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Peter Coyote. Photo: Miikka Skaffari/FilmMagic What would a Ken Burns documentary be without its measured, authoritative narration? In The West , The National Parks , Prohibition , The Dust Bowl , The Roosevelts , The Vietnam War , The Mayo Clinic , and now Country Music , actor Peter Coyote delivers hours of often dense, complex text — full of facts, figures, quotes, and grand unifying ideas — in a manner that Burns refers to as “God’s stenographer.” His calm, cowboy-around-a-campfire timbre is basically the voice of America, at least within the orbit of PBS. Generations of kids first met Coyote as the embodiment of authority — he played Keys, the head scientist in E.T. the Extra Terrestrial — but the man himself has lived a Zelig-like life. Growing up as a secular Jew with communist relatives during the McCarthy era, Coyote was an early convert to political activism and the counterculture. “I saw grown-ups weeping in my living room,” he says. “Men and women who were broken by lies the government was telling.” As a young man, he was invited into Kennedy’s White House after staging a protest against nuclear testing during the Cuban missile crisis, threw himself headlong into a decade of drugs, Hell’s Angels, and commune living , narrowly escaped being drafted to Vietnam by pretending to be a cold-blooded marauder, helped run the California State Arts Council for eight years, and then decided to become an actor. These days, he’s also an ordained Zen Buddhist priest. Coyote has lent his voice to a plethora of ads and documentaries over the decades, but his decades-long relationship with Burns is something special. Vulture spoke with both men about Coyote’s unequaled voice, their unique recording process, and how they handle political disagreements. Peter, how did you get into the narration game? Peter Coyote : I was broke after ten years in the counterculture and I needed a way to make some money. I wasn’t an actor at that … [Read more...] about The Golden Voice Behind All Those Ken Burns Documentaries

Photo: Artwork © Helen Marden. Photo: Robert McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian. Helen Marden spent the pandemic year painting and with family, her life slowed down but not in every way a bad way. “I felt lucky,” she says, “but extremely sad.” Despite her privilege, it’s not as though she wasn’t in the viral crosshairs: She’s almost 80, and her husband of over 50 years, Brice Marden , has been stalked by cancer. A number of her friends died of COVID, including one of her closest, the architect Edward Tuttle , whom she remembers meeting on the Greek island of Hydra back in the 1970s as if it were yesterday. “He was like 27, and I knew I was going to love him” — Helen is confident in her first impressions, as she seems at first to be in most things. “He had an Enter the Dragon T-shirt on and, I think, pearls,” she says. We’re sitting together, masked up and vaxxed up, at Gagosian’s first-floor gallery on Madison (the floors polished black, her hair Warhol white), surrounded by the lacquered tropicality of her paintings, eddies of plume-y pink, yellow, blue, and gleaming white, many shining with seashells, for an exhibition she has called “ Bitter Light a Year. ” Helen Marden and Brice Marden. Photo: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images There is a hard-candy determination in the work and, one suspects, in her. Helen is a fierce and imperious globe-trotting grande dame who has known several generations of pretty much all the accomplished and interesting people worth knowing. They flock to the Mardens’ many homes: the eclectic Greenwich Village townhouse, the place on Nevis in the Caribbean, the one in Marrakech, the mini family compound upstate in Tivoli, the place they’ve had for decades on Hydra. Actually, the two, since they gave the one at the top of the hill (at some point, it was just too many stairs) to their daughters: Melia , the chef, known for the Smile , and Mirabelle, who co-owned for a time the gallery Rivington Arms, where both … [Read more...] about Helen Marden’s Bitter, Lucky Light