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Notes from Hans H. Anderson
Seafood Joint happened like a lot of my stories. Something in real life
happened, and I start to fantasize about how I would have reacted, or how I
could have been the hero. This isn’t a conscious decision, and I fear what a
psychaitrist would say, but it happens a lot. For Seafood Joint, some friends
of ours were moving to LA and took my family to dinner because we’d been good
friends and all. We went to Red Lobster. They are black, we are white. It
meant nothing to us. That was it, though, nothing else happened. The rest
just popped into my head because stuff like that did (and probably does) happen.
What if a racist came up and started in on my friend? Would I sit there
staring at the floor? Would I punch the guy in the nose? What kind of person
am I?
Garbage was just an idea to mock all of these audio diaries that you hear. I
tried to think of something outrageous, and peeping through the neighbors
windows or listening to their phone conversations seemed a little TOO creepy,
and illegal, and honestly not all that interesting. Think about it, what do
you do at home that is interesting? What do you say on the phone? But, what do
you throw away? Yeah. Me, too.
Stress Test is actually 95% true, most of it really did happen, and in that
order. On the way home, I started writing it down because I knew it would be
interesting in the same way that some people drive to a gym two blocks away to
workout. I got home, took all the notes that I had written at stop lights and
typed them up, adding a few more. Then I forgot about it for a few months,
needed some extra stuff to add to a CD I was making for friends, family and
oh-what-the-heck: I sent the CD to a few PR outfits as well. No one was
interested. Stress Test was written and voiced, but it fell flat, no energy.
Then I remembered “Deviation,” took another listen,
and was inspired. I brought up the energy in Stress Test, tightened many of the
edits and what you hear is the result. Marianne’s piece, though obviously
different, inspired me.
Technically, none of what I do is terribly challenging, mostly very time
consuming. I have tons of software. I’m always looking for new stuff that will
make interesting sounds, make life easier, or do things I can’t. Audacity is an
awesome editor, probably could save you the $1000′s I’ve spent on audio editors
over the last decade. I currently use Vegas Video (great for audio, too), FL
Studio, and a really old version of Band-in-a-Box (kinda cheesy, but
once-in-awhile it has the right sound, and it’s so easy to use. I have a very
good external sound module for it, though, or else it wouldn’t sound good at
all). I’ve used literally dozens of different programs. If you can afford
Vegas, I wouldn’t hesitate to buy it, even with the free Audacity on the
market.
I’ve recorded sounds with all sorts of things… Marantz decks, cheap digital
audio recorders, newer MP3 players, like Ripflash and IRiver (both are
surprisingly good, but have some flaws, and you need a preamp), 8mm and miniDV
cameras, etc. I have a lot of microphones, from cheap shotguns meant for the
video cameras, a $20 stereo lavalierre from Radio Shack, and a then-$450
Sennheiser MD420 (good mic, and only about half that price now). I record in
my walk-in closet at home, with a long mic cable running to my computer. No
fan noise. Quiet.
 Hans H. Anderson |
About Hans H. Anderson
In my real life I’m a computer programmer — more clearly a web page programmer
and database designer. That life is coming to a close, though, as all that
work is drifting to India and Romania. That’s okay, those guys do a good job,
charge a third of what I charge and still can live like Americans. How can you
be upset about that? I’m doing my part to help spread capitalism and the
American way.
My dad and I have loved Prairie Home Companion’s Annual Joke show. I thought
it would be fun to do those well-told jokes, like PHC, but one at a time, and
in mp3 so people could hear them on the Internet. It was fun to do, but there
was no revenue model. This was back before the Internet bubble burst, and so
many people were giving stuff away for free you couldn’t make money on
anything. Maybe it would work now that the virtual world is more realistic.
Jokes are great because they are brief (usually) and have a built in punchline.
I experimented a lot, and found a) I can’t sing, even in a spoof b) I can’t
do voices c) I fiddle way too long. But, I still say turning a good joke into
a good audio piece has potential. I’d like to see 2 minute video-jokes on TV,
hear them on the radio.
