Year: 2009/Archives

Dear God

XTC’s lovely, lyrical, laughable, laudable, “Dear God”:

via MTV 120 Minutes: Archive.

Lyrics: More…

Camel Jockey- Glenda Sutton

The start of this year’s camel racing season is just starting in the United Arab Eremites. In Australia the season ended a few weeks ago. Every year veteran camel trainer and jockey Glenda Sutton competes, and often wins. Photographer Tim Bonham caught up with her in Queensland, at the Boulia Camel Races.

PRI The World is featuring a superb audio-slideshow of the event; photos and audio by producer Tim Bonham, “Camel Jockey- Glenda Sutton” (3:33 mp3):

Tim Bonham photos:

HV078- Shopping for Santa

Hearing Voices from NPR®
078 Shopping for Santa: A Season’s Greeting
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2009-12-09

“Shopping for Santa” (52:00 mp3):

Holiday spirits and communal consumption:

We go shopping at “City X,” a sound-rich history of America’s malls and their creator, architect Victor Gruen (PRX | Radio Lab | 3rd Coast).

The producer, at age 2, sings “Silent Night” with her Dad. A woman homesteader remembers brutal North Dakota winters in the 1920s. Blues legend Brownie McGhee describes homemade Christmas presents. Adi Gevins’ father reveals that all New York Santas gain entry through the fire escape. And an Oroville grandfather uses a snow machine to make his plastic Christmas tree even more realistic. Produced for the series A Gathering of Days, with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and KQED-San Francisco. Thanks to Adi Gevins, psychiatrist Ray Posie, John Langstaff: creator of Christmas Revels, and the late Peter Allison for the family recordings.

Eli Boggs, age 3, sings “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”. His dad, Jesse Boggs, plays guitar.

Hearing Voices wishes you lotsa Holidays Spirits and Prosperos Anos Nuevos.

Images from Coke Lore. Ads painted by Haddon Sundblom
1942 above, 1951 below:

Interviewing 3.0

Virtuoso Voices has compiled interviewing tips from pubradio personalities Bob Edwards, Susan Stamberg, Kurt Andersen, Lisa Mullins, John Diliberto, Lynn Neary and others. It’s all in a 25-page Interviewing 3.0 pdf (296KB).

David Schulman’s (of MITOW) thots on interviewing “feng shui” are revalations. Below are some excerpts from “Interviewing Performing Artists… and Others: A Practical Guide”…

Bob Edwards (The Bob Edwards Show):

Think of it as a conversation and not an interview. If you do an interview, it will likely SOUND like an interview. How do you talk to a friend over a beer? First you LISTEN—and you react to what you’ve heard. If someone tells me something really interesting, I’ll simply say, “Really?” or “No!” Those are little words of encouragement that signal the speaker to continue—and to expand on previous remarks. If your guest is truly confusing, try “Huh?”

Indulge yourself. Ask the question you’ve always wanted to ask. “What’s that lyric about?”

Susan Stamberg (NPR):

Listening to answers is more important than asking the question.

Best question is often the simplest: WHY?

John Diliberto (Echoes:

Don’t be afraid to ask the hard question. They aren’t your friends and you don’t have to worry that they won’t like you or walk out. Although occasionally they do.

Don’t be afraid to ask the obvious question. I got this from listening to Terry Gross, who, besides being a probing interviewer, also knows where the good stories are and isn’t afraid to query into known terrain, because a good story is still a good story, even if it’s been heard before. Chances are, most people still don’t know it. Then find a different angle on that story.

More…

Holy Land Tour

Jake Warga takes us on a personal tour through the Holy Land, looking at how the conflict started and what it’s like today between Jerusalem and Bethlehem… between birth and re-birth. (Also a PRX radio story.):

Holy Land Tour from Jake Warga

Googleverse

Matt Dunne, Google’s head of community affairs, names numbers:

Each day, Google processes 2 billion searches, sends two e-mails per second through its Gmail account system, and uploads 22 hours of video onto You Tube, per minute. It would take a lifetime to watch the video posted on the site every three months.

…and what a dull, dreary lifetime that would be. More Google #s in “The ever-expanding Googleverse” Vtdigger.org.

Cap’n Trade

The Story of Stuff folk have a new film out on The Story of Cap & Trade. Annie Leonard once again does her simple, straight-forward finger-pointing at job pointing to some devilish details in the current proposals:

Cap & Trade Trailer

The full film is: The Story of Cap & Trade.

