Here’s the Fresh Air ep that got the series cancelled in Mississippi, featuring the phenomenal “Comedian Louis C.K.: Finding Laughs Post-Divorce” (37:23 mp3):
A MS Pubcasting exec explained why they pulled TerryG off their air: “Too often Fresh Air’s interviews include gratuitous discussions on issues of an explicit sexual nature.” Damn, I’m gonna have to start listening more often.
Amazing how much feel you can pack into a two-minute song, “Ain’t No Sunshine” Bill Withers 1972:
via Some Velvet.
And here’s RRKIrk’s take on same tune…
“Ain’t No Sunshine” Rahsaan Roland Kirk Blacknuss
What the Cuss? From Modern Toss comes the Periodic Table Of Swearing:
New CD by The Books out soon called The Way Out
Their label, Temporary Residence Limited, is enticing us with this track, “Beautiful People” (2:53 mp3):
While we’re waiting for the new release (mine’s already pre-ordered), let’s go back and…
Song off CD Lemon of Pink
Video from DVD Playall.
The First Earth Battalion Field Manual (4.8M pdf)
The history of this manual is described in the book The Men Who Stare at Goats
In order to understand how this all played out, you’ll have to read the book. Don’t see the film, it’s a joke.
Journal of Non-lethal Combat, Feb 2000: The First Earth Battalion
Wikipedia: First Earth Battalion
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon: New Earth Army
Sometimes on Radiolab you hear Robert Krull-Witch refer to his co-host, Jad Abumrad, as a composer. Didn’t think much of that till my recent emusic purchase of In C Remixed
There’s 29 fine compositions of this 2-disc set. Turns out Jad’s is my favorite of the whole In C crop. So, with Jad’s permission…
“Counting in C (after T. Riley’s In C) (Jad Abumrad Remix)” (6:08 mp3):
[Carmen Delzell lives in Mexico, travels to India, and does occasional audio essays for us. Here’s another post in her: Bag Lady’s Guide to What’s Left of the Planet…]
This time alone living in the luxury of Martha’s house has helped me relax enough to see myself and my circumstances a little more clearly.
I’m sick of Mexico. Sick of living in fear, of poverty, of the (mostly) assholes I know there and most of all sick of loneliness.
So tonight I’ve decided to head out into the night with my digital recorder and start doing a story on loneliness. You know, loneliness is probably the hardest thing to admit and for sure the hardest thing to bear.
I was inspired last weekend by a singer songwriter named Steve, who is sadly, dead.
#1 Bar Noise at a place called Buttons.
So here I am again alone in a bar waiting for this Dave Millsap to come on stage and sing the songs of Steve Bruton whose life was loosely depicted in Crazy Heart, the movie with Jeff Bridges.
I actually cried when I saw his beat up old truck drive down one of these breath-taking New Mexico highways because God Damn It that’s me driving up from the Matehuala Desert towards Saltillo, Coahuila in my beat-up Jeep and whatever it is that’s sent me down those lonely Mexican and New Mexican roads, I’m pretty sure it has something to do with movies like this.
The difference is that I’m a woman and don’t play the guitar or paint or anything except live and write about being alienated and sad and, yes, lonely. More…
[Carmen Delzell lives in Mexico, travels to India, and does occasional audio essays for us. Here’s another post in her: Bag Lady’s Guide to What’s Left of the Planet…]
Just imagine, if you can being an old (and you know I don’t feel all that old) woman with less than a hundred dollars to her name driving north on Hwy 57 between San Luis Potosi and Matehuala as the sun goes down.
A motel costs 400 pesos. So does a tank of gas.
Children stand by the side of the road holding out live rattle snakes for sale or a wild eagle dangled by its feet.
It’s getting dark.
The empty light comes on the dash board. There are no gas stations anywhere.
Food is out of the question till you get to the border; and when you do get there it’ll be another six hours to your friend’s house where you can sleep for a couple of nights.
[Carmen Delzell lives in Mexico, travels to India, and does occasional audio essays for us. Here’s another post in her: Bag Lady’s Guide to What’s Left of the Planet…]
By Carmen Delzell (Written in 1988 just before I became homeless.)
I never intended to live the way I have.
I thought—in that hazy hopeful time right after graduation and before my foolish marriage that I could be a bohemian, a colorful avant-garde part of the late 1960s and then (I’m not sure when I thought it would actually be) I expected to have a house, go to graduate school and eventually teach at some small liberal arts college somewhere.