When we first received Hans Anderson’s work at Transom, the editors didn’t know what to make of it and were all set to pass, but then they realized they were missing the point. Once they figured it out, they decided he was brilliant. Hans is, as the Transom Editors say, "dangerously ambiguous."
We have since gotten used to Hans (for example, he sent us a highly-produced Short List of all the uncredited character names in Star Wars) and we have championed his tenure on the Editorial Board of the Public Radio Exchange.
Of course, like most of the people who drop over the Transom, we’ve never met him, but we think he’d be a very nice guy, friendly to the kids in the neighborhood, real quiet, never bother anybody… you just can’t tell about people, can you?
Stress Test was too audibly annoying for me to finish.
Seafood Joint kept me engaged but I found the ending disappointing. I think a better music selection would help.
Garbage. I thought the idea for Garbage was good but it feels like it still could use some work.
Hans has talent for the radio and I like his ideas. I hope he keeps at it.
I would have loved to have turned on my radio at 2 am and heard Garbage or Seafood Joint. Not often enough in my day do I ask the question, "What was that?"
Ever since I first stumbled onto his stuff on PRX, I have become an enthusiast for Hans’s (Hans’?) work and am delighted to see him featured on Transom. On first thought, it’s a grain-of-the-voice thing: it’s such a news-y voice. Stock quotes, press conferences — you name it, and Hans’s voice simply utters authority.
What a mindblower, then, if some imaginative program director (three words rarely known to go together) were to drop one of these stories into Morning Edition. Now wouldn’t that shake things up a bit.
Sadly, that won’t be happening in my town any time soon.
Hans: let’s see if the mic on the podium is working and please answer a couple of questions. When (and how) did you arrive at the jump cut technique in your narration? Do you find it just a little bit — well, addictive?
And not to get too Beethovenian about it, but is your hearing loss playing a role in your writing? I mention Beethoven because it was only after he went deaf that he composed his really breakaway works.
Something people should know: I can type 70 wpm and I’m not afraid to go for hours. You won’t see too many short replies even if I don’t know the answer. If I used emoticons, this is where I’d put a smiley.
The jump cut technique comes from two things: I used to do afternoon drive at a rock & roll radio station (in Missoula, MT — Z100, Missoula’s Best Rock & Roll!). Anyway, I was the first to use a digital multitrack editor at that station, maybe in that state, and I did a lot of "Monster Truck" type commercials with explosions and a shouting voice in each channel. You know, typical pr type stuff.
I was promotions director so I also edited these goofy promos for the morning show (which was killing with something like a 40 share every morning). I wish I’d saved a few of those promos, which involved some goofy music and basically jump edits of the morning show guys doing their thing. The promos blew away my boss and the station bought the same software I used back then, SAW — the Software Audio Workshop — a couple years later. Editing those promos was really fun and captured the flavor of the morning show in one minute chunks that would play during the rest of the day. It helped that the morning team were pros, fun but not your typical juvy humor.
So, I’d done this stuff before and probably would have been doing it all along except for the easy money being an Internet programmer type offered (note the excellent use of past tense). The kicker was when I listened to Deviation here on Transom last year (see link on first page) that I started using jump edits for stories like Stress Test. Deviation is very inspiring. It’s the sound and image that jumps into my head whenever I read about pub radio looking for new styles, new voices. That’s the piece. That’s the voice they are looking for. Marianne should be working as much as Sedaris.
Then, as you say, I became addicted to the technique. I probably have overused it to some extent, or forced it, with other pieces. But, it’s a fun sound to play with and makes those split second pauses seem that much longer when you want to make a point, and it changes the energy in a piece. We’ll see how long people can stand it — some not long at all, which is very understandable — as I’m writing a straight-to-audio book with a lot of jump edits in the energy (action) scenes. It’s aimed at the short-attention-span types.
A quick note about Missoula: that’s such a great place that the local pub station, KUFM, does one pledge drive each year, which lasts them all year (this doesn’t seem common), and they are usually in the top three stations in the ratings. Two years ago they actually won the ratings war, coming out on top in many of the important demographics. I don’t live there anymore, but I just thought I’d mention it’s a great station.
Hans
I forgot to address the hearing loss part.
