Hearing Voices from NPR®
140 John Cage: September 5 1912 – August 12 1992
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2012-08-29
“John Cage” (52:00 mp3):
A tribute to the composer on his 100th birthday:
From a half-hour radio play, commissioned by CBS, written by poet Kenneth Patchen and scored by Cage. Broadcast May 31, 1942 on WBBM radio station (Columbia Broadcasting System in Chicago), as part of their Columbia Workshop series. Performance by Xenia Cage, Cilia Amidon, Stuart Lloyd, Ruth Hartman, Claire Oppenheim and John Cage conducting.
A voxpop variety of folk answer the musical question: “Who’s John Cage?”
Few contemporary composers had the influence of John Cage. From experimental music to minimalism, Brian Eno to George Winston, echoes of John Cage continue to resound to this day, more than 6 decades after his “Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano” were first published. John Cage was a conceptualist of sound who turned even silence into music as he did with his famous piece, 4 minutes and 33 seconds. John cage died from a stroke in August of 1992. But we hear his thoughts in sound from a 1987 interview. From the series Echoes with John Diliberto, part of their Thoughts in Sound specials.
Pianist Stephen Drury performs a 1948 Cage composition; the title track of the album In a Landscape
From the collection A Chance Operation: The John Cage Tribute (this UbuWeb link has free downloads of the entire CD set).
An impressionistic illustration of synchronistic artistic cooperation, in the words of Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Interviews by Katie Davis, from Jay Allison’s series Living in the Arts.
Listen : John Cage – in love with sound / silence -01
Transcript of the interview with John Cage in the film “Ecoute” (Listen) by Miroslav Sebestik:
[part 1]
When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking, and talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic, here on 6th avenue for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound. What it does is it gets louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter. It does all those things.I am completely satisfied with that. I don’t need sound to talk to me. We don’t see much difference between time and space. We don’t know where one begins and the other stops. So that most of the arts we think of as being in time, and most of the arts we think of being in space. More…
From a Composer Weekend dedicated to John Cage, at the Barbican Centre, London (John Cage Uncaged, January 2004). Hope the musicians weren’t getting paid by the note, but you gotta admit it was a flawless performance; John Cage “4’33” by the BBC Symphony Orchestra:
“Everything is music.” “Wherever we are what we hear mostly is noise… When we ignore noise, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” —John Cage
From the BBC article, “Radio 3 plays ‘silent symphony.’ BBC Radio 3 has aired more than four minutes of complete silence… by design”:
[Cage’s] estate won a bizarre copyright battle in 2002, when composer Mike Batt agreed to pay a six-figure sum to a charity because his album featured a tongue-in-cheek silent track which he credited as co-written by Cage…
General manager Paul Hughes told BBC Radio 5 Live the orchestra had rehearsed to “get in the right frame of mind”.
Despite having no notes to play, the musicians tuned up and then turned pages of the score after each of the three “movements” specified by the composer.
The silence was broken at times by coughing and rustling sounds from the audience, who marked the end of the performance with enthusiastic applause.
Mr Hughes denied the performance was a “mindless gimmick” and said Cage believed “music was all around us all the time” and the piece was his attempt to make the audience focus on sounds that were “part of our everyday lives”.
But the audience at the premiere in 1952 was “so discomforted that mostly what you could hear was people getting up and walking out”, he said.
“They were completely outraged and extremely angry,” Mr Hughes added.
He said Cage, who died in 1992 aged 80, was very proud of the silent composition.
In readiness for the performance, Radio 3 bosses switched off their emergency back-up system – designed to cut in when there is an unexpected silence on air.
From the PBS American Masters doc, “I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It” (1990), John Cage prepares for a 1982 performance his 1955 composition for twirling radio dials, “Speech:”
This week’s HV cast: John Cage was born 95 years ago, September 5 1912. Here’s a quasi-Cage-ian sound portrait with voxpop featuring folk answering the musical question: “Who’s John Cage?”
A story by Barrett Golding, “Who’s John Cage (Silence)” (2:24 mp3):
WYNC celebrates John Cage for 24 Hours and 33 Minutes on his 95th birthday with The Playful and Playable Cage: A WNYC Festival. Airs September 5th at 00:00 (midnight) until 00:33 September 6th. They’ve published an hour-by-hour schedule of the broadcast and A John Cage Web Reliquary with Videos | Interviews | Writings | Quotes | Timeline | Visual Art | Links.
JC on JC from WNYC (4:57):
Other HV Cage posts.
John Cage performs — using Water Pitcher, Iron Pipe, Goose Call and a slew of other musical implements — in 1960 on the game show I’ve Got a Secret: video at WFMU’s BOTB: John Cage on a TV Game Show in 1960 video
A selection of Hearing Voices audio hours, with specials for Labor Day, Back to School, 9/11, and John Cage’s Birthday:
1959 (album cover)
For Labor Day: The work we do, from Wall Street traders to taxi cab drivers. People who work with brassieres, with dead bodies, and off-the-books in an underground economy. A tone-poem by Ken Nordine, a podcast from Love and Radio, and sound-portraits from Radio Diaries, Toni Schwartz, Ben Rubin, David Greenberger, and hosts Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler.
Joe Regis (Kahnawake Mohawk Territory) working on the Chase Manhattan Bank Building, 1960 (courtesy Bethlehem Steel)
What we do for a living: Mohawk ironworkers on the Twin Towers; a Radio Dairy from a scissors sharpener; exercises for existential overworked, undervalued employees; percussive postal clerks in Ghana; a man with 800 jobs; and what happens when there is no work… anywhere: the 1940 Great Depression “Voices from the Dust Bowl.”
Bell Multicultural High School (photo: Maria Tukeva)
Richard Paul follows “School VP,” Asst. Principal Irasema Salcido, through her hectic multi-lingual morning at DC’s Bell Multicultural High School. Host Katie Davis finds she “Got Carried.” Slam poet and history teacher Taylor Mali schools us on “What Teachers Make.” Producer Hillary Frank gets the shy “Quiet Kids” to speak up. Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich’s commencement speech advises “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen),” with music from filmmaker Baz Luhrman. Host Katie Davis takes her DC summer camp into the wild woods on a “Hike to Rock Creek,” two blocks from where the kids live. And poems from Meryn Cadell and Jelani.
While teaching fifth grade in a Chicago public school, Esme Codell kept a journal. This radio hour is based on her book Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year, produced by Jay Allison and Christina Egloff for their Life Stories series and Chicago Public Radio.
World Trade Center 1991 (photo: Nubar Alexanian)
The stars of this show are Americans, expressing their opinions, participating in our democratic discussion. We travel 8000 miles of America gathering “Vox Pop”, roam the streets of New York City in the hours during and weeks after 9/11, hitting “Golf Balls” and spending our “Last Night in New York.” And “Amber” provides an illegal alien p.o.v. via a radio call-in line. Works from Transom.org by producers Scott Carrier, Christopher Lydon, Matt Lieber, and Australian Wednesday Kennedy.
Prisoner of Zion book cover
Shortly after the World Trade Center fell in autumn 2001, it became clear the United States would invade Afghanistan. Producer Scott Carrier decided he ought to go there too. Why? To see for himself: that’s what writers do. Who are these fanatics, these fundamentalists, the Taliban and the like? And what do they want? For the weekend of 9/11/11, Hearing Voices from NPR presents “Prisoner of Zion.” Carrier narrates his trip to Afghanistan. With his young guide and translator, Najibulla, they tour the horrors of war. Years later Naji tells Scott he must leave his homeland — the dangers for a translator have become extreme. Scott gets Najibulla accepted at Utah Valley University. Naji, it turns out, handles the Mormons quite well, while Scott, teaching at the same school, has a hard time with them. At the end Naji is graduating, about to get married, and start a new job; while Scott wonders whether he can stand teaching another year — or if he’ll wind up on the street like Naji.
John Cage, Paris 1981
A tribute to the composer on his 100th birthday: We listen in on a 1942 John Cage radio play, “The City Wears a Slouch Hat.” We have a vox-pop asking “Who’s John Cage?”; an audio illustration by Jay Allison of a “John Cage and Merce Cunningham” collaboration; an excerpt from the film “John Cage: Ecoute (Listen)”; and, from the series Echoes, “Thoughts in Sound: John Cage- Imaginary Landscapes.” Laurie Anderson and Ken Nordine offer homages to the composer. And we hear Cage’s “In a Landscape,” Suite for Toy Piano, and “Variations IV.”
Hearing Voices from NPR®
142 Solidod: An Apache Original
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2012-09-26
“Solidod” (52:00 mp3):
The Life and Times of Solidod, the last remaining member of her village of Mescalero Apache who lived on the edge of Death Valley. HV editor Larry Massett helped our friend Solidad publish her new e-book, An Apache Original: The Life and Times of Solidod
Larry composed and performed the piano music in this radio hour.
Solidod is in her 80s and tells about 300 years of her life stories in the book. Here’s an excerpt from Larry’s…
Introduction
When I first met Solidod she was living alone in a tiny room in a rather depressing subsidized-income apartment complex in Florida. She herself was anything but depressing, though. A few minutes after we met she showed me the little knife she carries with her in her buckskin purse. “But Solidod,” I said, “that’s kind of a dangerous knife, isn’t it?” I said- meaning, dangerous for an 80-year woman. “Yeah, it’s sharp,” she laughed, “but it would be better if it was rusty. So the cut would get infected in case I stab somebody.”
Wow, tough lady. Tough, but also funny, curious, brimming with energy, and a world-class storyteller. As she told me about the adventures of her life I realized she’s been everywhere and done just about everything: horse-trainer, bodyguard, trans-Atlantic sailor, carpenter, gardener, artist, you name it. And she’s busy. She spends her days zipping around town selling the t-shirts she paints and the jewelry she makes, checking on old friends and chatting up new ones. Most people her age seem to be winding down; Solidod’s just getting started…
Me and my Indian, my husband
Several of Solidod’s paintings grace the book’s pages. The e-book
HV editor Larry Massett helped our friend Solidad publish her new e-book, An Apache Original: The Life and Times of Solidod
Introduction
When I first met Solidod she was living alone in a tiny room in a rather depressing subsidized-income apartment complex in Florida. She herself was anything but depressing, though. A few minutes after we met she showed me the little knife she carries with her in her buckskin purse. “But Solidod,” I said, “that’s kind of a dangerous knife, isn’t it?” I said- meaning, dangerous for an 80-year woman. “Yeah, it’s sharp,” she laughed, “but it would be better if it was rusty. So the cut would get infected in case I stab somebody.”
Wow, tough lady. Tough, but also funny, curious, brimming with energy, and a world-class storyteller. As she told me about the adventures of her life I realized she’s been everywhere and done just about everything: horse-trainer, bodyguard, trans-Atlantic sailor, carpenter, gardener, artist, you name it. And she’s busy. She spends her days zipping around town selling the t-shirts she paints and the jewelry she makes, checking on old friends and chatting up new ones. Most people her age seem to be winding down; Solidod’s just getting started…
Me and my Indian, my husband
Several of Solidod’s paintings grace the book’s pages. The e-book
Here’s a few paragraphs from chapter one: More…
Hearing Voices from NPR®
124 Walk in the Park: National Parks, Neighborhood Parks
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-10-19
“Walk in the Park” (52:00 mp3):
Yellowstone, Zion, the Everglades, and William Pierce Park in DC:
From the series Neighborhood Stories– Park Life, profiling the daily life of a community’s urban oasis: “Country Bobby” Lowry is the guardian of Walter Pierce Community Park in Washington, D.C. He’s been keeping an eye on the park for almost three decades, and knows more about how it than any city official — he knows the trees, the plants and the kids. In the first of four stories about the park, we meet this transplanted farm boy who never takes shortcuts in his work. See NPR’s has great photo gallery.
Utah’s Zion National Park draws 2.7 million visitors a year, and a major attraction for hearty hikers is a trek along the Grotto trailhead to Angel’s Landing. From the banks of the Virgin River, the yellow-and-red sandstone sides of Zion Canyon rise 2,000 feet. It feels like being inside a huge body. The canyon walls are the rib cage spread open and Angel’s Landing is like the heart.
Take an Angels Landing eHike. Photo gallery at NPR.
From Neighborhood Stories– Park Life: An ode to Leah at Walter Pierce Community Park, who braids hair by the basketball court while the guys play 5 on 5.
Music from Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds, Vol. 1
Mazar →Sherbigan →Qala-i-Jhangi →Kabul
Just in town, I decide to go for a walk. I leave the hotel, cross the street to the mosque, and gaze up at the blue tiled dome. The instant I stop walking four or five young men also stop walking, as if they’d just been pretending to be going somewhere. They stand right in front me. Then quickly there are ten, then thirty, fifty — all boys and men, crowding close together, a hundred eyes looking at me in disbelief.
“America,” I say, wondering if this is wise, because we’d just bombed their city and their country. But it’s the word they want to hear, they want to say it. America… America… America…
“California.” I say, wanting to hear it echo. “Mississippi.”
Three or four try to speak English. “Hello, how are you?” “Thank you very much.” “Okay, good luck, good-bye.”
“What do you think about America bombing your country?” I ask the first boy. “Was it a good thing or a bad thing?”
“It was a good thing. When the Taliban here there was no working, nothing working. Now America comes here. Is it correct? America comes here?”
“You mean will American soldiers come here? I don’t know, maybe.” He translates this for the crowd and they start shouting questions, too many to translate. Sort of frustrated, he says, “We want money to make work. We want now the schools.”
“I think there might be some money, but I don’t know, we might start bombing some other country and forget about Afghanistan.”
This makes the yelling get louder. They’re not yelling at me, just yelling for the sake of yelling, filling the space with their voices. I look down at a guy in a small cart. One of his legs is missing and the other is very short, like a baby’s. He says he needs a new cart, a real wheelchair with bicycle tires like they make in America, and some artificial limbs like they make in America, and he wants to know if I can get him some.
“I don’t know how to do that,” I say, “but it’s possible. I think that’s one of the things there will be money for.” They just keep pressing in, getting closer and closer, and it’s time to get going. So I say, “Okay. Good luck. Good-bye,” and wave and quickly back into the hotel.
Mazar-i-Sharif, which means “tomb of the saint,” is a city of adobe tenements that look ancient, all somewhere in the process of crumbling and collapsing. In the street men pull carts with wooden wheels, others are pulled by horses and donkeys, carrying wood and bricks. There are shops with skinned goats hanging upside down out front, shops where chairs and tables are made, shops with material for clothing and drapes. Subtract the cars and the shop where the guy is making satellite dishes from pieces of scrap metal, and ignored the occasional Russian-made proletarian concrete building, then the city would look 13th century, or even older.
Again I go out for a walk, and again I stop, and again four or five men around me immediately also stop, and again a crowd quickly forms. This time I pull out my camera and start taking pictures. They become quiet and still — not afraid or shy of the camera, but also not quite sure of its power. I hold it at arm’s length down low and they stare straight at the lens and I take their pictures. While I’m doing this I hear a voice, a soft, calm voice next to my ear say, “Excuse me, are you a journalist?” I turn and see a young man with a shaved head — kind of startling — and say, “Sort of.” He’s wearing a Planet Hollywood tee-shirt over a brown turtleneck, checked polyester pants two or three sizes too big and cinched by a belt — kind of a punk look, opposite of the others. And I have this feeling that he might actually be a woman. He has beautiful eyes with long lashes, and that soft voice. I look, twice, to see if he has breasts.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Just taking pictures,” I say. “How old are you?”
“Nineteen. Do you need a translator? I have been studying English in school, but there is no school now — the Taliban sent our teachers back to Turkey. I would very much like to work for you. I will help you in any way that I can, and I will not leave your side — as long as you are here I will be with you.”
“What’s your name?”
“Najibullah Niazi.”
“Najibullah. Why did you shave your head?”
“When the Taliban leave two weeks ago many men shave their beard, but I do not have beard, so I shave my hair,” he says, smiling.
“Good one,” I say, “but I’m sorry, I don’t have very much money and I just can’t afford to pay a translator every day.”
“For me money is not important. If you have money you can pay me. If you don’t have money you don’t pay me. When you are finished you can decide.”
I know that this is a deal that could go sour very quickly, but I do need a translator and, to a certain degree, I believe him. He’s trying to learn to look and act like a westerner, and probably the best way for him to do it would be to hang out with me. I wonder if his shaved head might frighten the locals, but then he is a local and it’s his business so I let it go.
“Come,” he says, “let’s go to the hotel and we can talk there.” We’ve attracted a large crowd, some of them spilling into the street, making traffic go around them. “This place is not so good for you.”
We walk through the crowd and they go on about their ways, all except for three very dirty little boys who try to stand in front of me and brush my hand begging for money, but all I have are 20-dollar bills. Naji saves me by scolding them away.
Mazar →Sherbigan →Qala-i-Jhangi →Kabul
Yesterday Najibullah told me that “The Titanic” was such a hit in Mazar that now if you want to say that someone is “with the latest style” you say that he is titanic. I’d say Najibullah is titanic. He gets there. I loaned him my sunglasses and hat and he thinks he looks like a U.S. Special Forces soldier, or actually he says that other people think he looks like this, that they can’t tell he’s an Afghan, and this makes him very happy. He’s driving the car — the old chauffeur is relaxing in the passenger seat, willing to let the 19-year old go ninety miles an hour across the desert — pounding the steering wheel to the beat of some Afghan disco music.
He drives too fast, and he slows down and speeds up too quickly. When passing big trucks on the left, the old chauffeur helps him out by saying whether it’s clear — the steering wheel is on the right side, as the car is from Pakistan. And always, when passing, he blows his horn for the entire distance. Everybody does. He swerves around the small potholes but crashes into the big ones. This happens again and again, even though I keep telling him to slow down.
Soon we come to the 3,000-year-old town of Balkh, sometimes called “the Mother of All Cities,” anciently called Bactria, perhaps the home of the double-humped Bactrian camel. Zoroaster is aid to have preached and died here. And then for a while it was Buddhist. The region was conquered by Alexander the Great in 329 B.C. It was taken by the Arabs in the 8th century A.D. They built one of the largest libraries in the world here, but it, and the entire city, was destroyed by Gengis Kahn in 1220. The mystic poet Rumi was born near and his family fled to escape the mongol hoard.
“Yes, it’s real. It’s the only one in Afghanistan, built by the Russians. The gas comes from the ground near Sherbigan and goes to Mazar, 160 kilometers.”
“And it actually works?”
“Yes, for electricity in Mazar. We have one five-megawatt station. My father, he helped in building this, as geology engineer.”
Up ahead a teenage boy with a Kalashnikov waves us over. It’s not a checkpoint, he just wants a ride, and we have to stop because he has a gun. It’s a common form of transportation for the soldiers. But when he comes up to the car the old chauffeur starts yelling at him, “What are you doing? You shouldn’t be out here stopping cars on the highway. This man is an American and you should be careful not to upset him or the bombs will find you in your house!” The kid falls back like he’s been punched hard. He looks truly frightened.
“He really believed that,” I say.
“Yes, they all believe it,” Naji says. “And it’s true.”
“Yeah, but I can’t make it happen.”
“But he does not know this.”
The old man looks at me and smiles.
Dostum’s compound in Sherbigan resembles a Soviet Club Med in decline. There are two pools, one indoors and one outdoors, both empty and breaking apart. The outdoor pool is deep and has a diving platform, surrounded by a concrete patio with lights for night-time parties. The indoor pool is housed in the strangest building I’ve ever seen, made from concrete but fantastical in style, a mixture of Bauhaus and Dr. Seuss. The doors are chained shut, but I can see the pool through the broken windows — long and shallow, perhaps for the women.
In the center of the compound, which is about the size of a city block and surrounded by a wall, is Dostum’s residence, a modest two-story beach house. Beyond is a garden with long rows of rose bushes and fruit trees, sidewalks and benches, a small Mosque in one corner, and a large fountain, also made of concrete, in the shape of an opium poppy. A giant concrete poppy fountain, dry and out of order.
Only two weeks before this city and even this guest house had been occupied by the Taliban. (They cut out the heads of the deer in the pastoral murals in the hallways.) For three years these mullahs and commanders have been in hiding in the mountains, while Dostum was in self-imposed exile in Turkey and other places. But now he’s back. He’s dressed in velour like a medieval monarch — a big man with a round face, black woolly caterpillar eyebrows, and salt and pepper hair and beard trimmed short and neat. He looks like a big teddy bear, and I have a strong urge to give him a squeeze, but I don’t because I know he’s a powerful warlord who is reportedly so evil that his laugh has frightened men to death, and so cruel that he once tied a man to the treads of a tank and then watched as he was crushed into mincemeat. He sided with the Soviets during the 1980s and built his army by running drugs, although no one speaks of this. (And, by the way, no one writes of the essential relationship between guns and drugs in Afghanistan for just this reason — it’s too dangerous.) During the 1990s, when Afghanistan was torn by civil war, Dostum sided with everyone and no one, making and breaking many promises, and surviving when many others did not.
One of the older men, a mullah, stands and tells Dostum that his office in a near-by town has no furniture or carpets left, that the Taliban took everything. “Here you have new things,” he says, “but we have nothing left, not even a desk.”
Dostum takes this in stride and tells the man that these things will not be a problem, but that they will take some time. He has only just now arrived in town. A younger man stands, a commander, and tells Dostum that there are still Taliban soldiers hiding in bunkers outside his village and that they have threatened to die fighting before they surrender. Dostum tells him to tell the Taliban that their resistance is futile — either they surrender or they will be bombed by U.S. planes until there will be none of them left.
A man walks to the center of the room holding a sheet of paper in his shaking hands. He stands there and looks at the paper and then he starts to sing. It’s a dirge, with many verses, telling of battles where brothers and friends fought bravely but were lost. The men in the room are transported in space and time, some of them sob, tears falling onto the blankets around their chests. There’s something very heavy in the room. I can’t see it but I can feel it. These men don’t want to fight anymore. Not because they are afraid of fighting, but because they are really very tired of fighting.
The power is off in the hotel as well as the entire city of Mazar, but I have a head lamp and a box of wooden matches. The head lamp I brought with me, but the match box is from Latvia, and I can’t remember how it came to me. Maybe by way of the Moscow-based Boston Globe reporter on the fifth floor. They are fine wooden matches, “Avion,” with a picture of an old airplane. The box is also made of wood, and sturdy. It seems very exotic and very much out of place.
There is no power in this hotel and there is no running water in this hotel, and I’ve been waiting for an hour for a simple dinner to be brought to my room — a 4×8 foot space with a bed and nothing else. The bed is a steel-mesh hammock with a thin cotton mattress, two dirty sheets, and one blanket. There are better rooms in the hotel, large rooms with windows and kerosene heaters, but I’m trying to save money and this one costs only ten dollars a night while the others go for $35. I don’t mind the darkness, and I don’t mind the bed, but without running water the communal toilets are filling up and the stink is hard to ignore. No self-respecting foreign correspondent would stand for this, but there are no other hotels in town.
I’m hungry. There is a restaurant in town, but even those who’ve been there don’t know where it is. The sound man with the French TV crew said, “You take a taxi and say you want to go to the restaurant. It’s around here somewhere, and it’s a real restaurant, with tables and table cloths and enough light so you can see what you are eating. Not bad.” But it’s night now, and nobody goes out at night. Nobody. The hotel doors are locked and the dogs control the streets.
