When Carol Brobeck was 20, she gave her baby boy away for adoption. Twenty years later, the son, Joel, came looking. They two tell their story of reunion.
Aired on NPR All Things Considered; by producers Shea Shackelford (of Big Shed) & Vige Millington for Speakeasy StoryCast, “Reunion- Mother & Son” (5:34 mp3):
For those who track copyright law, fair use, and the evolution of rights re: appropriated-cultcha and re-creation, check this TED-lecture from Larry Lessig:
No expert has brought as much fresh thinking to the field of contemporary copyright law as has Lawrence Lessig. A Stanford professor and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society, he chairs Creative Commons, a nuanced, free licensing scheme for individual creators.
We’ve been collecting comments in our current Pubradio Survey. Most folk are hooked on HV’s series; a few can’t stand it. We’ve posted a few of the most passionate love — and hate — notes:
Hearing Voices from NPR®
058 Motherly Love: Moms, Young and Old
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-05-04 (Originally: 2009-05-06)
“Motherly Love” (52:00 mp3):
For Mother’s Day:
Muriel & Walter Murch compose “A Mother’s Symphony” from womb sounds.
In 1996 Radio Diaries producer Joe Richman gave “Melissa Rodriguez from New Haven: Teen Mom” a microphone and tape recorder. Melissa was 18 and pregnant. Joe asked her to make an audio journal of her life, for the series Teenage Diaries.
Amy Jo, single mother of two toddlers, is “Surrounded by Lights,” by producer Erin Mishkin of Public Radio Redux and SALT Institute for Documentary Studies.
Myra Dean tells StoryCorps of the day her son was killed by a reckless driver.
Ben Adair takes his mom in search of her mom and “Family Baggage.” Ben heads American Public Media‘s Sustainability and Global Climate Change Reporting Initiative.
Katie Davis admits “I Live with My Mother,” part of her DC Neighborhood Stories.
Toronto musician Charles Spearin with his neighbor “Mrs. Morris,” from The Happiness Project
Seattle producer Jake Warga‘s “Far Side” calendars make metaphor and memories of his mother’s life and death.
And HV wishes all moms, especially ours, a happy Mother’s Day.
In support of David Greenberger’s new CD, Cherry Picking Apple Blossom Time is live on stage at the The Pabst Theater, Milwaukee WI, May 13:
A collaboration between Duplex Planet creator David Greenberger and Milwaukee music legend Paul Cebar
Featuring spoken word stories derived from Greenberger’s conversations with elderly residents of Milwaukee, backed by music composed by Paul Cebar that is seamlessly integrated with the mood of the words.
“A King in Milwaukee, part 1” from Cherry Picking Apple Blossom Time (2:23):
A listener requested info on finding the Jonathan Richman song we used in our “Dog Tales” HV Hour. It’s off a kids-songs compilation, Colours Are Brighter, now out-of-print. So I hope Jonathan don’t mind us posting his “Our Dog Is Getting Older Now” (2:30 mp3):
Hearing Voices from NPR®
057 Roof of the World: In the Himalayas
Host: Scott Carrier of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-07-07 (Originally: 2009-05-06)
“Roof of the World” (52:00 mp3):
Tibet and Nepal:
Walking a circuit alongside pilgrims, yaks and yogis, host treks one of the world’s most venerated — and least visited — holy sites, Mount Kailash. Produced for Stories from the Heart of the Land. Scott Carrier teaches Journalism at Utah Valley University in Orem.
And we climb to a remote Nepalese town of going up a mountain and back in time. Technical director: Flawn Williams, narrator: Joe Frank.
Two minutes of PolitiMusic bliss. Michael Schmoyoho Gregory, w/ his sis-in-law Sarah Fullen Gregory, “Auto-Tune the News #1”:
Also check “Auto-Tune the News #2” and an auto-tuned Churchill.
Michael Gregory: Face | Tube | Barely Political
via Mtn Music Project.
07/12/05 by Jay Alllison
At our radio stations (WCAI/WNAN/WZAI for the Cape and Islands in Massachusetts), we have been experimenting with interstitial time since the day we signed on. By interstitial time, I mean the cutaways, the hourly breaks, all the little moments between programming blocks, the cracks in the sidewalk.
We use that time to create our station signature, to declare our sensibility in 30, 60 and 90 second bursts.
Our first experiment is something we dubbed, “Sonic IDs,” an odd name that stuck. These are little community vignettes — portraits, anecdotes, oral histories, overheard conversation, short poems, jokes, slices of life — that end with our call letters. They are sudden narratives or images — like photographs for radio. Some are pure sound preceded by our favorite word: “Listen.” Others are simply the unheralded voices of our neighbors telling something about life. Our test of these surprising, non-standard moments, the way we know they work, is if the listener turns and looks at the radio when the come on. (Current article: “Bursts of lush and local life are new stations’ trademark“.)