I guess the thing that I would point to for hearing loss is that I pay closer attention to detail in audio than I would otherwise because I’m scared to death that there will be some annoying click or high-pitched sound that I can’t hear or the mix overloads the high ranges; sounds that are out of my range but would be noticeable to anyone else. That’s happened before, when I was doing commercial radio and the turnaround was very short but doesn’t happen now (I don’t think…). I blew out an eardrum windsurfing in 2002 and recently the doc found a cholesteatoma on that eardrum, too. On the bright side, I don’t live in Sudan right now. Life is more challenging there.
I doubt that I’d be able to continue producing stories if my hearing goes. Maybe I will write books and do tours like David Sedaris but in sign language to deaf audiences.
Or maybe I’ll be the produce manager at H.E.B.
I’m a huge fan of PRX, too. There is so much good stuff there that I often just listen for hours if my current programming work is sufficiently shallow to allow it (I can’t think and listen at the same time, one of my many flaws just ask my wife). In general, I could fill a 60 hour week listening to all the audio public radio puts on the Internet. What an amazing amount of good audio! With new programs like Day to Day and Public Radio Weekend, and with all the new digital channel possibilities, PRX could be ushering in a new heyday.
I agree with the above comment about the music in “Seafood Joint“, It sounded kind of porny to me and weighed the piece down, though I liked the concept.
Garbage is a great idea but again I lost interest mid-way through, I think either because the music seemed to be on a loop (11 minutes is a long time to have an electronic-type loop, I think) or perhaps because of the phrasing. I did laugh though, there was a real deadpan, surreptitious feel to it that I think could have been played up.
the Seafood Joint story could have been ok, but the music was so wrong and distracting – seriously … an annoying 80′s synthetic melody that kept drawing me to it and away from the story
Sassy & Michelle,
Thanks for the input. I’ll definitely keep my day job. Musical choices aside, I guess my stuff is still in that SNL not-ready-for-primetime slot. I wasn’t sure before, because I’ve never had a wide range of people to give me feedback on it. Besides the silence in the discussion area, which I take to be people that are not interested or are deciding to skip the critique, this input helps me understand where at least some people in public radio put my stuff, and I appreciate that.
I do think that some of my more recent work is better, but I always liked my first disc, too.
Hans
I love the jump cut technique because Hans is using a pacing and a sound that, as he mentioned above, we are all accustomed to hearing, but only in the context of crazed advertisements bombarding the listener about monster trucks and used cars. Hans’ reappropriation of the style not only offers insight into this media phenomenon of the recklessly-paced and aggressive onslaught, but his content is so clever and comprehensible that it manages to lend new and unexpected possibilities to this familiar form. I first heard him using this technique when I listened “mother’s day” and “4th of July” on PRX.org, and like “Stress Test,” my favorite part about them was the way in which he slips in witty little jokes which I don’t get until he’s already said three more sentences. It feels to me like standing on the back of a speed boat and watching the water – once you’re able to spot a neat little eddy that’s formed in the wake of the boat, you’re already 30 feet away – it’s exhilarating. And, to continue with this analogy, Han’s narratives is a bit like the stream in the water left by the boat – its got a clear linear core, but he tosses small digressions out from the sides of the narrative, which makes the whole thing feel looser and more spontaneous.
I also enjoyed “Garbage” very much because of how well the mood of the piece – the choice of music, the way in which it was interspersed, and the tone and manner of the speaker – was able to compliment the content of the story. Listening, I had a strong sense of the nighttime, of a man on his own connecting to near strangers in a dark way. I look forward to seeing what else you do in radio, Hans, and I think the jump cut still has a lot of possibilities waiting to be pioneered.
Greetings Hans,
Shame on you for even mentioning Prime Time Television. I’d much rather listen to your radio than watch television–okay, I might make an exception for "Antiques Road Show" and repeats of "Quantum Leap."
