Sedge Thomson's West Coast Live, San Francisco's Radio Show to the World!

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Join us in the Port Commission Room on the second floor of 1 Ferry Plaza in San Francisco, to make beautiful radio together. Sedge welcomes:

Author

Geoff Dyer

Author of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

Author

Louis B. Jones

Fiction director for the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and author of the brand-new novel Radiance.

Film Maker

Richard Schickel

Life and Time magazine's film critic and movie historian for over 40 years with his latest book, Conversations with Scorsese.

Farmer

Lee James

will briefly step out of the farmers market to talk to us about Tierra Vegetables, her family farm in the heart of Sonoma County.

Acoustic Trio

The Devil Makes Three

bring us their punky perspective on vintage American blues.

The Enchanting

Mike Greensill

Resident piano player and accompanist for Sedge Thomson's West Coast Live.

Join us in the Port Commission Room on the second floor of 1 Ferry Plaza in San Francisco, to make beautiful radio together. Sedge welcomes:

Author

BHARATI MUKHERJEE

with a new novel, Miss New India.

Author

ARMISTEAD MAUPIN

with his new Tales of the City musical at A.C.T.

Music Critic

GREIL MARCUS

author of The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes.

Farmer

DAVID WINSBERG

of Happy Quail Farms.

Musician

WESLA WHITFIELD

inhabiting that indeterminate zone where jazz meets cabaret.

Singers

MEREDITH MONK AND KITKA

in the first collaboration between a local favorite and a MacArthur Genius.

Online Organizer

ELI PARISER

Board President of the 5-million member organization MoveOn.org, with his insightful new book The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You.

Author

ROY BLOUNT JR. 

with his humorous new work Alphabetter Juice: or the Joy of Text.

Author

JULIAN DAWSON

author of And on Piano. Nicky Hopkins: The Extraordinary Life of Rock's Greatest Session Man.

Journalist

DAVID TEMPLETON

whose critically-acclaimed solo show Wretch Like Me is now at the Roxie Theater.

Travel Writers

SPUD HILTON & MARY MOORE MASON

stop by, representing the 450 travel writers in San Francisco this weekend!

Musical Group

ANCIENT FUTURE

creating cross-cultural music and dance by learning from the world's great ancient traditions.

 

We gather at REVIVAL, 2102 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, to make beautiful radio together!

Sedge welcomes:

MICHAEL McCLURE, award-winning poet, playwright, songwriter and novelist, with his newly-published book, Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems.

ANTHONY HOROWITZ, screenwriter of acclaimed British World War II detective television series Foyle's War, and author of the bestselling Alex Rider children's series, with the final installment, Scorpia Rising.

LISA TAYLOR, author of Your Farm in the City: An Urban Dweller's Guide to Growing Food and Raising Animals

BRIAN CHRISTIAN, author of The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What it Means to Be Alive.

QUINN DEVEAUX AND THE BLUE BEAT REVUE with their New Orleans soul and early blues sound that is sure to get you up out of our seat.

The Rambunctious MIKE GREENSILL

 

 

Join us at the Ferry Building in San Francisco to make beautiful radio together!

February 26, 2011 Show Guests

Sedge welcomes:

WESLEY STACE (AKA singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding) with his new novel, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

MAXINE HONG KINGSTON: In her singular voice—humble, elegiac, practical—Maxine Hong Kingston sets out to reflect on aging as she turns sixty-five, in her new book I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

Naturalist CLAIRE PEASLEE on Central Valley waterbirds

DAN HICKS and his Kollege of Musical Knowledge
 

THE EVENTFUL MIKE GREENSILL

and so much more!

Join us at REVIVAL, 2102 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, to make beautiful radio together!

All tickets for this show are $28.* and include prix fixe breakfast and coffee service.

Sedge welcomes:

ALAN PAUL, author of Big in China: My Unlikely Adventure Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, and Reinventing Myself in Beijing

ADAM HASLETT, author of Union Atlantic

 GABRIELLE HAMILTON  , founder of New York's acclaimed Prune Restaurant, with her new memoir Blood, Bones & Butter.