Continuing our historical Pubradio writs—
The Nation magazine devoted an entire issue (2005-05-23) to Radio Waves. Here’s an excerpt from a featured article, “Confessions of a Listener” by Garrison Keillor:
What I want is to be surprised and delighted and moved. Here at the low end of the FM dial is a show in which three college boys are sitting in a studio, whooping and laughing, sneering at singer-songwriters they despise, playing Eminem and a bunch of bands I’ve never heard of, and they’re having so much fun they achieve weightlessness — utter unself-consciousness — and then one of them tosses out the f-word and suddenly they get scared, wondering if anybody heard. Wonderful. Or you find three women in a studio yakking rapid-fire about the Pitt-Aniston divorce and the Michael Jackson trial and the botoxing of various stars and who wore what to the Oscars. It’s not my world, and I like peering into it. The sports talk station gives you a succession of men whose absorption in a fantasy world is, to me, borderline insane. You’re grateful not to be related to any of them, and yet ten minutes of their ranting and wheezing is a real tonic that somehow makes this world, the world of trees and children and books and travel, positively tremble with vitality. And then you succumb to weakness and tune in to the geezer station and there’s Roy Orbison singing “Dream Baby” and you join Roy on the chorus, one of the Roylettes.
I don’t worry about the right-wingers on AM radio. They are talking to an audience that is stuck in rush-hour traffic, in whom road rage is mounting, and the talk shows divert their rage from the road to the liberal conspiracy against America. Instead of ramming your rear bumper, they get mad at Harry Reid. Yes, the wingers do harm, but the worst damage is done to their own followers, who are cheated of the sort of genuine experience that enables people to grow up. The best of what you find on public radio is authentic experience. It has little to do with politics. The US Marine just returned from Sudan with lots of firsthand impressions of the crisis there; the journalist just back from Falluja, where he spent three months; a firsthand documentary about life aboard the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis in the Middle East–that’s what Edward R. Murrow did from London in 1940, and it’s still golden today. It’s the glorious past and it’s the beautiful future. (Thanks to the Internet, the stuff doesn’t vanish into thin air. You can go to thislife.org and get the story of the Houston woman or the aircraft carrier documentary. You can find the Sudan and Falluja interviews at whyy.org/freshair. More and more people are doing this. Nobody cares what Rush Limbaugh said two days ago; it’s gone and forgotten, but the Internet has become an enormous extension of radio.) That’s why public radio is growing by leaps and bounds. It is hospitable to scholars of all stripes and to travelers who have returned from the vast, unimaginable world with stories to tell. Out here in the heartland, we live for visitors like those. We will make the demented uncle shut up so we can listen to somebody who actually knows something.
—Garrison Keillor “Confessions of a Listener“
Also in The Nation: Radio Waves was Rick Karr (of NPR) with “Prometheus Unbound” (about the Prometheus Radio Project), and a mention of a Scott Carrier TAL piece in the Diary of a Mad Law Professor column.
My friends sent this vid-tour of their bike store, the West Hill Shop in Putney, Vermont. What a place, down-home and damn inviting — makes me wanna pedal cross-country just to go there and buy somethin…
If you’re anywhere near Putney VT, stop in, ask for Jim & Diny Sweitzer: tell ’em HV sent ya.
[Rob Rosenthal, host of the SALTcast, and Radio instructor at the SALT Institute for Doc Studies, begins each semester with a talk about…]
The Power of Sound
In the womb, our first connection to the outside world is through sound. Heartbeats. Voices.
When we’re born, our first impulse is to make sound.
Some creation myths say, in so many words, in the beginning there was sound.
Our voice starts deep within us and moves out into the world and into another person. Touch at a distance someone once said. And yes, sound enters us — all the time. We can’t help but hear. We don’t have earlids, as producer Jay Allison likes to say.
Our voice is a mixture of the air and our thoughts. They mingle together.
And this is a new thought to me. I’m still working on it. But, humans make sound. Think about it. We don’t make light. We don’t make taste. We don’t make touch, per se. Okay, I suppose you could aruge we make smells but that’s not something we fully control. But sound…we can create sound. We talk. We sing. We’re able to make noise with our bodies and because of our bodies — that’s how we’re constructed. That’s unique among the senses.
Have I gone off the deep end yet? No? Well try this.
Radio taps into something ancient. Something primal. Long before the printed word. Long before pictures and film. Waaay before Facebook, we communicated in sound. It’s all we had. We’ve been passing along information and telling stories sonically for about a bazillion years. At this point, it’s just how we’re wired. Radio plugs right into that.
