Inside the Shel Silverstein Archive.

I’m working at this fine place these days, writing and producing multimedia stories for their website. It has brought a lot of good poems into my life, like this one by Jean Toomer, which struck me with its eerie bustle — part city life sequence, part surrealist daydream.

Beehive

Within this black hive tonight
There swarm a million bees;
Bees passing in and out the moon,
Bees escaping out the moon,
Bees returning through the moon,
Silver bees intently buzzing,
Silver honey dripping from the swarm of bees
Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb,
And I, a drone,
Lying on my back,
Lipping honey,
Getting drunk with silver honey,
Wish that I might fly out past the moon
And curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower.

While you’re here, may I recommend a Tumblr of songs curated by a dear friend of mine? She features one a week-ish, with a photo and some brief musings. Gallopinging.

A story I made with support from the Sound Bank (thanks, In the Dark!) is now up online. It’s about the connection between the 1977 New York City blackout and the beginnings of hip-hop. What are those connections, you ask? Think aspiring young DJs without much money, post-blackout looting, and abundant hi-fi stores. And then, actually, just go listen to it. Thanks to Grandmaster Caz, Bronx County historian Lloyd Ultan, hip-hop historian Joe Schloss, the WNYC archives, and D.C. LaRue.

AND an exciting thing: the story got written up by the Guardian’s radio critic (yup, the Guardian has a radio critic).

Walking through the one of the biggest open air markets in Latin America:

]]> http://daphall.com/2010/09/12/chichicastenango/feed/ 1 tigress d chichicastenango_market http://daphall.com/2010/05/22/three-records-sun-ra/ http://daphall.com/2010/05/22/three-records-sun-ra/#comments Sat, 22 May 2010 15:33:37 +0000 Delaney http://daphall.wordpress.com/?p=396 ]]>

[From the opening of Re:sound #122: The Three Records from Sun Ra Show, featuring Three Records from Sundown by Charles Maynes and The Other Worlds of Sun Ra by Brent Clough and John Jacobs of the Night Air on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation... Both amazing stories and definitely worth listening to in their entirety.]

Most art forms have dedicated spaces where people can go to engage with them: movies have their cineplexes, sculptures have their gardens and museums, dance has the stage, music has the concert hall or the bar or even just the campfire. Radio is different — it’s diffuse and people almost never gather in special places to listen to it together.

I’d like to live in a world with radio theaters. Places with comfortable seats, where teenagers tear your tickets, and they dim the lights, and serve you popcorn, and there are nice speakers that play audio stories worth listening to in this dedicated way.

I imagine you’re thinking: it sounds weird to sit quietly in a dark room with strangers and listen to a story with no pictures. And I’m thinking: that’s true, but you should still give it a try.

On March 6th, the second ever Third Coast FilmLESS Festival is going down at the MCA in Chicago and you’ll have a chance to do just what I’ve described. Listen to amazing radio stories in a theater. With other people around you. And then talk about what you’ve heard.

Here’s a little something that I made for last year’s TCFF. It features the voices of Piers Plowright and Sean Hurley:

(photo by daph from Olafur Eliason exhibit at the MCA)

(photo by daph)

Chicago is bounded on the east side by Lake Michigan and all the tallest buildings in the city crowd up against its shore. But to the north, west, and south, there’s not much to stop the city as it spills out over old prairie land, gradually thinning into suburbs. Especially to the north and south, Chicago seems endless. Dozens of neighborhoods thread along the north-south corridors that run for miles and miles and miles: Rogers Park, Ravenswood, Lincoln Square, Logan Square, Humboldt Park, Ukrainian Village, Little Village, Back of the Yard, Englewood, more, more.
(On Paulina St.)

My friend Katie and I have been talking about documenting (in sound and photos) the entire length of one of the north-to-south streets, traveling the whole thing on foot. Maybe in a single day. We’ve considered Western Ave. Maybe California? Ashland? Halsted is a cool one, but Kartemquin did a film called “Halsted St., USA” way-back-when. We’re still looking for the right one. I’ve been taking bike rides up and down the city, checking out the possibilities. If you have suggestions, let us know.

(On Augusta Ave.)

The idea, in the end, will be to capture what makes each neighborhood along the route visually and sonically distinct, and to show how the identity of the street varies depending on the neighborhood it’s passing through. It won’t be comprehensive, of course (though I have geeked out on the thought of correlating seconds of sound to miles of distance), but it’ll be filtered through our particular inclinations and interests. For me, it’s a personal project as much as a documentary one, a way of getting to the know new parts of the city I’ve lived in for three years — on the sidewalk and very slowly, on foot. And a way of getting beyond the boundaries of the usual, familiar routes I trace everyday.

There’ve been a few recent projects which have planted this idea in my head. One is the Freesound Map, which lets you click on a geotagged point and listen to, say, Xhosa herdboys letting the cows out to graze in Eastern Cape, South Africa or traffic sounds in Copenhagen, Denmark. Then there’s Mapping Mainstreet, a collaborative project trying to document all ten THOUSAND American streets called “Main”. And then there’s this sweet Camilo Vergara photography site called Invincible Cities. All these projects are figuring out interesting ways to track images and/or sounds and/or stories over time and/or distance. Neat!

(Photos by daph)