Radio: Buffalo Soldiers in the National Parks

Interesting piece by Madison-based producer James Mills about the critical role that black American soldiers played in the establishment of the National Parks. It also goes into how segregation and racism has made blacks averse to visiting the Parks and wilderness in general in this country.

Listen to the whole episode.

Mills' piece is a few minutes in, but the entire hour is worth a listen.

Radio: A Life on Two Wheels

The Bike Show is always one of the most consistently great podcasts out there, but a few weeks ago, they swerved from their normal format of Jack Thurson presenting on this and that. Instead, production duties were handed over to Stewart Watt, who put together a very tender, ear-warming tribute to how cycling can very much influence who a person becomes.

Listen to A Life on Two Wheels >>.

Radio: The Bilingual Sparrow

Nature Stories, which was one of my favorite podcasts, is now sadly on indefinite hiatus.

Apparently the funding just isn't there, so they've halted on pushing out new works until they can find a new benefactor.

It's a real shame.

Anyway, I've been playing catch up with my podcast subscriptions over the last few days. Last night, I heard The Bilingual Sparrow, which is the penultimate Nature Stories piece.

Recorded in 1991 by, it's about a White Throated Sparrow in Central Park who can "speak" both his own language and, oddly, Black Throated Green Warbler. Crazy.

Listen to The Bilingual Sparrow (.mp3).

Radio: Matthew

One of the more tragic personal stories I've ever listened to. "Matthew" is a non-frills narrative of a life filled with an unceasing cycle of tragedy. Let's hope the heeling comes quick for Matthew.

At this point he revealed what was behind the mask, a face undergoing dramatic transformation through a series of surgeries. When we first met he’d already undergone a couple of surgeries and as I write this he is recovering from his ninth. I was honored that he trusted me enough to show me his face – he had never taken his mask off during the workshops.

Please have a listen/read more over at Transom.

Radio: Ghetto Life 101

Saltcast rebroadcasted (?) David Isay's incredible 1993 piece, Ghetto Life 101, as their 50th podcast. Congrats, Saltcast!

The piece is brutal & rich. Make sure you listen. Also, subscribe to Saltcast. It's good radio, often by newbies, weekly.

Listen to Ghetto Life 101.

Radio: Allan Gurganus reflects on the American South

Really interesting live session - writer Allan Gurganus listening and responding to radio pieces on the American South. He has some great insight and you can tell that he really loves audio storytelling.

Subjects range from rebel yells to Thelonious Monk to catnip gardening to more.

This was recorded part of the Listening Institute that happened back in November as a collaboration between The Duke Center for Documentary Studies and Third Coast International Audio Festival.

Listen to the piece (.mp3).

Radio: Too Much Information

Finding Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything was one of the more watersheddy moments when I started listening to radio seriously a handful of years ago. It was this weird, jittery mix of things, not unlike a less broody Joe Frank. A lot of times, I had trouble discerning what was truth and what wasn't. It was a gorgeous, neurotic mess.

After TOE stopped airing, I thought Walker had evaporated into the radio waves with it.

Not so.

Late last year, Walker surfaced with a new radio program, Too Much Information, on WFMU in New York. It's just as tangential, mixing narrative and interview to tell stories just unconvincing enough that you have to trust their authenticity (yes, it's that kind of conundrum).

The Jan 4 episode, for example, spans these topics

• KKK members using Christmas lights as fake flames on crosses
  
• Gold as currency
• Religion as mental illness
• Using DDT to kill bedbugs

And that's really just the tip of a very wonderful iceberg.

Do yourself a favor &....

Go listen to Too Much Information.

(photo by flickr.com/wayneandwax)

Radio: 200 Shaves a Day

Thanks to my buddies at Throps in Madison for indirectly reminding me that I'd been meaning to blog about 200 Shaves a Day. It's a radio documentary that aired a while back on RTÉ in Ireland.

It tells the story of a barber and musician Larry Hingerton and how he spent his life balancing his career and hobby. Trust me, it's way more interesting than any lame description I could offer up.

Oh, the photo above is taken from a really awesome gallery on Flickr called The Lonely Barber. You should check that out too.

Listen to 200 Shaves a Day.

Radio: Utah’s Dark Triangle

Short (7min) Nature Stories piece about how light pollution is fucking up the circadian rhythm of animals in the National Parks. This, in turn, is wreaking serious havoc on biodiversity and ecologic integrity.

