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Former U.S. Rep. Richard Gephardt has a key message for everyone these days: Politics “is a substitute for violence,” and respect for all is crucial.

On this edition of the Politically Speaking podcast, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum, Rachel Lippmann and Jenny Simeone welcome St. Louis Alderman Jeffrey Boyd to the program for the first time.

On the latest edition of the Politically Speaking podcast, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies welcome state Rep. Travis Fitzwater to the program for the first time.

Earth Day is a green-letter holiday for Earthworms, this year celebrating 29 years of communicative community service on KDHX! Worms and humans will whoop it up at the St. Louis Earth Day Festival in Forest Park on the glorious rolling grounds of The Muny. And did we say: it's all FREE!

           

We say a lot about this event in this Earthworms conversation with host Jean Ponzi and Bob Henkel, manager of St. Louis Earth Day's uber-resourceful year-round community-event program Recycling On The Go.
                              
These days, in the enviro-biz, it ain't all good news. But Earth's elegant, beautiful systems persist in humming all around us. Getting outside for a fete is a righteous way to celebrate the gifts of Earth, and of Life here. The Earth Day Festival in St. Louis offers open-air breezes, music, great food and drink, fun and enlightening activities, super-duper people-watching - and the opportunity to learn a lot of good stuff toward becoming a better steward of this Earth we in habit. All for Free. 

Hope to see you at the Earth Day Festival!

MUSIC: Agnes Polka, performed live at KDHX by the Chia Band.

THANKS to Andy Heaslet, Earthworms very Green-minded engineer.

 

On the latest edition of the Politically Speaking podcast, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies are pleased to welcome back Senate Minority Leader Gina Walsh.

On the latest edition of the Politically Speaking podcast, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies welcome Alderman-elect John Collins-Muhammad for the first time.

Their motto: 124 Cities, 10 States, 1 River. Their most recent collaboration: a proposal to the Trump administration for investing in an infrastructure plan that restores ecology as well as built features along the Mississippi.

They are the mayors of towns of all sizes bordering the river's "mainstem," forces joined in the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative. This group of local leaders jumped on the presidential campaign promise of infrastructure improvements, preparing a plan they presented in Washington on March 1, that calls for investing $7.93 billion in specific actions that will create 100,000 new jobs, sustain 1.5 million existing jobs, and generate $24 billion in economic return.

     

The mayors' plan is grounded in economics. It modestly calls for near-current levels of funding for valuable EPA, DOT, DOI, FEMA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers programs that clean our water and return taxpayer investments at the rate of at least 2 o 1. This group was FIRST to present a proposal to the White House, meeting with the President's senior infrastructure advisor and representatives from White House Intergovernmental Affairs and the National Security Council.

This Earthworms conversation with Colin Wellenkamp, Executive Director of MRCTI, details foresight, cooperation, leadership, and common sense - applied to protect and restore the Triple Bottom Line of natural, human and capital resources - from elected officials of American towns.

It's a proposal, not a done deal by any means, but . . . Kudos, mayors for GREAT work!  Stay tuned.

Music: Butter II, performed live at KDHX by Ian Ethan Case
THANKS to Andy Heaslet, Earthworms engineer.

Related Earthworms Conversations: Leadership in a Global Way: Mississippi River Town Mayors (June, 2016)

 

On the evening of Sunday, March 26, environmentalist-minded community members gathered at The Stage at KDHX for "The Invasive Species Follies: Bush Honeysuckle, Mosquitos, Us," an educational variety show with a you-can-do spin. Hosted by Jean Ponzi of KDHX's Earthorms podcast, the show featured live music, drama, and education, all centered on two of St. Louis's biggest invasive species: the bush honeysuckle and the mosquito. 

Despite the subject matter, the mood during The Invasive Species Follies multifarious acts was anything but doom and gloom. There was laughter abound during the "Honeysuckle Cabaret," a marionette show created by Christine Torlina and Gary Schimmelpfenig in which Ponzi and Dale Dufer, her husband and Follies co-producer, play characters who fight evil honeysuckle bushes and encounter levitating tables. The audience was charmed with the "Honeysuckle Table Fable" starring Ruby and Eli Ackerman, a fantastical skit in which girl and the spirit of bush honeysuckle learn to coexist. 