An hour ago I asked the ten-year old boy who works here if there was a way I could order something to eat. He speaks English pretty well, sometimes with an attitude if he doesn’t like you, but we get along fine because I tip him 10,000 Afghanis whenever he does something for me.
“Yes,” he snaps, “what do you want?”
“Do you have dinner?”
“Dinner?” like he’d never heard the word.
“Yes, dinner, like kabob. Do you have kabob?
“Kabob, no.”
“Rice?”
“Yes, rice.”
“And bread?”
“Rice and bread.”
“And tea.”
“Okay.”
“Do you have anything else?”
“What?”
“Is there anything else they can make in the kitchen besides rice and bread and tea?”
“No.”
“Okay then. Can you bring it to my room?”
“Yes, yes,” and he went off into the darkness and he has not come back. But there are many hungry people in this town, and I roll another cigarette and light it with my exotic matches and listen to the last prayer of the day being sung over a loudspeaker at the mosque.
I am standing outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs waiting for the young Najibullah to tell the authorities of our plans. He must report in, he says, or they will get rough with him. So I wait. Next to me is a Toyota Tacoma four-door, four-wheel-drive, diesel pickup. Chrome roll bars, chrome bars over the front grill, chrome running boards. In the back bed are three soldiers. The one in the middle is straddling a floor-mounted machine gun with a bore the size of three fingers. The man to his left cradles a medium-sized machine gun with fold-down tripod so that it can be set on the ground or maybe a rock. The other soldier has a Kalashnikov over his shoulder. They’re waiting for their commander who has gone inside the building. The sun is out but it’s a cold morning, and two of the soldiers are wearing polar gear dropped from American planes as part of the humanitarian aid program — thick insulated pants, big coats with big hoods, and black leather lace-up combat boots. It would be really cold riding in the back of a pickup and these clothes are perfect for the job, so they’re styling. It’s cool to sit in the back of a pickup with a machine gun. It’s cool to be part of the conquering army on a bright and sunny morning.
I ask the men if I can look inside the cab and they say go ahead, getting out and coming around to watch me. The floors and the seats are covered with Afghan carpets that look like they’ve just been vacuumed. There’s no mud or dirt anywhere, which seems impossible considering that it’s been raining for days and there’s mud everywhere. On the dash there are red plastic roses, and the front window has little multi-colored cotton balls hanging from its border, and there are little stickers around the cassette player of valentine hearts and the word LOVE written in that 60’s psychedelic font. I point to the stickers and look at the soldiers and one of them says, “Taliban.”
“Taliban?”
“Yes,” he says and makes a motion with his hand meaning that the whole truck had belonged to the Taliban.
“Kunduz?” I asked, meaning ‘Was this truck taken at the surrender of Kunduz?’
“Yes, Kunduz,” all nodding their heads.
It’s strange that Taliban soldiers had decorated the cab this way, like a gay bordello, and it’s stranger still that the Northern Alliance soldiers hadn’t changed it.
What does this mean?
It means the Taliban were more cool, more hip, than the Northern Alliance.
I’ve been cold at night so before going to bed I ask for an extra blanket. I find the young man who sweeps the floors and say, “Blanket?” making the motions like I’m sleeping and pulling a blanket over my head.
“Blanket?” he asks.
“Yeah, blanket,” acting like I’m in bed and shivering.
“Okay, blanket,” he says and goes directly to a room just across the hall from mine and pounds on the door. The young man who answers also works in the hotel, also sweeping the floors. My guy tells him that I need his blanket, so hand it over, since I’m a paying guest and all. But the other guy says no way, Jose, it’s cold out tonight. My guy says, listen, you’ve got to give him your blanket, if you get cold you can go sleep with your friend downstairs. This makes the other guy mad and he grabs my guy at the shoulders and they start wrestling, pushing each other in and out of the room, yelling, knocking stuff over while I’m saying, “I don’t want his blanket, stop, listen, there must be another blanket in this hotel somewhere.” They stop wrestling and just yell at each other for a few minutes, and then they’re not yelling at all but talking quietly, and then they’re hugging each other in the doorway and holding hands.
“Blanket?” I say, rather perturbed.
No, they both shake their heads, no.
Mazar →Sherbigan →Qala-i-Jhangi →Kabul
The mud in the basement at Qala-i-Jhangi is a thick brown mousse, eight inches deep. It makes a sucking noise when I step in it, and then sticks like clay to my boots. It smells of rotting corpses, because that’s what’s down here, some have been dead for seven days. There are two by the stairs, halfway cemented in the mud, faces swollen, the color of ashes. I walk carefully around them. There are more, a lot more, around the corner, but it’s dark in there and I don’t have a light and the smell alone is evidence enough.
I back out and go upstairs, neatly avoiding the unexploded mortar shells sunk into the wall. I stand outside the building trying to pick the mud off my boots with sticks from the shattered pine trees, ripped apart by U.S. missiles. When sticks no longer work I try scrubbing it off with snowballs packed from the three inches that had fallen and is still falling, blanketing the battlefield and the rubble, as in photos of the Battle of the Bulge or Wounded Knee. Workers, including a woman who isn’t wearing a burka, are going down in the basement and bringing up coats and shawls, dripping wet. They reek. I reek. I sit on what had been the front porch using a brick to scrape the mud off, and just to my right there’s a human foot, smudged and bloody, with a little patch of snow on the heel, snapped clean just above the ankle. Perhaps the body was obliterated with the front door, because there’s nothing there but a huge gaping hole.
They’d been in Kunduz, where all the Afghan Taliban surrendered by simply driving out of town and switching sides, suffering only hugs and kisses and the loss of their pick-up trucks. But for the foreign Taliban the decision was more complicated. The Northern Allilance Tajik commander had threatened to kill them all rather than take them prisoner, and Dostum had a history of massacres. Still, realistically, there were at least 4,000 of them and it would have been very difficult to slaughter 4,000 men on CNN. Also most of them were Pakistani Pashtuns, so it would have been politically difficult to kill them.
Dostum’s men took a long time disarming the Taliban, and then they very slowly began to search their bodies. But by the end of the day only some had been carefully searched. It was Ramadan, and Dostum’s men were hungry and not keen on getting blown up. This is when Dostum said, “Take them to my castle.”
Qala-i-Jhangi was fifteen miles away and had the advantage of being enclosed by a mud wall sixty feet tall, more than 400 yards on a side, with an elaborate stitch of crenellations, very medieval and huge, surrounded by a moat. Inside was mostly farm fields divided into three compounds separated by more high mud walls. The prisoners were taken to the third compound, a pasture with forty tethered cavalry horses. Also in this compound was a brick building previously used as a military classroom, and underneath this building was an air raid shelter, a basement, with thick concrete walls, built by the Russians.
The plan was to tie the prisoners’ arms and then put them in the basement, but before they could do this one of the prisoners blew himself up along with two high-ranking Northern Alliance commanders. Everybody hit the ground, and, to their credit, the other Northern Alliance guards did not start shooting. They pulled out and left the prisoners there for the night. During the night eight more foreign Taliban killed themselves in an explosion. But the next morning, even though the prisoners had been blowing themselves up, two CIA men (“Dave” and “Mike”), and two Red Cross directors from Australia and Swizterland went into the third compound. The Red Cross was there to ensure the humane treatment of the prisoners, but the CIA was there to interrogate them. It’s not clear what happened — either a prisoner rushed and grabbed Mike in a bear hug and blew both of them up, or a prisoner threw a grenade that killed a bunch of guards, or a soldier threw a rock at a guard, knocking him down and taking his gun and killing him and five others — but something happened and very quickly Mike was dead and Dave was shooting his pistol and a bunch of prisoners were shooting machine guns and the remaining guards fled the compound shutting the gate behind them, leaving Dave and the two Red Cross directors inside.
The three white guys and their associates found a way over the outer wall of the fortress while the Taliban found a huge cache of weapons near the stables. Why the prisoners had been put in an area with an arsenal of weapons was not clear. Some believed that the whole thing was a set up by the Northern Alliance. Others, including the commanding officer of the Northern Alliance, later said that they believed the prisoners could be contained in the basement and that they didn’t expect an uprising. But it happened. For the next two days there was intense fighting, the Taliban hiding behind trees and walls of the buildings, and climbing trees to shoot over the walls of the compound, firing rockets and mortars over the walls, screaming God is great and running into open fire and dying. Or just getting obliterated by a series of U.S. air strikes — precision missiles dropped from fighter bombers and artillery barrages from AC-130 gunships.
Because there were only 188 bodies in the pasture it meant that there must have been close to 200 other bodies down in the basement. Nobody went down there on Wednesday, but on Thursday some old men were told to start pulling out the bodies, which they did, only to meet with a spraying of bullets. One died and one was wounded; incredibly, there were men down there willing to keep fighting. They’d come out at night and cut pieces of flesh off the horses. They’d drank water mixed with blood from the floor of the basement. They’d survived the aerial bombardments, and still they would not surrender.
So, first, the Northern Alliance poured gasoline down through a ventilation duct and lit it. Then they poured diesel fuel down there and lit that. Then they dropped rockets and hand grenades, one after another, all afternoon, so many that it became boring. And then they flooded the basement with water, cold water. So much water that dead bodies started floating and the men who were too injured to stand drowned. This was too much for those who were still alive. They began screaming for the Northern Alliance to stop, and then they started coming out, one at a time, until there were 86 of them — wounded, wet, filthy, and insane. That was Saturday afternoon, one week after they had been brought there. The smoke from the fires had killed half of them, and then the water had killed half of those who were left , but the rockets and grenades were relatively ineffective because the walls down there were thick concrete — built by the Russians.
Some were treated by the Red Cross, some were given apples and oranges, all were loaded either into an open flat bed or an enclosed container. This is when a correspondent for Newsweek, Collin Soloway, discovered that one of the prisoners was an American. He was sitting up, leaning on the tail gate of the open truck. His long black hair and beard were caked with dirt and blood and the skin on his face was dark from soot. Suthaway asked him where he was from and he said, “I was born in Washington D.C.”
One of the prisoners died that night in the back of the flatbed, which left eighty-five men alive. If you add eighty-five and 188 and subtract from 400 that means there are still about a hundred bodies in the basement. The smell comes wafting up and rises through the air and the falling snow does nothing to diminish it. Naji is in the cab, honking the horn. He wants out of here. I leave and go back to the hotel and use my toothbrush, an extra one, to clean every bit of mud off my boots in the bathroom sink. I even take out the laces and wash them in my hands.
The power is out and there are eight of us in the room of the French television producer. She has three kerosene lamps and keeps her kerosene stove so hot that it glows red. She has pate, and she has vodka, and she has a satellite phone that sits on the floor and is open to anyone who needs to use it.
There’s a knock on the door and she yells, “Come in, don’t bother to knock. . . . Ah, Damien, you are so beautiful, I was looking for you. Please, take off your shoes.”
Damien is an independent cameraman, also French, who’s been trying to leave Afghanistan but has no visa to enter any bordering country. It’s a complicated story and one that’s not uncommon among the journalists here — they came in not worrying about how they were going to get out.
“Damien,” she says, “have some pate, it’s very good. I wanted to tell you that we were at the airport today when the French troops arrived, and as it happens I know their commander. He’s a very good friend of mine. We were together, years ago, in Africa. Anyway, I mentioned that there were some of us who had no way to get home and he offered to let us travel on his planes directly to Paris. What do you think of that?”
“Wonderful,” he says, “you’ve solved all my problems and given me pate.”
Najibullah is sitting next to me on the floor, transfixed, soaking in everything. This is what he lives for, to hang out with westerners and study their ways. He knows everyone and they all like him because he’s usually happy and curious and eager to help. He’s been offered more money than I am paying him, but he’s refused because of his promise to me.
There is another knock on the door and it’s the other Najibullah, the number-one translator in town. He’s an English teacher and wears a wool suit with a tie, a little stiff for this crowd. He enters and takes off his scarf and hat and says, “I have news. The Black Priest Dodullah, he is in Baaaaalllllllkhhhh.” He has a way of torching the last words of certain sentences, either for emphasis or because of a speech impediment. It’s hard to tell. The Taliban mullah Dodullah is in the ancient city of Balkh, only eight miles away. This means that there could be trouble, which would be good for business all around.
The situation in Balkh is that there are somewhere between 200 and 3000 Taliban there who refuse to surrender. Or perhaps there are no Taliban there at all. It’s hard to tell. The Black Priest is a hard-line Taliban leader known for his severe punishments. He swore never to surrender, but then he vanished. It was thought that he was in Kandahar or that he was dead, but now he’s back — or maybe he isn’t. The people of Balkh are mostly Pashtun — which is why Dodullah would take refuge there — and Dostum and his army are mostly Uzbek, and they want not only the Taliban but those who support them. They want their stuff, their money and pick-up trucks and maybe even their land. The advantage of the Pashtuns is that they have governed the region for 300 years. Dostum’s advantage is that he won the war and has an army capable of surrounding the city and then calling in U.S. air strikes.
Every day for the past week there have been at least 150 of Dostum’s soldiers in Balkh. They have three tanks and a couple dozen pickup trucks with large guns and rockets. The first day they were there I asked their commander what was going on and he said they were “cleaning up,” going from house to house, disarming the occupants and looking for Taliban soldiers. I asked him if I could observe the operation, but he said they only do it at night, and so it would not be possible. A correspondent for National Public Radio went there a couple of days later and demanded to see the weapons that had been confiscated and the men who had been taken prisoner, but he was given a long run around and then told that there were no guns or prisoners to be seen. On the same day I was stopped a mile outside of the city because Dostum’s men had shot at a Toyota van and three occupants had been wounded. One guy had been badly hurt and was taken to the hospital in Mazar, another was hit in the foot and was standing outside the van with a crutch, bleeding on the road, and the third guy was in the van with a bandage wrapped around his head, in shock. They were not Taliban, they were Uzbek. It had been a mistake, caused by someone wearing the wrong color of turban.
That’s about as much evidence as we have about what’s going on in Balkh. What needs to be done is for one of us to go there and stay for the night and go out and see what’s happening there — at night. This would no doubt be very scary and cause a large amount of pandemonium, and there are no volunteers. We sit in silence, looking at the kerosene lanterns, wondering if maybe there’s still some more vodka.
The road to: Mazar →Sherbigan →Qala-i-Jhangi →Kabul
I’m running out of money but I want to go to Kabul — just to see it and the mountains in between. I ask Najibullah how much it will cost.
“By private car it will take $200, maybe $400.”
“That’s like a year’s wages. There’s got to be a cheaper way or no one would ever go.”
“Yes, there are local cars, like taxis, and for this it is only $50 for both of us there and back, but we can not go by local car.”
“Why”
“Because journalists can only go by private car, and sometimes they take a guard with the Kalashnikov.”
“But that’s not necessary now. Is it? Isn’t it safe to Kabul now?”
“Yes, it’s safe, but we will not get permission to go by local car.”
“Then we won’t ask for permission, we’ll just go.”
“But this will be very bad for me.” He says this in the most forlorn way, as a sad sigh, as if I am asking him to cut off one of his fingers.
“Then I’ll go alone, and that way you won’t get in any trouble.”
“But I must go with you, I promised you that I would not leave your side, and so I can only go where you go. If you want we can ask to go by local car. Maybe they will say yes.”
“But it’s late now and the ministry is closed and I’d like to leave tomorrow morning.”
“We can ask the man here in the hotel.”
“Which man?”
“The man in the office.”
“I thought he was the manager of the hotel.”
“He works for the ministry of foreign affairs.”
“But he’s always here.”
“Yes, because all foreigners are staying here.”
“Then why do you always go across the street to the office to ask permission any time we go somewhere?”
“Because there is another man, a bigger man.”
“Okay, whatever.”
The smaller minister of foreign affairs is in the office sitting next to the wood stove. Najibullah tells him our plans and he asks us to sit down.
“We are asking that all journalists travel to Kabul in private cars with armed guards because we can’t be certain of your safety. It is a long way, and out of our district.”
I think this is bullshit, just a way to squeeze more money out me. But I don’t say this. “It’s very important for my story,” I say, “that I travel in a local car.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“No, I’m not. Everyone I’ve met here has been very friendly and helpful. I haven’t had any trouble with anyone, and this is what I would like to write for my magazine, which is read by millions of Americans. I would like to tell them that Afghanistan is a good place and that they should come here on vacation, but how can I say this if I travel with an armed guard? I need to take a local car and travel with other Afghans.”
“But we can’t be sure of your safety.”
“No, but then who can? My fate is in God’s hands, is it not?”
“Yes, certainly. Inshallah.” I had him there.
“Inshallah then, so it’s okay?”
“Yes, we will try it this once, but please if you would send word back with the driver, saying that you have made it safely so we do not worry.”
We leave the hotel just before dawn and take a taxi to the place where the local cars meet. Najibullah tells me to stay in the car while he goes in to buy two tickets. If they see me, he says, they will charge much more for my ticket. He comes back and says, “Okay, let’s go, follow me.” I get out and all the men who are standing around start yelling at once — “Horiji!” “Horiji!” — like they’d never seen a white man.
“Quickly.” Najibullah says, “Please, get inside the car.”
“What are they saying?” I’m sort of fascinated that my presence can cause such excitement.
“Never mind, just get in the car.”
“Tell me what they are saying so I can respond.”
He looks at me with a blank stare for a second and then turns and yells at the crowd and they back off and quiet down.
I get in and he tells me that the men were saying that I am a rich man and it’s not fair that I buy a regular ticket, and they wanted to take something from me. So he told them that I am a very famous writer and that if they didn’t stop bothering me I would tell all Americans that Afghanistan is full of bad men and that nobody should ever come here. It worked. We even have a man with a machine gun standing by the front of the car, on guard, although he’s letting a little kid press his face up against my window and stare, only inches away.
The car is a Toyota Corolla sedan. They fill it with three other passengers and the driver, making six — Najibullah sitting in the middle up front and shifting gears between his legs. We drive east out of the city across the flat desert, skirting the foothills of the Himalayas. I crack my window because it’s steaming up. I look for the mountains but it’s a gray and foggy morning and I can’t see a thing except sand dunes.
After fifty miles the fog has lifted and I can see the base of the mountain wall, impenetrable except for a narrow slit, almost like a vagina. We turn and head straight for it — a narrow canyon only fifty feet wide at bottom, room enough for only a river and a road between vertical cliffs of volcanic rock. This place has a very old name, for sure, but I don’t ask what it is because I want to make up my own. I’m thinking about it when the driver points out the rusted carcass of a Russian helicopter crashed into the cliffs 300 feet above the road. Then he points out the bomb craters in the road — twelve feet wide and six feet deep — and the burned out shells of Toyota pickups off to the side. The Taliban came through here when they fled Mazar and the U.S. planes picked a few of them off, maybe ten trucks and thirty bombs. The driver weaves between the craters and complains that this was a good road before the Americans bombed it, and he wants to know if somebody is going to come and fill in these holes.
“Yes, for sure,” I say. “We have special machines for doing this, they’re called bulldozers, very big and strong, and we have so many that we don’t know what to do with them.” And I make a note in my notebook, a reminder to call the road department upon my return home.
The narrow canyon opens onto a wide, flat valley. It’s circular, thirty to forty miles in diameter, surrounded by mountains, and in the center of the circle is a volcanic plug — the valley is a caldera. The surrounding mountains are smooth and barren, sun-baked dirt, like the skin of an elephant. They’re either heavily over-grazed or they’ve never, ever, had anything growing on them, it’s hard to tell.
“Is it okay if I smoke?” I ask. I’m hungry and because it’s Ramadan there’s little chance that we’ll be stopping to eat.
“Yes, go ahead,” the driver says.
“But is smoking against the rules of Ramadan?”
“Yes, everything is against the rules of Ramadan,” he says. “It is forbidden even to smell a flower, or to look at a beautiful young girl. We can have no pleasures during the day, but at night anything is possible.”
“But it’s okay if I break the rules?”
“For you it is not breaking the rules. You are a Christian and have your own book, and so for you it is not forbidden, am I right?”
“You’re right. In fact Jesus smoked hashish.”
“No, I think this is not true.”
“Well, maybe not, but Mohammed smoked hashish, didn’t he?”
“No, sir, I am telling you that this is not true. Where did you hear this?”
“From a Russian.” I’m making all this up and realize that I’m bordering on rudeness but I want to see how he’ll react. I grew up with religious fanatics, among the Mormons, and I can’t help myself.
“The Russians do not believe in God. You must not listen to what they tell you,” he says, and everybody in the car seems to agree on this.
“Well,” I say, “what about the deal with women. I haven’t seen one woman since I’ve been here who hasn’t been under a burka. Don’t you wish you could look at women, you know, just look at them?” And the driver is stunned by this. A horiji speaking of wanting to see Afghan women is too much of an affront. So Najibullah takes over, trying to smooth things out by telling me that perhaps with the Taliban gone the women will someday take off their burkas, perhaps at the university, but that it’s not such a good thing because these women might be beaten by their husbands or fathers.
“That’s how it used to be,’ I say, “but don’t you think it will change?”
“No,” he says, “it will not change because it’s what we believe. The Taliban believed this, but we also believe it, the Pashtun people.”
“So have you ever gone on a date?”
“What’s a date?”
“Like when you go somewhere with a girl and maybe hold her hand or kiss her.”
“No, I’ve never done this. I’ve never even spoken with a girl other than my sisters. If I speak with a girl in this way then our fathers would beat us with a stick.”
“What if you actually had sex with a girl?”
“Then we would both be beaten many more times and forced to marry each other.”
“What if when you are married, or not you, but someone else is married and his wife has sex with another man?”
“Then she will be killed with the Kalashnikov.”
“Who would kill her?”
“Her father or her brother.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true, believe me.”
“You would do this? To your own sister?”
“Yes, I would have to, for my family.”
“No,” I say, putting my hand on his shoulder, “Naji, I know you and you wouldn’t kill your own sister. I’m sorry, I wasn’t really serious before, but this is a serious thing. You wouldn’t really kill your own sister.”
“Yes, I would. First it is my father’s responsibility. If he doesn’t do it, then my biggest brother must do it. If not he, then my next smaller brother, and then my next brother, to me, and I’m telling you serious I would do it.” To drive home the point he tells the other men what he’s saying and they all nod their heads, Yes, she must be killed.
“With a Kalashnikov?” I ask.
“Or by putting the stones on top of her,” the driver adds.
From the plain of the caldera the road rises over a low pass and then into a broad canyon, more like a long valley, with pastures and irrigated fields, small villages and the town of Pol-e-Khomri, where there’s a cement factory and an army base built by the Soviets. Beyond the town is the Hindu Kush — snow-covered sawteeth over 15,000 feet high, a natural fortress made from the crashing of India into Asia. Somehow the highway goes up and over these mountains, from the Oxus to the Indus, but it looks impossible.
As it turns out, the ascent is gradual, with switchbacks and avalanche sheds built by the Soviets and marked every mile or so by one of their tanks, parked and abandoned circa 1989, left to rust as monuments. At eight thousand feet there’s snow and ice on the road and our driver gets out and ties on some chains with rope. At nine thousand feet it’s snowing. And then the road ends. We’re at the Salang Tunnel.
