For Veteran’s Day an audio story on SoundRich: Viet Nam Detachment 5; two men in battle during the 1968 Vietcong Tet Offensive, one arduously escapes “protected by angels,” the other spent five years in an enemy prison camp, produced by Rich Halten.
“Viet Nam Detachment 5” (10:37 mp3):
Hearing Voices from NPR®
076 Small Town: Rural Routes
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2009-11-03 (Originally: 2009-11-11)
“Small Town” (52:00 mp3):
Spending time in some shrinking American townships:
The postmistress of describes her Mississippi River community’s dwindling population. Music: Larry Massett.
Four former Massachusetts municipalities were flooded to make room for a reservoir. But the villages live on in the former residents’ minds. A ShortDocs winner, from Third Coast Festival.
This town in California never did exist, though it’s full of folk who live there: an unofficial RV Park and home to the homeless thrives in culture and community.
Little Talcott, West Virginia has a big claim to fame: It’s home to a famous story and song.
Slab City photo © DesertDutch.org.
Keitai is Japenese for cell-phone, shÅsetsu for novel; so keitai shÅsetsu is “cellphone novel” (also “thumb novel”): a new lit genre started by young .jp girls. Their novels are posted to a media-sharing site as a series of text messages, which millions of .jp-teens download and read on their mobile phones.
Readers rapidly respond, and sometimes suggest. Some authors have used the best suggestions to alter their plots. Quite a few of these cell-phone serials have evolved into successful paper novels, selling 100K’s and even 1M’s of copies. Readers often purchase not the paperback but the hardcover as a momento of their literary interactivity. Half of the Japan’s half the top 10 fiction bestsellers of late have started as keitai shÅsetsu.
The New Yorker interviewed author Mone:
Mone started posting her novel straight from her phone to a media-sharing site called Maho i-Land (Magic Island), never looking over what she wrote or contemplating plot. “I had no idea how to do that, and I did not have the energy to think about it,†she says. She gave her tale a title, “Eternal Dream,†and invented, as a proxy for her adolescent self, a narrator named Saki, who is in her second year of high school and lives in a hazily described provincial town. “Where me and my friends live, in the country, there aren’t any universities,†Mone wrote. “If you ride half an hour or so on the train, there’s a small junior college, that’s all.†Saki has a little brother, Yudai, and a close-knit family, a portrait that Mone painted in short, broad strokes: “Daddy / Mom / Yudai / I love you all so much.†Before long, however, Saki, walking home from school, is abducted by three strange men in a white car: “—Clatter, clatter — / The sound of a door opening. / At that moment . . . / —Thud— / A really dull blunt sound. / The pain that shoots through my head.†The men rape her and leave her by the side of the road, where an older boy from school, Hijiri, discovers her. He offers her his jersey, and love is born. More…
Six Revisions compiles, from the web, “10 Revealing Infographics about the Web” . For instance this iA Web Trend Map tracks top domains and personalities as stations in the Tokyo subway sysyem:
Large vers of all images w/ links to their creators at Six Revisions.
Indie producer Lu Olkowski debuted her In Verse: Women of Troy on this week’s Studio 360:
A century ago, Troy, New York, was a thriving industrial capital. Today many of its residents live in poverty. Studio 360’s Lu Olkowski went to Troy with poet Susan B.A. Somers-Willet and photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally to document some of Troy’s stories. They spent a lot of time with a single mother, Billie Jean Hill.
The result is poetry as journalism w/ some staggeringly accurate and beautiful photos:
In Verse: Women of Troy from InVerse Vimeo videos.
In Verse: PRX | MQ2 | Transom.org | Vimeo | iPhone app
Photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally has a film on Troy NY: Upstate Girls.
As America mulls our Afghan options, let’s also look for patterns in our past overseas interventions: We staged coups for the Shah of Iran and South Vietnamese generals. Panama’s Noriega cashed CIA checks for decades. In the 1980s we sent Saddam $40 billion — making Iraq the third-largest recipient of $US’s. More…
A while back we posted the audio to this spoken-weird collaboration btwn writer Mark Z Danielewski and his musician sister Poe. Here’s their vid…
Poe – Hey Pretty Music Video Official Label Video Drive-By 2001 Mix
HuffPo hatched a comedic intersecting circle competition, “Jesus, Karaoke, And Serial Killers: The Funniest Venn Diagrams The Web Has To Offer.” Create your own or vote on current creations. Like “I Am The Walrus:”
and in another pop-star‘s circles:
via JV.
Joyride Media’s recently PRX-posted a Gazillionth (or so) Monty Python Radio Special, narrated by Keith Olbermann (MSNBC). They start with this Python mini-masterpeice, “Radio Tuning Radio 4” (0:30 mp3):
Announcers: Graham Chapman and Terry Jones, off The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief.
Among the great oddio-viz coming out of Maker’s Quest is The Corner: 23rd and Union, stories, photos, and phone call-ins about one street intersection “near the geographical center of Seattle.”