HV talked with Annie in 2006.

Spooky Antarctic

DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid combines field-recordings and feelings he collected in the South Pole into Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, a “large scale multimedia performance work” (NPR story):

Miller’s field recordings from a portable studio, set up to capture the acoustic qualities of Antarctic ice forms, reflect a changing and even vanishing environment under duress. Coupled with historic, scientific, and geographical visual material, Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica is a seventy minute performance, creating a unique and powerful moment around man’s relationship with nature.

AutoTune Meme

Weird Al lays out the history and science of Auto-Tune, from the Know Your Meme series (tube):

HV did a radio intervu with the Gregory Bros on their Auto-Tuned News.

And here’s a playlist with most of the movies mentioned in above Auto-Tune explainer:

via Alix Blair.

KVMR Oaks

Drove 1100-miles in 19 hours last Wednesday — MT to NoCal — to be with fam for Thanksgiving. Pubradio kept me company the whole way (‘sides some signal-less spots in ID mtns and NV desert, filled with Joe Frank and TAL podcasts.)

Near NV/CA’s border heading east on I-90, when you crest Donner Pass, a pubradio feast commences. My presets fill up fast. From SF there’s KQED, NPR’s most listened-to station, and Pacifica’s KPFA, home to Negativland’s Over the Edge. One of college radio’s freeform finest is KDVS at U of CA-Davis. And community station KVMR-Nevada City CA manages to be hyperlocal yet always entertaining to this outta-towner.

While speeding downhill thru the Sierras, I caught KVMR’s eve news. It ended with a discussion about oak trees: one scientist/radio-announcer/educator talking to another scientist/author. I felt privileged to listen into their conversation. Their tree talk wasn’t dull or dumbed-down; it was comprehensible and comprehensive. An unexpected, imaginative use of radio, doncha think?:

Al Stahler’s Soundings: On Oaks
The oak is one of the signature trees of the Sierran Foothills. Al Stahler spoke with Glen Keator, author of The Life of an Oak: An Intimate Portrait (22:12 mp3):

Grandmother Alma

It is with a mixture of sadness and relief I announce the passing of my Grandmother: Alma J. Kelsey (Warga, Smith).

Born in Lincoln, Nebraska on July 4th, 1910, she passed away this weekend, 99 years later.

Alma was the oldest of seven siblings but the last to depart. She is survived by myself and her son Robin.

In 1928, at the age of 17, Alma Smith eloped with Wayne Warga, 19, and headed West for Hollywood to start a new life and a family. The family was harder to come-by for her husband was not medically able: but in 1938 she bore my father, Wayne (Bud), after a secret affair with an LAPD officer. Then in 1949 she met another man to have another child: Robin. She wanted a family so bad and bore the weight of her secrets until she started AA and revealed all.

In the 1970’s she met and married Dick Kelsey, painter and animator. They moved to Leisure Village in Camarillo where her Lilly Garden won village awards year after year. She stayed by Dick through his Alzheimer’s and eventual death.

In 1985 AA became Alma’s new church, where she grew to become a guru in the program. In 1994 we stood together and buried her son, my father, Wayne. It’s around that time Alzheimer’s started pulling her away.

In 2005 NPR aired a story about her (transcript). I invite you to hear Alma in her own voice, “Grandmother: Aging, Decline & Love” (8:16 mp3):

More…

Strange Mortals

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…
—Albert Einstein, “Mein Weltbild” (“My World-view” 1931)
More from his essay: “The World as I See It“

HV077- AIDS Diaries

Hearing Voices from NPR®
077 AIDS Diaries: For AIDS Awareness Day
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-11-24 (Originally: 2009-11-25)

“AIDS Diaries” (52:00 mp3):

Portraits of people fighting a plague:

South Africa has been hit hardest with H-I-V/AIDS. Five million people are infected (Avert: SA). One of them, Thembi Ngubane, at nineteen years old, carried a recorder in 2005 to document her life (NPR | PRX). Produced by Joe Richman, edited by Debra George and Ben Shapiro; more of Thembi’s story, with an audio-visual gallery, is at AIDSdiary.org.

December 1st is World AIDS Day. In the arts community it also had this other name, DWA.

