The reason I hesitate to say so absolutely is that I haven't been able to hear it yet: every time I start playing "Secrets and Noise," a garbage truck comes by and empties the bins in the alley under my window. This has happened three times already. Perhaps I should wait until midnight--but I don't want to give garbage pick-up any ideas here. Inadvertently, "Secrets and Noise" has got me listening to this vital municipal service more closely than ever before.
Ah, now they've gone at last. Let me try one more time...
Some months ago, I griped about how all public radio reports about Uganda seem to dwell upon AIDS, violence, or oppression. Now comes an exception--Tara Anderson's commendable feature about a pioneering filmmaker in Uganda.
Unfortunately, this piece relies too much on words. True, Anderson includes clips of actors and singers; but they seem token and fail to convey much atmosphere.
Especially for stories about far-away places, editors and reporters should throw away words, sentences, even paragraphs of precious text, or a whole voice cut, in order to allow time for sound. Consider: it is only through ambience, loud and clear (or soft but enduring), that a feature can breathe. More often than not, it is silence, or the pause for sound, that gives radio its power--rather than the wedging in of one more fact. This is true even in news reports.
End of sermon. I listen forward to Tara Anderson's next feature about Uganda.
This is an interesting essay, although I do think that Steven Tagle over-interprets male body-language. Yes, men often growl when they hug, but so do ladies when they go chest-to-chest. (Though, of course, it could be purring.)
By the way, the real male huggers in this world are not necessarily New Age or gay at all: they are merely Portuguese. Watch carefully: as Portuguese men (businessmen, politicians, everyone) extend their right hands for a shake, with their left hands they grasp each other tight around the back, and hug, and hug, and hug--turning even the most formal first encounter into a full-body grapple.
Back to radio: I think this essay would make a wonderful feature sound-piece, with the Steven's narration interspersed with real, live, you-are-there hug recordings. I can hear them now:
"Oh, John!...
"Oh, James!...
(Sound of male hug: "Grrrrr!" +pat-pat-pat)
Followed, of course, by:
"Oh, Latanya!......
"Oh, Trixie!!!..."
(Sound of female hug: "MMMMMmmm!...Purrrr!" + pat-pat-pat)
Unfortunately, I suspect that actual hug field recordings will turn out to be far less dramatic than the above, and sound more like:
(Traffic ambience. Then
"OK, so, like, I'll see you..."
"OK, like, whatever..."
Traffic fades...)
Thus, the radio hug will have to be cued in some way, perhaps with music provided by a convenient orchestra or, these days, cell-phone signal.
There are infinite possibilities. And I hereby give Steven Tagle an encouraging male...I mean, email...hug. (Grrr...pat-pat-pat...Music soars.)
This feature is a perfect restorative after the US Presidential elections. It conveys the passion of birdwatchers who, for more than two decades, have been trying to sight and record the legendary New Zealand kokako (which Kiwis pronounce 'korkakoo', 'kookahku' or even 'kawkahkkiew'...).
The program--itself a kind of musical composition--blends first-person narration, gritty archival tape, bird calls, and silence. It relaxes, yet at the same time enthralls as we strain to hear distant birds in the forest, or imagine, from one brief call on an old cassette played over and over, the ghostly beauty of the kokako in the "Lost World" of South Island, New Zealand.
After a time, even the cheerful voices of the New Zealanders start to strike the ear as a so many quiet, gentle chirps--heard over an ethereal bed of forest ambience and Tibetan bells.
I found this portrait of Charles Goodin compelling. Perhaps because of my maternal, Kentucky, side of the family; perhaps because of Goodin's accent, or the unexpected rhythms, energy and humor in his voice--or perhaps because people often shine when they talk about their work: I just wanted to hear more and more from this individual.
Still, this piece would have been better at about three-quarters of its actual broadcast length. Structurally, some of the end parts should have been at the beginning: I would have enjoyed hearing more from "Turkey" Goodin's acquaintances earlier on in the feature. Also, the producer could have included more interludes of ambience: the swish of cornstalks, or rain falling on a muddy field, or a tractor, or tomatoes squishing underfoot--anything to create little moments or "scenes" for the farmer's voice to float in on top of, and thus help the listener to imagine the locale. As it was, except for a telephone at the beginning, and some crickets later on, this piece boiled down to a string of comments from the protagonist with only incidental background sound. However, the producer made a good choice by keeping narration to an absolute minimum and letting the farmer tell the story.
