Brain Clouds: the Listening Post Blog

Starting gun

2009-07-02T15:18:00.002-04:00

Independence Day has gone through some changes over the years. Our notion of patriotism once focused much more on communitarian values, and less on the individual. A case in point is this excerpt from Franklin Benjamin Hough's History of St. Lawrence and Franklin County (1853). It concerns celebrations in the Town of Potsdam organized by pioneer settler Liberty Knowles.

"In 1825 the citizens of this town united in celebrating the national anniversary in a manner quite novel and utilitarian:

"Resolved therefore that it be recommended to the citizens of said town, to assemble the village, at an early hour on the 4th day of July next, with teams and suitable implements, for the purpose of embanking the meeting houses and gun house, and improving the public square in said town, as a principal part of the exercises of that day.

"Order of the Day:
1. The day will be ushered in by the discharge of cannon.
2. At half past 7 0'clock, A.M., prayers will be attended on the common.
3. Labor will commence at 8 o'clock A.M., at the discharge of one gun.
4. At half past 12 o'clock, at noon, at the discharge of a gun and the sound of a bugle, the procession will form, and, aided by the band, will march to the table (on the common), to be furnished with the provisions which each man will bring with him; and it is presumed some appendages will be added by the people of the village. Liquor will be furnished by the committee.
5. At half past one o'clock, P.M., labor will recommence, at the sound of the bugle.
6. At 5 o'clock, P.M., the sound of the bugle will announce the cessation of labor, when the procession will form and proceed to the place for receiving the address, from Rev. Wallace.
7. The day will close with music and the discharge of cannon."

Enjoy the holiday.

Eat the peas

2009-06-25T15:31:00.005-04:00

You know your state's in trouble when the antics of its politicians start turning up on The Daily Show and in late night monologs. While New York has been briefly displaced by South Carolina as the butt of jokes, due to their governor's (once) mysterious walkabout, don't count Albany out yet. It's a slow-motion train wreck that keeps on giving. Dueling simultaneous sessions?--you can't make this stuff up. Lockouts and walkouts, shouting matches, the governor threatening armed intervention--oh joy.

Formulating fixes for our dysfunctional state legislature has become a cottage industry. Popular suggestions: fire the leaders (assuming you can tell who they are); dock everyone's pay; make them all sit at the table until they eat their peas. Rick Lazio (former GOP candidate for the US Senate) suggests: "Senate? We don' need no steenking Senate," proposing a single-house legislature like Nebraska's.

This is the Empire State; maybe we just need an emperor. Caligula had no trouble with Rome's legislature; he could get his horse appointed to the Senate. The whole horse--he was probably thinking, "Why leave the job half done?"

Caption: Caligula parades his horse Incitatus before the Roman Senate.

Well-traveled

2009-06-18T14:54:00.004-04:00

Seems like everyone's been on the road lately--Bob and Jackie no sooner get back from their Greek excursion than Bob gears up to bicycle from Canton to Provincetown. Martha and David are recovering nicely from recent travels in the Northwest. I'm more of a home body, Thoreau's type, who famously said "I have traveled widely--in Concord."

I clock a lot of miles on evening strolls down the Red Sandstone Trail behind my house on the Raquette River. The route doesn't change much, but the seasons do. The ancient bones of the North Country show, sand and sandstone laid down by the Cambrian Sea, stone so old it contains no fossils large enough to see. The woods change--mostly oak along one stretch, mixed maple and struggling beech along another, cool pine shade farther down on Sugar Island.

At one end is Hannawa Falls, called by the original namers "nihanwate," laughing waters. My favorite stop is a shaded outcrop overhanging the falls at such a perilous angle, some day the water will have the last laugh. At the other end you can see the village of Potsdam downriver, the pilings of the old narrow gauge rail line leading to Oak Island, used to transport salmon-hued loaves of fresh-cut stone from the upstream quarries. The river is dotted with cairns of stone, where the log drivers anchored their booms deep in the 19th century. It's not wilderness, but a place like many in the North Country, where people have lived long enough to make their mark, and long enough for the marks to sink back into soil, to crumble and be overtaken by vines.

This has been my stomping ground since childhood excursions on a bike with a banana seat and ape-hanger handlebars. I see no reason to change now. Though it did look like there were some pretty fair walking trails on the Greek Isles, too.

Twenty Does Plenty

2009-06-11T17:07:00.002-04:00

Twenty bucks is real money--not a whole lot from any one pocket, but added to your neighbor's twenty, and his neighbor's--it becomes serious money, enough to build and maintain important community assets, like North Country Public Radio. We're no stranger to the importance of small gifts--the average gift to NCPR runs to two figures. We have a proud track record of doing a lot with a little.

But especially in these difficult economic times, it's important to dust off the long-neglected and much disrespected virtue of frugality. This summer, we will be looking to broaden our membership base beyond the usual public radio suspects, reaching out to students, younger listeners and other new members, folks who listen to us or visit us online, folks who may not use NCPR all day every day, but have appointments with one or two "gotta listen" programs, or a favorite podcast. Whether the traditional member levels are too much for your budget, or the math just doesn't jive with the way use NCPR, your support at any amount makes a difference. We suggest twenty bucks--a week's worth of mocha-frappa-doubleshotta-whipcreamies, or the price of a CD. Too much?--pick your own number. Spare more?--thank you kindly.

