This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the Shortcuts series of programs and the events, music and sounds that we've captured in 2012 make for a dense and "sound rich" celebration. Featuring the Presidential election campaign, the primaries, the debates, and the "empty chair" ; the superstorms, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the World Series, the NBA finals, the fiscal cliff, plus all the unrest, the scandals, the tragedies and triumphs; tributes to those who have passed, mixed with all the music that flowed through our lives during the past twelve months--including Adele, Dave Brubeck, Donald Fagen, Levon Helm, Sufjan Stevens, Russell Brand, Jonny Greenwood, Neil Armstrong, Neil Young,  Quvenzhané Wallis, Joaquin Phoenix,  Jim James, Ravi Shankar, Marvin Hamlisch, Andy Williams, Tom Davis, Al Franken, Peter Bergman, Helen Gurley Brown, Louie CK, David Lynch, MFSB, The Cadillacs, Dick Clark, Johnny Otis, Firewater, Danny Elfman, Donna Summer, Daniel Craig, Maurice Sendak, Pete Fornatale, Barry Commoner, Andy Griffith, Norman Corwin, Kevin Clash (Elmo), Don Cornelius, Robin Gibb, Etta James, Pinback, Gore Vidal, Ray Bradbury, Sally Ride, Phyllis Diller, Bob Welch, Sherman Hemsley, Paula Broadwell, Gen. David H. Petraeus, Larry Hagman, Seth Rogen, Whitney Houston, Jon Stewart, Clint Eastwood, Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachman, Donald Trump, David Letterman, Woody Allen, Frank Morgan, Claire Danes, Alabama Shakes, Chris Christy, Stephen Colbert, Sarah Palin, Michael Bloomberg, Hillary Clinton, Mike Wallace, Bill Moyers, George McGovern, Nora Ephron, Warren Beatty, Gloria Steinham, John McCain, Lynn Samuels, Ben Gazzara, Spain Rodriguez, Jerry Nelson as The Count,  Bert, Ernie, Big Bird and Barack Obama...

"The Fireside Afterglow" provides a laidback seasonal theme, featuring music that evokes love, reflection, and peace and the warm moods of winter--a sort of secular musical Yule-log offering.  Performers include Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Bill Evans, Norah Jones, and Louis Armstrong, doing songs such as "Violets for Your Furs," "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm," "Peace," and "Snowbound."  Perfect for any time in December, and especially for the week between Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

The New Year holiday is upon us, with all of its festivity, its resolutions, and its high-and sometimes low-spirits.  We'll be celebrating and reflecting with music from Dean Martin, June Christy, Louis Jordan, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, and a host of other artists, all as part of Afterglow's standard mix of jazz, ballads, and American popular song.  We'll feature a birthday  salute to New Year's Eve baby songwriter Jule Styne  (born Dec. 31, 1905) with a set of New Year's-appropriate Styne songs such as "Time After Time," "Three Coins in the Fountain," and "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" (we'll also talk about how the last song came to be written).  Other songs include some lesser-known and interesting tunes such as Bing Crosby's "Let's Start the New Year Right" (written by Irving Berlin for the film HOLIDAY INN, it was the B-side to "White Christmas!") and Nat King Cole's melancholic performance of Gordon Jenkins' "Happy New Year."  The program concludes with a rousing, vintage big-band-era recording of Vaughn Monroe doing "Auld Lang Syne." 

Help us roast 2012 to a crisp with The Capitol Steps and their annual year-in-review awards ceremony called “Politics Takes a Holiday!”  This year will feature all new awards, such as:

“Best Use of $3 billion Dollars to Run for President,” “Worst Place in Public to Admit You Had a Binder Full of Women,” “Most Prostitutes to Ever Fit into the Secret Service’s Hotel,” and “Worst Hair Cut Ever to Demand to See Anyone’s Birth Certificate, Much Less the President’s.”

Go ahead, post on Facebook (hopefully you didn’t invest in it) and tell your friends all about it!  If there is anything Congress can agree on, it is The Capitol Steps’ one hour long special will have you laughing harder than Joe Biden at a Vice Presidential debate.

So laugh away at 2012, because unlike any Presidential election, laughter is free.