(I also have to say that I would have posted sooner but having read about your Cholesteatoma I couldn’t "transom" until I consulted my Merck Manual–I was afraid you had a form of rare ear cancer ((clearly I do not have a good command of Latin suffixes)) but I am now brimming with good cheer to learn that that’s not what Cholesteatoma is–needless to say I got lost in my Merck Manual and sidetracked by my fascination with various lymphatic disorders)
Anyway…
I adore "Garbage" with all my heart. I am in awe of your ability to capture the ethos of each neighbor and so loyally and brilliantly express them through their garbage. The duct-tape-peanut butter-jar, the furniture poetry… Gomez’s phantasy phootball…it’s such poignantly authentic trash! It is banal yet endlessly fascinating. The garbage that the narrator discovers sets off this chain reaction of images and the next thing you know– you’re watching that woman as she stands over her kitchen sink, licking clean those red, white and green boxes from Krispy Kreme! This effect gives this piece amazing depth.
Another depth-filled moment is when the narrator buys his "Ultimate Shield" gloves. Even though he has this perverse and literally filthy hobby he does it with such caution—and he has the audacity to make moral judgments about his poor- -unsuspecting-drug-abusing-neighbor. (Long live the hyphen!–and parenthetical phrases!)
In this fictitious universe you say so much about the real universe that we all inhabit. This story within a story that directly reflects a reality –it reminds me of that painting "Gallery of the Louvre," by Samuel FB Morse. That painting is a look at reality twice removed.
My favorite passage in "Breakfast at Tiffany’s" is when the narrator describes the contents of Holly Golightly’s wastebasket, which sits in front of her apartment door. It is full of fashion magazines and containers of low-fat cottage cheese—it’s such a shortcut to who Holly is—what Capote did for Holly you have done for an entire neighborhood.
Hans:
I haven’t listened to your pieces yet, but I will soon.
Quick question: What software package do you use to create the images for your pieces and the Devil’s Radar site?
Anna,
Thanks for the kind words about the pieces. I think that there is a like/dis- relationship with that particular technique. It’s kind of like what MTV did to moving images, though I dare not imply I’ll have an impact anywhere approaching that. I just like to mess around.
I will say that I’m a fan of the short-attention-span jump cut/edit techniques for the same reason that many people are not. I think that the human eye, ear and, most importantly, brain is sufficiently advanced to be able to process loads and loads of information quickly (the opposing argument is the same, roughly). I don’t know how much of it we remember, but I like to be challenged by that.
If you showed me cropped photos of the homes across the street mixed with some from another street nearby, I probably couldn’t tell you which ones were on my block. According to my church’s doctrine, 4000 years ago people could remember and recite entire books from the Bible without error.
My point in all of this, other than I really don’t have any point, is that in years past our magnetic tape was in our head and I wonder if we are becoming more advanced at all. We’ll see how many more mega-tons of destruction I can drop via this jump edit technique. I bought a Mixman DM2 to toss some turntablism in, too.
Turbo,
Thanks for the two cultural references I’ll have to look up. I thrive on that. I’ve seen Breakfast before, but I don’t remember that scene (my wife insisted on renting it one time because the 1980′s DBS hit). Now I’ll have to watch it and claim it was inspiration.
I looked up the Samuel Morse reference, too. What a guy! Inventor of the telegraph, artist… Anyway, I found an image of "Gallery of the Louvre" on the Internet, which I realize isn’t anything like seeing it for real, or in a decent book, probably, but I at least can tell what you are talking about. I like that idea. He didn’t just paint paintings hanging in a museum, he rearranged it so it was "his" museum. Isn’t that what we all do with audio? We paint about paintings, but we rearrange the content to create a story.
That is to say nothing about the guy having to do a bunch of mini-copies of well-known paintings. Pressure.
Joshua,
I use an old version of Paint Shop Pro (www.jasc.com) to create images. It’s just advanced enough to be useful but not so advanced as to cost a ton of money. I do also use it a little for my business and have had it for four or five years. The aerial photos are eight year old satellite photos the government takes of our country and actually allows us to view (via the folks at microsoft.com, somehow). Your house is there somewhere, too. See terraserver.microsoft.com and next time you are outside, look up and smile.
Hans
God bless Hans Anderson! God fully restore his hearing and give him a full-time job making amazing pieces like these! Preferablly a job with health benefits so he’ll have plenty of fodder for future stories.