We've put together a few visual aids to help you make up your mind. Check it out at ncpr.org/20.

Deep obeisance

2009-06-04T14:52:00.004-04:00

Sometimes you just gotta give it up. So here it is--massive props to NCPR's code developer Bill Haenel, so great a geek that I am not worthy to lick his mousepad. His pioneering work in the wonky world of geodata has made North Country Public Radio the very first station or network in public broadcasting (or anywhere else in media that I am aware of) to be able to render all of its library of content onto maps.

Before you yawn, consider. One of the great defects of the internet has been that it serves communities of affinity at the expense of communities of residence, sucking huge amounts of attention and energy out of the places where people live, and transferring it into the no particular place of cyberspace. Reattaching "whereness" to the content of the internet can go a long way toward redressing that imbalance.

If, that is, others decide to follow the trail blazed by Bill for NCPR. Most work on internet mapping has focused on one-off efforts to map a particular sequence of events or group of related content. These efforts age out of relevance quickly, and apply only to a tiny fraction of content produced. Bill's approach is holistic instead, incorporating place into the DNA of everything NCPR releases into the wild. If other media follow suit, for the first time there will be "places" in cyberspace that actually correspond to the places where we live. To see some baby steps at exploiting these new capabilities, check out the map links on the home page at ncpr.org.

Photographic memory

2009-05-28T12:34:00.004-04:00

As Photo of the Day editor at NCPR, I get a unique, if skewed look at the North Country. Skewed by the predilections of our contributors, I mean--for beautiful landscapes, colorful fauna and flora, for the outdoor life and children and pets--all the things that become the jewels in family photo albums. Nothing wrong with that--I have an eye for the pretty shot myself. But just as a family photo album shows a sanitized version of family life, so the Photo of the Day shows a North Country absent many of its dimensions, and most notably rare--the picture that tells a story.

Which is why I get excited when I receive a contribution that perfectly captures a narrative, such as Lizette Haenel's portrait of a soldier at Monday's Memorial Day observance in Canton. I received many from that event-- flags and formations and wreaths and salutes. But Lizette's soldier is seated by himself in a section of folding chairs, deep in thought. His only neighbor is a neatly folded flag. You can tell he is about to get up and address the crowd--his notes are held in both hands. But his gaze is not toward the paper, rather he looks into that middle distance where memory resides. The picture tells you everything that he will say.

Peekaboo

2009-05-21T15:38:00.004-04:00

If you're the type of person who won't get the discount grocery card because you think the shadow government will use it to track you via Predator drones, you should probably just skip past this. I've been deep in the world of Google Maps this week, trying and not quite succeeding at building automated tools to generate a grand North Country map to deliver NCPR news, events, photos, etc., by geographical location. Mapping tools have been getter better and easier to use over the last few years, and I think it is long overdue that the amorphous space of the Internet should become reattached to the communities people actually live in. So-called geofeeds are still fairly deep geek, but they have the potential to really change the relationship between the real and the virtual world.

Google Maps got its first boost from satellite imaging combined with global positioning technology. But over the last few years, they have been dispatching fleets of 360-degree camera cars down the roads and streets of the world to catalog street views and to synch them up with addresses. It's kind of creepy, and the practice is getting Google into hot-water with the privacy-sensitive German government. Here's NCPR as seen by Google Maps, at 80 E. Main Street, Canton NY. Top floor, right wing, three windows in--that's me waving at you from my office. You can not only find us, get driving directions to us, and find the nearest place that sells pizza--you can rotate the view and get a good look all around the neighborhood.

You really should get rid of that junker under the tarp. You know who you are. And now we know where you live.

Best and worst (and first) rides

2009-05-15T09:14:00.014-04:00

Byron Whitney says:

My worst was a 1972 Chevrolet Vega hatchback. I bought it after rolling over a 1972 VW superbeetle in an ice storm on the Maine Turnpike. The Vega also had a 4 cylinder engine and was supposed to save on gas, but despite numerous return trips to the dealer it never got better than 10 miles to the gallon. You never had to change the oil because you were always adding more. We had to replace the transmission,the alternator, the water pump and have a half block replacement all under warranty.

Radio Bob Sauter says:

I've tried counting sheep, but the best way for me to fall asleep is by counting cars that I've owned....the number is currently around 85-90. Since this is the sort of number a guy likes to boast about, I'll confess that my total includes several vehicles that have not actually been "on the road", but served as parts cars, or were cars that I never actually got in full road trim. But I rationalize that (in theory!) I could have got them licensable.

My first car was a 1954 Renault 4CV. I was a whopping 14 when I paid $15 for it... and used it to drive around my parents 1/2 acre downstate. I suppose it was a great learners car, although I didn't learn that I had two of the four spark-plug wires in the wrong holes in the distributor until after I sold the car a few months later (also for $15!). I'd wondered why it seemed so underpowered. This (and any other 4CV) might also easily have qualified as the "worst" ride... (I owned 4 of them... the photo shows #4) Sure, they were underpowered (750 cc's, as opposed to a big Cadillac's engine displacement of 10 times that!) but they had a few other generic problems: Head gaskets would blow like Hubba-Bubble bubble gum! The suicide doors were very dangerous! Braking was minimal (don't forget these things were designed in the early 40's by some French engineering prisoners of the Third Reich!) And to make it more fun, the gas tank inlet was INSIDE the engine compartment, whilst the radiator cap was located OUTSIDE. If you were't very careful, a gas station attendant (remember those?) would often fill up the cooling system with gasoline. (maybe this was why the head gaskets used to blow?)

