ear crack

modern radio drama

2011-02-14T13:58:00.002-05:00

I wrote an essay about radio drama that just appeared on the Transom website. It explains what we're trying to do with our radio project The Truth, and why.

Click here to read the full article.

Modern Radio Drama - by Jonathan Mitchell
A champion of modern radio dramas, producer Jonathan Mitchell writes, "the fact of the matter is, radio drama is almost non-existent on public radio. And this is a little odd when you consider how good radio is at telling stories."

5 questions about Eat Cake

2010-07-22T19:39:00.006-04:00

A got an email not too long ago from Andrea Silenzi, a fellow radio producer who is teaching a radio drama class to high school students at 826 Chicago, that city's branch of the Dave Eggers-created 826 Valencia writing center.

Her students listened to my piece Eat Cake, and afterwards she had them write out questions for me. Here's the piece in it's original January 2009 broadcast on Weekend America:

Here is what the students asked:

1. What motivated you to make this story?

In Nov 2008, I got an email from Hillary Frank, who was working as an editor on the program Weekend America. She asked me to pitch something to the show. I was dying to do more radio drama, and Hillary has lots of experience writing fiction, so I thought she'd be an ideal editor to work with on a short radio drama piece. She told me that Weekend America was receptive to fiction, and it would be easiest to do something if I could "peg" it to something that was happening the weekend it aired, a holiday for example.

I looked at the calendar, at the end of January and beginning of February (because that's how long I thought it would take me to do a piece), and I looked for what I might be able to use as a peg. Valentine's Day is February 14th. Perfect.

I pitched them on the idea of developing something with improvisors. I've had a long interest in improv, I've taken lots of improv classes, and I'd become familiar with an incredibly talented improvisor named Eliza Skinner whose voice I thought would be perfect for public radio. My idea was to make a story with her and a few other improvisors based on the theme of "being alone on Valentine's Day." Most of my radio work has been more documentary-oriented, and I was interested in applying some of the techniques I'd used in documentary to make fiction, and I thought that working with improvisors was a good way to tap into that.

I cast the story before I knew what the story would be, and we built it around the performers I chose. I first just brought them into a studio with no preconceptions, and recorded them improvising all kinds of different scenarios, trying this idea and that idea, everything we could think of. After four solid hours of this we didn't have much. What was I thinking? This was not working.

I went home depressed, and listened to all of the tape. I heard one idea in there that I thought might work. We'd hit upon this idea of Valentine's Day traditions, and having some sort of anti-Valentine's Day tradition. I mentioned this to Hillary, who said, "what if you have two characters with competing traditions?" And I said, "how about one of them always calls people at random on Valentine's Day?" and we were off. I took the idea to the improvisors, and we played out the scenario in lots of different ways. I took that tape, edited it (a lot!), heard changes that needed to be made, brought the improvisors back again and we recorded pickups and new scenes. That's how the piece got written, going back and forth like that. We had four recording sessions in all.

The story came out of the process of collaboration. It doesn't sound improvised so much in the end because it's very tightly & thoroughly edited, but absolutely nothing you hear was scripted.

Incidentally, after the 2nd recording session, we found out that Weekend America was cancelled. The last show was to be January 30th, two weeks before our scheduled air date. Luckily, they let me do the piece anyway, and it aired on Weekend America's final broadcast (even though Valentine's Day was still two weeks away).

2. What was your favorite part to make?

I wouldn't say there's one scene or part of this that was more fun than another. Everything has its challenges and rewards. Overall, I'd say my favorite part was finishing the piece, because up until that point, I had no idea if it would even work as a story or not. I find making these kinds of stories to be such a delicate balance, one false note and you can lose your audience. It was a big relief to end up with something we all liked, that felt bouyant and cohesive, and that was actually going to air after all that. It always feels really good to finish something.

I also really enjoyed the casting process, Eliza was a big help with that, she introduced me to Birch Harms and Curtis Gwinn. Working with good performers makes everything easier.

3. Which scene was the most difficult to produce?

The most difficult aspect of this piece was figuring out how to make Eliza's switch from "creeped-out " to "intrigued" believable, and how to do that in a very short span of time. When Brian says he never meets the people he talks to in person, Eliza came up with this great line, "how do you know?" I think she really saved the piece with just that one line.

4. How do you picture Brian? Is he nerdy but secretly handsome? Or is he just nerdy, but that's Elizabeth's type?

I think the beauty of radio is that we each get to decide that kind of stuff for ourselves as individual listeners. Listening to the radio is a constant reconciliation between what we are told and what we imagine. What we're not told adds up to something in our heads based on what we are told, and because radio has no pictures, what it adds up to is often very different from person to person.

When Eliza says, "I didn't think you'd be blonde," that just came from the fact the Birch really does have blonde hair, she was just reacting honestly to the situation as an improvisor.

I think notions like "handsome" and "beautiful" are very subjective, and the truly important thing here is that the characters were right for each other. Elizabeth & Brian happened to click and be on the same wavelength, and they were really lucky that they liked each other even more after they met. It's hard to explain why that ever happens.

5. How authentic were the sounds you used? Were they all recordings of real places and actions?

Almost the entire story was recorded in a studio, with three mics (AKG 414's), one on each performer. I had the luxury of isolation booths, so each of the performers had their own track, which could be edited independently of the others with no bleed-though. This made working from improvisations MUCH easier.

There are two exceptions to this: At the beginning, when Eliza is talking to her cat, we recorded that down the hall from the studio, where there was a small kitchen area. And then when she's outside and yells "taxi" we recored that out on the street.

These days, my preference is to record on-location. But in the case of this piece, it was easier to do it in a studio because we were doing so much improvising, and we didn't always know what location we'd need. All the stuff that sounds like it's coming over a phone line was recorded through a studio mic and then processed & eq'd later to sound as though it were over the phone, with the exception of the random strangers Brian is calling in his exposition section. All of the ambience, sound effects and music were done in post-production. I wrote all of the music myself, and most of the sound effects came from commercially available sound effects libraries.

old artist diptych

2009-03-14T11:27:00.009-04:00

I have a new piece on Studio 360 this weekend. I interviewed two artists (Betty Woodman and Taylor Mead) who have little in common except their age. In the piece, they give their individual reflections on spending a lifetime as an artist.

eat cake

2009-01-31T16:39:00.002-05:00

I produced and directed this radio fiction piece, which features performances by Eliza Skinner, Birch Harms, and Curtis Gwinn. We developed the story by recording and editing improvisations over the course of several weeks. It aired this weekend on Weekend America's final broadcast. Enjoy!

washing lint

2008-06-21T17:56:00.002-04:00

My cat is famous.
Courtesy of my friend Sally.

wordless music

2008-06-05T13:21:00.003-04:00

The four-hour radio series I made about the Wordless Music concerts in New York is airing this month on WNYC. You can listen to it here.

Jad Abumrad hosts the programs, I wrote & produced. They are based around live recordings that WNYC made of several concerts from the Wordless Music series that took place last fall.

The Wordless Music Series pairs rock and electronic musicians with more traditional chamber and new music performers, to create an entirely new concert experience. As Wordless Music opens on a new season, WNYC presents four one-hour specials that highlight and underscore the ground-breaking '07-'08 season, hosted by Radio Lab's Jad Abumrad.

The shows are music/documentary hybrids, with pieces that support the live performances and explore some of the issues that the concert series raises, particularly the relationship between classical music and pop. Guests on the shows include Meredith Monk and David Lang, with music from Beruit, Do Make Say Think, Electrik Company, Nico Muhly, Sandro Perri, Hauschka, Torngat, John Adams & Gavin Bryars.

Enjoy!

free agent

2008-03-12T17:12:00.002-04:00

As of now, I am officially no longer an employee of Fair Game.

I left my job there so that I could get back to doing more documentary and music work. There are lots of new and exciting things on the horizon, I'll post more here as they happen along...

