Read the Fine Print

Anne Hill, identified as "Dream Talk Radio host" by the Huffington Post, instructs us to dream our way to success in 2010 by going for what makes us happy in dreams.

At first it seemed she was advising us to pay attention to our dreams and pursue them in our waking lives. As if we were Old Testament prophets carrying out instructions whispered into our ears while we sleep by YHWH Himself.

Reading further it became clear she intends for us to go for it while dreaming.

This is a relief, because I've tried it the first way, and the results were somewhat disastrous.

Click here for the details, as I shared them on the 2007 public radio series Stories from the Heart of the Land.

Time and Space Defied Once Again

We humans get accustomed to new realities so quickly, it can be frightening sometimes.

I was thinking about this during the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Here was this thing that had defined our lives for decades after World War Two. I spent my junior year in France convinced I'd be incinerated by a nuclear bomb. And then, suddenly, the defining reality was gone literally overnight.

And within a couple of days we already became accustomed to our new life we were living utterly devoid of fear.

Every once in a while I am reminded of what a sea change has taken place in the very, very recent past. Here is the interview I did on Thursday, December 3, with Ellen Rocco and Chris Robinson, for the program Readers & Writers on North Country Public Radio. An interview that was conducted live on local radio - in other words, at a specific time in a specific place.





And now, barring disaster, anyone can listen to it at any time, wherever they want on the planet.

I'll Be on the Radio - Where the Winds Hit Heavy on the Borderline

I'm looking forward to being back on the air again at North Country Public Radio. The Next Big Thing enjoyed a happy home on this sweet little (big, actually!) network of stations in upstate New York. I'll be interviewed about FROM SQUARE ONE on the book show Readers & Writers Thursday, December 3, from 7 to 8pm. NCPR's live stream can be heard from anywhere on Earth by clicking here.

Of course now I can't get this out of my head:

Pandora: Still Unleashing All the Evils of the World

Rob Walker teases out much of what's wrong with Pandora in the New York Times Magazine < http://bit.ly/hdUhV > (including, as I discovered a few months ago, the astonishing absence of Fela Kuti).

What struck me from the beginning, when Pandora made its debut in 2005, was that they picked the wrong metaphor. Music Genome Project makes a promise on which it can't deliver. At least not yet.

The genome is what shows us how much humans are more or less the same as Fleischmann's yeast, even though you'd never know it by looking at us.

By extension, cracking the music genome would explain why some people are drawn both to Beethoven and to Norah Jones. It would reveal the ways in which apparently different musical phenotypes disguise surprising similarities under the surface.

If you tell Pandora you like Bill Evans, you don't find yourself eventually listening to Javanese gamelan. Instead, you are treated to yet more white jazz guys from the 1950s and 60s: Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan. Here, the surface similarities disguise a fundamental difference in approach. The Brubeck and Mulligan tracks served up by Pandora are usually active and uptempo - and they punch a hole in the quiet introspection I seek in Bill Evans.

The new media landscape offers much to love, but Pandora represents a step backward. Those of us who grew up listening to FM radio looked to the DJs to expose us to things we never knew existed. The Internet makes it too easy to block out things you think you don't like. There: I discovered a genomic link between Pandora and Fox News.

I keep looking online for a new generation of curators willing to shape the public's taste because they have confidence in their own. Where are those people?

Live, from Labastide-Esparbairenque, France, It's Tuesday Morning!

In other words, thanks to Skype, I'll be appearing on blogtalkradio (http://bit.ly/1EfsMt) at 9am ET.

Two for Two

Once again, minutes before the scheduled start of a bookstore event, violent weather strikes. I am trying not to take it personally.

The first time it happened, at RJ Julia in Madison, CT, turnout was slim - there was a tornado warning, for Pete's sake! - and I do not have a local circle of friends in that area.

Last night, however, playing for the home crowd, not only friends but total strangers packed the Lenox Bookstore. The interview on WAMC's Roundtable seemed to do the trick.

While at the Bookstore, I learned from proprietor Matt Tannenbaum about this review of FROM SQUARE ONE, in the Kenyon Review.

On to Brooklyn!

From the Roundtable Today on WAMC

I was interviewed by Ian Pickus, who gave me lots of room to give a sense of what I tried to do in the book.

Here's one clip.

Here's another.

And yet another.