Join in a New Year journey with host Hal Cannon to an ancient Gaelic ritual of bringing in the year with fiddler Alasdair Frazier. Then join Jean Redpath for the original ?Auld Lang Syne.? From the Isles back to the States we travel to delve into the Native American way of marking time with a heartfelt story from Lakota elder, Leonard Littlefinger telling how ritual can help us transform a brutal history into a new story of hope. We end with the hope of a healthy land from the Grand Canyon. Join us

NOTE: you can listen to the stereo .wav version of this piece at: http://sarahboothroyd.com/artwork/2053112_ALL_IN_TIME.html

 

The clock ticks; the moon waxes; the autumn leaves turn crimson. Time is as ubiquitous as it is elusive. Guided by science and science fiction, All In Time traverses the timeless mystery of time itself.

This 25-minute work won the 2011 Luc Ferrari International Broadcast Arts Competition, won a 2011 Gold World Medal for Best Sound at the New York Festivals Radio Programming Awards, and was shortlisted for the 2011 Phonurgia Nova Prize.

All In Time was commissioned by La Muse En Circuit in Paris (Centre National de Création Musicale), with the support of Radio Suisse Romande, Deutschlandradio Kultur, RTBF Musiq 3, Groupe de Recherches Musicales, and Radio-France.

In 2011 All In Time was broadcast on Radio Suisse Romande in Switzerland; on Deutschlandradio Kultur in Germany; on Swedish Radio Channel 2; on TIK ArtRadio Days in Slovakia; on The Radius (New York), WKXR (New York), WMUA (Massachusetts), KUT (Texas), and KFAI (Minnesota) in the U.S.A.; and on over 40 radio stations around the world, thanks to the Radiophonic Creation Day Festival and the Future Places Festival.

This independent production was also published on two CDs – Deep Wireless VIII and Concours d'art radiophonique Luc Ferrari: Composer Le Réel – and was featured in several online publications; including Transom.org, Public Radio Remix Blog, Third Coast International Audio Festival, Syntone, InStereoPress, Girrlsound, and Infinity's Kitchen.

In 2011, All In Time was also presented in spatialized, octophonic format at the Archipel Contemporary Music Festival in Switzerland; at Festival Extension XI and the Prix Phonurgia Nova Concert in France; at Netaudio London in the U.K.; at the Ohrenhoch Sound Art Gallery in Germany; at the Deep Wireless Festival (Toronto) and Canadian Electroacoustic Community Anniversary Concert (Vancouver) in Canada; and at the PNEM Festival in The Netherlands.

Written, recorded, edited and mixed by Sarah Boothroyd, special thanks are extended to physics maven Peter Watson; to antique clock collector Georges Royer; to Travis Morgan and Dokashiteru for providing Creative Commons samples; and to Himan and Melina Brown for permitting the use of CBS Radio Mystery Theatre clips.



To read more about this production please visit
http://transom.org/?p=16802,
http://thirdcoastfestival.org/library/1009-all-in-time?closed=true, and
http://publicradioremix.org/2011/09/pressing-play-may-stop-time

Copyright: All Rights Reserved

Part One: TOXIC LIVING: They say ?what you don?t know can?t hurt you?. While there is some truth to that, being informed allows us to make better choices. From formaldehyde to methyl-mercury to dioxins, there are a wide variety of hazardous chemicals in our furnishings, clothing, cleaning and grooming products, our food, water and air. Kathy Golden speaks with Deirdre Imus, founder of the Deirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology, a foundation committed to promoting non-toxic alternatives to the more harmful products we may be using everyday. OPTIONAL CUTAWAY CUE: ?That?s 1-8-7-7 M-A-R-Y-K-N-O-L-L" at 14:00. Part Two: MERCURY RISING: Most of us have been exposed to mercury, a poisonous metallic element and neuro-toxin, in several of its various forms, either in the fish we eat or even as an ingredient in a vaccine we received. The mercury preservative in inoculations is thimerosal, and Deirdre Imus advises that parents simply request thimerosal-free vaccines. Then we talk with Nat Mund, Senior Washington Representative for the Sierra Club about the latest relaxations in emission standards for coal burning power plants and the resulting rise in environmental mercury contamination. End Cue: ?And please be sure to join us next time for more Voices of Our World.? At 28:00. Can be broadcast at 14:00 or 28:00 minutes. Format fits well into either time slot.

