- Playing
- Alaskan Fish Guts
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- Terin Mayer
Summer in southeast Alaska is salmon season, and that means lots of seasonal work for everyone from mexican immigrants, to locals, to naive and adventurous college students.
"Alaskan Fish Guts" is a first person essay with an experimental twist about the mental ordeal of working on a fish processing line. What on earth would bring someone to stand slicing fish for 9 hours a day? And how do you build meaning out of such a strange and foreign experience?
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Piece Description
Summer in southeast Alaska is salmon season, and that means lots of seasonal work for everyone from mexican immigrants, to locals, to naive and adventurous college students. "Alaskan Fish Guts" is a first person essay with an experimental twist about the mental ordeal of working on a fish processing line. What on earth would bring someone to stand slicing fish for 9 hours a day? And how do you build meaning out of such a strange and foreign experience?
2 Comments
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Review of Alaskan Fish GutsThis is nice short piece. Good use of sound effects and actualities. The writing is good, it's personal and introspective. The story of working with fish. The smells, the sounds, the resignation are highlighted in a very serious and slightly angst ridden way. Throw in a bit of guilty liberal slumming and we've got a piece that works over and over again public radio. There are few interesting production techniques, like repeating a phrase from a supervisor on the dock. It kind of works like the repeated phrasing in a rap/hip-hop tune. I might suggest that the levels of the narration should be brought up a bit and that the narrator should do a few diction exercises with a voice coach, but nothing that would prevent me from recommending the segment as is. Strong and visual, this piece brings a tone of seriousness for fish and people. Kind of a weird thought I know, but take a listen. |
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Marjorie Van Halteren
Posted on October 26, 2005 at 05:03 AM | Permalink
Review of Alaskan Fish Guts
AT LAST A RADIO PIECE I CAN SMELL - and one my students in Media Studies and The Nature of Sound will relate to - not just because it's downright musical - they are REGUIRED to work on assembly lines in the summer -and they react much the same. And like my French engineers, this guy studies philosophy -Excellent training to counteract the effects of chewing and swallowing media air for 25 years. Yes, he talks alittle fast - that kind of American speech that slips in and outta there like a' ultra-sound frisbie - but, hey, I think he sounds a bit like the young Ira Glass - and look what happened to HIM!