I guess I got a lot of these notions from biographies and magazine articles that fell into my hands from my mother’s casual (and probably mundane) choice of reading material.
She herself had fancied a similar life and she too found the shock of turning middle aged without it too much to bear.
She died.
I’m hoping I won’t have to.
Certainly not yet and hopefully not ever. More…
Hearing Voices from NPR®
093 Lewis & Clark Trail II: The Columbia River
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-06-23
“Lewis & Clark Trail II” (52:00 mp3):
Biking & Mic-ing the Lewis & Clark Trail; part 2 (of 2), from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean:
Chief Mountain Hotshots, Nicole Meeso and Aldon Wells, Powell Campground ID — Getting ready for a day’s work in the Clearwater Forest with the Blackfeet wildland firefighters, known as some of the best in the world.
Sister Carol Ann and the Bendictine Sisters, St. Gertrude Monastery, Cottonwood ID — Land stewardship is a matter of faith in these sisters’ rural Catholic perspective. We walk thru the woods of the monastery; 800 acres which the sisters have had to learn how to manage.
Horace Axtell, Nez Perce leader, Lewiston ID — Nez Perce Bones: tribal elder, spiritual leader, and the last fluent speaker of the Nez Perce language. Co-author of A Little Bit of Wisdom: Conversations With a Nez Perce Elder.
Lois & Betty, Patterson Restaurant, Patterson WA — Sipping coffee and surveying farm life from the breakfast tables of a small town cafe.
Louis Butler and family, Walla Walla River WA — Four Generations Fishing: A retiree from Hanford Nuclear Reservation goes catfishing with his daughter, grand-daughter and great-grandsons.
Ken Karzmiski, Archeologist, Columbia Gorge Discovery Center, The Dalles WA — Looking for lost Lewis & Clark legacy, and the artifacts and languages of native cultures drowned by the Columbia River dams.
USCG Duty Surfman Kyle Betts, now Chief Boatswain’s Mate and Executive Petty Officer, Cape Disappointment U.S. Coast Guard Station WA — The USCG Search and Rescue team pulls boats and people out of treacherous West coast waters along the Columbia River bar, where the river meets the ocean: “the graveyard of the Pacific.”
An earlier pedal over the same route, from the Rocky Mountains, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, interviewing whoever crosses our path: wind surfers, church organists, forest service employees, and “we’ve been talking to as many loggers as we can, to try and find out if they don’t see bicyclists, or they just hate us.”
The first movement in From the Journals of Lewis and Clark, a symphonic work for orchestra and choir based on the expedition’s journals. Montana’s Great Falls Symphony commissioned University of Idaho music professor Dan Bukvitch as the composer. The text is President Jeffersons’s instructions to Captain Lewis in 1803.
Listen to Part One. And read more on the Lewis & Clark Trail and our bike trip.
Yellowstone Public Radio’s Lois Bent passed on into that great audio control room in the sky last week. I remember late night at a PRPD party; I was three sheets to the whiskey (what else is new), talking to Jessie Thorn (TSOYA) and Jonathan Goldstein (WireTap). Lois came over to say Hi. She’s got phenomenal operatic pipes, so I asked for a song. She belted out a rousing version of Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Made my night, and that of all others w/in earshot.
A project of mine asks folk “How would you change the world?” Here’s Lois’ answer:
“Lois Bent- Change the World (circa 2003)” (1:51 mp3):
A little more Lois:
YPR personality Lois Bent remembered for humor.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
092 Lewis & Clark Trail I: The Missouri River
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-06-16
“Lewis & Clark Trail I” (52:00 mp3):
Biking & Mic-ing the Modern Lewis & Clark Trail; part one of two, up the Missouri River into the Rocky Mountains. Barrett Golding and Josef Verbanac, a radio producer and an English professor, a Jew and a Souix, bicycle from Missouri to Montana, enduring floods, war, worms, mud, and myriad Lewis & Clark festivals:
Prep: Cross-country preparations, then and now, from Penis syringes and Indian presents, to AAA and GPS. “Your observations are to be taken with great pains and accuracy, for others as well as yourself” –Jefferson’s Instructions to Lewis, 1803.
