Iraq: Leaving

Something beautiful, haunting and appropriate about Jack Warga’s photo exhibit “Leaving Iraq:”

Jake was embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division, US Army. He snapped several dozen back-of-head portraits before he left. More Iraq images and audio in Jake’s Iraq Xmas 2009 HV posts.

The [Un]Observed

The [Un]Observed is a new Radio Magazine whose stories cross genres, countries and societal subjects.

Try “The Trouble With Rick” by Aussie “media practitioner” Kyla Brettle. She calls her piece a “radiophonic exploration and impressionistic interpretation of how the world spoke to Rick.” May sound pretentious, but is a pretty good description of the way she paints her audio portrait:

Walking into a noisy restaurant, Rick Tarulli felt inundated by a barrage of sound — the effect of which was so overwhelming that it made him lose his balance. Every conversation in the room shouted at him, the scrape of knives on plates made his vision jump and he could clearly discern the hum of the fridge out back. Rick knew there was something going wrong inside but couldn’t work it out. Neither could his doctors. Three years ago Rick discovered his symptoms were caused by superior canal dehiscence syndrome, a recently diagnosed condition that affects the inner ear.

Other contributors include HV frens Aaron Ximm (aka, quiet american; “Guatanamo Express“, Jonathan Mitchell (”Eye Contact“), and, ‘course, AnnKara: those females at the forefront of every forward facing futuristic audio feature.

Interested in contributing? Contact them; their ears are wide open:

What we’re looking for [is] innovative, engaging and dynamic use of sound as a medium to tell a story. That story can be about a wide range of things, and can be as long or short as the producer would like. The main guideline is in the execution. One of the goals of The [Un]Observed is to move away from traditional, act/track, radio pieces to something where the medium of sound is explored and expanded. The magazine hopes to be a playground of sorts for radio and audio producers to present work they are excited about and proud of. Beyond that, we hope to create an international space where sound makers from all different parts of the world can come together.

via sound Rich and Chadwicks.

HV023- This Is Insanity

Hearing Voices from NPR®
023 This is Insanity: Disturbed Mental States
Host: Scott Carrier of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-03-03 (Originally: 2008-08-06)

“This is Insanity” (52:00 mp3):

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

A survey of disturbed mental states:

With the music of Disposable Heroes of Hiphopcracy (rapper Michael Franti and percussionist Ron Tse), from the 1993 CD Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales.

A first-person account from an anonymous reporter of his experience undergoing ElectroConvulsive Therapy.

Music from the Australian mashup/cut-up artists 2000 CD Since I Left You.

Our host travels the Utah backroads testing folk for schizophrenia.

The narrator is pathologically challenged by time, and the stories societies tell themselves, excerpted from the 2006 radio hour “Time’s Arrow.”

Howard Dully traces the reasons and repercusssions of his transorbital or “ice pick” lobotomy, a radical new procedure in the treatment of mental illness in this country, pioneered and performed by psychiatrist Walter J. Freeman.

Produced by Dave Isay and Piya Kochhar, with help from Larry Blood, Eliza Bettinger, Brett Myers, Jessica Tickten, Anna Goldman, Maisie Tivnan, Colin Murphy and Jonah Engle Narratored by Howard Dully; edited by Gary Covino. Jack El-Hai was project advisor. Special thanks to: Barbara Dully, Andrew Goldberg, Christine Johnson, Lyle Slovick & David Anderson at the GWU Gelman Library archives. Funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

HV085- Protest

Hearing Voices from NPR®
085 Protest: From the National Mall to Town Halls
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-03-24

“Protest” (52:00 mp3):

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Complaining about the government is an American pastime. We hear protest music and mashups; we go to protest marches, from Vietnam War era actions on the National Mall, to modern-day Tea Parties and Town Halls:

Protest used to be mainly for the young and left-leaning, but recently older right-wingers have joined the party — the Tea Party. When Congressmen went home in 2009, this is what they heard from constituents. Music: Jeff Arntsen, mix: Robin Wise, audio: excerpted from YouTube videos.

A sound collage of protests and protest music over the past 40 years

The popular Burmese rock band Iron Cross is using music to challenge the nation’s infamously repressive regime. In the great tradition of rock and roll, Iron Cross is taking on Burma’s military government with song.

Music made from field recordings at 2003 anti-war protests. MP3s at Hawks and Sparrows:

…originally existed as an edition of 100 cd-rs packaged individually with the first flowers of spring in clear glass cases. the audio on each disk is made up of reconstructions and rearrangements of field recordings from 4 anti-war protests (seattle, new york, philadelphia, and washington dc) that took place in the late winter of 2003, with a specific intent to remove any rhetoric, any dogma, incantations, chants, or spoken language of any sort, and leave musical constructions culled from in-between pauses, whistles and yells, drums, sirens, helicopters, electric hums, boomboxes, etc… distributed by reverse shoplifting, filed under “h” in a store near you. never pay for this cd.

