The first of our Soldier’s Soundtrack series: Embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division, US Army, Baghdad, the producer plugged into the soldier’s iPods, asking them what they were listening to, why they liked the song, and what their lives were like. To Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Major James Lockridge tells us, “The United States Army can go anywhere at anytime or anyplace. I learned that during the first war. I wouldn’t want to be anybody that had to face the United States.”
Aired on PRI The World; by producer Jake Warga, “Iraq: Major Lockridge- Bohemian Rhapsody” (2:47 mp3):
Hearing Voices from NPR®
087 Thumb and Thumber: The Joy of Hitchhiking
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-04-06 (Originally: 2010-03-24)
Hitchhiking was once common, These days it’s aquired an aura of danger and desperation. Who wants to take the risk — especially after all those gruesome stories about rapists and serial killers? But occasionally you can still spot some guy stranded on the side of a road, sign out, thumb up, hoping that your car will be his salvation. Is he dangerous? Insane? Or just plain dirty? Maybe we should stop and find out. (PRX)
Hitchhiking cross-country with a telegram for the Dalai Llama, a prayer for compassion from the cops, and half your net worth invested in a pair of high-top sneakers.
In Mom, Dave Isay, StoryCorps founder and editor of the bestselling book, Listening Is an Act of Love, presents a celebration of American mothers from all walks of life and experiences. Selected from StoryCorps’ extensive archive of interviews, Mom presents the wisdom that has been passed from mothers to their children in StoryCorps’ recording booths across the country.
The publshers of Reality Radio have allowed to post a bit of their book. From John Biewen’s Introduction:
The goal is to bring together producers with distinctive, powerful, and richly varied approaches to their craft. Some of our essayists call themselves audio artists. They push the boundaries of journalism to the breaking point—okay, beyond the breaking point—in the service of an aesthetic vision but also in pursuit of a different (higher?) sort of truth. Others describe themselves primarily as storytellers, drawing mainly on the narrative power of the spoken word. Still others see themselves as journalists; on the surface, at least, they emphasize information over formal innovation. But the journalistic documentarians, too, give careful attention to form and, in fact, employ plenty of (conventionally sanctioned) artifice along the way.
Here’s an excerpt of the essay “Coming Home,†by Katie Davis:
A boy rumbles by on his skateboard, says his name is Julio and asks to pet the dogs. Sure. Another twelve-year-old bellows like a carnival hawker, “Hey lady, you got a tire patch?†Sure. And I give Joaquin ten dollars to run to the bike store to buy three patch kits, one for him, and the rest I’ll keep for other kids. The super from the building down the street notices the cluster of kids and lugs up two old bikes he found in the alley. And this is how, without planning, I start a recycle-a-bicycle program on my front porch. Everything takes place on my front porch for a long while.
I become known as the “bike lady,†the lady who always has granola bars and time to sit and listen. After a year, I form a youth group called the Urban Rangers and begin raising money to pay for bike parts and snacks. Two teenagers ask me start a basketball team. Sure why not? And then as I explain my philosophy to the guys, that winning is not important on this team, and everybody will get to play in every game. “No, no,†the boys interrupt and begin coaching me on how to be a coach. The dialogue is funny and that night the rusty part of my radio brain begins chanting, Good tape. Good tape.
So, I call an old friend at NPR and float the idea of writing an “essay with tape†about my team. I warn the show producer that the story will be personal, like a diary, that I break the rules of journalism in every paragraph. I write in the first person and I have not kept any objective distance from these boys. I give money to two brothers because I know they are hungry. I hire another kid’s father because they are struggling on $12,000 a year. The boys hang out at my house, they come to tell me about problems. I no longer wanted any distance between me and these neighborhood kids. NPR solves the issue of my status by calling me a commentator. My transition from reporter to commentator took four years of neighborhood porch sitting and trouble shooting and is distilled into this one word.
The House Gates Built is not normally known as a fountain of innovation. But MS’sLiveLabs has really delivered the future in the form of Pivot. It’a web application — “don’t call it a browser”: getting lasix
“Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?” ativan online
We’re navigating the web for the first time as if it’s actually a web, not page to page, but at a higher level of abstraction… So right now, in this world, we think about data as being this curse. We talk about the curse of information overload. We talk about drowning in data. What if we can actually turn that upside down and turn the web upside down, so that instead of one thing to the next, we get used to the habit of being able to go from many things to many things, and then being able to see the patterns that were otherwise hidden? If we can do that, then, instead of being trapped in data, we might actually extract information. And, instead of dealing just with information, we can tease out knowledge. And if we get the knowledge, then maybe even there’s wisdom to be found.
—Gary Flake, Technical Fellow, Microsoft; founder/director, Live Labs
Also check the TED talk for LiveLabsPhotosynth — another Seadragon derivative.