My best ride was possibly my 1957 Jaguar XK-140. I paid a whopping (at the time) $270 for it... they're now selling (fully restored, of course) on ebay for $100-$150K! THAT's why it was my best ride. I wish I still had it so I could have turned a 55,000% profit! As it actually worked out, I "threw a rod" in the engine, and sold it for a paltry $100. But it was a great car... it had two 6 volt batteries, one inside each front fender, to balance the ride. And these really sexy blue lights to illuminate the knurled walnut dash. AND the tachometer which indicated more rpm's in the counter-clockwise direction.

My other best ride was my 1960 Humber Super Snipe. It cost $50, but was worth every penny of it, especially for the name! It was missing the back seat, and needed a water pump. I "made" a water pump from the parts from another Rootes Group Car (Rootes had Humber, Singer, Hillman and Sunbeam, and was eventually purchased by that luckless mark... Chrysler) and drove it for thousands of miles. See that little hole in the front bumper, just above the plate? The car came with a crank... and it was fairly easy to start the beautiful hemi-head 6 with it! (I know because I found another Super Snipe down in Key West which needed a starter, but had nice set of seats!) It was a very smooth ride! And was a cool two-tone deep blue with a grey wasitband. I did have a small problem with it when I tried to replace the driveshaft "universal joint", and discovered that the front of the U-joint was Humber stock, but the rear fitted the 50's Ford differential that some prior owner had installed.

My worst ride? Well, its all relative... I've liked every car I've owned at least a little, so I'll use the term "worst" to refer to mechanical condition. The one I picked for this category would by the 1957 Austin Healy 100-6 I owned for a few months in 1969. I bought it for $20 (a real bargain!) ... but it had its issues too. For example, there was no top... and since it was late winter, and I was living in Potsdam, this was a definite drawback. Also the "front end" was shot... it would shimmy alarmingly at certain speeds... over almost any bump. And the prior owner (who was a bit of a maverick!) replaced the broken windshield glass with plexiglass... then decided to drill a series of 1/4" holes in the plexiglass to ventilate the interior! Other than that it really was a pretty good car. I eventually sold it to some guys in Jersey who wanted to make a "race car" out of it, by dropping a big V-8 into it. Never heard from them again.

Ellen Rocco says:

My friend Walter agreed to teach me how to drive on his old something (I'm a gal who never learned makes of cars). Unfortunately, my first time out at the age of 23 (I grew up in Manhattan, we took subways), I was a bit overenthusiastic about using the column shift stick, hit it really hard... except it wasn't the stick shift it was the signal light stick, which snapped neatly off the column...

Favorite, hands down: 1985 VW Vanagon, which we named Loretta for our 2003 cross country trip-- "we"being my best buddy Laurie, her 120 lb dog, me and my 15 lb pug. Everywhere we went we made friends--partly because we were such a funny looking group everyone enjoyed chatting us up, and partly because people were drawn to the Vanagon which either made people wistful about the trip they'd always wanted to take or nostalgic about some youthful adventure they had undertaken, albeit in the original air-cooled model--we had the "improved" water-cooled engine. Okay, not everyone thought we were cute...I forgot about the cars behind us when we were ascending the Rockies on two-lane roads.

Dale Hobson replies:

Another favorite of mine--my father bought the '76 Vanagon new and Terry and I busted the new off it on our honeymoon (my '65 Chevy van being unfit for human habitation). It did double duty as his summer camp, parked at Coles Creek Marina with the top up, the sliding door open, with a tarp shading the lawn chairs and hibachi as he tried to cajole at least one of the two 40-horse Johnsons on his wooden Lyman runabout into life. Like all the air-cooled VWs, in later life the heat exchanger rotted out, and my father solved his winter commuting problems by lashing down a Coleman catalytic camp heater to the floor with bungee cords and driving with the windows cracked. The fumes were no more noxious and life-threatening than his Cherry Blend pipe tobacco. It spent its declining years in his driveway, getting most use as our daughter's playhouse. She and her friends would put up the pop-top, climb up and giggle insanely over whatever it is that 5-year-old girls talk about when no one else is around.

Mark says:

My first was a 1963 MG B. I bought it in December 1971 from a family friend for $100... and it was a $100 car. I sold it in late spring of 1972 - why did I sell it at the BEGINNING of summer after having just driven it through the winter?... dumb! But it was one of the most fun cars I ever owned... until I bought recently a car I have now, a 1967 MG B. Reliving my youth I guess.

Roger says:

My vote goes to the '63 Chevy Impala Super Sport. It was the first and only car I ever ordered direct from the factory and remains the one "I wish I still had."

Michael Malley says:

A '65 Chevy Van, 90" wheelbase, 13'' wheels, it was like driving a go-cart. A flat glass windshield and a metal dash were all that protected you things that go bump. You sat on top of the front wheels, turned a near vertical steering column, and the radiator was right beside you. When it was overheating, we would drive it with the engine cover open and dribble water into the radiator from the beer cooler. Very handy for tweaking the distributor cap and carburetor on the fly too. It didn't ever have seat belts when I bought it for $200.