In Fall 2009, President Obama flew into Bozeman, Montana. He gave a health care talk… in an airplane hanger. The protesters were kept a half-mile away from the airport, in a field — what the Police called a “free-speech zone.” The local Tea Party had reserved it, but plenty of single payer advocates had showed up. There were dueling megaphones, simul-chanting, and even some level-headed discussions. Voices include Chief Bill Dove, Linda Kenoyer, Tom Hunter, Don McClarty, Bob Adney, Alene Brackman, John Chaffer, Kent Madin, Lance Craighead, Henry Kriegel, Joanne Kessler, Tammy Hall, and Bob Folsick.

Every day protesters take over Zocalo plaza in Oaxaca City, Mexico; recorded for quiet american in 2003.

From May 3 1971, an excerpt from All Things Considered’s first broadcast. The debut program takes to the DC streets to cover that day’s anti-war (Vietnam) actions. Host Robert Conley describes “the crush, catcalls, flux and flow of the demonstrations in Washington.” Reporter Jeff Kamen bears witness: “Today in the nation’s capital, it is a crime to be young and have long hair.”

Based on a recording of protest against Iraq War, New York, March 2003. Written/produced/performed by Bob Goldberg/BAN Radio “Orchestra”, 2003 (and of Famous Accordions). MP3 found at Another Protest Song.

---

Suppose they gave a Town Hall, and a Tea Party showed up. Excerpts for 2009 health care collective chaos…

“Town Halls 2009″

Audio/Video Production: Barrett Golding
Music: Jeff Arntsen
Audio mix: Robin Wise
Video clips: ABC World News, WGNO- New Orleans, David William Hedrick, The Young Turks, Hot Air Pundit Kathy Castor, Hill Newspaper, YouTube. Video playlist- Town Halls 2009 (videos).

Scoop Nisker

Wes ‘Scoop’ Nisker tried to transform what news can be, blurring the lines of communication between newscast and sonic-collage. His reports aired on KSAN, the wildly popular commercial station, in the 1970s.

Selected casts were later compiled as “A Decade In your Ear” by New American Radio, and are now posted at Scoop’s site. This underground classic “helped define and express the counter-culture of that era. You will hear the voices of presidents, people in the streets, and the Swami from Miami.”

From Scoop’s Greatest Hits, “Turn On, Drop Out” (21:52):

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Scoop: interviewed at Some Assembly Required

From the End of the World-Patagonia Day 2

Patagonian Expedition Race

Day 2
The best traveling is time traveling.  We (journalists and planners) awoke this morning in the early 1900’s.  A potbelly stove strove to warm the dusty, drafty, and mostly forgotten ranch house built from 1903-1905.  The house itself woke to find squatters in sleeping pods in every room and hallway.  This ranch house is now used only once a year for a month of skiing.  Skiing?  I looked at Frederico Siha, the 67 year old man who owns the property and has lived here for over 50yrs.  He didn’t strike me as a skier.  Apparently the word for skiing and sheering (of sheep) is very close, my translator corrected with a smile.  Senior Siha has three children, all living in the city, none with any interest in continuing the farm tradition, “You have to keep going till you can’t,” he tells me.  Further, he’s sure they’ll just sell the land when the time comes.  But before then, he wants to travel to Europe, a place he’s never been.  When  pressed for specifics he smiles and says, “Anywhere in Europe.”
More…

From the End of the World – Patagonia

Wenger Patagonian Expedition Race

Day 1

The race started, like all good races, with a bang – this particular bang came from a Chilean policeman’s pistola. The beach was empty of teams long before the bullet fell God knows where. Getting to this point however was far from easy.

6:30am, Punta Arenas (Photos)

Everyone, including the first rays of sunlight, gathered in the town’s Central Plaza to board a fleet of buses…buses we would get to know very well. Many of us had already survived the greatest danger of the day…a frenetic ride in local taxis. We watched our last city sunrise for many days and packed into the tour coaches for transport to the kayak launching point and the official start of the race. The early hour muted some of the excitement as racers settled-in. Highly engineered socks started poking up from reclined bus seats by those achieving curious pretzel-nap poses only possible on chartered transports. Lumbering down the highway I watched the scenery change from graffiti-peppered buildings to industrial brick-making plants to just lots of plants being nibbled on by sheep. Lots of sheep. Then the vast nothingness of land, of that something we’re here to traverse and treasure.

More…

Union Docs Fortnight

Tomorrow night (Sat Feb 20 8p) Union Docs premeires a DocumentaryFortnight at MoMA- NYC, hosted by Kara Oehler of HV and MapMainSt:

This is a year-long program for non-fiction media research and group production brings together 12 media artists (including Tina and Shawn) from diverse backgrounds (film, radio, poetry, architecture, performance, photography) to collaboratively create new works. This Saturday, we’ll be screening and performing pieces from our most recent collaborative project – the exploration of myths and mythology in documentary. Partly inspired by Roland Barthes classic Mythologies, a slim volume from 1957 composed of many short but revelatory essays, this ongoing multi-media project seeks to interrogate some of the myths that underlie everyday life.

Following the MoMA presentation, we will head over to The Space in Long Island City for our official benefit after party. Join us for drinks and music, featuring the legendary New York City brass ensemble the Hungry March Band and surprise DJ’s. $7 suggested donation, 10:30pm – until?

(46-01 5th Street at Vernon Ave, LIC. Take the E and V to the 23rd Street Ely Avenue stop.)