When an elderly parent dies after a long life of lovingly acquiring things, she leaves behind more than memories for her kids. She leaves something much more tangible: The things. So many, many things. Is it things that make a home? This week, to kick off Season 2, it’s a story of life, death, memory, loss, Christmas, trash bags, and what it means to unmake a home. One housekeeping note: With this episode, HOME joins such excellent shows as You Are Not So Smart, Futility Closet and Gweek on...

Season 2 of HOME comes your way in January. Subscribe today and new episodes will automagically fly through the aether to you more or less the very second they’re released. And if you get a moment between now and the start of the new season to tell your friends about the show, or even better, to rate and/or review it at the iTunes Store, why, there’ll be a fine fat goose under your Christmas tree!* (Many thanks to the most excellent Podington Bear for much of the music used in Season 1,...

The venerable Villa Carlotta — home to show business A-listers in the Golden Age, and later to a generation of young actors, writers and musicians  — sits, a hollowed-out shell, on Hollywood’s Franklin Avenue. It may or may not be about to undergo a transformation into an upscale hotel. What happens to a community when it’s driven from the place where it’s made a home? One resident stubbornly hangs on, battling for the soul of a building that once buzzed with life and energy. MUSIC: *...

There’s the San Fernando Valley, the one you can find on a map… and then there’s The Valley, the one that exists in the culture, whose notoriety far outstrips its size. How did that happen? How did it come to be that you can mention The Valley to people in Milwaukee or Toronto or Tokyo and they’ll know what you’re talking about? And what does it mean to call The Valley home? This week HOME looks at the tangled legacy of a place that managed to be both the iconic American suburb and an...

Andy Puddicombe left college at 22 and spent a decade tramping the world before returning to the UK and landing, eventually, in Los Angeles. He’s lived in so many countries that he has trouble recalling them on demand. How did his travels, and his training in Buddhism, alter the way he thought about home? This week on HOME: The winding road that led an ex-monk from Bristol to Venice Beach. Music, once again this week, by the prolific and generous Podington Bear: * “Gamma Ray” *...

This week it’s a story about Amboy, CA, a ghost town 30 miles from anywhere on the old Route 66, and the chicken magnate who’s spent a fortune trying to keep it from collapsing into the desert sand. Can Albert Okura really hold back both history and nature? Read more about Amboy here and here. You can find a video about Albert, his right-hand man Charlie and the town here. MUSIC: All the music in this episode is by the wonderful Podington Bear, a/k/a Chad Crouch of Portland, Oregon....

On a warm May day in 2005 a crowd gathered near a freeway embankment in Hawthorne, CA and turned its gaze to a house that wasn’t there. Nobody knows where inspiration comes from — but was the little house that once stood at 3701 West 119th St. the one place above all others that made The Beach Boys sound like they did? The story of the Beach Boys Historic Landmark is a story of exaltation and something darker, of light and shadow, and of hard lessons learned. Music: * “Surfin’...

Herman Stein contributed music to more than 200 films, including some of the 1950s’ best-known monster movies: Creature From The Black Lagoon, This Island Earth, It Came From Outer Space, The Mole People, Tarantula and The Incredible Shrinking Man. He also composed for television, most memorably the Family Theme for “Lost In Space.” He was a prodigy who took up piano at 3, first performed in public at 6, arranged for Count Basie at 16, was a colleague of Henry Mancini on the music staff at...

A story about home, and place, and donuts. Music by: * Mongo Santamaria (“Mother Jones”) * Wintergatan (“Starmachine2000”) * Roger Roger (“Slippery Sid”) * Bobbi Humphrey (“Harlem River Drive”) * Nick Jaina (“Man Without A Head”) * Podington Bear (“Tweedlebugs”) * Cosmic Rough Riders (“Morning Sun”)