Flood: Missouri floodwaterss, a frog symphony, a million worms, bowfishing a beanfield, and in Marthasville MI little league it’s Lemke Trenching and Excavating vs. Miller Funeral Homes. Don Sherman, a retired Chrysler worker, who now volunteers his time taking care of the city park in the flood-prone landmark rural town — which, in Lewis & Clark’s time, was the last outpost of white society. And we go bow-fishing for in a bean field.
Rendezvous: Biking and mic-ing the Missouri River. Captain Lewis’ Aria, surveyor-stalking cougars, black powder bursts, cave wall Manitous, and Edens lost. Explorers express emotions and the Expedition breaks into song, in “Corps of Discovery: An Opera in Three Acts” produced by music professor Eric Dillner and the University of Missouri’s Show-Me Opera. Geographer James Harlan maps the Two Missouris, the Missouri Territory now and two centuries ago, using an 1815 Land Office survey and Clark’s field-notes. James Denny, Historic Interpreter, for Missouri’s Department of Natural Resources, points out where pictografs on a cliff were a landmark of the Lower Missouri, until the railroad blew ’em up; we tour through the tunnel of the ex-Manitous.
Wars: No Home on the Range, Chief Joseph’s Race Track, and Brothers Buddha and Brahma. Farrell Adkins, Campground Host at Arrow Rock MO sings the little known second verse of “Home on the Range.” Matt Nowak, Natural Resources Director at Fort Leavenworth Army Base KA describes this places part in the death and desctrution of the Nez Perce people.
Indian County: Daily pow-wows, casino economies, and Lewis’ birthday gloom. Neil Phillips, Penobscot tribal member and former canoe racer paddles from Maine to Montana, experiencing life on the river, a little-seen view of America. Joe Verbancec Sr. tours us thru the Standing Rock reservation.
The Strenuous Life: Bruce Kaye, Chief Naturalist at Theodore Roosevelt National Park recounts Teddy Roosevelt’s time in North Dakota. His ideas about conservation developed in the badlands, then get expressed in the acts of the President of the United States and the start of the National Park system.
Re-enaction: At Coal Banks Landing, on Missouri River “Breaks” in Montana, we encounters the re-reactors, traveling up-river using the boats, clothes, food, guns and knifes of the Lewis & Clark era.
Camp: Lewis and Clark made 600 campsites on their expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific and back. So far, the exact location of only one has been identified. For 13 years, archaeologist Ken Karsmizki has been digging at Lower Portage camp of the Great Falls, on the Missouri River in Central Montana, and finding fire pits, butchered bones, wooden stakes and other artifacts, all dating to Lewis and Clark’s time.
Orchestration: “From the Journals of Lewis and Clark” is a symphonic work for orchestra and choir based on the expedition’s journals. Montana’s Great Falls Symphony commissioned University of Idaho music professor Daniel Bukvich as the composer, whose job was to make Art imitate History.
Listen to Part Two. And read more on the Lewis & Clark Trail and our bike trip.
Via the nipper, some fine and Free NPR Music At Bonnaroo Sampler
Trax:
Swim” by The Black Keys
“Woof Woof” by Dan Deacon
“Makin’ Plans” by Miranda Lambert
“Elysian Persuasion” by Ozomatli
“Sound the Alarm (feat. Sleepy Wonder)” by Thievery Corporation
“Sigh No More” by Mumford And Sons
“Your Easy Lovin’ Ain’t Pleasin’ Nothin” by Mayer Hawthorne
“Fuego” by Bomba Estereo
“Fader” by Temper Trap
“Longform” by The Dodos
“The Water Glass” by Melvins
Finally a reason for twitter to exist…
BP Public Relations (BPGlobalPR) on Twitter:
Producer Jay Allison on the new pubradio series PRX » The Moth, stories told unscripted and live before an audience:
Attended the 2nd day of Shavuot ceremonies yesterday. Major Talmudic Mojo: anniversary of Commandments10.0, Jewish people becoming nation, etc.
Especially loved the Yizkor prayer. Gotta love a G-d who, after a hard day of spilling blood and crushing heads “over a vast area,” carves out some personal me-time to sip from the stream…
Let there be known among the nations, before our eyes, the retribution of the spilled blood of Your servants. And it is said: For the Avenger of bloodshed is mindful of them; He does not forget the cry of the downtrodden. Further it is said: He will render judgment upon the nations, and they will be filled with corpses; He will crush heads over a vast area. He will drink from the stream on the way; therefore Israel will hold its head high.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
091 Bad Trip: Your Next Vacation
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-06-22 (Originally: 2010-05-19)
“Bad Trip” (52:00 mp3):
Offbeat retreats and obscure tours thru the heart of Americana:
Temporarily insanity during a tour of Universal Studios in southern California. So many cool things to see, to do, to tour. The writer is overwhelmed by the magnificence of it all, and pretty much loses his mind. Based an Mark Allen’s web essay “I Suffered Stendhal Syndrome At Universal Studios Hollywood!.”
