The ZBS Foundation has long been at the forefront of the dramatic radio arts. Their podcast is a great survey of their audio excursions, mixing flights of fancy with real sound effects.
From the series Neighborhood Stories– Park Life, profiling the daily life of a community’s urban oasis: “Country Bobby” Lowry is the guardian of Walter Pierce Community Park in Washington, D.C. He’s been keeping an eye on the park for almost three decades, and knows more about how it than any city official — he knows the trees, the plants and the kids. In the first of four stories about the park, we meet this transplanted farm boy who never takes shortcuts in his work. See NPR’s has great photo gallery.
Utah’s Zion National Park draws 2.7 million visitors a year, and a major attraction for hearty hikers is a trek along the Grotto trailhead to Angel’s Landing. From the banks of the Virgin River, the yellow-and-red sandstone sides of Zion Canyon rise 2,000 feet. It feels like being inside a huge body. The canyon walls are the rib cage spread open and Angel’s Landing is like the heart.
From Neighborhood Stories– Park Life: An ode to Leah at Walter Pierce Community Park, who braids hair by the basketball court while the guys play 5 on 5.
Want an interview w/ Jay Thunderbolt, At-Home Strip Club Manager? Well, bring money. If you can’t, bring booze. But not beer: Jay drinks Tequila. And he’ll drink the whole bottle with you in a couple hours, while unleashing The Wisdom of Jay Thunderbolt.
His face looks like that b/c he was shot in the head and left for dead — at 11yo. How much is a dance? “$10 with the g-string on; $20 with it off. No licking, sticking, biting or slapping.”
The piece is a Love + Radio podcast (28min) with some wonderful moments. Jay’s “Things I do know…” is pure poetry, as is the original music score by Brendan Baker — love that “Doberman” mix near the top.
Leo Grillo locates lost pets in Los Angeles. He cares for animals, thousands of them. Today, his organization, D.E.L.T.A Rescue (Dedication and Everlasting Love to Animals), is the world’s largest animal rescue shelter.
A mid-90s visit to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Everyone knows this one of the places where the government developed the first atom bomb during World War II. But our host was interested in Chaos Theory, an elaborate mathematical description of turbulent systems like the weather, and possibly the stock market, and who knows what all else. Chaos Theory was all the rage in Los Alamos then. Along with the theory, it turned out there was also real chaos in Los Alamos. It was slinking up and down the streets late at night in the form of a feral dog. Produced for the radio series SoundPrint.
Just another Saturday night at the compound. ‘Course trouble’s nuthin’ new out here — this shot’s from Friday night: Black bear in neighbor’s tree, ’round midnight.
Several age-old questions have long plagued man’s mind. Today we discovered the definitive answer to one of them:
Q: Does a bear shit in the woods?
A. Yes. Quite a bit, especially during chokecherry season: Bear scat with ample amount of chokecherry seeds,
Bear Trap Canyon Wilderness, Madison River, Montana
Took this picture of two otters at Trout Lake in Yellowstone National Park. The one on the right is chowing down on a good-sized cutthroat trout: {click pic for full-size 80K image)
Bruce Davidson has been a member of the U.S. Equestrian Team since 1971. He’s a world class rider, trainer and breeder. NPR visited Chesterlands Farm, in Unionville, Pennsylvania, when Bruce Davidson and his horse JJ Babu were training for the 1984 L.A. Olympics (they won a Team Gold). David Molpus is now with Ideastream in Cleveland. The producer Carolyn Chadwick’s latest project is Conservation Sound.
Summer Bird, Rags to Riches, Empire Maker, Lemon Drop Kid, Colonial Affair, Thunder Gulch, those are some of the winners at the Belmont Stakes, the last leg of the Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing. In 1979, an army of NPR sound-recordists showed up trackside at Belmont Park, Long Island to document Spectacular Bid’s attempt to match Secretariat’s legend. Writer/Produced: Josh Darsa. Technical Director: Skip Pizzi, with Field Engineers: Paul Blackmore and Ceil Muller. Technical Assistance: John Widoff and Dave Glasser. Editorial Assistance: Neal Conan.
A new movie on MT mtn sheep-herders, “ Sweetgrass“:
An unsentimental elegy to the American West, “Sweetgrass†follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana’s breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture. This astonishingly beautiful yet unsparing film reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.
In Montana, a rabbi is an unusual sight. So when a Hasidic one walked into the State Capitol last December, with his long beard, black hat and long black coat, a police officer grabbed his bomb-sniffing German shepherd and went to ask the exotic visitor a few questions.