The roads ends here because the tunnel was blown up in 1997 by the ethnic Tajik commander Masoud, who was killed in September by Al Queda terrorists impersonating television reporters. Masoud’s troops had been pushed out of Kabul by the Taliban and he bombed the tunnel as a defense. Now cars and trucks cannot enter, but you can walk through — a distance of two kilometers — or you can walk over the Salang Pass — 2,000 feet higher — the old way, in a blizzard. On the other side it’s downhill all the way to Kabul.
At road’s end, men and boys — porters — stand in the snow with bare ankles and plastic slippers. All the cargo on this, one of the oldest and most important roads in the world, has to be carried by hand and on the back through the tunnel. They want to carry my pack and I tell them no. They get upset and grab at it — acting like it’s a union deal and I don’t have a choice in the matter — but I push their arms away and tell them to back off.
“Come quickly,” Najibullah says, “and you must walk exactly where I step. There are still land mines here.” But it seems that he’s exaggerating the risk and maybe freaking out a bit from the alpine conditions.
The north entrance of the tunnel is clear, but inside is a jumble of re-bar and slabs of concrete and sections of ventilation ducts, and we have to turn on our head lamps and move carefully so as to not get jabbed or tripped. And then it gets worse, so that we’re climbing over and ducking under fallen supports, big slabs of concrete hanging down from the ceiling. There are many other people in here — women with little kids crying, porters with huge boxes on their backs, workers or slaves salvaging scraps of metal and huddling around small fires to stay warm — and the air is so full of dust and smoke that every flashlight makes a distinct cone that fades into darkness. It’s creepy, apocalyptic, and bad for your lungs. It takes an hour to get through, moving as fast as we can go without running.
The south portal has been blown apart so that we have to climb over a tall and icy mound of debris, then we’re out. It’s still snowing, although there’s no wind on this side. Just beyond the portal are more taxis and trucks, along with another crowd of men. I walk up and they all start yelling, making noise like a swarm of angry bees. They try to surround me, they try to block me, but I keep walking. I’m not worried — I’m much larger than they are, and they’re wearing those plastic slippers — but I am amazed by the barrage of shouting, they’re so excitable. Najibullah finds a car going to Kabul and tells me to get in.
“What were they saying?” I ask.
“When you came out of the tunnel they were saying that you were a foreigner and that you were alone and that they should take your money and kill you.”
“But they didn’t have any guns.”
“Yes, they have guns. And knives, like this,” he said, pulling out a four-inch stiletto. “They hide them.”
“Naji,” I say, “put that away. No one’s going to mess with us.”
“Okay, but please stay in the car.”
Again there are six of us in a Toyota Corolla and the driver speeds down the mountain, hurrying to get to Kabul before dark. Three times we cross the river in the bottom of the canyon and at each crossing there’s a concrete bridge that was blown up by Masoud’s troops. In place of the larger concrete bridges they’ve made smaller bridges down close to the water by piling up big mounds of dirt, sometimes using Russian tanks for buttresses, and spanning the distance with metal planks that look like dismembered pieces of tank frames. Nothing larger than a small truck can pass over these bridges, and none faster than a breathless crawl.
We arrive at the edge of Kabul at dusk. It feels like being in a crater where the bomb exploded a long time ago but the dust has still not settled. The road into the city is lined by shipping containers, side to side, continuous, filled with scraps of metal and fire wood and dark dusty stuff like car wheels and motorcycle frames and doors. In front of the containers men stand around and work, pounding metal or cutting wood or fixing horse carts or cutting up empty cans. Our driver is swimming through traffic — honking, stopping, going. I ask Najibullah a question just as the guy on the other side of the back seat says something to him. I say, “Hey, do these people live in those containers?” but Naji chooses to translate for the other guy. “This man thinks you have a very beautiful face and he would like to give his love to you.” No one laughs. No one thinks this is funny except for me, and I let the comment fade with the light.
“Would you like some tea and bread?” he asks, carefully separating each word and rolling the r in bread.
“Yes, thank you.”
“In Afghanistan we give our guests everything. While you are in my house whatever you need you have.” He’s beaming at me like I am a rare jewel, and three of his little children are climbing over each other holding themselves back from petting me like a new puppy.
I’ve been told that Afghans consider themselves to be the ultimate hosts, that once you are in their home they will die trying to protect you from your enemies. This may be true, but at the same time they won’t let you meet or even look at their women.
“What was it like when the U.S. was bombing the city?” I ask. “Did bombs fall close to here?”
“Yes, every night, some only five or six blocks from here. Big bombs, very big bombs. I could not sleep, my children were very afraid.”
“Did the bombs kill civilians or did they hit military targets/”
“They hit the military targets, but some civilians were died.”
“How many?”
“I think 100 or 150.”
“And is that a lot or not that many?”
“I think it is not that many. We are very happy that the Taliban are finished. I am engineer, but I have no work for four years. I work only some days as chauffeur. I want very much to work for my family.”
“What do you think America should do to help?”
“America should give peacekeeping force here to take guns. There are many, many guns, and there are many fighting for Afghan people. If America or United Nations peacekeeping force do not come here then it will be very bad, worse than before the Taliban. But they will come, it is true?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe not.” I don’t want to lie to him.
The next morning another uncle of Najibullah’s drives us around the city in his taxi cab. We go by the lamp post where the Taliban hung the body of President Najibullah. We drive by the soccer stadium where the Taliban conducted public executions. Then we go to the zoo, which has been bombarded by mortar shells. There are a lot of empty cages with big holes in the walls, but there are still some animals alive — monkeys, hawks and eagles and vultures, and a lion that looks senile or dazed and is missing an eye. Near some of the cages is a shipping container riddled with bullet holes and blown up from the inside out — it’s square metal doors shredded and its walls were puffed out, sort of spherical. It’s empty, sitting by itself, like a piece of sculpture.
Beyond the container is the Kabul river, which after three years of drought is not much more than a series of festering pools. Still, there are people using the water — bathing in it, drinking it, and filling buckets to wash taxi cabs. We exit the zoo into an entire neighborhood that has been demolished by bombardments — acres and acres of adobe ruins.
“What happened here?” I asked Naji.
“It was the Hazara people who were living here and Masoud’s army shelled them from that hill.”
“Why?”
“Because they are Hazara people and Masoud’s people are Tajik.”
“This was before the Taliban took over?”
“Yes, when the Taliban came they stopped this fighting.”
“What a fucking mess,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“How long would it take in America to rebuild this place?” Naji asks.
“Oh, shit, in America it might take three years.”
“And then it would be as good as Tashkent?”
“Well,” I say, “anyplace in America is a lot better than Tashkent. But it’s not going to happen like that, I don’t think. Maybe America will give Afghanistan some money for rebuilding, but the work will probably have to be done by the Afghan people.”
“And how long will that take?”
“I don’t know, maybe fifty years.”
“But I will be an old man by then.”
“Yeah, you would be. My advice to you is to try to find a way to get out of here.”
“Where will I go?”
“Anywhere. The world is a big place and there are a lot of things to see. A lot of opportunities.”
“But I think this is not possible for me.”
I don’t know what to tell him. If his family had any money they would have left years ago, along with the rest of the middle class. The only people left in Afghanistan are poor and have no modern skills. It will take a long time, maybe forever, to make this place look even as good as Tashkent, and then it will still suck.
Naji just looks at the ground and kicks a brick and says, “Shit.”
As a WordPress coder he has cared for sites at:
A sampling of sonics by Barrett Golding, aka, The Wandering Jew:
“Voices from Tahrir” (2012 / 11:40 mp3)Interviews with the protesters, performers, and planners of the January 25 2011 Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt. Human Rights Watch recorded the interviews and gave me complete access to make this radio story. Includes field-recordings made in the square, collected from citizen journalists and reporters around the world. Aired January 25 2012, the one-year anniversary, on APM The Story and Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcast. A one-hour version aired on Hearing Voices from NPR and the Human Rights Watch podcast.
“The Pledge” (1997 / 5:23 mp3)People with different ethnic and regional dialects try to remember the Pledge of Allegiance, and reflect on the the words in this single century-old sentence. Voices collected from around the country; music from a high-school marching band practice. Aired July 4th on NPR All Things Considered.
“Old Together” (1992 / 2:36 mp3)Three couples reminisce on their life and love together; original music by Kels Koch, with Skyward. Aired Valentine’s Day on NPR Weekend Edition- Sunday.
“What is Poetry? (Sandburg)” (2001 / 3:35 mp3)Carl Sandburg poems and thoughts on poetry, with original music by Skyward. Aired on Carl Sandburg’s birthday on NPR All Things Considered.
“Silence (Who’s John Cage?)” (1992 / 2:24 mp3)People answer the question: “Who’s John Cage?” layered over Cage-like sounds and broadcasts. Aired the week of John Cage’s death on NPR All Things Considered.
“John and Nippy” (2006 / 5:08 mp3)Rancher John Hoiland describes his life, his work, and the accordion music he plays with his dog Nippy.. Aired on NPR Day to Day.
“Blackfish” (2007 / 3:57 mp3)Dr. John Ford of the Vancouver Aquarium can ID individual Orca pods by their calls. He spends nights on the water, with a hydrophone, an underwater mic. Nights, because the days are too noisy. Dr. Ford’s underwater orca recordings are mixed with original music by Racket Ship. Aired on NPR Day to Day.
“American Dream” (2004 / 4:22 mp3)Chicago college students consider the definitions (and existence?) of the American Dream. Original music by Racket Ship. Aired on NPR Day to Day.
“John Ono Lennon” (2005 / 20:40 mp3)John Ono Lennon, in his own words, on peace, family, and music. Aired the 10th anniversary of his death on NPR All Things Considered.
“Sun Song” (2002 / 2:47mp3)Solar particles hitting the Earth’s magnetic field light up the skies with auroras. The particles also emit low frequency electromagnetic waves, a type of natural radio. Every year recordist Steve McGreevy heads north, where reception is best, and points his receiver toward the sky. Original music by Racket Ship. Aired on NPR Living on Earth.
“Kaddish” (1999 / 3:26 mp3)Messages on my mother’s tape machine, found after my father’s death; original music by Skyward. Aired on PRI This American Life.
“Threats and Bribes” (1985 / 4:59 mp3)Parents talk about raising children, layered over children playing. Original music by Skyward and Joel Phelps. Aired on NPR All Things Considered.
[Today is the final broadcast of NPR Day to Day. The show, which has aired so much HV stuff and been a pleasure to work with, has been canceled.]
Much of our news today is like much of our food today. Heavily processed. Raised in cages, fed hormones and antibiotics. It makes us sick, maybe causes cancer. At least it doesn’t seem unreasonable that you could get cancer from the news.
But we need news, just like we need food. In order to maintain a civil society we need to stay well informed of the issues at hand, and the news is how we do this. So what we need is news that isn’t processed, we need more organic news.
In my opinion as a news connoisseur and critic, Day to Day was the cleanest, most ‘wild caught’ program produced by NPR. Sometimes after listening to the program I actually felt better. I had more energy and eagerness to go about my life. I wondered what would be on the show tomorrow. More than anything Day to Day gave me hope of hearing something really fresh and true. If anything suffers in processing, it’s the truth.
Faced with alleged budget shortfalls last Fall, some of NPR’s 17 vice presidents decided to cut Day to Day from it’s schedule and fire everyone who worked there. Personally, I would have erased all vice presidents. When was the last time you heard of a vice president in a news room? There are people called editors and producers and engineers in a news room but nobody goes by vice president, let alone 17 people who go by vice president all making around a quarter million a year. Not to mention their secretaries and assistants. Maybe some country club memberships.
This class of NPR employee apparently doesn’t mind producing and consuming processed news. They’ve done tests and conducted studies that show the news they produce is made from the best ingredients, assembled by trained professionals, all approved by the Columbia School of Journalism, and brought to you at a surprisingly inexpensive price. They are marketers and lawyers, and I say they should be gathered together and marched out onto the downtown Washington street on a snowy day and made strip down to their underwear, and then every single one of them should be fired and forced to eat nothing but Big Macs for the rest of their lives.
What a Kroc of shit!
–Scott Carrier
They fixed it in the mix:
“The Obama inauguration performance was pre-recorded, as we learned a few days after the event. Here is how the live performance might have actually sounded, for all we know… This is a satirical hypothetical document, not an actual record of what happened on inauguration day. Albeit with a nod to StSanders, numerous viewers have also pointed out that the duration of this video (4’33”) makes it a sort of John Cage tribute.”
via Lucas at WFMU.
The Life and Times of Solidod, the last remaining member of her village of Mescalero Apache who lived on the edge of Death Valley. Listen…
In May 2012, Soundwalk Collective traveled into the heart of the Peruvian Amazon to document the ancient chanting rituals of the Ayahuasquero, the Master Shaman and practitioner of plant medicine. The shaman consumes a potent brew made from the Ayahuasca, a sacred vine of the Amazonian jungle, the “vine of the souls”. The brew induces a powerful psychedelic experience that causes visual and auditory hallucinations. This hour we present a radio essay by anthropologist Jeremy Narby, a impressionistic mix of the recordings of the Collective’s time with this plant and these people. Listen…
A tribute to the composer on his 100th birthday: We listen in on a 1942 John Cage radio play, “The City Wears a Slouch Hat.” We have a vox-pop asking “Who’s John Cage?”; an audio illustration by Jay Allison of a “John Cage and Merce Cunningham” collaboration; an excerpt from the film “John Cage: Ecoute (Listen)”; and, from the series Echoes, “Thoughts in Sound: John Cage- Imaginary Landscapes.” Laurie Anderson and Ken Nordine offer homages to the composer. And we hear Cage’s “In a Landscape,” Suite for Toy Piano, and “Variations IV.” Listen…
Producer Scott Carrier’s wife learned early, in her “Swimming Lessons,” to skim beautifully across the water. The National Track and Field Hall of Fame commissioned sound-artist Ben Rubin to make audio art from interviews with athletes, who tell themselves “We Believe We Are Invincible.” Like many gay men, Mark Allan, didn’t appreciate “Football,” until the day he watched and learned. Producer Katie Davis kept a “Basketball Diary” as she coached the kids in her downtown DC team, part of her series Neighborhood Stories. And in spin class, “Everybody Scream,” from the new APM improv podcast, “The Truth, produced by Jonathan Mitchell.” Listen…
What does an city block sound like? Aaron Henkin of WYPR-Baltimore and electronic/hip hop musician Wendel Patrick hit the streets, and spent several months documenting the stories, voices, and people who populate the 3300 block of Greenmount Avenue, in Baltimore. We go inside the hair salon, the tattoo parlor, and the check cashing business. We talk to a street preacher and homeless street people. This part of the city is a collection of different nationalities, ethnicities, and religions; in other words: an All American block. Listen…
Heading towards the summit: NPR’s Alex Chadwick finds the “Ah Toy” Chinese Gardens hidden in the mountains of Idaho’s Payette National Forest. Scott Carrier scales Utah’s Wasatch Range for some spring skiing. Quiet American gathers sounds in Nepalese mountain Towns. Joe Frank attempts an ascent of K2, the planet’s second tallest peak — not all our treks are successful. Listen…
A memorial to recently departed cultural innovators: Beastie Boy bassist and rapper Adam Yauch — aka, “MCA,” British hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, pioneer FM rock n’ roll disc jockey Pete Fornatale, and mostly we hear mostly we hear children’s literature author/illustrator Maurice Sendak, along with all the music and movies inspired by his 1963 classic, “Where the Wild Things Are.”
Listen…
An hour-long audio mosaic about abortion in America: Pro-choice. Pro-life. Most people have already chosen sides in the ongoing debate, so why revisit the issue? Shades of Gray shares a range of stories told by people young and old who have been directly affected by abortion, instead of the polemics of irreconcilable extremes. It’s a carefully crafted audio mosaic and a stark portrayal of the intensely personal nature of our relationship with abortion. Winner of the 2004 Golden Reel for National Documentary. Listen…
It takes “Four Seconds” to hit the water from the Golden Gate Bridge — producer Jake Warga’s friend took that fatal jump. NPR’s Josh Darsa interviews “The Man with the White Cane,” a blind man who fell under a subway train. Carmen Delzell’s 89-year-old “Grandmother’s Hip” is broken. Scott Carrier talks to the family, the doctors, even the grave digger, to everyone affected by “The Death of Ruth Tuck. And we hear an answering machine “Kaddish” for producer Barrett Golding’s father. Listen…
Getting Nowhere, Slow: Producer Scott Carrier hitchhikes cross-country. Tony Joe White give directions to the swamp. Ben Walker brings books to a Balkan war criminal. Donna, a supermarket check clerk, dreams of faraway places, in the ZBS radio soap, Saratoga Springs. And People Like Us find an Arkansas Explorer. Listen…
A history of what composer Steve Reich call “speech-melodies:” We start with Riech’s 1965 tape-compositions, then move to Reich Remixed, sampled and mashed-up several decades later. Composer Adam Goddard makes music from his grandfather’s stories of “The Change in Farming.” We hear David Byrne and Brian Eno’s spoken-word experiments and a collage called “Fundamentals: Musical Preachers.” And we replay the classic Radiolab story on unintentional music, “Sometimes Behaves So Strangely.” Listen…
January 25, 2011. One year ago, a revolution began in Cairo’s Tahir Square. For the next eighteen days, millions of Egyptians across the country would demonstrate in the streets, demanding the end of their 30-year dictatorship. They were inspired by Tunisians, whose protests, that same month, had forced out the authoritarian regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Now it was time for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to go. A few weeks after the protests, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch interviewed some of the organizers of the January uprising: union leaders, civil rights workers, and young social media activists. These Human Rights Watch interviews provide a rare, eyewitness account of a revolution, told by the Egyptian people, the activists, human rights defenders, and bloggers who persevered during those eighteen days. These are the “Voices from Tahrir. Listen…
Speeches, songs, events, and people who past last year: We hear Queen Elizabeth, Occupy Wall Street, The Arab Spring, Osama Bin-Laden’s death, Japan’s nuclear accidents, North East floods, Texas fires, GOP presidential candidates, Michael Moore, and Charlie Sheen. Music includes: PJ Harvey, Ry Cooder, Fleet Foxes, Bright Eyes, The Coasters, John Barry. Tributes to: Steve Jobs, Jerry Leiber, Andy Rooney, Joe Frasier, Gil Scott Heron, Hubert Sumlin, Wild Man Fischer, Amy Winehouse, Clarence Clemons, Harry Morgan, Sylvia Robinson, Carl Gardner, Wildman Fischer, Phoebe Snow, Jack Lalane. Listen…
Christmas at a Bagram Air Base hospital, Afghanistan; a tour of the Holy Land, Hannukah military history; a visit to a toy store; and musical Chrismashups. Listen…
In December 1944 the Allies were closing in on Germany. HHitler had a desperate plan to save the Third Reich, a massive assault he believed would so demoralize that the Allies, they would seek a separate peace, leaving only the Russian army on the eastern front. On December 16 the Germans unleashed an offensive that would become the most brutal battle of the European war: the Battle of the Bulge. Nineteen thousand Americans were killed, about the same number were taken prisoner. We hear from four Americans soldiers about their time — before, during and after — in a German POW camp. Listen…
Music makers on making music: French vocalist Camille, Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista, a Hidden Kitchen at a Mozart Festival, and a high school sax player with immigration issues. Stories from the Kitchen Sisters, Long Haul Productions and the series Musicians in Their Own Words. Listen…
An hour under the influence of radio maestro and master storyteller Joe Frank, featuring many of Joe’s sonic co-conspirators, including David Cross (Fox “Arrested Development”), Laura Esterman (ZBS “Ruby”), Larry Block (PBS “Sesame Street”), and Grace Zabriskie (“Twn Peaks,” HBO “Big Love”). Deep and dark does not begin to describe the solitary, ponderous melancholia that is a Joe Frank story. Listen…
Joe Frank talk to a homeless man on the streets of Los Angeles. David Greenberger visits Senior Centers in East LA. Pastor Michael Cummings patrols the grounds of at Jordan High School, Watts, California. And we hear excerpts from Tom Russell’s “Hotwalker,” an Americana ode to old LA, the music and the culture, with beat outsiders, religious revivals, and L.A. poet Charles Bukowski. Listen…
National Parks, Neighborhood Parks: Scott Carrier climbs Angel’s Landing in Zion National Park. Jay Allison goes deep into the Everglades with Lance Corporal James McMullen, author of “Cry of the Panther.” Katie Davis introduces us to her neighbors in William Pierce Community Park, DC. And Yellowstone’s geyser guy, geologist Rick Hutchinson, gets us up close and personal with the Park’s hydrothermal features. Listen…
Laura Rothenberg audio-documents two years of her life with CF, in the classic Radio Diaries story “My So-Called Lungs.” A new piece by Catie Talarski of WNPR, Connecticut Public Radio, “Four Failings Lungs,” follows two other CF patients; one wants a lung transplant, the other does not. And StoryCorps brings us one of the longest-surviving lung-transplant recipients, Howell Graham, who had both lungs replaced in 1990. Listen…
Shortly after the World Trade Center fell in autumn 2001, it became clear the United States would invade Afghanistan. Producer Scott Carrier decided he ought to go there too. Why? To see for himself: that’s what writers do. Who are these fanatics, these fundamentalists, the Taliban and the like? And what do they want? For the weekend of 9/11/11, Hearing Voices from NPR presents “Prisoner of Zion.” Carrier narrates his trip to Afghanistan. With his young guide and translator, Najibulla, they tour the horrors of war. Years later Naji tells Scott he must leave his homeland — the dangers for a translator have become extreme. Scott gets Najibulla accepted at Utah Valley University. Naji, it turns out, handles the Mormons quite well, while Scott, teaching at the same school, has a hard time with them. At the end Naji is graduating, about to get married, and start a new job; while Scott wonders whether he can stand teaching another year — or if he’ll wind up on the street like Naji. Listen…
Engine Overdrive: Ode to Internal Combustion. We talk to people with oversized engines: on Harley’s, and Low Riders, at race tracks and drag strips. Music from Big Stick (aka, Drag Racing Underground) and an opera, “The Miracle of Cars,” by Robert Ashley. Off to the races at the Long Beach Grand Prix and the Bonneville Salt Flats. Some classic comedy car ads, and hanging with Hog riders. Listen…
