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 The World Trade Center, 1991 Photo: Nubar Alexanian |
From Jay Allison
Right after September 11th, we created the “Days That Follow” section here at Transom.org. Eventually, we expect to turn it into a timeline of work that resonates forward and backward from the events of that day. Creative and useful audio evidence, that’s what we’re looking for.
Here in our “Shows” section, though, we’ll keep on looking for all manner of new and different pieces, not necessarily tied to those events. But this month we felt we should mark the time with work that relates.
These are three pieces, each set in a temporal relationship to that day. Two come from New York City, one from Washington, DC. One is from a first-time producer, another from a seasoned journalist. Each was made within a week of the 11th and neither has been broadcast. The third piece was broadcast in 1983 and was made by a group of about a dozen recordist/producers living in New York City at the time. It was, and still is, a tribute.
It was hard to decide what to feature this month.
We had already begun building a "timeline" in our Days that Follow section to gather what we’re calling "creative and useful audio evidence."
But we haven’t felt ready to continue our general mission of presenting new work of all kinds just yet.
So we’ve chosen three pieces with distinct temporal relationships to September 11th to mark this time.
Katie Davis’ piece, "Rediscovering Normal," wrestles with that very idea of continuing the general mission. It is part of her ongoing series, "Neighborhood Stories" which experiments with combining a journalistic view of her own neighborhood in which she is not an observer, but an activist. This raises all sort of interesting questions. And it makes you glad Katie is back at work.
"Golf Balls" is Matt Lieber’s first piece. In fact, September 11th was the first time he ever used his new mini-disk player. We spent a lot of time talking about how this piece might sound, based on the raw tape. Is it an essay, a story, an image? How should it be framed? How open should the ending remain? Is it for NOW, or should it last? We at Transom hope that Matt keeps on recording.
The other piece, "New York City: 25 Hours in Public Places," has aired nationally before. In 1983. It is a tribute from a dozen producers to the city they lived in at the time. We are breaking our Transom rule of featuring only un-aired work. We think it’s okay.
How visual this medium is. Where do these images come from? I am absolutely certain I know exactly what all these people look like: the guy hitting golf balls, the owners of all those voices in the NY piece, and everybody Kate talked about in her piece. I can even tell you where all those kids in the World Trade Center observation deck were standing (squirming, actually) in relationship to the guy pointing out his car to them. They were to his right, and behind him…I’m sure of it. And I listened in mono, too. And I should mention, while we’re there, that the sound, the story…of all those kids and that guy finally seeing the same thing was one of the most fascinating sequences of events I’ve heard in a long time.
Image, story or essay? All three pieces are all three, it seems to me. The question of observer versus participant? More and more I’m thinking one simply can’t separate those roles. As a matter of fact, rather than assuming they are at opposite ends of some continuum, we probably ought to complicate the picture by including the audience, and all that they bring to the experience.
It would be interesting to hear the raw tape of the golf ball hitter. Or to at least know how much of it there was. It seems almost completely unedited, real-time…which I mean as the highest compliment. And, maybe, the more raw tape the higher the compliment.
That’s as close as I can come onomatopoeicly to the sound that’s going to be in my head for the next couple of days.
Matt, thanks so much for Golf Balls. I knew that there had to be some of these types of stories out there. Stories that exist in a vacuum…stories that are so much about the moment and say so much everything that comes after. Admist all the flag waving and overtly emotional reports that started to appear on all the t.v. newsmagazines after they were done reporting the facts, this piece stands out as such an honest document of what happened in a round about way. There’s been plenty of quotes on t.v. and radio that have expressed the shock of the whole thing ("it was like a movie") and the fact that America will triumph (whatever that means) but your piece reflects all of those concepts much more beautifully.
What I really like about it is that it is so subtle. So open and thought provoking and real. I miss real.
In the midst of all this news, it’s hard to remember how much I like and need story. I think others need to hear this. Congratulations.
I’ll post more when I’ve heard the others. I had to get this out while it was fresh.
Matt,
Wow, great piece. I really enjoy your calm and intimate style of narration (David Radcoff?-like) If your reaction to events was to go out with a recorder, they you’ve got it…keep at it. Of all the coverage I’ve been listening to (TAL at the moment), I will remember the distance you set for us, the great quotations from your subject.
Can I ask what mic you used, same for field and studio?
Jake.
I’m an old guy matt, who used to do things like "golf balls."
You’re a young guy wondering if you should keep going. Please do. I encourage you to take the machine out from under the bed more often.