The start of this year’s camel racing season is just starting in the United Arab Eremites. In Australia the season ended a few weeks ago. Every year veteran camel trainer and jockey Glenda Sutton competes, and often wins. Photographer Tim Bonham caught up with her in Queensland, at the Boulia Camel Races.
PRI The World is featuring a superb audio-slideshow of the event; photos and audio by producer Tim Bonham, “Camel Jockey- Glenda Sutton” (3:33 mp3):
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.
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.
“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.”
“Glenda Sutton is a camel jockey.” She trains, rides and races the critters. Photographer Tim Bonham is mixing a radio story for us on Glenda, based on his superb photo-audio slideshow, “The Boulia Camel Races,” in his multimedia collection.
According to some estimates there are upwards of a million feral camels roaming the Australian outback. Some end up as meat, some are culled in a seemingly futile attempt to keep their numbers down, some ruin sacred aboriginal watering holes by drowning in them. A select few end up in the outback town of Boulia, Queensland to run in the most important camel race in Australia. Glenda Sutton is a camel jockey and talked to me about the nature of camels and what it’s like to hurtle down the racecourse on the back of one.
—Tim Bonham
Fuck You, Penguin is “a blog where I tell cute animals what’s what. Lotsa crazy critter pix like the aye-aye to the right (title of post: “Slow-burn cuteness: the silent killer”), and the zonkey below.
This 1980 classic radio doc from the NPR archives visits Cheyenne Frontier Days, “The Daddy of ’em All.”
Along the way, Darsa digs into the the history of the “cowboy,” mixing in the experiences of Baylis John Fletcher on an 1879 cattle drive, herding 2000 longhorns from Texas to Wyoming (read by Paul Blakemore from the book Up the trail in ’79.
And underscoring it all is the wild-west symphonies of Aaron Copland.
Josh Darsa wrote and narrated. The technical director and recording engineer was John Widoff, assisted by Miles Smith, Dave Glasser and shop technician Bob Butcher.
“While we were at the rodeo, Josh Darsa wanted to record multiple vantage points of a single scene. For instance, I’d have a Nagra tape recorder on the roof of the grandstand and Miles Smith would have a Nagra in the chutes where the riders would bust out for their ride. Then we would have a free-running Nagra III on the rodeo announcer. We ran them in sync kinda like you would do in video with multiple cameras. This gave us three vantage points. During the show you hear the perspective change through cross fading which is a result of these different but simultaneous perspectives.
There must have been 70 hours or more of tape we shot out there in Cheyenne and every single thing got dubbed. What you heard in the halls of the old NPR were rodeo sounds coming from RC1. Constant horses, bulls, things crashing, just all kinds of things. I think it drove people nuts hearing this stuff up and down the halls.
This was the height of my career at NPR. It was a combination of everything… the music recording, the production sound recording, interviews… every single thing that I had ever done for this company all came together in this show. This was probably how Walt Disney felt when he made Mary Poppins. It was a dream come true for me to build something like this. ‘Cowboy’ is the kind of show you would listen to in a darkened movie theatre. The writing is spectacular.”
–John Widoff, “‘Cowboy,’ a Study in Radio Tale-Telling” Read the entire interview.
The ZBS Foundation has long been at the forefront of the dramatic radio arts. Their podcast is a great survey of their audio excursions, mixing flights of fancy with real sound effects.
Check Podcast #8, “Weird Frogs” (7:55 mp3):
From Neighborhood Stories– Park Life: An ode to Leah at Walter Pierce Community Park, who braids hair by the basketball court while the guys play 5 on 5.
The NYTImes caught this canine-capitol-Chanukah connection: “
The start of this year’s camel racing season is just starting in the United Arab Eremites. In Australia the season ended a few weeks ago. Every year veteran camel trainer and jockey Glenda Sutton competes, and often wins. Photographer Tim Bonham caught up with her in Queensland, at the Boulia Camel Races.
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“While we were at the rodeo, Josh Darsa wanted to record multiple vantage points of a single scene. For instance, I’d have a Nagra tape recorder on the roof of the grandstand and Miles Smith would have a Nagra in the chutes where the riders would bust out for their ride. Then we would have a free-running Nagra III on the rodeo announcer. We ran them in sync kinda like you would do in video with multiple cameras. This gave us three vantage points. During the show you hear the perspective change through cross fading which is a result of these different but simultaneous perspectives.