Boonville is a small community in Northwest California, founded in 1862, a few hundred feet in elevation, with few hundred residents. And… the town has it’s own language, Boontling. We go sharkin’ and harpin’ thru Boonville with Charles C. Adams, author of Boontling: An American Lingo.
Traveling America’s Intermountain West with a group of visiting Buddhist monks: sand paintings and ski hills, prayers, politics and mountain passes.
“David Lynch goes into clean neighborhoods and finds the germs and bugs beneath; I go into dirty neighborhoods and find the life.” That’s how filmmaker Tony Buba describes his twelve documentaries about his hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Buba is the son of Italian immigrants, part of the wave of Europeans who came to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work in the steel mills of Braddock and other towns around Pittsburgh. Now the steel industry is almost dead, and Braddock is the prototypical post-industrial “‘rust belt” town, a town where a person either lives by his or her wits or lives in poverty. Buba tours through the streets of Braddock, past the old Croatian and Slovak social clubs and through streets, now empty, that once bristled with activity.
From LHP’s series of radio works: Place Portraits. Music: “The Very Thought Of You,” instrumental version by Eddie Lockjaw Davis off the 2006 compilation Jazz For Lovers, and Elvis Costello singing on Marian McPartland’s 2006 Piano Jazz: McPartland/Costello.
Now showing at the Seattle Art Museum a photo-audio exhibit, by HV producer Jake Warga, of “Faces: Rwanda, Ethiopia, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya.” Features digital stills projection with field recordings:
One hundred faces introduce individuals from many cultures in five African countries, a collection that became part of Jake Warga’s response to his work as a public radio producer since 2007. As he states, “Journalism’s tendency is to talk only of numbers — numbers starving, numbers infected, numbers displaced — while individuals are easily hidden, their unique details lost in the shadows.†He started out with a conventional search for numbers and statistics, but Warga later decided to take a “tree-for-the-forest approach†by focusing on individuals.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
090 On Horseback: Equine Athletes
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-05-12
“On Horseback” (52:00 mp3):
A couple equestrian classics from the NPR archives, along with some equine music and found-sound:
The collaged sounds of a Carriage Race at the annual Stampede in Austin, Manitoba. Excerpted from The little man in the ear, off the CD Radio Roadmovies; and on the Deep Wireless 2004 by Toronto’s New Adventures in Sound Art.
Bruce Davidson has been a member of the U.S. Equestrian Team since 1971. He’s a world class rider, trainer and breeder. NPR visited Chesterlands Farm, in Unionville, Pennsylvania, when Bruce Davidson and his horse JJ Babu were training for the 1984 L.A. Olympics (they won a Team Gold). David Molpus is now with Ideastream in Cleveland. The producer Carolyn Chadwick’s latest project is Conservation Sound.
From the band’s 2006 album Limelight Cordial.
A poem about a poem about a horse, from the singer’s 2005 album Pearl Street (lyrics).
From Dylan’s 1970 Self Portrait (musicians).
Summer Bird, Rags to Riches, Empire Maker, Lemon Drop Kid, Colonial Affair, Thunder Gulch, those are some of the winners at the Belmont Stakes, the last leg of the Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing. In 1979, an army of NPR sound-recordists showed up trackside at Belmont Park, Long Island to document Spectacular Bid’s attempt to match Secretariat’s legend. Writer/Produced: Josh Darsa. Technical Director: Skip Pizzi, with Field Engineers: Paul Blackmore and Ceil Muller. Technical Assistance: John Widoff and Dave Glasser. Editorial Assistance: Neal Conan.
Top: Jazil, 2006 Belmont Stakes winner, photo by Adam Coglianese/NYRA Photo.
Video by Miguel Soares (migso.net) made 2003 with Negativland for their classic radio-signal-sampling collage “Time Zones”, off the band’s 1987 Escape from Noise…
Miguel Soares, Negativland’s Time Zones from migso.
Transcript at “It’s ridiculous. It’s not even funny.“