Walt Avery is throwing a New Year's Eve party. He's invited all his friends, and expects a big crowd. Who will show up? And who won't? In this short story, we spend an evening with a man coming to terms with the death of his wife, and the choices he has made to preserve her memory.

Performed by Ben Jones and Tom Ligon.

Written and directed by Jonathan Mitchell. 

Join us in a toast! On today's episode ofDistillations we're celebrating the holiday season with a couple of drinks—and a side of aspirin. First, producer Catherine Girardeau heads to St. George Spirits, a distillery in California, to find out how the most potent ingredients in our favorite cocktails are made. Then we check in the morning after to reveal what hangover cures actually work. (Hint: Not many.)

I’m sitting at a picnic table in our screened-in porch. It’s my third birthday party, and I’m opening presents. I unwrap a Tonka truck, and drop to the floor to start playing with it.

That’s been my earliest memory ever since I can, well, remember. But as the years wore on, something weird started happening. I started to feel less attached to the person in that memory. Now, I feel like I’m seeing the memory through someone else’s eyes, watching myself push that truck on the green astroturf carpet. I’m not even sure it’s a real memory anymore.

This has been on my mind because my own son recently had his third birthday. It got me wondering what his first memory will be, and more broadly, what is the nature of early memories? How reliable might they be, and how important to the construction of our identities?

On the latest installment of Clever Apes, we dig into what science has to say about early memory. Young kids actually have lots of memories that don’t make it into long-term storage. The phenomenon, called “childhood amnesia,” is not very well understood. But it seems to have something to do with the lens through which we see the world, and how it changes from early childhood (say, age three) to the more verbal period starting around age five or six. It’s tough to bridge that divide, and that may explain why I’m having a hard time connecting with my three-year old self.

And there’s another reason: memories are made from networks of neurons in our brains. That wiring gets used for lots of things, and so with each new memory, the networks change a little. When we remember something, we effectively rewrite it. That means that in some sense, each time we reflect on a memory, we’re putting a little more distance between ourselves and the actual event. Recent research suggests we’re even doing this in our sleep.

It’s enough to give a fellow a dose of existential distress. But there’s an upside too: A Chicago researcher has demonstrated ways that parents can reinforce and help solidify a child’s memories.If you listen to the show, you can hear me trying this out on my son, Ezra. I bribed him with M&Ms to get him to sit still.

A friend of mine gave me an assignment to answer my telephone at 7:30 am on December 7th. She gave my phone number to one of her writing mentors and told her to call me. My only guidelines were to answer the telephone and share something with her. So..I created a Google Voice account and asked my friends and family to leave Good Morning messages. I edited a handfull of my favorites together, mixed them with some music, and layered in a recording of my Grandfather singing one of his favorite songs. At 7:30 am I shared this piece with the stranger. She emailed me today and told me that she's taken to playing it every monring as part of her daily ritual.

In the movies, a single cut can jump several decades. Bullets stop and linger onscreen. In this piece, three film critics dissect how directors have twisted time in recent movies. Orginally aired on Studio 360 in May, 2002 NOTE: Because this piece was produced in 2002, the film examples are probably a bit dated. Included are examples from Memento, Run Lola Run, and Timecode. We hear from: Holly Willis, editor of Res magazine Michael Fox, film journalist for San Francisco Weekly David Laderman, professor of film at the College of San Mateo

What did you do on New Year's eve? Youth reporter and self-described geek, Ethan Jud, takes listeners on a lively, sound-rich voyage to the world of a LAN (Local Area Network) party Delve deep into the world of teen geeks gone wild on energy drinks, junk food, and networked gaming. This piece originally aired on the Blunt episode, "Geeks", at WMPG in Portland, ME.

Broadcast on WFPL, December 22, 2005.

Folklorsit Jon Lohman shares the background of  little-known tradition of "Breaking Up Christmas," a series of gatherings the week between Christmas and New Year's, where people get together in each other's homes and jam until the wee hours of the morning. Many generations participate, and it's a really wonderful way for the community to come together and wind down the holiday season.

Scott Wall and his wife, Isabel Sobozinsky-Wall, talk about their long-distance courtship that began on New Year's Eve.

A new study reveals that a messy desk can make you sick. Ian examines his own desk/health ratio, and reaches some conclusions.