was his relationships with his parents and his grandparents and the people in his life. It really was important to me to spend a lot of time on his childhood in his formative years and find out what his relationship was like with individuals, the people who helped make him into the person that people are looking up to today.

Dr. Kent: I guess my final and favorite question for you is what makes Barack Obama so cool in two ways? The first way of course is I as well as many people were swept up in who is this guy around 2006. I thought wow, how amazing would it be if he could get elected and I was amazed by the things he said; to me it felt cool. He was this incredibly popular character. In the other sense where everyone says how does he stay so calm? And that’s part of what got him elected and what’s so reassuring now to see in this president is this coolness. I think I lost Garen Thomas! I will hang on the line for a minute and see if we can get her back. The book is called Yes We Can: A biography of President Barack Obama and I’m going to put a commercial on for a minute while we get her back. So we’re back on the line with Garen Thomas. I think we dropped her call for a minute there but we’re talking about Yes We Can: A biography of President Barack Obama. Welcome back to the show.

Garen Thomas: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: Sorry I lost you there but I was asking about our cool president and he’s both cool in a very popular sense and cool, calm, collected, reassuring – so talk about our president’s coolness.

Garen Thomas: It’s funny that you should mention that. I’m actually in business school now and one of the people in our admissions department talks about swag and how some people have just a little of a swagger about them and I think our current president has that. I think he has an air about him; it’s not a conceited air but I think he gives a level of confidence and calm. I don’t think I’ve seen him open to anger or lose his cool. He just sort of has a measured approach to things and a reasoned approach. I think it helps put people at ease and it’s really a fun thing to see. Part of that might come from Michelle to because I think she’s got some of that as well.

Dr. Kent: And at the same time he’s cool for kids, for young people, for Gen-Xers and he’s also cool for boomers. Why is this character politically so cool?

Garen Thomas: I think because people have grown tired of the same type of politician and he brings a new style to politics. I think he’s actually made people more engaged and more excited about policy and about what can be done. There is a lot going on in the United States and across the globe that really needs fixed and this is somebody who’s standing up for principals and working to fix it. In terms of what makes him cool to younger kids, I know one of my close friends has a three year old and helped sway his dad to vote for Obama because that’s the candidate who’s name he could say. And I think he has a fun name as well; Obama is a fun name for kids to say.

Dr. Kent: Right and its true and I recall before he was elected about a week before I was on a walk with my dog and we passed a younger woman with her child and we introduced my dog to the child first and then I remember her saying tell him what you think? I think I must’ve been wearing some kind of Barack Obama shirt and the kid said bawack Obama and I won’t forget; it’s the funniest thing but the kid just loved saying his name.

Garen Thomas: It has a nice little ring to it. I definitely think kids like that plus I think he just it’s a generational thing. He’s a new kind of politician and Colin Powell talks about a need for generational change in the white house and I think we see this person as that shift in policy and just a new face that’s something that’s bringing America into the 21st century.

Dr. Kent: It’s been such a pleasure chatting with Garen Thomas, she’s the author of Yes We Can. It’s a new York Times best seller and it’s a biography of our new president Barack Obama and it goes from his kindergarten essay “I Want to become President” all the way back to his childhood and to the present day in the new edition so thank you so much for chatting with me.

Garen Thomas: Thanks very much it was fun.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is Nina Burleigh and she’s the author of Unholy Business: A true tale of faith, greed and forgery in the holy land. Come on back for that one.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Childrens, History, TRANSCRIPTS, Politics, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Inspiration, PODCAST

Nina Burleigh | Live on Sound Authors

February 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is the author of Unholy Business: A true tale of faith, greed and forgery in the holy land. Author Nina Burleigh has written a few acclaimed books and this is her latest. A gorgeous cover, incredible content, welcome to the show Nina Burleigh.

Nina Burleigh: Thank you, it’s nice to be here!

Dr. Kent: Tell me about this. I’m so intrigued by just like so many people by the true stories coming out of the Middle East and the holy land of treasures, of religious persecution and religious rights and histories. How did you get into this and what’s the background of this book Unholy Business?

Nina Burleigh: Well, I got into it because I was reading the New York Times a couple years ago, procrastinating writing another book actually and read this story about these five men who had been indicted for allegedly forging some very famous archaeological objects with inscriptions on them that purported to be the first material evidence of the existence of Christ and the first material evidence of Solomon’s Temple ever found in archaeological record among other objects. And I read this and I thought boy this is curious. I had not heard about these objects; one of them is very famous, it’s called the Jane Ossuary. It’s a little coffin that came to light in the market in antiquities around 2002.

A movie was made out of it, a book was made out of it, it’s supposed to be the box that held bones of Christ’s brother James. I didn’t know that Christ had a brother either so I read this and thought this is interesting. What kind of people would make proof for the faithful? And who among the faithful want proof? Because in my growing up around the Mennonites in Michigan, I’m not a Mennonite but I knew a lot of faithful people and they didn’t need physical proof. Faith is an ephemeral thing. So I started to look into it and I eventually went over to Israel and got off the plane, I had never been there before, I got off the plane just to see if I could talk to the detectives who had unraveled the case and whether or not I would be able to talk to the dealers of these antiquities.

