As part of a ProPublica investigation into the deep, dark toxic chemicals we penetrate Mother Earth with to make her cough up “natural” gas, here’s “Fracking: The Music Video– My Water’s On Fire Tonight:”
The video is by David Holmes and other J-students at NYU’s Studio 20 . Sez they: “The best explainers are direct, concise and easy to understand. But investigative journalism is rarely any of those things, instead reflecting the messiness of real life.”
Hearing Voices from NPR®
117 War Torn: Weapons-grade Radio
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-06-08
“War Torn” (52:00 mp3):
A weapons-grade hour of wartime radio. The people who start the fight, and the people who pay the price:
From the British prime minister’s speech to the House of Commons, June 4 1940, preceding the Battle of Britain:
We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
From the benefit CD Path To Zero – A Prayer Cycle
The recollections of Hiroshima survivor Kaz Suyeishi, rendered by two young Japanese woman, Kazuka and Kiyo. Alvin Huntsman performed the improvisational music by banging, scraping, and bowing several large sculptures by Gary Bates, including the “Wind Wagon,” a 35-foot multi-stringed banjo-like structure.
From The Poetry Of Carl Sandburg, an out-of-print Caedmon Audio collection. Background sounds: Mazen Kerbaj “Starry Night” (info below).
Radiophonic Creation Day draws near:
Saturday June 4 2011 12:00am – 11:30pm.
24 hours of programming dedicated to international radio creation broadcast simultaneously on radios all over the world.
a way of making people aware of the cultural richness that these radio stations can bring to today’s radiophonic landscape.
This promising Euro project sports a lengthy list of x-pond programs (FB pg). Listen online starting 2011-06-04 00:00:00 UTC+2 (French Time) = 2011-06-03 18:00:00 UTC-4 (Eastern Daylight Time).
via Lu Olkowski.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
116 Homeless: Living on the Streets
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2012-09-19 (Originally: 2011-06-01)
“Homeless” (52:00 mp3):
The voices of people who were or are homeless:
Land of 10K Homeless is a Minneapolis music-audio documentary project by Voices of the Streets, “An Artistic Portrayal of Homelessness in Minnesota.” Thier “website of artistic activism provides a space for the disadvantaged to share their stories.” Producer Danny Burke created this mix of the main theme, blended with interviews with individuals staying at a family shelter in Minneapolis.
The string arrangement was written and produced by Brian J. Casey and Danny Burke of the Skeptics, and performed by the Arlington String Quartet (Matthew Knippel, cello; Conor O’ Brien, violin; Gabriel Platica, violin).
After leaving the Marines, George Hill became addicted to drugs and alcohol. He soon found himself on the streets of Los Angeles, homeless for 12 years. But the kindness of another homeless man changed everything. Hill is now off the streets, working for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and pursuing a computer information systems degree at Cal State University. Recorded in Santa Monica, CA; part of StoryCorps’ Griot Initiative.
A portrait of the self-named, Crazy John, who lives on the streets of Austin, Texas. He tells writer Carmen Delzell about his life. Carmen was homeless for a couple of years in the early 1990s. This piece was made after she got on her feet and was living in Austin. Produced by Jay Allison (PRX).
“Bill Speaks” (2008 / 2:24) The Land of 10,000 HomelessAn interview with Bill, recorded near the Dorothy Day Center homeless shelter, St. Paul MN. Andrew Turpening, the Land of 10K Homeless Artistic Director, composed the music and produced the piece.
The producer spends a night at a church homeless shelter in Washington DC.
A profile of life on the streets for homeless youth told through the experiences of 21-year-old Miracle Draven, Portland OR. Original music by Craze MC. (Longer version at PRX).
Boulder MT 9-year-old, Brigid Reedy, may be young, but she can yodel with the best of ’em. Mountain West Voices, a new series by producer Clay Scott, presents a radio portrait of this pre-teen musical tour-de-force, “The Yodeler” (5:00 mp3):
The MtnWVox site has nice photos of Brigid in full yodel, and with the animals on her fam’s farm. While there, check these other series eps: “The Pastor” and “The Returning Warriors.”
