Photo courtesy of Anya Kamenskaya

Farming 2.0: Young farmers use sustainable methods and social networks for a new kind of nationwide harvest

The landscape of farming in this country is changing- the average age of the U.S. farmer is 57, and when these farmers retire, their land will go up for sale. In some cases this land ends up in the hands of developers and presto, new subdivisions grow where crops once flourished. Now a new harvest of young farmers, armed with organic know-how and new media savvy, are getting organized- and getting political. They want to preserve farmland and keep the art of farming alive. And the movement is taking root right here in Washington State, where farmers under 34 years old have increased by 32%. One World Report has this story from Vashon Island.

One World Report on KBCS

The Greenhorns Blog

National Young Farmers’ Coalition

Island Meadow Farm

Alleycat Acres Urban Farming Collective

The fatal shooting of John T. Williams in downtown Seattle last week by a police officer has provoked outrage and questions from his family, friends, and community members. Unfortunately, this killing follows a pattern of disturbing incidents where both local and regional police have used lethal force under questionable circumstances. Amber Cortes presents this profile of John T. Williams and some of the people who knew him.

Courtesy of The George Jackson Brigade Information Project

by Daniel Burton Rose

Not your hipster’s Seattle: the political bombings of the George Jackson Brigade

The George Jackson Brigade was an underground revolutionary collective active in the Seattle     area. They set off 15 bombings in solidarity with the prison and labor movement in the mid-seventies. Most of their bombings either destroyed buildings or cut power to certain neighborhoods. However, one bombing, of a Safeway grocery store, injured several innocent people. A new book has come out documenting the hidden history of this group, and Amber Cortes has the story.

One World Report on KBCS

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Retold Journeys from Amber Cortes on Vimeo.

NOTE: This video is 6 minutes long but is looped into a half hour piece. Repeats after six minutes.

Retold Journeys is a video and sound installation by Amber Cortes. It was created for the exhibition The Arctic Book Club: Artists Respond to An African in Greenland, curated by the Flux Factory and EFA Project Space in NYC.

Interleaving text from Tete-Michel Kpomassie’s travelogue “An African in Greenland” with footage from one the earliest documentary films ever made, Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty, Retold Journeys casts personal impressions and experiences of a culture directly into romantically stylized, ethnographic narrative.

The sound piece that accompanies the video projection is an imagined arctic landscape found simultaneously above and below the surface of ice: linking the film images to an internal atmosphere of reflection that comes with traveling and encountering new cultures and places.

“I had started on a voyage of discovery, only to find it was I who was being discovered.”

–Tete-Michel Kpomassie

“One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.”

–Robert Flaherty

Our gallery exhibit opens next Thursday, September 17th, from 6-8pm at the EFA Project Space in Manhattan, featuring all kinds of art: sculptures, paintings, installations, photographs and videos- each piece inspired by the book. My installation, ‘Retold Journeys,’ is a video and sound installation that mixes text from ‘An African in Greenland‘ with footage from one of the earliest documentary films ever made, Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty, set to a strange arctic soundscape of isolation.

This my first ever installation featured in an actual gallery! I’m so excited.

Arctic Book Club Presents: An African in Greenland

This year people all along the Hudson River are celebrating the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s historic journey of discovery. Over the summer, I got to spend some time along the Hudson and learned that the river is in a state of recovery from years of pollution and damage.

I produced this radio piece for National Radio Project’s Making Contact about the controversial General Electric dredging to remove PCB contamination in the Hudson River, one of the largest national Superfund environmental cleanups in history.

Give a listen.

Or, check out the entire show, Swimming Upstream: Can Our Rivers Be Saved?

There you will find some of the contact information for the organizations featured in the piece, as well as more information on PCBs in the Hudson.

Also, a great article called “Hitching Rides Up Henry Hudson’s River” came out in this week’s New York Times about getting up the Hudson by kayak, tall ship, yacht, and Lincoln Town Car (hey, not fair!).

]]> http://www.youneverknowradio.com/2009/08/hudson_making_contact/feed/ 0 http://www.youneverknowradio.com/2009/05/best-frenemies-an-audio-installation/ http://www.youneverknowradio.com/2009/05/best-frenemies-an-audio-installation/#comments Sun, 03 May 2009 01:00:04 +0000 Amber http://www.youneverknowradio.com/?p=127

best frenemies: is an audio installation created for the Megapolis Audio Art Festival in Boston as part of the Ladio (Ladies+Radio) sonic slumber party. The installation was based on a series of handwritten notes exchanged between two fifth grade girls in reading class.
Friends? Enemies? Welcome to girls’ world age 12.

The notes were read by Lulu Hamilton-Janak and Sam Meyer.

Click on the link below to listen:

Best Frenemies

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Every year, men from Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn hoist a four-ton, 68-foot statue called the Giglio into the air and move it six blocks while dancing ‘the Giglio’ under the sweltering sun. The event commemorates the San Paolino de Nola Feast, which originated in Nola, Italy. This year, Weekend America correspondent Amber Cortes took us to the festival.

Check out the slideshow above, or just listen to the piece on Weekend America:

The idea behind the challenge is to create an audio story from two books archived from the Prelinger Library and include the voice of a stranger. I ended up combining these two books: Trees as Good Citizens (a civic-minded planting guide), and Control of Body and Mind (a kind of science book with a moral hygiene edge).

The voices of strangers are: Dr. Simon Evans, Neurologist and Cleve Backster, Polygraph Expert

Check out all the imaginative Radio Ephemera stories on their archive.

