The new movie “The Mountain Music Project” (by HV producer Jack Chance) is “A Musical Odyssey from Appalachia to Himalaya.” The film screens Sunday December 6th at 7PM at the Emerson Center, Bozeman MT. Families and Fiddles welcome.
The flick looks/sounds superb: just played to a packed house at National Geographic’s Grosvenor Auditorium, DC. Now it makes it’s Montana debut.
[Fresh from Joe Franks’s Facebook page, reprinted by permission…]
Across the alley is an apartment building. You look into one of the windows and see an old black couple arguing in a loving, formulated fashion that they’ve worked for years to perfection. He gestures violently, his left hand holding a half‑eaten turkey leg.
She, continually wiping her hands on her apron, finally balls her fist up and shakes it in front of his face. He turns away in disgust. Who is she? Bessie, mother of many children, daughter of a sharecropper, opens the Bible to the very same verses. Behind her eyes lurk 1,000 dead Ashanti dreams. She possesses the keys to a house in the suburbs. She gets car fare. She takes the early bus to where she wears the same housedress and walks from room to room carrying a radio. She’s never paid taxes — she’s always paid in cash. She has no Social Security number.
She is an angel on earth, the guardian of the house, forever wiping her hands upon her apron, tucking the children into bed, sitting heavily beside them, her breath sweet, her stories bittersweet, her hair a crinkly, soft white tied with a bandana, always weary, never tired, with a great posterior that moves with grace from room to room. Housemaid, housemother, house spirit, protector of children’s dreams. Verses, Psalms. She sings them in a melody that evokes the sound of a great flowing river, of distant banjos, the scent of magnolias, great porticos upon which gentlemen with drooping mustaches sit, feet up, drinking mint juleps.
She knows the secrets of the master and mistress of the house. She knows where he keeps his pornographic magazines, where she keeps the list of lovers that she visits from time to time. She’s found the wife’s recent love letters, airplane tickets to destinations not mentioned in daily conversations, receipts for jewelry the wife does not possess, and deep within a jar of Vaseline, the key to a motel room.
She’s found the cotton handkerchief into which the teenage son spills his seed in the secret moments of his private ecstasy. She’s found a small, brown bottle with white powder in it, the cap of which is attached by a small, brass chain to a spoon, rolled up into a pair of socks in the drawer of the teenage daughter’s bedroom.
The blue arc of Earth, photographed by the European Space Agency- Rosetta spacecraft:
ESA’s photo data:
Image of the Earth acquired with the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera from a distance of 633 000 km on 12 November 2009 at 13:28 CET. The resolution is 12 km/pixel. The image is a part of a sequence of images taken every hour through one full rotation (24 hours). The movie will be published later.
To gather up the necessary energy to reach the comet out past Mars’ orbit, Rosetta needed three swings past Earth. This is its third and final flyby. It will reach the comet in early 2014.
Unlike the most famous pictures of Earth, which show most of the blue marble, this photo presents a planet in darkness, just the South Pole awash in light.
We’ll leave you with “this historic recording was made by D.H. Van Lenten in 1962 as part of a series of experiments at Bell Laboratories to understand the nature of speech and hearing.” From Vintage Computer Music, “Computer Speech Demonstration w/ “Bicycle Built for Two” (2:19 mp3):
While in Iraq, former U.S. Army Sergeant Matthew McCue witnessed the power and peace-making potential of agriculture. When he returned to the States he worked with the Farmer-Veteran Coalition, and now works at the French Garden Farm near Sebastopol. Says McCue: “I still want to make the world a better place. I think i can do more good with a shovel than with an M-16.” McCue worked with the Farmer-Veteran Coalition and the French Garden Farm in Sebastopol CA, This story was originally produced for the SpeakeasyDC Storycast.
For Veteran’s Day an audio story on SoundRich: Viet Nam Detachment 5; two men in battle during the 1968 Vietcong Tet Offensive, one arduously escapes “protected by angels,” the other spent five years in an enemy prison camp, produced by Rich Halten.
Four former Massachusetts municipalities were flooded to make room for a reservoir. But the villages live on in the former residents’ minds. A ShortDocs winner, from Third Coast Festival.