Dale Hobson replies:

My first wheels, too. I learned standard by driving it home from the lot. I used it for my first two jobs--delivering pizza, and hauling a 9-piece fusion-funk band to every prom and watering hole in the North Country.

Susan Gaffney says:

My 1965 powder blue Mustang convertible. After I got married, my husband made us sell it because the transmission needed replacing -- what a mistake. The husband is still here -- not a mistake...

And my 2009 dark blue Prius. Those are the cars I have loved...

My husband, in his graduate school days, used to receive Aunt Catherine's cast-off Plymouth Valliants. They were all called The Shark.

David says:

I nominate my first car - the '68 Ford Mustang - wish I still had it...

Anonymous says:

The best was my first, what had been my Dad's car. He gave it to me when I graduated from college, a 2Dr 1964 Chrysler 300. It had a huge V8 with a 4 barrel carburetor and when you had the gas to the floor at 80 that carburetor would kick in and you would be thrust back into the seat until you attained free fall around 120-130.

Nancy Currier says:

My husband bought it for me 4 years ago as a $500 birthday gift. My 1985 VW Cabriolet is rusty and the paint is dull, but it zips through all 5 gears like it was born yesterday and goes through the turns like it's bolted to rails. Now, put the top down and driving any where through the Adk's is like driving through heaven, especially Rt 74 from the Northway to Lake Placid. It is an all sensory assault that you just can't get enough of. Top down, 5 gears, ecstasy.

The Dude says:

Wow Dale, the mention of the Borgward was like a floodgate for my automotive memories. My dad and I even made a half assed attempt at building an Armstrong Sidley Safire. Polishing the radiator, stripping off the fenders in preparation for new welding, only to loose altitude when the electric transmission couldn't be made to go into reverse. Odd to think that I could fix it now but wouldn't. Then I couldn't but would. You're right--the symbolic world is more valuable than the real one.

Dale Hobson replies:

Our family Borgward died from 200 miles of straddling the hump made by wider American cars in a snowstorm. Shot wheel bearings stranded us overnight at the Hotel Woodruff in Watertown. I snuck downstairs to get my first gander at go-go dancers in the hotel lounge.

Phyllis Brown says:

My worst car EVER was an absolutely adorable candy-apple-red Renault Alliance. From the day I bought it spiffy and shiny-new, till the day it limped into a dealer lot (less than 2 years later) to be traded, there was barely a moment without an aggravation.

For starters - it was a stick shift – and I’d grab the lever to shift gears, and the knob would come off in my hand (oh-oh, what do I do now?). They’d glue it on, and inevitably, it would happen again. Or I’d close the door as I got in to drive, and the side-moldings would fall off. And again. Or I’d be driving down the highway at 70+ mph and I’d attempt to redirect the heater vents, and the whole vent system thingy would fall out and a cold blast of air would barrel through the car. And of course, after it was fixed, it happened again. Then there was the spider-web cracking of paint all over the hood and roof, which was repainted THREE TIMES in my two years of ownership.

But maybe the most painful experience was the total lack of heat less than a day after I purchased the car, on a dark cold (30-below-0 degrees) Plattsburgh morning as I drove the 17 miles to my job in Peru. It didn’t matter how long the engine “warmed up”; there was NO HEAT. And, like everything else, fixing it once did not fix it permanently. Everything that went wrong with this car happened repeatedly.

Of course, even with various parts regularly falling off, the hideously cracked paint, and the problems with the heat, the car was still ridiculously CUTE.

Editor's note: The first car I ever bought new. Had all the same problems. It went from 1983 Car of the Year to total turkey in 5.9 seconds. I could retire on what I put into repairs. DH

Some wheels

2009-05-14T13:42:00.002-04:00

Back when my personal finances were evenly divided between budget lines for comic books, candy/soda, and Revell models, I was car crazy. I dreamed of saving up 50 bucks to buy the army surplus jeeps advertised on the inside back cover of Marvel Comics. The age of hot rods and dream cars was in full swing, and I carefully assembled copies of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth's Mysterion, 007's Aston Martin, GM's turbine-powered x-car. My father was a gear-head too, adopting a string of alt-tech autos ranging from the rickety Borgward to the ill-fated Corvair. His brother Don worked for Studebaker, on the design team that turned out the elegant Avanti. It was the kind of pure love that couldn't survive contact with reality--learning to drive, and getting a real job to save up for some wheels.

Since that time, I've herded a lot of junk, laundry vans, rusted-out Valiants, little things made by Mitsubishi, enormous V-8 wagons from Detroit. Cars named after birds and divinities and predators, and cars named by faceless committees. But I've never driven anything that I could love the way I loved the idea of a '57 T-Bird, or a coffin-nosed Cord Roadster. Like most folks, I view the beast in the drive with something between conditional acceptance, resignation and outright loathing. Just as the poem on the page never quite lives up to the poem that was in the head, the car in the drive can never be as good as the car of the mind. Now that was one sweet ride.

Send along your own nominations for best rides and worst. I'll dig up photos and post with your replies. Use the comment link below or email dale@ncpr.org.

