HV124- Walk in the Park

Hearing Voices from NPR®

124 Walk in the Park: National Parks, Neighborhood Parks

Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices

Airs week of: 2011-10-19

“Walk in the Park” (52:00 mp3):

Yellowstone, Zion, the Everglades, and William Pierce Park in DC:

From the series Neighborhood Stories– Park Life, profiling the daily life of a community’s urban oasis: “Country Bobby” Lowry is the guardian of Walter Pierce Community Park in Washington, D.C. He’s been keeping an eye on the park for almost three decades, and knows more about how it than any city official — he knows the trees, the plants and the kids. In the first of four stories about the park, we meet this transplanted farm boy who never takes shortcuts in his work. See NPR’s has great photo gallery.

Utah’s Zion National Park draws 2.7 million visitors a year, and a major attraction for hearty hikers is a trek along the Grotto trailhead to Angel’s Landing. From the banks of the Virgin River, the yellow-and-red sandstone sides of Zion Canyon rise 2,000 feet. It feels like being inside a huge body. The canyon walls are the rib cage spread open and Angel’s Landing is like the heart.

Take an Angels Landing eHike. Photo gallery at NPR.

From Neighborhood Stories– Park Life: An ode to Leah at Walter Pierce Community Park, who braids hair by the basketball court while the guys play 5 on 5.

Music from Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds, Vol. 1

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HV073- Home Team

Hearing Voices from NPR®
073 Home Team: For World Series Season
Host: Gwen Macsai of WBEZ Re:sound
Airs week of: 2011-10-12 (Originally: 2009-10-21)

“Home Team” (52:00 mp3):

For the weeks of the Conference Championships and World Series, baseball stories from the Public Radio Hall of Fame:

The sounds of a St. Louis Cardinals’ baseball game are combined with the echoes of Scott Joplin’s ragtime and the distinctive calls of Bushy Wushy the Beer Man. This 39-year veteran beer vendor at Busch Stadium, he shares his love for the game, the crowd, and the communal spirit of St. Louis. Commissioned by Continental Harmony, a partnership of America Composers Forum, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the White House Millennium Council. Performed by Equinox Chamber Players, who premiered the work in their hometown of St. Louis.

Our “Home Team” guest host goes to games at her local minor league stadium, in Prince William, Virginia. After hearing the a host of different folk try to sing the Star-Spangled Banner there, she figures she could do better. That’s where the trouble begins.

At the Helena Brewers ballpark in Montana, teens and early twenty-somethings get their first, and for most their only, taste of playing of pro baseball.

The fictionalized history of two people: a man born in the late 1800s who runs away from home to play baseball, and a woman born in the early 1900s in a half-dugout (a small house partially built into the side of a slope or hill), who grows up to be a piano player and a beautician. Told by Terry Allen, Jo Harvey Allen, and Katie Koontz, with music by Terry Allen. Commissioned in 1993 by New American Radio. (“Radio Memories” self-interview with Terry Allen.)

HV123- Cystic Fibrosis

Hearing Voices from NPR®
123 Cystic Fibrosis: Living with CF
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-10-05

“Cystic Fibrosis” (52:00 mp3):

Audio diaries document a decade of life with CF, a chronic, often deadly, genetic disease:

“Radio Diaries: My So-Called Lungs”" (2001 / 21:13) Joe Richman

A classic Radio Diaries: When this program premiered, Laura Rothenberg was 21 years old, or, as she likes to say, she already had her mid-life crisis a couple of years ago, and even then it was a few years late. Laura has cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that affects the lungs and other organs. People with CF lived an average of 30 years then (now it’s 37). Radio Diaries gave Laura a tape recorder and, for two years, she kept an audio diary of her battle with the disease and her attempts to lead a normal life with lungs than often betray her.

