Saturday Morning for Saturday 5 November 2022

8.10 Katty Kay: is democracy on the ballot at US midterms?

Americans go to the polls next week for their midterm elections. At stake is the balance of power within the House of Representatives and the Senate. But more fundamentally - as the first elections since the January 6 2021 Capitol insurrection - these midterms are being seen as a critical test of the democracy and electoral systems in the US. 

BBC Correspondent Katty Kay has been road tripping across the swing states to get a sense of what’s on voter’s minds. She shares her discoveries in the documentary Trump: The Comeback?  

8.40 Rhiannon Mackie: Young NZer fighting for climate justice at COP 

More than 45,000 people, including world leaders and our own climate change minister, are descending on the resort town of Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt for COP27, the annual UN climate conference, which starts on Sunday night.

Rhiannon Mackie is one of them. At just 18 the Hutt Valley High School student is a climate champion who has organised protests across New Zealand, and has been running a campaign to get rid of fossil burning boilers from schools.

She’s concerned that COP is inaccessible to those most at risk from climate change.

9.05 Jacob Mchangama: the historical limits on free speech  

Earlier this week the government announced plans to introduce hate speech legislation. Such legislation has not always proven successful, as Danish lawyer Jacob Mchangama shows in his book Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media.

The book traces the legal, political, and cultural history of the idea of free speech; from the ancient Athenian orator Demosthenes and the ninth-century freethinker al-Rāzī, to the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and modern-day digital activists.

Mchangama is the founder and executive director of the Danish think tank Justitia and host of the podcast Clear and Present Danger: A History of Free Speech. 

He is in New Zealand as a guest of  the Free Speech Union.

9.35 David Farrier: playing cat and mouse with Mister Organ

“Mr Organ is a black hole and I’ve fallen in,” quips journalist and filmmaker David Farrier midway through his latest feature documentary, as he plays a bizarre cat and mouse game with the titular and litigious Michael Organ. 

Mister Organ follows Farrier following Organ, and Organ following Farrier, over three years - from headline-hitting clamping of cars in Ponsonby to the Disputes Tribunal in Whanganui, where Farrier was successfully charged with stealing abandoned antiques store signs. 

Mister Organ is a troubling, if at times funny study of the psychological warfare one individual can play with many people’s minds. Sometimes with tragic consequences. 

Farrier’s previous films include Tickled and Dark Tourist. Mister Organ screens in NZ cinemas from Thursday 10 November.

10.05 Paul Diamond: the remarkable fall of Charles Mackay

In 1920 Whanganui residents were rocked by the news that their mayor had shot D'Arcy Cresswell, a young gay poet, who had been blackmailing him.
 
Mackay was sentenced to hard labour and later left New Zealand, only to be shot during street unrest in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.

This remarkable story, says Paul Diamond is at its heart about how society conspired to control and punish homosexual men 100 years ago. Diamond’s book Downfall: The Destruction of Charles Mackay has been many years in the making, involving numerous trips to Europe and Australia.

Paul Diamond (Ngāti Hauā, Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi) is Curator, Māori at the Alexander Turnbull Library and author of A Fire in Your Belly: Māori leaders speak, Makereti: Taking Māori to the world and Savaged to Suit: Māori and cartooning in New Zealand. 

10.35 Kath Irvine: time for planting ahead of summer

Planting time! Organic gardener Kath Irvine returns to share gardening tips and to answer your questions. 

Irvine counts pumpkins, squashes and beans as easy, beneficent summer crops to plant now. She also says its the best time to be planting citrus and avocados - but your garden needs to ready to receive them 

Kath Irvine provides advice from her permaculture home garden in Ōhau, in the Horowhenua. Her practical guide to growing organic fruit and vegetables, The Edible Backyard was published last year. 

Send your gardening questions through to saturday@rnz.co.nz or text 2101.

11.05 Clinton Heylin: Bob Dylan on modern song 

Biographer Clinton Heylin is arguably the world’s foremost Dylan authority, having written a dozen books on the Nobel Prize for Literature winner. Heylin’s other books range from the Velvet Underground and Punk to mental illness in British rock music of the ‘60s and ‘70s and appropriation and copyright issues right back to the advent of recorded music.

Which makes Heylin the perfect Saturday Morning guest to share some favourite songs from The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan's first book of new writing since 2004's Chronicles: Volume One. 

In the book Dylan writes over sixty short essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello.

Heylin’s The Double Life of Bob Dylan: Volume I: 1941-1966 A Restless, Hungry Feeling was published last year. The voluminous volume 2 is due out in 2023.

 

Books featured on this show:

Free Speech - A History from Socrates to Social Media
by Jacob Mchangama
ISBN-13 9781541600492
Published by Basic Books

Downfall -The destruction of Charles Mackay
by Paul Diamond
ISBN: 9781991016188
Published by Massey University Press

The Philosophy of Modern Song
by Bob Dylan
Published by Simon & Schuster
ISBN13: 9781451648706

The Double Life of Bob Dylan: Volume I: 1941-1966 A Restless, Hungry Feeling
by Clinton Heylin
ISBN: 0316535214
Published by Little Brown and Co

 

Music played in this show

Last Days of the Internet
The New Existentialists
Played at 8.35am

Breast of Glass
Jake Xerxes Fussell
Played at 8.50am

John Bryce
Don McGlashan
Played at 10.35am

Old Violin
Johnny Paycheck
Played at 11.15am

Garden Party
Rick Nelson
Played at 11.25am

London Calling
The Clash
Played at 11.35am

Pancho & Lefty
Townes Van Zandt
Played at 11.45am

Everybody's Crying Mercy
Mose Allison
Played at 11.55am