With radio, the listener is a co-author. Radio engages the mind like a good book and we paint our own pictures. Television, which I know is an easy target, but for comparison, television tells you everything you need to know with its combination of pictures and sound. Radio lets you think.
Radios are inexpensive and ubiquitous — most homes have a good half dozen. You can be illiterate and ‘get’ radio.
There’s something magical about the radio. How the hell does sound get into that little box? If you talk to old school radio engineers, they’ll tell you the “M” in “F. M.” Stands for magic. I’ll let you guess what the “F” stands for. In fact, when radio was first discovered, it was thought that we tapped into a mysterious atmospheric element, the ether. I actually like to believe that’s true. More…
Bloodshot Records “the home of insugent country music” released an anthology (revu) 1980s cowboy punker Charlie Pickett, a staple of indie-music radio in our neuvo wave phase. One irresistible track is 1984’s “Marlboro Country” Charlie Pickett and the Eggs, Bar Band Americanus: The Best of Charlie Pickett And…
Hearing Voices from NPR®:
056 An Hour of Earth— For Earth Day
Host— Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of— 2009-04-15
“An Hour of Earth” (52:00 mp3):
Walk on the wild side with earthly tales of animals, environments, and outdoor adventure:
We canoe Wyoming’s “Green River” (1994) with Scott Carrier.
Tom Lopez of ZBS records some samba “Singing Frogs” in Brazil, or are they toads?
Poet Andrei Codrescu, of The Exquisite Corpse, composes a microcosmic “Environment” based on burgers (from No Tacos for Saddam 1992
“Subtext: Communicating with Horses” is Jay Allison‘s inter-species conversation, part of his 1985 series Animals and Other Stories.
And Sarah Vowell has subterranean supper in the Carlsbad Caverns’ “Underground Lunchroom”, from a 2001 This American Life.
While catching up on SALTcast‘s, I caught this gem, a radio story about silence at Quaker meetings, “Silence Among Friends” by Joni Murphy (12:07 mp3):
SALTcast is the podcast of the SALT Institute for Doc Studies (w/ PRX help). Each cast contains an audio story, accompanied by an appropos nugget of journalistic insight from SALT radio instructor Rob Rosenthal. Listen weekly and you’ve got yourself the equivalent of an online J-Skool degree.
[John Rieger’s three-year bi-weekly late-night experiment in radio programming, Artifacts: KPFA-Berkeley 1985-1987, introduced the idea of “audiography”…]
“Artifacts” is an experiment in the esthetics of non-narrative audio figuration and thematic organization. The sound recording media have produced figurative works primarily in such narrative forms as journalism and drama. Non-narrative audio composition has been understood as a musical enterprise rather than a figurative one. The poverty of this accepted wisdom is suggested by the analogy with photography. While painting begins with “stuff” — paint, the elementary color stuff — photographic composition begins with what might loosely be called “semantic” elements, visual records of world objects which contain a world reference. Photography has a passive or receptive moment which painting does not; for while painting may be a wholly abstract enterprise, photography must at least begin from the figuration which occurs when the film receives the light image from the world object.
clomid
So we may compare sound recording with musical composition. Music begins with the elementary sound stuff, whose fundamental property, we shall say, is timbre. Sound recording, however, begins with the passive or receptive moment which we noted in photography, where in this case the audio image of the world object is received and recorded. Sound recording is “audiographic”. But while photographic figuration has long since freed itself from the compositional constraints of the narrative tableau and the news photo, audiographic figuration still serves almost exclusively the dramatist and the journalist. Only by considering the audiographic record as sound stuff (musique concrete) have we managed to break these narrative shackles; but in so doing we have lost the reference to the world object and so destroyed the audiographic image qua image.
ambien
Surely, then, we have not yet exhausted this remarkable medium!Audiography records only the mystery. Radio journalism has fought against this mystery, doing appalling violence to what is subtle, ambiguous and profound in the name of clarity, and strapping the unruly “actuality” into a straightjacket of anemic literalism.Consider the richness of the audiographic image. Unencumbered by the superabundance of banal visual information against which photographers and filmmakers have had to struggle to uncover what is mysterious in the Thing, audiography records only the mystery. Radio journalism has fought against this mystery, doing appalling violence to what is subtle, ambiguous and profound in the name of clarity, and strapping the unruly “actuality” into a straightjacket of anemic literalism. (Or perhaps it is the journalist who wears the straightjacket.) Radio drama, with equal violence, reduces the audiographic image to a sound “effect”, playing a perpetually supporting role, and coming and going by the servants’ entrance. Should the image then seek the seductive embrace of musique concrete it will find only the ultimate subjugation, its destruction.