“My So-Called Lungs” was reported by Laura Rothenberg and produced by Joe Richman, for Radio-Diaries-dot-org, with support from the Open Society Institute and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Deborah George was the Editor. Laura Rothenberg died in March 2003. Her memoir, Breathing For a Living was published a few months later. And Joe Richman had this Laura Rothenberg Remembrance on NPR.

“Four Failings Lungs” (2011 / 25:14) Catie Talarski

In 2010, there were 1,770 lung transplants performed in the United States — the most ever in a single year. For a person with Cystic Fibrosis, the transplant may extend life by years — or it could lead to continued suffering and rejection of the new organ. This documentary follows two young people struggling with end-stage Cystic Fibrosis, and struggling with a decision about transplant. While most of us are just hitting our stride in our late 20s, Beth Peters and Brian Sercus are medicating, massaging and coaxing their lungs into lasting as long as possible. Producer Catie Talarski documented Beth and Brian for a year to understand what its like to live with this chronic disease.

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HV066- Desert Air

Hearing Voices from NPR®
066 Desert Air: Audio from the Arid Regions
Host: Ben Adair of American Public Media
Airs week of: 2011-09-28 (Originally: 2009-08-05)

“Desert Air” (52:00 mp3):

Hot & dry stories and soundscapes (see Dave’s Deserts for photos from the American West):

Coyotes, owls, frogs and songbirds are part of Desert Solitudes, recorded by Bernie Krause and Ruth Happel in the Sonoran and Chihuauan deserts, part of New Mexico’s panhandle.

Host Ben Adair heads down to the ghost towns, Opera Houses, century-old abandoned mines, and billion-year old boulders along Death Valley’s “Mojave Road.”

Kraut-rockers Faust dial in “Long Distance Calls in the Desert,” from their album Rien.

The Quiet American (Aaron Ximm) sound-captures the forbidding warning signs rattling in a harsh wind and “Desert Sun” outside the nuclear Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas.

Back in the early 1990s, SLC producer Scott Carrier found the Basin & Range, near Nevada”s “Battle Mountain,” beautiful, lonely, dreary, and full of sagebrush, solace and stories. And more Desert Solitudes.

Death Valley sand dunes in California, © David Matherly

Our Dave’s Deserts gallery has more David Matherly photos from the American West.

HV102- Lost Critters

Hearing Voices from NPR®
102 Lost Critters: Dogs, Cats, a Pig, & 1M Camels
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-09-21 (Originally: 2010-10-20)

“Lost Critters” (52:00 mp3):

Some Dogs, Some Cats, One Pig, and a Million Camels:

On the race track and on the grill, competing and eating wild camels in the Northern Australia Territories. (Camel photo: Jake Warga)

Leo Grillo locates lost pets in Los Angeles. He cares for animals, thousands of them. Today, his organization, D.E.L.T.A Rescue (Dedication and Everlasting Love to Animals), is the world’s largest animal rescue shelter.

Produced by Jay Allison with Cristina Egloff for their series Animals and Other Stories; funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

A pig is spared the butcher block but lost in the wilds of Washington DC. Blame the Air Force?

A mid-90s visit to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Everyone knows this one of the places where the government developed the first atom bomb during World War II. But our host was interested in Chaos Theory, an elaborate mathematical description of turbulent systems like the weather, and possibly the stock market, and who knows what all else. Chaos Theory was all the rage in Los Alamos then. Along with the theory, it turned out there was also real chaos in Los Alamos. It was slinking up and down the streets late at night in the form of a feral dog. Produced for the radio series SoundPrint.

HV072- Predator

Hearing Voices from NPR®
072 Predator: Hunter and Hunted
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-09-14 (Originally: 2009-10-14)

“Predator” (52:00 mp3):

For the opening of hunting season:

A teenage babysitter convinces his younger siblings he’s a werewolf… who’s going to kill them, produced by Hillary Frank (author of I Can’t Tell You) for This American Life.

Beatrice is a white toy poodle, a neighbor, and “the most evil entity, force, energy known to man. Death to humans is a mere plop of a pebble in the ocean that is the evil that you are Beatrice. Evil Beatrice the white poodle.”