Terrible longing

2009-05-07T14:07:00.004-04:00

Lust is one of the big sins, right up there with sloth (my personal favorite) and simony--whatever that is. The usual objects of lust are money, power or sex, but I have become fixated on trillium. So ephemeral, so simple, so precious. I want to cut them and put them in a vase, or dig them up and transplant them home--I want to possess them. They are not gaudy and sociable like the daffodil, which permits itself to be herded chock-a-block into beds. They are modest and retiring, thriving in the most anemic of soil; they hide their beauty under partial shade. They keep a discreet distance from one another, lightly salted along the woodland trails. Far from the aggressive perfume of lilac, they cast no more aroma than cold spring water.

It's one thing to patiently wait out the cruel winter, then to take to the blackfly-infested woods, where one can savor their natural virtues in situ. But this terrible longing, this criminal impulse to uproot them--it can only lead to dining on larks in aspic, to buying strawberries out of season, to keeping a cheetah in the apartment on Central Park West. Were the trillium all mine, hoarded beneath my window, I would slaughter a dozen chipmunks to protect them. I would take a chainsaw to the pine trees if they so much as blocked the light.

Breathing the same air

2009-04-30T14:38:00.001-04:00

Listening to the radio while doing chores, or playing a CD while driving a lonely stretch of road, it's easy to fall into the habit of thinking about music as a solitary experience. Cafes are full of people, each hearing their own soundtrack to life through earbuds. If we sing at all, it's to ourselves in the shower. Music is a commodity, served at a table for one.

What a change, then, to experience the real thing, the way humans have practiced the art for 20,000 years or so--as a community. Last Saturday I attended the spring concert of The Orchestra of Northern New York. While I haven't the ear to judge the quality of the performance--a program of Haydn and Beethoven--the quality of the experience was remarkable. Dozens of performers, many of them known to me, and hundreds of listeners, many also known to me, gathered in one room at one time, breathing the same air. The orchestra gave the gift of their practice and talent. The audience gave the gift of their attention and appreciation. They dressed up, put aside their other business, and traveled to be together for a single purpose. It happened in real time, from the opening theme to the final fall of the baton, becoming what it was moment by moment. If you weren't there, you missed it, and no recording can replace what you missed.

I will never forego the solitary pleasures of recorded music, and would never discourage anyone from listening to the radio--preferably to NCPR for hours each day. Just bear in mind that what you hear is only a synthetic echo of a moment, not the moment itself. For that, you need to go to where the music is being played.

Bean soup

2009-04-23T14:28:00.003-04:00

Bean counting, like bean soup, can be very satisfying. You count every bean you can find, tote the results up by category, and you have hard facts. You can take it to the bank. You know where you stand. You have the skinny. Except when the math goes fuzzy on you.

One fuzzy example: if you know 10,000 tennis balls are sold in the county each year, and that the average tennis player buys 10 balls each year, you might think that there are 1000 tennis players in the county. But if you work at NCPR, across from the physical therapy office, you will see ten people with walkers go by the door each day, each with two tennis balls impaled on the back legs. And in the parking lot, you might see another five balls doing duty as car antenna flags, and another five in back seats as chew toys. You might as well base your estimate of tennis players in the county on the number of paunchy middle-aged guys who tell their doctors they work out on the courts three times a week.

All stats are more or less like this: web visitors, balance sheets, census data, economic forecasts. 64,387 visitors came to ncpr.org last month--Yay! 45,760 stayed for 10 seconds or less--Yikes! I spend more and more time poring over numbers--audience data, download counts, page views, loyalty trends, day-part stream graphs. There's enough information out there for two of me, resulting in enough ignorance for three. So how are we actually doing? It will be sunny and 70 tomorrow, sunny and 80 on Saturday. You can take that to the bank.

Nominees: The best LP album art ever

2009-04-16T15:42:00.022-04:00

To make your own nomination, comment on this post, or email to dale@ncpr.org.

Mary Abramson of Minerva says:

I enjoy the free spirit image of Bob Seger’s Against the Wind, and the outrageous spirit on Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell.

Varick Chittenden of Canton says:

What a good idea...and excuse to search through the cupboard full of vinyl LP's and see some long-ago favorites again. Here's my choice, (Talking Heads: Little Creatures) tho' I must say I like the cover more than the music! Heresy!!

I got to know about [the cover artist, Howard] Finster from an old and close friend, Bert Hemphill, a major collector of 20th century American folk art.

Jonathan Brown of Canton says:

Even though they're so familiar to me now, these are still two of the most arresting images I've ever seen.

Above: Relayer, Yes

Right: Brain Salad Surgery, Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Keith Freeman of Bloomingdale says:
My favorite that I gazed at for hours was Queen’s News of the World. Thanks for the fond memories.

Tom Boothe of Saranac Lake says:

That Santana album with the black and white lion face has gotta be up there. That’s all I’m sayin’.

Jodi Tosti of Potsdam says:

I lived for liner notes that seem to have fallen by the wayside in today's recording industry. I guess there's not too much to say about the musical accomplishments of so many artists whose only qualifications are that they look good on stage. Anywho, the first album cover to come mind is one of Boston's with the flying ufo/guitar, I believe. I also always liked the Rolling Stones cover with the cake on it.

Small is not so beautiful

2009-04-16T13:01:00.001-04:00

It's time for spring cleaning in the NCPR music library again, and there is a takeaway table outside the studio door stacked with LPs and CDs. While I don't miss the inconvenience of vinyl, I must say that the LP art drew me to the table from all the way down the hall. Something went out of music appreciation when the foot-square album cover shrank to a few inches on CD, then vanished altogether in the age of downloads.