By the way, there's an update to report since the interview was taped. The Atlantic apparently has not read my book and has announced it will no longer run Cox & Rathvon's outstanding Puzzler, even online. You can read the Times story here.

Radio Radio

On Tuesday, June 30, I'll appear on New Hampshire Public Radio talk show Word of Mouth, which is hosted by the lovely and amazing Virginia Prescott. The segment is scheduled from 12:43 to 12:51pm ET. This is not a typo.

Then, the next day (July 1) I'll be on for a whole hour, taking calls and everything, on WHYY's outstanding Radio Times. That's from 11am to 12 noon ET.

For updates about future appearances on air, watch this space.

On the Radio

Today:

The Leonard Lopate Show, 12:40-1pm ET

Then, in the evening (News willing), an interview with Melissa Block on All Things Considered

[updated update: These things are always highly subject to change, even at the last second, but the All Things Considered interview is now scheduled for today at 4:20pm ET - and every two hours thereafter.]

Back Where I Came From

I jumped from commercial to public radio 25 years ago when I took a job as a board operator in Hartford, Connecticut. The station's star interviewer then was Faith Middleton. She still is. Yesterday Faith did an interview with me, and it's scheduled to air today. Of course, you never know with these things - there's always the possibility of being bumped to a later date. This link will take you to her show.

Not That I Condone Violence

but …

among my major regrets in life, one is that we did not act a little more like the Iranian people after our own presidential disaster in 2000.

I did try to stir up outrage with the hope of organized protest. To this day, I can't shake the memory of a left-leaning colleague who counseled me, condescendingly, that it was important to “move on.”

Such terrible advice. And hindsight is not required to know it. At the time, even, that line from Yeats replayed itself in my head like a stuck record. I wish the poet were alive today so that I could argue with him: if they truly were the “best,” then they wouldn't lack all conviction, would they?

As the 2002 midterm elections approached, it was time to vote again, and for the life of me I couldn't see the point of it. Unless all votes are counted, the exercise is empty.

The weekend before election day, I tried to argue my case to former New York Governor Mario Cuomo. (Click here and then fast forward to 1:39 to skip past the show intro and listen to the interview. Sorry, but WNYC still requires RealPlayer.)

I bring this up again now to set the record straight. The governor characterized my position this way: “I [Dean] didn't get what I want when I vote, so why should I vote? They're not really listening to me.”

I can't remember what happened next in the raw, unedited interview. There are two possibilities. The first is that I wasn't quick enough on my feet to press the point. The second is that I did press the point but a producer took it out, thinking it unimportant, and I wasn't hovering closely enough to make sure it was left in.

What needed to be said next was this: “No, Governor. That's not it at all. Actually, in November of 2000, we didn't have enough information about George Bush to hate him yet. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt about compassionate conservatism. It has nothing to do with what I want. The disaster was that when all the votes were counted, the American people had voted the other way. When all the votes were counted—and this point has never sunk in, perhaps because it's too horrifying to contemplate—Gore had won not only the popular vote but also the Electoral College. I would shut up about it if Bush had really been the candidate America wanted in 2000.”

Of course, then came the 2004 election, which rendered me speechless. But that's another matter.

One thing the governor said seems alive again in light of Iranians' response to their election results. He said: “This is a system that rewards involvement and punishes aloofness.” I hope to have a chance in my lifetime to witness if that is true.

Page Two

GoodDAY!

Check It Out

New, original reporting in sound by my grad students, at The End of the Dial. They've got some pretty cool stuff going on, including, this week, a piece from Upper Darby, PA, on the "reverse Bradley effect."

Tune In Tomorrow

and Wednesday, too, to the Leonard Lopate Show. I'll be hosting. Among the guests: Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Maira Kalman, David Ives. Listen 12-2pm ET in the New York area on 93.9FM or 820AM, and anywhere in the world at wnyc.org (where the show is also archived).

Compare and Contrast

The intro as submitted (title of piece, "Middle of the Road"):

"Until science comes up with a definitive theory for why humans are drawn to music, writer Dean Olsher is sticking with his: because it induces time travel."

And as it appeared this evening on All Things Considered (along with the piece itself):

Listen.

Housewarming Party

I wish to direct your attention to the new home of audio reporting done by the workshop I started at NYU's journalism department. It's The End of the Dial. Two pieces have been posted so far, each taking a different approach.