In the meantime, I'll be working on a limited series (4 episodes) for WNYC based on the Wordless Music concert series in New York. They'll be music show/documentary hybrids, with full musical selections accompanied by short documentary-type pieces that support the music.

walter ruttman's weekend

2008-02-08T14:52:00.000-05:00

I just found this blog post from my friend Jesse Shapins, who is at Harvard working on a doctorate in urban documentation (that's not the exact name of the degree, it's just my understanding of what it is). Last semester, he wrote a paper on Walter Ruttmann, whose work I spoke about at my Union Docs talk last August. Click on the links below for a pdf of his paper. Here's a copy of his blog post:

The subject of the first paper was inspired directly by the presentation of Jonathan Mitchell in The Documentary Bodega Audio Series (thanks UD & Jonathan!). This essay explores Walter Ruttmann’s 1930 experimental radio documetnary Weekend. In particular, as I write, my aim here is to develop an analysis of Weekend in the context of the discourse of documentary arts, sensorial experience, and urban representation. While groundbreaking on many fronts, I am most interested in Ruttmann’s attempt to represent the urban experience in a purely sonic form through documentary recordings. For as Fran Tonkiss writes, “The modern city, for all that there is to see, is not only spectacular: it is sonic.” It is precisely this interplay between the visual and the aural in the context of urban space and its representation through montage that makes Ruttmann’s work so compelling. While my analysis focuses on Ruttmann’s Weekend, I also travel through the work and theory of other avant-garde critics and artists of the time, especially Rudolf Arnheim, Dziga Vertov, Alfred Döblin, and Walter Benjamin. Recent research into the role of the senses in experiencing place conducted in geography and neuroscience helps further develop the framework for my theoretical arguments. Cultural geographer Gerald Pocock writes, “[Sound] is dynamic: something is happening for sound to exist. It is therefore temporal, continually and perhaps unpredictably coming and going, but it is also powerful, for it signifies existence, generates a sense of life, and is a special sensory key to interiority.” It is the auditory faculty’s unique “key to interiority” that can be developed through temporary blindness that grounds my final argument about the new subjectivity suggested by Ruttmann’s Weekend.

You can read listen to the piece and read the whole paper online or download a PDF.

no comment

2008-01-24T11:45:00.000-05:00

I finally break my blogging silence to bring you this...

new toy

2007-09-10T01:05:00.000-04:00

I've been working on this score for a television documentary, and I decided that I'm going to need a broader palate of sounds. So last week I bought a set of fairly realistic orchestra samples. I have it all set up so I can record the instruments directly into Pro Tools. I played with it all weekend, just to get to know the software and see what it's capable of doing. This is what I ended up with:

powered by ODEO

If you have trouble getting the flash player to work, try clicking on this sentence.

new news

2007-08-19T12:07:00.000-04:00

There are a few things that have been going on lately that I'd like to share with you all...

Item #1 - Union Docs
I'm going to be giving a talk at Union Docs next Sunday, August 26th at 7pm, part of their Documentary Bodega series. I'll be discussing the idea of documentary as a musical artform, and my talk will include work by Walter Ruttmann, Glenn Gould, and Steve Reich. The address is 322 Union Avenue, in Brooklyn. Click here for directions. Admission is $8. Come check it out if you can!

Item #2 - PRX's mp3 downloads
Ear Crack the downloadable mp3 collection is here! PRX has started an mp3 label, and one of their offerings is a collection of my work. You can check it out here or here. They also offer collections of other producers' work, including Jake Warga, Benjamin Walker, Dmae Roberts, Long Haul Productions, and Love & Radio, to name a few. Check out their whole catalogue here.

Item #3 - Half-time
Starting Sept 1st, I'll be half-time at Fair Game. I was really missing doing documentaries (and other non-comedy related stuff), so I decided to start using half of my week to produce work for other shows again. My first project will be the sound design and musical score for a television documentary that will air as an episode of Nova on PBS in January 2008. I'll post more details when I can.

That's it for now. Hopefully I'll be posting more often when I'm back to freelancing again, so keep checking in!

my brilliant niece

2007-07-13T23:09:00.000-04:00

jim henson was awesome

2007-07-05T10:22:00.000-04:00

The Tonight Show would never ever feature something like this now, but in 1974 things were much different. That's when they featured Jim Henson performing this very surreal, adult, and un-Muppet puppet show. Raymond Scott composed the score (you can hear a few bars from "Soothing Sounds for Baby" in there).

The sound is a bit muffled on the high end, so you'll want to turn your speakers up a bit for this, or eq it if you can...

good times

2007-06-03T09:17:00.000-04:00

There's a really nice article about Fair Game in the New York Times today. I'm really excited about this because a lot of people will see it. My dad even gets the Sunday NYT, and he lives in the middle of Illinois. The title of the article is a bit unfortunate, but the piece itself is very positive. Here's what they say about Faith (our host):

What makes her stand out on public radio is her down-to-earth approach. She doesn’t hold back on genuine (read nonjournalistic) gasps of “Oh my God” astonishment or delight.

But the really exciting news for us is this:

“Fair Game” is making inroads in the highly traditional world of public radio, but slowly. A spokesman for WNYC, which bumped “On Point” for “Fair Game,” said the new show had improved ratings in its time slot, but wouldn’t give specific numbers. At KERA in Dallas “Fair Game” replaced “BBC World Service” at 11 p.m. and has raised listenership by 58 percent. KERA initially heard grumbling from people who missed the BBC, said the station’s program director, Jeff Ramirez, but now “the main complaint is that people wish it were on earlier.”

We also had a good write-up in Time Out New York this week, so overall it's been a good week for us, publicity-wise. In all honesty, I think the show keeps sounding better and better, so if you haven't heard it in a while, give it a listen!

Click on this sentence to read the whole article.

if you have come to complain, there's a better place to go (and no, it's not hell)

2007-03-11T09:24:00.000-04:00

Producing a new show from scratch is challenging, and often very rewarding. I really enjoy figuring out what works, what doesn't, how to fix it... alongside more practical matters like, how to get that all done before 7:00pm every day.

And through the wonder of the internets, you can measure your show's impact on the listening audience. It's true. Just read this. And this. Some people like the show. Others don't. Some even imagine that one of our writers Brian Donovan resembles a handheld device or implement, perhaps used to hammer nails or saw wood. (He's actually a very nice and talented guy).

Some people have even taken to leaving their comments on the quality of our radio program here, on this very blog. But alas, I'd like to keep this more of a personal space, a place where I can post my side projects, or info on radio pieces airing. (btw, City X aired in Minnessota this week!)

So... If by chance you have stumbled upon this blog and don't know me, and you have some kind of complaint about the radio show "PRI's Fair Game with Faith Salie" (which I happen to be working on at the moment), kindly do not post to this blog. Or at the very least, don't do it anonymously -- criticism is meaningless without the context of knowing what a person typically likes or dislikes. There are some people whose negative opinion of my work I would take as a supreme compliment. But if you feel the urge, you can always vent your frustrations here:

morefairgame.org

If I already know you personally, and you have something you want to tell me about the show, please by all means do. But send it to my personal email account. Only do this if I ALREADY KNOW YOU.

Thanks,

The Managment

P.S. Sorry I haven't been posting in months, starting a new show like this is very time consuming. I hope to be posting more frequently soon. Finishing up a pop song that I'll post exclusivly to this blog, PLUS more videos of cats and babies, and maybe even some animation for your amusement!!! Stay tuned....

more fair game

2006-12-02T09:13:00.000-05:00

This comment was just posted to my blog:

Wow. Just heard my first episode of Fair Game on KUOW tonight. This has to be the worst new show on public radio that I've heard since...hmmmm, was Rush Limbaugh ever on public radio? Basically, Fair Game is identical to Rush except that it appeals with the same mindless enthusiasm to idiots on the left.

Colleges! Sign up now for a speakers debate between Rush and Faith: Idiotic spew from people who don't know any better for their dumb little choirs.

Best,

jim

This was posted to the entry labeled "Fair Game". I deleted the comment, because it seems mean-spirited and it doesn't appear to be from anyone I know personally. But in retrospect maybe I just should have left it. Doesn't matter now, because I'm featuring it in this post.

This is an ongoing issue for us -- how to keep the show balanced, while also making it relevant, and funny in an intelligent way. Some epsiodes we achieve this better than others. But we've only just begun, and we're still learning. It's good to know that there are people who are hearing a bias, because this is clearly a problem and something we want to avoid in the future. I just wish some people were more polite about voicing their concerns, ya know? We work pretty hard.

What do the rest of you think?
(UPDATE: On second thought, I think we should leave that question rhetorical)

If you'd like to give it a listen, our fifth show ever was produced this week. You can hear it by clicking on this sentence.
(UPDATE: the show is sounding much better now than it did then. To hear the latest show, go to Itunes or morefairgame.org)

P.S. I just created a new myspace page, for my little pop song things I make. All the songs there can be heard here too, but on myspace you can see a cool picture of Super Grover as my profile pic. Check it out!

americana

2006-11-18T09:34:00.000-05:00

I'm going to make a confession, and this is not going to be pretty, folks. I went through a phase in college when I was a real snob about music. Basically, I thought anything that was really accessible was too easy to write, and therefore bad. I was wrong. And I'm so relieved that I was wrong, because I was missing out on some pretty amazing music.

John Corigliano is a composer who I missed out on during that time. Now I realize how great he really is. He's even won a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar, which ought to count for something. About a year ago, I met with him to talk about one of his major influences (and a composer who I always loved, even when I was in college): Aaron Copeland. The piece I produced from the interview is airing on Studio 360 this weekend.

You can hear it by clicking on this sentence.

Also this week, our third ever Fair Game episode aired.
You can hear it by clicking on this sentence.
This being a new show, I'd be really interested in any feedback you have...