MARK MOFFETT, AKA "Dr. Bugs," author of Adventures Among Ants

KARL AND CARL'S Tips on Travel

EOS ENSEMBLE, an exciting chamber music group comprised mainly of members of the San Francisco Opera orchestra

EVIE LADIN, in a solo performance 

THE EFFERVESCENT MIKE GREENSILL

 

*No discounted tickets or gift certificates accepted for this show

Join us at REVIVAL, 2102 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, to make beautiful radio together!

All tickets for this show are $28.* and include prix fixe breakfast and coffee service.

Sedge welcomes:

T.C. BOYLE, celebrating the publication of his thirteenth novel, When the Killing's Done

CAROL EDGARIAN, cofounder and editor of Narrative Magazine and author of the novel Three Stages of Amazement

TOM SHADYAC, director of Ace Ventura, The Nutty Professor, Patch Adams and many more, on tour with his latest project, something completely different. In his new documentary I AM, Shadyac asks some of today's most profound thinkers two questions -- What's wrong with our world, and What can we do about it?

LORETTA LYNCH, with music that's a little bit front porch, a little bit backwoods, the art motel on a long stretch of highway

STEVEN WILLIS, with a new CD Taproot

THE SPONTANEOUS MIKE GREENSILL

 

*no discounted prices or gift certificates accepted for this show

Join us at REVIVAL, 2102 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, to make beautiful radio together!

All tickets for this show are $28.* and include prix fixe breakfast and coffee service.

Sedge welcomes:

CATHLEEN SCHINE, whose new novel The Three Weissmanns of Westport is a modern retelling of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility

SARA WHEELER, author of The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle

KEITH THOMSON, author of Twice A Spy (sequel to Once A Spy)

LINDA TILLERY and BARBARA HIGBIE, in honor of In honor of National Women's History Month

TYLER NELSON and NANCY GUSTAFSON, of Lorin Maazel's Castleton Festival Opera, performing next week at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, the first time the company has performed outside of their home theater in Virginia.

THE SMARTEST MIKE GREENSILL

 

*No discount tickets or gift certificates accepted for this show

 

Join us at the Ferry Building in San Francisco to make beautiful radio together!

Sedge welcomes:

CHRIS SMITHER with a new CD, Time Stands Still

SUSAN HALL, artist and author of River Flowing Home

JANE MCGONIGAL, game designer and author of Reality is Broken

SHARON SALZBERG, author of REAL HAPPINESS: The Power of Meditation

SUMMER BRENNER, author of My Life in Clothes

KEN OLSEN, Olsen Organic Farm

ZAHRA NOORBAKHSH, whose comedy show All Atheists Are Muslim is now at San Francisco's Stage Werx Theatre

THE GENEROUS MIKE GREENSILL

More wonderful guests, TBA

In the Port Commission Room on the second floor of the San Francisco Ferry Building

RESERVATIONS: for your 2 hours of slow-food organic radio with only the freshest conversation, music and play: 415-664-9500, or TICKETWEB.

 

Join us at the Ferry Building in San Francisco to make beautiful radio together!

Sedge welcomes...

LISA NAPOLI, public radio show producer and host, and author of Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth.

MARK STEVENSON, futurist, stand-up, musician, and author of An Optimist's Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer "What's Next?"

MICHAEL DAVID LUKAS, author of The Oracle of Stamboul, in which a preternaturally intelligent little girl becomes an advisor to the Ottoman sultan.

TOMMY EMMANUEL, Australian guitar wizard with a new album, Little by Little

The SAN FRANCISCO BOYS CHORUS, led by Artistic Director Ian Robertson, will share their Grammy Award winning sound with us before their upcoming performance in Robert Moses' world premier of Fable & Faith at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

THE DIMPLEY MIKE GREENSILL

In the Port Commission Room on the second floor of the San Francisco Ferry Building

RESERVATIONS: for your 2 hours of slow-food organic radio with only the freshest conversation, music and play: 415-664-9500, or TICKETWEB.

