KUCI: Get the Funk Out

Featured Writer-Director Cevin Soling and his highly anticipated documentary, The Gilligan Manifesto at 9:30am PST today!

“THE GILLIGAN MANIFESTO” WILL DEBUT AT 12TH ANNUAL
LA FEMME INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, SATURDAY OCT. 22
Writer-Director Cevin Soling’s highly anticipated documentary, The Gilligan Manifesto, will be the Saturday night presentation at the La Femme International Film Festival on Oct. 22 at 6 pm at Laemmle’s Music Hall Theater Venue 2 in Beverly Hills.
If you missed Cevin Soling on today's show, listen here!
Just one year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, radio and television writer Sherwood Schwartz began filming his comedy classic Gilligan's Island, which depicts seven Americans shipwrecked on a deserted island.
Soling’s film reveals that this seemingly innocuous sitcom was actually an analogue for a post-apocalyptic world where survivors had to rebuild civilization as this was a major concern during the Cold War where many families had fallout shelters in their homes. What is even more shocking is that the society the castaways create is founded on Marxist Communism. Soling’s revelation was published in the prestigious academic journal, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture.
To convert his article into a feature documentary, Soling interviewed creator Sherwood Schwartz. He also spoke with Russell Johnson and Dawn Wells, who played the Professor and Mary Ann, and several professors from Harvard.
“Sherwood Schwartz often noted that he conceived Gilligan’s Island as a social microcosm where people from all walks of life would have to figure out how to get along,” Soling said, “but he confessed to me, in his last interview, that the show was deliberately designed as lowbrow humor in order to conceal its political message. For this reason, American audiences never realized that the show celebrates Marxism and lampoons Western capitalism and democratic governance.”
“The most transgressive message conveyed by Gilligan’s Island is that it shows how much better off people are in under true communism – not the dictatorship government the Soviets and McCarthyites called communism. The characters that represent the pinnacle of success in capitalist society – the millionaire and the movie star, become whole people and establish social bonds that they never could have otherwise. On the island, their lives cease to be empty.”
La Femme board member Deborah Gilels served as associate producer on the documentary which was edited by Joe Davenport and narrated by Rennie Davis, who, along with Abbie Hoffman was a member of the Chicago Seven. David Jackson’s Showcase Entertainment is selling the worldwide rights.
Cevin Soling produced and directed the first theatrically released documentary on education, The War on Kids, which was honored as the best educational documentary at the New York Independent Film and Video Festival and has been broadcast on The Documentary Channel and The Sundance Channel.
Soling wrote, produced, and directed Ikland, which documented his efforts to rediscover the lost Ik tribe of northern Uganda, who were famously disparaged in the early 1970s as the worst people in the world. The film won Best Documentary Content at the Boston International Film Festival and was heralded by the NY Times and other major media outlets. Last year, he completed Mr. Cevin & the Cargo Cult, a documentary about a tribe in Vanuatu who worship America, and is currently working on The Summer of Hate, a documentary on the Beatles’ controversial observations on religion and racism during their tour of America in 1966.
ABOUT THE FILM
At the height of the Cold War, Gilligan's Island depicted seven Americans living in an analogue of a post-apocalyptic world where the survivors have to rebuild civilization. Remarkably, the society they create is pure communist. Interviews with the show's creator and some of the surviving actors, as well from professors from Harvard, reveal that Gilligan's Island was deliberately designed to be dismissed as low brow comedy in order to celebrate Marxism and lampoon Western democratic constructs.
Laemmle’s Music Hall theater is located at 9036 Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills. Tickets can be purchased in advance at www.lafemme.org/festival or at the box office prior to the screening. For a special discount coupon, please visit: http://www.lafemme.org/tickets/individual-film-screening-discount/ password : special (all lower case)

Briana Gallo joined me at 9:15am to talk about her film “The Bee Keeper.