Audio documents of daily life: From Radio Diaries a Teenage Diary of “Nick In Salt Lake City, from Home School to High School.” Recording an ascent of “Cho Oyo, 8201m,” the sixth highest mountain in the world. A transgender tells her mother she’s gay, in “Dia’s Dairy.” And in “Carmen’s Diaries” a woman rediscovers what she wrote as a girl. Listen…
From Bad to Worse: A private investigator empathizes with the criminal element. Katie Davis hunts the vermin of her rat-infested DC neighbor. Joe Frank read the nightly news: no wonder we’re all so depressed. And somehow a KGB-led road trip thru the Republic of Georgia has gone wrong. Listen…
Self-propelled travels: We walk five thousand miles with a Fanatic Reactionary Pedestrian. We pedal thru Yellowstone and Teton Parks. And we trek with the Queen of Bhutan to remote villages, promoting what-they-call Gross National Happiness. (“The Queen’s Trek” is an Outer Voices production — they were first foreign journalists allowed to accompany a Bhutanese monarch on the trek, and the first to interview the Queen.) Listen…
A weapons-grade hour of wartime radio: The people who start the fight, and the people who pay the price. The words of Churchill, Bush, Rumsfeld, LBJ, MacNamara, J. Robert Oppenhiemer, and a Hiroshima survivor. Carl Sandburg reads his poem “The Unknown War.” Scott Carrier reports from an Afghan battlefield in November 2001. Ryuichi Sakamoto has a musical contemplation of “War & Peace.” And “Prayer Circle: Path to Zero,” a CD for global nuclear disarmament. Listen…
The voices of people who were or are homeless: Carmen Delzell takes “Crazy John” into her home. Scott Carrier spends a night in DC “Gospel Mission” shelter. The “Land of 10,000 Homeless” is a Minneapolis music/audio documentary project. Dmae Roberts interviews a young homeless girl in “Miracle on the Streets.” The Homeless Writers Coalition performs poetry put to music. Homeless people tell their stories to StoryCorps. And the Kitchen Sisters visit with street and low-income people whose main cooking utensil is the the “George Foreman Grill.” Listen…
The journeys of people driven from their homeland by war, disaster, and religious and political persecution: We travel “From Afghanistan to Amarillo,” “From Sudan to Omaha,” “From Burma to Indianapolis,” and “From Iraq to Detroit” (stories in the One Thing series). Mountain Music Project records “Blues for the Karen” in a Thai/Burma border refugee camp. A “Cargo Flight to Somewhere” starts in the Congo and ends in an airport detention center (a song/story for Crossing the BLVD project, Queens NYC). And “Refugee Dreams” of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, now living in Portland, Oregon (Crossing East story). Listen…
States Of Mental Health, in three diagnoses: Depression, Amnesia, and Mental Breakdown. Cameron Ledoux talks with his dad about his father’s depression. Scott Carrier goes looking for amnesia victims. And a sonic journey into the depths of mental breakdown — a first-person account told by the person losing grip on reality, and her friends who witnessed the descent. Listen…
Tuned in and turned on: Interviews with Merry Pranksters (Carolyn Garcia and George Walker). The Beautiful People remixes Jimi Hendrix. Johhny Depp conjures Hunter S Thompson. And a walk down Haight Street, looking for the lost generation of the 1960s. Listen…
A tour of our nation’s First Nations: NPR’s Alex Chadwick rides into the Bitterroot Mountains with Natives and Forest Service workers. We paddle the Pacific Coast with the Canoe Nations of the Northwest. And native poets Henry Real Bird, Joy Harjo, John Trudell and Keith Secola sing us the stories of their homes and ancestors. Listen…
Pickers, Pluckers, Players: The bad man of blues guitar, Charley Patton. A Master Class with classical guitarist Christopher Parkening, narrated by Susan Stamberg. Bass and steel guitarist Musicians In Their Own Words. Learning to play with Lemon Jelly and Birdsongs of the Mesozoic. And Asian stringed instruments recorded by the Mountain Music Project. Listen…
Practicing polygamy, finding pockets of Polynesian Mormons, and converting the lost Native-American Israelites: “Saints and Indians,” a Homelands Production, on the Latter-Day Saints school for Navaho children — restoring their original place as the lost Kingdom of Isreal. A “Utah Luau” with displaced Hawaiians. And Scott Carrier’s sound-portrait of the “Last Days” plural marriage sects of Manti, Utah. Listen…
The Soundtrack of Our Lives: Selected stories from the series “Musicians in their own words” and “Song and Memory”, which asks the musical question: What one song do your remember most from your childhood? Also Melissa Block interviews musician Abigail Washburn about her project Afterquake: creating sound poetry with the children who survived China’s 2008 earthquake. Listen…
Making Music, For a Living, For a Life. 1930s Florida folk music in the turpentine camps — a WPA project with Zora Neale Hurston and Stetson Kennedy. The Maddox Brothers and Rose, a California country star. A North Carolina preacher’s son plays everything on guitar. And a whistler on the streets of Mexico City. Listen…
Way beyond the norm: Host Larry Massett has an audio essay on the life and literature of Paul Bowles (December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) on his 100th birthday. The original mock man-on-the-street interviews, Coyle & Sharpe turn the everyday into the extremely strange. Producer John Rieger is enveloped in an Amazonian Ayahuasca expedition, a tale of ritual drugs and tourism. Listen…
The conclusion of this 1978 NPR/CBC radio classic, featuring interviews with artists on the origins of the creative impulse. Interviewees include psychologist Rolly May (author of The Courage to Create), scupltor Ernst Neizvestny (translation read by Mike Waters), jazz violinist Joe Venuti, composer Harry Somers, classical guitarist Larry Snitzler, dancer Francesca Corkle (Joffrey Ballet), actor/director Jeanne Moreau, stained glass artist Rowan LeCompte, photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Listen…
A 1978 NPR/CBC radio classic, featuring interviews with artists on the origins of the creative impulse. This first of two hours includes psychologist Rolly May (author of The Courage to Create), classical guitarist Larry Snitzler, actor/director Jeanne Moreau, pianist Loren Hollander, photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, stained glass artist Rowan LeCompte, mezzo-soprano Fredericka von Stade, painter Harold Town, novelist Marie Claire Blais, flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal, folk guitarist Leo Kotke. Listen…
For Veterans Day: Vietnam, Korean, and World War Two vets, recorded by StoryCorps, along with a Marine Sergeant’s recent “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” discharge. And we hear plug into the iPods of active-duty troops in Iraq, aksing them what they’re listening to, and what their lives are like. Listen…
Let’s rev-up this election process with a Political Party, crisscrossing the county collecting opinions: Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City watches his mayor debate Fox News host Sean Hannity, as the audience prepares for battle. Oregon kids brief us on the Constitution. Chicago college students discuss politicians. Montana pols talk politics. Howard Dean screams. We hear two opposing musical messages about the Obama administration. And we Auto-Tune the News, turning speeches info songs. Listen…
Some Dogs, Some Cats, One Pig, and a Million Camels: Camel racers ride the wild herds of Australia. Leo Grillo’s DELTA Rescue locates lost pets in Los Angeles. Piggles eavdes the butcher block, and wanders the backwoods near Washington DC. And the mythical Mama Chaos leads the feral dogs of Los Alamos. Listen…
On Monday October 9, 2010, John Lennon would have turned 70 years old. “John Ono Lennon” is an hour public-radio memorial and celebration, much of it told in Lennon’s own words and musics, from interviews, albums, outtakes, antics and poetics. The hour features: “All We Are Saying” by Barrett Golding- Lennon sings, talks, and testifies about peace, family, and art. And “The Day John Lennon Died” by Paul Ingles- 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. Listen…
Two audio diaries about character and change: a street kid who decides to wise-up and a person born in the wrong body. We hear two people documenting their own personal transformation. “Finding Miles” is the story of a person named Megan who began a slow and difficult transition into manhood, into becoming Miles. “Running from Myself” is the story of of boy who used to rob people, and his decision to stop. Listen…
An oral history of San Francisco’s premiere queer neighborhood, told by those who’ve called it home: 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. A Transom Radio special. Listen…
What we do for a living: Mohawk ironworkers on the Twin Towers; a Radio Dairy from a scissors sharpener; exercises for existential overworked, undervalued employees; percussive postal clerks in Ghana; a man with 800 jobs; and what happens when there is no work… anywhere: the 1940 Great Depression “Voices from the Dust Bowl.” Listen…
The final part of this two-hour special: A century ago the six Crow Reservation Districts came together for a cultural gathering with other Great Plains tribes. The Crow Fair honors that tradition with a “giant family reunion under the Big Sky.” Every August is now Crow Fair in southeastern Montana, with a parade, a Pow Wow, and a rodeo. In 1977 a team of NPR producers and recordists spent a week collecting sounds and interviewing people at this annual event with the Crow people: the Apsaalooke Nation. Listen…
A century ago the six Crow Reservation Districts came together for a cultural gathering with other Great Plains tribes. The Crow Fair honors that tradition with a “giant family reunion under the Big Sky.” Every third weekend of August the Apsaalooke Nation puts on a five-day festival in southeastern Montana, with a parade, Pow Wow, rodeo, and traditional and fancy dancing. In 1977 a team of NPR producers and recordists spent a week collecting sounds and interviewing people at this annual event. This early ambient sound-portrait breathes with the arts and activities of the Crow people. Part one of two. Listen…
First-person accounts from all sides of adoption. Stories about living with questions and searching for answers. We hear from birth families (mothers, siblings and a father), adoptees (both kids and adults), and various adoptive families including open adoption and international adoption (China). Producers for Transom.org by Samantha Broun and Viki Merrick with help from Jay Allison. Listen…
A Transom.org tribute to the great broadcaster and author Studs Terkel (1912-2008): For many years, Transom.org editor, Sydney Lewis, worked side by side with Studs on his radio show and his books. For this remembrance, a blend of documentary and reminiscence, she brings together a crew of Stud’s co-workers. They share great stories and wonderful previously-unheard tape of Studs himself. Listen…
Biking & Mic-ing the Lewis & Clark Trail; part two, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean: Barrett Golding and Josef Verbanac, a radio producer and an English professor, a Jew and a Sioux, bicycle from mountains to the sea, looking for hidden histories. Listen…
Biking & Mic-ing the Lewis & Clark Trail; part one, up the Missouri River into the Rocky Mountains: Barrett Golding and Josef Verbanac, a radio producer and an English professor, a Jew and a Sioux, bicycle from Missouri to Montana, enduring floods, war, worms, mud, and myriad Lewis & Clark festivals. Listen…
Obscure tours and offbeat retreats thru Americana: Filmmaker Tony Buba takes the Long Haul Productions team around his hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once thriving steel town, now one-tenth the town it was in population. Scott Carrier transports visiting Tibetan monks around the U.S. West. The town of Boonville, California has it’s own language: Boontling, a story by Ginna Allison. And writer Mark Allen tours Universal Studios and pretty much loses his mind. Listen…
A couple equestrian classics from the NPR archives: Olympian Bruce Davidson shares his techniques for training equine athletes, with NPR’s David Molpus. Josh Darsa and a team of sound-recordists are at Belmont Stakes for the third leg of the Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing. And a poem by singer Annie Gallop about the poem that unleashed her love of horses. Listen…
Musicians minds sometimes work differently. So interviews with musicians sometimes take unexpected turns: Host Lynne Neary’s interview with David Byrne ends up with her answering his questions. Mickey Hart takes us on an audio tour of his extensive worldwide percussion collection. Negativland turns their NPR interview into audio art. Musicians In Their Own Words surveys the sonic spectrum of musicians warming up for a performance. Listen…
There will be blood: An archival interview with 1950s NYC crime scene photographer, Weegee; then excerpts from old time radio’s “Casey, Crime Photographer” and “Dragnet.” Nancy Updike of This American Life spends the day with professional “Crime Scene Cleaners.” A sound-portrait of a convicted “White Collar Criminal,” by Adam Allington. And host Jake Warga does a good deed, for which he ends up assaulted, bleeding, and hospitalized. Listen…
Is hitchhiking the great American adventure sport or just a risky last resort for folks who can’t come up with bus fare? Producer Jonathan Mitchell offers a “Beginner’s Guide to Hitchhiking”. Scott Carrier relates a hitchhiking adventure involving “New Shoes” and a letter to the Dalai Lama. And host Larry Massett drives a battered Olds 88 from New Mexico to Florida, picking up every hitchhiker on “The Road” he sees — no matter how dangerous-looking. Listen…
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. “WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts” was produced by the Kitchen Sisters for their Lost and Found Sound series. Listen…
We hear crowds and confrontations at the “Town Halls 2009” collective cross-country chaos. “Protest 1968-2008” is four decades of marches and musics, montaged by Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler. Scott Carrier introduces a junta-threatening Burmese rock band, Iron Cross. Tea Partiers and single-payer proponents shout outside a Presidential health care whistle stop; there’s debate, division and a “Day of Democracy”. NPR’s Jeff Kamen takes to the DC streets amid a police crackdown on an anti-war rally — from ATC’s first broadcast day (May 1971). Listen…
We play keno, cards, and craps in Sin City: Scott Carrier stays up all night in America’s gambling Mecca: “Vegas”, baby. “Casino Suite” is three pieces for strings, winds, and Vegas dice table worker, composed by Phillip Kent Bimstein. Jazz bassist Kelly Roberti lost his bass to the “Keno Machines”. NPR host Alex Chadwick pits his wits against the casino regular playing “Poker at the Ox”. Joe Frank’s “Old Gambler” gets on the wrong side of Sin City’s collection crew. And playwright John Ridley’s “Lock It Up” is set inside the Hollywood Park Casino, which is neither in Hollywood nor a park. Listen…
The final part of our three hour-long retrospective of the 21st Century’s first decade. A sonic survey of Christ’s passion, planetary climate change, presidential contenders, Ponzi schemes, collapsing economies, and all the stories and celebs of 2006-2009. (Produced by Peter Bochan of All Mixed Up, WBAI-NYC and WPKN-Bridgeport CT.) Listen…
The second of our three hour-long retrospective of the Aughties. The Iraq war, the missing WMDs, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Katrina flood, and sounds, speeches and songs from 2003 thru 2005. (Produced by Peter Bochan of All Mixed Up, WBAI-NYC and WPKN-Bridgeport CT.) Listen…
The first of a three hour-long retrospective of the first decade, of the century, of the millennium. Beginning with the 2000 election and recounts, from Bush, Gore, Bill and Hill; thru 911, Homeland Security, and Afghanistan. A survey of selected speech, song, and soundbites from 2000 thru 2002. (Produced by Peter Bochan of All Mixed Up, WBAI-NYC and WPKN-Bridgeport CT.) Listen…
Elvis Presley (Jan 8 1935 – Aug 16 1977), a 75th Birthday Party: Long Haul Productions rides the bus to Graceland, talking to the EP pilgrims. Producer Adam Allington rides along with a policeman and Elvis impersonator. The Residents storytell the allegorical “Baby King.” Knonos Quartet performs “Elvis Everywhere”. Gillian Welch expounds her biographical song “Elvis Presley Blues”. Go Home Productions mashes up a “Strung-Out King” on-stage meltdown. And from Joyride Media & Sony’s Elvis 75 project, we hear Elvis’ friends and bandmates recall his righteous faith in both religion and rockin’. Listen…
Host Alex Chadwick charts “The Geography of Heaven” from the holy Hindu city of Vrindavan, India. Barrett Golding finds “Sacred Spaces” around Montana in a Buddhist woman’s home, a Methodist prairie church, a Soiux Sundance, and a sculptor’s ranch. Dmae Roberts climbs to a “Temple in Taiwan” with 100 people singing. Judith Sloan gathers “Incantations” in Queens, New York, prayers from churches, mosques, synagogues, apartments, and public gatherings. And Hammad Ahmed get’s “Lost in Ritual” with American Muslims searching for places to pray and ways to find Mecca five times daily. Listen…
Holiday spirits and communal consumption: We go shopping at “City X,” a history of America’s malls and their creator, architect Victor Gruen, told by producer Jonathan Mitchell. And “T’is Season” is home recordings, a woman homesteader remembering brutal North Dakota 1920s winters, blues legend Brownie McGhee describing homemade Christmas presents, a father recounting St. Nick’s the fire escape entry, and an grandfather employing a snow machine to enhance a plastic Christmas tree; from Ginna Allison’s series, A Gathering of Days. Listen…
Documenting a disease: “Thembi’s Diary” follows a South African teenager as she records her life with AIDS, produced by Radio Diaries. In “LiveHopeLove” poet Kwame Dawes travels Jamaica talking to the many HIV/AIDS sufferers on his small island, produced by Outer Voices for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Barbara and Dori Bryon are a “Family with AIDS,” the mother unknowingly passed the virus to her daughter in the womb. African children orphaned by AIDS store keepsakes of their parents in a “Memory Box.” produced by the Africa Learning Channel. And artists declare AIDS Awareness Day a “Day without Art.” Listen…
Spending time in some shrinking rural American townships: The postmistress of “Tomato, Arkansas” describes her community’s dwindling population. “X-Town” is four former Massachusetts municipalities, now flooded to make room for a reservoir. “Slab City” in California never did exist, though it’s full of folk who live there. And little Talcott, West Virginia has a big claim to fame as home of “The Legend of John Henry: Steel Drivin’ Man.” Listen…
Voices from the Armed Forces: “Project Healing Waters” teaches wounded warriors, including amputees, to fly-fish; we spend a day catching trout at Rose River Farm in Virginia. “Operation Homecoming” is an NEA book project featuring writings and readings by vets returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. “Winter Soldiers” is testimony by soldiers and marines at the Iraq Veterans Against the War hearings. “Sword to Ploughshare” follows a member of the Farmer-Veteran Coalition: farmers helping veterans helping farmers. And the last Vet we hear is from Afghanistan; he’s a former Taliban. Listen…
An hour of horror for All Hallows’ Eve, the first half is bloody, the second goes to hell: ESP, dreams and intuition drip “Blood on the Pulpit” by David Greenberger. La Llorona, the crying woman, is Mexico’s bogeyman. ZBS adapts Cherokee writer Craig Strete’s “The Bleeding Man.” FM Einheit delves in Dante’s DivineComedy in a “Radio Inferno.” A woman narrates her found-sound trip to hell with Jesus. Shel Silverstien introduces us to “Monsters I’ve Met.” And the 90 Second Cellphone Chillin’ Theater wonders what’s in “The Box.” Listen…
For the weeks leading to the World Series, baseball stories from the Public Radio Hall of Fame: Host Gwen Macsai takes a swing at singing the National Anthem. Composer Phillip Kent Bimstein plays ball with the St. Louis Cardinals’ “Bushy Wushy Beer Man.” Barrett Golding spends a season with the Rookie League. Singer/playwright Terry Allen defines the many meanings of Dug-Out, amid the emerging early 1890s sport of professional baseball. Listen…
For hunting season: Hillary Frank’s tale of a teenage babysitter who’s siblings think he’s a werewolf. Mark Allen fears a toy poodle — the most evil entity known to man. Matmos mixes music with North American Mammals. Long Haul Productions witness a PA Spillway, where tourists toss bread, and the carp amass so thickly that ducks walk the fish’s backs for a slice. Norman Strung demonstrates the shrill sound and thrill found in calling for elk. A father and son provide a hunter’s perspective of the annual deer breeding cycle. And Alex Chadwick visits hunts wildlife and the wild life in Idaho. Listen…
The sounds of Saigon, 1972: in combat, on the radio, in the streets, were recorded by Claude Johner for the Folkways recording “Good Morning, Vietnam. Doug Peacock, former Green Beret medic, deals with the PTSD of vets, including himself (interviewed by Scott Carrier). Rich Kepler’s war experiences were bottled up and about to burst, until he released them in his poetry (producer: Larry Massett). And producer Katie Davis talks with African American vets, a sound-portrait based on the book Bloods: Black Veterans of the Vietnam War: An Oral History by Wallace Terry. Listen…
A 40th anniversary survey of the year in an hour: the Moon landing, Woodstock, Altamont, Stonewall, Vietnam. The year 1969 in speeches songs and soundbites. With comments and clips from John and Yoko, Iggy Pop, the Smothers Brothers, The Firesign Theater, Monty Python, Richard Pryor, Jagger and Richards, Roman Polanski, Richard Nixon, JFK, Buzz Aldren, Neil Armstrong, Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Arlo Guthrie, Harry Reasoner, and The Black Panthers. Listen…
Writer Charles Bowden reports from the US-Mexico border about the drug wars, the poverty, and the environment. His writing is harsh but unflinchingly accurate. Host Scott Carrier has a sound-portrait of Bowden, told by the people he has written about. Then Susan Stamberg revisits the world of Karen Blixen, aka, Isak Dinesen, when she wrote “Out of Africa.” And poet Alex Caldiero ponders the writing and sounding of words, with music by Theta Naught. Listen…
Part two of this two-hour tribute to Jean Shepherd, “A Voice in the Night.” Marshall McLuhan called him “the first radio novelist.” From 1956-1977 Shep spun his late night stories over WOR radio, New York City. PBS gave him a TV series, “Jean Shepherd’s America.” In 1983 he co-wrote and narrated the film version of his “A Christmas Story.” He inspired a new generation of spoken narrative artists who tap into the American psyche. Among them was Harry Shearer, who hosts this two part tribute, from KCRW and NPR. Listen…
Jean Shepherd used words like a jazz musician uses notes, winding around a theme, playing with variations, sending fresh self-reflective storylines out into the night. Marshall McLuhan called Shepherd “the first radio novelist.” From 1956-1977 Shep spun his late night stories over WOR radio, New York City. PBS gave him a TV series, “Jean Shepherd’s America.” In 1983 he co-wrote and narrated the film version of his “A Christmas Story.” He inspired a new generation of spoken narrative artists who tap into the American psyche. Among them was Harry Shearer, who hosts this two part tribute. Listen…
Hot & dry Summer soundscapes: Coyotes, owls, frogs and songbirds are part of “Desert Solitudes,” recorded by Bernie Krause and Ruth Happel. Host Ben Adair (APM Global Climate Change Initiative) heads to the ghost towns, abandoned mines, and billion-year old boulders along Death Valley’s “Mojave Road.” Kraut-rockers Faust dial in “Long Distance Calls in the Desert.” The Quiet American sound-captures a nuclear Nevada Test Site warning sign rattling in a “Desert Sun.” In the early 1990s, SLC producer Scott Carrier found Nevada”s “Battle Mountain” full of sagebrush, solace and stories. Listen…
Host Josh Darsa of NPR spends nine days with rodeo riders in a rural Western town at Cheyenne Frontier Days (“The Daddy of ’em All”), underscored by the history of the “Cowboy” and the wild-west symphonies of Aaron Copland.
For the anniversary of Apollo 11, the first moon man, launched July 16, landed July 20 1969: Astronauts communicate from beyond earth in “Zero G, & I Feel Fine” and “Last Man on the Moon.” President LBJ and Commander Scott Carpenter have a helium-infused confusing phone conversation. Sonic transmissions from deep in our solar system are sent back by Voyager I and II. The Sun and “space weather” emit “Natural Radio” sounds. Christine Lavine laments the loss of planetary status of “planet X.” And Laurie Anderson relates a “Night Flight from Houston.”