(bad kitten + toilet paper) X radio show = no life

2006-11-11T09:22:00.000-05:00

Wow it's been a while since I posted anything here. But I have a good excuse because I've been crazy busy. The new radio show (Fair Game) is eating up all of my life time these days, our second episode ever just aired this week.

You can hear it by clicking on this sentence.

Highlights include:

- our host Faith saying funny stuff (she's so smart)
- new music from The Cardigans performed live in studio!
- a piece I produced with Gideon Evans about a new TV show he's creating that promises to be a HUGE hit
- our new theme music - composed by ME!

We have a temporary website right now if you want to learn more about the show. It can be found here.

In other news, I was at the Third Coast Festival a few weeks back. I even have a picture to prove it:

(photo by John Barth)

I gave a talk at the festival about sound design. You can hear it by clicking on this sentence.

Oh yeah, and I have a new roommate. Her name is Lint.

you turn me on i'm a radio

2006-10-06T22:05:00.000-04:00

I was once mistaken for Joni Mitchell. It's true.

And today, the whole story of how this happened was broadcast nationally on the radio. My friend Sally interviewed me for a piece she produced for Marketpace. The part in the piece where I talk is pretty short, but even so it's very exciting to be on the other side of the mic for a change.

You can hear the piece by clicking on this sentence.

My moment of glory is about 2 minutes in...

michel gondry

2006-09-22T18:03:00.001-04:00

I had always heard that Spike Jonze (the guy who directed Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) was a really great music video director, but I'd never seen any of his videos. So one day I was at the video store, and I noticed a collection of his work, and I rented it. His videos were very entertaining, and I noticed it was part of a series of collections of music videos by various directors. So I decided to look at the next one on the shelf, which happened to be a collection of Michel Gondry's work. I'd never heard of Michel Gondry, but the cover of the DVD had Legos on it, which was a big plus...

Now, you have to understand, I've never been a big fan of music videos, I think most of them are pretty boring. But when I started watching Gondry's work, I was taken with it right away. I'd never seen any of it before, I didn't even know it existed. But every one of his videos was based on a really clever, beautiful, and brilliant visual concept.

He made a video palindrome for the Cibo Mato song "Sugar Water." The screen is divided in half, and the right half is just the left half played backwards, yet the whole thing comes together to tell a story.

Another video, for "Star Guitar" by The Chemical Brothers, is simply looking out the window of a moving train, but Gondry uses digital effects to sychronize the passing landscape to the music.

A lot of his work uses stop motion animation. In this video for "Fell in Love with a Girl" by the White Stripes, he animates with Legos. (Legos, by the way, are one of the great inventions of modern man)

The DVD also includes several short films and commercials he directed, along with a well-made 70 minute documentary about his work. I loved it so much that I went out the next day and bought it. It's the first DVD I ever purchased, and for a long while it was the only DVD I owned.

I became very interested in Gondry's work (which includes the films Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and suggested to Studio 360 that it might be fun to do a piece about him (this was about a year ago). I contacted his publicist, and of course they wanted to wait for his movie to come out (so that, like, 500 pieces about him would appear all at once...). But I kept up correspondence with them, and three weeks ago I finally got to meet him. We spent an hour talking about all kinds of things, mostly his new film The Science of Sleep. The completed segment is airing this weekend on Studio 360.

You can hear the segment by clicking on this sentence.

In the piece, he talks about how he really just started doing all this creative stuff to meet girls, and that it turned out to maybe not be the best strategy after all... but still has its rewards nonetheless.

At the end of the interview, I asked him to sign my DVD (just couldn't help myself). He told me that my request was very unprofessional, and then said (in his thick French accent), "but, you know, in French, amateur means 'lover of things'..." So I guess that eased my embarrasment a little. And then he signed my DVD, even drew a little picture. Here's what it looks like:

sweet 16

2006-09-22T17:45:00.000-04:00

The third of the pieces I worked on for Time Magazine is online now. It's actually the first piece I did for them (it's also the one I did the most work on), but I think they pushed the date back on it to coincide with back-to-school. They sent a photographer (Lauren Fleishman) and an audio recordist to a Sweet Sixteen party in Long Island, and I edited together a multimedia slideshow from the material they collected.

Basically, the story is that this girl had a 16th brithday party that was on the scale of many weddings, courtesy of her parents. And now, courtesy of Time, you can experience the joy of adolescent indulgence. Enjoy!

fair game

2006-09-17T10:17:00.000-04:00

So it's finally official, we've just announced our new project for PRI. It's a nightly comedy/variety show for public radio hosted by Faith Salie. I really wanted to call it "The Faith Salie Experience," but no one else agreed. Instead we're calling it "Fair Game." My job title is Consulting Producer, and I'll be working on the show until the end of November, so my full time involvement is temporary. Look for the show to start airing in NYC & other selected cities in November, with an official national lauch in January. Here's the first part of the press release, the part that describes the show:

MINNEAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 7, 2006--Public Radio International (PRI) announces the creation of "Fair Game from PRI with Faith Salie," a high energy, interactive news and entertainment program produced by PRI and based in New York. Slated to premiere nationally this fall, "Fair Game" is hosted by the irreverent Faith Salie, Harvard alumna, Rhodes Scholar and star of "Significant Others," Bravo's critically acclaimed improvisational sitcom. With "Fair Game," PRI again moves the industry in a new direction, designing the hour-long weekday evening program as a hybrid of the satirical news and late-night variety show for a young, culturally connected, politically savvy demographic. The "Fair Game" Web site will be a vital part of the show's appeal, incorporating the most powerful attributes of social networking. Not only will visitors be able to interact online with the producers and one another, they will also help shape the program by posting content, rating musical performances and weighing in on the latest broadcast.

PRI President and CEO Alisa Miller says, "Research clearly shows that 20- and 30-somethings consume media on multiple platforms simultaneously. 'Fair Game' will capitalize on those listener preferences and offer a lively show in the ways listeners want to get and interact with it. The resulting influx of new, younger listeners to public radio benefits everyone. Our taking this step is consistent with our history of developing and supporting innovative programs -- 'This American Life' with Ira Glass, PRI's 'Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen,' 'The Tavis Smiley Show' and 'Open Source from PRI' with Christopher Lydon to name a few."

"Breaking new ground," adds Melinda Ward, PRI's senior vice president, Content, "is one of the things we do best at PRI. 'Fair Game' is the latest of many original, imaginative programs we've introduced to the public airwaves. And 'Fair Game' is just the start. We've got other major program initiatives in the pipeline, all intended to expand our affiliate stations' reach and impact on air, online and on demand."

If you'd like to read the entire press release, click here.

portraits of russia

2006-08-22T19:43:00.000-04:00

I recently worked on another web feature for Time, called Portraits of Russia. Photographers Jason Eskenazi and Valeri Nistratov traveled to Russia, where they photographed and interviewed random people. For this project, the sound and pictures were combined into a multimedia slideshow.

see the horses

2006-08-20T20:12:00.000-04:00

This video is made from the stuff I shot when I was in Illinois. I made this because I just bought some new video editing software, and I wanted to practice editing video. It stars my friend Becky's daughter, Hannah. Their neighbors have two horses, and she took me to see them.

vacation video album

2006-08-15T18:05:00.000-04:00

I went to Illinois a couple of weeks ago to visit my family, and I took along my new video camera. Instead of editing it into one long video, I decided to make it more like a photo album. You can click on each of the pictures to see it move. If your computer can handle it, I recommend clicking on all of them really quickly, to get them all going at once...

graying of AIDS

2006-08-09T16:54:00.000-04:00

I did a little sound editing work for this web feature on Time Magzine's website. It's a photo essay by Katja Heinemann, who also collected audio interviews of the people she photographed. It's pretty interesting, check it out.

More Americans are living with HIV into middle age and beyond, but they are often ignored by doctors and society. Six people share their stories about surviving with HIV.

up up and away

2006-07-06T12:07:00.000-04:00

When we played "Superman" as kids, we'd always shout the words "up up and away" before we ran around the playground pretending to fly. Those were like the magic words you had to say. We made up our own rules. Like, you also needed a cape -- anyone with a cape could fly. Even Batman. And Robin. Aquaman was SOL.

I never actually read comic books as a kid, but I just spent the last four weeks of my life immersed in Superman. I was producing the latest installment of Studio 360's American Icons series, which is airing this weekend. Eric Molinsky collected all the interviews, and I used that tape to write an hour-long show, which I also mixed and sound designed (David Krasnow was our editor, Jocelyn Gonzales and Derek John each produced a piece, and Kurt Andersen hosted). This project was really intense with a very tight turnaround, and I haven't had a day off since I started (I even worked on 4th of July). So I am taking the day off today, woohoo!