Briana Gallo’s “The Bee Keeper” tells the story of Ed “Doc” Ziegler, a retired dentist living in a small town in New England. 35 years ago, he discovered apitherapy - the power of bees to heal - both physically and mentally. He now devotes his life to beekeeping and shares the curative powers of bee venom with his community. His neighbors and friends recount their own recovery stories and loving thoughts about this kind and humble man who, at the age of 97, is still tending to the needs of his ‘patients.
WATCH the trailer here.
ABOUT BRIANA GALLO
"Courage is the power to let go of the familiar."
Briana Gallo is a Fine Art Photographer as well as a Photo Philanthropist. She currently lives and works in La Jolla, CA. She believes in the power of Photo Philanthropy to inspire hope and understanding, and to connect people around the world, as well as in our local communities. She visually articulates the mission of non-profit organizations in a compelling manner through Fine Art Photography. She believes in people’s interest in knowing more, in understanding better, in seeing the story, which can then lead to action and involvement.
In 2011, her travels took her to Honduras to work with Shoulder to Shoulder and the town of Guachipilincito. In 2012, she traveled to Cuba, where she captured the stories of the Cuban people and their vibrancy of life. 2013 she worked on a piece for Make It Right, a non-profit in the Lower Nine area of New Orleans focusing on housing for Katrina Victims. She is currently working on a number of projects in heart of the Omo Valley, Ethiopia. Each experience has inspired her to search for those communities where there is a story to be told. Briana forges real connections with communities when she shoots turning her lens into a bridge rather than a wall.
She is currently a member of the New Hampshire Art Association. She has had juried pieces in the PhotoPlace Gallery in Vermont. She has attended two juried Fine Art shows – The Foundry in Pawtucket, RI and the Mystic Art Festival in Mystic, Connecticut. She also has pieces published in the PhotoPlace Gallery Books–Self Portrait, City Streets & Country Roads, Portraiture: Expression & Gesture, The Golden hours Dawn and Dusk, The Art of Travel Photography. Briana was featured in Omo Magazine in 2014. Her Cuban series is currently in the Emerald C Gallery, Coronado, CA.
Briana uses her photography to help people see through a variety of lenses. To open doors to what is surrounding us, both locally and abroad. The emotion she captures in her photography pulls viewers out of their comfort zones, provokes questions, brings smiles to ones face, tears to ones eyes, and makes one say, “I never knew.”

Alexandra Horowitz joined me at 9am PST to talk about her fascinating book, BEING A DOG: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell.

Scribner is delighted to announce the publication, on October 4, 2016, of Alexandra Horowitz’s BEING A DOG: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell. In her New York Times bestselling Inside of a Dog (2009), Horowitz revealed the often surprising evolutionary reasons behind why dogs behave the way they do; in BEING A DOG, she explores what dogs know in even greater depth, following their lead to learn about the dog’s spectacular nose and how we mere humans can improve our under-used sense of smell. The result is a revelation about the world that we share.
In BEING A DOG, readers will learn how well a dog can smell versus how well a human can smell. We humans are what Alexandra and her fellow scientists call microsmatic, i.e. “poor smellers,” compared to dogs. We have a mere six million olfactory receptor cells in our noses, whereas dogs have between 200 million and a billion, depending on the breed. Here’s another comparison: Human beings have three receptor genes that allow us to see all the colors of the world. Dogs have some 800 receptor genes just for smell. In theory, they can smell billions of different odors. We therefore have a very difficult time understanding what dogs can do with their noses because most of us can’t even tell if what burnt in the kitchen this morning was the coffee or the toast.
So what, exactly, can dogs smell? Amyl acetate is the chemical that gives bananas their smell. Dogs can smell one drop of the chemical in a trillion drops of water. Dogs smell earthquakes before they happen, and rainstorms miles away. They have been trained to find explosives, land-mines, chemical accelerants, missing people, underwater cadavers, drugs of every type, counterfeit goods, illicit cell phones in prison and imported shark fins in suitcases, dry rot, termites, fire ants, bed bugs, truffles under the ground, and dairy cows in estrous. They smell what you had for breakfast and whether a cat touched your leg yesterday. They can smell cancer, both inside human beings and in lab samples. They can smell their way home, the time that has passed since a flower closed up, and the body under the rubble.
BEING A DOG delves into all of these remarkable abilities and more, revealing a whole world of experiences we miss every day. Horowitz, inspired by her dogs, tries to be a better smeller. She spends days smelling everything her dogs smell. And she volunteers at an olfaction lab at Rockefeller University (sniffing hundreds of bottles of scents per session.) It is not that we humans can’t smell; it’s that we largely don’t. Based on the biological facts alone, the major determining factor in whether we smell an odor or not seems to be just this: whether we bother to try and smell it.
Writing with scientific rigor and her trademark wit, Horowitz changes our perspective on dogs – and smelling – forever. Readers will finish this charming and informative book feeling that they have broken free of human constraints and understood smell as never before; that they have, however fleetingly, been a dog.
Alexandra Horowitz is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know and On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation. She teaches at Barnard College, where she runs the Dog Cognition Lab. She lives with her family and two large, highly sniffy dogs in New York City.
Visit her website: alexandrahorowitz.ne
More praise for BEING A DOG:
“I’m not entirely certain whether Alexandra Horowitz’s BEING A DOG has made me want to buy a dog or morph into one—but I do know that it was magical. Horowitz has crafted an utterly engrossing, witty, finely-observed narrative that will make you look at the power of the nose in a wholly new way.”—Maria Konnikova, author of The Confidence Game and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