 

Join us at the Ferry Building in San Francisco to make beautiful radio together!

Sedge welcomes...

SNL's LARAINE NEWMAN, performing Feb. 4 and 5 at The Marsh in San Francisco

RODNEY CROWELL, Grammy-winning performer, and author of a new memoir Chinaberry Sidewalks

PEGGY ORENSTEIN, award-winning writer, editor and speaker talks about her newest book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter

HELENE MARSHALL of Marshall's Honey Farm

THE MOORE BROTHERS, the innovative acoustic duo from Grass Valley 

THE SPECIFIC MIKE GREENSILL

 

In the Port Commission Room on the second floor of the San Francisco Ferry Building

RESERVATIONS: for your 2 hours of slow-food organic radio with only the freshest conversation, music and play: 415-664-9500, or TICKETWEB.

 

Join us a the Ferry Building in San Francisco to make beautiful radio together!

GREIL MARCUS revisits more than forty years of listening to Bob Dylan, weaving individual moods and moments into a brilliant history of changing times

MIKE DAISEY, on his double-header--The Last Cargo Cult and The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs--at the Berkeley Rep

BRUCE JENKINS, author of Goodbye: In Search of Gordon Jenkins, about his father, Gordon "Gor" Jenkins, top-notch composer, arranger, conductor and performer

THE BOBS, beloved (and award-winning) a cappella practitioners return to the WCL stage

"HE SAID/SHE SAID" - duets performed by Dan (from the Bobs) and Angie Doctor (from the group Clockwork)

The Magic MIKE GREENSILL

In the Port Commission Room on the second floor of the San Francisco Ferry Building

RESERVATIONS: for your 2 hours of slow-food organic radio with only the freshest conversation, music and play: 415-664-9500, or TICKETWEB.

Our first LIVE Broadcast of 2011

JOAN GUSSOW, author of Growing, Older: a Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables, in which the author writes about everything from garden pests and national food policy, to zucchini and butterflies

LINDA SCHLOSSBERG, award-winning writer with her debut novel Life in Miniature, a wholly original coming-of-age story.

TOM RACHMAN, author of The Imperfectionists, his highly acclaimed debut novel about a struggling international newspaper in Rome

DAVID VANN, former National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Wallace Stegner Fellow, John L'Hereux Fellow, with his new novel Caribou Island

WILL BROKAW of Brokaw Nursery, on California-grown subtropical fruits

Music by OR, THE WHALE, a band that will rock you, make you dance, and maybe even inspire you to contribute to their amazing vocal pyrotechnics—voices everywhere, indeed.

THE REAL MIKE GREENSILL

In the Port Commission Room on the second floor of the San Francisco Ferry Building

RESERVATIONS: for your 2 hours of slow-food organic radio with only the freshest conversation, music and play: 415-664-9500, or TICKETWEB.

Whoa, you can be there again!  January 26, 2006. 

presented LIVE at the now defunct Empire Plush Room in still extant York Hotel.  ( Back LIVE 2011 at the Ferry Building January 22nd)

MONEY is the theme today, and 

DAVE BARRY, humorist and columnist, has something to say about the subject in his new book Money Secrets...

LIZ PERLE, author of Money: A Memoir, also Editor-in-Chief of Common Sense Media

MATTHEW and TERCES ENGELHART, authors, The Abounding River, owners of Cafe Gratitude

THE COTTARS, amazing young CELTIC musicians from Cape Breton

CHARLIE OWEN, San Francisco's best-kept-secret soul singer

and the ever-splendid MIKE GREENSILL, investing in the house piano.