I turned a lot of hard-earned cash into so-so music just on the strength of cover art back in the '60s and '70s. I can't say that I ever bought a CD just because of the cover. Nor have I ever memorized the lyrics of a song from the CD insert, where the type is as tiny as the fine print on a subprime mortgage.

The best album covers had enough going on to keep you occupied through both the A and B sides--front cover, back cover, overleaf, sleeve, insert, label--all crawling with images and text. The best graphic artists in the world dined out on the copious real estate. Album covers performed the job of fan newsletter and band website. The object was the promotion. I could hardly wait to tear away the plastic wrap, and I can't think of a "shopping experience" that has been so satisfying since. Send me your nominations for the best LP art of all time. Tell us why they rock, and provide an image, if you can. Email to dale@ncpr.org. We'll post the results (with disappointingly tiny thumbnails) next week.

What you paid for

2009-04-09T12:02:00.003-04:00

For the first time since I started at NCPR in 2001, I was out of town for one of our fund drives, presenting at the National Federation of Community Broadcasters conference in Portland, OR. I worried (needlessly as it turns out) that the world would stop turning if I wasn't working the crank. And what a turn! You came through with astonishing generosity in down economic times, pushing us nearly 10% over our goal of $175,000. And everyone back at home worked a little extra to keep the website fresh and interesting while I was away. What can I say? The only proper response to such an outpouring of support--expressed in its sincerest form, cash--is sweat and excellence, sweetened with gratitude. You have the first, and certainly the last.

And the evidence is coming in that we can be moved toward excellence in serving the community that supports us. NCPR News is once again making news, taking home two regional Edward R. Murrow Awards from this year's round. The first is for continuing coverage of the impact of war at home. You find these stories on our Fort Drum community page and on topic pages for Peace and War, On the Home Front, and The National Guard. David Sommerstein took home honors for sports reporting for his story "Native Americans in baseball's past and present." And the NCPR website was recognized as the best among among small-market radio stations in the region (which encompasses New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.)

Your gifts also support excellence at National Public Radio, whose largest source of revenue is fees paid by station affiliates like us. National Public Radio has won three prestigious Peabody Awards for news coverage this year. They are for reporting on the 2008 earthquake in China, a three-part investigation of the unanswered questions surrounding two men convicted of the 1972 murder of a prison guard and held in solitary confinement for 36 years at Angola prison, and for "The Giant Pool of Money," NPR's collaboration with This American Life.

You give what you can; we try to give our best back. The results are--well--pretty special. Thanks again for your generous support.

As usual

2009-03-26T13:49:00.001-04:00

The Spring Membership Drive begins on Monday, and the studio is in a preparatory frenzy as usual. And as usual, you will find an alluring assortment of goods and services to encourage your support (including some stuff that can only be characterized as highly cool). And you will hear the usual public radio celebrities, national and home-grown, making the case for member support. The usual volunteers will staff the phone room and chow down on the usual food and snack donations. So it has been for many years--fifty weeks to make the radio, two weeks a year to make the members who make it all work.

But these are not usual times; these are hard times. Like you, we are tightening our belts as much as we can--thinking hard about where the dollars come from and where each dollar goes. The biggest share of our support comes from small gifts, made by people with ordinary means--the kind of gifts we ask for each spring during this drive. More people than ever may be looking in their wallets this year and concluding that they can't give as much as they could in fatter times. Been there. Whatever you can do is welcome and more than welcome. We never forget who "brung us to the dance."

But if you have been a listener for years, someone who has thought about becoming a member one of these days--this is the day. Start small; dip a toe in the water, but don't kick the can down the road another year. If you're in one of our new service areas along Lake Champlain or on the Tug Hill, welcome. NCPR invested in your community to build this service, please consider returning the favor. And thanks to everyone who has already made a membership gift this year.

Road notes

2009-03-19T13:49:00.002-04:00

There is lot of road between the North Country and Maryland underserved by public radio, providing the traveler prolonged opportunities for contemplation. As I zipped along the endless pavement in concert with thousands of other drivers, it occurred to me what a backward solution we have arrived at for the problem of getting from place to place in a hurry. The problem, as I see it, is that we are slow, and we get tired. Neolithic man took the first whack at this problem. Some early genius noticed that other animals ran faster, climbed on top of one, and bullied it into going his way. There must have been a learning curve--saber-tooth? No. Horse? Not too bad!

But it's not our lot to be satisfied with incremental improvements. Smooth roads would help--so we have paved 1% of the surface of the continental US. Wheeled vehicles?--pretty efficient--so 2% of all our labor and a bigger chunk of our income goes into building, buying and feeding cars and trucks. Cheap high-power fuel?--drill out 100 million years of fossil carbon and torch it all off in the blink of a geological eye. And we need garages and bridges and car stereos and diners and drive-thru wedding chapels and malls. We spend hours commuting and zip around like mosquitoes all day.

Seems pretty Rube Goldberg. Think if all that effort, treasure and resources spent over the centuries had gone into learning how to run faster and longer. We could probably run 45 miles per hour for ten hours at a crack. We might have learned how to fly like Superman does. Instead we're stuck with all this scrap metal. Are we there yet?