Deni Ellis Béchard, author of Into the Sun, joined me Monday at 9:45am PST

Kabul—Ten Years After 9/11: After a car explodes in the city, a Japanese-American journalist discovers that its passengers were acquaintances—three fellow expats who had formed an unlikely love triangle—and becomes convinced that a deeper story lies behind the moment of violence. The investigation that follows takes the journalist from Kabul to Louisiana, Maine, Québec, and Dubai, from love to jealousy to hate—and acutely reveals how the lives of individuals overseas have become inseparable from the larger story of America’s imperial misadventures.
About Deni Ellis Béchard
Deni Ellis Béchard is the author of the novel Vandal Love, winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book; Cures for Hunger, a memoir about growing up with his father, who robbed banks; and Of Bonobos and Men, winner of the 2015 Nautilus Book Award for investigative journalism. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including the LA Times, Salon, Pacific Standard, and Foreign Policy, and he has reported from India, Iraq, Colombia, Rwanda, the Congo, and Afghanistan.

B. Brett Finlay, PhD, co-author of ”Let Them Eat Dirt - Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World,” joined me Monday at 9:15am PST

B. Brett Finlay, PhD, is professor of microbiology at the University of British Columbia and a world leader in how bacterial infections work. He has been studying microbes for over thirty years and has published over four hundred and fifty articles. Also a founder of the biotech companies Inimex, Vedanta, and Microbiome Insights, Brett is Officer of the Order of Canada—the highest Canadian civilian recognition. He lives in Vancouver, BC, with his wife, who is a pediatrician, and has two grown-up kids.

Marie-Claire Arrieta, PhD, co-author of Let Them Eat Dirt - Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World,” joined me Monday at 9am PST

Marie-Claire Arrieta, PhD, trained in the Finlay lab and is now an assistant professor at the University of Calgary in Canada. She has been studying intestinal microbiology and immunology for the past 10 years. Her recent study connecting asthma in very young babies to missing key intestinal bacterial species was deemed a breakthrough in the field and was reported by dozens of news outlets around the world in 2015. Arrieta has been published in leading scientific journals such as Gastroenterology, PNAS, and Science Translational Medicine. She spends her busy days juggling between experiments, science writing, kindergarten pick-ups, and play dates for her two young children.

Peter Himmelman, an award-winning Emmy and Grammy-nominated musician, founder of Big Muse, and author of Let Me Out, joined me Monday at 9:30am pst!