Frankie (along with Billie and Vivaldi) is played daily in every café, American and European, this side of creation, and I don't ever, EVER need to hear him again in a Morning Edition piece.
In this particular Morning Edition offering, Mr. I-Got-You-Under-My-Skin (Cue: Big band trumpets) seemed to pop up here, there, and everywhere almost at random--and was mixed far too LOUDLY under Jay Allison's voice. (Or so it sounded on RealPlayer.)
That's my technical gripe. As for content: I got a mite confused. Did Jay Allison really interview his kids for a potential public radio feature as he was showing them his new gun purchases? And did his minidisk recorder just happen to be running as Jay spontaneously, in some sort of Apocalypse Now-like episode, fired his empty pistol at the wall (Cue: "Click... click...click...")? And did Jay truly and honestly feel more--ahem--"manly" after his divorce by buying a few more guns?
Gosh, if so, then I must say that this strange and funny piece--which comes across as part true confession and part artistic confection--leaves me wondering if Jay Allison is a strange and funny person. (Or is he just an ordinary American with a little thing about guns?)
The good part about this radio essay is that it reminded me of two strange and funny gun episodes from my own life. Decades ago, I overheard a housemate--a pacifist, vegetarian philosophy student--talking on the telephone with his girlfriend.
"I've decided." he said, "to eat meat again."
Ah!, I thought--and pricked up my ears.
"But I'm not going to buy it," he continued. "I'm gonna hunt it and kill it and clean it myself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah...I do have a gun. Got it yesterday. It's out in the car..."
And so forth. That's the philosophical approach to gun possession.
Now for the second story: Fast forward a few decades to the 1980s when I worked at NPR. One day I went shooting with a Russian language teacher of mine and my brother (who is a member of the NRA and has hunted a lot). First we went trap-shooting and then fired at targets on a range. This was my first time with a gun.
Range shooting was real boring: a bunch of guys with rifles on supports, shooting at targets, observing the results through binoculars--and then jotting down notes. I was expecting a dramatic scene from High Noon and this was more like a methodical rocket-launch. I couldn't hit targets, but was quite good at trap-shooting, which involves quick pointing and firing. In fact, I actually bagged more skeets--clay pigeons--than did my rifle-owning brother.
"That is because target-shooting is science," said my Russian language instructor, Natasha. "But skeet-shooting...is ART!"
The next day, I boasted about my shooting exploits to my (then) colleagues at All Things Considered. To my astonishment, they were not impressed. Indeed, they heartily disapproved.
"Alex!" they scolded, "How could you--of all people--shoot those poor little DEFENSELESS skeets?
Because, I explained, weary of do-goodism. Skeets are tasty--especially four and twenty of them...baked in a pie...
.
Comment for
"Rod Paige, Go Sit in the Corner." (deleted)
Review of Rod Paige, Go Sit in the Corner. (deleted)
Ian Shoales always turns me into the Cheshire Cat: whenever I listen to one of his trademark mile-a-minute blasts--which I've been doing for a couple of decades now--I end up grinning ear to ear, without knowning why or remembering a word the man has said (except: 'Gotta go').
Perhaps I should be attending to what Mr. Shoales is saying behind or in between his words, if acoustically possible, or reading the gentleman's lips (a challenge on radio).
In any event, Ian Shoales is always a hoot. My only complaint is the obvious effect he has had on the public: While Shoales' radio pieces are polished gems, with manicured phrases and perfectly timed pauses, I suspect that they've inadvertently set off in this nation an epidemic of prestissimo banter.
I mean, just listen to people--on the street, in the metro, hanging out in cafes--they are all on mobile phones and THEY ALL SOUND JUST LIKE IAN SHOALES! Except that they're saying things like:
AC
"Likeyouknowlikelikeit'ssoImeanlikesolikeyouknowlike...".
Or, if its a Congressional secretary on Capitol Hill who answers the phone:
Bravo! It is so encouraging to hear work that captures the wonder and mystery of science, as well as the routine and accidental aspects of lab research--all without a reporter's voice.
In a way, THE SINGING YEAST CELL is a marvelously "dated" kind of feature in that it hearkens back to the cult film THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS (with Stevie Wonder) and to various 1970s and 1980s NPR documentaries--for example, on the Electromagnetic Spectrum--which used tones and music imaginatively and effectively. (Alas, nowadays such radio techniques are all too often dismissed as inappropriately artistic, confusing, even 'manipulative.')