When I got off the plane it was like being in a movie. Everything that happened was strange, mysterious, these eccentric characters, it was like being in The Maltese Falcon/The Davinci Code. Walking a back alley of Jerusalem to the Jerusalem meeting these men in these shops that are just piled to the rafters with stuff like Peruvian oil lamps or supposedly Peruvian oil lamps and mammoth swords and coins that the money changers may have held in temple and I learned there’s this whole industry in buying and selling of stuff that really dates back to the ancient times or medieval times when European pilgrims started going there to bring relics back.

Now, its just more high tech. basically what these guys are alleged to be doing is taking real old stuff that comes out of one of the 30,000 archaeological sites in Israel and the west bank and inscribing these objects, altering them mostly with inscriptions of ancient Hebrew or Aramaic to make them look like their related to actual biblical characters and events. Therefore validating certain things that made them more famous.

Dr. Kent: The validation is the interesting thing and that’s what you talked about a second ago and I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the old city of Jerusalem. It’s a wonderful place. Every maze comes back to the main road, dark little corners, beautiful place. What is it that drives people to Jerusalem, drives people to holy sites? Makes people see Jesus’ face in a piece of toast as well as with this, I’ve heard of the James Ossuary of course with a lot of the population. Why are people drawn to oh, this could be…?

Nina Burleigh: Well I think people bring their belief system to looking at objects like that and I mean people I did speak with people who were over there digging. Some of these archeological sites, many of them in fact, have people from the seminaries, students from theological schools working in the summer because they need power and these kids will go over there and dig. It just means a lot to them to be in the place that they’ve read about or heard about since they were in Sunday school. Then you have the tourists who go over there in busloads, older people mostly who have the time and money.

There are busloads of westerners going through that country, up and down that country day after day being dropped off at archaeological sites that may or may not contain proof of certain stories in the bible. They lap it up because they grew up believing these stories and now they’re in the country, in the region of the world where the stories were written and the ancient cities are there. So its understandable certainly but what was happening here is these men were alleged because they have not yet been convicted by the way, the trial continues to go on four years later. They played with those belief systems and played on peoples emotions and that’s what really got the Israeli authorities angry enough to investigate this for two years.

The agency that investigated is really under funded, its called the Israel Antiquities Authority and its supposed to oversee and keep from being funded these 30,000 archaeological sites. There’s only 12 men and they cant possibly keep up with it. There’s a huge private trade in very high end stuff. Now tourists wouldn’t be buying it but I learned in the search that the real mark of these men were these very wealthy collectors in the United States, in London, in Switzerland and in Tel Aviv who happened to have a taste for ancient things.

Certainly it’s a bit like collecting baseball cards. These guys collect million dollar ancient ### that had ancient kings name on them or something and the forgers or forger were or was making stuff for them really. Then he got kind of pugilistic, he’d been getting away with it for a very long time, ten years, 20 years, and made these two objects that were really important to religious believers, both Christian and Jewish.

Dr. Kent: So part of this whole thing is deception and I love at the very beginning of your book you’ve got a quote by Amil Zolav, and it says, “We are a civilized people and of what use is civilization if it doesn’t help us to deceive and to be deceived in order to make life more worth the living.” I find it, I’m one of the subscribers to there was a real Christ and he had a real family and et cetera, which makes me fascinated by this whole topic. Then there’s others that say oh no, of course he didn’t and all of that. It feels like all of it’s a little about deception. The founders of the church might’ve been trying to deceive. What’s the role of deception in this whole thing?

Nina Burleigh: Well I don’t know about the founders of the church, I didn’t get into that. This is a book really about modern criminals and a modern crime in the current era. I don’t get into the history of the church and their activities but certainly deception is, when you’re playing with peoples belief system, deception is actually easier and one of the things they were doing was they would target certain scholars to validate these objects and the scholars they picked very cleverly were people who had strong belief systems; either Catholics or orthodox Jewish and they would bring them these things and it was very difficult for the scholars when confronted with something like the bone box that contained James’ bones, the brother of Jesus, for them to be sort of distant about it.

I think there were a lot of emotions tied up so there was a lot of forethought in how they would bring these objects to the public. They had to get them validated by scholars first and really what’s happened is the scholarship of biblical archaeology is what’s on trial in Jerusalem right now with this forger and his cohorts. The alleged forger and his alleged cohorts because they keep bringing these experts in, scholar after scholar and then the defense attorney who are like the best paid lawyers in Israel, they’re like OJ Simpson’s lawyers, they take these scholars and they just shred them. The scholars aren’t used to being questioned like that, they’re used to being treated with enormous respect from students, right?