I love this self-starter audio fiction. Or in the case of "Stress Test," non-fiction. I totally agree with Anna and Turbo. (Don’t think I’ve ever written that sentence before.) You have an enviably large imagination, are able to to create completely parallel worlds in your stories that are at once obscure and totally realistic. Maybe hyper-realistic. It makes me wonder if you’ve always been writing stories, in print form, even before you started making radio pieces. And if you’ve sent out print versions of your work to literary journals. They’re just great stories and you perform them so well. I particularly like the verite, "spontaneous" sound of of your read in "Garbage." At first you can kind of tell you’re reading a script (but reading it well and naturally) but as the piece goes on it really sounds like all the thoughts are just coming into your head as you say them. That’s the kind of style that can really NOT work for people who aren’t good at it (like me). But you pull it off expertly.
I think the music in "Garbage" and "Seafood Joint" is fine. I think you could stand to mix it up a little bit thought, use different music here and there during the piece. Just to refresh the canvas a little bit (how’s that for a poorly executed mix metaphor?) And I wasn’t always sure why you were bringing up the music when you were. But those were small concerns compared to the genius of the furniture poetry/fantasy football marraige, the licked-clean Krispy Creme boxes and the dark (and I’m guessing intentional) ambuiguity of the ending.
Stress Test is just straight up fun. I want to say I’d be surprised if that piece didn’t find it’s way onto a radio show somewhere but the cynical part of me won’t allow me to say that. I too adore the sound of the jump edits… loved it when I heard "God Is Talking To Me" on PRX (a must hear if you like Hans’s work) and I love it here. It’s such a simple device and yet it seems like a perfect representation of what it would sound like if you could directly record someone’s thought process before the words came out of their mouth. I think you’re right that the brain is a fast enough computer to handle all that information. I would even go so far as to say that’s what the brain sounds like when it’s processing information, throwing in little asides, making connections and then discarding them, running the full gamut of emotions in just seconds. I suppose I could see that style being overused but then again, you never hear someone say that the straight-up, traditional reading style is over-used. Ordinary, maybe, but not over-used. Anyway, congratulations Hans. Please keep making pieces.
Sean,
Recently I have sent some of my stories to a couple of magazines (one windsurfing magazine that printed this one: http://www.windsurfingradio.com/digest/v1.1/poser.html (familiarity of windsurfing might be necessary), but I’ve never spent a lot of time on that. I don’t know how or when I started writing. I guess I’m always just full of stories. I’m always writing down ideas that I’ll never get to, but writing them down gets them out of my head so I have room for other things.
What prompted me to start writing for audio is Prairie Home Companion’s annual joke show. My father and I love that particular show (and all of them in general) and we started playing around with acting out jokes. I evolved into stories of my own from there, though I really like the idea of taking the right joke and expanding it into the right piece. The possibilities are enormous, in my opinion. I can see someone doing that in the right way and being the next Bob Edwards/Red Barber morning staple.
Right now I’m writing a full-length audiobook and skipping the printed book stage mostly because of what this guy Yuri Rasovsky says here: http://www.irasov.com/art.htm. I thought I’d give it a shot, anyway.
You’ve given me a shot of confidence about the overuse of jump-edits, too. I have started to worry how it would burn, but you know, I don’t really care if it does. People aren’t required to listen, PRI or NPR isn’t required to buy it, and as for my audiobook, no one probably will ever even hear about it anyway, so I’m just going to keep doing it that way and see how it works out. I’ve finished writing the book and am producing it, and I am pretty happy with how the story shakes out. It’s another one of those God-books born-agains like me are prone to write, kind of a thank-you-slash-payback. It’s written for audio, though, and it’s basically for those with short attention spans. It’ll be done around Christmas, as long as school starts on Thursday as planned.
I really like this guy, he’s cool. However, the cheesy background royalty-free production music has got to go. Sounds like it was mixed on a generic keyboard purchased at a Mexican pawn shop in the 80′s. Mr. T’s first album had a better mix. I’ve worked with production music before and there are better choices. Better less intrusive choices. If we could just hear his voice without all of the sad synth sounds of a public access show in the South we’d all be better off.