“Fear is one of life’s biggest roadblocks, which is why Peter Himmelman’s book is so important. Let Me Out gets to the heart of how we can keep fear from limiting our potential by tapping into our inner resilience, creativity, and strength. There’s deep wisdom here along with very practical tools for translating our ideas into the real world.”– Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post
Whether we’re laid off from a job, growing a family, or moving to a new city, life often requires us to reinvent ourselves or switch paths. Making that successful transition, however, can be challenging due to our fear of failure or our inability to take action. After years of dreaming, training and good fortune, Peter Himmelman became an Emmy- and Grammy-nominated musician, songwriter and performer. But when the music industry hit hard times, he was forced to reinvent himself at age 52. While Himmelman developed exciting ideas of what he wanted to do, he also thought that’s impossible or how unrealistic. It took him two years to actually stop mulling and start doing.
Having made a living in the trenches of the creative world for the last thirty-five years, first as a musician and now as a top speaker and consultant on creativity and leadership for businesses around the world through his company Big Muse, Peter Himmelman knows first-hand both the pitfalls and triumphs of what goes into turning endless pondering into actual innovative achievement. In his forthcoming release LET ME OUT: Unlock Your Creative Mind and Bring Your Ideas to Life, he combines proven cognitive methods with his own unique artistic techniques to unite and convert left and right-brained thinking into action. Readers learn new ways to:
Reduce fear as a means to becoming more creative;
Create with purpose, whether it's an ad campaign, a song, or a new business;
Communicate more effectively and on a deeper level;
Complete worthwhile projects that have stayed in the "bits and pieces" phase forever
LET ME OUT tackles the fact that our greatest barrier to entry is often ourselves. For those who think starting a new path is unrealistic, this book provides practical tools and insights to make our creative goals take shape in the real world.
Peter Himmelman is an award-winning, Emmy and Grammy-nominated musician and the founder of Big Muse, a company that teaches creative thinking, leadership skills, and deeper levels of communication in all facets of life – from personal to professional. As Big Muse has grown in popularity over the last four years, Peter has come to share his program with thousands of individuals, including academic institutions like The Wharton School, UCLA, and The Ross School of Business, and international brands such as McDonald’s, Adobe, and Gap Inc. He has an Advanced Management Certificate from The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Learn more at http://www.bigmuse.com/ and http://www.peterhimmelman.com/ home.php.

PAUL BRINKLEY-ROGERS, Pulitzer-prize winning war correspondent and author of PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS, joined me Monday at 9am PST!

PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS, Pulitzer-prize winning war correspondent PAUL BRINKLEY-ROGERS is a gorgeous and evocative memoir that has captured the hearts and minds of our staff and the booksellers who have received an early glimpse of his pages recounting a haunting love affair with a mysterious older Japanese woman in the summer of 1959.
“Please enjoy…the most romantic memoir you’re likely to read in a lifetime.”
—ELIN HILDERBRAND, New York Times bestselling author of HERE’S TO US
“A searing final love letter.”—DAILY EXPRESS (UK)
“A moving memoir exploring the last imprint of his first love.”—THE LADY (UK)
“[A] haunting memoir.”—DAILY MAIL (UK)
At age 75, Paul began writing PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS after discovering his long-lost love’s letters tucked inside a book by a British poet he had not opened in years. When he reread her passionate epistles—which are also featured verbatim in his memoir—he set out to recapture this singular time and place, his coming-of-age as a 19-year-old sailor aboard the USS Shangri-La, and to pay tribute to Kaji Yukiko, the incredible woman who continues to influence his life long after they parted more than half a century ago.
Paul and Yukiko met by chance in the Japanese seaport of Yokosuka. Picking him out of a crowd because he was carrying a book, she shared her astonishing knowledge of literature, music, film, and poetry with him and encouraged—even demanded—that he use the talent she saw in him to become the writer he is today. Through Yukiko, he discovered a shared passion for the arts and learned many heartbreaking truths about post-war Japan. He also learned what it takes to love without regret.
Theirs was not a quiet love story. When a member of the yakuza, Japan’s brutal crime syndicate, attempted to kidnap Yukiko, Paul realized that there was much more to her—and to Japan in the devastating wake of World War II—than he saw at first glance. Through the searing letters that Yukiko wrote to him and his vivid telling of a history made all the more powerful by the passage of time, PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS reaches across decades and continents, inviting readers to reclaim and celebrate the lifelong loves that never really end.
PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS has quickly become an in-house favorite and is all the more personal to us because the beautiful image on the cover is a photo of the mother of Tara Parsons, Touchstone’s Editor-in-Chief (and the book’s editor). The photo of Parsons’ mother dressed in a formal kimono was taken in Japan during the same time period in which PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS is set.
Paul Brinkley-Rogers is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and veteran war correspondent. For many years he worked in Asia as a staff member of Newsweek, covering the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, the death of Chairman Mao, and Japan's economic miracle. He also reported from Latin America for The Miami Herald, sharing the Pulitzer Prize with a reporting team in 2001 for coverage of the Elian Gonzalez custody battle. He is the author of Please Enjoy Your Happiness, a memoir. Now retired, he lives in Arizona.

