Nonogirl Radio

An Audio Postcard from Zero Gravity

I believe I've written a criticism before of Pat Duggins. I usually hear his spots on NASA for NPR news and his delivery is so fast that it sounds like commercial radio with little personality or compassion.

But this audio postcard lets the real Pat Duggins shine.

The segment includes great ambi, onsite reporting, and it breathes with pauses usually absent from the spot reports.

The Bullfighter Checks her Makeup

                                       

   

       

                

                                            

            

               

The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People

               

Susan Orlean

                         

           

   

Now that I'm reading more, i decided to alternate my reading selections between content and style.

My content choices are to help me learn something about a topic. The last content read was The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers. My current content read is Under the Banner of Heaven.

In between the two was my read for style. These selections are of notably good writers either in nonfiction or fiction or even books on how to write better. (Of course, the content selections may be by great writers as well).

My first style selection was a book by Susan Orlean suggested by my friend and expert advice giver. The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup is a collection of profiles Orlean wrote mostly for the New Yorker.

Technically, she always has a paragraph where she describes the way her protagonist looks, usually listing details. She has a gift for listing, sometimes listing activities the protagonist participates in to further paint a picture of their life.

She also uses mystery as a hook in the opening paragraph. She'll make a pronouncement that seems to make no sense like the intro to her profile of Colin Duffy, a ten-year-old boy. "If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter." Throughout the essay, these mysteries are explained.

She explains in her introduction to the book that she often spends days or weeks with a person to do her reporting. My one wish for this book is that she put this kind of detail and reflection on writing the piece at the front of each essay so that I, a person reading her for style, could understand the challenges or techniques she used to write the essay.

Overall, a great read that I finished in a week!

Recording straight to laptop

I've been using my laptop and Mbox now when recording from a sound board. I used to plug into my minidisc, but realized that I can get better sound by avoiding the minidisc's compression and going straight in to my computer.

Last week, I recorded Barbara Kingsolver's reading that promoted her new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Initially I had problems receiving signal and here's why:

I only needed to record in mono and used just a single quarter inch sound in. But I was plugging it into the TOP location (see the red "2"?). I could hear sound in my headphones, but didn't see signal in Protools.

Then I took the plug out and put it into the BOTTOM location (see the red "1") and I had signal.

Now I know: if I only have one plug, start from the bottom.

Verbs not Adjectives

On my way to the final day of AIR's Dick Brooks intensive workshop, I heard this narration-less piece produced by Liane Hansen, who is also on sabbatical.

Now, you can't really go wrong doing a piece on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s oration, but this piece exemplifies Brooks teachings of using verbs rather than adjectives to get your audience to paint the scene.

Some might think the music that punctuates the end of King's speech might be inappropriate; it's not an organic part of the story. What do you think?

On Writing Well

I took a writing class this winter. The class was called Putting the There in There and I thought it would help my writing for radio in terms of creating vivid scenes for the listener.

  Tonantsin Renace 
  Originally uploaded by ehoyer.

It did a lot more than that. It introduced me to a deeper appreciation of the written word and also pushed me to meet a neighbor who I only knew through the political posters he placed on his window.

Catherine Stifter, the editor for Crossing East, suggested a book to strengthen radio writing called On Writing Well.

And while we're at it, here's an interview Michele Norris did with the author in April 2006.

Avoiding a Hangover

Also on Morning Edition is a segment about avoiding hangovers! Here's the gist of it:

Here's what's known to work: Eat while you imbibe. Pace your drinking -- your liver can keep up with one drink an hour. Alternate alcohol with water and fruit juice. If you take a painkiller before bed, stay away from products like Tylenol -- it has an ingredient that's toxic to the liver in combination with alcohol. Use a long-acting drug such as Aleve.

On Getting Around

I love my new bike!

It's really light, so it's really fast.

But it whistles.

The back tire brake is too tight and I am too newbie to do anything about it.

The good thing is that by buying the bike from a bike shop, I get 90 days of adjustments. Or as they say, "Bring your bike in and then go get a cup of coffee."

As for my car, it's time to renew my registration and I found an old parking violation on it. $60 on top of my registration! And even though I have my cancelled check with the citation number on the memo line, I still need to go to DPT, get a "court abstract," return to AAA and have it removed.

Bah! if the Flexcar thing works out, I may not want to renew and it'll be the dawn of Nonogirl's car-free living...

You Give Me Fever

On day four of my flu, I finally decided to look in Dr. John's recommended Healthy Healing book by Linda Page. I learned many things that I wish I knew earlier:

• A fever is a way for your body to get rid of toxins, so it's better to let your body heat up
• You do want to get to a point where you ARE sweating
• Shower twice a day because as your body releases toxins (usually out your skin), you don't want it reabsorbed into your body by leaving it on your skin.
• Stick to a liquid diet while you're feverish to maximize the clensing process (juices, water, broths, herbal tea)
• Sip on lemon juice with maple syrup and a pinch of cinnamon in the morning and grapefruit juice during the evening (not sure why. maybe so you don't have sugar in the evening)
• Take lots of vitamin A at the onset (10k IU every 6 hours)

Recording the Live Show

Sound guys (and they're usually guys) can be scary. I do a fair amount of recording at live events and like to connect to the sound board. This is usually seen as a nuisance to the sound person.

But Dana, the woman working sound at the La Plebe show, was a dream! She teaches ProTools at city college and held my hand through my first recording from the board directly into my laptop via an M-box. (Previously, I would go out the board and into my minisic.) She was professional and friendly and went that extra mile for me.

First she told me that I should use 1/4" to 1/4" not the XLR, when ever I'm not using a mic. So I hustled up to Radio Shack before the show. Then, she gave me my own mix(!), lowering the vocals and boosting the guitar. And finally, she showed me some PT short cuts like hitting "Enter" during a recording session to place markers.

Thanks Dana!

Tomorrow Should Be Today

From now on, whenever I think I'll do something TOMORROW, I now know I should do it TODAY.

Atsushi told me about the upcoming Mogwai show before it was even listed on the Fillmore's website. I canceled my plans to Toronto for the New Adventures in Sound Art conference (an amazing conference full of inspiration which I missed last year), becuse of conflicts with the Mogwai show.

Then, instead of hopping on getting tickets, I kept putting it off, kept putting it off, until today. And today, when I went up to the tix booth, I find that it SOLD OUT YESTERDAY!

I'm an idiot. If you can help a gal out, you know how to reach me...