I especially appreciated Claes' use of "mystery" sounds: sounds which are not explained, or not immediately explained, or which are self-explanatory over time. Such sounds make make the radio piece all the more vivid.
By the way, this superb feature reminds me of when, at NPR ages ago, I assigned a reporter to do a piece about certain cells in the human cochlea which apparently vibrate at a constant frequency and thus "broadcast" a tone. I would now like to encourage Claes to consider producing a piece about--THE SINGING EAR CELLS.
These pieces took work, and courage, to pull together. Yet they often fall short in their production.
An aside: I lived in Uganda as a child and I long to hear reports from that country which AREN'T about AIDS, warfare, and other dismal matters. Unfortunately, most journalists and news editors go for “more news of fresh disasters” in Africa. In short: the Heart of Darkness.
The Radio Netherlands series held my attention most when the producer let the Ugandans themselves, with their gentle, dignified voices, speak at length and thus pull the story along.
Some pieces included pauses and ambience—both of which which are sorely lacking in “informational” documentaries these days. Others were pretty dry, with only a few seconds of sound near the top.
In these I began to wonder whether the producer had been so busy getting the heartrending story that he had had no time to look around, or go for a walk with his microphone to record, say, for example:
Wind in the bougainvillea bushes; women pounding ground-nuts or cooking matoke (plaintains) over fires; drums in the night; walking through elephant grass (it squeaks as it cuts your legs); flies and lizards scrabbling; huge birds calling from high up in the trees—and so on.
To be sure, my memories of Uganda pre-date AIDS and the Lord's Resistance Army. But I know those sounds, and I know that they are still there.
As a painter, the only critique I have of this piece is that the producer missed a great opportunity to explore why clothing is harder to paint than the human body. That's a fascinating point.
Pieces about the visual arts are hard to do on radio. So is humor. This piece presented much food for thought -- but unfortunately, too quickly. It needed to breathe more. Also, the humor it contained tended to be unnecessarily broad and cutesy, especially when the producer assumed that I was thinking (wink, wink!) of...you know what (wink, wink, wink!).
Well, I wasn't. I was thinking of something else:
I was thinking about the time one of my art reports was censored on public radio (the only time). It was in the mid-1990s, when I produced a story for a national news program about an exhibition of work by a gay photographer of yesteryear -- Wilhelm von Gloeden.
Even National Geographic Magazine acquired some of Von Gloeden's more chaste photos, of 19th century Sicilian landscapes and village life. But it was his depictions of peasant youths posed against scenic backdrops of Roman ruins and Mt. Etna, playing pan-pipes, wearing veils or leopard skins -- or nothing at all -- that became all the rage at the turn of the last century.
Wilhelm von Gloeden got along just fine with his neighbors in Sicily, and -- honorable man -- paid his models a commission. His nudes were extremely popular; and so they remain, for they are wonderfully sensual and evocative -- and poignant too, for the lads would be around 120 years old by now.
According to modern critics (and this was the crux of my radio report), Von Gloeden's pictures struct a chord for reasons beyond the erotic:
Apparently the Victorians and Edwardians suffered from generational angst brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the First World War, when a generation of golden youths perished in the trenches. These were shattering events, and for some people Von Gloeden's nudes offered not only a certain frisson, but also escape from the present into an imaginary Arcady, a Never-Never Land, a past Golden Age that was so much pleasanter than anything the grim, grey 20th Century seemed likely to offer.
That at least was the gist of my report, but it got yanked from the show at the last minute: the program editor worried that listeners would think the network was condoning...child abuse.
So much for presenting male frontal nudity -- on radio.
Comments by Alex van Oss
Comment for "Secrets and Noise"
Alex van Oss
Posted on May 19, 2009 at 08:25 AM | Permalink
Secrets, noise and garbage
This is a lovely work--I think.
The reason I hesitate to say so absolutely is that I haven't been able to hear it yet: every time I start playing "Secrets and Noise," a garbage truck comes by and empties the bins in the alley under my window. This has happened three times already. Perhaps I should wait until midnight--but I don't want to give garbage pick-up any ideas here. Inadvertently, "Secrets and Noise" has got me listening to this vital municipal service more closely than ever before.
Ah, now they've gone at last. Let me try one more time...
Comment for "Mira Nair in Uganda"
Alex van Oss
Posted on June 01, 2005 at 09:01 PM | Permalink
Review of Mira Nair in Uganda
Some months ago, I griped about how all public radio reports about Uganda seem to dwell upon AIDS, violence, or oppression. Now comes an exception--Tara Anderson's commendable feature about a pioneering filmmaker in Uganda.
