The finalists have been announced in the Radio-Mercury Awards for radio spots. A couple of my faves:
Client: The Canyons Resort
Agency: Crowell Advertising
Spot Title: “Do It” (1:00 mp3):
Client: State Fair Of Virginia
Agency: Siddall
Spot Title: “Yesterday” (1:00 mp3):
On WFMU’s Beware of the Blog is an ATC Theme Overload. More than a dozen mp3s of the All Things Considered “dinks,” along w/ a link to listener suggested lyrics.
There’s the seminal sappy synth:
“ATC Theme- 1971 original” (1:52 mp3):
The breathy brass of the:
“ATC Theme- Washington Saxophone Quartet” (0:29 mp3):
To which we’ll add our own:
“ATC Theme- Dinky the Dingo” by Larry Massett (2:12 mp3):
Hearing Voices from NPR®
059 War Memorial: Return to Vietnam
Host: Alex Chadwick of Interviews 50 Cents
Airs week of: 2011-05-25 (Originally: 2009-05-20)
“War Memorial” (52:00 mp3):
For Memorial Day, two stories recorded in Vietnam, one after the war, and one during:
In 1966, a young Lance Corporal carried a reel-to reel tape recorder with him into Vietnam. He made tapes of his friends, of life in fighting holes, of combat; and he continued to record until, two months later, when he was killed in action. Friend and fellow marine, Tim Duffie, remembers him in “The Vietnam Tapes of Michael A. Baronowski,” produced by Jay Allison and Christina Egloff for Lost & Found Sound. NPR: story | response | credits/links; American RadioWorks: transcript; Lance Cpl Baronowski: Memorial.
Host Alex Chadwick first went to Southeast Asia was as a soldier in the Sixties. Two decades later, he made a “Return to Vietnam” as a journalist, on the anniversary of the Tet offensive, to find what had and hadn’t changed since the war (producer: Art Silverman, engineer: Flawn Williams).
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):
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.
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“.)
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.
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.
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.
“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.
–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…
Hearing Voices from NPR®:
055 WordshakerS: For Poetry Month
Host: Andrei Codrescu of NPR / Exquisite Corpse
Airs week of: 2012-04-04 (Originally: 2009-04-01)
Wordshakers (52:00 mp3):
Poetry Grits Glory Verve:
POETRY is a discourse
and we its discouragees.
Lord Alfred Tennyson bangs the podium in “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (from the book/CD set Poetry Speaks).
Thomas Edison waxes Walt Whitman’s “America” (Poetry Speaks).
Cheerleaders Chant” a found-poem (CD: The United States Of Poetry, part of the USOP project).
If it’s a worldwide depression, everyone is depressed.
Ah, but try to run a gypsy through the ruins of time.
Host Andrei Codrescu decontructs his “Poetry.” Codrescu assembles The Exquisite Corpse (a Journal of Life and Letters), and is an NPR commentator.
Denise Levertov knows “The Secret” (Poetry Speaks).
Carl Sandburg wonders “What is Poetry?” (produced by Barrett Golding).
Scott Carrier presents the categorical conundrum of “Alex Caldiero- Poet?”
Ed Sanders (fmr Fug) poses “A Question of Fame,” off his CD Thirsting for Peace.
My publisher says “At some people’s readings
the crowd goes out and buys their books.
At yours they run out and steal them.”
For a recent This American Life, “The Inauguration Show,” I was among several producers TAL asked “all over the country to go out and talk to people about what they’re thinking as Barack Obama gets ready to take office.” From the dozens of hours of interviews, they crafted another fine TAL hour.
I went to our state capital, Helena MT, to talk to citizens, and to the “citizen-legislators” now in session. (The Montana legislature meets only 90 days every two years, so our reps are real folk most of the time and only part-time pols.)
I’m posting a few of the more fascinating MT voices which couldn’t fit in the TAL episode. Each offers a singular vision of political history:
State Representative Brady Wiseman
(D– Bozeman MT)
“They have eaten out our essence…” (1:38 mp3):
State Senator Jonathan Windy Boy
(D– Box Elder MT)
“Natural Law” (1:20 mp3):
State Representative Janna Taylor
(R– Dayton MT)
“Not Substance, Appearance” (1:19 mp3):
Bishop David Eslick
Worship House of the Rockies, Helena MT
“Jesus Is Coming” (1:19 mp3):
(more) Rep. Brady Wiseman
“Jubiliee” (1:03 mp3):
Brady is a friend and a real big-picture person. We’ll be posting a longer vers of his interview soon, with transcript, cuz I think people should hear what this guy has to say.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
054 Food Fight: The Dark Side of the Muffin
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-11-17 (Originally: 2009-03-25)
“Food Fight” (52:00 mp3):
Serving a savory mix of these Ingredients (photo © Hildie Golding):
“Eat the damn cheese,” sez Carolyn Hopewell in the web series Chesty Morgan’s Forbidden Love.
A Chinese student, Mr. Yen Ching, shares with host Larry Massett his recipe for cooking “Carp” and escaping communism.
Young Palestinian-American Rocky Tayeh, from WNYC Radio Rookies, fights food in “My Struggle with Obesity.” More…
Hearing Voices from NPR®
053 Ranchers: Life, Death, Land, and Livestock
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-02-09 (Originally: 2009-03-18)
“Ranchers” (52:00 mp3):
Cattle and sheep, wool and meat:
Our host documents a year on a Roxanne Linderman’s Montana sheep ranch, raising, lambing, herding, shearing, and selling sheep.
Click thru our audio-viz gallery of sheep-shearer Jerry Iverson’s ranch paintings.
Composer Phillip Bimstien made music with the voice of his neighbor, a Rockville, Utah cattleman, in “Garland Hirschi’s Cows
Lili Olsen, 3-years-old, takes us around her New Hampshire farm, recorded by Jason Rayles.
The late Attilio Genasci, interviewed for this story at age 97, held onto his California alpine-valley cattle ranch. Produced for the Nature Conservancy’s Stories from Heart of the Land and Saving the Sierra.
Nine former prisoners describe their experiences in solitary confinement. Produced for the STOPMAX project and video, working to end cruel treatment of prisoners. (Voices: Robert Dellelo, Munirah El-Bomani, Tommy Escarcega, Ray Luc Levasseur, King Arch Angel, Hakeem Shaheed, Bilal Sunni-Ali, Laura Whitehorn, Robert King Wilkerson.) Aired on NPR Day to Day; by producer Claire Schoen, “Solitary Confinement” (7:19 mp3):
Guide Jane Mills take us on a night tour inside the walls of Port Arthur, Tasmania’s former convict settlement and notorious 19th century penitentiary, now one of Australia’s top tourist attractions. Aired on PRI The World; by producer Jake Warga, “Ghostly Prison- Tasmania” (2:49 mp3):