order soma
“Artifacts”, then, is the audiographic annunciation of the Thing. It heralds the esthetic of the blank stare. It calls upon us not to subjugate the image, but to receive it as it is for-itself; for within these audiographic artifacts objects lead lives of their own, revealing in their gravitational attraction one to another the unconscious mass, the hidden psychic substance which sustains them. They are to be approached not with a will to mastery, but with an attitude of reverence and humility befitting one on whom a thing of mysterious beauty has been bestowed.
order prednisone
–John H. Rieger, June 17, 1985
Riegs on: New American Radio | DNA Files | Hearing Voices |
Science and the Search for Meaning
The above Audiographic essay was performed live on-air by the author, with Catherine Stifter and Steve Tokar, on their KPFA program, “Artifacts: Manifesto, 1985” (7:58 mp3):
[Brady Wiseman is a friend, programmer, state legislator for my hometown of Bozeman, and a Big Picture guy. We previously posted a couple clips from an intervu w/ him. I think people should hear what he has to say; so here’s the audio and transcript of the long vers…]
Audio: Montana State Representative Brady Wiseman (D- Bozeman) Jan 2009, Helena MT — over pints at the Blackfoot Brewery (15:13 mp3):
National politics is not subject to change because there are too many powerful forces behind it. So the change is gonna come from the grass roots. As people become less and less well off, as our standard of living continues to decline, people will self-organize into different modes of economic activity. And it won’t be directed from the top, it will simply happen from below.
And we still, at this point, have a wonderful advantage and that is the existence of the Internet to help transfer the knowledge of grass roots change, self-organized change happening in one place to another. And, so, we may be able to see a sweeping difference in how America operates, quite rapidly, but it will happen from the bottom, I believe, and not from the top.
Well, if they fall flat on their face now , they still have control over events. They have their people in place in the new Obama Administration. And I don’t have to say the names, the names are well known. But it’s the same people who developed the system in the Clinton administration that is now collapsed.
So, I don’t expect them to do anything other than to take care of the people at the top, and nobody’s talking about taking care of the people at the bottom. And that’s what I’m here to do in my job as a Citizen Legislator is to look out for the people at the bottom.
How do we heat our homes? How do we turn on the lights? How do we put food on the table? These are the essential problems of life and they are becoming more and more apparent as the remaining four acts of the five act play play out.
There is no chart for the waters that we’re in now. There’s no map for the territory on the other side. That’s where the self organization come in. People will simply cope. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was nobody there to tell the people how to take care of themselves but they did. They managed it, they figured it out and I believe as things continue to decline — and economically I’m convinced they will — then our people will figure out how to make things work for themselves. And my job is to help that along as well as best as I am able from the level of State government. More…
Some more Lorenzo Milam, Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station for the Community (available: Prometheus Radio Project | Amazon):
A Brief History of Radio
Radio was discovered some 50 years ago by a dog named RCA Victor. RCA Victor discovered radio accidently by looking into a horn, and discerning the voice of his master. Ever since then, RCA Victor has been a tradition, and many have capitalized on his cocked ear and puzzled face.
In the early days of radio, there were many exciting inventions. The Father of The Tube was Lee DeForest. He evacuated a bulb left by the Gardener (coincidentally, a friend of RCA Victor) and stuck his in his thumb and pulled out some mysterious little bugs called electrons. When he put the whole thing in a wall-socket, he said “Yreka.” And he heard the voice of London Calling. The voice said, “This is London Calling!”
Radio grew apace after that. There were modifications of DeForest’s evacuated tube. One of them was put together with some verve by Maj.-Gen. Edw. Armstrong. He called it the Heartstrong receiver. He was able to hear Trenton on his receiver. He also said ‘Yreka!’ which was a favorite quote of radio inventors.
Television also grew apace. The first signal was a picture of Howdy-Doody sent from Seacaucus N.J. to Weehawken, N.J. The effect was electrifying. Howdy-Doody was seen from as far away as Bayonne. CBS then was invented to steal patents from RCA Victor and his friends.
There were many suits. More…
UPDATE: NPR story on Kitman
Kitiman’s ThruYOU vids are mashups & mixes of “unrelated YouTube video/clips edited together — what you see is what you hear.” The latest is the “Mother of All Funk Chords:”
Sez 43 Folders of Kutiman:
Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is “Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who ‘did this’ with our IP?†instead of, “Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,†it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.
Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like, gang. And, eventually somebody will figure out (and publicly admit) that Kutiman, and any number of his peers on the “To-Sueâ€list, should be passed from Legal down to A&R.
Kutiman: Space | Wikip | More ThruYOU‘s
via Smatter.
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.