Our Anniversary Show - Today - a live-ish special mixed with some highlights from those formative years.  We pulled together just a few hilarious and moving moments with a few of the 10,000 guests since Sedge Thomson's West Coast Live first broadcast January 8, 1994 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco. West Coast Live succeeded his successful West Coast Weekend, which began in October 1984, following a year of Breakfast Jam he began in September 1983, both produced live. Yikes, 27 years of live radio!

The theme today turns out to be Voices -- voices still here, some gone, voices produced through other forms -- of instruments, history, emotions.  We start with the first :30 prior to the first broadcast from the Cowell Theater, before we went live to air, and the opening moments from January 8, 1994, with DIANE HIDY at the piano.  You are there!  

In the First Hour we begin with a conversation with the inimitable JULIA CHILD about food and eating and love, from 11/16/1996 when she was 84, doing her best Meryl Streep impersonation. We reveal her favorite hors d'oeuvre. 

From 10/221994, TERRY JONES of MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS expounds of falsettos, and how comedy is made in Life of Brian. What fun we can have in a live, spontaneous show with a lively audience!

Later, on 11/25/2006 at the Plush Room, LAURIE ANDERSON and the Tuvan Throat Singers CHIRGILCHAN came in and we persuaded the TUVANs to teach the renowned a capella group THE BOBS how to throat-sing.  First you imitate a Harley-Davidson....

MIKE GREENSILL plays the brief interval break, 

then the 2nd Act begins with THE STRING CHEESE INCIDENT from 8/31/1996 as they were on their way to acclaim 

From November 11, 1995, as we celebrated the reopening of the Legion of Honor Museum, STUART CANIN demos with a Bach fugue the Guarneri Del Gesu violin Jashcha Heifitz played and donated to the museum.  And he recreates the beginning of the FRED ALLEN - JACK BENNY feud of 1936 with the :45 Bee.

STUDS TERKEL, the late, great Chicagoan waxes on the horrors of solo violin music, except for STUART CANIN, JASCHA HEIFETZ, and FRITZ KREISLER and how his mother always wanted him to play like MARVIN, his upstairs neighbor.  Then we here about the importance of stories that make political movements human and personal.

MIKE GREENSILL and WESLA WHITFIELD updated the 1952 LOUIS JORDAN jazz classic as Greensill for President for Nov. 1, 2008, a story of political adventures that are the same, but different, and still the source for great lyrics.

And we close with a high-energy song from the 6/8/1996 show with TAJ MAHAL joining with JIM CAMPILONGO and the 10 GALLON CATS for a festive fishing and libation number.  We had to retrieve TAJ from the end of the Cowell Theater pier, where he'd gone to hang out that beautiful morning with the Russian fisherman using cuttlefish and cut fish as bait and spark plugs for weights.

The closing credits from that day features DIANE HIDY rocking out with her classical verve 

 

RESERVATIONS for the Live Broadcast at the Ferry Building in San Francisco: for your 2 hours of slow-food organic radio with only the freshest conversation, music and play: 415-664-9500, or TICKETWEB.  Also facebook.

Gentle Frolic and New Year highlights for this special that made it way through ice and snow and sunshine and time and space to be with you as we commence 2011.

Originally broadcast January 3, 1998 from The Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco.

OMAR SOSA and JOHN SANTOS, featuring music from their latest recordings Nfume - For the Unseen and Omar Omar.

Monologist SPALDING GRAY. Seven years ago, Spalding went elsewhere.  What stories he told. Here he talks about The Slippery Slope. Poignant then, and especially now. He says stories are a form of reincarnation.

Slack guitar music from GEORGE KUO, MARTIN PAHINUI, DENNIS KAMAKHI, and DAVID KAMAKAHI.

KEVIN KELLY, editor of "Wired" (in 1998). Here talking about technology as we knew it in 1998 and in Out of Control.  His new book, 2011, is What Technology Wants. What a time-trip.

Travel tips from CARL AND KARL, timeless, chanelling on Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Jonathan Winters, and George Carlin.

Music from piano player MIKE GREENSILL who's partied all night to be with you today.