Reverential other scholars at conferences, they’re not used to being queried about minutia like well was the menorah 2000 years ago eight inches high normally or three inches high? Here’s a book that says they’re three inches high and you’re saying this one is fake because its only three inches high, well here you said this, you’ve contradicted yourself in this speech here and every one of them has been basically impeached or just made to look like a fool. The judge will make the call on this, the judge is no closer after four years to knowing whether this stuff is fake or not let alone whether these guys are committing a fraud.

Dr. Kent: So set the stage a little more. I love of course I know Jerusalem pretty intimately from living there and being in the old city so often but for people who haven’t been there I think it’s a mysterious place but when you’re there its so real, so dirty, and the way you describe that one store front that was piled with these alleged antiquities, the whole city is like that. Like there’s layer upon layer, it’s a big layered big city. Talk about your description. What does that have to do with this story? And I know your other books, Mirage, Napoleon Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt and Unsolved Murder, a very private woman you published in 1998, you’re really intrigued by twisted stories.

Nina Burleigh: Well yes! I guess that’s right you’re picking up on my interest in the dark side and you’re right. I don’t know why. I guess I am one of those people who wants to poke around and see what’s under the, so far it hasn’t been to my detriment to see what’s going on in a dark corner or dark room you’re not supposed to go into but yeah when I was a kid I wanted to be an archaeologist and then I wanted to be a detective, when I was about nine years old, those were my twin desires and of course I became an English major and spend most of my time correcting peoples pronouns now and sitting in a chair and writing.

My life is not that glamorous, but I did get to live that out by going over there and live out; I didn’t realize until later when I started talking about it that I was kind of living out this childhood dream and that’s why everything about the writing of it was so vivid. I was able to bring that place to life I think because it just jazzed me. I got this fascinating writers of history, great mystery, these eccentric characters, people you just cant make up. The billionaire who collects 6,000 objects of archaeology. He’s an enormously wealthy man and that’s what he’s doing with his money in his 80s, that and smoking Marlboro Lights.

His house, his apartment is this Tel Aviv penthouse and his London apartment which he got as a payment of debt from the King of Jordan years ago, they’re just like indoor markets. People just come to him; I sat at his table and he told me his life story. He was a child rabbi in 1920 Jerusalem, which was an Arab city at that point, his family had been there for generations and his dad was very strict and he was dyslexic and the dad threw him out on the streets in Jerusalem and he ended up sleeping in these caves with Arab urchins. That’s how he started finding coins when he was a kid and that’s what his obsession now, in his late life obsession goes back to this childhood obsession with finding God because his dad was a very religious man and he couldn’t read so he abused him.

Its just a fascinating story and then the dealers themselves; these guys who none of them will tell you a straight answer for where they got the stuff but they basically get it from these Palestinians who are on the other side of the line who go to these unguarded sites with metal detectors and dig stuff up, come back, bring it to the edge of the checkpoint, 50 yards in, the dealer will go in, pay the guy or his middle man, and the minute he crosses back over the line the stuff is like 100 times more valuable than what he paid for it. If he can get away with it because the Israel antiquities authority cant keep up with all this, he can get away with it and sell it to some collector in Switzerland or London, well he’s just made a ton of money.

But they’re all ### these guys; they’ll sit there and tell you its like listening to Scheherazade, you’ll see an object and say where did that thing come from and they’ll sit there, they’ll make you coffee and they’ll weave this tale about what it means and the Canaanites, and the philistines and the this and that and you’re sort of discombobulated by the end of it. Of course if you wanted to buy it then they put the price tag on it if you were in the market for it. What the Israel antiquity authority claims is that 90 percent of the stuff in the shops caveat emptor is fake. So if you’re a tourist and planning to go over there, just keep in mind when you’re bringing this coin back to church and you’re thinking this thing was traded in the templar, this was may not be the case. Be happy that you got your souvenir but don’t go paying $1,000 or something unless you’ve got an expert next to you.

Dr. Kent: The folks in the old city of Jerusalem are expert bargainers. I remember going for cookies and bargaining for the price on cookies because I was a foreigner and freshly learned Arabic and sat for 20 minutes with a store owner in the middle of the walkway and bargained the cookies down and he was enjoying it immensely. It was an art, they have the art of bargaining over there.

Nina Burleigh: That’s right.

Dr. Kent: What I find so fascinating about our discussion and about this book, which is out on the Smithsonian label which is really cool, is that its about the personalities and so many of these tales are kind of like the items itself. You read the books and think well do I believe that or not? Where as this one tells the stories of the people.

Nina Burleigh: Yes, I was really interested in the people more than the objects. This is why there are no pictures of objects in the book. The characters made the story, the characters I think I make them come to life in that book and I’m real happy with it because when I look at it I feel like I accomplished what I set out to do, which was to use the crime story as a way to kind of tell a large, talk about a larger world that people know very little about, which is this world of objects being bought and sold in the context of middle eastern politics and the seething kind of conflict between the three religions in Jerusalem, which is where this is all taking place.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been such an honor chatting with this book and on a side note, I have a good friend Sally Shields who is a fellow instructor at your writer’s conference I believe next week, right?