The show includes interviews with Art Spiegelman, Jules Feiffer, Michael Chabon, Bryan Singer, Brandon Routh, Margot Kidder... but my favorite was this British guy named Howard Jacobsen, who has one of the most amazing British accents I've ever heard. If I were talking to you right now, I would do my immitation. But this is the internet, so you'll have to settle for the real thing.

You can hear the show by clicking on this sentence.

In other news, the PRI pilot I worked on last month is going into production in late August. I'll post more on that when the time comes...

lincoln memorialized

2006-06-11T23:53:00.000-04:00

An hour-long radio documentary I've been working on for the past few months finally aired this weekend. It's about the Lincoln Memorial, and it aired as part of Studio 360's American Icons series.

Clicking on this sentence will take you to the show's webpage.

Abraham Lincoln is a subject near to my heart. I grew up in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln lived before he became president, and where he's now buried. Growing up there, one tends to take Lincoln for granted, because his name is the kind of thing you see on street signs and in the name of auto parts stores.

But in the period after college and before grad school, I worked for the Illinois State Historical Society, as an assistant to Tom Schwartz, who at that time was the curator of the Lincoln collection. He's now the historian for the State of Illinois, and I interviewed him for this documentary. Working for him was one of the most memorable work experiences I've ever had (surpassed only by the time I worked with Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, but I digress...) During the time I was there, I got to hold -- in my very hands -- manuscripts written by Lincoln, and historical objects like the spoon that he ate his last meal with. Yeah. I know. Pretty powerful stuff. So it was really satifying for me to have had the chance to interview my old boss. It felt as though I'd come full circle in a way.

This past month has been crazy, because on top of the Lincoln Memorial doc, I also just finished working on a pilot for PRI and WNYC. We're all very excited about it, and hopefully I'll be able to talk about it in more detail very soon...

resonantie

2006-05-30T23:30:00.000-04:00

found this on YouTube this evening...

music from a former life

2006-05-21T09:20:00.000-04:00

My thesis project in grad school was a 45-minute "sound opera" (this was circa 1993-95). The idea was to create a long-form piece of music that integrated all the sounds that might be used to tell a story, including written and improvised dialogue, singing, found tape, interviews, sound effects, ambiance, musical instruments (cello, clarinet, percussion), and whatever else would fit into the kitchen sink. The results were mixed.

In retrospect, I think the narrative aspects didn't really work (my sense of story was pretty underdeveloped at the time). I've since tried to salvage some of what I consider to be the more successful aspects of the piece, like some found tape of my grandfather (which was used in a Lost and Found Sound piece, in a much more personal story), and the music, which I've been cannibalizing ever since (most notably in the score for Shades of Gray).

In a fit of nostalgia, I went back and mixed a few excerpts of the music into individual soundfiles. These are a few of my favorite musical fragments from the piece...

the trouble with key of g (excerpt 1)

the trouble with key of g (excerpt 2)

the trouble with key of g (excerpt 3)

This is all to point out that, if you'll look to the right of this blog page, I've added a list of work samples for your listening pleasure. You'll find some of my radio pieces there at the top, followed by some music (including the aformentioned nostalgia), and then a place for videos.

I have new glasses

2006-05-16T07:34:00.000-04:00

They are radically different than the ones I had before. I still don't know if I like them.

But I've noticed something curious...
In the building where WNYC is located, there are lots of other city offices, and the guards at the entrance have always asked me where in the building I was going. "WNYC," I'd reply. But now, ever since I've been wearing the new glasses, the guards just look at me and say, "Radio?"

I don't neccesarily see this as a positive development.

in a parallel universe, I am a rock star

2006-05-13T12:51:00.000-04:00

I started writing songs in high school, around the time I got bored with playing video games and became interested in girls.

When I was growing up, my dad played the organ at a lot of weddings, and so we had this huge stack of sheet music sitting next to our piano. Sheet music always fascinated me, because above the piano staff it had these grid things with dots on them, which my dad explained was a notation for guitar players. Back then, I played piano but I didn't play the guitar, so it looked really cool and mysterious to me. And by the time I was fourteen, I had figured out that if I played the chords on the piano that corresponded to the guitar tableture, it sort of sounded like I was playing the song. And that made me realize that songs could be analyzed in terms of a melody over a chord structure, and all I needed to do to write a song was come up with a chord structure I liked and start singing a melody over it that fit.

Of course, it can get way more sophisticated than that, and there are lots of other ways to think about writing music. But it was enough to get me started, and I spent the rest of my high school years writing songs like that. I loved doing it so much that when I went to college, I majored in music composition, where they taught me just enough to screw me up for the rest of my life. I've been trying to recover ever since.

Here are four of my recent recovery attempts:

1 The Trip That You're On
2 Coney Island
3 Nothing You Can Do
4 The Way She Broke My Heart

Enjoy!

On a completely different note... I discovered something interesting following my last blog post. If you are a blogger, and you're looking to get lots of new people looking at your blog, put the word "sex" in the title of your post. Apparently, lots and lots of people do these blog searches of new posts with the word "sex" in them. I suppose mine looked especially enticing to them, because it was followed by the word "addict"...

caveh zahedi is a sex addict

2006-04-30T10:48:00.000-04:00

The first time I encountered Caveh Zahedi was when I saw the Richard Linklater film Waking Life. If you haven't seen it, it's a series of animated philopsophical rants about dreaming, the meaning of life, and other stuff you used to talk about in college when you were stoned. The animation is rotoscoped from digital video, so it has a neat look to it. Caveh's scene was the most memorable for me, he's having a conversation about Andre Bazin's ideas regarding the nature of cinema. He says that film, because of its inherent specificity, is best suited to recording moments of reality. At the end of the scene, everything dissolves into clouds.

The second time I encountered Caveh was when I interviewed him for a piece I was producing about the filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt. Interviewing Caveh felt just like that scene in Waking Life -- it was like he'd hypnotized me with his big bug eyes. And when I was driving home from the interview, all I could think about was how much I loved my job.

The third time I encountered Caveh was when he invited me to be in a film he was making called I Am a Sex Addict. He needed extras for a scene he was shooting that takes place at a Sex Addicts Annonymous meeting, and he wanted me to play one of the sex addicts. I sat in a circle with 20 or so other guys in a classroom at a Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, with children's drawings on the walls behind us, as each of us improvised a monologue in front of the camera. I have no recollection of what I said.

Several years later, Caveh invited me to the screening of the completed film at the Tribecca Film Festival in New York. In my big scene, you only see me for about 3 seconds, and you can't really hear what I'm saying, you just hear Caveh's voice over. He was in town for the screening, so I thought it might be a good opportunity to interview him again, and maybe produce a piece about his work. That was one year ago, and the piece finally aired this weekend on Studio 360.

You can hear it by clicking here.

The piece explores the nature of autobiography in film, and why I think Caveh's films have successfully navigated some of the inherent pitfalls in choosing oneself as a subject matter. But I think the film is just as interesting for it's stylistic choices. He presents a blend of documentary and fiction, and the making of the film becomes sort of a subplot, but in a subtle and organic enough way that it doesn't pull me out of the film. And he mixes all kinds of media: animation, archival footage, still photography. This kind of postmodern self conciousness is certainly nothing new (see Godard et al), but it seems very much of this time. Zahedi talks about this in a recent interview for Slant Magazine.

I think that the cinematic zeitgeist is not neo-realism anymore. My first films were coming out of neo-realism and an exploration of how far into the real you could go. But I thought I got as far as I could go in embracing reality, in a photographic way, with the last film, In the Bathtub of the World. There was no future there for me. I think that the zeitgeist now is the different levels of reality and the way that fiction and reality are radically intertwined. I think that hybrid films are the wave of the future. What's happening in the present at a very deep level is a very self-conscious awareness of the history of cinema, the dishonesty of mass culture, and how do you speak sincerely and intelligently within the constraints of the current culture. I think the answer to that is new and emerging. [Pause] There are two things happening. There's the personal documentary coming out of the tradition of Sherman's March, and which I think is starting to get a little tired. And there's this other strand, a playful, self-conscious strand, which you see in Charlie Kaufman movies, Run Lola Run, or Moulin Rouge. These films are very self-conscious, non-linear, and intricate aesthetically. Tarnation is a good example because it blends the intricacy with the personal. Without the intricacy the personal documentary is starting to feel tired. Without the personal the intricate feels empty.

You can read the entire interview here.

I think what he is saying is true of radio. There's the personal documentary, which is probably most associated with This American Life, that's beginning to feel like it has run its course (it'll be interesting to see what they do with the TV show). Then there's an emerging style which is more self-concious of the medium, intricate, and non-linear. I'm thinking about work like Radio Lab, Long Haul Production's recent "Lord God Bird" piece, CBC's series The Wire, and I think my own work fits in with that as well.