Unfortunately, this piece relies too much on words. True, Anderson includes clips of actors and singers; but they seem token and fail to convey much atmosphere.
Especially for stories about far-away places, editors and reporters should throw away words, sentences, even paragraphs of precious text, or a whole voice cut, in order to allow time for sound. Consider: it is only through ambience, loud and clear (or soft but enduring), that a feature can breathe. More often than not, it is silence, or the pause for sound, that gives radio its power--rather than the wedging in of one more fact. This is true even in news reports.
End of sermon. I listen forward to Tara Anderson's next feature about Uganda.
Comment for "To Hug or Not to Hug?"
Alex van Oss
Posted on February 27, 2005 at 11:35 PM | Permalink
Review of To Hug or Not to Hug?
This is an interesting essay, although I do think that Steven Tagle over-interprets male body-language. Yes, men often growl when they hug, but so do ladies when they go chest-to-chest. (Though, of course, it could be purring.)
By the way, the real male huggers in this world are not necessarily New Age or gay at all: they are merely Portuguese. Watch carefully: as Portuguese men (businessmen, politicians, everyone) extend their right hands for a shake, with their left hands they grasp each other tight around the back, and hug, and hug, and hug--turning even the most formal first encounter into a full-body grapple.
Back to radio: I think this essay would make a wonderful feature sound-piece, with the Steven's narration interspersed with real, live, you-are-there hug recordings. I can hear them now:
"Oh, John!...
"Oh, James!...
(Sound of male hug: "Grrrrr!" +pat-pat-pat)
Followed, of course, by:
"Oh, Latanya!......
"Oh, Trixie!!!..."
(Sound of female hug: "MMMMMmmm!...Purrrr!" + pat-pat-pat)
Unfortunately, I suspect that actual hug field recordings will turn out to be far less dramatic than the above, and sound more like:
(Traffic ambience. Then
"OK, so, like, I'll see you..."
"OK, like, whatever..."
Traffic fades...)
Thus, the radio hug will have to be cued in some way, perhaps with music provided by a convenient orchestra or, these days, cell-phone signal.
There are infinite possibilities. And I hereby give Steven Tagle an encouraging male...I mean, email...hug. (Grrr...pat-pat-pat...Music soars.)
Comment for "Grey Ghost"
Alex van Oss
Posted on November 11, 2004 at 04:20 AM | Permalink
Review of Grey Ghost
This feature is a perfect restorative after the US Presidential elections. It conveys the passion of birdwatchers who, for more than two decades, have been trying to sight and record the legendary New Zealand kokako (which Kiwis pronounce 'korkakoo', 'kookahku' or even 'kawkahkkiew'...).
The program--itself a kind of musical composition--blends first-person narration, gritty archival tape, bird calls, and silence. It relaxes, yet at the same time enthralls as we strain to hear distant birds in the forest, or imagine, from one brief call on an old cassette played over and over, the ghostly beauty of the kokako in the "Lost World" of South Island, New Zealand.
After a time, even the cheerful voices of the New Zealanders start to strike the ear as a so many quiet, gentle chirps--heard over an ethereal bed of forest ambience and Tibetan bells.
Comment for "Diversified Farming with Charles "Turkey" Goodin"
Alex van Oss
Posted on November 08, 2004 at 03:28 PM | Permalink
Review of Diversified Farming with Charles "Turkey" Goodin
I found this portrait of Charles Goodin compelling. Perhaps because of my maternal, Kentucky, side of the family; perhaps because of Goodin's accent, or the unexpected rhythms, energy and humor in his voice--or perhaps because people often shine when they talk about their work: I just wanted to hear more and more from this individual.
Still, this piece would have been better at about three-quarters of its actual broadcast length. Structurally, some of the end parts should have been at the beginning: I would have enjoyed hearing more from "Turkey" Goodin's acquaintances earlier on in the feature. Also, the producer could have included more interludes of ambience: the swish of cornstalks, or rain falling on a muddy field, or a tractor, or tomatoes squishing underfoot--anything to create little moments or "scenes" for the farmer's voice to float in on top of, and thus help the listener to imagine the locale. As it was, except for a telephone at the beginning, and some crickets later on, this piece boiled down to a string of comments from the protagonist with only incidental background sound. However, the producer made a good choice by keeping narration to an absolute minimum and letting the farmer tell the story.