For Lincoln’s birthday bicentennial year and Independence Day, Old Abe, the Civil War, and its still-present aftermath: NPR recreates the “Gettysburg Address.” An archival recording of Walter Rathvon, who heard that speech live. Musings by poets Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg. In the 1950s Tony Schwartz recorded an NYC voxpop “Portrait of Lincoln.” Radio Diaries of the last “Civil War Widows,” one Union, one Confederate. Producer Jake Warga goes to battle with “Civil War Re-enacters.” Performance artist damali ayo sits on our city sidewalks collecting “Reparations.” Listen…
Sons, daughters, and dads: Storyteller Kevin Kling shares pancakes with his “Dad.” Sarah Vowell is a gunsmith’s daughter, in “Shooting Dad.” Joe Frank lets us eavesdrop on a father-son phone call between Larry and Zachary Block. Host Larry Massett and several other sons try to get to know their “Lost and Found Fathers.” Listen…
While teaching fifth grade in a Chicago public school, Esme Codell kept a journal. This radio hour is based on her book Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year, produced by Jay Allison and Christina Egloff for their Life Stories series and Chicago Public Radio. Listen…
Go to school, keep your grades up, go to college. That’s what we tell kids — over and over. What if just leaving your apartment, and walking up the block is risky? What if it feels safer to stay home, keep a low profile. When you do go out, head somewhere safe, like the teen center. That was the world of African American teenager, Jesse Jean. He lived a half block from host Katie Davis in their DC neighborhood. Jesse was lucky enough to get a scholarship to a private boarding school. Katie kept in touch with him. We hear three stories covering seven years. Listen…
For Memorial Day, two stories recorded in Vietnam: In 1966, a young Lance Corporal carried a reel-to reel tape recorder with him. He made tapes of his friends, of life in fighting holes, of combat, until, two months later, when he was killed in action. His friend and fellow marine remembers him in “The Vietnam Tapes of Michael A. Baronowski” (by Jay Allison for Lost & Found Sound). And host Alex Chadwick’s first trip to Southeast Asia was as a soldier in the Sixties. Two decades later, as a journalist, he makes a “Return to Vietnam” to find what has and hasn’t changed since the war. Listen…
For Mother’s Day: The Radio Diaries of “Melissa, Teen Mom” move her from foster home to starting her own family. Muriel & Walter Murch compose “A Mother’s Symphony” from womb sounds. Amy Jo, single mother of two toddlers, is “Surrounded by Lights” (producer: Erin Mishkin). Myra Dean tells StoryCorps of the day her son was killed. Ben Adair takes his mom in search of “Family Baggage.” Toronto musician Charles Spearin with his neighbor “Mrs. Morris,” in The Happiness Project. Katie Davis admits “I Live with My Mother.” And Jake Warga’s “Far Side” calendars make metaphor and memories of his mother’s life and death. Listen…
Tibet and Nepal: Walking a circuit alongside pilgrims, yaks and yogis, host Scott Carrier treks one of the world’s most venerated — and least visited — holy sites, “Mount Kailash: Cricling the Center of Creation.” And we climb to the Nepalese town of “Siklis,” going up a mountain and back in time, produced by Larry Massett, narrated by Joe Frank. Listen…
For Earth Day, Sounds from the Ground. Walk on the wild side with earthly tales of animals, environments, and outdoor adventure: We canoe Wyoming’s “Green River” with Scott Carrier. Tom Lopez of ZBS records some samba “Singing Frogs” in Brazil, or are they toads? “Subtext: Communicating with Horses: is Jay Allison’s inter-species conversation. Sarah Vowell has subterranean supper in the Carlsbad Caverns’ “Underground Lunchroom.”. And poet Andrei Codrescu composes a microcosmic “Environment” based on burgers. Listen…
Host Andrei Codrescu’s “Poetry” redux. Lord Alfred Tennyson leads “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Thomas Edison waxes Walt Whitman’s “America.” Denise Levertov knows “The Secret.” Carl Sandburg wonders “What is Poetry?” (by Barrett Golding). Scott Carrier wonders about “Alex Caldiero- Poet?” Ed Sanders (fmr Fugs) poses “A Question of Fame.” In New Orleans a hot-dog vendor, barkeep, and stripper are in the “Poetry Combine (by Larry Massett). Jan Kerouac responds to her father’s poetry and parenting in “Jan on Jack” (by Marjorie Van Halteren). Allen Ginsberg runs a “Personals Ad.” Listen…
A Chinese student shares his recipe for cooking “Carp” and escaping communism. Young Palestinian-American Rocky Tayeh fights food in “My Struggle with Obesity;” and later, surgically, he is “Saying Goobye To Food” (from WNYC Radio Rookies). And Louisiana State Penitentiary inmates prepare “King’s Candy: A Prison Kitchen Vision” and concessions for “The Angola Prison Rodeo” (part of the Kitchen Sisters series Hidden Kitchens). Listen…
Life, Death, Land, and Livestock: We spend a year on a sheep ranch, lambing, shearing, selling and “Counting Sheep.” Musician Phillip Bimstien bases his classical composition, “Garland Hirschi’s Cows,” on the voice of a Rockville, Utah cattle-man. And 97-year-old rancher is “Holding His Ground” (produced by Jesikah Maria Ross for Stories from Heart of the Land and Saving the Sierra). Listen…
A world-class troupe of audio daredevils and media magicians: SF Chronicle journalist Jon Carroll interviews his daughter Shana as she swings thru the air on her flying “Trapeze”, from the Life Stories series by Jay Allison. Joe Frank loves the lady “Lion Tamer,” an excerpt from his hour “The Dictator.” Adam Rosen mixes a medley of the many versions of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” And Elizabeth Eck returns to the circus family she ran away to join, in Larry Massett’s “Circus in the Blood.” Listen…
Tony Schwartz documents the entire first year in “A Dog’s Life.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti performs his poem “Dog.” Scott Carrier encounters a frisbee-catching “Blind Dog.” “Dogs in the Yard” is musician Steven Vitiello’s multi-bark composition. Jay Allison collects some possible “Dog Dreams.” A man and his dog, “John & Nippy,” share a rancher’s life, and musical duets. Laura Silverman (Sarah’s sister) calls about her canine into Jonathan Katz’s talk show, “Seeing is Believing.” And we end with this doggie treat: an on-air “Cat Bath” from producer Dmae Roberts. Listen…
Lovelorn letters to an advice columnist. Women’s tales of true but tainted “Cringe Love,” from producer Nancy Updike. A “Valentine” from Kevin Kling. “Love & Marriage Atop the Towers,” stories of weddings at the World Trade Center, collected by The Kitchen Sisters. Host Amy Dickinson and hundreds of other “Leftover Brides,” lining up for mass Moonie marriages. And a “Parent and Child” discussion between Jessica and Scott Carrier on what makes a good marriage. Listen…
“Waking Up” from a nightmare in a city split by three religions, as dreamt by an Jewish soldier, an Arab bomber, and a Mississippi minister; from Joe Frank’s hour Time’s Arrow. And “The Lemon Tree,” on the property of the same family home, in the same family homeland, shared by an Israeli and an Palestinian family; from Sandy Tolan of Homelands Productions. Listen…
Four years of reports on life in the Mexican border-town of Ciudad Juarez, with poverty and corruption, with daily drug-cartel murders and military violence. Told by photographer & Juarez resident Julian Cardona, along with author Charles Bowden, and host Scott Carrier. Listen…
Gliding, sliding, and speed: NPR’s Alex Chadwick invites America to share their stories of Flexible Flyers and downhill runs in this cross-USA audio “Sledding Party” (produced by Katie Davis). Seven skiers go into the back-country, only six return in this “Avalanche” survivors’ story (told to producer Scott Carrier). And host Barrett Golding documents a training day in the life of three women “Olympic Speed-Skaters.” Listen…
Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But sometimes it’s hard to tell who is and isn’t happy: After decades together, the Nadeaus find their husband/father is a “Crossdressing Family Man” (told by family friend Eric Winick). “After the Forgetting” (produced by Erica Heilman) is an evolution of relationships revealed in conversations between Greg Sharrow, his mother Marjorie, and Greg’s husband Bob Hooker, as Marjorie’s dementia progresses. Steve Fugate roams the roads of America, walking thousands of miles with a sign stuck over his middle-aged head that reads “Love Life” — because of what happened to his son (produced by Larry Massett). Listen…
An audio scan of Year 2008, from the the Olympics to oil prices, from the elections to the economy. A memorial to those who passed, including Studs Turkel, Eartha Kitt, George Carlin, Bo Diddley, and Paul Newman. And a tribute to the changing of the presidential guard. (Produced by Peter Bochan of MixedUp.com). Listen…
Recollections, remembrances, and mnemonics for recalling time: Lester Nafzger recalls his life as a litany of “Lynchpins” (as told to Joe Frank, excerpted from his Hour Performer). Host Ceil Muller takes us on a tour of her own memory palace, made bits of unsued of tape recordings she’s gathered over the years, in “Persistence of Memorex.” “Death in Venice” roams the beach with retired folk in Venice, Florida, finding seashells, shark’s teeth and distant memories (written and produced by Larry Massett, narrated by Joe Frank). Listen…
Musician Calvin Johnson (Beat Happening, K Records) hosts train tales: An existential interaction with an automated Amtrak voice. The Kronos Quartet plays Steve Reich’s “Different Trains.” Singer Jules Shear recalls an on-board performance. A Sound Portrait of a Pullman Porter. A track-hopping hobo named Short Stop. Circus performer Little Jack Horton and poet Charles Bukowski stolen engine car. Segregated train-travel from StoryCorps. The world’s largest model railroad. And Calvin’s Great Aunt Grace’s 1891 train trip. Listen…
At the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, NPR’s Noah Adams talks to those who know Thomas Merton, the Catholic writer and Trappist monk. Host Beverly Donofrio, reads from her book, Riding in Cars with Boys; then goes on a cross-country quest, “Looking for Mary” in those who see visions of the Virgin, a Sound Portraits production. Listen…
A mix of holiday stories, found-sound, and sampled songs: A bell-ringer at the Mall of America. Holiday history as told by second graders. A trip to the toy store. Carols sung by Zulu children in a South African orphanage. And holiday bits from Bing Crosby, George W. Bush, and The Beatles Fan Club Christmas messages. Listen…
A preacher/prank-caller conjures “Alice of the Spirits.” Carmen Delzell samples the “Ritual Magic” of a voodoo Santera, soaks in a spirit bath, and prays for sex, adventure, and central heat. Ceil Muller visits “The Psychic Center of the World,” the town of Cassadega, Florida. And host Larry Massett spends “A Night on Mt. Shasta.” Listen…
Sister Agnes Ramashiga’s Radio Diaries of “Just Another Day At the World’s Biggest Hospital,” Soweto — 2000 patients check in daily, half HIV positive. Teenager documents their HIV “Positive Life,” by American RadioWorks. Poet Lisa Buscani is “Counting” on her mom’s health advice. “And Trouble Came: An African AIDS Diary” is Laura Kaminsky’s compositon for viola, cello, piano, and stories of Tamakloe: warrior, tailor, AIDS victim. Life-saving meds brought Krandall Kraus back from the dead, like “Lazarus.” And dying mother’s writes her son “Letters to Butchie,” by Sound Portraits. Listen…
An audio Thanksgiving feast. We binge on fattening stories, then purge with a documentary on refusing food. Scott Carrier tours a “Turkey Ranch,” following the gobbler from farmyard to frozen food. Joe Frank describes a typically twisted family “Thanksgiving Dinner” (from his program “Pilgrim”). Dean Olscher goes “Chowhounding in St. Paul,” searching for Hmong food, with cellphone assistance from Chowhound Jim Leff. And Annie Cheney offers a touching document of her eating disorder, “Concerning Breakfast” from Jay Allison’s Life Stories series. Listen…
John Mills is “Doing Time” and Sergeant Furman Camel is “Serving 9 to 5;” two Prison Dairies from an inmate and a guard at Polk Youth Institution, North Carolina. (John Mills is out now and co-hosts our hour with Prison Dairies producer Joe Richman.) Voices and sounds of youth in “Lockdown!” at Utah’s Washington County Crisis Center, a techno tone poem by composer Phillip Kent Bimstein. Payton Smith calls her mom in prison to discuss “Not All Bad Things,” produced by Chana Joffe-Walt and Transom. And “Tossing Away the Keys” at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola Prison, is stories of lifers from Sound Portraits. Listen…
Susan Stamberg enlists elementary school kids to evaluate the paintings of “Picasso.” Poet Gertrude Stein paints “A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” Singer Jonathan Richman believes “No One Was Like Vermeer” but “Pablo Picasso” was never called an @#%hole. And a history of injuries and inspiration unfolds in “Frida Kahlo: Viva La Vida,” an audio biography produced by Katie Davis. Listen…
It’s another presidential election year; the American people are deeply divided and deeply entrenched in another unpopular war. The topic is not 2008, but 1968. If 1967 was the Summer of Love, maybe 1968 was the Summer of Hate. We hear the songs, speeches, and news reports of the times. We go live to the demonstrations, and drink “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Listen…
We get out of one conflict and into another. “Goodbye to Saigon” chronicles the day of the last US flights out of the Vietnam War, narrated by Noah Adams and produced by Art Silverman. And Scott Carrier travels the country in early 2003 asking people “Are You Ready?” for war. Listen…
In 1992 producer Barrett Golding found remnants of Jefferson’s theories and Toqueville’s writings still very much in play, as he followed Montana’s two incumbents US Representatives, one Democrat, one Republican. Due to re-apportionment, they were vying for the state’s one remaining Congressional seat, on a yearlong statewide game of political musical chairs. And we hear college students in Chicago discuss Democracy. Listen…
We hang with the mostly homeless protesters, and Scott Carrier, in “Lafayette Square” across from the White House. Writer Dave Eggers helps his brother Bill run for State Representative as a Republican — blood proves thicker than politics. Slam poet Taylor Mali tells us “How to Write a Political Poem.” Host Sarah Vowell digs “The Garden for Disappointed Politicians.” Audio artist Jesse Boggs choreographs a bipartisan “WMD Waltz.” And we hear excerpts from All the Presidents’ Inaugurations. Listen…
Susan pulls some pieces she’s most proud of from the NPR audio archives: She knits her way though history, takes us on a personal tour of DC, and tries to interest her colleagues in resurrecting her infamous relish recipe. She talks with economist Milton Friedman, actor Judi Dench, writer Nora Ephron, and pianist Leon Fleisher. In pursuit of patriotism, Ms. Stamberg de-France-ifies popular culture, then ends in a Parisian park, chatting with a world-class conversationalist. Listen…
The work we do, from Wall Street traders to taxi cab drivers. People who work with brassieres, with dead bodies, and off-the-books in an underground economy. A tone-poem by Ken Nordine, a podcast from Love and Radio, and sound-portraits from Radio Diaries, Toni Schwartz, Ben Rubin, David Greenberger, and hosts Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler. Listen…
Richard Paul follows “School VP,” Asst. Principal Irasema Salcido, through her hectic multi-lingual morning at DC’s Bell Multicultural High School. Host Katie Davis finds she “Got Carried.” Slam poet and history teacher Taylor Mali schools us on “What Teachers Make.” Producer Hillary Frank gets the shy “Quiet Kids” to speak up. Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich’s commencement speech advises “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen),” with music from filmmaker Baz Luhrman. Host Katie Davis takes her DC summer camp into the wild woods on a “Hike to Rock Creek,” two blocks from where the kids live. And poems from Meryn Cadell and Jelani. Listen…
The stars of this show are Americans, expressing their opinions, participating in our democratic discussion. We travel 8000 miles of America gathering “Vox Pop”, roam the streets of New York City in the hours during and weeks after 9/11, hitting “Golf Balls” and spending our “Last Night in New York.” And “Amber” provides an illegal alien p.o.v. via a radio call-in line. Works from Transom.org by producers Scott Carrier, Christopher Lydon, Matt Lieber, and Australian Wednesday Kennedy. Listen…
Poland battles against the Germans and then the Russians at the start of the Second World War. A German foot soldier and Polish townspeople recall, differently, the first days of the invasion of Poland in September 1939, and Poland’s later battle to fight years of environmental poisoning during the Soviet era. All in a series of stories written by NPR’s Alex Chadwick and produced by host Art Silverman. Listen…
Politicians who fancy themselves president tromp thru the New Hampshire mill town of “Claremont,” produced by Larry Massett, Art Silverman and Betty Rogers. The media spin myths out of misquotes in “Democracy and Things Like That” by Sarah Vowell and This American Life. The Language Removal Service concocts the world’s first wordless political debate in their “California Recall Project.” And all this years primary losers re-appear in “Super Tuesday Mixdown,” from Peter Bochan’s series Presidential Shortcuts. Listen…
Symptoms of heat fatigue: A sound-poem for “Dead of Summer” in the city by Marjorie van Halteren & Lou Giansante. Tuscon residents reflect the desert “Heat,” with author Charles Bowden, poet Ofelia Zepeda, and music by Steve Roach; produced by Jeff Rice. The perfection of family, a crippled man on a blind man’s back, and a collective scream of “I’m not dead,” sweat it out in Joe Franks’s “Summer Notes.” Cats pulling pianos are “The Little Heroes” in John Rieger’s Dance on Warning series. And host Scott Carrier takes a long hot cross-country drive down “Highway 50,” the loneliest road in America. Listen…
“Bad Teeth at King Drew Dental Clinic” by Ayala Ben-Yehuda: the Dental Divide, South L.A.’s clinic of last resort. “The Breast Cancer Monologues- Three Woman” by Dmae Roberts: surviving breast cancer, perspectives of a Chicana, African-American and Romanian immigrant. “A Square Meal, Regardless” by Jennifer Nathan: Two old friends caring for each other into old age. “Dialysis” by Joe Frank: kidney failure and a friend indeed. “Hospice Chronicles” (excerpt) by Long Haul Productions: Volunteer Bettie’s first patient. “The Person I Admire Most” by Jake Warga: A day with Jenafir in Ethiopia, trying to save the world. Listen…
“This is Insane,” says William S Burroughs to the music of Disposable Heroes of Hiphopcracy. An anonymous reporter describes his “Electroshock.” The Avalanches mashup a “Frontier Psychiatrist.” Host Scott Carrier takes “The Test” for schizophrenia. Joe Frank is pathologically challenged by time. And Sound Portraits helps Howard Dully recount “My Lobotomy,” documenting the experimental procedure of “ice pick” surgery. Listen…
In “Enola Alone” Antenna Theater interviews bomber pilots, bombing victims, and Colonel Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay. Political speeches and popular songs chart our changing attitudes towards the “Atomic Age.” Residents recall the 1950s Nevada and Utah nuclear bomb tests in Claes Andreasson series “Downwinder Diaries.” Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti has “Wild Dreams of a New Beginning.” Americans across the country answer Scott Carrier’s question: “What Are You Afraid Of?” The band Lemon Jelly presents “Page One,” presents the Big Bang with a beat. And we select some “Atomic Platters: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security” compiled by CONELRAD.com. Listen…
Tony Schwartz, media pioneer, audio documentarian, and the most famous radio person you probably never heard of, died June 2008. We hear The Kitchen Sisters’ Lost and Found Sound-portrait, “Tony Schwartz, 30,000 Recordings Later,” and the Tony Schwartz-inspired verite documentary of the town he lived in and loved, “New York City: 24 Hours in Public Places.” Listen…
Three hearts searching for home: Going back to Vietnam makes Nguyen Qui Duc realize “Home is Always Somewhere Else;” host Neenah Ellis goes looking for her family in Croatia, where “The Old Country is Gone.” And Andrei Codrescu returns to his Romanian home town and stares into the “Eyes of Sibiu.” Listen…
A Tour of the River Towns: Hannibal, Missouri, birthplace of Mark Twain; a day on a tugboat; St. Louis showboats; and changing the course of mighty rivers. A downstream trip through the history and mystery of the Big Muddy, with Larry Massett and Scott Carrier. Listen…
Celebrating America with Flags and Festivals, featuring: Recitations and reflections on “The Pledge” of Allegiance and “War vs. Peace.” The annual “Rainbow Family” migration into the Montana forest on July Fourth — their day of prayer for peace. A town that covets their title of the “Armpit of America” — welcome to Battle Mountain, Nevada. Mississippi moonshine, barbecued goat and old-time Fife & Drum at “Otha Turner’s Afrosippi Picnic.” Stories by Joe Frank, Barrett Golding, host Larry Massett, and Ben Adair. Listen…
Scott Carrier has a cultural history of the Great Salt Lake’s “West Desert,” a land of polygymists, bombing ranges, and toxic waste incinerators. There’s chlorine gas in the air, anthrax stored underground, and people who call the place home. Sarah Vowell’s childhood move from rural Oklahoma to small-town Montana was, for her, a change from the middle ages to a modern metropolis. And two Stories from the Heart of the Land: NYC native Natalie Edwards hates grass, bugs, dirt, and trees, but attempts a walk thru Brooklyn’s Prospect Park; and Carmen Delzell tells why she moved to and has stayed in Mexico. Listen…
Jeff Rice of the Western Soundscape Archive hosts an hour of sounds for the start of Summer: an extinct woodpecker revives an Arkansas town, car alarms made from bird calls, breeding moths for their music, a morning walk with poet Jim Harrison, dancing with gnats, the seismic underground sounds of spiders, and the perspective of a pest controller. Stories by Long Haul Productions, M’Iou Zahner Ollswang, host Jeff Rice, and Scott Carrier; and recordings by Nina Katchadourian, Lang Elliot, and Dr. Rex Cocroft. Listen…
Paternal praise, pride, disappointment and love, hosted by Jay Allison (This I Believe): Scott Carrier gives his son Milo a “Ski Lesson.” From Animals and Other Stories, we hear “Reflections of Fathers,” aka, Bugs & Dads. Comic strip artist Lynda Barry wishes her divorced dad a “Happy Father’s Day.” A doctor tells his daughter about her granddad in “Story Corps- Dr. William Weaver.” Jay Allison describes his daughter’s questions about his love life as “Grilling Me Softly”. Dan Robb’s family remembers the day “Dad’s Moving Out,” from Life Stories. “Doc Merrick” and daughter Viki go through some girl problems. David Greenberger tells David Cobb’s story “Because of Dad.” Deirdre Sullivan’s father advises “Always Go to the Funeral,” a This I Believe essay. And from producer by Viki Merrick, Dave Masch wants to be “A Better Father.” Listen…
Host Ian Svenonius, of the band Weird War, introduces “The Groupies,” a 1969 album of interviews by producer Alan Lorber. We visit with the pilgrims at Pere LaChaise cemetery, who’ve come to see “Jim Morrison’s Grave” (a sound-portrait by Mark Neumann and Barrett Golding). John Denver’s anti-Christian conspiracy is exposed in the series “Song and Memory” from producers Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler. And Bo Diddley blows up his mom’s radio in David Schulman’s series “Musicians in Their Own Words.” Listen…
Marcos Martinez, (formerly) of KUNM Alberquerque, hosts A Tale of Two Countries, from Mexico to US: In “Sasabe,” a Sonora, Mexico border town, Scott Carrier talks to immigrants on their hazardous, illegal desert crossing, and to the border patrol waiting for them in Sasabe, Arizona. Luis Alberto Urrea reads from “The Devil”s Highway,” his book about death in the desert. Guillermo Gomez-Pena imagines “Maquiladoras of the Future,” fantasy border factories. “And I walked…”, by Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler, is a sound-portrait of Mexicans who risk their lives to find better-paying jobs in the United States. Listen…
