Sound Print Radio
A small gem in the sandy reaches of my weekly habits is Sound Print Radio. A National Public Radio affiliated thing it shows up on my local station at 7:30 am Saturdays. Sound Print Shows are radio documentaries.
I image that this is an almost dead genre, I'm more inclined after listening for a few months to consider it more a nearly lost art. What surprises me is how powerful they are. They are true documentaries, someone goes out into the field and records an activity or conducts extended multiple interviews in real time. They are usually intricately edited into a crafted and complex narrative layered on a sound bed for the final production. Sound Print exists as a cooperative partnership with other Radio networks, and airs documentaries from several nations
My favorite so far has been Low Flying Fish a light hearted but skeptical look at the world of corporate team and self esteem building. You can't be too skeptical of corporate culture. I've spent the last several years in a work place filled with managers who will look at you with the most condescending false benevolence it is possible for a human face to achieve and ask you if you are disturbed because someone has moved your cheese. Each show gains its own web page with credits and a brief description, links to things mentioned in the show or further information pointers, and a streaming audio link for the show itself. There's a list of these off the main page:
Soundprint Programming for 2003. Another show was about about a hotel in Jerusalem known as the colony . Founded by American expatriates at the beginning of the last century. It has tried to stay neutral if not above the strife for a hundred years. That piece had an interview with actor Peter Ustinov (Baron Von Ustinov morphed the colony into a hotel around the time of the end of the British mandate apparently. Other shows have involved Flamingo dancers in Newfoundland, and this past week an Australian women (the producer/narrator) obsessed by the movie the Sound of Music.
Coming on a such an early hour (for me, 7:30Saturday is early) the big problem I have with these shows is that they don't stick in my active consciousness, but seems to dive down and lodge at some more interior level. From where I only recall them when something triggers their return. It's much the same with what I hear on morning edition , but there what I hear is either news-of-the-day which is usually reinforced by later inputs of news-of-the-day: X bombed Y, then Y bombed X, Z missed a kick - the Z'ettes fall to 1 and 3. Or it is broadcast ephemera passing through and circling around me like the sound of Red Barbers voice. They have longer produced pieces they call features as well Some time ago I heard a piece on Morning Edition on Henri Cartier-Bresson. Bresson talked of his reasons giving up photography to paint instead. I meant to retain that in mind and find a book that shows his paintings as well as his photographs. I will have to make a note for myself.
10:18:57 AM  ;;
|
|