Nina Burleigh: I know, she just sent me an email; in Mexico yeah.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about that workshop.

Nina Burleigh: Well I’m going to teach a 2-day workshop called A Million Stories in Naked City kind of just basically for people who want to learn how to write their own non-fiction tale. Whether they be a personal memoir or something they come across that they find interesting and I want to talk about how what genres there are and the good models to follow and just some basic rules about how to sit down in a chair. First how to research and organize your material and then how to keep yourself interested and the reader interested by outlining and structuring the book properly.

Dr. Kent: Then hopefully how to fulfill your childhood fantasies.

Nina Burleigh: That’s right.

Dr. Kent: This is a wonderful book; Unholy Business. I’m only a couple pages in but I’m psyched to read the rest.

Nina Burleigh: Great I hope you enjoy it!

Dr. Kent: Yeah, and its called A true tale of faith, greed and forgery in the holy land. Its been a great fun chatting with you.

Nina Burleigh: Can I add one thing? Go to my website www.ninaburleigh.com and click on the book and I believe its through Amazon you can download pages of it for free so you can see whether you’re going to like it. You cant get the whole book that way but I think once people start reading it they told me they cant put it down, so I invite everyone to have a look at it.

Dr. Kent: So we’ll check you out at ninaburleigh.com and yeah absolutely. People will be psyched to read a couple pages. So unholy business, its available just about everywhere and we’ll talk to you next time. What’s your next project?

Nina Burleigh: I have just made an agreement to write a book about the Amanda Knox case in Italy, which is another extremely dark murder mystery involving a university of Washington exchange student accused of killing her British roommate.

Dr. Kent: Wow.

Nina Burleigh: In a very mysterious circumstance and the prosecutor in the case this Italian prosecutor has a very active imagination and has charged her with participating in an orgy or satanic rite and he believes there’s this satanic cult in Italy that’s existed there for centuries so its about this girl pitted against this prosecutor. The new world mountain climber in gortex and pot smoker basically and that’s how she got herself into trouble; pitted against this old world prosecutor who represents severe, rigid Catholicism Italian tradition, which really respects a great dark secret and this fresh faced American girl looks like Mona Lisa.

Dr. Kent: Wow, as always you’re right on the path of really exciting stories.

Nina Burleigh: Thanks, I hope I can talk to you about that one when it comes out.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely. This book is Unholy Business, Nina Burleigh, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

Nina Burleigh: Thank you, take care.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is called Snowblink. We’re going to listen to a track from their album, it’s called the Tired Bees. It’s a beautiful song, incredible duo out of Canada and we’ll talk to them right after we listen to this track.

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, Art, TRANSCRIPTS, Hollywood, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Daniela Gesundheit of Snowblink | Live on Sound Authors

February 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: That was a great track by a group called Snowblink. We’re going to play another gorgeous track at the end but right now we’re going to talk to Daniela Gesundheit of Snowblink. Welcome to the show.

Daniela G: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: Now I speak German so I will tend to pronounce it gezundheit.

Daniela G: I guess I would say gezunheit but I don’t speak German so!

Dr. Kent: Tell me about this record. I chatted of course with your fellow musician last week and another time and Dan Goldman and such a beautiful sound.

Daniela G: Oh well thank you, I appreciate that.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about the record and what you’re working on now.

Daniela G: Well we’re actually this record we finished a few months ago and we’re still working on putting it out officially but it was quite a process. We holed up in the studio in California for about a week and then went to a cabin in the eastern sierras and kept working on it and finished it up that way over the course of about five weeks.

Dr. Kent: The album is called Long Live. What’s that inspired by?

Daniela G: You know sometimes when I’m kind of in the process of finishing up a record I have my antennas out and I just wrote it down somewhere and I thought I liked the sound of long live and the meaning of it and we usually say long live (fill in the blank) so I liked the punctuated phrase like that.

Dr. Kent: Talk about the music a little bit. What I find so intriguing about it is that its got the same syrupy quality that I also saw in his music. Very much its got such a gorgeous flow to it. Do you sit home alone thinking of strings and electronics and things? Do you sit down and play the guitar and sing? How do you go about creating this stuff?

Daniela G: I usually work with guitar and mostly when I’m working on songs I’m mostly thinking about the words, the melody and the singing, its very vocally based for me and most of the other electronic and violin arrangements were worked on with the other musicians so with Jan Vincent or Caley Monahan Ward, they’re producer on the record. But when I’m just working on things alone I’m mostly using the voice and kind of playing with words.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about your history in music.

Daniela G: I didn’t train my voice until I was about 19 or so and I studied classical voice at the university so that was my only formal vocal training. I had about four years of that and I’ve studied music at university and I’ve studied experimental composition and I liked all the alternative music classes so that’s what I was drawn to.