It will give me hope that there’s a future for public radio. I appreciate your honesty and soul searching about what you do and why. I don’t know any other way to be. So stay in touch with your hunches and instincts as you turn the microphone on.
As a young guy maybe you thought of things to ask mr. golf balls but were hesitant. I would have been shy at your age. But now I would have been more in his face and said…"But all those people over there are stopped. They can’t do anything. They can’t go on right now with life even though like you there’s nothing they can do. So what’s the difference between you and them?" Anyway, that’s what I wanted to ask him. But that’s me, not you. Keep on going.
I should mention that Matt and I went through an editorial process on this piece. The Transom style is to leave final decisions to the producer, but we’re not above kibitzing and helping, especially when asked.
Matt described the piece to me. I said we were interested and he sent a draft script. We worked on his script. He recorded and sent his tracks and the actuality for me to edit and mix. There were some tricky parts and, in the time we had, he requested that route. Next time, I bet he’ll use his own rig.
The main editorial questions turned on whether the piece should be more of a "commentary" relating to the moment/mood of the days it was written/presented (several days after) or whether it could be framed in such a way (without comment) so that it might have a more open quality.
The other big decision was about Matt’s questions on scene. Some of them, in the vein of Lou’s note above, had a judgemental quality. We cut that out, thinking it preferable for the listener to make his own judgement. The phrase, "This is America, Man" can be interpreted 285 million different ways. I like that.
Matt can tell you more about the back and forth from his perspective
I’d also mention that it’s nice to see Lou Giansante here. He’s the narrator for "NYC: 24 Hours in Public Places." And Katie Davis, who produced this month’s AFTER… essay, was one of the recordists 18 years ago in New York.
Katie’s "Reinventing Normal," by the way, received no editing. She sent the copy, got an okay, recorded it. I cut it from several of her takes, and presto.
"golf balls" is a wonderful piece. all those police sirens swirling around this calm center: it’s lyrical. this piece is one of the the few accurate reports to emerge from the event. was an attempt made to get this thing aired?
it’s brand new. You heard it here first.
Matt: I am growing to think that radio — the kind of radio we’re looking at here — is the capturing of moments. In one sense, it’s reporting, being the first there on the scene. So it’s luck, but it’s not luck. What you say is a beautiful set up for what we hear afterwards. Your piece was the second shoe dropping for me. Knowing Jay, I know he helped; but knowing Jay, I also know it’s your work. It’s gorgeous.
As for "After…" It touched me, but there was a certain immediacy that I wanted but didn’t get. Perhaps because I had already read this by Sharon Brody:
The Aftermath: When Your Child Doesn’t Need the Help You Need to Offer
http://www.wgbh.org/highlight?item_id=464744
Wow. There really isn’t much else for me to say. Wow…. it’s not the sort of style you hear that much on the radio. I appreciate that.
This is a very tricky business.
When I’m thinking or talking about a piece of radio, a book, a film, a song, I often find myself thinking about a moment. But a good moment is like punctuation, it exists only in the context of a sentence, a paragraph, a story. And though I may remember only the moment, I only do so because of the rest of the story. In the final analysis, something like a longer form radio piece needs more than just a moment, more than just a few moments. It seems to me it has to be a sustained affair, for while the power of moments is piercing, the power of narrative is shattering.
But then, here is an example which I think runs counter to my argument: My favorite moment in all of documentary film is in Frederick Wiseman’s “store,” which is not a great film, I don’t think. But there is one scene in which a man has brought his girlfriend to the department store (where the entire film is shot), to buy a mink coat. She spends a long time with the sales associate trying on different coats while the husband stands there with his hands in his pockets looking totally uninterested. But then, when the girlfriend goes into a different part of the store with the sales associate, the husband stays behind with the fur coat on the rack. And as he’s standing there alone in the store, he picks up the arm of the mink coat on the hanger, and starts touching it and holding it, touching and holding it as if there was a woman inside it. The moment is amazing, but the film is a failure (at least as narrative).
Are moments the stuff of narrative, or the opposite?
To bring this back to radio, I think the business of moments is really the business of length. Most of the stories I listen to on radio (the usual suspects) are not long form. They’re generally under 15 minutes, and rarely longer than 20. Can a longer form radio piece be sustained for more than an hour, and can it be done consistently? I ask this out of equal parts ignorance and curiosity. I can think of a handful, the most recent being an hour long piece on TAL called, I believe, “Hitler’s Yacht.” I admired the ambition of that piece quite a bit, and admired its sustained conveyance. In the end though, for reasons I don’t think had to do with length, I thought it was too clever.