Sure Facebook sux. But it has its moments; and many of them are found on Joe Frank’s page, amongst his semi-regular deliciously dark ramblings:
Flying over the Tanganyika Game Reserve in a hot air balloon. My guide is a drunken Englishman from the old colonial school dressed entirely in white. He has a flask of port strapped to his leg. His nose is red and veined. We travel over a savannah, observing herds of wildebeests and zebras below.
hen the colonel removes his clothes and throws them over the side of the basket. He claims the natives collect them and use them to make flags and scarves, which they sell to the tourists.
Dancing in the streets of Rio in a samba club, making our way up Sugar Loaf Mountain to ascend to the statue of Christ that looks over the city. I feel a sense of exhilaration, my heart bursting with joy. I’m wearing a fantastic feathered woman’s mask, eyeballs on stalks, ears on springs, Pinocchio nose supporting a live tree limb filled with songbirds, and joyously dancing in high heeled platform shoes and net stockings, gyrating my hips, a pair of soccer balls attached to my rear…»
Be his FB-fren and read the rest of this, and many other of his flights of freaky.
The first all-girl radio station in the nation, WHER-Memphis, went on-air in 1955. It was the brainchild of sound legend Sam Phillips, who created the groundbreaking format with money he raised from selling Elvis Presley’s Sun Studios contract. Women almost exclusively ran the station. They read the news, interviewed local celebrities, and spun popular records. They sold and produced commercials, directed and engineered programming, and sat at the station’s control boards.
NPR’s Susan Stamberg hosts this one hour special on WHER, produced for the Kitchen Sisters’ series Lost and Found Sound. Mixed by Jim McKee of Earwax.
Iraq War vet Army Spc Marc Hall has been in Georgia county jails since December 12 2009 for producing a hip-hop song about “stoploss.” The Army’s claims the music “communicated a threat.” On Friday night March 1, the soldier was removed from jail, placed on a military flight, and flown back to Iraq.
Hall had planned to leave the Army when his contract expired this year, but the Army issued a stop-loss order preventing Hall’s separation. Hall recorded the song “Stop-loss” and mailed it to the Pentagon.
Reality Radio celebrates today’s best audio documentary work by bringing together some of the most influential and innovative practitioners.
Contributors [include]: Jay Allison, damali ayo, Emily Botein, Chris Brookes, Scott Carrier, Katie Davis, Ira Glass, The Kitchen Sisters, Maria Martin, Karen Michel, Rick Moody, Joe Richman, Dmae Roberts, Stephen Smith, Sandy Tolan.
Publisher UNC Press offers this Q & A w/ the book’s editor John Biewen.
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 2009HV posts.
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.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
085 Protest: At the National Mall & Town Halls
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-03-23 (Originally: 2010-02-24)
Protest may be new to some parts of the world, but in America, complaining about the government is a national 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:
“Town Halls 2009” (2:05) Barrett Golding
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.
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.
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.”
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…
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.
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.)
Hearing Voices from NPR®
084 Place Your Bets: What Happens in Vegas
Host: Alex Chadwick of Conservation Sound
Airs week of: 2011-01-26 (Originally: 2010-02-17)
A classical composition, in three parts, for strings, winds, and an interview with Tom Martinet, who trained to be a priest, but, instead, started working Nevada dice tables. Premiered 1997 in Vegas, performed by Sierra Wind Quintet. Re-released on PKB’s 2006 Larkin Gifford’s Harmonica.
“Poker at the Ox” (9:54) Alex Chadwick
An NPR hosts pits his wits against the regulars at a downtown small-town casino. Guess who wins. Produced by Carolyn Jensen; sound engineer by Michael Schweppe.
“Old Gambler” (7:07) Joe Frank
An excerpt from Joe’s hour “Zen” in his series The Other Side. What happened in Vegas… definitely didn’t stay in Vegas. Getting on the wrong side of Sin City’s collection crew.
“Bass Keno” (8:18)
Jazz bassist Kelly Roberti (David Murray Quintet) lost his bass to the keno machines. He kicked the habit; the scars remain, but the bass is back. Kelly was a 2010 Governor’s Arts Awards winner.
“Lock It Up” (5:56) John Ridley
A radio drama written for Ridley’s 2001 LA Series on NPR Morning Edition. Performers are Bob Wisdom, Yang Chee, and Jim Wallace (script).
Above photo of the Las Vegas sign by Kcferret, June 2005.
The first of our Soldier’s Soundtrack series: Embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division, US Army, Baghdad, the producer plugged into the soldier’s iPods, asking them what they were listening to, why they liked the song, and what their lives were like. To Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Major James Lockridge tells us, “The United States Army can go anywhere at anytime or anyplace. I learned that during the first war. I wouldn’t want to be anybody that had to face the United States.”
The publshers of 
Sure Facebook sux. But it has its moments; and many of them are found on 
Iraq War vet Army Spc 
A new new book out, 
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.