KUOW’s Jenny Asarnow directs the project. One of the many fine Corner interviews at the site is with “Aaron Dixon: The Checkmate” (mp3):
EarthEar is back as a CD label and a new blog, both devoted to natural soundscapes and field recordings. The blog-post “Acoustic Monitoring in New Caledonia” has some startling sounds, w/ pix and map, of the Kagu bird:
Sophie Rouys is a conservation biologist and heads up the Kagu Recovery Plan for New Caledonia; she recorded some really close up calls one morning in the park at Riviere Bleue. They call, usually in groups, for anywhere between 5 minutes and an hour at dawn. They’re pretty silent the rest of the time, except for clucking sounds when male and female switch off at the nest and the occasional display.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
075 Veteran’s Day: Iraq and Afghanistan Vets
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-11-09 (Originally: 2009-11-04)
“Veteran’s Day” (52:00 mp3):
Voices from the Armed Forces men and woman who fight our wars:
Go to YouTube, search for: Iraq Afghanistan combat footage. You’ll get lotsa hits.
This former National Guard Specialist has “surrendered the force that I carry, the weapon to those elected officials chosen by the American people.” She hopes the people inform themselves and choose wisely.
A U.S. Army soldier reports: “When you speak Arabic, you become the interface with the local population — which is 99% of the work in a counter-insurgency.” (McCary is a Truman National Security Project fellow; his January 2009 article in the Washington Quarterly was “The Anbar Awakening: An Alliance of Incentives” –pdf.)
US and Iraqi Special Operations Forces conduct a combat operation inside Sadr city, Baghdad in order to capture known insurgents and terrorists. The operation was conducted on an undisclosed date/time in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. US Army video by: SSG Ryan C. Creel.
From an HV/NPR series: Retired Navy Captain Ed Nicholson is an avid fly-fishermen. He realized fishing would be good therapy for disabled veterans. So he hooked up with Trout Unlimited and the Federation of Fly Fishers, and with private donations and volunteer guides, they began teaching wounded vets, including many amputees, how to fly-fish. Project Healing Waters, now regularly takes vets on these therapeutic fishing outings. These interviews were recorded in 2007 on Virginia’s Rose River Farm.
From an HV/NPR series: A Specialist in the Missouri Army National Guard reads from her email to family and friends about her first few days in Iraq, part of the NEA book/writing project Operation Homecoming. Guitar by Jess Atkins. (Read Ms. Gerhardt’s NYTimes article “Modern Love; Back From the Front, With Honor, a Warrior’s Truth”.)
Please read, rate & review on our Knight News Challenge entry:
“Hearing Voices: Coal Town” Online News Tools.
Coal-fired Power Plant, Colstrip MT
Designer Jonathan Yuen has a hypnotic, beautiful Flash site intro. Keep clicking the + signs up and to the right to follow his illustrations, inspirations, and animations.
The Encyclopedia of Life: “Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth…” —Edward O. Wilson. EOL is community-building online database of animals, plants, and other organisms. Lost to learn, for instance,I know that we saw on our hike yesterday 150 Cervus elaphus.
A HuffPo report:
“Two coyotes attacked a promising young musician as she was hiking alone in a national park in eastern Canada, and authorities said she died Wednesday of her injuries. The victim was identified as Taylor Mitchell, 19, a singer-songwriter from Toronto who was touring her new album on the East Coast.
She was hiking solo on a trail in Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Nova Scotia on Tuesday when the attack occurred. She was airlifted to a Halifax hospital in critical condition and died Wednesday morning, authorities said.…
Wildlife biologist Bob Bancroft said coyote attacks are extremely rare because the animals are usually shy. Bancroft, a retired biologist with Nova Scotia’s Department of Natural Resources, said it’s possible the coyotes thought Mitchell was a deer or other prey.
“It’s very unusual and is not likely to be repeated,” Bancroft said. “We shouldn’t assume that coyotes are suddenly going to become the big bad wolf.”
The NPR Halloween music playlist is screaming thru Nov 3, click the image below to start the scare; hours of horror, from Bach’s Toccata to Bauhaus’ Bela Lugosi. Complete list of spooky songs at Ghosts In The Machine: A Haunted Mix:
Don’t think I ever linked to this page at the Nature Conservancy, created a couple years ago by Atlantic Public Media and myself, “Tips For Long Distance Biking.” Another vers is at APM. Both have the Emily Botien-produced radio story, “Biking the Back Roads,” which inspired the Tips page.
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The LATimes profiled Western Soundscape Archive field-recordist, database-director (and HV Producer) Jeff Rice, in “Recording the sounds of the West.” Also check their audio slideshow and photo gallery.
The life cycle of a software, from “How the customer explained it” to “How the project leader understood it” to “What marketing advertised” to “What the customer really needed.”
Software Development Life Cycle [SDLC]
Illustrations: Project Cartoon (adapted by Mina Isaac)
Video: Iman Louis
Music (“Technologic”): Daft Punk
Make your own Project Cartoon.