Dr. Kent: When you say experimental composition, I actually have my PhD in new music and classical music composition. Is that what you mean, new music?

Daniela G: Yeah, I sang in a lot of recitals that would be in that category and the teachers I studied with were Anthony Baxter and Alvin Roussier. I don’t know if you know them.

Dr. Kent: I like both of their work actually.

Daniela G: Oh great, yeah.

Dr. Kent: And how does that sort of the alietory element of a lot of that music, how does that apply? Obviously it comes through your music and actually through Dan’s music also. What does it mean to you to not have Britney Spears coming out on the other end of the tape machine?

Daniela G: You mean you don’t hear Britney Spears in this music? Maybe I’m doing something wrong, I don’t know. No I don’t know I mean it is tough to quantify how those experiences and those studies come through but I guess its just the experience of working with those teachers and learning about their work and the work of the contemporaries; I guess it just forced me or encouraged me to keep a questioning mind or to not just find a form that works and write on that but to constantly pick apart my own approach. Its like I’ll come up with rules then I break them down myself.

Dr. Kent: Cool, so tell me a little bit about the two tracks I’m playing on the show. We listened to the Tired Bees, which is a fantastic title for a song and the next track we’ll listen to will be Rut and Nuzzle. Tell me about the tracks on the album.

Daniela G: The Tired Bees, the title I suppose is for a little while everyone was scared all the bees were dying off and they couldn’t figure out what was happening and what was causing it. I remember being upset about that so that’s where the title comes from but the song itself is just a tiny moment, like a microcosm sort of moment. The first line is one little breeze, just goes through and tries to find the tiny moments.

Dr. Kent: There’s a great thing on your website under your biography. It’s a clip of a little girl singing Kokomo. Is that you?

Daniela G: Yeah, that’s me.

Dr. Kent: So you have a great history as a rock and roll star here.

Daniela G: Yeah right! I was a little more shy then actually, a lot more shy but its true. I grew up in Los Angeles so I think somehow performances its all around in LA I guess and I grew up performing a little.

Dr. Kent: I sort of interrupted you there talking about the tracks on the album.

Daniela G: Oh sure. So Rut and Nuzzle, that song I suppose is about, it points to this idea, well if you think of the song talks about antlers, right? So if you think of antlers animals grow them and for awhile they can use them for combat and they’re really strong and anchored then after awhile they just fall out and their entirely useless to the animal. So this idea of the changing nature of things and how an object can have more than one use at different times. Just the changing nature of almost everything.

Dr. Kent: Awesome. How about the whole album; what does it mean to you? As a fellow musician, it’s a great thing to put the CD in the hands of a family member, but beyond that, the sort of lesser joys of releasing it to the public. What does this album mean to you? What does it say about you?

Daniela G: Well, I suppose I was living in San Francisco when I was writing those songs and very much in nature a lot. That city is really surrounded by nature so I think I was just observing, using memory and absorbing my surroundings and trying to assimilate all those things together. The record is kind of just a capturing of an era like my time over there and the experiences I had while I was out there.

Dr. Kent: Cool, well the group is called Snowblink and the album is called Long Live and we can find out more about the whole project at snowblink.org. I imagine you also have a MySpace?

Daniela G: Yeah, myspace\snowblink.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful, so we’re going to listen to the track Rut and Nuzzle. Its been a pleasure chatting with you and I look forward to hearing from you and Dan how things are going.

Daniela G: Thanks a lot its been fun.

Dr. Kent: Listen to Rut and Nuzzle from Snowblink; their new album just being released called Long Live. Listen to this.

[music]

Dr. Kent: That was a beautiful track from Snowblink called Rut and Nuzzle. Their new album is just being released; its called Long Live. We listened also to the track of the Tired Bees. We were talking to musician to Daniela Gezundheit of snowblink. Today on the show we chatted with the well acclaimed author of Yes We Can, a biography of Barack Obama with Garen Thomas. At the beginning of the show we talked to Jim Duzak, with Attorney at Love, and the third guest on the show was Nina Burleigh, the author of Unholy Business. See you next week on Friday again. This was an irregular schedule show this week to be on Wednesday and we’ll have three more authors and one more musician to chat with. Be safe and we’ll talk to you next week.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Experimental, Pop, Folk, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Sharon Waxman | Live on Sound Authors

February 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! I’ve got four great author guests on the show today. My first guest will be award winning journalist Sharon Waxman. She’ll be speaking to us about her latest book called Loot: The Battle over stolen treasures of the ancient world and later on in the show we’ll talk to Jocelyn Crowley, who has a book called Defiant Dads: Fathers rights activists in America and there’s an author called Karen Brody and her latest book is called Birth and at the end of the show, we’ll speak to musician Dan Goldman who has truly gorgeous songs. But my first guest, it’s my special honor to welcome Sharon Waxman. She’s written a wonderful book called Loot: The battle over the stolen treasures of the ancient world. Beautiful inside and out this book. Welcome to the show Sharon Waxman.