The piece is focused on Utah’s Dark Triangle. Scientists are using the fact that you can still see the Milky Way there as motivation for locals to help reduce light pollution.

Produced by Ross Chambless.

Listen to Utah’s Dark Triangle.

Radio: Jihadi Cool

There was a good story called Jihadi Cool: Terrorist Recruiters' Latest Weapon on NPR's Morning Edition today. It talks about a new generation of "lazy Muslims" who are drawn to extremism not because of religious fervor, but because of the allure of guns, women, and "coolness".

Listen to Jihadi Cool

WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts

Listen to WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts

In 1955, Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, with financial help from Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson, started American's first all-female radio station, WHER.

It should be significantly noted that Phillips sold his rights to Elvis's music to fund the station. He also refused to play Sun recordings or any other rock and roll on air.

The Kitchen Sisters produced this piece for the Lost & Found Sound program, but I just heard it for the first time on Hearing Voices. The archival clips are somewhat discomforting. But they really illustrate how women were perceived/ how they presented themselves back then.

Despite that, the WHER "girls" were waaaay ahead of their time, doing things in quietly radical ways.

Listen to WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts.

Radio: Hidden World of Girls

The Kitchen Sisters just launched a new series on NPR called Hidden World of Girls. If you know The Kitchen Sisters' work, you know how spare, moving, and real it is. This one sounds like it will be no different.

If you know where to look, there's a hidden world of girls — and the women they become. Their stories are everywhere, but they don't always get to tell them. There are stories of coming of age, rituals and rites of passage, secret identities — of women who crossed a line, blazed a trail or changed the tide.

Listen to a preview of Hidden World of Girls.

Radio: New Third Coast website

If the particular rock you're living under prevents you from hearing about the great launches of great new websites for the greatest audio arts organizations in these great United States, well, then you likely haven't heard about the new great internet face of the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

Go poke around. It's, um...great. While you're there, listen to the Three Records From Sundown pieces, about Nick Drake & Sun Ra.

Radio: Never Whack

Cool piece, albeit rock-in-your-shoeish piece about on the Duke Center for Documentary Studies podcast with George O'Neal from Lil' Farm in Carrboro, NC.

George talks about punk rock farming. He also talks about how most back-to-landers, or those who dream of being or have their kids being, are misguidedly idealistic (he'd rather have parents wish big wieners on their sons than careers as organic farmers) and farcical. But how that may not be the worst thing in the world.

Listen to Never Whack.

Radio: Last Words

A great radio piece from Youthcast about the violence, humiliation, and inspiration of the dying language of the Hopi Indians.

Listen to Last Words.

2009 TC / Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition

On the Third Coast International Audio Festival website, you can now stream all the 2009 TC / Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition winning stories.

I've heard a number of the pieces (and even wrote about Hamish Sewell's piece almost exactly a year ago) and am excited to dive in and listen to the rest. Join me.

grasshopper mouse

The genus Onychomys

contains species commonly referred to as grasshopper mice.

#

Hear Jeff Rice's Hearing Voices/Nature Stories story

The Mouse That Roars(mp3)

Battle Flagging Father

I've talked about Hamish Sewell's radio documentary, Battle Flagging Father, a lot lately. It follows a really strange family journey that begins and ends in the small mindedness of the confederate American south.

Here's a more official description of the story:

Earlier this year Brisbane based writer and radio documentary maker Hamish Sewell travelled to Alabama in the American 'Deep South' to meet his estranged father for the first time in more than 30 years. This tentative reconciliation had to bridge not only a distance of many thousands of kilometres and a lifetime of separation, but the profound gulf between their values and understandings of history, symbolised by the giant Confederate flag (the 'Battle Flag' of the American South) hanging on Jim Sewell's front porch. The gulf between father and son is all the more profound when you know that Hamish's mother was a prominent New Zealand feminist and a senior government bureaucrat.

Set against the re-enactment of a Civil War battle, and the last stages of the Democratic Party's presidential primaries campaign, Battle Flagging Father is the story of what happens when two very different worlds collide, and an intimate portrait of two men attempting to reach out across a great divide.

Sometimes you just have to look the other way if you want to connect.

Go to the Radio Eye site to see hear the story and look at photos.