I wish there were more critical thinking about radio production, like there is in film. There are a few places, like Transom and the Third Coast Festival, but they seem more geared more towards ingratiating people into the medium, and teaching them how to make radio pieces, rather than analyzing the work that's being produced in a really deep way. Professional journals seem concerned with the tools of trade and the mechanics of funding, rather than the more ambigous creative questions regarding how we are using this medium and what that might say about the way people are responding to the world. Surely there are people thinking deeply and critically about radio these days, there are very good college courses in radio that examine these very ideas. But it would be nice to have some sort of scholarly journal about radio production that could help unite us into a collective dialogue, like you see in film, music, and other art forms. Does this exist already, and if not, how can we make it happen?

jet lag

2006-04-10T23:19:00.000-04:00

Travel, for me, feels a little like dreaming. The airplane takes you through clouds into another timezone, to a place where everything is just a little bit different. And the time shift makes everything feel sort of like it's happening in a parrallel universe.

I just got back from Amsterdam yesterday, I was there for a radio conference, where I was invited to speak about my work. I was the only American there, although one of the other speakers was Canadian, and everyone there spoke English. Almost all of the pieces they played were in Dutch, it was interesting to hear what their radio is like these days. I didn't hear anything that I liked more than anything I've heard before, but then, I didn't hear everything, because it was in Dutch, and I was in Amsterdam, and one's just got to make the most of these things.

This is the hotel where I stayed:

It was really really nice, right on one of the canals. I was spoiled by the festival organizers. When I looked down the street from my hotel, it looked a little like this:

I had a good time, Amsterdam is a beautiful city, very old yet also quite progressive. When I first got there, roaming the streets with a few hours to kill, I was euphoric (and it wasn't just due to the "coffee"). There's something about being in a place with such a long history that just feels different. The canals were very beautiful, cobblestone roads, everyone rides a bicycle. Then there's the red light district, which I found a little creepy (full of obnoxious college boys in packs of 3 or 4, there for the sex and drugs and not much else). I wandered around and saw a street artist who made intricate and very colorful costumes, and there were men modeling the costumes in the middle of the square, posing, moving, posing, with money hats in front of them. I guess people were supposed to tip based on the costume. The interesting thing about it to me was, one of the costumes was a Roman gladiator (kind of to be expected), but the other was Jim Carry's character from "The Mask".

I love that kind of stuff. And I thought to myself, "I could live here..." But now, I'm not so sure that's true. For all of America's shortcomings, we've actually got it pretty good. I don't think I could make a living doing what I'm doing over there, radio funding there is dwindling (much more so than here). And people here, generally speaking, seem much more willing to express themselves openly, which is something I don't think I could live without.

rubber porcupine

2006-03-19T09:18:00.000-05:00

I wrote this song a while ago, and I thought it might be fun to make a music video for it. It just somehow seemed appropriate to animate it like a Saturday morning cartoon. This is my first big animation project. It took a long time, but it was really fun. It's a lot like mixing sound, but with pictures.

UPDATED July 17, 2006 -- New, improved version!

life in a cave

2006-02-25T18:39:00.000-05:00

I'm teaching myself how to use this animation software I downloaded, and I needed something to do for practice. The audio for this is a bumper that I made last month for a radio show (I wrote the music, and that's me singing). Just for fun, I decided to try and come up with an animation that would go with it.

You need Shockwave installed to see it, I'm using YouTube as a hosting site.

game for a party

2006-02-11T19:37:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to post more often, and more spontaneously, so to that end, here's my thought for the day:

What's the difference between the 80's and the 90's?
Rosanna and Patricia Arquette

I was thinking this while standing in the video store down the street, listening to two young women who work there debate who is the best Arquette, as the movie Desperately Seeking Susan played in the background. They both agreed that Rosanna was clearly superior, but complained that their boss (who wasn't there) favors Patricia. "She's just weird," one of them said, refering to their boss. So far as I could tell, David Arquette didn't get any votes.

Anyway, I suppose the decades thing might make for a fun(ctional) party game some time, in lieu of actual conversation, but I think I was too out of touch with pop culture in the 90's to play it well. I am game for a party tonight, but instead I'm spending the night with my DVD player. I've got two movies - A Shot in the Dark and Purple Rain. The first I got because I was reading a review of that newly terrible Pink Panther thing, and it said that SITD was the only really great film of the series. I've never seen it. Also, I saw Sellers in Being There last week, and have decided that my knowledge of his oeuvre (hey look, I snuck two french words into one post!) could use some fleshing out. So I've decided to educate myself. Same goes for Prince: wish I knew more about him. Hence, Purple Rain.

Today started out faithful to routine, when I woke up at 6:30am courtesty of my next door neighbor, who happens to be a 5 year old boy with anger management issues. I finally made it back to sleep several hours later (so I could wake up at a reasonable hour, you see), and had strangely tangible dreams, the kind that smell just real enough to screw you up for the rest of the morning.

I didn't have a piece airing this weekend (I think), but I did play the piano on the radio. You can hear me playing the song "Manhattan" on Weekend America, in a piece produced by Ann Hepperman, Kara Oehler, and Rick Moody. The piece is writer Julia Slavin's story of how she associates that song with her oblivious father. My playing is supposed to represent his horrible piano playing, so clearly I was the proper choice for the role. You can hear it by clicking here.

Also, the blogging software I use has mysteriously deleted my previous post to this blog, the one titled "Making the Cut". I really wish it were still there. But it isn't. Sorry for the inconvenience. If anyone out there reading this has any advice which might miraculously recover said post, I will make you my best friend forever.

mixed up

2006-01-11T11:46:00.000-05:00

I first heard of Peter Bochan about 6 years ago, when Ben Manilla (my boss at the time) handed me a cd of Bochan's work. He's really good at mixing audio clips over music, and he has a nack for putting just the right song in just the right place. Anyone interested in sound-rich non-narrated radio production owes it to themself to check him out. Here's his bio:

Peter Bochan is the creator of the Shortcuts radio series, and the host and DJ of All Mixed Up, which has run on WBAI in New York City for over 20 years. He is a frequent winner of local and national radio awards, and was voted "Best (and most eclectic) Radio DJ of 2000" by the Village Voice, #1 Pick of Top 10 Music Programs by The New York Times, and was listed as one of the Top Ten Radio Programs by Time Out New York. He also works as the Alternative Music Guide at about.com, music director for the PBS series "The History Detectives" and Operations Director at WBAI.

For the past 30 years, Bochan has been producing a non-narrated hour-long year-end retrospective called Shortcuts. He's posted his latest one on PRX, but you can also hear it (via Real Audio) by clicking on this link:

A Shortcut Through 2005

You can learn more about Peter Bochan by going here.

the plan

2006-01-05T00:12:00.000-05:00

Barrett Golding's got a new show.
It's a sound rich orgy of radio goodness culled from already existing material, a lot of it found on the Public Radio Exchange.

I just listened to the Elvis episode, I'm looking forward to hearing more. Barrett says the idea for this show is to be "closer to the way a music DJ presents a show than to the typical public radio ‘informational’ style. The showcase will mesh with the format of an eclectic, music-based station."

It's called The Plan...

"A weekly half-hour transmitting all human knowledge on a single subject via a series of rhythmic radio bursts."

Perhaps you didn't know there was a Plan. Well, there is:
The Plan transmits all human knowledge on a single subject as thirty minutes of rhythmic radio bursts. You have been selected by the Planetary Powers to receive this week's Plan.

You will then have The Plan. Your will then know The Plan. Do Not Attempt to Change The Plan.

Here's our Future Plans:
Time - 1/1/2006 - New Year's chronological contemplatons.
http://www.prx.org/pieces/7949

Elvis - 1/8/2006 - Elvis Presley Jan 8 1935 - Aug 16 1977.
http://www.prx.org/pieces/8106

Race - 1/15/2006 - Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Holiday.
Train - 1/22/2006 - Ridin' the rails.
Ice - 1/29/2006 - Groundhog Day (Dead of Winter).
Love - 2/12/2006 - Valentine's Day.
Prez - 2/19/2006 - Presidents' Day.

The Plan is a PRX-funded Showcase Series, produced by KGLT and Hearing Voices. They are to blame.

You need to have a prx account to hear it, but it's free to sign up if you just want to listen.

PRX recently gave grants to six stations to produce their own local shows using material found on PRX, this is part of that. Barrett's station is KGLT in Bozeman, Montanna, the other stations that got these grants are Vermont Public Radio, New Hampshire Public Radio, KFAI, KRTS, and WMPG.

now playing

2005-12-30T23:04:00.000-05:00

If life were a movie, the trailer might sound like this.

I produced this piece for Weekend America, it'll be airing this weekend. The announcer voice is Bob Ford, you can also hear my voice in there too, along with some random WA folks.

cold sound

2005-12-21T23:43:00.000-05:00

What is it about tinkley high-frequency bell sounds that's so evocative of winter? It it that it's sort of like the sound of ice cracking when the wind sways frozen tree branches? Or maybe it's just that it's been used to accompany winter scenes in so many film soundtracks and TV commercials that we've been conditioned...

