Hearing Voices from NPR®
031 The Stamberg Files: Essays, Audio-tours, and Interviews
Host: Susan Stamberg of NPR
Airs week of: 2009-12-30 (Originally: 2008-10-01)
Sundown last night started the year 5769, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year; the first day of Tishrei, the seventh month of the Hebrew calendar. Rest, repent, blow the shofar, and get ready for Yom Kippur.
Who are these Undecideds, who absorb the media spotlight like a black whole, who can’t leave their house w/o participating in 3 surveys, 4 focus groups, and a sit-down w/ CNN? The Undecideds look like us, they talk like us. They live amongst us. But they are different, my friends, to the core.
Their choice it simple: it’s either Fresh Face or POW-guy. We all picked long ago. Yet the Undecideds waffle and flip-flop. They are guilty of, in a word, Indecisiveness.
And Indecisive is not something America can afford. Not in these perilous times, what with the overseas War on Anxiety and domestically The Greatest Economic Collapse Since The Last One.
These Undecideds threaten all we hold dear and purchasable by credit.
Why don’t we make them choose? Now. Maybe if they made their minds up, we could hold the elections early. This would save the US billions in attack ads alone, which we could reinvest in bribing Wall Street to quit killing our economy.
Indecision, not now, not ever, not here in the good ol’ USA.
(For more on battling indecisiveness, see previous post.)
Up Mount Blackmore the other day, 10,128 ft (Hyalite Range, Gallatin Forest). That’s me, Pogo, and Gus, with Capt. James Ortman workin’ the Nikon. Walked in snow the whole way. At the top guys were skiing. Fall equinox everywhere else, but here high in MT it’s the first taste of winter:
LA Weekly article on Joe Frank’s one-man play “Just an Ordinary Man” (opens Oct 1 & 8 Largo’s LA), along with a bio of Joe’s career: “Off the Radio.” Sez Joe:
“I particularly loved listening to baseball because the announcer wouldn’t just say, ‘He hit the ball to third base.’ He’d talk about the history of baseball, the weather, the lives of the different players – it was like being with somebody I liked. So I started thinking about being on the radio myself.â€
“I’d take actors into a studio, tell them what a scene required and have them improvise, then I’d edit the best of what we’d produced into a show that also incorporated music and monologues of me speaking. It was unreal, yet real, and people didn’t know what to make of it.â€
I caught his last stage performance, “The Blue Room.” Was everything you’d expect from a Frank-en-story: LOL funny, absurd, disturbing. What more could you want from a night out?
“Just an Ordinary Man” is a new theatre piece with dancer Argentina’s Carolina Cerisola, vocalist Julie Christensen, and musicians David Ralicke, Kenny Lyon, Mike Boito, Lorca Hart, Danny Frankel, Mark Harris and Mike Bolger.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
030 Nine to Five: The Working Week
Host: Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler of Mapping Main Street
Airs week of: 2009-09-02 (Originally: 2008-09-24)
For Labor Day, the work we do, from Wall Street traders to taxi cab drivers. People who work with brassieres, dead bodies, lost golf balls, and off-the-books in an underground economy. Part one…
The Ramones obviously believe “It’s Not My Place (In the 9 to 5 World)” (1980 Pleasant Dreams).
In the 1950s Tony Schwartz conversed with The New York Taxi Driver about “A Temporary Job.” (This 1959 LP is on The Library of Congress National Recording Registry).
Grief and guts fill the work day of Aftermath,® Inc: Specialists in Crime Scene and Tragedy Cleanup, Trauma Cleanup, Accidental Death Cleanup. Interview with Tim Reifsteck by Laura Kwerel, produced by Nick van der Kolk; an excerpt from “Aftermath,” a Love and Radio podcast. (L & R’s slogan: “What Ira Glass might make if he showed up to work drunk.”) More…
The Fly Boys have a new excerpt from their fish-porn film, landing steelhead in BC:
Raising The Ghost (5 Min Cut)
By way of bio: my kid, Jess, be a Fly Boy. And I narrated, tho I’ve no clue what a drake dry fly does. But if you like great river footage and lunker back-country trout, this one’ll catch you hook (light wire up-turned loop eye), line (floating double taper), and sinker (tungsten alloy).
Another Protest Song “invites artists, songwriters, and musicians to create, upload, listen, and debate new songs of protest as part of a growing audio archive of politically engaged music.” The site asked the musical question: “What does a 21st Century protest song sound like?”
Well, it mostly sounds pitiful, pampered, and pompous, if the protest songs posted there are any indication. But among the garbage are some gems, like…
1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country
2. People who think they run can the country read the Washington Post.
3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and are very good at crossword puzzles.
4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but do not really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.
5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who would not mind running the country — if they could find the time — and if they did not have to leave Southern California to do it.
6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a poor job of it, thank you very much.
7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
8 The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who is running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running (from) another country but need the baseball scores.
10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it, but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist gay dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided of course, that they are not Republicans.
11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.
12. The Bozeman Daily Chronicle is read by people who have recently caught a fish and need something to wrap it in.
…none of these is read by the guy in the big white building in the nation’s capital.
You can now trace a subject in NPR stories over time with the new NPR / SIMILE Timeline (connects NPR’s API with MIT’s Simile Timeline). Scripts courtesy of John Tynan, poet w/ a piano and a python code-book — a dangerous combo.
You create the timeline with a search term; then you can scroll thru the months, or click the story-titles for summaries and links. For instance, there seems to be a recent spike in NPR stories on “lipstick” — maybe Revlon announced a new color:
Hearing Voices from NPR®
029 Old School: Back-to-School Special
Host: Katie Davis of Neighborhood Stories
Airs week of: 2012-06-06 (Originally: 2008-09-17)
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 (CD: Something For Everybody), performed by actor Lee Perry, sung by Quindon Tarver).
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.
Music: Jurassic 5 “Lesson 6: The Lecture” Jurassic 5 EP, Archie Moore’s “Times Table’ With Soul and a Beat” from WFMU Blog- 365 Days Project, Lanterna “Fields” Sands, Sam Cooke “Wonderful World” Greatest Hits.
Scraper Bikes, the videos, the photos, the song, the space, and the radio report, by Jacob Fenston with the “Scraper Bike King” (Tyrone Stevenson Jr.) — broadcast on California Report, then NPR:
Josh Quittner recently wrote an article for Time, “The Photoshop Guys Revealed!†unmasking the creators of the enormously popular and hilarious Photoshop tutorials “You Suck At Photoshopâ€. The 10 episode series (Season 1) on My Damn Channel was created by Matt Bledsoe and Troy Hitch (Troy does the voice of Donnie) of the creative agency Big Fat Brain, who designed the My Damn Channel website and are the guys behind the series “Tim after Timâ€.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
Sundown last night started the year 5769, 
Who are these Undecideds, who absorb the media spotlight like a black whole, who can’t leave their house w/o participating in 3 surveys, 4 focus groups, and a sit-down w/ CNN? The Undecideds look like us, they talk like us. They live amongst us. But they are different, my friends, to the core.
LA Weekly article on Joe Frank’s one-man play “Just an Ordinary Man” (opens Oct 1 & 8 