Fine wine and I

2009-03-12T12:27:00.002-04:00

Fine wine and I don't travel very well. I like my own bed; I have my little routines. I have certain needs—broadband, my preferred brand of peanut butter, a gas stove, The Comedy Channel. So I just make do on the road, and try to suck it up. And I try to bring my new environment into line with my inclinations. For example, my brother lives in dial-up land. You've been there--everything is very slow, the cars are large and the hair funny. You can't carry the phones around, and the rabbit ears bring in fuzzy reruns of Green Acres and soap operas that haven't fully resolved any plot line since the 1970s.

After trying to connect to the world through AOL on a 10-year-old computer, I try to pirate his neighbor's wireless on my laptop, but they are an untrusting lot in the city. So I go to the local library branch to scavenge a slow and spotty connection from the fire hall down the road. I replace the antique phones with portables and convince my bro' to invest in DSL--which will be turned on a week after I leave--sigh. I connect up his digital conversion boxes, but his antenna lives in the basement, and brings in little to titillate my viewing pleasure.

But all is not lost—the twenty-first century can still be found at the mall. Free wifi, good coffee, fresh pastries, and a battery-saving plug-in in my own booth. Now this is more like it. Sure it's a wasteland of parking lots outside and it has a carbon footprint the size of Connecticut, but I'm plugged in, back in business until the lunch crowd eats all the scones and bandwidth.

All a-Twitter

2009-03-05T15:01:00.003-05:00

As newspapers groan and collapse under the twin pressures posed by the financial meltdown and the challenge of making new media pay, we have to wonder if we're next. Already there have been layoffs at NPR and member stations; a few stations have disappeared altogether. Our public radio neighbors are reporting budget shortfalls as underwriters cut back in the face of a dismal retail environment. So far, NCPR is in pretty good shape, but like everyone else, we are sweating about the future.

At the same time, there is an explosion of new tools and platforms for distributing public radio, for knitting its members into an interactive whole, for collaborating with colleagues, and in general doing a bigger and potentially better job of serving as the public square. The pace of development and rollout has accelerated to the point where it drags all the blood to the back of the brain.

Which is all I can offer as an explanation for the rise of Twitter, a communication vehicle so ephemeral, so limited in scope, so throwaway it staggers the imagination. If a newspaper is a rag, Twitter is Kleenex. Its motto would be "All the news that fits into 140 characters." While it might have great potential as a new poetic form, Twitter, and much else that is new in new media, offers little to media companies, public and private, that are struggling for survival. It is this conversation, going on behind the scenes in newsrooms and boardrooms around the country and the world, that has us all a-twitter.

Cartoonist Marquil weighed in on the subject today with this offering.

Behind the mule

2009-02-26T13:29:00.005-05:00

Farmers have always been used to the notion that year by year their work disappears. The crop goes into bellies; the stubble is plowed back in to fertilize the soil; the weeds that are pulled always return. Only the land itself, ready for the next crop, endures from year to year. The work of carmakers lasts a little longer--ten years, twenty years for some, fifty for a tiny few. The rest is crushed for scrap. Artists and writers, on the other hand, have always had their eye on eternity, expecting their work to endure on paper or canvas, stone or bronze, moving on into the future after their creator has been plowed back in.

But modern media has a shelf life shorter than a Twinkie. I've spent a lot of time over the last months trying to resurrect for reprint a book I designed back in 1992. I found it finally among a stack of dusty floppy diskettes--old Mac-format floppies with the files compressed via a no-longer-available utility. If I could extract them, they would be in a design format for software I no longer possess. If I could reinstall the software on a machine old enough to run it, it would be too old to connect with the Internet or network to a newer machine needed to convert it for contemporary use. It might as well be the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I tried--cajoling antique hardware back to life, searching out old applications and relearning how to use them--but, in the end, no luck. So I have taken the dusty book itself from the shelf, to laboriously scan it page by page, to re-edit and design from scratch. And that should do it for a few more years--the lifetime of a Twinkie, perhaps. Progress has put us all back behind the mule.

"Out there" is a good thing

2009-02-19T13:28:00.004-05:00

One of the things I like about the North Country, and about North Country Public Radio, is that we are a little "out there." A little loopy, often unpredictable, sometimes a little extreme. For example, one would expect any border news station to send a reporter to cover Obama's visit to Canada. But David Sommerstein, NCPR's guy on the scene, was probably the only one to skate five miles down the Rideau Canal to get to this morning's press conference. You would expect a bluegrass music host to enjoy and play old-time music. But Barb Heller has brought a dozen local musicians into the studio today, encouraging the world to play along with the radio, and providing all the sheet music online. One would expect an Adirondack reporter to cover outdoor recreation--maybe from an Olympic venue press booth. But Brian Mann reports from deep beneath Lake Champlain diving on a shipwreck, or from halfway up a cliff on an ice climb. In his spare time he writes a definitive book on the urban-rural political divide.

It's a little intimidating when all your colleagues have "exceeds expectations" written somewhere in their personnel jacket. But that's how we roll. That, and all the coffee.

Round numbers

2009-02-12T14:19:00.004-05:00

A big day--the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, and Darwin's, two of the most influential minds of the 19th century. Kit Carson was also born in 1809, as was Nikolai Gogol, Edgar Allen Poe, Alfred Tennyson and 562 other notables and excrebles listed in the Wikipedia category:1809 births. How we love round numbers--50, 100, 200, 1000.

