John Hersey High School ARC

S03E03: Push Puppets, Adventures of the Musical Union and Elvis Costello’s Pizza: A Conversation with Erich Specht Erich Specht is a 1986 graduate of Hersey High School. He also attended River Trails back when it was a junior high. As the man behind the band Push Puppets, Erich came to the ARC Studio to talk about his life in music, the new Push Puppets album and played a few songs.  He also reminisced about his time at Hersey and the founding of a short-lived club called the Adventures of the Musical Union. Oh, and he also talked about a slice of pizza he got from Elvis Costello. Listen to the episode to understand this picture: More information about Erich Specht and Push Puppets can be found at https://www.pushpuppets.net .  Digital downloads are available on Bandcamp . The new album from the band is called Allegory Grey . You can also find the Push Puppets on Spotify . The episode features a lot of music references. Here is a list of the bands, artists and songs mentioned in the

I first read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus when I was in junior high. Like most people, I was indoctrinated first by the Hollywood iterations of the story and only knew “Frankenstein” as Boris Karloff, and was surprised by the novel and the way in which the ideas of monstrosity were not associated with the creature, but with Dr. Victor Frankenstein. In particular, I was taken by the humanity and intelligence of “the monster,” who articulately narrates a significant portion of the book.  The novel remains one of my favorites, and I have returned to it several times in my life. But the novel is problematic, in many ways. In particular, the characters outside of Victor and the “Monster” are never fully developed and their motivations and personalities are never fully explored in the epistolary nature of Shelley’s work. Unnatural Creatures , by Kris Waldherr, corrects this flaw and presents Frankenstein in its full human and emotional potential by focusing not on