The Adulting Well Podcast
This week we sit down with Dunstan Bruce. Dunstan is an English musician and filmmaker who is perhaps best known for his work with Leeds-based anarcho-pop band Chumbawamba, of which he was a founding member. He grew up in the northern industrial town of Billingham.
This week we sit down with No Fascist USA author James Tracy. James is an author from the San Francisco Bay Area specializing in cities, hidden histories and social movements.
He is the co-founder of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and is active with Jobs With Justice. Tracy also is an adjunct Instructor in the Labor & Community Studies Department of City College of San Francisco.
This week we had an amazing conversation with filmmaker Crystal Moselle. Cyrstal is a New York based director best known for her Sundance, Grand Jury Prize award winning documentary, The Wolfpack. In the past she was a producer on the critically acclaimed documentary film, Excavating Taylor Mead. In the last decade she has been working with short-form storytelling for publications such as Vice, Nowness and The New York Times, where she created a series called “Something Big, Something Small,” featuring talent such as Pharrell Williams and Shepard Fairey. Later collaborations with Pharrell included, “Meet the Bae’s,” a series profiling the artists back up dancers. Moselle’s short film for Miu Miu, That One Day, premiered at The Venice Film Festival. The feature version of the film “Skate Kitchen” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2018.
Her HBO series, Betty, is airing now.
Dani Burlison is the creator/editor/author of “All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger and the Female Body” (PM Press, 2019), “Dendrophilia and Other Social Taboos: True Stories,” a collection of essays which first appeared in her McSweeney’s Internet Tendency column of the same name, and the “Lady Parts” zine series (available at Pioneers Press). Her short story collection “Some Places Worth Leaving” will be published by Tolsun Books in February 2020.
Dani has been a staff writer at a Bay Area alt-weekly, a book reviewer for Los Angeles Review and a regular contributor at Yes! Magazine, Chicago Tribune, KQED, The Rumpus, Made Local Magazine and Emerald Report. Her journalism, fiction and personal essays can also be found at Ms. Magazine,WIRED, Vice, Utne, Earth Island Journal, Ploughshares, Portland Review, Hip Mama Magazine, Rad Dad, Spirituality & Health Magazine, The Press Democrat, Shareable, Common Good, Sustainable America, Tahoma Literary Review, Vestal Review, Bike Monkey Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, sparkle + blink and more.
https://www.daniburlison.com/
This week we sit down with James Spooner. James owns and operates Monocle Tattoo. Being a vegan for over twenty years, he pioneered a vegan tattoo procedure in Los Angeles in order to be consistent with his politics and lifestyle.
He describes himself as a pretty literal tattooer. “I’d be happy tattooing portraits, pictures of animals, and pretty ladies all day everyday”. One of his favorite things about tattooing is challenging clients to be more creative with their ideas. “You want a song lyric? Let’s illustrate the song instead! You want a bible verse? Let’s recreate a scene from the bible on your arm!”
He also is an award winning filmmaker and illustrator. His documentary film Afro-Punk sparked what many consider to be a movement within the black community. He is currently working on two full length graphic novels. You can follow him here: “Spooners No Fun”.
This week we have a great talk with Matthew Adam Nathanson. Matt is an American singer-songwriter whose work is a blend of folk and rock and roll music. In addition to singing, he plays acoustic and electric guitar, and has played both solo and with a full band. His work includes the platinum-selling song “Come On Get Higher”.
https://mattnathanson.com/
Michelle Cruz Gonzales was born in East LA in 1969 but grew up in Tuolumne, a tiny California Gold Rush town. She started her first band in that small town at the age of fifteen and moved to San Francisco two years later. She played drums and wrote lyrics for three bands during the 1980s and 1990s: Bitch Fight, Spitboy, and Instant Girl.
In 2001 and 2003, she earned degrees in English/creative writing from Mills College, where she also minored in ethnic studies. Michelle has published in anthologies, literary journals, and Hip Mama magazine. She teaches English and creative writing at Las Positas College, and she enjoys reading her work and lecturing at colleges and art spaces around the country.
She sings and plays drums in an English department band, loves to sew with her mom, even though she never thought she would, and she’s at work on a satirical novel about forced intermarriage between whites and Mexicans for the purpose of creating a race of beautiful, hardworking people. She lives with her husband, son, and their three Mexican dogs in Oakland, California.
Michelle is the author of The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band
This week we did something a little different. We interviewed Father Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries. While he is not a grown-up punk kid, he is a grown-up we respect on many levels.
His lifetime commitment to helping people who are in the margins is truly an inspiration. Big thanks to Father Greg for coming on! We hope you enjoy this as much as we enjoyed the interview.
In the face of law enforcement tactics and criminal justice policies of suppression and mass incarceration as the means to end gang violence, Father Greg and parish and community members adopted what was a radical approach at the time: treat gang members as human beings.
In 1988 they started what would eventually become Homeboy Industries, which employs and trains former gang members in a range of social enterprises, as well as provides critical services to thousands of men and women who walk through its doors every year seeking a better life.
Father Greg is the author of the 2010 New York Times-bestseller Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. His 2017 book is the Los Angeles Times-bestseller Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship.
He has received the California Peace Prize and been inducted into the California Hall of Fame. In 2014, the White House named Father Boyle a Champion of Change. He received the University of Notre Dame’s 2017 Laetare Medal, the oldest honor given to American Catholics.
This week we talk to Ella Bass about being on Top Chef, playing football, and much much more.
Ella Bass is a student, chef, and athlete. She appeared in Season 2 of Top Chef Junior and lives in Philadelphia, PA with her family.
This week we talk to Bay Area artist Miriam Klein Stahl about punk rock, teaching, resistance art, and much, much more.
Miriam Klein Stahl is an artist, educator and activist and the New York Times-bestselling illustrator of Rad American Women A-Z and Rad Women Worldwide . In addition to her work in printmaking, drawing, sculpture, paper-cut and public art, she is also the co-founder of the Arts and Humanities Academy at Berkeley High School where she’s taught since 1995. As an artist, she follows in a tradition of making socially relevant work, creating portraits of political activists, misfits, radicals and radical movements. As an educator, she has dedicated her teaching practice to address equity through the lens of the arts. Her work has been widely exhibited and reproduced internationally. Stahl is also the co-owner of Pave the Way Skateboards, a queer skateboarding company formed with Los Angeles-based comedian, actor, writer and skateboarder Tara Jepson. She lives in Berkeley, California with her wife, artist Lena Wolff, daughter Hazel, and their dog Lenny.