Green Beret and poet, Major Robert Schaefer, US Army, hosts the voices of veterans remembering their comrades: We talk with troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, reading their emails, poems, and journals, as part of the NEA project: “Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.” We hear interviews from StoryCorps, an essay from This I Believe, and the sounds of a Military Honor Guard, recorded by Charles Lane. And we attend the daily “Last Post” ceremony by Belgian veterans honoring the WWI British soldiers who died defending a small town in western Belgium (produced by Marjorie Van Halteren). Listen…
Host Larry Massett spends a “Long Day on the Road” with ex-KGB in the Republic of Georgia. Scott Carrier starts in Salt Lake and ends on the Atlantic in this cross-country “Hitchhike.” Lemon Jelly adds beats to the life of a “Ramblin’ Man.” The band Richmond Fontaine sends musical postcards from the flight of “Walter On the Lam.” And Mark Allen tells a tale of a tryst with a “Kinko’s Crackhead.” Listen…
For Mother’s Day, maternal tales from producers around the country: “Travels with Mom” follows Larry Massett and his mother to the Tybee Island, Georgia of today and of the 1920’s, as recalled by Mrs. Massett. Writer Beverly Donofrio joins her mom for “Thursday Night Bingo,” produced by Dave Isay of Sound Portraits. In Nancy Updike’s “Mubarak and Margy,” a gay man returns home to care for his mom, and to the “cure” his family plans for his homosexuality. And comedian Amy Borkowsky shares her hilarious phone “Messages from Mom.” Listen…
Rabbi Samuel Cohon of Temple Emanuel, Tucson and Too Jewish Radio, presents stories of survivors, for Holocaust Remembrance Day: In “Descended from the Holocaust” Dr. Alan Berkenwald records his trip with his parents to the Holocaust Museum — it was first time they talked openly about their experience in the concentration camps; this audio diary is of Jay Allison’s Life Stories. “Yom Hashoah 1994” is Shoah services in Billings MT and Cleveland OH, survivor interviews, and the story of the Billings communities united “Not in Our Town” response that stopped a series of anti-Jewish crimes. The Rhino Records documentary project “Voices of the Shoah: Remembrances of the Holocaust” is drawn from interviews with 180 survivors. Also survivors sing Hebrew, for the first time in years, in a live May 1945 BBC report by Patrick Gordon Walker from the just liberated “Belsen Concentration Camp.” Listen…
Host David Greenberger of Duplex Planet presents glorious moments and observations from people in the last years of their lives: Dave Alvin discusses the song he wrote about his dying father, “Man in the Bed,” from the Western Folklife Center’s “What’s in a Song?” series. Comedians Bob & Ray are “The Whirleys”. From StoryCorps comes a remembrance from Richard Craig of his days as a dance host on cruise ships. In Sound Portraits’ “The Ground We Live On” journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc faces mortality in recordings she made during her father’s last months alive. And host David Greenberger shares some stories told him over the years by the elderly, including “Growing Old in East L.A.” Listen…
Host Dmae Roberts of Stories1st.org, for Earth Day, presents Sounds for and from Mother Earth: The Quiet American takes an audio trek through Nepal”s “Annapurna” Circuit. Host Dmae Roberts records Maori music and culture. We hear Pulse of the Planet’s “Extraordinary Sounds From the Natural World.” And from Gregg McVicar and the “Earthsongs” series: Sioux Soprano Bonnie Jo Hunt layers opera over insects (on Robbie Robertson’s Music for the Native Americans) Listen…
Radio stories about radio, then stories about radio stories: Jake Warga paints sound-portraits of “Urbana FM” in Uruguay and “Radio Gondor” in Ethiopia. The ShortWaveMusic blog records “Duelling Transmitters.” Larry Masett interviews the “Language Removal Services.” Recordist Steve McGreevey captures the solar sounds of space weather, the northern lights, and “Natural Radio.” The Android Sisters lament the loss of great “Ray-Dee-Ohh.” And Scott Carrier reports to work for “The Friendly Man.” Listen…
Audio excursions from the early eighties: Four traveling stories from public radio’s past, hosted by the independent producers who made them, Scott Carrier attends a native service of “Navajo Pentacostalists.” The Kitchen Sisters ride with the “Road Ranger,” an American auto-mechanic hero. John Rieger samples small-town life “Fifty Miles Out of Gerlach.” And Larry Massett takes a nitrous-oxide fueled “Trip To the Dentist.” Listen…
Host David Ossman of Firesign Theatre presents mixes comic bits with music beats, from Wally Cox yodeling to Peter Sellers singing while shaving, from Jack Kerouac crooning “Ain’t We Got Fun” to Charles Mingus jazzing up Jean Shepherd’s “The Clown” to comedian Greg Giraldo layered over Lazyboy. “Lenny Bruce Gets Busted” in Jonathan Mitchell’s documentary. And we hear rare and classic bits from host David Ossman’s Firesign Theatre. Listen…
Host Dmae Roberts of Stories1st.org, for Women’s History Month, presents Stories By, For, and Of Women: The Kitchen Sisters go to “Tupperware®” parties. A supermarket checker checks out her life, in ZBS’s radio soap Saratoga Springs. Jenifir returns “Home From Africa” with all 13 Symptoms of Chronic Peace Corps Withdrawal. Host Dmae Roberts has a collage of and about “Sisters.” In a new syntax of whispers and words Susan Stone tells the story of “Ruby” and her husbands. And Sonia Sanchez, Tracie Morris, Jill Battson and Meryn Cadell perform short poems. Listen…
Host Ceil Muller of KQED presents “The Kiss and the Dying,” her etiquette list for the dying and soon-to-be survivors. “Fire and Ice Cream” is from Brent Runyan’s book “The Burn Journals.” Brian Brophy documents the death of “Our Father.” Carmen Delzell helps heal her “Grandmother”s Hip.” And patients pass time with TV in Nancy Updike’s “Channeling Health.” Listen…
Scott Carrier walks around his Salt Lake City “The Neighborhood.” Host Katie Davis of Neighborhood Stories contemplates decades of changes at the “Corner Store” on her DC street. Larry Massett’s friend bids “Goodbye, Batumi” to his Republic of Georgia hometown. And Romeo and Juliet plays out in “Oakland Scenes: Snapshots of a Community” by Youth Radio and poet Ise Lyfe. Listen…
The Life and Times of Solidod, the last remaining member of her village of Mescalero Apache who lived on the edge of Death Valley. Listen…
In May 2012, Soundwalk Collective traveled into the heart of the Peruvian Amazon to document the ancient chanting rituals of the Ayahuasquero, the Master Shaman and practitioner of plant medicine. The shaman consumes a potent brew made from the Ayahuasca, a sacred vine of the Amazonian jungle, the “vine of the souls”. The brew induces a powerful psychedelic experience that causes visual and auditory hallucinations. This hour we present a radio essay by anthropologist Jeremy Narby, a impressionistic mix of the recordings of the Collective’s time with this plant and these people. Listen…
A tribute to the composer on his 100th birthday: We listen in on a 1942 John Cage radio play, “The City Wears a Slouch Hat.” We have a vox-pop asking “Who’s John Cage?”; an audio illustration by Jay Allison of a “John Cage and Merce Cunningham” collaboration; an excerpt from the film “John Cage: Ecoute (Listen)”; and, from the series Echoes, “Thoughts in Sound: John Cage- Imaginary Landscapes.” Laurie Anderson and Ken Nordine offer homages to the composer. And we hear Cage’s “In a Landscape,” Suite for Toy Piano, and “Variations IV.” Listen…
Producer Scott Carrier’s wife learned early, in her “Swimming Lessons,” to skim beautifully across the water. The National Track and Field Hall of Fame commissioned sound-artist Ben Rubin to make audio art from interviews with athletes, who tell themselves “We Believe We Are Invincible.” Like many gay men, Mark Allan, didn’t appreciate “Football,” until the day he watched and learned. Producer Katie Davis kept a “Basketball Diary” as she coached the kids in her downtown DC team, part of her series Neighborhood Stories. And in spin class, “Everybody Scream,” from the new APM improv podcast, “The Truth, produced by Jonathan Mitchell.” Listen…
What does an city block sound like? Aaron Henkin of WYPR-Baltimore and electronic/hip hop musician Wendel Patrick hit the streets, and spent several months documenting the stories, voices, and people who populate the 3300 block of Greenmount Avenue, in Baltimore. We go inside the hair salon, the tattoo parlor, and the check cashing business. We talk to a street preacher and homeless street people. This part of the city is a collection of different nationalities, ethnicities, and religions; in other words: an All American block. Listen…
Heading towards the summit: NPR’s Alex Chadwick finds the “Ah Toy” Chinese Gardens hidden in the mountains of Idaho’s Payette National Forest. Scott Carrier scales Utah’s Wasatch Range for some spring skiing. Quiet American gathers sounds in Nepalese mountain Towns. Joe Frank attempts an ascent of K2, the planet’s second tallest peak — not all our treks are successful. Listen…
A memorial to recently departed cultural innovators: Beastie Boy bassist and rapper Adam Yauch — aka, “MCA,” British hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, pioneer FM rock n’ roll disc jockey Pete Fornatale, and mostly we hear mostly we hear children’s literature author/illustrator Maurice Sendak, along with all the music and movies inspired by his 1963 classic, “Where the Wild Things Are.”
Listen…
An hour-long audio mosaic about abortion in America: Pro-choice. Pro-life. Most people have already chosen sides in the ongoing debate, so why revisit the issue? Shades of Gray shares a range of stories told by people young and old who have been directly affected by abortion, instead of the polemics of irreconcilable extremes. It’s a carefully crafted audio mosaic and a stark portrayal of the intensely personal nature of our relationship with abortion. Winner of the 2004 Golden Reel for National Documentary. Listen…
It takes “Four Seconds” to hit the water from the Golden Gate Bridge — producer Jake Warga’s friend took that fatal jump. NPR’s Josh Darsa interviews “The Man with the White Cane,” a blind man who fell under a subway train. Carmen Delzell’s 89-year-old “Grandmother’s Hip” is broken. Scott Carrier talks to the family, the doctors, even the grave digger, to everyone affected by “The Death of Ruth Tuck. And we hear an answering machine “Kaddish” for producer Barrett Golding’s father. Listen…
Getting Nowhere, Slow: Producer Scott Carrier hitchhikes cross-country. Tony Joe White give directions to the swamp. Ben Walker brings books to a Balkan war criminal. Donna, a supermarket check clerk, dreams of faraway places, in the ZBS radio soap, Saratoga Springs. And People Like Us find an Arkansas Explorer. Listen…
A history of what composer Steve Reich call “speech-melodies:” We start with Riech’s 1965 tape-compositions, then move to Reich Remixed, sampled and mashed-up several decades later. Composer Adam Goddard makes music from his grandfather’s stories of “The Change in Farming.” We hear David Byrne and Brian Eno’s spoken-word experiments and a collage called “Fundamentals: Musical Preachers.” And we replay the classic Radiolab story on unintentional music, “Sometimes Behaves So Strangely.” Listen…
January 25, 2011. One year ago, a revolution began in Cairo’s Tahir Square. For the next eighteen days, millions of Egyptians across the country would demonstrate in the streets, demanding the end of their 30-year dictatorship. They were inspired by Tunisians, whose protests, that same month, had forced out the authoritarian regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Now it was time for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to go. A few weeks after the protests, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch interviewed some of the organizers of the January uprising: union leaders, civil rights workers, and young social media activists. These Human Rights Watch interviews provide a rare, eyewitness account of a revolution, told by the Egyptian people, the activists, human rights defenders, and bloggers who persevered during those eighteen days. These are the “Voices from Tahrir. Listen…
Speeches, songs, events, and people who past last year: We hear Queen Elizabeth, Occupy Wall Street, The Arab Spring, Osama Bin-Laden’s death, Japan’s nuclear accidents, North East floods, Texas fires, GOP presidential candidates, Michael Moore, and Charlie Sheen. Music includes: PJ Harvey, Ry Cooder, Fleet Foxes, Bright Eyes, The Coasters, John Barry. Tributes to: Steve Jobs, Jerry Leiber, Andy Rooney, Joe Frasier, Gil Scott Heron, Hubert Sumlin, Wild Man Fischer, Amy Winehouse, Clarence Clemons, Harry Morgan, Sylvia Robinson, Carl Gardner, Wildman Fischer, Phoebe Snow, Jack Lalane. Listen…
Christmas at a Bagram Air Base hospital, Afghanistan; a tour of the Holy Land, Hannukah military history; a visit to a toy store; and musical Chrismashups. Listen…
In December 1944 the Allies were closing in on Germany. HHitler had a desperate plan to save the Third Reich, a massive assault he believed would so demoralize that the Allies, they would seek a separate peace, leaving only the Russian army on the eastern front. On December 16 the Germans unleashed an offensive that would become the most brutal battle of the European war: the Battle of the Bulge. Nineteen thousand Americans were killed, about the same number were taken prisoner. We hear from four Americans soldiers about their time — before, during and after — in a German POW camp. Listen…
Music makers on making music: French vocalist Camille, Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista, a Hidden Kitchen at a Mozart Festival, and a high school sax player with immigration issues. Stories from the Kitchen Sisters, Long Haul Productions and the series Musicians in Their Own Words. Listen…
An hour under the influence of radio maestro and master storyteller Joe Frank, featuring many of Joe’s sonic co-conspirators, including David Cross (Fox “Arrested Development”), Laura Esterman (ZBS “Ruby”), Larry Block (PBS “Sesame Street”), and Grace Zabriskie (“Twn Peaks,” HBO “Big Love”). Deep and dark does not begin to describe the solitary, ponderous melancholia that is a Joe Frank story. Listen…
Joe Frank talk to a homeless man on the streets of Los Angeles. David Greenberger visits Senior Centers in East LA. Pastor Michael Cummings patrols the grounds of at Jordan High School, Watts, California. And we hear excerpts from Tom Russell’s “Hotwalker,” an Americana ode to old LA, the music and the culture, with beat outsiders, religious revivals, and L.A. poet Charles Bukowski. Listen…
National Parks, Neighborhood Parks: Scott Carrier climbs Angel’s Landing in Zion National Park. Jay Allison goes deep into the Everglades with Lance Corporal James McMullen, author of “Cry of the Panther.” Katie Davis introduces us to her neighbors in William Pierce Community Park, DC. And Yellowstone’s geyser guy, geologist Rick Hutchinson, gets us up close and personal with the Park’s hydrothermal features. Listen…
Laura Rothenberg audio-documents two years of her life with CF, in the classic Radio Diaries story “My So-Called Lungs.” A new piece by Catie Talarski of WNPR, Connecticut Public Radio, “Four Failings Lungs,” follows two other CF patients; one wants a lung transplant, the other does not. And StoryCorps brings us one of the longest-surviving lung-transplant recipients, Howell Graham, who had both lungs replaced in 1990. Listen…
Shortly after the World Trade Center fell in autumn 2001, it became clear the United States would invade Afghanistan. Producer Scott Carrier decided he ought to go there too. Why? To see for himself: that’s what writers do. Who are these fanatics, these fundamentalists, the Taliban and the like? And what do they want? For the weekend of 9/11/11, Hearing Voices from NPR presents “Prisoner of Zion.” Carrier narrates his trip to Afghanistan. With his young guide and translator, Najibulla, they tour the horrors of war. Years later Naji tells Scott he must leave his homeland — the dangers for a translator have become extreme. Scott gets Najibulla accepted at Utah Valley University. Naji, it turns out, handles the Mormons quite well, while Scott, teaching at the same school, has a hard time with them. At the end Naji is graduating, about to get married, and start a new job; while Scott wonders whether he can stand teaching another year — or if he’ll wind up on the street like Naji. Listen…
Engine Overdrive: Ode to Internal Combustion. We talk to people with oversized engines: on Harley’s, and Low Riders, at race tracks and drag strips. Music from Big Stick (aka, Drag Racing Underground) and an opera, “The Miracle of Cars,” by Robert Ashley. Off to the races at the Long Beach Grand Prix and the Bonneville Salt Flats. Some classic comedy car ads, and hanging with Hog riders. Listen…
Audio documents of daily life: From Radio Diaries a Teenage Diary of “Nick In Salt Lake City, from Home School to High School.” Recording an ascent of “Cho Oyo, 8201m,” the sixth highest mountain in the world. A transgender tells her mother she’s gay, in “Dia’s Dairy.” And in “Carmen’s Diaries” a woman rediscovers what she wrote as a girl. Listen…
From Bad to Worse: A private investigator empathizes with the criminal element. Katie Davis hunts the vermin of her rat-infested DC neighbor. Joe Frank read the nightly news: no wonder we’re all so depressed. And somehow a KGB-led road trip thru the Republic of Georgia has gone wrong. Listen…
Self-propelled travels: We walk five thousand miles with a Fanatic Reactionary Pedestrian. We pedal thru Yellowstone and Teton Parks. And we trek with the Queen of Bhutan to remote villages, promoting what-they-call Gross National Happiness. (“The Queen’s Trek” is an Outer Voices production — they were first foreign journalists allowed to accompany a Bhutanese monarch on the trek, and the first to interview the Queen.) Listen…
A weapons-grade hour of wartime radio: The people who start the fight, and the people who pay the price. The words of Churchill, Bush, Rumsfeld, LBJ, MacNamara, J. Robert Oppenhiemer, and a Hiroshima survivor. Carl Sandburg reads his poem “The Unknown War.” Scott Carrier reports from an Afghan battlefield in November 2001. Ryuichi Sakamoto has a musical contemplation of “War & Peace.” And “Prayer Circle: Path to Zero,” a CD for global nuclear disarmament. Listen…
The voices of people who were or are homeless: Carmen Delzell takes “Crazy John” into her home. Scott Carrier spends a night in DC “Gospel Mission” shelter. The “Land of 10,000 Homeless” is a Minneapolis music/audio documentary project. Dmae Roberts interviews a young homeless girl in “Miracle on the Streets.” The Homeless Writers Coalition performs poetry put to music. Homeless people tell their stories to StoryCorps. And the Kitchen Sisters visit with street and low-income people whose main cooking utensil is the the “George Foreman Grill.” Listen…
The journeys of people driven from their homeland by war, disaster, and religious and political persecution: We travel “From Afghanistan to Amarillo,” “From Sudan to Omaha,” “From Burma to Indianapolis,” and “From Iraq to Detroit” (stories in the One Thing series). Mountain Music Project records “Blues for the Karen” in a Thai/Burma border refugee camp. A “Cargo Flight to Somewhere” starts in the Congo and ends in an airport detention center (a song/story for Crossing the BLVD project, Queens NYC). And “Refugee Dreams” of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, now living in Portland, Oregon (Crossing East story). Listen…
States Of Mental Health, in three diagnoses: Depression, Amnesia, and Mental Breakdown. Cameron Ledoux talks with his dad about his father’s depression. Scott Carrier goes looking for amnesia victims. And a sonic journey into the depths of mental breakdown — a first-person account told by the person losing grip on reality, and her friends who witnessed the descent. Listen…
Tuned in and turned on: Interviews with Merry Pranksters (Carolyn Garcia and George Walker). The Beautiful People remixes Jimi Hendrix. Johhny Depp conjures Hunter S Thompson. And a walk down Haight Street, looking for the lost generation of the 1960s. Listen…
A tour of our nation’s First Nations: NPR’s Alex Chadwick rides into the Bitterroot Mountains with Natives and Forest Service workers. We paddle the Pacific Coast with the Canoe Nations of the Northwest. And native poets Henry Real Bird, Joy Harjo, John Trudell and Keith Secola sing us the stories of their homes and ancestors. Listen…
Pickers, Pluckers, Players: The bad man of blues guitar, Charley Patton. A Master Class with classical guitarist Christopher Parkening, narrated by Susan Stamberg. Bass and steel guitarist Musicians In Their Own Words. Learning to play with Lemon Jelly and Birdsongs of the Mesozoic. And Asian stringed instruments recorded by the Mountain Music Project. Listen…
Practicing polygamy, finding pockets of Polynesian Mormons, and converting the lost Native-American Israelites: “Saints and Indians,” a Homelands Production, on the Latter-Day Saints school for Navaho children — restoring their original place as the lost Kingdom of Isreal. A “Utah Luau” with displaced Hawaiians. And Scott Carrier’s sound-portrait of the “Last Days” plural marriage sects of Manti, Utah. Listen…
The Soundtrack of Our Lives: Selected stories from the series “Musicians in their own words” and “Song and Memory”, which asks the musical question: What one song do your remember most from your childhood? Also Melissa Block interviews musician Abigail Washburn about her project Afterquake: creating sound poetry with the children who survived China’s 2008 earthquake. Listen…
Making Music, For a Living, For a Life. 1930s Florida folk music in the turpentine camps — a WPA project with Zora Neale Hurston and Stetson Kennedy. The Maddox Brothers and Rose, a California country star. A North Carolina preacher’s son plays everything on guitar. And a whistler on the streets of Mexico City. Listen…
Way beyond the norm: Host Larry Massett has an audio essay on the life and literature of Paul Bowles (December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) on his 100th birthday. The original mock man-on-the-street interviews, Coyle & Sharpe turn the everyday into the extremely strange. Producer John Rieger is enveloped in an Amazonian Ayahuasca expedition, a tale of ritual drugs and tourism. Listen…
The conclusion of this 1978 NPR/CBC radio classic, featuring interviews with artists on the origins of the creative impulse. Interviewees include psychologist Rolly May (author of The Courage to Create), scupltor Ernst Neizvestny (translation read by Mike Waters), jazz violinist Joe Venuti, composer Harry Somers, classical guitarist Larry Snitzler, dancer Francesca Corkle (Joffrey Ballet), actor/director Jeanne Moreau, stained glass artist Rowan LeCompte, photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Listen…
A 1978 NPR/CBC radio classic, featuring interviews with artists on the origins of the creative impulse. This first of two hours includes psychologist Rolly May (author of The Courage to Create), classical guitarist Larry Snitzler, actor/director Jeanne Moreau, pianist Loren Hollander, photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, stained glass artist Rowan LeCompte, mezzo-soprano Fredericka von Stade, painter Harold Town, novelist Marie Claire Blais, flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal, folk guitarist Leo Kotke. Listen…
For Veterans Day: Vietnam, Korean, and World War Two vets, recorded by StoryCorps, along with a Marine Sergeant’s recent “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” discharge. And we hear plug into the iPods of active-duty troops in Iraq, aksing them what they’re listening to, and what their lives are like. Listen…
Let’s rev-up this election process with a Political Party, crisscrossing the county collecting opinions: Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City watches his mayor debate Fox News host Sean Hannity, as the audience prepares for battle. Oregon kids brief us on the Constitution. Chicago college students discuss politicians. Montana pols talk politics. Howard Dean screams. We hear two opposing musical messages about the Obama administration. And we Auto-Tune the News, turning speeches info songs. Listen…
Some Dogs, Some Cats, One Pig, and a Million Camels: Camel racers ride the wild herds of Australia. Leo Grillo’s DELTA Rescue locates lost pets in Los Angeles. Piggles eavdes the butcher block, and wanders the backwoods near Washington DC. And the mythical Mama Chaos leads the feral dogs of Los Alamos. Listen…