Gilbert “Gil” Scott-Heron April 1, 1949 – May 27, 2011:
Above video clip excerpted from “The 90’s, episode 306: Race And Racism – Red, White, And Black.”
Gil Scott-Heron & band, live “The Bottle:”
HV are spoken word evangelists. But sometimes it’s best to keep your mouth shut. Like in this one-minute piece of performance art on the US House floor, delivered by Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) on the House floor, April 14 2011:
A nice blend of map-based selectable sounds/images at “The Soundlines Project.” It’s a project-in-progress done by Andrea Hammer’s Cornell students about the town of Endicott NY.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
115 Refugees: Forced to Leave
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-05-11
“Refugees” (52:00 mp3):
The journeys of people driven from their homeland by war, disaster, and persecution:
From One Thing: The producers spent a year talking to refugees living in USA about why they had to leave their country, how they got here, and what “One Thing” they brought with that reminds them of home. In this first of several stories from the series, the Sher Ali family, a mother and nine children, was the first Afghan family to be resettled in Amarillo, Texas in 2000. They fled the Taliban in the middle of the night with only the clothes they wore. Their one thing was a photo of their father. (Produced for Weekend America w/ photo gallery.)
The stories of Burmese refugees, the Karen people, recorded in the camps on the Thailand-Burma border, and in their new American homes. Thru it all their music preserves their culture. Part of The Mountain Music Project.
The One Thing for the Augustin family was their home movies. Their religious beliefs forced them out of Iraq: Mom Nujood is a Chaldean Christian and Dad Abdullahad is a Latin Catholic. The Augustins left a comfortable life in Baghdad for Jordan, where limited opportunities siphoned much of their savings. They arrived in Detroit, where son Arkan takes pre-med courses at the local community college, while working part-time at a grocery store. (Produced for Weekend America: From Iraq to Detroit.)
Starting with the fall of Saigon in April 1975, refugees from Vietnam awaited approval to move to the US and other countries. By 1979, there were almost 62,000 Vietnamese in refugee camps, with more than 140,000 people displaced from Cambodia and Laos. Portland, Oregon, was one of the medium-sized US cities that dealt with the relatively sudden influx of every major ethnic group (Vietnamese, Lao, Hmong, Mein and Cambodian) from Southeast Asia. More than 25 former refugees were interviewed for radio piece, and movie below.
PRX brought enuf for the whole class: they’re now Sharing Pieces and spreading the sonic love, in players big:
and small:
Audio pieces at PRX now embeddable in blogs, websites, and sharable via FB, Twit, email and other socially transmitted media.
Another Radiolab video by Everynone, inspired on the Lab’s epsiode “Desperately Seeking Symmetry:
Filmmakers Will Hoffman, Daniel Mercadante, and Julius Metoyer III play with our yearning for balance, and reveal how beautiful imperfect matches can be.
Music: Sufjan Stevens “The Avalanche” (iTunes)
via storyful HTML5 & Public Media.
Technologists have identified the moment of conception, the instant life begins… for WordPress, that is.
Mike Little pinpoints this 2003-01-24 Matt Mullenweg blog-post as WP’s birth — Matt later updated it with: “This became WordPress.” More…
A friend found this literary gem of musical analysis:
An excerpt:
Wikipedia writes: “Bob Larson is an American radio and television evangelist.” Aka, in RationalWiki terms: “a notoriously sensationalist fundamentalist Christian windbag… He spent at least 1/3 of every show begging for money.”
WFMU has more Anti-Rock ‘n’ Roll Books.
Excellent essay on “The Power of Voice” by Siobhan McHugh. She shares a devastating tape-recording of Jan Graham, an Australian woman who reported the Vietnam War:
She wept as she told of finding the mutilated body of her lover, a Green Beret on surveillance with the US army. I offered to stop the tape, but she wanted to be purged of all the memories, and the worst was yet to come. Have a listen to the three minutes of tape here. It’s barely been edited, apart from where I shortened some of the pauses, as her grief was just unbearable:”
“Jan Graham” (3:18 mp3):
Then she compares that spoken version to the written text of it that appeared in the book Minefields and Miniskirts:
But when I wrote up the interview for a book, the flatness of the words on the page haunted me…
…Much more to read and think about in this Transom > Sidebar proclaiming “The Power of Voice.”
