Weird Al lays out the history and science of Auto-Tune, from the Know Your Meme series (tube):
HV did a radio intervu with the Gregory Bros on their Auto-Tuned News.
And here’s a playlist with most of the movies mentioned in above Auto-Tune explainer:
via Alix Blair.
Drove 1100-miles in 19 hours last Wednesday — MT to NoCal — to be with fam for Thanksgiving. Pubradio kept me company the whole way (‘sides some signal-less spots in ID mtns and NV desert, filled with Joe Frank and TAL podcasts.)
Near NV/CA’s border heading east on I-90, when you crest Donner Pass, a pubradio feast commences. My presets fill up fast. From SF there’s KQED, NPR’s most listened-to station, and Pacifica’s KPFA, home to Negativland’s Over the Edge. One of college radio’s freeform finest is KDVS at U of CA-Davis. And community station KVMR-Nevada City CA manages to be hyperlocal yet always entertaining to this outta-towner.
While speeding downhill thru the Sierras, I caught KVMR’s eve news. It ended with a discussion about oak trees: one scientist/radio-announcer/educator talking to another scientist/author. I felt privileged to listen into their conversation. Their tree talk wasn’t dull or dumbed-down; it was comprehensible and comprehensive. An unexpected, imaginative use of radio, doncha think?:
Al Stahler’s Soundings: On Oaks
The oak is one of the signature trees of the Sierran Foothills. Al Stahler spoke with Glen Keator, author of The Life of an Oak: An Intimate Portrait (22:12 mp3):
How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. 
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…
—Albert Einstein, “Mein Weltbild” (“My World-view” 1931)
More from his essay: “The World as I See It“
Hearing Voices from NPR®
077 AIDS Diaries: For AIDS Awareness Day
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-11-24 (Originally: 2009-11-25)
“AIDS Diaries” (52:00 mp3):
Portraits of people fighting a plague:
South Africa has been hit hardest with H-I-V/AIDS. Five million people are infected (Avert: SA). One of them, Thembi Ngubane, at nineteen years old, carried a recorder in 2005 to document her life (NPR | PRX). Produced by Joe Richman, edited by Debra George and Ben Shapiro; more of Thembi’s story, with an audio-visual gallery, is at AIDSdiary.org.
December 1st is World AIDS Day. In the arts community it also had this other name, DWA.
Poet Kwame Dawes travels his native Jamaica talking about HIV/AIDS. This is part of the hour-program “Live Hope Love: HIV/AIDS in Jamaica” (PRX) Support came from the MAC AIDS Fund, of MAC Cosmetics, and from and PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Produced by Stephanie Guyer-Stevens and Jack Chance of Outer Voices, for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Their emmy-winning muchomedia website for the project Live Lope Love.
Scupltor Kenn Coplan has been making Rust Angels out of desert debris:
Rust Angels are made from recyled material (Trash) that I have collected from my local deserts. My hope is to create 1,000 Rust Angels in the tradition of Sadako Sasaki, who tried to make a thousand cranes (Senbazuru) to grant her wish for her life after she was irradiated in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima during World War II.
Heard this morn on KGLT, a new Flaming Lips silly song w/ a silly vid w/ some silly spoken and mouth-sound effects: aka, we love it; from their album Embryonic:
The Flaming Lips – “I Can Be A Frog” (Official Video)
Beck (-Hansen not Jeff-) has a Record Club of rock ‘n’ luminaries. They’ve covered the songs of Leonard Cohen, Velvet Underground, and now Skip Spence (of Moby Grape). Beck, Feist, and Wilco recorded their studio session tackling this track from Skip’s 1969 solo LP Oar:
Skip Spence “Little Hands”
Record Club: Skip Spence “Little Hands” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.
via some velvet blog.
There’s a new Group on Facebook called FU FB:
For taking our time and our bandwidth, for making “friend” a verb while devaluing it as a noun, and for lotsa otra evils we’ll add later: FU FB, a new Facebook Group
The reputable Public Policy Polling .
reports:
One question we asked on this poll gives a good idea of how difficult it is to inform the public on this complicated issue. Medicare is obviously an inherently public program, but just for the heck of it we asked the somewhat tongue in cheek question of whether the government should ‘stay out of Medicare.’ 39% of Americans said yes.