The evening show also featured a (sort of) 'adult-oriented' act, in which 'Sarah the Honeysuckle Stripper' (Sarah Bundy) lasciviously stripped the bark off of a honeysuckle bough in a dress handmade entirely out -- you guessed it -- honeysuckle fibers and wood. The show's lighthearted atmosphere was complemented by music from St. Louis's own Augusta Bottoms Consort, whose setlist included "Time to Kill the Rooster" off 2000's Bottomland and some Follies-exclusive songs including Gloria Attoun's true-experience "Diggin' Up That Honeysuckle." 

Sunday evening's show also included some serious moments for learning and reflection. Ponzi provided information about bush honeysuckle and mosquitos (specifically, the three types of mosquito that transmit diseases to humans), as well as things people can do in their lives to counter these pesky species. Dale Dufer of Think About Tables gave a short demonstration on how to turn honeysuckle into beautiful, organic-looking tables, thereby giving uprooted plants a second life. The show also featured Jenn DeRose of the Green Dining Alliance, who gave a presentation on the organization's mission of promoting sustainable practices within local restaurants. 

The show closed on an optimistic note with a cover of Bing Crosby's "Accentuate the Positive," sung by Ponzi and backed by the Augusta Bottoms Consort. The song encapsulated the forward-looking essence of the show. "We want the audience to come away with a positive feeling and motivation to do something," Ponzi said in a phone interview the day before, acknowledging that it's common for environmentalists to fall into the doomsday mentality. "Sometimes, it's not all that easy to make this stuff funny," Ponzi said. "But it's a worthwhile effort." 

Keep watch for the next Follies and in the meantime subscribe to the Earthworms podcasts including related episodes such as "Fight the Bite," "Beyond the War on Invasive Species," "Bush Honeysuckle: Sweep It!" 

A river in songs and legends is also one of the most altered major waterways in the world, and the longest river in North America. The Missouri roils eastward from the Rocky Mountains to join it's mighty Mississippi cousin just upstream of St. Louis. 

Before this powerful confluence, Big Muddy flows past the historic, friendly town of Washington, MO. And on those banks - in fact, right in Renwick Riverfront Park - all are welcome to help clean up and celebrate the Missouri in the 6th Washington River Festival on Saturday, April 8th. Local artists and river friends host this festival in partnership with Missouri River Relief.

            

Join the clean-up effort from 9 am - 1 pm. The Festival from 11 am - 5 pm features music, educational booths, art activities, food, and an art auction - all FREE and all arrayed along Washington's Missouri River banks.

THANKS to Earthworms guests Steve Schnarr, River Relief Program  Manager (and real-life River Rat) and festival organizer Gloria Attoun for this flowing conversation!

THANKS also to Andy Heasley, Earthworms engineer.
Related Earthworms Conversations: Living With Rivers: Big Muddy MO (February 15, 2017 - AND Mississippi River Town Mayors: Leadership in Global Way (June 2016) 

On the latest edition of the Politically Speaking podcast, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies welcome back Missouri state Sen. Jake Hummel to the show for the fourth time.

On the latest edition of the Politically Speaking podcast, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies are pleased to welcome Rep. Holly Rehder for the first time.