Sharon Waxman: Hi, thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about how this book started for you.

Sharon Waxman: Oh this book well you know I’m actually better known to my readers as someone who’s written about Hollywood a lot in the past decades plus, but before that I was a foreign correspondent for about ten years and for particularly interested in the ancient world and the middle east. Living in Los Angeles where I do there were a lot of headlines that at one point started to emerge as problems getting ###, which is based here and Italy and Greece, demanding antiquities be returned from the museum.

Then I started hearing from friends; I used to have long-distance relationships in Egypt and the chief archaeologist of Egypt was telling me he had started this campaign to get the return of major treasures from western museums like the Bust of Nefertiti, which is in Berlin and the Rosetta stone which is in London at the British museum. I started putting the pieces together thinking there’s some broader trend going on here, what is it all about? Why are all of these smaller countries challenging big countries like the United States or France and England to get these things back? Then I started realizing that its part of a bigger picture that’s going on in the world, which is people, smaller countries taking control of their cultural heritage and taking possession of their cultural identity and wanting the return of these treasures as part of that.

So I decided to explore that question as a journalist, just to take that journey back in time to countries where pieces are now residing and where it was taken from and it was really fascinating. I learned about these amazing characters in the 19th century and I also learned a lot of stuff that I had kind of taken for granted. For example, I never knew how the Rosetta Stone got to the British museum or how the bust of Nefertiti came to be in Berlin. In fact I didn’t really know how the great treasures or even how the collections of ancient treasures even originated at the great museums. So all of it was a great learning journey for me and if readers are interested in learning about that I think they’ll like that journey back.

Dr. Kent: Its almost its not too far a departure from your Hollywood reporting because all of us love talking about these ancient treasures in Egypt and since we were small children we’ve seen it in cartoons and documentaries. How did your passion start for all of this?

Sharon Waxman: For the ancient world?

Dr. Kent: Yes.

Sharon Waxman: Well I think probably going to museums as a kid. I grew up in Cleveland and there was a really great collection of antiquities and art too in the Cleveland Museum of Art by the way which is not a major character in the book but does happen to be one of the museums in the crosshairs of countries like Italy and Greece. In fact they just made a deal to give 13 pieces back from their collection, so this is a trend that’s going on and its affecting our museums. It’s absolutely true that as a young person, which I guess I’m not anymore, it was going after college to the Louvre and discovering these amazing treasures helped really peak my curiosity in archaeology and the ancient world and ancient civilizations.

Dr. Kent: So let’s talk about the politics of this right away because I don’t think all that many folks are familiar with the battles that have gone back and forth and the legal aspect. You talk about what’s the law surrounding it. How long does it have to be gone and all that stuff?

Sharon Waxman: Well there aren’t really laws that govern who took what, when and what’s the right thing to do. That’s part of the reason why it’s a free for all right now and why as you say it really does become political very quickly. There are local laws in each country for example, the curator, the former curator of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Marian True, is on trial today in Rome under Italian law for fraud and for receiving stolen goods. So it’s actually a criminal trial. You’re talking about a Harvard educated PhD in Greek and Roman civilization who for 24 years collected antiquities as chief curator of the antiquities department at the Getty and its not like she was stealing for herself, she was collecting for the museum.

That is the person who is now on trial for fraud and criminal possession in Rome under Italian law. So there is a problem that you have a ### law and you can have a politically motivated prosecution because this is certainly politically motivated in the case of Italy and the Getty. In fact they told me and you can see in the book what they say is what they really wanted was to get their stuff back but the Getty wouldn’t give it so they undertook this prosecution of the Getty curator. The thing about it is my first instinct was to say the west stole all these things, they should give them back it would be the just thing to do, but as I investigated I found its really more complicated than that and raises so many questions.

In addition to that, of course I traveled to the countries that were where the ancient world was; Egypt, Turkey and one of the stories I tell in the book is how Turkey through the Metropolitan Museum a law suit actually sued under American law the Metropolitan Museum of New York in the 1980s to get these golden treasures back from the time of King Crisis. You know the phrase he’s as rich as Crisis so there really was a King Crisis and he was very rich of course and they were very skilled in making gold and silver back in the time we’re talking going back 2500 years. That civilization is now completely gone but its in Turkey so Turkey found out that the Met had bought illegally dug up and smuggled gold and silver pieces and sued and got them back. Then I went and found out that in 2006 a hoardist called the Lydian Hoarde was stolen from a museum in Turkey where they didn’t have security cameras and they didn’t take care of it and let anybody visit it.

So the question arises is the right thing to do, certainly its not right to buy illegally dug up things because it ruins archaeological sites and kills our common heritage, but is it always the right thing to give it back if that country cant take care of what they have.