I was inspired by Psychobotany‘s experiments with primary perception in plants, as developed through the research of Cleve Backster, who used a polygraph test to determine electrical resistance in the organism. The idea that plants can somehow sense our emotions or thoughts appeals to me: communication on another, more basic, more energetic level. What do we have to learn from other species?

Check out Psychobotany’s experiment here.

Suggested Donation $8/ students $5

The award winning Radio Diaries empowers people to “become reporters of their own lives”–then airs their stories on National Public Radio. Finding voices that often go unheard- teenagers, prisoners, AIDS patients- Radio Diaries trains people to share their stories by keeping audio journals, interviewing the people close to them and recording their daily life.

Thembi’s AIDS Diary documents a year in the life of a South African teenager who has AIDS.

And since 1996, Teenage Diaries has worked with teenagers across the country to report on their own lives and unique circumstances, eventually airing them as radio documentaries for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

Please join Radio Diaries producer Joe Richman as he plays selections from Thembi’s AIDS Diary and Teenage Diaries, as well some other recent work, as part of the Audio Series Doc Bodega at UnionDocs.

Learn more about Radio Diaries and listen to some stories.

Will the Real NPR Please Stand Up?

Neighborhood Public Radio

Monday April 14 | 8 pm

@UnionDocs
$5 suggested admission.

Meet the new NPR on the block: Neighborhood Public Radio. An artist run radio project now broadcasting live from a former shoe storefront at The Whitney Biennial, NPR provides an alternative media platform to community artists and musicians, activists, and local residents. By opening up the channels of communication through both internet streams and a micro-powered signal, Neighborhood Public Radio creates a kind of open radiophonic space: one free of FCC rules and regulations, corporate underwriters, and, well, any editorial involvement whatsoever. The motto for NPR is: “If it’s in the neighborhood and it makes noise .. we hope to put it on the air.”

For their current production, titled “American Life” in association with the Whitney Biennial, NPR broadcasts live from the Madison Avenue storefront and invites anyone passing by to tell stories, perform, interview, or just talk. They have also developed boxed broadcasting kits that they will distribute in cities across the country. NPR founders Lee Montgomery and Jon Brumit will be on hand to discuss their project, recall some memorable locally-produced radio moments and respond to a piece about them recently aired on that other NPR . They’ll also play audio from other recent community-based transmission arts projects including State of Mind Stations and Talking Homes.

After the presentation there will be a casual collaborative talk in the yard over snacks and beer about the future of transmission arts with free103point9 in Brooklyn, NY.

I just got a job at UnionDocs. UnionDocs a documentary arts collective and studio space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (and in fact only blocks from my place!). They also run a residency program, six documentarians live upstairs and collaborate in curating screenings every week of feature length documentaries, with the director around for a post screening discussion.

There is also a studio space and loads of resources for artists and filmakers in the community.

I am proud to be representing this totally unique documentary arts organization!!!

I just finished up an amazing internship at The Brian Lehrer Show at WNYC in New York City. The Brian Lehrer Show is a live, daily, two-hour long call in show that covers issues and news in New York and beyond. Working in live radio was an exciting challenge and I got to pitch and help produce several segments featured on the show, including:

Facebook and Lifeat.com–Social Networking for the Young and Not-so-Young

Spooky Spots

The Mexican Model

Young, Homeless, and Gay

Youth Culture Capitalism

You can listen to them here:
One Thing: From Burma To Indianapolis

Inside The Berlin Philharmonic

Here’s a piece I did for the news about the most recent threat to Internet radio:

Internet_Radio

The Copyright Royalty Board has decided to raise royalty rates –webcasters will have to pay up to a 300% increase in royalty fees on a per-song basis. The consequences of this could signal the end of independent web-based radio shows and podcasts, as Josh Ward from SaveNetRadio says in the piece, and could bankrupt even larger webcasting stations like Yahoo and Pandora.

Record Industry organization Sound Exchange says they just want artists and labels to get paid fairly for their work. But thousands of bands and artists may not get their chance to be heard or discovered, since the proposed fees would reduce the variety of independent programming out there.

For more information, check out www.savenetradio.org

Here are a few reports I produced for a Pacifica National Special about the United States Social Forum, which grew out the World Social Forum.
Nearly 10,000 people gathered from many social movements in the U.S. and around the world. The Forum workshops and events revolved around several issues: labor rights, the environment, Indigenous rights, Immigration, gender equality, and the war in Iraq. Check out the entire Pacifica broadcast of the U.S. Social Forum here.
USSF_Closing.mp3
USSF_Immigration.mp3
USSF_Be_the_Media.mp3
USSF_Youth_Performers.mp3
USSF_Prisoner Family Project.mp3

Here is a news piece I did for WBAI Sunday News about the changes happening to Coney Island and the rumor that this was the last Mermaid Parade:

The Coney Island Mermaid Parade celebrated it’s Silver Anniversary this year with a record crowd of over half a million people attending. But many are saying this will be the last summer of the ‘good ol’ days’ of Coney Island, as developers move forward with a $2 billion dollar plan to drastically remake this historic neighborhood.

Give a listen here:

Mermaid_parade.mp3

The Mermaid Parade is organized by Coney Island USA, a tourism groups that organizes some of the better burlesque/sideshow/freakshow events that make Coney Island so great. Hopefully this summer I will get out there more to record and photograph Astroland while it lasts.