I'm listening to the "Winter" movement from Wendy Carlos' 1972 composition Sonic Seasonings on WNYC's New Sounds, hosted by John Schaefer. He says that Stanley Kubrick used this music in The Shining at the end of the film when the cold turns deadly. I have to admit that the music is quite chilling, even though it's a balmy 30 degrees in New York City right now, with overcast skies and wind from the north at 4 mph.

unsilent nighted

2005-12-18T20:21:00.000-05:00

I just got home from Phil Kline's Unsilent Night, and I feel so strangely peaceful and transformed. What looked like at least 1000 people walked from Washington Square Park to Thompson Square Park carrying boomboxes, all simultaneously playing a cassette tape of Kline's composition. Because no two boomboxes play exactly the same way, the tapes gradually drift out of sync, creating this really rich spacial dimension to the sound. It's a very unique experience to be in a large group of people who are all collaborating in mass-communal music making. It's sort of a secularized modern-technology form of caroling, with the people we passed by on the street stopping everything they're doing just to listen to the beautiful sounds.

I recorded the whole thing (I also interviewed Kline last week) for a piece I am producing about the event for Studio 360. The piece will air next weekend, and it's due this Tuesday, so gotta get crackin'. I'll post a link to it here when it's up on the web...

ADDENDUM 12/22/2005
As promised, here is a link to the piece.
I also happen to have another piece on the same episode, about a bible depicted in legos. It's a reworked version of a piece that originally aired a few years back. This one's about half as long as the original, with less sound design, but new narration that I think gives it a stronger close.

(photos by Jake Dobkin)

radio in concert

2005-12-12T17:19:00.000-05:00

Transonic Arts is "an arts-presenting organization dedicated to crossing the boundaries between different subgenres of contemporary music, sound art, and any other sound-based artistic endeavor we can get our hands on." They recently got their hands on some of my work, and will be presenting two of my pieces, Vinyl and City X, on a concert this Wednesday, December 14th, at The Tank in New York City. Here's the press release:

Transmissions
Presented by Transonic Arts
Wednesday, December 14, 2005, 8:00pm. Admission is $10.

Location: The Tank; 217 East 42nd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues; Subways: 4/5/6/7/S to Grand Central

Transmissions will explore works which use found sound -- recorded sound like a bird chirping, a train passing by, or speech. The program will look at how computer technology has extended the definition of the term by allowing real-time recording and alteration of musical instruments and ambient sounds. Trasmissions will feature two multimedia sound installations, by sound artist Jessica Feldman and composer Jonathan Zalben; a "composed" radio documentary and a piece of concert music by composer/radio producer Jonathan Mitchell; and two contrasting performances of Jascha Narveson's work for improvising soloist and computer processing.

Jessica Feldman's installation uses overheard conversation as its sound source, broadcasting bits of conversation back to the people who said them using devices she has built. Jessica's recent work explores the way that audiences interact with sound based on where they hear it and how they perceive how the piece works.

In his audio/visual interactive installation Organized Color Intoxication, composer Jonathan Zalben (http://www.jonathanzalben.com) has designed a piece in which the audience is the performer, and the creator is the architect. The audience is encouraged to play with a ìfenceî that affects what they hear and see around them.

Jonathan Mitchell (http://earcrack.blogspot.com/) is interested in exploring how sound elements which are often thought of as separate - speech, music, sound effects, ambiance - can all be combined in a unified, cohesive way. His radio documentary City X and his concert piece Vinyl are examples of the ways in which Jonathan doesn't separate how he deals with sound, whether writing in an informational genre, like journalism, or one more traditionally thought of as being artistic, like music.

Kaleidoscope, by Jascha Narveson (http://www.jaschanarveson.com), uses live, improvised instrumental performance as found sound. The computer functions like a delay unit (which records bits of sound and plays them back later), except with a longer memory and without any of the predictability. Sound is chopped up into phrases, stored in memory, and played back in different ways at different times. These regurgitated snippets in turn affect how the performer proceeds with her improvisation.

###

herzogian

2005-12-11T10:53:00.000-05:00

If you enjoyed the recent Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man, three of his short documentaries from the 1970's were recently released on a DVD called Short Films by Werner Herzog. They're each 45 minutes long, which made them difficult to distribute theatrically, but ideal for a DVD compilation.

I love DVD's. They make so many things possible, like seeing films that break the molds of traditional formats, or watching TV shows without having to watch TV, or hearing my favorite directors ramble on about lighting and their battles with weather conditions. But I digress.

This particular DVD didn't have a commentary track, but the liner notes included an excerpt of a print interview with Herzog (from the book Herzog on Herzog, edited by Paul Cronin). If "Herzogian" is a word, I think it has to do with man confronting nature and accepting the will (or wrath) of God. Or something like that.

The three films included on the DVD are:

The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner (1974)
I liked this one so much I watched it three times. The subject is the great Swiss ski-flyer Walter Steiner, and it includes some stunning slow-motion ski jumping, filmed at 1/20th speed. The score by Popel Vuh is beautiful too, with electric guitar swells that perfectly mesh with the snowy-mountain images. In the film, we witness Steiner breaking the world ski-flying record, easily beating all of his competition. He starts his run lower down on the ramp than the other skiers, because he's concerned that he'll fly too far and have a terrible accident if he starts any higher up, and he still beats everyone handily. But the film is not about athletic accomplishment, it's about spiritual quest. What they are doing is very dangerous (Herzog repeatedly shows images of ski-flyers wiping out in "agony of defeat"-type crashes), but they confront their fears, pushing the limits of physics and nature in order to achieve the ecstasy of flight, if only for a few seconds.

How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1976)
This one takes place at the 1976 World Championship of Livestock Auctioneers in New Holland, Pennsylvania. It begins with some interviews with the winning auctioneers, made all the more touching by the way Herzog lets the camera linger on the subjects for a brief moment after they finish talking, somehow making me feel like I was stealing a glimpse of their souls. But most of the film is simply watching the competition, letting the viewer revel in the beauty and poetry of the auctioneers' voices. I read someplace that the German version of this film includes a voice-over by Herzog in which he calls the auctioneers' chants the "poetry of capitalism."

La Soufriere (1977)
A volcano on the island of Guadeloupe is steaming, threatening to erupt at any moment. Authorities claim the force of the eruption could be equilvilent to several atomic bombs, and the island has been deserted, the residents fearing for their lives. What does Herzog do? He goes there with a camera crew and climbs the volcano. The man has guts. There are some beautiful and erie shots driving down the streets and docks of the deserted island town, and late in the film the crew happens upon a man who stayed behind, accepting his possibile fate as the "will of God." Luckily for Herzog, the ending is anticlimactic. But while waiting for the "unavoidable catastrophe" that never takes place, the film becomes a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life.

Sometimes I think part of me secretly wants to be a film reviewer, but then I worry that having to write about movies like this all the time instead of just watching them would totally suck.

I speak

2005-12-09T00:56:00.000-05:00

It's always a good feeling to think that someone cares about what you have to say, especially when they have no idea what you might say. The Public Radio Exhange recently took that chance on me, and you can read the results in a nifty little interview entitled, Gettin' Cozy with Jonathan Mitchell.

And if, after reading that interview, you find yourself saying, "yes, but Jonathan...HOW? and...WHY? and...MORE DETAILS PLEASE," well it just so happens that there are a few more online interviews from my past that you might enjoy:

Third Coast (June, 2003)
Third Coast (January, 2005)
WBEZ's re:Sound (July, 2005), an audio interview which also features the pieces Terminally Blonde and Sopranos in the West Wing

his medium? suburban christmas display.

2005-12-04T12:59:00.000-05:00

from Barrett Golding via the AIR listserve:
someone sent me this kewl vid of a
rapid-fire sound&lights xmas display.

is it real?
being an incurable fact-checker, i did some digging.

song is "Wizards of Winter" by Trans-Siberian Orchestra

this guy sez the light-show exists at an Ohio home:
"This is a friend of mine in Mason, Ohio. These are REAL lights - not animated. The lights are ran from a computer program and it is impressive the time and effort he has put into them to make them work. He only runs it from 6p-10p and the sound is very low outside. He broadcasts over FM so you listen in your car on the radio, that is what you are hearing on the clip. Not offensive to neighbors except for the bright lights for 4hrs."

and here:
they say it's uses a Light-O-Rama sequence
"a leading manufacturer of user programmable light controllers"

bg

ADDENDUM 12/9/05
According to the bulletin board where this video is posted, this display is from 2004, and is the work of Carson Williams, a Mason, Ohio electrical engineer. This year (2005), he had his lights choreographed to three different songs. On December 6, 2005, news reports announced that the 2005 display had been shut down because it was causing traffic congestion problems. Apparently there was an accident in his neighborhood and emergency crews could not get to it because of all the cars lined up to see the display.