On Monday October 9, 2010, John Lennon would have turned 70 years old. “John Ono Lennon” is an hour public-radio memorial and celebration, much of it told in Lennon’s own words and musics, from interviews, albums, outtakes, antics and poetics. The hour features: “All We Are Saying” by Barrett Golding- Lennon sings, talks, and testifies about peace, family, and art. And “The Day John Lennon Died” by Paul Ingles- 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. Listen…
Two audio diaries about character and change: a street kid who decides to wise-up and a person born in the wrong body. We hear two people documenting their own personal transformation. “Finding Miles” is the story of a person named Megan who began a slow and difficult transition into manhood, into becoming Miles. “Running from Myself” is the story of of boy who used to rob people, and his decision to stop. Listen…
An oral history of San Francisco’s premiere queer neighborhood, told by those who’ve called it home: 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. A Transom Radio special. Listen…
What we do for a living: Mohawk ironworkers on the Twin Towers; a Radio Dairy from a scissors sharpener; exercises for existential overworked, undervalued employees; percussive postal clerks in Ghana; a man with 800 jobs; and what happens when there is no work… anywhere: the 1940 Great Depression “Voices from the Dust Bowl.” Listen…
The final part of this two-hour special: A century ago the six Crow Reservation Districts came together for a cultural gathering with other Great Plains tribes. The Crow Fair honors that tradition with a “giant family reunion under the Big Sky.” Every August is now Crow Fair in southeastern Montana, with a parade, a Pow Wow, and a rodeo. In 1977 a team of NPR producers and recordists spent a week collecting sounds and interviewing people at this annual event with the Crow people: the Apsaalooke Nation. Listen…
A century ago the six Crow Reservation Districts came together for a cultural gathering with other Great Plains tribes. The Crow Fair honors that tradition with a “giant family reunion under the Big Sky.” Every third weekend of August the Apsaalooke Nation puts on a five-day festival in southeastern Montana, with a parade, Pow Wow, rodeo, and traditional and fancy dancing. In 1977 a team of NPR producers and recordists spent a week collecting sounds and interviewing people at this annual event. This early ambient sound-portrait breathes with the arts and activities of the Crow people. Part one of two. Listen…
First-person accounts from all sides of adoption. Stories about living with questions and searching for answers. We hear from birth families (mothers, siblings and a father), adoptees (both kids and adults), and various adoptive families including open adoption and international adoption (China). Producers for Transom.org by Samantha Broun and Viki Merrick with help from Jay Allison. Listen…
A Transom.org tribute to the great broadcaster and author Studs Terkel (1912-2008): For many years, Transom.org editor, Sydney Lewis, worked side by side with Studs on his radio show and his books. For this remembrance, a blend of documentary and reminiscence, she brings together a crew of Stud’s co-workers. They share great stories and wonderful previously-unheard tape of Studs himself. Listen…
Biking & Mic-ing the Lewis & Clark Trail; part two, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean: Barrett Golding and Josef Verbanac, a radio producer and an English professor, a Jew and a Sioux, bicycle from mountains to the sea, looking for hidden histories. Listen…
Biking & Mic-ing the Lewis & Clark Trail; part one, up the Missouri River into the Rocky Mountains: Barrett Golding and Josef Verbanac, a radio producer and an English professor, a Jew and a Sioux, bicycle from Missouri to Montana, enduring floods, war, worms, mud, and myriad Lewis & Clark festivals. Listen…
Obscure tours and offbeat retreats thru Americana: Filmmaker Tony Buba takes the Long Haul Productions team around his hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once thriving steel town, now one-tenth the town it was in population. Scott Carrier transports visiting Tibetan monks around the U.S. West. The town of Boonville, California has it’s own language: Boontling, a story by Ginna Allison. And writer Mark Allen tours Universal Studios and pretty much loses his mind. Listen…
A couple equestrian classics from the NPR archives: Olympian Bruce Davidson shares his techniques for training equine athletes, with NPR’s David Molpus. Josh Darsa and a team of sound-recordists are at Belmont Stakes for the third leg of the Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing. And a poem by singer Annie Gallop about the poem that unleashed her love of horses. Listen…
Musicians minds sometimes work differently. So interviews with musicians sometimes take unexpected turns: Host Lynne Neary’s interview with David Byrne ends up with her answering his questions. Mickey Hart takes us on an audio tour of his extensive worldwide percussion collection. Negativland turns their NPR interview into audio art. Musicians In Their Own Words surveys the sonic spectrum of musicians warming up for a performance. Listen…
There will be blood: An archival interview with 1950s NYC crime scene photographer, Weegee; then excerpts from old time radio’s “Casey, Crime Photographer” and “Dragnet.” Nancy Updike of This American Life spends the day with professional “Crime Scene Cleaners.” A sound-portrait of a convicted “White Collar Criminal,” by Adam Allington. And host Jake Warga does a good deed, for which he ends up assaulted, bleeding, and hospitalized. Listen…
Is hitchhiking the great American adventure sport or just a risky last resort for folks who can’t come up with bus fare? Producer Jonathan Mitchell offers a “Beginner’s Guide to Hitchhiking”. Scott Carrier relates a hitchhiking adventure involving “New Shoes” and a letter to the Dalai Lama. And host Larry Massett drives a battered Olds 88 from New Mexico to Florida, picking up every hitchhiker on “The Road” he sees — no matter how dangerous-looking. Listen…
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. “WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts” was produced by the Kitchen Sisters for their Lost and Found Sound series. Listen…
We hear crowds and confrontations at the “Town Halls 2009” collective cross-country chaos. “Protest 1968-2008” is four decades of marches and musics, montaged by Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler. Scott Carrier introduces a junta-threatening Burmese rock band, Iron Cross. Tea Partiers and single-payer proponents shout outside a Presidential health care whistle stop; there’s debate, division and a “Day of Democracy”. NPR’s Jeff Kamen takes to the DC streets amid a police crackdown on an anti-war rally — from ATC’s first broadcast day (May 1971). Listen…
We play keno, cards, and craps in Sin City: Scott Carrier stays up all night in America’s gambling Mecca: “Vegas”, baby. “Casino Suite” is three pieces for strings, winds, and Vegas dice table worker, composed by Phillip Kent Bimstein. Jazz bassist Kelly Roberti lost his bass to the “Keno Machines”. NPR host Alex Chadwick pits his wits against the casino regular playing “Poker at the Ox”. Joe Frank’s “Old Gambler” gets on the wrong side of Sin City’s collection crew. And playwright John Ridley’s “Lock It Up” is set inside the Hollywood Park Casino, which is neither in Hollywood nor a park. Listen…
The final part of our three hour-long retrospective of the 21st Century’s first decade. A sonic survey of Christ’s passion, planetary climate change, presidential contenders, Ponzi schemes, collapsing economies, and all the stories and celebs of 2006-2009. (Produced by Peter Bochan of All Mixed Up, WBAI-NYC and WPKN-Bridgeport CT.) Listen…
The second of our three hour-long retrospective of the Aughties. The Iraq war, the missing WMDs, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Katrina flood, and sounds, speeches and songs from 2003 thru 2005. (Produced by Peter Bochan of All Mixed Up, WBAI-NYC and WPKN-Bridgeport CT.) Listen…
The first of a three hour-long retrospective of the first decade, of the century, of the millennium. Beginning with the 2000 election and recounts, from Bush, Gore, Bill and Hill; thru 911, Homeland Security, and Afghanistan. A survey of selected speech, song, and soundbites from 2000 thru 2002. (Produced by Peter Bochan of All Mixed Up, WBAI-NYC and WPKN-Bridgeport CT.) Listen…
Elvis Presley (Jan 8 1935 – Aug 16 1977), a 75th Birthday Party: Long Haul Productions rides the bus to Graceland, talking to the EP pilgrims. Producer Adam Allington rides along with a policeman and Elvis impersonator. The Residents storytell the allegorical “Baby King.” Knonos Quartet performs “Elvis Everywhere”. Gillian Welch expounds her biographical song “Elvis Presley Blues”. Go Home Productions mashes up a “Strung-Out King” on-stage meltdown. And from Joyride Media & Sony’s Elvis 75 project, we hear Elvis’ friends and bandmates recall his righteous faith in both religion and rockin’. Listen…
Host Alex Chadwick charts “The Geography of Heaven” from the holy Hindu city of Vrindavan, India. Barrett Golding finds “Sacred Spaces” around Montana in a Buddhist woman’s home, a Methodist prairie church, a Soiux Sundance, and a sculptor’s ranch. Dmae Roberts climbs to a “Temple in Taiwan” with 100 people singing. Judith Sloan gathers “Incantations” in Queens, New York, prayers from churches, mosques, synagogues, apartments, and public gatherings. And Hammad Ahmed get’s “Lost in Ritual” with American Muslims searching for places to pray and ways to find Mecca five times daily. Listen…
Holiday spirits and communal consumption: We go shopping at “City X,” a history of America’s malls and their creator, architect Victor Gruen, told by producer Jonathan Mitchell. And “T’is Season” is home recordings, a woman homesteader remembering brutal North Dakota 1920s winters, blues legend Brownie McGhee describing homemade Christmas presents, a father recounting St. Nick’s the fire escape entry, and an grandfather employing a snow machine to enhance a plastic Christmas tree; from Ginna Allison’s series, A Gathering of Days. Listen…
Documenting a disease: “Thembi’s Diary” follows a South African teenager as she records her life with AIDS, produced by Radio Diaries. In “LiveHopeLove” poet Kwame Dawes travels Jamaica talking to the many HIV/AIDS sufferers on his small island, produced by Outer Voices for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Barbara and Dori Bryon are a “Family with AIDS,” the mother unknowingly passed the virus to her daughter in the womb. African children orphaned by AIDS store keepsakes of their parents in a “Memory Box.” produced by the Africa Learning Channel. And artists declare AIDS Awareness Day a “Day without Art.” Listen…
Spending time in some shrinking rural American townships: The postmistress of “Tomato, Arkansas” describes her community’s dwindling population. “X-Town” is four former Massachusetts municipalities, now flooded to make room for a reservoir. “Slab City” in California never did exist, though it’s full of folk who live there. And little Talcott, West Virginia has a big claim to fame as home of “The Legend of John Henry: Steel Drivin’ Man.” Listen…
Voices from the Armed Forces: “Project Healing Waters” teaches wounded warriors, including amputees, to fly-fish; we spend a day catching trout at Rose River Farm in Virginia. “Operation Homecoming” is an NEA book project featuring writings and readings by vets returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. “Winter Soldiers” is testimony by soldiers and marines at the Iraq Veterans Against the War hearings. “Sword to Ploughshare” follows a member of the Farmer-Veteran Coalition: farmers helping veterans helping farmers. And the last Vet we hear is from Afghanistan; he’s a former Taliban. Listen…
An hour of horror for All Hallows’ Eve, the first half is bloody, the second goes to hell: ESP, dreams and intuition drip “Blood on the Pulpit” by David Greenberger. La Llorona, the crying woman, is Mexico’s bogeyman. ZBS adapts Cherokee writer Craig Strete’s “The Bleeding Man.” FM Einheit delves in Dante’s DivineComedy in a “Radio Inferno.” A woman narrates her found-sound trip to hell with Jesus. Shel Silverstien introduces us to “Monsters I’ve Met.” And the 90 Second Cellphone Chillin’ Theater wonders what’s in “The Box.” Listen…
For the weeks leading to the World Series, baseball stories from the Public Radio Hall of Fame: Host Gwen Macsai takes a swing at singing the National Anthem. Composer Phillip Kent Bimstein plays ball with the St. Louis Cardinals’ “Bushy Wushy Beer Man.” Barrett Golding spends a season with the Rookie League. Singer/playwright Terry Allen defines the many meanings of Dug-Out, amid the emerging early 1890s sport of professional baseball. Listen…
For hunting season: Hillary Frank’s tale of a teenage babysitter who’s siblings think he’s a werewolf. Mark Allen fears a toy poodle — the most evil entity known to man. Matmos mixes music with North American Mammals. Long Haul Productions witness a PA Spillway, where tourists toss bread, and the carp amass so thickly that ducks walk the fish’s backs for a slice. Norman Strung demonstrates the shrill sound and thrill found in calling for elk. A father and son provide a hunter’s perspective of the annual deer breeding cycle. And Alex Chadwick visits hunts wildlife and the wild life in Idaho. Listen…
The sounds of Saigon, 1972: in combat, on the radio, in the streets, were recorded by Claude Johner for the Folkways recording “Good Morning, Vietnam. Doug Peacock, former Green Beret medic, deals with the PTSD of vets, including himself (interviewed by Scott Carrier). Rich Kepler’s war experiences were bottled up and about to burst, until he released them in his poetry (producer: Larry Massett). And producer Katie Davis talks with African American vets, a sound-portrait based on the book Bloods: Black Veterans of the Vietnam War: An Oral History by Wallace Terry. Listen…
A 40th anniversary survey of the year in an hour: the Moon landing, Woodstock, Altamont, Stonewall, Vietnam. The year 1969 in speeches songs and soundbites. With comments and clips from John and Yoko, Iggy Pop, the Smothers Brothers, The Firesign Theater, Monty Python, Richard Pryor, Jagger and Richards, Roman Polanski, Richard Nixon, JFK, Buzz Aldren, Neil Armstrong, Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Arlo Guthrie, Harry Reasoner, and The Black Panthers. Listen…
Writer Charles Bowden reports from the US-Mexico border about the drug wars, the poverty, and the environment. His writing is harsh but unflinchingly accurate. Host Scott Carrier has a sound-portrait of Bowden, told by the people he has written about. Then Susan Stamberg revisits the world of Karen Blixen, aka, Isak Dinesen, when she wrote “Out of Africa.” And poet Alex Caldiero ponders the writing and sounding of words, with music by Theta Naught. Listen…
Part two of this two-hour tribute to Jean Shepherd, “A Voice in the Night.” Marshall McLuhan called him “the first radio novelist.” From 1956-1977 Shep spun his late night stories over WOR radio, New York City. PBS gave him a TV series, “Jean Shepherd’s America.” In 1983 he co-wrote and narrated the film version of his “A Christmas Story.” He inspired a new generation of spoken narrative artists who tap into the American psyche. Among them was Harry Shearer, who hosts this two part tribute, from KCRW and NPR. Listen…
Jean Shepherd used words like a jazz musician uses notes, winding around a theme, playing with variations, sending fresh self-reflective storylines out into the night. Marshall McLuhan called Shepherd “the first radio novelist.” From 1956-1977 Shep spun his late night stories over WOR radio, New York City. PBS gave him a TV series, “Jean Shepherd’s America.” In 1983 he co-wrote and narrated the film version of his “A Christmas Story.” He inspired a new generation of spoken narrative artists who tap into the American psyche. Among them was Harry Shearer, who hosts this two part tribute. Listen…
Hot & dry Summer soundscapes: Coyotes, owls, frogs and songbirds are part of “Desert Solitudes,” recorded by Bernie Krause and Ruth Happel. Host Ben Adair (APM Global Climate Change Initiative) heads to the ghost towns, abandoned mines, and billion-year old boulders along Death Valley’s “Mojave Road.” Kraut-rockers Faust dial in “Long Distance Calls in the Desert.” The Quiet American sound-captures a nuclear Nevada Test Site warning sign rattling in a “Desert Sun.” In the early 1990s, SLC producer Scott Carrier found Nevada”s “Battle Mountain” full of sagebrush, solace and stories. Listen…
Host Josh Darsa of NPR spends nine days with rodeo riders in a rural Western town at Cheyenne Frontier Days (“The Daddy of ’em All”), underscored by the history of the “Cowboy” and the wild-west symphonies of Aaron Copland.
For the anniversary of Apollo 11, the first moon man, launched July 16, landed July 20 1969: Astronauts communicate from beyond earth in “Zero G, & I Feel Fine” and “Last Man on the Moon.” President LBJ and Commander Scott Carpenter have a helium-infused confusing phone conversation. Sonic transmissions from deep in our solar system are sent back by Voyager I and II. The Sun and “space weather” emit “Natural Radio” sounds. Christine Lavine laments the loss of planetary status of “planet X.” And Laurie Anderson relates a “Night Flight from Houston.” Listen…
For Lincoln’s birthday bicentennial year and Independence Day, Old Abe, the Civil War, and its still-present aftermath: NPR recreates the “Gettysburg Address.” An archival recording of Walter Rathvon, who heard that speech live. Musings by poets Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg. In the 1950s Tony Schwartz recorded an NYC voxpop “Portrait of Lincoln.” Radio Diaries of the last “Civil War Widows,” one Union, one Confederate. Producer Jake Warga goes to battle with “Civil War Re-enacters.” Performance artist damali ayo sits on our city sidewalks collecting “Reparations.” Listen…
Sons, daughters, and dads: Storyteller Kevin Kling shares pancakes with his “Dad.” Sarah Vowell is a gunsmith’s daughter, in “Shooting Dad.” Joe Frank lets us eavesdrop on a father-son phone call between Larry and Zachary Block. Host Larry Massett and several other sons try to get to know their “Lost and Found Fathers.” Listen…
While teaching fifth grade in a Chicago public school, Esme Codell kept a journal. This radio hour is based on her book Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year, produced by Jay Allison and Christina Egloff for their Life Stories series and Chicago Public Radio. Listen…
Go to school, keep your grades up, go to college. That’s what we tell kids — over and over. What if just leaving your apartment, and walking up the block is risky? What if it feels safer to stay home, keep a low profile. When you do go out, head somewhere safe, like the teen center. That was the world of African American teenager, Jesse Jean. He lived a half block from host Katie Davis in their DC neighborhood. Jesse was lucky enough to get a scholarship to a private boarding school. Katie kept in touch with him. We hear three stories covering seven years. Listen…
For Memorial Day, two stories recorded in Vietnam: In 1966, a young Lance Corporal carried a reel-to reel tape recorder with him. He made tapes of his friends, of life in fighting holes, of combat, until, two months later, when he was killed in action. His friend and fellow marine remembers him in “The Vietnam Tapes of Michael A. Baronowski” (by Jay Allison for Lost & Found Sound). And host Alex Chadwick’s first trip to Southeast Asia was as a soldier in the Sixties. Two decades later, as a journalist, he makes a “Return to Vietnam” to find what has and hasn’t changed since the war. Listen…
For Mother’s Day: The Radio Diaries of “Melissa, Teen Mom” move her from foster home to starting her own family. Muriel & Walter Murch compose “A Mother’s Symphony” from womb sounds. Amy Jo, single mother of two toddlers, is “Surrounded by Lights” (producer: Erin Mishkin). Myra Dean tells StoryCorps of the day her son was killed. Ben Adair takes his mom in search of “Family Baggage.” Toronto musician Charles Spearin with his neighbor “Mrs. Morris,” in The Happiness Project. Katie Davis admits “I Live with My Mother.” And Jake Warga’s “Far Side” calendars make metaphor and memories of his mother’s life and death. Listen…
Tibet and Nepal: Walking a circuit alongside pilgrims, yaks and yogis, host Scott Carrier treks one of the world’s most venerated — and least visited — holy sites, “Mount Kailash: Cricling the Center of Creation.” And we climb to the Nepalese town of “Siklis,” going up a mountain and back in time, produced by Larry Massett, narrated by Joe Frank. Listen…
For Earth Day, Sounds from the Ground. Walk on the wild side with earthly tales of animals, environments, and outdoor adventure: We canoe Wyoming’s “Green River” with Scott Carrier. Tom Lopez of ZBS records some samba “Singing Frogs” in Brazil, or are they toads? “Subtext: Communicating with Horses: is Jay Allison’s inter-species conversation. Sarah Vowell has subterranean supper in the Carlsbad Caverns’ “Underground Lunchroom.”. And poet Andrei Codrescu composes a microcosmic “Environment” based on burgers. Listen…
Host Andrei Codrescu’s “Poetry” redux. Lord Alfred Tennyson leads “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Thomas Edison waxes Walt Whitman’s “America.” Denise Levertov knows “The Secret.” Carl Sandburg wonders “What is Poetry?” (by Barrett Golding). Scott Carrier wonders about “Alex Caldiero- Poet?” Ed Sanders (fmr Fugs) poses “A Question of Fame.” In New Orleans a hot-dog vendor, barkeep, and stripper are in the “Poetry Combine (by Larry Massett). Jan Kerouac responds to her father’s poetry and parenting in “Jan on Jack” (by Marjorie Van Halteren). Allen Ginsberg runs a “Personals Ad.” Listen…
A Chinese student shares his recipe for cooking “Carp” and escaping communism. Young Palestinian-American Rocky Tayeh fights food in “My Struggle with Obesity;” and later, surgically, he is “Saying Goobye To Food” (from WNYC Radio Rookies). And Louisiana State Penitentiary inmates prepare “King’s Candy: A Prison Kitchen Vision” and concessions for “The Angola Prison Rodeo” (part of the Kitchen Sisters series Hidden Kitchens). Listen…
Life, Death, Land, and Livestock: We spend a year on a sheep ranch, lambing, shearing, selling and “Counting Sheep.” Musician Phillip Bimstien bases his classical composition, “Garland Hirschi’s Cows,” on the voice of a Rockville, Utah cattle-man. And 97-year-old rancher is “Holding His Ground” (produced by Jesikah Maria Ross for Stories from Heart of the Land and Saving the Sierra). Listen…
A world-class troupe of audio daredevils and media magicians: SF Chronicle journalist Jon Carroll interviews his daughter Shana as she swings thru the air on her flying “Trapeze”, from the Life Stories series by Jay Allison. Joe Frank loves the lady “Lion Tamer,” an excerpt from his hour “The Dictator.” Adam Rosen mixes a medley of the many versions of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” And Elizabeth Eck returns to the circus family she ran away to join, in Larry Massett’s “Circus in the Blood.” Listen…
Tony Schwartz documents the entire first year in “A Dog’s Life.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti performs his poem “Dog.” Scott Carrier encounters a frisbee-catching “Blind Dog.” “Dogs in the Yard” is musician Steven Vitiello’s multi-bark composition. Jay Allison collects some possible “Dog Dreams.” A man and his dog, “John & Nippy,” share a rancher’s life, and musical duets. Laura Silverman (Sarah’s sister) calls about her canine into Jonathan Katz’s talk show, “Seeing is Believing.” And we end with this doggie treat: an on-air “Cat Bath” from producer Dmae Roberts. Listen…
Lovelorn letters to an advice columnist. Women’s tales of true but tainted “Cringe Love,” from producer Nancy Updike. A “Valentine” from Kevin Kling. “Love & Marriage Atop the Towers,” stories of weddings at the World Trade Center, collected by The Kitchen Sisters. Host Amy Dickinson and hundreds of other “Leftover Brides,” lining up for mass Moonie marriages. And a “Parent and Child” discussion between Jessica and Scott Carrier on what makes a good marriage. Listen…
“Waking Up” from a nightmare in a city split by three religions, as dreamt by an Jewish soldier, an Arab bomber, and a Mississippi minister; from Joe Frank’s hour Time’s Arrow. And “The Lemon Tree,” on the property of the same family home, in the same family homeland, shared by an Israeli and an Palestinian family; from Sandy Tolan of Homelands Productions. Listen…