—”National Poll: Obama Approval, Health Care, Birthers” ( 172K)
Other sad states of American affairs in thenational phone survey (909 voters, Aug 14-17 2009, MOE +/-3.3%.909): “Do you think Barack Obama was born in the United States?” 44% of Republicans said no. (For all respondents: Yes- 62%, No- 25%, Not Sure- 14%.)
Here’s a question I hope PPP poese in their next survey: “Should aborted evolutionists serve birther Obamacare death panels?” Let folk figure that one out.
xkcd on iPhone vs Droid vs Life:
A sparkling revu of David Greenbergers spoke-word w/ music Cherry Picking Apple Blossom Time by none other than Robyn Hitchcock:
David Greenberger meanders around America, lovingly collecting the life stories of old people like fireflies in a jar. On Cherry Picking Apple Blossom Time he visits Milwaukee which, as one elderly resident explains, has the same number of letters as Wisconsin. Over a smoky grid of blues-funk and acoustic guitar played by Paul Cebar and his band, David recites anecdotes and reflections from the Milwaukee senior citizens that he has interviewed on his recent visits there.
In an America that seems increasingly dominated by amnesia, and the erosion of its history, it’s very heartening — and poignant — to hear these fragments of lives as they draw to a close. The rootsy tone of the music — Ry Cooder, Tom Waits, David Byrne and even Beefheart’s Magic Band come to the mind’s ear — adds Americana to these tales of vanishing Midwestern life. Here are the man who cheated at tomato- growing by hanging a purchased one on a vine; the man who made peace with his artificial arm and hung shopping bags from it; and the man in a red shirt who feels like a king. There are exuberant moments, but the most moving pieces are the elegies: people who gently mourn their vanished partners — one speaks of his wife as his co-pilot, another of how he’s tried to replace his wife with crossword puzzles. The matter-of-fact tone that David uses in these vignettes is partly what makes them so emotional. In ‘No Rooms Here’ you can hear the life and memory of the elderly female narrator dissolving as she speaks. Just as certain as our death is the uncertainty of what follows — this ambiguity riddles the inhabitants of Cherry Picking Apple Blossom Time. More…
The new movie “The Mountain Music Project” (by HV producer Jack Chance) is “A Musical Odyssey from Appalachia to Himalaya.” The film screens Sunday December 6th at 7PM at the Emerson Center, Bozeman MT. Families and Fiddles welcome.
The flick looks/sounds superb: just played to a packed house at National Geographic’s Grosvenor Auditorium, DC. Now it makes it’s Montana debut.
The Mountain Music Project- Trailer
Emerson Ctr for Arts & Culture | Mountain Music Project
Fiddler Danny Knicely with a traditional Nepalese musician; © Jack Chance:
Across the alley is an apartment building. You look into one of the windows and see an old black couple arguing in a loving, formulated fashion that they’ve worked for years to perfection. He gestures violently, his left hand holding a half‑eaten turkey leg.
She, continually wiping her hands on her apron, finally balls her fist up and shakes it in front of his face. He turns away in disgust. Who is she? Bessie, mother of many children, daughter of a sharecropper, opens the Bible to the very same verses. Behind her eyes lurk 1,000 dead Ashanti dreams. She possesses the keys to a house in the suburbs. She gets car fare. She takes the early bus to where she wears the same housedress and walks from room to room carrying a radio. She’s never paid taxes — she’s always paid in cash. She has no Social Security number.
She is an angel on earth, the guardian of the house, forever wiping her hands upon her apron, tucking the children into bed, sitting heavily beside them, her breath sweet, her stories bittersweet, her hair a crinkly, soft white tied with a bandana, always weary, never tired, with a great posterior that moves with grace from room to room. Housemaid, housemother, house spirit, protector of children’s dreams. Verses, Psalms. She sings them in a melody that evokes the sound of a great flowing river, of distant banjos, the scent of magnolias, great porticos upon which gentlemen with drooping mustaches sit, feet up, drinking mint juleps.