This is the centennial of the NAACP, started on the centennial of Lincoln's birth. Also, the Lincoln penny was introduced in 1909 to honor The Great Emancipator. According to the inflation calculator, that 1909 coin was worth 22 times the value of its 2009 descendant. I have a 1909 Lincoln penny collected in my numismatic youth, bearing the mark VDB, the initials of its designer. Wouldn't trade it for a quarter. Also in 1909, Mahler conducted the NY Philharmonic for the first time, Perry reached the North Pole, Orville Wright tested the first military aircraft, and the first ship at sea was rescued due to radio.

Celebrating fifty (tomorrow) is Barbie, whose freakish anatomy cannot be accounted for by Darwin's theories. 1959 saw Castro chuck Fulgencio Batista out of Cuba; Alaska joined the Union as the 49th state, Bozo the Clown and Rawhide premiered on TV, Pope John XXIII proclaimed the Second Vatican Council, and the Presbyterian Church OKed the ordination of women.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre before Al-Hakim.

Those who take the longer view might note the coronation of Henry VIII in 1509, the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem by Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, who hacked the church's foundations down to bedrock in 1009 AD, or the birth of Roman Emperor Vespasian in 9 AD. You have to wonder, looking at a 2009 infant, what they might do to get themselves onto the 2209 list. We can hope it's not the hacking down to bedrock thing.

Dodo

2009-02-05T14:34:00.002-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about Darwin, leading up to the bicentennial of his birth next week. Though I was nominated for several Darwin Awards in my youth, I did in fact live to breed, and have now passed into that portion of the population largely irrelevant to the survival of the species. Anyone who has gone through a few North Country winters knows that humans did not evolve here, but in some more blessed clime. Had we always needed to fight the ice along with all the toothier types around us, human culture would now consist of nothing but flapping our furry arms for warmth and grunting. It's a measure of our ancestors' desperation that they would think to take on a snarling mountain of fur with nothing but a stone knife, just so they could cut off its skin and climb inside to get warm. Been there.

Last night I was watching a documentary on hip-hop in Cuba. Now that's a climate I could evolve in. Palms, sand, houses painted mango and lime and the color of the sea. Cool breezes, hot music and a 100% fleece-free wardrobe. Instead I look out onto this glaring moonscape of snow. What a dodo.

Breaking new ground

2009-01-29T14:37:00.004-05:00

NCPR has put up a lot of new sticks (transmitters, for the radio-jargon impaired) over the last few years. Mostly to fill in holes in our broadcast area that result from the vagueries of terrain, from wilderness regulations, and from protecting the frequencies of our radio neighbors. The biggest remaining hole--sort of like a cavity in a molar that you keep poking at with your tongue--is in the eastern Adirondacks and along the NY shore of Lake Champlain. No combination of horsetrading and technical wizardry would allow us to site a transmitter in New York that would serve the deserving (but NCPR-deprived) communities of Westport, Port Henry and Essex. And so it remained for many years.

Today we announce the launch of transmitter WXLQ, broadcasting at 90.5 fm from Bristol, Vermont. This "filling" in the NCPR smile will serve thousands of new families on the New York side of the lake, as well as provide a better alternative signal to listeners in New York and Vermont on the south and eastern fringes of coverage by NCPR's 88.1 fm transmitter in Peru, NY. This expansion of our service area was made possible in part through friendly negotiation with our neighboring public radio service, Vermont Public Radio. We thank them. Thanks also to the Essex Community Fund, administered by the Adirondack Community Trust, and to two volunteers who provided assistance with signal assessment, Ed French and Carole Slatkin, both of Essex, NY. If you happen to know people in the new broadcast region, please help us to spread the word.

Photo: Tim from Wells Communications, installs a new antenna on an existing tower for WXLQ.

History in company

2009-01-22T14:10:00.001-05:00

When I was a child in the 1950s, you would sometimes still see a newsreel in the theater, wedged between the previews and the cartoon. Television was still a baby, and video news was something consumed in company. Today, it is only the truly dire, or the truly monumental, that brings unrelated people together around a TV. I can count the occasions on my fingers: 1963, at school, as the events in Dallas unfolded; 1969, in the lounge of a South Dakota dude ranch, to watch the moon landing; 1974, at the commune, watching Nixon resign; 1986, at work, as the Challenger exploded; 2001, in the Satellite Room of the NCPR studio, as the World Trade Center fell; and Tuesday, back in the Sat Room, to watch an African American take the oath of office as president.

It is the last two that keep coming back to mind--maybe because I was in the same place with the same people. The occasions seem to be bookends, bracketing an era. After each, I found it necessary to walk by myself--after 9-11, to walk off the evil, and after the Inauguration, to savor relief and gratitude. As political happenings, they also bookend the spectrum--suicidal and murderous intimidation contrasted with peaceful transformation, one appealing to the tribal divide, and one to the common impulse toward mutual progress.

While each of the occasions listed above mark history for good or ill, I have to believe the most momentous is the most recent. An America that can embrace its diversity, rather than merely tolerate it, is a nation not only new to itself, but something new in the history of nations. And such a rebuke to the politics of fear.