Mills College at Northeastern University

That's cool.

Um, Pamela Z, one of our listeners, uh, writes in to ask, Mike writes in, "Please ask your guest to comment on the loss of Mills College, uh, whose musical director, Fred Frith, was critical, critically important to improvisational music."

Well, it's devastating to all of us, um, the, uh, the loss of arts institutions, um, not just Mills, but just so...

But like, the Art Institute-

But before it was all just, uh, recording and, and just...

I also have a, uh, an MFA in electronic music and recording media from Mills College, so that was my training as a recording engineer.

So that's where a lot of that stuff came up.

But it was mainly recording for, to documenting live performances rather than broadcast.

First I was studying piano and then I finally heard bebop, Miles Davis and the drummer Kenny Clark when I was 14 and I immediately fell in love with that and I had a friend who was a better piano player than I was.

So I became a drummer and when I had gone through music school and sort of swept that under the rug, so to speak, when I got out of after Juilliard and Mills College in 1963, I said to myself, "Well, where in the world is drumming the main voice in the orchestra, so to speak?" And the answer to that is two places in West Africa or I guess in East Africa as well and in Indonesia.

What happened was in a nutshell was that I felt very strongly that I didn't want to come back and imitate the sound of African drums or African bells or either Balinese instruments.

They're very beautiful, they're very perfect, but they have their own history, they have their own tradition, they have their own context.

And we know from accounts from other makers, there are people who were enraged by this.

Tony Prieto, who was teaching at Mills College, was absolutely up in arms about this work.

By the time we're sort of coming to a close here, he's made the rocking pot.

He's begun his employment at Otis College of Art in L.A.

Ayelet Waldman's The Other Woman in 2009, Berkeley.

Annie Barrows' The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society in 2018, connecting to UC Berkeley and Mills College.

And we haven't even touched sports, finance, or crime.

Michael Lewis operating out of Berkeley absolutely dominating the cultural conversation with Moneyball in 2011 and The Big Short in 2015.

Um, when, when, when he appointed him, my first thought was he knows where the bodies are buried.

I mean, there, there's been rumors of Rob and Bonta forever, going even as far as, uh, tips I've gotten that they were involved in the deal for Mills College, um, to be sold.

And so there are a lot of deals out there that they've made with, you know, with the devil.

I'm sure they were not all on the up and up by any means.

Um, I, I think, look, the, to me, this just, first of all, he was obviously pandering to the world audience, but it actually wasn't the right one.

I expect this kind of speech, and it would actually make sense if he was giving it at like Mills College in Oakland, right? But that audience was diverse, too.

So who exactly is he talking to? Michelle?

Mm.

I was looking at your bio.

I noticed you have an MFA in creative writing from Mills College.

I do.

How would you say that the creative writing sort of influences your approach to burlesque?

Yeah.

Didn't it change into Mills College later on? I think.

I think it was, yeah, it was kind of the precursor to, I don't, I don't know the whole history, but yeah.

I mean, when you look at all the people who were involved in that from like