She knows the secrets of the master and mistress of the house. She knows where he keeps his pornographic magazines, where she keeps the list of lovers that she visits from time to time. She’s found the wife’s recent love letters, airplane tickets to destinations not mentioned in daily conversations, receipts for jewelry the wife does not possess, and deep within a jar of Vaseline, the key to a motel room.
She’s found the cotton handkerchief into which the teenage son spills his seed in the secret moments of his private ecstasy. She’s found a small, brown bottle with white powder in it, the cap of which is attached by a small, brass chain to a spoon, rolled up into a pair of socks in the drawer of the teenage daughter’s bedroom.
—© Joe Frank
JF social: maillist | space | space | face
JF var: 1st-lines | intervu | fresh-air | 3rd-coast | la-weekly | guardian | salon
Common, produced by Will.i.am, sampling Martin Luther King Jr, for the Freedom Writers soundtrack:
Common: “A Dream” Music Video
Freedom Writers: film | soundtrack | videos | audio. Film based on the book: The Freedom Writers Diary; How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them.
via KEXP: Songs of Celebration & Remembrance: Commemorating the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Inauguration of Barack Obama.
The eye-easy and sonorous Feist effectively communicates sequential integers to kids; from the back-alleys of Sesame St — the show just turned 40yo:
Sesame Street: Feist sings 1,2,3,4
and here’s a Google Doodles‘s homage to S.St‘s 40th anniversary:
More classic S.St vids at Some Velvet Blogspot, including Stevie Wonder, Richard Pryor, and R.E.M. w/ “Fuzzy, Happy Monsters.”
via Ben- Comma Q.
I think over again my small adventures.
My fears.
Those small ones that seemed so big.
For all the vital things
I had to get and to reach.
And yet there is only one great thing.
The only thing.
To live to see the great day that dawns,
and the light that fills the world.
—The Light that Fills the World, old Inuit song
(used at end of Never Cry Wolf)
The blue arc of Earth, photographed by the European Space Agency- Rosetta spacecraft:
ESA’s photo data:
Image of the Earth acquired with the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera from a distance of 633 000 km on 12 November 2009 at 13:28 CET. The resolution is 12 km/pixel. The image is a part of a sequence of images taken every hour through one full rotation (24 hours). The movie will be published later.
The ESA has posted a hi-rez vers (206KB) of Earth from Rosetta. More info at ESA news, the Rosetta Blog, and this Wired article:
This gorgeous image of a blue arc of the Earth against the blackness of space was captured by the Rosetta spacecraft as it swung by our planet.
The European Space Agency mission is on its way to intercept the comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The ship will deploy a lander onto the comet’s surface, the first such attempt to be made.
To gather up the necessary energy to reach the comet out past Mars’ orbit, Rosetta needed three swings past Earth. This is its third and final flyby. It will reach the comet in early 2014.
Unlike the most famous pictures of Earth, which show most of the blue marble, this photo presents a planet in darkness, just the South Pole awash in light.
Join the Church of the SubGenius:
…or triple your money back.
via AH3.
Arthur C. Clarke chose HAL’s 2001 music cuz ’twas the same ditty demo-ed by Bell Labs, turning the IBM 704 into the 1st singing computer. Lots more 20001-Daisy related videos, links, audio, and history at Switched, “‘2001’ Geeks, Rejoice! World Learns Why HAL Sang ‘Daisy’.”
We’ll leave you with “this historic recording was made by D.H. Van Lenten in 1962 as part of a series of experiments at Bell Laboratories to understand the nature of speech and hearing.” From Vintage Computer Music, “Computer Speech Demonstration w/ “Bicycle Built for Two” (2:19 mp3):
While in Iraq, former U.S. Army Sergeant Matthew McCue witnessed the power and peace-making potential of agriculture. When he returned to the States he worked with the Farmer-Veteran Coalition, and now works at the French Garden Farm near Sebastopol. Says McCue: “I still want to make the world a better place. I think i can do more good with a shovel than with an M-16.” McCue worked with the Farmer-Veteran Coalition and the French Garden Farm in Sebastopol CA, This story was originally produced for the SpeakeasyDC Storycast.
Aired on PRI Hear & Now; by producer Alix Blair, “Swords to Plowshares” (0:00 mp3):