Comment for "Owning Guns"
Alex van Oss
Posted on November 08, 2004 at 02:43 PM | Permalink
Review of Owning Guns
Oh please: not Frank Sinatra again!...
Frankie (along with Billie and Vivaldi) is played daily in every café, American and European, this side of creation, and I don't ever, EVER need to hear him again in a Morning Edition piece.
In this particular Morning Edition offering, Mr. I-Got-You-Under-My-Skin (Cue: Big band trumpets) seemed to pop up here, there, and everywhere almost at random--and was mixed far too LOUDLY under Jay Allison's voice. (Or so it sounded on RealPlayer.)
That's my technical gripe. As for content: I got a mite confused. Did Jay Allison really interview his kids for a potential public radio feature as he was showing them his new gun purchases? And did his minidisk recorder just happen to be running as Jay spontaneously, in some sort of Apocalypse Now-like episode, fired his empty pistol at the wall (Cue: "Click... click...click...")? And did Jay truly and honestly feel more--ahem--"manly" after his divorce by buying a few more guns?
Gosh, if so, then I must say that this strange and funny piece--which comes across as part true confession and part artistic confection--leaves me wondering if Jay Allison is a strange and funny person. (Or is he just an ordinary American with a little thing about guns?)
The good part about this radio essay is that it reminded me of two strange and funny gun episodes from my own life. Decades ago, I overheard a housemate--a pacifist, vegetarian philosophy student--talking on the telephone with his girlfriend.
"I've decided." he said, "to eat meat again."
Ah!, I thought--and pricked up my ears.
"But I'm not going to buy it," he continued. "I'm gonna hunt it and kill it and clean it myself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah...I do have a gun. Got it yesterday. It's out in the car..."
And so forth. That's the philosophical approach to gun possession.
Now for the second story: Fast forward a few decades to the 1980s when I worked at NPR. One day I went shooting with a Russian language teacher of mine and my brother (who is a member of the NRA and has hunted a lot). First we went trap-shooting and then fired at targets on a range. This was my first time with a gun.
Range shooting was real boring: a bunch of guys with rifles on supports, shooting at targets, observing the results through binoculars--and then jotting down notes. I was expecting a dramatic scene from High Noon and this was more like a methodical rocket-launch. I couldn't hit targets, but was quite good at trap-shooting, which involves quick pointing and firing. In fact, I actually bagged more skeets--clay pigeons--than did my rifle-owning brother.
"That is because target-shooting is science," said my Russian language instructor, Natasha. "But skeet-shooting...is ART!"
The next day, I boasted about my shooting exploits to my (then) colleagues at All Things Considered. To my astonishment, they were not impressed. Indeed, they heartily disapproved.
"Alex!" they scolded, "How could you--of all people--shoot those poor little DEFENSELESS skeets?
Because, I explained, weary of do-goodism. Skeets are tasty--especially four and twenty of them...baked in a pie...
.
Comment for "Rod Paige, Go Sit in the Corner." (deleted)
Alex van Oss
Posted on August 10, 2004 at 01:54 AM
Review of Rod Paige, Go Sit in the Corner. (deleted)
Ian Shoales always turns me into the Cheshire Cat: whenever I listen to one of his trademark mile-a-minute blasts--which I've been doing for a couple of decades now--I end up grinning ear to ear, without knowning why or remembering a word the man has said (except: 'Gotta go').
Perhaps I should be attending to what Mr. Shoales is saying behind or in between his words, if acoustically possible, or reading the gentleman's lips (a challenge on radio).
In any event, Ian Shoales is always a hoot. My only complaint is the obvious effect he has had on the public: While Shoales' radio pieces are polished gems, with manicured phrases and perfectly timed pauses, I suspect that they've inadvertently set off in this nation an epidemic of prestissimo banter.
I mean, just listen to people--on the street, in the metro, hanging out in cafes--they are all on mobile phones and THEY ALL SOUND JUST LIKE IAN SHOALES! Except that they're saying things like:
AC
"Likeyouknowlikelikeit'ssoImeanlikesolikeyouknowlike...".
Or, if its a Congressional secretary on Capitol Hill who answers the phone:
"MorningthisisthesenatehousecaucasusarmssuboversightcommitteehowmayIdirectyourcall?"
It's all Ian Shoales' fault. On the other hand, while people-on-the-phone make me wince, Shoales on the air makes me grin and grin and grin.