Great conversation about Get the FUNK Out! Today on

Moneeka Sawyer has often been described as one of the most joyful people you will ever meet. She finds her bliss through helping people live a life filled with meaning, purpose, passion, and joy. She has been coaching in the Silicon Valley for over 10 years and her unique approach has helped clients from artists and soloprenuers, to high-tech CEO’s discover their own personal definition of bliss and create a whole new sense of power, energy, and excitement about their lives. She shares her life and her joy with her wonderful husband, David, and adorable Pomeranian in Mountain View, CA

Raquel D’Apice, a humor writer and founder of the popular blog The Ugly Volvo, joins me Monday at 9:30am PST to talk about her hilarious and insightfu...

From the comedian behind the popular parenting blog The Ugly Volvo comes a refreshing spin on the baby milestone book. Instead of a place to lovingly capture the first time baby sleeps through the night, this book shows what it's like the first time baby rolls off the bed/sofa/changing table, leaving mom or dad in a state of pure terror (it happens). These 100 rarely documented but all-too-realistic milestones—such as "First Time Baby Says a Word You Didn't Want Her to Say"—provide comfort, solidarity, and comic relief for new parents. Laugh-out-loud relatable text and distinctive paper-cut illustrations of these "bad" parenting moments make this a must-have book for anyone entering the mysterious club of parenthood.
Raquel D’Apice is a humor writer and founder of the popular blog The Ugly Volvo. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and son.
Here is some information about Raquel from her site: http://www.theuglyvolvo.com/
I watch a lot of documentaries on Instant Netflix. I love The World According to Garp and everything by Shel Silverstein and I read The New Yorker but mainly I read it for the cartoons. I have a phobia of jewelry. I have a horrible sweet tooth and could easily eat nine boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch in one sitting. (Update: I have a cavity.) Sometimes I daydream about living in other countries and then immediately go online to look up the size of the spiders in those countries.
I wear almost the exact same outfit every day. I am married to someone who speaks three languages and there are days when I feel like I barely speak English. I love stand-up comedy and Far Side cartoons and books about science. When I like songs I will obsessively listen to them on repeat for hours or days until everyone nearby wants to throw me and my CD player out a window. Yes, for whatever reason I still play music on a CD player.
I have a very nice mother and an eccentric father. I have two younger sisters and a dog named Tig and a husband who obsessively follows international weather patterns the way other men follow sports. I have a wonderful son who makes me smile a lot of the time. My first car was an old, ugly Volvo that I loved so much and that’s why the blog is called The Ugly Volvo. I wish there were a more interesting story behind it but there isn’t.
I have a book coming out in Fall of 2016 through Chronicle Books. When we get closer to fall of 2016 I will write about that in slightly more detail.
If you enjoy my posts, like The Ugly Volvo on Facebook or follow me on here (www.theuglyvolvo.com) orfollow me on Twitter. If there’s a post you like, please share it with friends as I love writing but am notoriously bad at promoting things. I try to post around once a week.