In addition to the critiques that were raised by our first attempt, a third has come up: several people said they really don't want to have to look at anything. They want to just download the audio to their iPods or, even if they're sitting at the computer, they want to do other things while listening, like make dinner or veg out on the couch.

In this case, there is information that gets alluded to in the narration, but not spelled out. Our hope is that by putting that information on the blog post, you'll be properly prepared for when the moment arrives. Does it work? Tell us.

How Can We Make It Better?

Thanks to John for weighing in on this week's experiment in sound reporting.

Here are two other issues that have been raised by colleagues in NYU's journalism department:

1.) How do we create the expectation in the end user that this is not going to be a movie? One person thought, upon first playing the piece, that something had gone wrong: that, perhaps, only the titles had been rendered but the video track had been erased. After all, you see the little arrow and the black screen and that makes you think a movie is about to begin. We experimented with putting an ear behind the arrow but it looked a little gruesome. Hey, it is Halloweek [sic], after all.

2.) Are we overloading the part of the brain that processes words? I find, for example, that when I'm writing, I can listen to instrumental music but not songs with lyrics, and certainly not news or talk. (It always seemed remarkable how many visual artists told me they listened to The Next Big Thing while making their work; I guess they really do operate from a non-verbal place.) Is looking at text and hearing different words simultaneously the same as patting your head and rubbing your tummy?

The Start of Something New?

I've been struggling to solve a problem regarding what's still being called, until a better name comes along, the Medium Formerly Known as Radio. The problem is: how do we meet the internet's demand for visuals in a way that is true to who we are? After all, working in sound is superior because it requires the listener to supply the pictures. If we wanted to do our audiences' seeing for them, we'd have become filmmakers.

So far, the "enhanced" audio podcast seems to consist of slapping up a still photo corresponding in some way to the piece being heard. Unimaginative at best.

Instead, I see the internet providing an opportunity to make up for radio's main weakness. As many of us have learned over the years, it is a terrible medium for communicating information. To properly hold our listeners' hands, we load our scripts with necessary facts that encumber the storytelling.

For some time, I've imagined a kind of internet audio reportage that leaves the main narration to the reporter and offloads some of the overly specific information into visible text, i.e., constantly changing titles that can be read while listening and that don't do your seeing for you. And, when needed, these titles can give a leg up to tape that might be hard to grasp on its own.

One of the students in a weekly sound reporting workshop I run, Anne Noyes, has published what I think might be the first example of this new form. Give a listen to A Basement in Queens and tell us what you think.

Update

That piece I did about my battle with the beavers is airing on these stations at these times. My portion starts about 20 minutes into the fifth episode.

Never Forget

Long before enemy combatants, there have been all kinds of legally suspect ways to ruin innocent lives. I remember the morning Carl Kasell announced to the world that Richard Jewell had been named a "person of interest." I went to the office that day (I was working at NPR at the time) and asked the managing editor if it we, as a news organization, were really willing to go down that road. His answer was that since the FBI had released the name, it was our job to report it.

I've often wondered what it would have taken to get all news organizations in America to say no, sorry, we're not going to do your dirty work for you.

Listen.

My Next Big Thing

This will come as a bit of a surprise, but a week from today I begin a visiting professorship in NYU's journalism department. It's a one-year appointment. Friday was my last day on the air at Martha Radio.

At NYU I'll create a concentration in radio journalism. From scratch.

It's a pretty exciting thing. This coincides with an anniversary: 30 years on the air. I still have my third class radio operator's license from the FCC. Yes, it's framed.

When I first started talking with Brooke Kroeger, the journalism department chair, about the possibility of coming on board, she asked me to write a statement outlining how I'd proceed. What follows is a portion of what I presented to her:

Each year, the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago attracts dozens of aspiring young producers involved in radio projects for organizations such as Blunt Youth Radio in Portland, ME; Youth Radio in Oakland, CA, and Radio Rookies in New York City. They tend to share early memories of growing up with NPR during long family car rides and a more recent fascination with public radio programs that target younger audiences, such as "This American Life" and "The Next Big Thing." They are excited about the medium and the possibility of injecting new life into it. They make me hopeful about radio’s future. I also think there is every reason to believe the Internet will provide expanding opportunities for journalistic audio production.