In 2004 former KDHX DJ Kip Loui gathered some of the most talented musicians in St. Louis to produce a Chuck Berry tribute album for KDHX titled "Brown Eyed Handsome Man". In honor of the recent passing of the St. Louis legend and founding father of rock 'n' roll, we are making a limited run available to order from our online store. Recorded at the Magnolia Studios, this CD features recordings of famous Chuck Berry tunes reinterpreted by Fontella Bass, Jay Farrar, Bottle Rockets, The Skeletons, and more. Roy Kasten, DJ of Feel Like Going Home on Wednesday mornings 7-10 a.m., wrote the liner notes:

Chuck Berry has been called the poet laureate of rock & roll, but that doesn’t go far enough. Dramatist, historian, philosopher, and sociologist, Berry can tell you more about the promise of rock & roll than any music critic can. “Hail, hail rock & roll/Deliver me from the days of old,” he sang. Berry didn’t bluff. He gave voice to a new culture with wit, wordplay, and narratives that trumped catchy novelties, though he could write those, too. His greatest songs — so full of life, so affectionately detailed, so rhythmically natural, so observant and so playful — rock for the sake of rocking, for how good it feels to have no particular place to go because that means you can go anywhere.

Berry wrote some fine blues — especially “Have Mercy Judge” and “Why Should We End This Way?” — but he paid no mind to fate and received repetition. His verbal ingenuity is spectacular; a souped-up groove is all it takes to let the imagination rip. All the junk and jewels of America — the glory is you can’t tell them apart — are packed into the most compressed form. His songs move, the rhymes rocking in perfect time, the stories grabbing you from the get-go: “Tulane and Johnny opened a novelty shop/Back under the corner was the cream of the crop/Everything was clicking’ and the business was good/‘Till one day, lo and behold, an officer stood.” His style isn’t inimitable, and it isn’t precisely original; it’s archetypal and American. Once that would have been a contradiction, but that was before Berry turned the sound of a subculture into a universal lingo and made three-minute dance numbers into comprehensive portraits of life.

Berry’s characters — the mysterious Brown-Eyed Handsome Man, Memphis Marie, Tulane and Johnny, and Sweet Little Sixteen, with her grown-up blues and fan-club photos — resonated with an audience hip to the cinematic realism of “On the Waterfront” and “Giant” but even hipper to the wave of rocking rhythm and blues cresting before them. Years before he walked into Chess studios to record “Maybellene,” Berry was integrating country and blues in St. Louis bars. When he changed Johnny B. Goode from “colored boy” to “country boy,” he wasn’t pandering; he was stretching his audience and his art. His songs rarely confronted class and color lines directly; they made an end run to the wide open space on the other side.

Once asked to name his favorite cover version, Berry grinned and replied, “All of them.” To cover Chuck Berry is to find the abracadabra of rock & roll, to open a thousand creative doors. Our lives are never so open-ended, our possibilities never really endless. But punch up the juke box and for three minutes “Around and Around,” “Come On,” and “Little Queenie” present more freedom, more truth, and more delight than you could otherwise hope for. It just goes to show that with a great rock & roll song, and with the artist who set the gold standard, you really never can tell.

Tracklist

1. Fontella Bass- "Brown Eyed Handsome Man"
2. Bottle Rockets- "Come On"
3. Earl- "Beautiful Delilah" 
4. Jay Farrar- "Why Should We End This Way"
5. Rockhouse Ramblers- "Tulane"
6. Tinhorn- "Club Nitty Gritty"
7. The Skeletons- "Jaguar & Thunderbird"
8. Soulard Blues Band- "No Money Down"
9. Bennie Smith & The Urban Express- "Viva Viva Rock & Roll"
10. Waterloo- "No Particular Place to Go"
11. The Gentlemen Callers- "Ramona Say Yes"
12. The Phonocapters- "Little Queenie"
13. Gumbohead- "You Never Can Tell"
14. Highway Matrons- "Sweet Little Sixteen"
15. Bob Reuter & Palookaville- "Bye Bye Johnny"
16. The Orbits- "Thirty Days"
17. Trip Daddys- "Johnny B. Goode"
18. Magnolia Summer- "Around & Around" 

Order your copy here!

"It's how we used to learn," says Scott McClintock, science teacher and board member of the Experiential Education Exchange of St. Louis. "You experience something, reflect on it - learn from it - and incorporate it into your life skills."