You can see a video of his 2005 display here.
A radio interview with Carson Williams aired on WGMD Deleware,
it can be heard here. I don't know the name of the interviewer.

ADDENDUM 12/27/05
Last night I saw this video used in a beer commercial. A fricking beer commercial. I'm not going to say which brand because I wouldn't want to give them even more publicity, but it was a "lite" beer. Get it? Christmas lights..."lite" beer... I feel so disappointed, almost betrayed. But to be honest, I'm not sure why. I mean, everyone and their myspace friend has heard about this video by now. And it just means that even more people can now enjoy this wonderous spectacle of light and sound, while simultaneously getting a beer brand burned into their brain waves. Merry Xmas.

dj robot

2005-12-02T20:39:00.000-05:00

I just found out about a music website that makes some interesting implications about the future of radio. You type in an artist or song you like, and it plays music that it thinks you might like. And then you rate what it plays for you, and it adjusts to your musical taste. So it's sort of like having your own personal disc jockey. It's free, although you need to sign up for an account to hear an unlimited number of songs.

http://www.pandora.com

"The Music Genome is a detailed analysis of a century of popular music. We employee a large team of professional musicians who spend their days listening to music one song at a time and "analyzing" the detailed musical characteristics of the song. This includes obvious stuff like tempo and key, but more importantly it covers a lot of subtle nuance: how much tremolo in the voice, what kid of harmony, guitar picking style, how much cowbell, etc. In total we listen for hundreds of different qualities and painstakingly record the results for each some. After 5 years, we've built up an incredible asset that allows us predict music you will like based on simple input (for example, the name of an album, artist, or song that you love)."

(thanks Maureen Jackson for the link!)

dj steinski

2005-11-20T10:46:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine just turned me on to this really great DJ named Steinski. Apparently in the DJ world he's, like, a legend. Since as far back as 1983, he's been taking a very wide range of audio samples from various aspects of popular culture, and weaving them into these slick little pieces of music. I think one of the reasons I've never heard of him is that his music uses so much sampled material that the clearance rights have made it impossible to distribute legally. Another reason may be that I'm woefully ignorant of DJ culture.

But that's why God created Google, which not only led me to a few informative articles and interviews, but some mp3's of his music as well. And thanks to the miracle of copy and paste technology, I'm able to offer them to you, here, today.

Lesson 1: The Payoff Mix (mirror)
Lesson 2: The James Brown Mix (mirror)
Lesson 3: History of Hip-Hop (mirror)

(These mp3s are graciously hosted by Andre and Cameron)

surrender dorothy

2005-11-18T12:47:00.000-05:00

Last summer, I rode the train to Chittenango, New York. It was the weekend of their annual Ozfest, and I had a reservation for one at Friday evening's Spaghetti Dinner with the Munchkins in the Chittenango High School Cafeteria. The guests of honor would be three of the actors who played munchkins in the obscure 1939 film adaptation of L. Frank Baum's book "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." You know, the one starring Judy Garland? The Wicked Witch of the West? Flying Monkeys?

Anyway, so Chittenango is L. Frank Baum's birthplace, he lived there until he was five. But I have the feeling that when he was living there, the sidewalks weren't painted gold like they are now, and the Poppy Field in the town center was just a bunch of grass or dirt or something. I'd also be willing to bet that back then, they didn't host an annual festival in Baum's honor, featuring said spaghetti dinner, a screening of the film, a carnival, a parade, and a costume contest for the kids. But luckily for us they do now, and people travel from miles around just to be there.

I had a really wonderful time. Most of the people I met were very friendly, and the whole event had that old-timey small town feel to it. I even got to meet the Munchkins! I recorded everything, not for posterity, but for the radio. That's right, I was on assignment. Studio 360 was producing a brand new episode of their American Icons series, and I was their man in the field...of poppies. This weekend, you can hear the results.

Here's the show description:

Studio 360 follows the yellow brick road. You may think you know the story, but Kurt Andersen and guests will take you to places in the land of Oz that are more wonderful, and weirder, than you ever imagined. We'll meet the original man behind the curtain, L. Frank Baum, who had all the vision of Walt Disney, but none of the business sense. We'll discover how Oz took over the Soviet Union. We'll check in with filmmakers Neil LaBute and Nora Ephron, novelist Salman Rushdie, performer Bobby McFerrin, and others from across the world who find magic, meaning, and inspiration in Oz.

I did a lot of work on it, including preparing the final mix of the whole show. But all I really care about you hearing is this. Enjoy!

prx podcast: two from terin

2005-11-13T19:59:00.000-05:00

I ran accross an interesting producer on the Public Radio Exchange, named Terin Mayer. He's a sophomore at Carleton College, and he produces a show for KRLX in Northfield, Minnesota called "Periscope Radio".

PRX is featuring two pieces of his in a podcast:

Freshmen Formations: James Hannaway
James Hannaway spent this last summer working with a political non-profit walking door to door to raise the minimum wage.

"Subaru’s are the best by the way; most reliably democratic car. Jaguars the least.”

A Prohibition
Originally curated for a temporary museum installation at Carleton College, "A Prohibition" is a poetic contemplation of campus race relations. What do you mean when you say the word "black"? Why can't you say the word "nigger"? Three African American students navigate the language of identity.

click here to download the mp3.

monster stash

2005-11-05T17:17:00.000-05:00

I know it's about 5 days out of fashion right now, but I was just thinking about Halloween as sort of like an American secular cultural exorcism, clearing the way for Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's as though, in order to enjoy all that heartwarming family buying power, we have to get all the darkness out of our systems first.

When I was a very young kid, I remember Halloween seriously freaking me out. Anything could be real at that age. I mean, I still believed in Santa Claus, and if he’s real, all bets are off. But however scary it got, the next morning it was always ameliorated by a fresh bucket of candy for my mom to hide from me. That candy was like my heavenly reward for surviving the darkness.

But I’m older now and, while some of you may still cling to the hope that (as of November 1st) we’ve rid the world of the beasts that haunt your soul, I know better. Which is why I offer to you this piece, recently re-broadcast on Studio 360. It's about monsters. It was originally produced in 2003, click here to listen.

Two more pieces that recently aired:

October 26th, on Marketplace Morning Report, a (brand new!) piece I produced about a play that's been running in New York for 18 years, called "Perfect Crime". Click here to listen.

And Studio 360 is airing the Peabody Award-winning episode about Moby-Dick this weekend (check out the nifty new American Icons website design).

(pumpkin photo by Timothy Bates)

paul pena

2005-11-04T17:07:00.000-05:00

I’ve just become aware that Paul Pena passed away last month, on October 1st. As I type this blog post, WNYC is playing his recording of “Jet Airliner”, a song he wrote that was made famous by the Steve Miller Band. (His version is much better, in my opinion)

I interviewed Pena at his home in San Francisco in 2003. He was blind, and it was fascinating to see the inside of his apartment, because of course nothing was there for looks. He was in very poor health when I saw him. If you hear earlier tape of him speaking, it’s clear how sick he was when we talked. He struck me as a very talented and soulful performer, who never quite attained the success that his talents might have allowed. But he did enjoy some renewed attention near the end of his life, mostly due to the 1999 video documentary Genghis Blues.

Here is the piece I produced. In it, Pena tells the story of how he discovered Tuvan throat singing, and divulges his secret for attaining the perfect Kargyraa Moan (it's hands down my favorite interview memory EVER).

Here is the announcement from his website.

We're sad to report that Paul passed away Saturday October 1, 2005 in the early evening at his apartment in San Francisco. He'd been through a long battle with Pancreatitis and Diabetes. This is a huge loss for all of us.

During the the past 8 years, Paul's health has been on the decline and his quality of life was greatly diminished by the nearly constant state of pain that he was in. We can take comfort in knowing that he's no longer suffering.

October 2, 2005
San Francisco

post coast

2005-10-27T15:54:00.000-04:00

I think conferences are an interesting social laboratory. You end up saying the same things over and over and over again to each new person you meet, but with radically different responses depending on the person. Just goes to show that it's not you, it's them. Really.

(Photo Credit: Jared Benedict)

I was at the Third Coast Festival last week, and it was a great big pool of new people, all open to meeting one another, all with different backgrounds and reasons for being there. I spent a good 2-3 days with them, passing them in the lobby, making eye contact with the person I just spoke with 10 minutes ago... oh there you are again. Didn't I just pass by you near the elevator? Maybe we should just give each other a gentle nod, no need to say anything. In fact, maybe we should look away quickly and pretend we didn't see each other. I mean, how many passing acknowledgements can you give a person before it becomes ridiculous? Nothing personal, you understand. In fact, you probably feel the same way, right? I hope I didn't just offend you. Oh maybe I did... the next time I see you, I'll have to be extra nice, just to show I'm an ok guy and all... oh there you are again. Do you have a twin here? Because I'd swear I just saw you standing next to the coffee cart...