Four years of reports on life in the Mexican border-town of Ciudad Juarez, with poverty and corruption, with daily drug-cartel murders and military violence. Told by photographer & Juarez resident Julian Cardona, along with author Charles Bowden, and host Scott Carrier. Listen…
Gliding, sliding, and speed: NPR’s Alex Chadwick invites America to share their stories of Flexible Flyers and downhill runs in this cross-USA audio “Sledding Party” (produced by Katie Davis). Seven skiers go into the back-country, only six return in this “Avalanche” survivors’ story (told to producer Scott Carrier). And host Barrett Golding documents a training day in the life of three women “Olympic Speed-Skaters.” Listen…
Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But sometimes it’s hard to tell who is and isn’t happy: After decades together, the Nadeaus find their husband/father is a “Crossdressing Family Man” (told by family friend Eric Winick). “After the Forgetting” (produced by Erica Heilman) is an evolution of relationships revealed in conversations between Greg Sharrow, his mother Marjorie, and Greg’s husband Bob Hooker, as Marjorie’s dementia progresses. Steve Fugate roams the roads of America, walking thousands of miles with a sign stuck over his middle-aged head that reads “Love Life” — because of what happened to his son (produced by Larry Massett). Listen…
An audio scan of Year 2008, from the the Olympics to oil prices, from the elections to the economy. A memorial to those who passed, including Studs Turkel, Eartha Kitt, George Carlin, Bo Diddley, and Paul Newman. And a tribute to the changing of the presidential guard. (Produced by Peter Bochan of MixedUp.com). Listen…
Recollections, remembrances, and mnemonics for recalling time: Lester Nafzger recalls his life as a litany of “Lynchpins” (as told to Joe Frank, excerpted from his Hour Performer). Host Ceil Muller takes us on a tour of her own memory palace, made bits of unsued of tape recordings she’s gathered over the years, in “Persistence of Memorex.” “Death in Venice” roams the beach with retired folk in Venice, Florida, finding seashells, shark’s teeth and distant memories (written and produced by Larry Massett, narrated by Joe Frank). Listen…
Musician Calvin Johnson (Beat Happening, K Records) hosts train tales: An existential interaction with an automated Amtrak voice. The Kronos Quartet plays Steve Reich’s “Different Trains.” Singer Jules Shear recalls an on-board performance. A Sound Portrait of a Pullman Porter. A track-hopping hobo named Short Stop. Circus performer Little Jack Horton and poet Charles Bukowski stolen engine car. Segregated train-travel from StoryCorps. The world’s largest model railroad. And Calvin’s Great Aunt Grace’s 1891 train trip. Listen…
At the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, NPR’s Noah Adams talks to those who know Thomas Merton, the Catholic writer and Trappist monk. Host Beverly Donofrio, reads from her book, Riding in Cars with Boys; then goes on a cross-country quest, “Looking for Mary” in those who see visions of the Virgin, a Sound Portraits production. Listen…
A mix of holiday stories, found-sound, and sampled songs: A bell-ringer at the Mall of America. Holiday history as told by second graders. A trip to the toy store. Carols sung by Zulu children in a South African orphanage. And holiday bits from Bing Crosby, George W. Bush, and The Beatles Fan Club Christmas messages. Listen…
A preacher/prank-caller conjures “Alice of the Spirits.” Carmen Delzell samples the “Ritual Magic” of a voodoo Santera, soaks in a spirit bath, and prays for sex, adventure, and central heat. Ceil Muller visits “The Psychic Center of the World,” the town of Cassadega, Florida. And host Larry Massett spends “A Night on Mt. Shasta.” Listen…
Sister Agnes Ramashiga’s Radio Diaries of “Just Another Day At the World’s Biggest Hospital,” Soweto — 2000 patients check in daily, half HIV positive. Teenager documents their HIV “Positive Life,” by American RadioWorks. Poet Lisa Buscani is “Counting” on her mom’s health advice. “And Trouble Came: An African AIDS Diary” is Laura Kaminsky’s compositon for viola, cello, piano, and stories of Tamakloe: warrior, tailor, AIDS victim. Life-saving meds brought Krandall Kraus back from the dead, like “Lazarus.” And dying mother’s writes her son “Letters to Butchie,” by Sound Portraits. Listen…
An audio Thanksgiving feast. We binge on fattening stories, then purge with a documentary on refusing food. Scott Carrier tours a “Turkey Ranch,” following the gobbler from farmyard to frozen food. Joe Frank describes a typically twisted family “Thanksgiving Dinner” (from his program “Pilgrim”). Dean Olscher goes “Chowhounding in St. Paul,” searching for Hmong food, with cellphone assistance from Chowhound Jim Leff. And Annie Cheney offers a touching document of her eating disorder, “Concerning Breakfast” from Jay Allison’s Life Stories series. Listen…
John Mills is “Doing Time” and Sergeant Furman Camel is “Serving 9 to 5;” two Prison Dairies from an inmate and a guard at Polk Youth Institution, North Carolina. (John Mills is out now and co-hosts our hour with Prison Dairies producer Joe Richman.) Voices and sounds of youth in “Lockdown!” at Utah’s Washington County Crisis Center, a techno tone poem by composer Phillip Kent Bimstein. Payton Smith calls her mom in prison to discuss “Not All Bad Things,” produced by Chana Joffe-Walt and Transom. And “Tossing Away the Keys” at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola Prison, is stories of lifers from Sound Portraits. Listen…
Susan Stamberg enlists elementary school kids to evaluate the paintings of “Picasso.” Poet Gertrude Stein paints “A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” Singer Jonathan Richman believes “No One Was Like Vermeer” but “Pablo Picasso” was never called an @#%hole. And a history of injuries and inspiration unfolds in “Frida Kahlo: Viva La Vida,” an audio biography produced by Katie Davis. Listen…
It’s another presidential election year; the American people are deeply divided and deeply entrenched in another unpopular war. The topic is not 2008, but 1968. If 1967 was the Summer of Love, maybe 1968 was the Summer of Hate. We hear the songs, speeches, and news reports of the times. We go live to the demonstrations, and drink “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Listen…
We get out of one conflict and into another. “Goodbye to Saigon” chronicles the day of the last US flights out of the Vietnam War, narrated by Noah Adams and produced by Art Silverman. And Scott Carrier travels the country in early 2003 asking people “Are You Ready?” for war. Listen…
In 1992 producer Barrett Golding found remnants of Jefferson’s theories and Toqueville’s writings still very much in play, as he followed Montana’s two incumbents US Representatives, one Democrat, one Republican. Due to re-apportionment, they were vying for the state’s one remaining Congressional seat, on a yearlong statewide game of political musical chairs. And we hear college students in Chicago discuss Democracy. Listen…
We hang with the mostly homeless protesters, and Scott Carrier, in “Lafayette Square” across from the White House. Writer Dave Eggers helps his brother Bill run for State Representative as a Republican — blood proves thicker than politics. Slam poet Taylor Mali tells us “How to Write a Political Poem.” Host Sarah Vowell digs “The Garden for Disappointed Politicians.” Audio artist Jesse Boggs choreographs a bipartisan “WMD Waltz.” And we hear excerpts from All the Presidents’ Inaugurations. Listen…
Susan pulls some pieces she’s most proud of from the NPR audio archives: She knits her way though history, takes us on a personal tour of DC, and tries to interest her colleagues in resurrecting her infamous relish recipe. She talks with economist Milton Friedman, actor Judi Dench, writer Nora Ephron, and pianist Leon Fleisher. In pursuit of patriotism, Ms. Stamberg de-France-ifies popular culture, then ends in a Parisian park, chatting with a world-class conversationalist. Listen…
The work we do, from Wall Street traders to taxi cab drivers. People who work with brassieres, with dead bodies, and off-the-books in an underground economy. A tone-poem by Ken Nordine, a podcast from Love and Radio, and sound-portraits from Radio Diaries, Toni Schwartz, Ben Rubin, David Greenberger, and hosts Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler. Listen…
Richard Paul follows “School VP,” Asst. Principal Irasema Salcido, through her hectic multi-lingual morning at DC’s Bell Multicultural High School. Host Katie Davis finds she “Got Carried.” Slam poet and history teacher Taylor Mali schools us on “What Teachers Make.” Producer Hillary Frank gets the shy “Quiet Kids” to speak up. Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich’s commencement speech advises “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen),” with music from filmmaker Baz Luhrman. Host Katie Davis takes her DC summer camp into the wild woods on a “Hike to Rock Creek,” two blocks from where the kids live. And poems from Meryn Cadell and Jelani. Listen…
The stars of this show are Americans, expressing their opinions, participating in our democratic discussion. We travel 8000 miles of America gathering “Vox Pop”, roam the streets of New York City in the hours during and weeks after 9/11, hitting “Golf Balls” and spending our “Last Night in New York.” And “Amber” provides an illegal alien p.o.v. via a radio call-in line. Works from Transom.org by producers Scott Carrier, Christopher Lydon, Matt Lieber, and Australian Wednesday Kennedy. Listen…
Poland battles against the Germans and then the Russians at the start of the Second World War. A German foot soldier and Polish townspeople recall, differently, the first days of the invasion of Poland in September 1939, and Poland’s later battle to fight years of environmental poisoning during the Soviet era. All in a series of stories written by NPR’s Alex Chadwick and produced by host Art Silverman. Listen…
Politicians who fancy themselves president tromp thru the New Hampshire mill town of “Claremont,” produced by Larry Massett, Art Silverman and Betty Rogers. The media spin myths out of misquotes in “Democracy and Things Like That” by Sarah Vowell and This American Life. The Language Removal Service concocts the world’s first wordless political debate in their “California Recall Project.” And all this years primary losers re-appear in “Super Tuesday Mixdown,” from Peter Bochan’s series Presidential Shortcuts. Listen…
Symptoms of heat fatigue: A sound-poem for “Dead of Summer” in the city by Marjorie van Halteren & Lou Giansante. Tuscon residents reflect the desert “Heat,” with author Charles Bowden, poet Ofelia Zepeda, and music by Steve Roach; produced by Jeff Rice. The perfection of family, a crippled man on a blind man’s back, and a collective scream of “I’m not dead,” sweat it out in Joe Franks’s “Summer Notes.” Cats pulling pianos are “The Little Heroes” in John Rieger’s Dance on Warning series. And host Scott Carrier takes a long hot cross-country drive down “Highway 50,” the loneliest road in America. Listen…
“Bad Teeth at King Drew Dental Clinic” by Ayala Ben-Yehuda: the Dental Divide, South L.A.’s clinic of last resort. “The Breast Cancer Monologues- Three Woman” by Dmae Roberts: surviving breast cancer, perspectives of a Chicana, African-American and Romanian immigrant. “A Square Meal, Regardless” by Jennifer Nathan: Two old friends caring for each other into old age. “Dialysis” by Joe Frank: kidney failure and a friend indeed. “Hospice Chronicles” (excerpt) by Long Haul Productions: Volunteer Bettie’s first patient. “The Person I Admire Most” by Jake Warga: A day with Jenafir in Ethiopia, trying to save the world. Listen…
“This is Insane,” says William S Burroughs to the music of Disposable Heroes of Hiphopcracy. An anonymous reporter describes his “Electroshock.” The Avalanches mashup a “Frontier Psychiatrist.” Host Scott Carrier takes “The Test” for schizophrenia. Joe Frank is pathologically challenged by time. And Sound Portraits helps Howard Dully recount “My Lobotomy,” documenting the experimental procedure of “ice pick” surgery. Listen…
In “Enola Alone” Antenna Theater interviews bomber pilots, bombing victims, and Colonel Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay. Political speeches and popular songs chart our changing attitudes towards the “Atomic Age.” Residents recall the 1950s Nevada and Utah nuclear bomb tests in Claes Andreasson series “Downwinder Diaries.” Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti has “Wild Dreams of a New Beginning.” Americans across the country answer Scott Carrier’s question: “What Are You Afraid Of?” The band Lemon Jelly presents “Page One,” presents the Big Bang with a beat. And we select some “Atomic Platters: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security” compiled by CONELRAD.com. Listen…
Tony Schwartz, media pioneer, audio documentarian, and the most famous radio person you probably never heard of, died June 2008. We hear The Kitchen Sisters’ Lost and Found Sound-portrait, “Tony Schwartz, 30,000 Recordings Later,” and the Tony Schwartz-inspired verite documentary of the town he lived in and loved, “New York City: 24 Hours in Public Places.” Listen…
Three hearts searching for home: Going back to Vietnam makes Nguyen Qui Duc realize “Home is Always Somewhere Else;” host Neenah Ellis goes looking for her family in Croatia, where “The Old Country is Gone.” And Andrei Codrescu returns to his Romanian home town and stares into the “Eyes of Sibiu.” Listen…
A Tour of the River Towns: Hannibal, Missouri, birthplace of Mark Twain; a day on a tugboat; St. Louis showboats; and changing the course of mighty rivers. A downstream trip through the history and mystery of the Big Muddy, with Larry Massett and Scott Carrier. Listen…
Celebrating America with Flags and Festivals, featuring: Recitations and reflections on “The Pledge” of Allegiance and “War vs. Peace.” The annual “Rainbow Family” migration into the Montana forest on July Fourth — their day of prayer for peace. A town that covets their title of the “Armpit of America” — welcome to Battle Mountain, Nevada. Mississippi moonshine, barbecued goat and old-time Fife & Drum at “Otha Turner’s Afrosippi Picnic.” Stories by Joe Frank, Barrett Golding, host Larry Massett, and Ben Adair. Listen…
Scott Carrier has a cultural history of the Great Salt Lake’s “West Desert,” a land of polygymists, bombing ranges, and toxic waste incinerators. There’s chlorine gas in the air, anthrax stored underground, and people who call the place home. Sarah Vowell’s childhood move from rural Oklahoma to small-town Montana was, for her, a change from the middle ages to a modern metropolis. And two Stories from the Heart of the Land: NYC native Natalie Edwards hates grass, bugs, dirt, and trees, but attempts a walk thru Brooklyn’s Prospect Park; and Carmen Delzell tells why she moved to and has stayed in Mexico. Listen…
Jeff Rice of the Western Soundscape Archive hosts an hour of sounds for the start of Summer: an extinct woodpecker revives an Arkansas town, car alarms made from bird calls, breeding moths for their music, a morning walk with poet Jim Harrison, dancing with gnats, the seismic underground sounds of spiders, and the perspective of a pest controller. Stories by Long Haul Productions, M’Iou Zahner Ollswang, host Jeff Rice, and Scott Carrier; and recordings by Nina Katchadourian, Lang Elliot, and Dr. Rex Cocroft. Listen…
Paternal praise, pride, disappointment and love, hosted by Jay Allison (This I Believe): Scott Carrier gives his son Milo a “Ski Lesson.” From Animals and Other Stories, we hear “Reflections of Fathers,” aka, Bugs & Dads. Comic strip artist Lynda Barry wishes her divorced dad a “Happy Father’s Day.” A doctor tells his daughter about her granddad in “Story Corps- Dr. William Weaver.” Jay Allison describes his daughter’s questions about his love life as “Grilling Me Softly”. Dan Robb’s family remembers the day “Dad’s Moving Out,” from Life Stories. “Doc Merrick” and daughter Viki go through some girl problems. David Greenberger tells David Cobb’s story “Because of Dad.” Deirdre Sullivan’s father advises “Always Go to the Funeral,” a This I Believe essay. And from producer by Viki Merrick, Dave Masch wants to be “A Better Father.” Listen…
Host Ian Svenonius, of the band Weird War, introduces “The Groupies,” a 1969 album of interviews by producer Alan Lorber. We visit with the pilgrims at Pere LaChaise cemetery, who’ve come to see “Jim Morrison’s Grave” (a sound-portrait by Mark Neumann and Barrett Golding). John Denver’s anti-Christian conspiracy is exposed in the series “Song and Memory” from producers Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler. And Bo Diddley blows up his mom’s radio in David Schulman’s series “Musicians in Their Own Words.” Listen…
Marcos Martinez, (formerly) of KUNM Alberquerque, hosts A Tale of Two Countries, from Mexico to US: In “Sasabe,” a Sonora, Mexico border town, Scott Carrier talks to immigrants on their hazardous, illegal desert crossing, and to the border patrol waiting for them in Sasabe, Arizona. Luis Alberto Urrea reads from “The Devil”s Highway,” his book about death in the desert. Guillermo Gomez-Pena imagines “Maquiladoras of the Future,” fantasy border factories. “And I walked…”, by Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler, is a sound-portrait of Mexicans who risk their lives to find better-paying jobs in the United States. Listen…
Green Beret and poet, Major Robert Schaefer, US Army, hosts the voices of veterans remembering their comrades: We talk with troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, reading their emails, poems, and journals, as part of the NEA project: “Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.” We hear interviews from StoryCorps, an essay from This I Believe, and the sounds of a Military Honor Guard, recorded by Charles Lane. And we attend the daily “Last Post” ceremony by Belgian veterans honoring the WWI British soldiers who died defending a small town in western Belgium (produced by Marjorie Van Halteren). Listen…
Host Larry Massett spends a “Long Day on the Road” with ex-KGB in the Republic of Georgia. Scott Carrier starts in Salt Lake and ends on the Atlantic in this cross-country “Hitchhike.” Lemon Jelly adds beats to the life of a “Ramblin’ Man.” The band Richmond Fontaine sends musical postcards from the flight of “Walter On the Lam.” And Mark Allen tells a tale of a tryst with a “Kinko’s Crackhead.” Listen…
For Mother’s Day, maternal tales from producers around the country: “Travels with Mom” follows Larry Massett and his mother to the Tybee Island, Georgia of today and of the 1920’s, as recalled by Mrs. Massett. Writer Beverly Donofrio joins her mom for “Thursday Night Bingo,” produced by Dave Isay of Sound Portraits. In Nancy Updike’s “Mubarak and Margy,” a gay man returns home to care for his mom, and to the “cure” his family plans for his homosexuality. And comedian Amy Borkowsky shares her hilarious phone “Messages from Mom.” Listen…
Rabbi Samuel Cohon of Temple Emanuel, Tucson and Too Jewish Radio, presents stories of survivors, for Holocaust Remembrance Day: In “Descended from the Holocaust” Dr. Alan Berkenwald records his trip with his parents to the Holocaust Museum — it was first time they talked openly about their experience in the concentration camps; this audio diary is of Jay Allison’s Life Stories. “Yom Hashoah 1994” is Shoah services in Billings MT and Cleveland OH, survivor interviews, and the story of the Billings communities united “Not in Our Town” response that stopped a series of anti-Jewish crimes. The Rhino Records documentary project “Voices of the Shoah: Remembrances of the Holocaust” is drawn from interviews with 180 survivors. Also survivors sing Hebrew, for the first time in years, in a live May 1945 BBC report by Patrick Gordon Walker from the just liberated “Belsen Concentration Camp.” Listen…
Host David Greenberger of Duplex Planet presents glorious moments and observations from people in the last years of their lives: Dave Alvin discusses the song he wrote about his dying father, “Man in the Bed,” from the Western Folklife Center’s “What’s in a Song?” series. Comedians Bob & Ray are “The Whirleys”. From StoryCorps comes a remembrance from Richard Craig of his days as a dance host on cruise ships. In Sound Portraits’ “The Ground We Live On” journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc faces mortality in recordings she made during her father’s last months alive. And host David Greenberger shares some stories told him over the years by the elderly, including “Growing Old in East L.A.” Listen…
Host Dmae Roberts of Stories1st.org, for Earth Day, presents Sounds for and from Mother Earth: The Quiet American takes an audio trek through Nepal”s “Annapurna” Circuit. Host Dmae Roberts records Maori music and culture. We hear Pulse of the Planet’s “Extraordinary Sounds From the Natural World.” And from Gregg McVicar and the “Earthsongs” series: Sioux Soprano Bonnie Jo Hunt layers opera over insects (on Robbie Robertson’s Music for the Native Americans) Listen…
Radio stories about radio, then stories about radio stories: Jake Warga paints sound-portraits of “Urbana FM” in Uruguay and “Radio Gondor” in Ethiopia. The ShortWaveMusic blog records “Duelling Transmitters.” Larry Masett interviews the “Language Removal Services.” Recordist Steve McGreevey captures the solar sounds of space weather, the northern lights, and “Natural Radio.” The Android Sisters lament the loss of great “Ray-Dee-Ohh.” And Scott Carrier reports to work for “The Friendly Man.” Listen…
Audio excursions from the early eighties: Four traveling stories from public radio’s past, hosted by the independent producers who made them, Scott Carrier attends a native service of “Navajo Pentacostalists.” The Kitchen Sisters ride with the “Road Ranger,” an American auto-mechanic hero. John Rieger samples small-town life “Fifty Miles Out of Gerlach.” And Larry Massett takes a nitrous-oxide fueled “Trip To the Dentist.” Listen…
Host David Ossman of Firesign Theatre presents mixes comic bits with music beats, from Wally Cox yodeling to Peter Sellers singing while shaving, from Jack Kerouac crooning “Ain’t We Got Fun” to Charles Mingus jazzing up Jean Shepherd’s “The Clown” to comedian Greg Giraldo layered over Lazyboy. “Lenny Bruce Gets Busted” in Jonathan Mitchell’s documentary. And we hear rare and classic bits from host David Ossman’s Firesign Theatre. Listen…
Host Dmae Roberts of Stories1st.org, for Women’s History Month, presents Stories By, For, and Of Women: The Kitchen Sisters go to “Tupperware®” parties. A supermarket checker checks out her life, in ZBS’s radio soap Saratoga Springs. Jenifir returns “Home From Africa” with all 13 Symptoms of Chronic Peace Corps Withdrawal. Host Dmae Roberts has a collage of and about “Sisters.” In a new syntax of whispers and words Susan Stone tells the story of “Ruby” and her husbands. And Sonia Sanchez, Tracie Morris, Jill Battson and Meryn Cadell perform short poems. Listen…
Host Ceil Muller of KQED presents “The Kiss and the Dying,” her etiquette list for the dying and soon-to-be survivors. “Fire and Ice Cream” is from Brent Runyan’s book “The Burn Journals.” Brian Brophy documents the death of “Our Father.” Carmen Delzell helps heal her “Grandmother”s Hip.” And patients pass time with TV in Nancy Updike’s “Channeling Health.” Listen…
Scott Carrier walks around his Salt Lake City “The Neighborhood.” Host Katie Davis of Neighborhood Stories contemplates decades of changes at the “Corner Store” on her DC street. Larry Massett’s friend bids “Goodbye, Batumi” to his Republic of Georgia hometown. And Romeo and Juliet plays out in “Oakland Scenes: Snapshots of a Community” by Youth Radio and poet Ise Lyfe. Listen…
Nuthin’ like a good gas crisis to spurn some excitement for energy conservation— the Aptera electric and hybrid vehicle, 300 miles-per-gallon, extended range models, “composite safety cage similar to Formula-1 cars,” exceeds 85 mph, 0-60 mph in under 10 seconds, “designed from the ground up as an electric vehicle;” that’s just some of its innovations.
The car had a cameo in this Touchstone Energy ad:
Found this at PRX Youthcast blog; quoting Kiera Feldman:
“‘As Slow As Possible’ by John Cage is my new favorite song. It takes 639 years to play. This is what it currently sounds like:”
“(Feel free to listen at your convenience–the next note won’t be added to the song until July 5, 2008). ‘As Slow As Possible’ is scheduled to conclude September 5, 2640.”
Kiera asks, if she played it at a party, “would you dance?” The piece is known as ORGAN 2/ASLSP (“as slowly and softly as possible”, reads Cage’s score).