LA’s The Natural History Museum commissioned original music compositions to accompany their 2006 exhibit Sonic Scenery: Music for Collections. Matmos’ music used the vocal sounds of North American mammals.

One of America’s oldest roadside attractions is the Linesville Spillway in northwest Pennsylvania. Tourists toss bread; carp amass at the spillway’s edges: The fish are so thick that mallard ducks hop, skip and jump on the fish’s backs to compete for a slice of bread. Original music by Tim Fite, part of LHP’s song/story series.

More music from the LHP story.

Writer (Amazon), hunter, angler, outdoorsman, Norman Strung demonstrates the shrill sound and thrill found in calling for elk. (Miss ya, Norm: “Labradors [are] lousy watchdogs. They usually bark when there is a stranger about, but it is an expression of unmitigated joy at the chance to meet somebody new, not a warning.” –Norman Strung)

Father Rupe LaRock and son Joe provide a hunter’s perspective of the annual deer breeding cycle. “You can just smell the heat and smell the rut right in the air.” Another of the Deer Stories , produced with Gregory Sharrow at the Vermont Folk Life Center.

Guns, guitars, guts, and wild game. Hunting wildlife and the wild life in the mountains of Payette National Forest. From the Chadwick’s Conservation Sound series. Audio by Micheal Scweppe.

HV122- Prisoner of Zion

Hearing Voices from NPR®
122 Prisoner of Zion: Religious Fundamentals- 9/11/11
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-09-07

“Prisoner of Zion” (52:00 mp3):

Shortly after the World Trade Center fell in autumn 2001, it became clear the United States would invade Afghanistan. Producer Scott Carrier decided he ought to go there too. Why? To see for himself: that’s what writers do. Who are these fanatics, these fundamentalists, the Taliban and the like? And what do they want?

For the weekend of 9/11/11, Hearing Voices from NPR presents Prisoner of Zion. Carrier narrates his trip to Afghanistan. With his young guide and translator, Najibulla, they tour the horrors of war.

Years later Naji tells Scott he must leave his homeland — the dangers for a translator have become extreme. Scott gets Najibulla accepted at Utah Valley University. Naji, it turns out, handles the Mormons quite well, while Scott, teaching at the same school, has a hard time with them. At the end Naji is graduating, about to get married, and start a new job; while Scott wonders whether he can stand teaching another year — or if he’ll wind up on the street like Naji.

→From Afghanistan: A photo-audio-essay by Scott Carrier; with sounds, images, songs and prayers of the Afghan people.

HV098- Working Class

Hearing Voices from NPR®
098 Working Class: For Labor Day
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-08-31 (Originally: 2010-09-01)

“Working Class” (52:00 mp3):

Our Labor Day weekend welcome to the work week looks at what we do for a living:

Exercises for existential overworked, undervalued employees: a more realistic approach to yogic spiritual awareness for the cubically encased.

Produced by Rebecca Flowers, author of Nice to Come Home To.

Pasquale Spensieri spends his days driving around Brooklyn looking for dull blades. When he rings the bell on his truck, the owners of upholstery shops, restaurants and pizza parlors come out with knives and scissors to sharpen. Pasquale’s father first started sharpening knives during the Depression, with a pedal-operated grinding machine strapped to his back. At that time, there were hundreds of door-to-door grinders in New York. Today, at the age of 71, Pasquale is one of the last. Produced by Joe Richman and Emily Botein (WNYC) for their series New York Works.

Since the 1880s, Mohawk Indian ironworkers have been known for their ability to work high steel. From the Empire State Building to the the World Trade Center, generations of Mohawks have helped shape New York City’s skyline. Each week, they commute to Manhattan from their reservation in Canada, framing the city’s skyscrapers and bridges. In September 2001, after the fall of the Trade Center Towers, the sons and nephews of these men returned to the site to dismantle what their elders had helped to build.

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