Highbrow and Mighty
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A Wilmette native who wanted to be a broadcaster from the age of six (insert your own background music here, something like the New Trier rouser), Lifson spent a long “formative” period knocking around art and architecture schools and Europe before coming back to Chicago, where he started freelancing for NPR. He filed his first piece in 1988 and was soon working for the network full-time from his hometown. In ’96 he was sent to Berlin to launch an NPR bureau there and wound up covering the war in Kosovo, “watching villages burn, driving roads planted with land mines, having a paramilitary stick a gun in your mouth and tell you he’s going to kill you.” WBEZ reached him in Berlin to talk about opportunities in Chicago; he returned 16 months ago as executive producer of Odyssey, the noontime talk show hosted by Gretchen Helfrich, working on the show’s transition to national syndication. (So far stations in nine markets have signed on.) When the Graham Foundation came through with a grant to pay the first year’s salary for an arts editor at WBEZ, Lifson made the switch.
Cultural coverage on the station’s local morning program Eight Forty-Eight is out of Lifson’s bailiwick, at least for now. Parker’s pieces will usually air as local “cutaways” during Morning Edition and All Things Considered and then be run again, perhaps at greater length, on a weekly arts magazine of the air he’s planning to launch soon after the first of the year. To be hosted by Lifson, the as-yet-unnamed magazine is likely to run on Sunday nights and could include interviews, poetry readings, and musical performances, making use of WBEZ’s new Jim and Kay Mabie Performance Studio, a just-completed state-of-the-art space Lifson says is another sign of the station’s heightened commitment to culture. His vision for the station includes conducting a competition for the next poet laureate: “We’d invite entries, work with the Poetry Center on a panel of judges, have the finalists read on the air, send recommendations to the governor.”