I often feel as though I'd make better social decisions if I could just go back and change one little thing I did, like in that movie Groundhog Day. I think one of the reasons I'm so drawn to recordings is that it allows me to share ideas with people outside of real time -- there's an editorial process involved. And I make much different decisions if I have the opportunity to reflect and make changes later. This blog post, for instance, has been edited many times. I don't talk like this, really. In fact, I'll probably edit this again after it's been posted. Whereas, if I were forced to just type with no delete key, I think I might come accross much differently than I do now. So which is closer to who I really am? Is the spontaneous, stream of conciousness me more true because it's a reflection of how my mind works in real time, warts and all? Or is the edited, thought-out me truer, because I've had the opportunity to reflect on what I've said and make sure that it's consistent with what I really want to say?

The thing is, even with all that editorial control, I still can't control how that plays to another person. For example, I was in what they called a "Close Listening" session, moderated by the Kitchen Sisters. It was 8-10 producers each playing a recent piece for the group, a really wide variety of work from a really wide variety of producers. I played a piece called Eye Contact that I produced for Weekend America last summer.

click on this picture to hear

Eye Contact

One person in the session said he thought the music should be taken out. Another person said she loved the music and thought it was great as is. In fact, everyone in the session seemed to have a different sense of what worked and what didn't. If anything, it gave me more confidence in my own instincts, because everyone's just going to react differently anyway.

This brings to mind a perennial debate: how much should the audience matter? It came up recently in Rick Moody's discussion forum on transom. I think it was an interesting thread, you can read the whole discussion by clicking here.

hip hop anthology

2005-10-19T11:23:00.000-04:00

Last weekend, Studio 360 re-broadcast a piece I produced two years ago about hip hop battles. When the radio piece was first produced, Eminem's movie 8 Mile was still in theaters, so it had a slightly more topical feel to it. But certain purveyors of the hip hop artform seem intent on being hate-uhs (why oh why can't they just be play-uhs? oh yeah, it sells), so it wasn't all that hard to find a new peg.

Over the years, I've produced three pieces about hip hop for Studio 360, so I decided to provide an anthology for those of you who may be interested in my hip hop oeuvre. Here they are, in chronological order:

1. Gangsta Rap
2. Hip Hop Battles
3. Hip Hop in the 90's

In other news, I'll be at Third Coast this weekend, I'm looking forward to seeing old faces and meeting some new ones. And after that, it's off to meet my new niece! Should be a fun vacation.

meet olivia!

2005-10-17T13:40:00.000-04:00

Olivia Grace Simonson
born October 13, 2005 at 9:39 pm
6 lbs, 1 oz

My sister gave birth last Thursday night, this photo is from the hospital's website.

You can look at lots of babies there. It's really fun -- each baby has four pictures that you view one at a time, and if you click through them really fast, it looks like the baby is doing a little baby dance. Very entertaining.

Kevin (my brother-in-law) gives this report in his blog:

"Greetings from le Hospitale. Yesterday morning, A's water broke at 7:30 am. Her first contraction was around 8:30. O arrived via C section around 9:30-9:45 last night and is the approximate size of one of those 'dare you to eat it' burritos. 6 pounds, 1 ounce.

It was less stressful for me than a typical day at work.

Everbody is fine."

the good old days

2005-10-09T14:44:00.000-04:00

In 1977, NPR gave experimental sound artist Max Neuhaus free rein over the national airwaves for two hours. He was never asked to return.

This is his story.

This piece was produced by Roman Mars for the show he produces, re:Sound on WBEZ. You can hear all of their shows online, they have hours and hours of stuff, all of it worth a listen.

For more on Max Neihaus, here's a bio and list of works.
And here's a recording of his 1977 broadcast:
::- part 1 -:- part 2 -::

sound of the universe

2005-10-08T14:41:00.000-04:00

Ever seen the film "Powers of Ten"? It was made by Charles and Ray Eames in 1977, and it starts with a close-up of a couple and moves farther and farther away every ten seconds until the perspective reaches the edge of the universe, 40 powers of ten from where it began. Monday is Power of Ten Day, a holiday that's clearly a construct of the greeting card industry. But I decided to celebrate anyway, by producing this piece for Weekend America.

It may not be very precise, but it will blow your mind.

The piece is built around a conversation I recorded with Ellen Horne (friend and co-producer of Radio Lab). If it gets too confusing, here's a handy diagram that will clear everything up, courtesy of my editor Amanda Aronczyk:

tasty treat

2005-10-04T21:48:00.000-04:00

as you can see, I'm having a bit of trouble with the title photo at the top of this page, the thing that's supposed to show you the lovely "ear crack" logo... I think this will take a bit of HTML knowledge to fix, I hope to learn that little bit of code someday.

In the meatime, here's a snack treat to keep you distracted...

compliments of Jonathan Menjivar, who says:

"they're available at my local market just down the street here in chicago. me and hillary have bought several packs for friends but have yet to try them ourselves. word is they are pretty terrible."

enjoy!

psycho babble

2005-09-29T02:26:00.000-04:00

I once interviewed an illustrator of children's books who said that writing for kids is especially difficult, because when you are forced to become simple, all of your adult repressed psychological baggage is unwittingly revealed. And sometimes reducing your thoughts to their purest form leaves you with something you don't expect to find.

I've always felt that Halloween costumes are similarly revealing. And they're particularly interesting to me because you have people expressing themselves who don't generally do so with such a visible act of creativity. For instance, one year a guy I know dressed up as a proctologist. Now, I'm no psychoanalyst, but what that says to me is: this guy is a pain in the ass, or he likes to be. Another guy I know dressed up as a painting, with a frame around his head. To me, this means he doesn't just want to create or inspire art; he wants to BE art. And then there was the guy with a shoe glued to his crotch. I think you know where I'm going with this...

Anyway, I started thinking about this recently because I've been thinking about what to write in this blog. The interesting thing about blogging to me is not just the accessibility of the tools or the ability to communicate with people all over the world. It's that you never know who is going to read it. It could be my parents. It could be my ex-girlfriend. It could be my ex-girlfriend's parents. And because this is such a personal form of expression, almost like a diary (diarrhetic?), it's easy to get caught in the trap of second guessing. What some might find interesting, others might find TOO interesting... or really boring. See what I mean? It's impossible. Getting caught up in this way of thinking will paralyze you.

The only solution is to be myself.
Sometimes a simple insight like this can prove itself most relevant.
See, I feel better already.

All of which brings me to our sound of the post.
It's a piece that I produced a few months ago for Studio 360, about a video game called Psychonauts (which by the way is a really excellent game, if you're into that sort of thing). The first voice you'll hear will be Kurt Anderson, he's the host of the show. And the Jonathan in the discussion after the piece that Kurt is talking to is not me, it's Jonathan Lear, a psychoanalyst and professor of philosphy at University of Chicago...

click here to listen

long lost twin

2005-09-23T19:19:00.000-04:00

so there's this chidren's t.v. show called This is Daniel Cook that my friend Becky watches with her children, and she thinks I look just like the kid on the show. Here are two pictures of him:

and here's a picture of me, roughly the same age...

crackle

2005-09-23T00:11:00.000-04:00

I've figured out a way to post sound.
My inaugural sound for this blog is:

Vinyl

just click on the link, you need Real Audio to hear it.
more to come...

i have evolved

2005-09-22T15:08:00.000-04:00

click on the picture to hear what she hears

as you can see, I can now post pictures to this website.

this is the first known picture of my niece, Olivia. She will be born in October, currently she's in my sister's uterus. Already you can see that she is displaying a keen fashion sense, with a taste for polka-dotted bows.

I think it's cool that you can kind of see the 3 dimensions, and it's really quite amazing that this is happening inside another person's body.

"Hearing is the first of our senses to be switched on, four-and-a-half months after we are conceived. And for the rest of our time in the womb—another four-and-a-half months—we are pickled in a rich brine of sound that permeates and nourishes our developing consciousness: the intimate and varied pulses of our mother’s heart and breath; her song and voice; the low rumbling and sudden flights of her intestinal trumpeting; the sudden, mysterious, alluring or frightening fragments of the outside world — all of these swirl ceaselessly around the womb-bound child, with no competition from dormant Sight, Smell, Taste or Touch."

- Walter Murch, from his essay on on transom.org

welcome to ear crack

2005-09-19T12:33:00.000-04:00

This is my blog, your online resource for stuff I want to put here.

I'll be posting audio files and other creative endeavors designed to please the senses. But I'm still trying to figure out how to post pictures, so posting audio seems kind of ambitious at the moment. Rest assured, I'm on it...