Coders, complete this sentence:
Some responses:
…when I was 11 so that I could beat my dad at Robot Battle.
…on the back side of punched cards on a UNIVAC 1100 as an intern at the Swedish Defence Central in the late 70s.
…making a website for my band that I wanted to be more dynamic.
…because I believed (and still do) it’s one of the best skills to have in order to change people’s live for the better.
…and it changed my life forever.
I learned to program… is a project of Ben Chun, who posted this call to coders on wp-hackers (WordPress maillist):
I’m a high school computer science teacher and I often have students who
want to hack on things like WordPress or other open-source projects, but they don’t see a path from where they are to that goal.So I started a web site for sharing how and why people started programming. Will you share your story? http://ilearnedtoprogram.com.
As the site has gotten more entries, I’ve been reminded of a bunch of fun things from my childhood. Maybe you’ll enjoy a trip down memory lane as well.
For more, see Ben’s post, “How did you learn to program? « And Yet It Moves.”
(FWIW, my answer:
I learned to program… to make web presentations of our public radio stories — now I do far more web and far less radio.)
Hearing Voices uses the WPAudioPlayer plug, which, since it’s Flash, the iPhone can’t see. But iPhone Safari is HTML 5 aware, and supports mp3 play. So here’s our quick&filthy fix. In the file: /plugins/audio-player/audio-player.php, find the: function getPlayer, and w/in that the variable: $playerCode. More…
Hearing Voices from NPR®
114 Psychological: States Of Mental Health
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-04-20
“Psychological” (52:00 mp3):
Three Diagnoses– Depression, Amnesia, Mental Breakdown (image: Rorschach test Card VI):
12-year-old Cameron Ledoux’s father doesn’t work, because of his deep depression. Cameron dialogs with his dad about the condition. Produced at The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies; broadcast by All In The Mind; podcast on Saltcast, with thie follow-up, “Sit With Me Again.” (Music: “Leaves Falling” by Lullatone from We Will Rock You… To Sleep: An Introduction to Lullatone).
A quest for amnesia victims — it happens a lot more in movies, books and TV shows than real life. An attempt to find someone who has really had amnesia, to give someone amnesia, and to get it. Aired on This American Life “Get Over It!” and “The Friendly Man.”
A sonic journey documenting one woman’s loss of reality and descent into mental breakdown; a first-person account, with the voices of her friends who witnessed her collapse. Available as an audiobook: “Breakdown and Back.”
A cover
From the Rauch Brothers‘s animations of StoryCorps pieces, “Germans in the Woods” (used in HV’s For the Fallen):
Germans in the Woods: Joseph Robertson was an infantryman in the U.S. Army during World War II, where he fought in the Battle of the Bulge. The stark black and white images in this short haunt the viewer, just as Robertson is haunted by his memories from that battle. (Directed by: The Rauch Brothers. Art Direction: The Rauch Brothers. Background Painting: Iandry Randriamandroso & Tim Rauch. Producers: Mike Rauch & Lizzie Jacobs. Animation: Tim Rauch. Audio Produced by: Michael Garofalo. Music: Fredrik. Label: The Kora Records. Publisher: House of Hassle.)
See all the animations: StoryCorps | Vimeo | YouTube.
“This is the web right now” —The Oatmeal. From Feeding Humans to Facebook to HTML5 Cheetah Balls, a series of cartoons on The State of the Web, including:
.
Hand-crafting Excerpts for Pages got a lot easier in in WordPress 3+. Put this in your functions.php:
add_post_type_support( 'page', 'excerpt' );
And voilà, an Excerpt textarea should now show on your Edit Page screen (make sure “Excerpt” is checked in Edit Page»Screen Options). To extract Pages’ Excerpts…