Dr. Kent: I spent a little time in Cairo and went to the Cairo Museum and I was astonished that the wall is just plastered with things and I had no idea what I was looking at.

Sharon Waxman: Yeah, exactly. That place is a relic in and of itself, it’s amazing. their trying to build a new museum; trying to raise money to build a state of the art museum outside of the pyramids, but it is astonishing. I’m sure some of your listeners have been to Egypt and if they’ve been to Egypt they’ve been to the Cairo Museum and you can see that the lettering on the typewriters looks like it was done in 1902 and it was. The labeling is there; the museum was built in 1900 so it’s a great example of colonial architecture and stuff goes missing. I could go on but its all in the book.

Dr. Kent: I heard that they even stored mummies in the hallway for awhile for some reason.

Sharon Waxman: Things are stored not only in the hallway but one of the things I tell in the book because I had lost who your listeners if they’ve seen anything about Egypt they’ve seen this guy. He’s an Indiana Jones type character, you know he wears the Indiana Jones hat; he’s always very charismatic and is really trying to drag Egypt into the 21st century so he has a team of people building a computer database because they have no proper inventory of what they even have. But what I discovered when I went to the museum and lots of people were doing the inventory were students who were volunteering from France and England and America, but on this little team of people on the left off in this very sweaty corner of the museum.

I found that there was another rival project going on underneath the building which I also went to visit, which is funded by the Japanese to do the same thing. So there’s bureaucracy, politics, and I went and asked why are there two projects duplicating one another’s work? They said, well it’s true that there are but we are going to take this out to the new museum when it opens. It kind of highlights a bit of chaotic and Byzantine and a hard job to take a country like Egypt which has so many issues; poverty being a main one, and try to bring it to a state of the art museum. They have so much, they have far more monuments and statues and mummies than even a wealthy country would have trouble taking care of all of that.

Dr. Kent: Now I’m curious, I’d like to talk a little about your background. I did read that you learned both Hebrew and Arabic. I’m also an Arabic speaker.

Sharon Waxman: Oh cool; we could conduct the interview in Arabic. You might lose all your listeners, they might not like that.

Dr. Kent: Yeah, I don’t think the transcriptionist would be happy with me! How have all of your life paths crossed in your latest project?

Sharon Waxman: In my latest project? Are you referring to the book?

Dr. Kent: The book and whatever else you’re working on.

Sharon Waxman: My latest project is actually a news site, a news organization which took me back into Hollywood and that was launched a week ago and is called thewrap.com, which is a play on “that’s a wrap” and that’s taken me back out of the world of cultural politics where I’ve gone to and I’m not sure that all the strands of my life do meet. I’ve been a newspaper journalist for 20 some years and you may know and your listeners may know that newspapers are in deep trouble financially at the moment and we’re trying to create a new kind of digital news organization that’s still professional journalism.

Dr. Kent: I’m looking at one of your latest articles that says exclusive, Bale says his F-bombs were justified.

Sharon Waxman: Oh where did you find that on Google?

Dr. Kent: No I found it on your thewrap.com site.

Sharon Waxman: On the site, right, so we got a big story today, the studio is rising, the studio is falling, deals are falling through the Oscars are coming.

Dr. Kent: I’m curious about this whole Christian Bale thing and all of the celebrity things that end up being pitched to major networks and coming through CNN and all that. How does all of that happen?

Sharon Waxman: How do celebrities get on major networks?

Dr. Kent: There’s a lot of people that have meltdowns, how does this particular story about Bale get front page?

Sharon Waxman: Well that’s one of the things that we’re really focused on in the wrap because nobody’s really chronicling and the web has changed our culture; that’s too broad a statement but how it has just I’m sure nobody’s reporting on that in the Hollywood arena basically because that’s exactly what happened is you had this A-list star Christian Bale who had a long moment of indiscretion on the set of his movie but that happened nine months ago! Just because somebody released the audio of that, it was the seed that was in his microphone. He was miked as an actor, got out on the internet and within 24 hours the guy went from being a hero, the Dark Knight into being the subject of ridicule and satire and poor moral judgment.

Not to say that he does not deserve that but it serves as a mirror of what the bloggists here and the web becomes as a collective judgment. That in turn percolates up immediately to the broadcast networks or the big boys of which there are fewer and fewer. It is a real lesson I think in how our culture has changed so profoundly. Just think about it, a set is a very private place where it’s considered a closed circle of that family. For that to come out in public in this community where I am in Hollywood is a very jarring but it’s the world we live in now.

Dr. Kent: I’m fascinated; now as I’m listening to you and checking out your site at the same time, you’ve got the waxwork and I find it so interesting these days that all these media collide. Books, blogging, and news media all sort of blend into one these days. Where do you think its going?