This town in California never did exist, though it’s full of folk who live there: an unofficial RV Park and home to the homeless thrives in culture and community.
“The Legend of John Henry: Steel Drivin’ Man” (27:48) Ginna Allison
Little Talcott, West Virginia has a big claim to fame: It’s home to a famous story and song.
Keitai is Japenese for cell-phone, shōsetsu for novel; so keitai shōsetsu is “cellphone novel” (also “thumb novel”): a new lit genre started by young .jp girls. Their novels are posted to a media-sharing site as a series of text messages, which millions of .jp-teens download and read on their mobile phones.
Readers rapidly respond, and sometimes suggest. Some authors have used the best suggestions to alter their plots. Quite a few of these cell-phone serials have evolved into successful paper novels, selling 100K’s and even 1M’s of copies. Readers often purchase not the paperback but the hardcover as a momento of their literary interactivity. Half of the Japan’s half the top 10 fiction bestsellers of late have started as keitai shōsetsu.
Mone started posting her novel straight from her phone to a media-sharing site called Maho i-Land (Magic Island), never looking over what she wrote or contemplating plot. “I had no idea how to do that, and I did not have the energy to think about it,” she says. She gave her tale a title, “Eternal Dream,” and invented, as a proxy for her adolescent self, a narrator named Saki, who is in her second year of high school and lives in a hazily described provincial town. “Where me and my friends live, in the country, there aren’t any universities,” Mone wrote. “If you ride half an hour or so on the train, there’s a small junior college, that’s all.” Saki has a little brother, Yudai, and a close-knit family, a portrait that Mone painted in short, broad strokes: “Daddy / Mom / Yudai / I love you all so much.” Before long, however, Saki, walking home from school, is abducted by three strange men in a white car: “—Clatter, clatter — / The sound of a door opening. / At that moment . . . / —Thud— / A really dull blunt sound. / The pain that shoots through my head.” The men rape her and leave her by the side of the road, where an older boy from school, Hijiri, discovers her. He offers her his jersey, and love is born. More…
A century ago, Troy, New York, was a thriving industrial capital. Today many of its residents live in poverty. Studio 360’s Lu Olkowski went to Troy with poet Susan B.A. Somers-Willet and photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally to document some of Troy’s stories. They spent a lot of time with a single mother, Billie Jean Hill.
The result is poetry as journalism w/ some staggeringly accurate and beautiful photos:
As America mulls our Afghan options, let’s also look for patterns in our past overseas interventions: We staged coups for the Shah of Iran and South Vietnamese generals. Panama’s Noriega cashed CIA checks for decades. In the 1980s we sent Saddam $40 billion — making Iraq the third-largest recipient of $US’s. More…
Joyride Media’s recently PRX-posted a Gazillionth (or so) Monty Python Radio Special, narrated by Keith Olbermann (MSNBC). They start with this Python mini-masterpeice, “Radio Tuning Radio 4” (0:30 mp3):
Among the great oddio-viz coming out of Maker’s Quest is The Corner: 23rd and Union, stories, photos, and phone call-ins about one street intersection “near the geographical center of Seattle.”
KUOW’s Jenny Asarnow directs the project. One of the many fine Corner interviews at the site is with “Aaron Dixon: The Checkmate” (mp3):
Sophie Rouys is a conservation biologist and heads up the Kagu Recovery Plan for New Caledonia; she recorded some really close up calls one morning in the park at Riviere Bleue. They call, usually in groups, for anywhere between 5 minutes and an hour at dawn. They’re pretty silent the rest of the time, except for clucking sounds when male and female switch off at the nest and the occasional display.
While in Iraq, former U.S. Army Sergeant Matthew McCue witnessed the power and peace-making potential of agriculture. When he returned to the States he worked with the Farmer-Veteran Coalition, and now works at the French Garden Farm near Sebastopol. Says McCue: “I still want to make the world a better place. I think i can do more good with a shovel than with an M-16.” McCue worked with the 
For Veteran’s Day an audio story on SoundRich: 
Joyride Media’s recently PRX-posted a 
Among the great oddio-viz coming out of 