Recently a vice president at NPR told me that he thinks it is no longer feasible to create new programs for the nationwide system of affiliate stations; instead, he finds himself directing his energies more and more toward advertiser-supported podcasting and indeed discovering there is already a sizable audience for audio content over the web. I myself have come to refer to "the medium formerly known as radio.”

At its founding, NPR was dedicated to the notion that radio journalism is its own discipline, not merely print reportage that happens to take place on the air. It was understood that sound gathering was integral, not incidental, to the process. As a result, you will always get more facts from reading The New York Times, but radio allows you to feel a story as no other medium can.

As NPR became more of a primary news source—around the time of the Persian Gulf War—a large number of print journalists were hired in the belief that they possessed superior reporting chops. Those who espouse radio journalism's unique and special qualities became scarcer. There grew a cultural divide within the institution between news values and radio values.

I believe this is an unnecessary dichotomy, fostered by an educational landscape that offers training either in reporting or in broadcasting, but rarely a substantial experience in both, together. I propose to introduce radio in a way that gives equal emphasis to each word in the term radio journalism.

There are many ways to practice radio journalism. The style that interests me most, and which I believe is the most useful in a teaching environment, is the use of sound-gathering to capture stories as they unfold, where listeners witness events as they happen (rather than hearing after-the-fact narratives). In the truest sense of the word, we should call this documentary. And yet it is a loaded word. As practiced by filmmakers, it often implies a mixture of fact with fudge.

This addresses the question of form. As for content, I return to the idea that radio allows listeners to feel a story the way no other medium can. To that I wish to add the original description of All Things Considered: a radio magazine of the human experience. While it may sound a little grand, it does capture radio's unique strength as a medium. Radio is intimate. It reaches in through your ears, deep into your heart and soul. It encompasses the large and the small, the public demonstration and the quiet personal epiphany.

Advertisements for Myself

I've contributed a piece to a series called Stories from the Heart of the Land. It's the tale of one man's struggle with Castor canadensis (a.k.a. beaver). The series is airing at various times in different cities so, as they say, check local listings.

Remember Me?

Hi there. Yes, it's been quite a while since I've tended to things over here. Had a sudden increase in the workload, having taken on a job as the morning man at Martha Stewart's channel on Sirius satellite radio. I realize it seems like quite a departure, but in the month and a half or so since I started doing it I discovered just how developed my inner Martha is.

So that's my excuse. Oh, by the way, I discovered some egregiousness over at Wikipedia's entry for the late, great TV show Omnibus, from the 1950s. I realize (I hope, actually) that by the time you read this, someone will have come along to make things right. As of this writing, the entry for Alistair Cooke didn't even mention the show, and that can't be allowed to stand.

But I don't have time to deal with it.

What I Did During My Winter Vacation

Listen.

One More Thing and Then I'll Shut Up About It

NPR fixed the link.

The Heterodyne Principle

In the absence of a live link on the NPR page, here is the piece that aired this evening.

MELISSA BLOCK INTRO:

It is called the Heterodyne Principle: a poetic sounding name for a discovery that led to a chain of events culminating in me, talking to you, right now. Reginald Fessenden made the discovery in the early years of the twentieth century. A Canadian by birth who began his career working for Thomas Edison, Fessenden figured out that by combining two frequencies together, radio could do more than simply transmit Morse code. It would be possible to SPEAK over the airwaves. Thanks to him, radio became a sound medium.

It happened one hundred years ago Sunday. And as writer Dean Olsher tells us, the first implementation of Fessenden's principle is one of radio's creation myths.

Listen here

MELISSA'S BACK ANNOUNCE:

Dean Olsher is a writer in New York. We heard violinist Christina Smith, and Chris Brookes as the voice of Reginald Fessenden.

Sorry About That

To be complete and correct, I ought to have specified that it was likely but not certain that my piece would air at 5:50 pm ET. As it happens, All Things Considered ran it an hour earlier. So sorry if you ended up listening to unwanted segments of the show. Under normal circumstances, I'd be able to direct you to a link so that you could hear it online, but for some reason that file is blank. A jinx? Perhaps.

Back on the Radio Again

I came to Yaddo to try new things. As fate would have it, being here inspired me to make a radio piece—my first since the The Next Big Thing went off the air. Thus does my 18-month sabbatical come to an end.