Scott expands this modest summary in an Earthworms conversation that covers outdoor trips, building school gardens, digging up the cow that died on the school farm last year - and how real-life experiences (and topics like climate change or tolerance) are growing human minds and hearts while also teaching necessary math and reading. Not your straight-line test-score old-school blues song.

                    

Leaders and partners of the EEE have collaborated since 2013 to help teachers, students, parents and school administrators get access to Experiential know-how, grounding St. Louis in an international education movement. A free Spring Event on March 29 and the annual conference on April 29 of the Experiential Education Exchange are opportunities to build skills and relationships in a learning mode where connecting to nature and becoming fully human headline the curriculum.

Learn (a lot!) more at www.eeestl.org 

Music: Magic 9, performed at KDHX by Infamous Stringdusters

THANKS to Andy Heaslet, Earthworms engineer

Related Earthworms Conversations: The Big Book of Nature Activities (June 28, 2016)

Our latest edition of the Politically Speaking podcast features St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger, who’s making his first appearance since taking office more than two years ago.

On the latest edition of the Politically Speaking podcast, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies welcome Dan Guenther to the program for the first time.

They may nest in a tree stump, or holes in the ground, or pull nest fibers from the stalks of your dried-up native plants. Wherever they can make a home, you will find them fascinating, useful guests. Earthworms guest Heather Holm - a landscape designer, author and native plant expert - LOVES to introduce humans to them!

                           

They are Native Bees - species of insects that pollinate many kinds of plants. They are very different from familiar honeybees (introduced here from Europe) which live in huge colonies of thousands of bees. Our native bees are usually solitary, visible only during their brief adult lives, when their determined purpose is to build an out-of-the-way nest, provision it with "bee bread" made from flower pollen, lay eggs, seal their nest up - and die. Next year, new native bees will hatch from those obscure places and re-start the cycle of reproduction and pollination.

Heather Holm now works, researches, writes and speaks from her Minnesota home in the Twin Cities. She hails from the University of Ontario, Guelph, where another recent Earthworms guest brought us intel about honeybees. She visited St. Louis in early March, as keynote speaker for the Partners for Native Landscaping workshop, where she kindled many fires of interest in gardening to attract and observe native bees - including with Earthworms host Jean Ponzi!

Music: Divertimento K 131, performed by Kevin McLeod

Thanks to Andy Heaslet, Earthworms engineer.

Related Earthworms Conversations: Bees and People (January 2017)

Prairie Plants: Growing a Joint Venture with Nature (February 2017)

Gina Alvarez is the Executive Director at Living Arts Studio, a non-profit organization based in Maplewood that gives artists with disabilities a place to explore their passion for art. "We aren't approaching art as a rehabilitation or therapeutic tool," Alvarez explains -- nonetheless adding, "art does change lives." Given the freedom to express themselves and adapt to positive feedback, artists develop a unique confidence in their abilities: "They can initially walk in and think 'I don't know,' and then a year later say 'I am an artist.'"

Valentine' Day celebrations.

When I visited the studio just before Valentine's Day, everyone was getting ready to show their love. Colorful heart-shaped balloons made the environment even homier, while fellow artists collaborated on a project in which they drew hearts in their own unique styles. 

Aided by Alvarez, Living Arts not only facilitates art-making but also introduces artists with disabilities to a wider community beyond the studio. Member artists have exhibited their work at venues such as the Sheldon Art Gallery and the University City Library. For Alvarez, this represents the community-building promise of art: "The level of exhibition opportunities they are participating in is notable. I think that's huge. The sense of accomplishment anybody would experience with opportunities like that is tremendous." She also believes in the potential of her artists: "Pursuing exhibitions at high-calibre venues shows that people with disabilities can participate on that level, and should, and will."  

Since joining Living Arts Studio in May of 2012, Alvarez has witnessed the progress her artists have made in their art careers. But more importantly, she is thrilled to see them gain community and friendship in the studio as they build trust between each other and with facilitators. "I don't think it's easy walking into any studio and agreeing to be part of something that you are not entirely sure what it is."