Poet Kwame Dawes travels his native Jamaica talking about HIV/AIDS. This is part of the hour-program “Live Hope Love: HIV/AIDS in Jamaica” (PRX) Support came from the MAC AIDS Fund, of MAC Cosmetics, and from and PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Produced by Stephanie Guyer-Stevens and Jack Chance of Outer Voices, for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Their emmy-winning muchomedia website for the project Live Lope Love.

More…

1000 Rust Angels

Scupltor Kenn Coplan has been making Rust Angels out of desert debris:

Rust Angels are made from recyled material (Trash) that I have collected from my local deserts. My hope is to create 1,000 Rust Angels in the tradition of Sadako Sasaki, who tried to make a thousand cranes (Senbazuru) to grant her wish for her life after she was irradiated in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima during World War II.

Kenn Coplan: site | flickr

Be A Frog

Heard this morn on KGLT, a new Flaming Lips silly song w/ a silly vid w/ some silly spoken and mouth-sound effects: aka, we love it; from their album Embryonic:

The Flaming Lips – “I Can Be A Frog” (Official Video)

Beck’s Record Club

Beck (-Hansen not Jeff-) has a Record Club of rock ‘n’ luminaries. They’ve covered the songs of Leonard Cohen, Velvet Underground, and now Skip Spence (of Moby Grape). Beck, Feist, and Wilco recorded their studio session tackling this track from Skip’s 1969 solo LP Oar:

Skip Spence “Little Hands”

Record Club: Skip Spence “Little Hands” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

via some velvet blog.

FU FB Group

There’s a new Group on Facebook called FU FB:

For taking our time and our bandwidth, for making “friend” a verb while devaluing it as a noun, and for lotsa otra evils we’ll add later: FU FB, a new Facebook Group

Gov Outta Medicare?

The reputable Public Policy Polling .
reports:

One question we asked on this poll gives a good idea of how difficult it is to inform the public on this complicated issue. Medicare is obviously an inherently public program, but just for the heck of it we asked the somewhat tongue in cheek question of whether the government should ‘stay out of Medicare.’ 39% of Americans said yes.
—”National Poll: Obama Approval, Health Care, Birthers” ( 172K)

Other sad states of American affairs in thenational phone survey (909 voters, Aug 14-17 2009, MOE +/-3.3%.909): “Do you think Barack Obama was born in the United States?” 44% of Republicans said no. (For all respondents: Yes- 62%, No- 25%, Not Sure- 14%.)

Here’s a question I hope PPP poese in their next survey: “Should aborted evolutionists serve birther Obamacare death panels?” Let folk figure that one out.

xkcd- Droid v iPhone

xkcd on iPhone vs Droid vs Life:

xkcd #662 © Randall Munroe

Robyn Hitchcock Picks Cherry Picking

A sparkling revu of David Greenbergers spoke-word w/ music Cherry Picking Apple Blossom Time by none other than Robyn Hitchcock:

David Greenberger meanders around America, lovingly collecting the life stories of old people like fireflies in a jar. On Cherry Picking Apple Blossom Time he visits Milwaukee which, as one elderly resident explains, has the same number of letters as Wisconsin. Over a smoky grid of blues-funk and acoustic guitar played by Paul Cebar and his band, David recites anecdotes and reflections from the Milwaukee senior citizens that he has interviewed on his recent visits there.

In an America that seems increasingly dominated by amnesia, and the erosion of its history, it’s very heartening — and poignant — to hear these fragments of lives as they draw to a close. The rootsy tone of the music — Ry Cooder, Tom Waits, David Byrne and even Beefheart’s Magic Band come to the mind’s ear — adds Americana to these tales of vanishing Midwestern life. Here are the man who cheated at tomato- growing by hanging a purchased one on a vine; the man who made peace with his artificial arm and hung shopping bags from it; and the man in a red shirt who feels like a king. There are exuberant moments, but the most moving pieces are the elegies: people who gently mourn their vanished partners — one speaks of his wife as his co-pilot, another of how he’s tried to replace his wife with crossword puzzles. The matter-of-fact tone that David uses in these vignettes is partly what makes them so emotional. In ‘No Rooms Here’ you can hear the life and memory of the elderly female narrator dissolving as she speaks. Just as certain as our death is the uncertainty of what follows — this ambiguity riddles the inhabitants of Cherry Picking Apple Blossom Time. More…