Studio 360: David Byrne & Teachers Rebooted

Earlier this week, A Separation won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, and is considered a strong contender for the Academy Award. Asghar Farhadi is the latest Iranian director to achieve acclaim in the West while working under tight government controls. Despite success abroad, though, the industry is in serious trouble at home.

Next, the new DVD Talking Heads: Chronology contains film and video of Talking Heads in performance going all the way back to 1975 — before the advent of camcorders, and two years before the release of the band’s first LP.

Then, when Amy Douglas was a teenager, her parents sent her to a boarding school for troubled kids deep in the Arizona desert. There she fell deep into a depression and struggled with an eating disorder. Then a cassette copy of The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads helped turn her life around.

After that, for the last five years Studio 360 has been hiring graphic design teams to rethink various cherished symbols — from the gay pride flag, to the board game Monopoly. Last fall, Kate Ahearn from Haverhill, Massachusetts, wrote in begging us to redesign the image of teachers.

Following that, the New Orleans piano player Henry Roeland Byrd made a name for himself as Professor Longhair, a former street hustler turned self-taught musician who started recording in his early 30s. In 1953 Atlantic records released Tipitina.

And finally, what if Anne Frank had lived? That’s the premise of the new novel by Shalom Auslander, who made his name with the dark comic memoir Foreskin's Lament. Hope: A Tragedy is about a yuppie named Solomon Kugel who leaves New York City with his family for a rustic farmhouse. It turns out the house has a squatter, a crazy old lady hiding out in his attic who claims to be Frank. [Broadcast Date: January 21, 2011]