Sharon Waxman: I think we don’t know exactly where it’s going and that’s what makes for a very exciting time as a journalist to be able to be writing about it and learning and exploring. Stuff is being invented every single day and the kind of changes we’re seeing in the way we communicate and the vehicles that create common glue that holds together as a society. Movies are a big part of that; TV is a big part of that. Newspapers were a part of it but they’re going away so what’s going to replace that is obviously something that’s a conversation, the connection that’s happening on the web but a different kind of communicating and its much more interactive obviously and fluid and instantaneous and global. That to me as a journalist is one of the most fascinating things we can observe and write about but yet we’re also part of that because we are changing too as part of those changes. It’s a really interesting time to be doing what I’m doing, at least for me.

Dr. Kent: Wow. It seems like you always choose the things that you enjoy. Let’s go back to Loot for a minute. Because you’ve covered celebrities and big figures how did you find it chronicling these big figures in all of history here? Being tossed back from country to country.

Sharon Waxman: It was really wonderful. It was like being Indiana Jones as a journalist because the 19th century had; you know what they did in the 19th century? You’re bopping me back and forth but I spent a year mostly by myself in libraries and crawling through tombs and now I’m back in the web world which is completely different. The thing about the people in the 19th century is that they all kept journals. All these guys with these incredible characters; one of whom I write about in the book, this guy Giovanni and he was a circus performer who became an archaeologist at a time when it was being invented.

Archaeology itself only dates back to the 19th century and he kept these amazing diaries of his travels up and down the Nile. He discovered the Abu symbol, these huge statues in Aswan that was a temple built by Ramsey’s and he discovered the entrance to the second pyramid and he really was a circus strongman, that’s how he started. But he was a self taught engineer and inventor and all these guys in the 19th century is part of the people getting educated and they learned how to draw. So they would keep diaries and do sketches of their work. There’s this one amazing character after another that you can read and listen to their own words because they really come to life.

Dr. Kent: When you cover Hollywood, do you also find yourself in a back dusty room of libraries?

Sharon Waxman: No, not at all, I’m at my desk.

Dr. Kent: How do you go about that?

Sharon Waxman: Oh we’re just fielding phone calls, emails, texts from all over but yeah, we do go to the movies occasionally, not often enough.

Dr. Kent: You really tread the line between generations; it’s fascinating. Well there’s many websites online that detail things about this book Loot.

Sharon Waxman: There’s my site which is lootbook.com and all the reviews and commentary are there, discussion about the book and that’s the most gratifying thing is the response from readers who really have embraced the subject and offered up suggestions and thoughts. That was my goal with the book to bring the subject out of the hands of the museum authority and bring it to the wider public because there are solutions to be found to this issue of antiquities that are in a state of war at the moment. But only when more reasonable people, which are those of us who are not primary actors in this thing, there are ways to find to come to solutions that serve all of us and that in fact most of all serve the antiquities themselves so they’re not lost.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely and where can we find out about the antiquities after reading your book?

Sharon Waxman: Well, you can go to lootbook.com, that’s one place where there are resources, there’s lots of resources in the back of the book in the bibliography and I would contact the local museum and get involved in your local museum.

Dr. Kent: And visit Egypt.

Sharon Waxman: Yeah.

Dr. Kent: Now I have another question for you. from my personal experience, when I went down beneath the pyramid like most tourists do in that narrow, narrow tunnel and there’s this sort of empty room at the bottom.

Sharon Waxman: It’s a tomb.

Dr. Kent: What did you feel? You’ve been down there I assume.

Sharon Waxman: I didn’t go down there because I went all the way to the top, which is I think his name was ### tomb at the top. ### And it’s amazing; it’s like being in a modern art gallery, all wax that was floated up the Nile and yeah.

Dr. Kent: In your mind can you picture the works of art in those spaces? I know when I was in this tomb I was like man, this is empty I wish I knew what used to be in here.

Sharon Waxman: Either it was empty, or I think the tomb robbers took whatever was in there many years ago and I’m not enough of an Egyptologist although I did learn a great deal from doing this book, but I don’t know if that tomb was full in the same way that the tombs in the Valley of the Kings was filled absolutely chalk a block with furniture and food and like King Tut which was absolutely top to bottom every square inch filled with the belongings of the king. Those might’ve been the same.

Dr. Kent: It’s so much fun thinking about this stuff, just like I’m pretty obsessed with the newest headlines in Hollywood and this book I’ve heard a lot about it. I’m only a few pages into it but I’m psyched to read the rest. It’s called Loot: The battle of the stolen treasures of the ancient world. It’s by Sharon Waxman, thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Sharon Waxman: Thank you and I hope your listeners will check out my new site thewrap.com if they’re interested in intelligent dialogue about what’s going on in Hollywood.

Dr. Kent: Yeah, its good stuff. Thewrap.com. Well thank you so much and have a nice day!

Sharon Waxman: Thanks for having me, see you later.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show will be Jocelyn Crowley who has interviewed more than 150 father’s rights group leaders and she’s got a new book called Defiant Dads: Fathers rights activists in America, so come on back and listen to that.

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