The piece is a meditation on the first broadcast of music and speech on the airwaves, which took place one hundred years ago this Sunday. My piece will air tomorrow, December 22, on All Things Considered. If you'd like to hear it, start listening around 5:50 pm ET.

Happy listening and Merry Christmas!

Rejected First Lines

From the book of Genesis:

"You're not going to believe this...."

—BBC Radio, "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue"

The Mozart Defect

I'm one of those rare Americans who listen to classical music on the radio. Except for times like these, when it's just not safe. I've stopped listening, for the time being, because of the ever-present danger of hearing Mozart.

Don't get the wrong idea. I love Mozart. It's the birthdays I hate. And with his 250th upon us, there is no avoiding him.

I can't think of a better example of how marginal classical music has become to our culture. The best reason radio programmers can think of to play a piece is because someone happened to be born on that date. I'll never forget the show that celebrated the 114th anniversary of the birth of the R. Nathaniel Dett.

Are you kidding me?

Sure, there's no comparison between this obscure American composer and—well, one of the greatest musical geniuses ever in the whole history of ever. But that's just a small part of the problem. Okay, so it's Mozart's birthday, and it's a big, round number. So. What? Does that make him more relevant than he was in 2005? Does that merit an entire year of so much forced overfeeding that I can't stop thinking about those poor geese and their livers on the way to becoming foie gras?

Okay, so if not for his birthday, then what makes Mozart relevant? Here's a hint: the answer is not that he'll make your kids smarter. Yes, the Mozart Effect has entered the language and people make money selling CDs for parents to play in cribs—and what's lost in the profits is that there is no Mozart Effect. It's been debunked. By the very scientist whose research was misused in the first place.

Music can make you joyous, pensive, bawl your eyes out or dance around the room. But smarter? Come on.

It's really heartbreaking when arts advocates make the case that government should pay for culture because of some pragmatic reason—like giving kids a competitive advantage in school. This is well-meaning, but ultimately cynical. And desperate. I know better than anyone that it's not fashionable to talk about art for art's sake anymore. And yet still I hope for the day when someone stands before Congress and asks it to support performances of Mozart's music simply because it makes us better human beings. And that's reason enough. Wouldn't that be fantastic? For someone to have the courage to demand that we redefine our idea of what makes something relevant.

So happy birthday to Mozart. If you do decide to listen to his music, please do so because it moves your spirit. Try not to overdo it. As for me, I'll turn the radio back on a year from now. When it's safe again.

Submitted With Humility (And a Fair Amount of Trepidation)

Anyone who has witnessed the opening of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford knows that one points out errors in the Times crossword at one’s own risk. This past year, the festivities began on the very day the puzzle included a marvel of misdirection: 1D, “They got back on the road in 1998.” Before the end of the day, Will Shortz had already received a note from a reader expressing utter disdain. Everyone knew the Beatles had disbanded nearly three decades earlier. (I was reminded of Paul McCartney’s line that there would be no reunion as long as John Lennon remained dead.) Shortz was pitch-perfect as he captured the moral outrage of the letter—and then gently deflated it as he pointed out that the actual answer, BEETLES (as in Volkswagen), not BEATLES, was correct all along.

I’ve learned to assume over the years that if I spot something that looks wrong, it’s a good idea to look a second, third and even a fourth time. Usually, I’m the one who’s just not seeing things the right way.

This morning, when I encountered 52D, “‘As It Happens’ airer,” I didn’t think twice before entering CBC (all the while wondering if the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has in fact been broadcasting its long-running interview program during the lockout that has crippled the network for the last six weeks). This, however, resulted in a suspicious CN combination in the crossing entry.

Aha, I thought, Will Shortz and the constructor, Levi Denham, must be thinking of the broadcast entity that distributes the show south of the border. And indeed they were. They got the wrong one, though. While NPR (the answer in today’s puzzle) does air interesting news programs, it is American Public Media, a division of Minnesota Public Radio, that distributes “As It Happens” here in the States. Because NPR is the oldest and the most famous of the three major distributors of public radio programming in the U.S. (the other two being PRI and the aforementioned APM), it has become the Kleenex of its industry. And it’s natural to want National Public Radio and “national public radio” to be synonymous. But they’re not.

Still, it was a very enjoyable puzzle.