Let’s rev-up this election process with a cross-county Political Party:
“Salt Lake City Debate” (2007 / 15:52) Scott Carrier
Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson publicly debates FOX News host Sean Hannity. The spectacle took place inside a chasm called Us versus Them. Produced in 2007 for This American Life; music: Rickie Lee Jones, “Nobody Knows My Name” from Sermon On Exposition Boulevard.
Politics can be frustrating. It can make you scream — which made one Presidential candidate became famous for. Here’s Howard Dean’s scream put to music (more mixes at James Lileks’ Bleatophony).
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.
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.
“Leet” (more often “1337”) is half-joking hacker code for elite, or skilled. A leet programmer or gamer is at the top of her game.
“Shibboleth” comes from the Bible. It’s the Hebrew word for an ear of corn, but requires a true native accent to pronounce properly. Because the word was so difficult for foreigners to say, shibboleth became a code word for early Israelites, a dead giveaway that someone was an interloper. Now, shibboleth is a catchall term for any custom or belief that sets one group of people apart from another.
A friend, database/web designer Jon Nehring, is configuring some colored county-level data visualizations (aka, choropleth map) for a client. During dev, a “happenstance created this image in SQL Server”:
Some mining melodies to watch the Chilean miner’s rescue by (PBS NewsHour coverage; ABC News live feed; and if your eyes ain’t wet yet, try this NYTimes.com slideshow)…
Yours truly wrote a guest post — part 1 of 2 — for Hack/Hackers, summing up the major pubmedia movers & shakers’ multi-year, multi-$M pubradio projects: “Public media is investing in major digital projects.”
The next post will call for some smaller-scale open-source efforts, more likely to help mid-to-small size stations and independents.
Our host recalls how the Beatles changed everything, and John lead the charge; an audio essay, sprinked with live performances and 1963-64 Fan-Flub flexi-disk Christmas messages.
Lennon’s life, in own words, from his hundreds of interviews. Accompanied by music, outtakes, antics and poetics — singing, talking, and testifying about peace, family, and art.
Produced at KGLT-Bozeman with mix help from Colter Langan. Archive recordings are courtesy of Yoko Ono, the BBC, the CBC, Chicago’s Museum Of Broadcast Communications, Group W Productions, Rolling Stone Magazine, Apple, Capital, EMI, and Polydor Records.
WONSAPONATIME there was two Ballons called Jock and Yono. They were strictly in love-bound to happen in a million years. They were together man. Unfortunatimetable they both seemed to have previous experience — which kept calling them one way oranother (you know howitis). But they battled on against overwhelming oddites, includo some of there beast friends. Being in love they cloong even more together man — but some of the poisonessmonster of outrated buslodedshithrowers did stick slightly and tey occaasionaly had to resort to the drycleaners. Luckily this did not kill them and they werent banned from the olympic games. They lived hopefully every after, and who could blame them… —Lennon, Skywriting By Word of Mouth
Members of the generation jolted by Lennon’s death recall how they heard the news and how deeply this ex-Beatle’s life affected theirs (where were you when you heard?)
Voices: Scott MacNichol, Daniel Callis, Martin Goldsmith, Jane Blume, Mark Weber, Jim Palmer, John Scariano, Bonnie Renfro, Mary Oishi, Rob Raucci, and Emily Zambello. Produced at Cedar Creek Studios and KUNM-Albuquerque. PRX has a half-hour version of “The Day John Lennon Died.”
A fren clued me to this Seattle band, Head Like a Kite. Nice pop tune, inventive vid, “We’re Always on the Wrong Side of Sunrise” from their 2010 Dreams Suspend Night:
CycleStreets: UK-wide Cycle Journey Planner and Photomap is a feature-rich route-planner for pedalers. Lotsa info and options, including a choice between the Fastest or Quietest route (or blend of both), an elevation map, an export in GPS format, and turn-by-turn directions w/ type of road (Quiet St, Cycle Track, Busy Rd, etc.).
They just released an iPhone app. Their web version’s in beta, and built on the OpenStreetMap project.
CycleStreets is a UK-wide cycle journey planner system, which lets you plan routes from A to B by bike. It is designed by cyclists, for cyclists, and caters for the needs of both confident and less confident cyclists.
Say you were pedaling from Wolverhampton and Nottingham (hey, I don’t name these places), here’s some of what CycleStreets tells you about your route:
Miles has the wrong body. He was born a woman, Megan. After 15 years of serious depression and confusion about his place in the world, at age 28, he decided to make a change. He chose the name Miles and began his slow, difficult transition into manhood. All along the way, he carried an audio recorder with him. This is his story. Produced for Transom (available at PRX); edited by Jay Allison.
For most of his high school career, Louis robbed people: for money, and for thrills. He never got caught. Then, in his senior year, he decided to stop. Louis talks to friends and family, and to himself, about why he was a criminal, and why he needs to change. Produced for Transom (also at PRX) and the 826NYC writing center.
Just another Saturday night at the compound. ‘Course trouble’s nuthin’ new out here — this shot’s from Friday night: Black bear in neighbor’s tree, ’round midnight.
Yet another WFMU find; blogger Tony Coulter describes this record as:
A single offering up audio-verite recordings made in a Scottish bingo parlor. Despite being completely unmanipulated, the A-side, which you’ll find below, serves quite well as sound art, no?
From the liner notes:
Day by day, Angela McColloch, the Glaswedian Bingo hostess, reads her colours and numbers to the ambient melodies of the big buck$ slot machines… for hours at a time.
Public Historian Joey Plaster spent a year gathering 70+ interviews from people experiencing Polk Street’s transition from a working class queer neighborhood to an upscale entertainment district. Polk Street’s scene predates the modern gay rights movement. It was a world unto itself, ten blocks of low rent hotels, bars and liquor stores, all sandwiched in between the gritty Tenderloin, City Hall, and the ritzy Nob Hill: a home invented by people who had no other home.
For decades, the street had been a national destination for queer youth and transgender women, many of them fleeing abusive or unwelcoming homes. But by the mid-1990s, the last of the working class bars that formed the backbone of the Polk community were being replaced by a new bloc of mid-income businesses and residents.
Long-term Polk residents were incredibly emotional about these changes. Many considered the neighborhood to be their first real home. Now they saw their family’s gathering places evaporating. The conflict was sometimes dramatic: owners of one gay bar claimed that the new business association forced them off the street. A gay activist group made national news when they plastered the street with “wanted” posters featuring a photo of the new association’s president.
These intense reactions suggested a rich history, but I found that it had not been recorded. I feared it would be lost with the scene. I had prior experience as an oral historian. This was my first effort to find overlap with radio, which I’ve long felt is the best medium for broadcasting intimate, personal stories from “marginal” populations. —Joey Plaster
The following exercise in simplicity is just Sir Tom Jones, accompanied by Brian Monroney, his musical director since 1996 and a masterful guitarist — with a few fans among the nipper folk, all clustered around a diminutive desk:
Hearing Voices from NPR®
The next post will call for some smaller-scale open-source efforts, more likely to help mid-to-small size stations and independents.
WONSAPONATIME there was two Ballons called Jock and Yono. They were strictly in love-bound to happen in a million years. They were together man. Unfortunatimetable they both seemed to have previous experience — which kept calling them one way oranother (you know howitis). But they battled on against overwhelming oddites, includo some of there beast friends. Being in love they cloong even more together man — but some of the poisonessmonster of outrated buslodedshithrowers did stick slightly and tey occaasionaly had to resort to the drycleaners. Luckily this did not kill them and they werent banned from the olympic games. They lived hopefully every after, and who could blame them… 