Comment for "The Singing Yeast Cell"
Alex van Oss
Posted on June 27, 2004 at 02:16 PM | Permalink
Review of The Singing Yeast Cell
Bravo! It is so encouraging to hear work that captures the wonder and mystery of science, as well as the routine and accidental aspects of lab research--all without a reporter's voice.
In a way, THE SINGING YEAST CELL is a marvelously "dated" kind of feature in that it hearkens back to the cult film THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS (with Stevie Wonder) and to various 1970s and 1980s NPR documentaries--for example, on the Electromagnetic Spectrum--which used tones and music imaginatively and effectively. (Alas, nowadays such radio techniques are all too often dismissed as inappropriately artistic, confusing, even 'manipulative.')
I especially appreciated Claes' use of "mystery" sounds: sounds which are not explained, or not immediately explained, or which are self-explanatory over time. Such sounds make make the radio piece all the more vivid.
By the way, this superb feature reminds me of when, at NPR ages ago, I assigned a reporter to do a piece about certain cells in the human cochlea which apparently vibrate at a constant frequency and thus "broadcast" a tone. I would now like to encourage Claes to consider producing a piece about--THE SINGING EAR CELLS.
Comment
Alex van Oss
Posted on May 04, 2004 at 08:59 PM
Review of RN Special Series: Uganda (deleted)
These pieces took work, and courage, to pull together. Yet they often fall short in their production.
An aside: I lived in Uganda as a child and I long to hear reports from that country which AREN'T about AIDS, warfare, and other dismal matters. Unfortunately, most journalists and news editors go for “more news of fresh disasters” in Africa. In short: the Heart of Darkness.
The Radio Netherlands series held my attention most when the producer let the Ugandans themselves, with their gentle, dignified voices, speak at length and thus pull the story along.
Some pieces included pauses and ambience—both of which which are sorely lacking in “informational” documentaries these days. Others were pretty dry, with only a few seconds of sound near the top.
In these I began to wonder whether the producer had been so busy getting the heartrending story that he had had no time to look around, or go for a walk with his microphone to record, say, for example:
Wind in the bougainvillea bushes; women pounding ground-nuts or cooking matoke (plaintains) over fires; drums in the night; walking through elephant grass (it squeaks as it cuts your legs); flies and lizards scrabbling; huge birds calling from high up in the trees—and so on.
To be sure, my memories of Uganda pre-date AIDS and the Lord's Resistance Army. But I know those sounds, and I know that they are still there.
Comment for "Naked People"
Alex van Oss
Posted on January 30, 2004 at 08:39 PM | Permalink
Review of Naked People
As a painter, the only critique I have of this piece is that the producer missed a great opportunity to explore why clothing is harder to paint than the human body. That's a fascinating point.
Pieces about the visual arts are hard to do on radio. So is humor. This piece presented much food for thought -- but unfortunately, too quickly. It needed to breathe more. Also, the humor it contained tended to be unnecessarily broad and cutesy, especially when the producer assumed that I was thinking (wink, wink!) of...you know what (wink, wink, wink!).
Well, I wasn't. I was thinking of something else:
I was thinking about the time one of my art reports was censored on public radio (the only time). It was in the mid-1990s, when I produced a story for a national news program about an exhibition of work by a gay photographer of yesteryear -- Wilhelm von Gloeden.
Even National Geographic Magazine acquired some of Von Gloeden's more chaste photos, of 19th century Sicilian landscapes and village life. But it was his depictions of peasant youths posed against scenic backdrops of Roman ruins and Mt. Etna, playing pan-pipes, wearing veils or leopard skins -- or nothing at all -- that became all the rage at the turn of the last century.
Wilhelm von Gloeden got along just fine with his neighbors in Sicily, and -- honorable man -- paid his models a commission. His nudes were extremely popular; and so they remain, for they are wonderfully sensual and evocative -- and poignant too, for the lads would be around 120 years old by now.
According to modern critics (and this was the crux of my radio report), Von Gloeden's pictures struct a chord for reasons beyond the erotic:
Apparently the Victorians and Edwardians suffered from generational angst brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the First World War, when a generation of golden youths perished in the trenches. These were shattering events, and for some people Von Gloeden's nudes offered not only a certain frisson, but also escape from the present into an imaginary Arcady, a Never-Never Land, a past Golden Age that was so much pleasanter than anything the grim, grey 20th Century seemed likely to offer.
That at least was the gist of my report, but it got yanked from the show at the last minute: the program editor worried that listeners would think the network was condoning...child abuse.
So much for presenting male frontal nudity -- on radio.
-- Alex van Oss