..** "To have a song with Earth, Wind & Fire, it's a miracle...."

Tommy Davidson Talks Stronger. The no laughing matter standup comedian, actor, author and musician has chosen as one of his many hats on the show this week, his stunning, very personal musical collaboration with Earth, Wind & Fire in perfomance.

Revisiting through song, from being born into a broken life as an abandoned baby, to Spike Lee's Bamboozled, In Living Color, and many other productions.
 

** "Let's start here, why am I doing this.Because basically I'm ready to tear my eyes out, cut my ears off, and jump off a cliff..."

Pacifica Host Garland Nixon on the politics of personality, cults, narcissists, sociopaths, and looking in the mirror.

** "You see white guards coming from the South policing the largely black population. And a lot of the racial dynamics in the US and the history of the US, are very persistent in the prison system - although it's important to remember that the hunger strikes were multi-racial, black, white and Latino..."

The Strike: A continuing conversation with filmmakers Joebill Munoz and Lucas Guilkey. Investigating how the idea of a hunger strike began as a whisper inside solitary confinement - then spreading to 30,000 imprisoned away...

** "It was somewhat cool, you know, fashionable, to be a rebel during that time. And Tarkovsky was that kind of rebel. He was always interested in non-Soviet stuff, bourgeois music, art, cinema, philosophy. But let's not forget that all his Soviet movies were funded by the state. So when he complained over his battles with the censors - I can't really take them seriously..."

Valery Eliseev, Apocalypse - Dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky: A Cinema Of Contradictions - A Conversation With Sergei Toymentsev. The writer delves into the enigmatic filmmaker finding no personal relevance making movies under either ideology - later denouncing what he perceived in Western commercial dominance and imperatives, as a 'petty bourgeois mentality.'

And his conflicted artistic journey. turning to the mystical - as if wandering lost through his own melancholy cinematic landscapes...