Living Arts Studio is always actively seeking methods to improve their programs and increase accessibility. "We work with cultural institutions through workshops, and see what accessibility looks like in programing, in art tools, and how you adapt tools to meet the needs of people with disabilities," Alvarez explained. The studio also uses the help of other institutions to "mould the programs into a more universal design." As Alvarez put it, "Through universality, there is inclusion."  

        Larry Eisenberg at work.

Artist Larry Eisenberg has been part of the community at Living Arts Studio for over a year now. Seeing his father work on architecture design growing up, Eisenberg has taken to drawing houses and making art that shows a sense of space. "I am always looking for something that reminds me of landscape beauty," he pointed out. For Eisenberg, the freedom of creativity is expansive: "You never make mistakes because it doesn't matter if it it's art." Laughing, he added, "Nobody knows."

Melelani Perry, another artist, found belonging at Living Arts. When I asked Perry what the studio means to her, without hesitation she said, "Safe. Everyone is friendly and keeps us laughing." 

Melelani Perry with her work.

Perry came to the studio two years ago wanting something different. She learned to sew and alter her own clothes. A recurring theme in Perry's work has been images of women. Using self-portraits or pictures from magazines or self-portraits, she bedazzles her women with colorful tapes, glitter and stickers. Inspired by Buddhism and the mandala, Perry often gives her women a third eye, a symbol of spiritual enlightenment. She also uses markers for exaggerated makeup, which adds a postmodern quality to her work. "I put myself in my art a lot. It's my signature," Perry explained. Alvarez added, "Because you are the one thing you know the best, right?" 

The fulfillment Alvarez gets from her work goes beyond seeing the positive change art-making can bring to others -- it has also made her a better artist. "They work totally intuitively without criticism of their own personal process, often with reckless abandon. The freedom they have is extremely inspiring to me."

Producing sculptural objects and installations using ceramics, glass, fiber and print techniques, Alvarez has exhibited her own work in solo and group exhibitions at many venues, including the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Gallery 210, Boots Contemporary Art, the Center for Creative Arts, Craft Alliance, the Des Lee Gallery, Pele Prints and fort gondo. She has received abundant recognition from both local and national organizations and has also curated many shows at these same spaces. 

Besides her careers as an artist and director of Living Arts, Alvarez teaches at St. Louis Community College, Forest Park and serves as Executive Director of VSA Missouri, which promotes arts resources for people with disabilities. 

Her path to Living Arts began when she was Gallery Director at the St. Louis Artists' Guild. While working there, she and the former Executive Director of Living Arts Studio and VSA Missouri curated an exhibition in the Sight and Vision series called Speaking Volumes, for artists Susan Shie, who is visually-impaired, and Richard Meyers, who is hearing-impaired. Through that experience Alvarez decided to come work at Living Art Studio.

Alvarez recalled how, with no background in social services, she went through a learning curve as she transitioned from a working artist to something of a community organizer, aided in part by her experience in the Regional Arts Commission's Community Arts Training Institute. But being an artist rather than a social worker has meant that she makes sure to treat members as artists first and foremost. Alvarez explains, "It has changed my personal practice to be less individual and more community-based. It has had an impact on me personally in ways I never anticipated as a working artist." 

On the latest edition of the Politically Speaking podcast, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jenny Simeone welcome state Rep. Jean Evans to the program.

In Earthworms' experience, when people want to do something Green they think recycling - or solar panels! But what makes solar tick? What are your options? How is solar evolving, in efficiency, affordability, and influence in the "energy space?"

                         
Paul McKnight, owner of St. Louis-based EFS Energy, has made solar his business since 2011. He's weathered solar's ups/downs - and continues to be excited by innovations in power storage, renewable energy financing - and more.

                    

Music: Giant Steps, Dave Stone

THANKS to Andy Heaslet, intrepid engineer

Related Earthworms' Conversations: PACE Financing (January 2017)

Energy: Efficiency, Policy, Financing (September 2016)

All-Electric America> (August 2016)

The melee to get closer to becoming St. Louis mayor is mere hours away from its conclusion.