For JIALIO’s first tri-national episode and first episode with more than one guest, Aaron and Ira are joined by former Chicagoans Tony Macaluso and his son Giulio from Chapel FM, the community radio station Tony runs in Leeds, UK. They discuss a road trip they took the previous summer exploring places meant to offer alternatives to mainstream society in the American West, including the urban design project Arcosanti in Arizona, where Ira and Aaron have both lived.

What unfolds is a quite nuanced, yet accessible, overview of Arcosanti, including some of the tensions and contradictions that have shaped and defined the project. These include the slowness of construction and what that has made possible, and the tension between the design of the project and the life lived inside of it.

Ultimately, Tony, who has long worked with archives (including the archive of Studs Terkel’s radio show) remarks on the coexistence of Arcosanti with its own archive, which is housed onsite. Arcosanti is itself a document of its own making, and it contains all of the documentation of its design and construction, and still more designs for projects envisioned and unrealized. Documents within documents within a document, like Russian nesting dolls - archives all the way down.

Arcosanti

Original Arcosanti design from Arcology: City in the Image of Man (1969)

Chapel FM (Leeds, UK)

Music:
“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.

“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller
Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

Ira and Aaron welcome Ira’s friend and collaborator Seth Zurer, longtime Chicagoan recently transplanted to Southern California. The starting point is a piece of family history that Seth recounted in the 2007 performance about utopias through which he and Ira first met. It is the little-known story of Clarion, a short-lived early-20th century Jewish agrarian settlement in Utah where his grandmother was born.

From there, the conversation drifts to Seth’s own westward move to Riverside, CA, where he has discovered The Cheech, Cheech Marin’s museum of Chicano art, and started navigating California’s cottage industry laws to sell his home-baked bread and fruit preserves. An oral history that Seth shared, which his mother, Diana, gave to the Yiddish Book Center about her lifelong relationship to Yiddish culture, provides a point of reference throughout.

Underlying the conversation is the ever-charged topic of when, how, and where Jews gather together identifiably as Jews, particularly in the American context where doing so has largely become a choice. Examples range as widely as the Catskills vacation colony founded by descendents of residents of Clarion to ecstatic dancing and singing with Israeli Hasids at a Rainbow Gathering in the Wyoming wilderness. In the end, Aaron just wants to know how a nice Jewish boy ends up starting Chicago’s largest festival celebrating cured pork?

NOTE: This episode has been in the hopper a long time before being released. It was recorded in August 2023, two months before the October 7th 2023 Hamas attack in Israel and the subsequent and ongoing Israeli war in Gaza. There is some discussion of American Labor Zionism in the mid-20th Century in the episode, but not much reference to present-day Israel-Palestine. However, if it seems strange that the post-Oct. 7th world is not acknowledged, that is why.

Diana Woll Zurer's Oral History @ Yiddish Book Center

Zurer Bread in Riverside, CA

Music:
“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.

“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller
Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

Following a thread about falling into things, Jiggle It a Little It’ll Open welcomes a surprise third guest, who also happens to be the grandson of the podcast’s first guest, and Aaron's first cousin once removed.

Jesse Schumann  stops by the virtual podcast studio with a tale to tell about the last six weeks. Since taking a temporary break from college for some self-discovery and recalibration, Jesse has practiced mindful self-compassion on a Canadian meditation retreat, launched a rap career in collaboration with his Venezualen barber in Argentina, and started gathering material for a novel about his grandfather and himself covering, in part, these last six weeks.

Additional topics along the “corridors of self-revelation” include the role of mushrooms in the development of human consciousness, pop songs named after famous people, the family trees of Jewish Mormons, and perceptions of the most intimate of human interactions in popular culture.

Find Jesse and his music on the internet:

Spotify

Apple Music

YouTube (music video)

Jesse's Instagram @jeschum




Music:
“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.

“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller
Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)