I don’t want to talk to much about this piece, it is what it is. What I will say is that there was brief talk about using this image, moment, scene, whatever, as an entrance into a commentary about how to persevere in the face of this horror. My idea for a commentary was a variation on the same idea that has now been quite eloquently articulated in the New Yorker, in the New York Times, and ten other places: that at this time, the only thing a thinking and sensitive person can do is to remain human if possible, and a gesture of helplessness, even of frivolity, might be the best way of doing that. In other words, bathe in the mundane, quotidian details of life, don’t drown in the big dark generalities.
The reason I didn’t go the commentary route, however, was that eventually it would have sounded dated. Jay said it best: will this be listenable in a month?
Jake Warga- I used a Shure SM-58 mic for everything.
I really was going to go to bed, but …
I used to work in a corner of publishing devoted to antiques and collectables and the place where I almost got excited was ephemera — the things that were supposed to be thrown out.
So Jay asks, will this be listenable in a month. Commentary does tend to root something, doesn’t it? Roots that are not necessarily of the thing itself. They tend to be add-ons. The little bit of this-or-that that brings "closure" and "wholeness" and other kinds of wholesome, worthwhile characteristics to the piece.
And then — whether it’s you or Jay, it doesn’t matter, the fact is you say it — "What’s your name, where are you from, that sort of thing" (I may not have it verbatim). I would have cut that in a flash — you were probably thinking so as you as the question, or else you would have been much more, oh, *reportorial*.
Yet there it is. It is, God help me, *real*, and it makes a wonderful link between you and Dave.
The throw-away question, the most ephemeral part of the entire piece, and yet it is this critical bridge between your reconstruction of the scene and the actuality of the golf club hitting the ball.
And it, in a curious way every bit as much as what David has to say, makes the piece not ephemeral but, well — don’t take this the wrong way — timeless.
There was a spontaneous moment in the Hindenburg disaster when the reporter goes, "Oh, the humanity!"
One of the balancing acts we must face at the frontier of radio is the point where artfulness and spontaneity collide.
We always stand somewhere between Fred Friendly’s rap on Quonset (a lovely L&F Sound piece) and the TAL piece, where the almost throw-away line is pondered, poked at, and finally accepted.
No one that I heard spoke of "Oh, the humanity!" at the WTC. God knows it would have been appropriate. Perhaps the need for an individual, distinctive, readily identifiable verbal "object" has disenfranchised us from evoking (conveying, even perceiving) a typical human response. The beauty of David from Brooklyn/Trinidad is the idiocyncracy of the voice, the gesture.
But where is the more commonplace? A nice piece on ME this morning — folklorists emulating Alan Lomax after Pearl Harbor — offers an interesting path.
no one has to reinvent normal. it happens. that’s why atrocities suck. b/c the next day you still have to brush yr teeth and feel regular about it. i think this piece touched on that in an interesting way.
The reason our country has gotten through this crisis is people like that guy hitting golf balls in the park. Some politically correct folks might call him insensitive or unfeeling for not crying and staring and exchanging news from a pocket radio. But I ask you… what good would crying have done. Don’t mistaken me for suggesting that those who lost loved ones shouldn’t cry, or that the nation shouldn’t mourn. That is by no means my intent. We must keep "hitting our golf balls," flying on planes, and buying stocks.
I commend you Mr. Lieber for producing this piece. It has had more of an impact on me than anything I have heard to date about Sep. 11. It seems unbelievable that this is your first time with a tape recorder.
Just found your piece on Transom. Good to know you’re still pursuing work in this biz. Saw most of the ‘dearly departed’ last evening. I’ll tell them to find you hear. Your piece? The sirens, the sirens. That says it all.
This is actually one of my favorite radio pieces. I’ve been teaching radio off and on, and use this piece as a template. Bravo to Matt Lieber.
Hello from Montreal
i’ve been a journalist for 25 years and met with Mr Louis Giansante in… 1984, i guess, while i was doing a series on Soundscape at the french network of the CBC. I thouht i had an old cassette that i wanted to share with my daughter… not found. How did I think to look for it on the web? well… i want to tell you what a joy it is to listen again to NYC 24 hours in Public Places.
i will us it in a paper i am writing,
is it anyway you would like me to report it in my Bibliography ?
you may answer at: cavaliere@videotron.ca
from Montréal , cheers!
carole