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SO! Amplifies: Allison Smartt, Sound Designer of MOM BABY GOD and Mixed-Race Mixtape
SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig. You're welcome!
Currently on the faculty and the associate technical director of California Institute of the Arts Sharon Lund Disney School of Dance, Allison Smartt worked for several years in Hampshire's dance program as intern-turned-program assistant. A sound engineer, designer, producer, and educator for theater and dance, she has created designs seen and heard at La MaMa, The Yard, Arts In Odd Places Festival, Barrington Stage Company, the Five College Consortium, and other venues.
She is also the owner of Smartt Productions, a production company that develops and tours innovative performances about social justice. Its repertory includes the nationally acclaimed solo-show about reproductive rights, MOM BABY GOD, and the empowering, new hip-hop theatre performance, Mixed-Race Mixtape. Her productions have toured 17 U.S. cities and counting.
Ariel Taub is currently interning at Sounding Out! responsible for assisting with layout, scoping out talent and in the process uncovering articles that may relate to or reflect work being done in the field of Sound Studies. She is a Junior pursuing a degree in English and Sociology from Binghamton University.
Recently turned on to several of the projects Allison Smartt has been involved in, I became especially fascinated with MOM BABY GOD 3.0, of which Smartt was sound designer and producer. The crew of MOM BABY GOD 3.o sets the stage for what to expect in a performance with the following introduction:
Take a cupcake, put on a name tag, and prepare to be thrown into the world of the Christian Right, where sexual purity workshops and anti-abortion rallies are sandwiched between karaoke sing-alongs, Christian EDM raves and pro-life slumber parties. An immersive dark comedy about American girl culture in the right-wing, written and performed by Madeline Burrows. One is thrown into the world of the Christian Right, where sexual purity workshops and anti-abortion rallies are sandwiched between karaoke sing-alongs, Christian EDM raves and pro-life slumber parties.
It's 2018 and the anti-abortion movement has a new sense of urgency. Teens 4 Life is video-blogging live from the Students for Life of America Conference, and right-wing teenagers are vying for popularity while preparing for political battle. Our tour guide is fourteen-year-old Destinee Grace Ramsey, ascending to prominence as the new It-Girl of the Christian Right while struggling to contain her crush on John Paul, a flirtatious Christian boy with blossoming Youtube stardom and a purity ring.
MOM BABY GOD toured nationally to sold-out houses from 2013-2015 and was the subject of a national right-wing smear campaign. In a newly expanded and updated version premiering at Forum Theatre and Single Carrot Theatre in March 2017, MOM BABY GOD takes us inside the right-wing's youth training ground at a more urgent time than ever.
I reached out to Smartt about these endeavors with some sound-specific questions. What follows is our April 2017 email exchange [edited for length].
Ariel Taub (AT): What do you think of the voices Madeline Burrows [the writer and solo actor of MOM BABY GOD] uses in the piece? How important is the role of sound in creating the characters?
Allison Smartt (AS): I want to accurately represent Burrows's use of voice in the show. For those who haven't seen it, she's not an impersonator or impressionist conjuring up voices for solely comedy's sake. Since she is a woman portraying a wide range of ages and genders on stage and voice is a tool in a toolbox she uses to indicate a character shift. Madeline has a great sense of people's natural speaking rhythms and an ability to incorporate bits of others' unique vocal elements into the characters she portrays. Physicality is another tool. Sound cues are yet another…lighting, costume, staging, and so on.
I do think there's something subversive about a queer woman voicing ideology and portraying people that inherently aim to repress her existence/identity/reproductive rights.
Many times, when actors are learning accents they have a cue line that helps them jump into that accent. Something that they can't help but say in a southern, or Irish, or Canadian accent. In MOM BABY GOD, I think of my sound design in a similar way. The "I'm a Pro-Life Teen" theme is the most obvious example. It's short and sweet, with a homemade flair and most importantly: it's catchy. The audience learns to immediately associate that riff with Destinee (the host of "I'm a Pro-Life Teen"), so much so that I stop playing the full theme almost immediately, yet it still commands the laugh and upbeat response from the audience.
AT: Does [the impersonation and transformation of people on the opposite side of a controversial issues into] characters [mark them as] inherently mockable? (I asked Smartt about this specifically because of the reaction the show elicited from some people in the Pro-Life group.)
AS: Definitely not. I think the context and intention of the show really humanizes the people and movement that Madeline portrays. The show isn't cruel or demeaning towards the people or movement – if anything, our audience has a lot of fun. But it is essential that Madeline portray the type of leaders in the movement (in any movement really) in a realistic, yet theatrical way. It's a difficult needle to thread and think she does it really well. A preacher has a certain cadence – it's mesmerizing, it's uplifting. A certain type of teen girl is bubbly, dynamic. How does a gruff (some may say manly), galvanizing leader speak? It's important the audience feel the unique draw of each character – and their voices are a large part of that draw.
AT: What sounds [and sound production] were used to help carry the performance [of MOM BABY GOD]? What role does sound have in making plays [and any performance] cohesive?
AS: Sound designing for theatre is a mix of many elements, from pre-show music, sound effects and original music to reinforcement, writing cues, and sound system design. For a lot of projects, I'm also my own sound engineer so I also implement the system designs and make sure everything functions and sounds tip top.
Each design process is a little different. If it's a new work in development, like MOM BABY GOD and Mixed-Race Mixtape, I am involved in a different way than if I'm designing for a completed work (and designing for dance is a whole other thing). There are constants, however. I'm always asking myself, "Are my ideas supporting the work and its intentions?" I always try to be cognizant of self-indulgence. I may make something really, really cool but that ultimately, after hearing it in context and conversations with the other artistic team members, is obviously doing too much more than supporting the work. A music journalism professor I had used to say, "You have to shoot that puppy." Meaning, cut the cue you really love for the benefit of the overall piece.
I like to set myself limitations to work within when starting a design. I find that narrowing my focus to say…music only performed on harmonica or sound effects generated only from modes of transportation, help get my creative juices flowing (Sidenote: why is that a phrase? It give me the creeps)[. . .]I may relinquish these limitations later after they've helped me launch into creating a sonic character that feels complex, interesting, and fun.
AT: The show is described as being comprised of, "karaoke sing-alongs, Christian EDM raves and pro-life slumber parties," each of these has its own distinct associations, how do "sing alongs" and "raves" and our connotations with those things add to the pieces?
AS: Since sound is subjective, the associations that you make with karaoke sing-alongs are probably slightly different from what I associated with karaoke sing-alongs. You may think karaoke sing-along = a group of drunk BFFs belting Mariah Carey after a long day of work. I may think karaoke sing-alongs = middle aged men and women shoulder to shoulder in a dive bar singing "Friends In Low Places" while clinking their glasses of whiskey and draft beer. The similarity in those two scenarios is people singing along to something, but the character and feeling of each image is very different. You bring that context with you as you read the description of the show and given the challenging themes of the show, this is a real draw for people usually resistant to solo and/or political theatre. The way the description is written and what it highlights intentionally invites the audience to feel invited, excited, and maybe strangely upbeat about going to see a show about reproductive rights.
As a sound designer and theatre artist, one of my favorite moments is when the audience collectively readjusts their idea of a karaoke sing-along to the experience we create for them in the show. I feel everyone silently say, "Oh, this is not what I expected, but I love it," or "This is exactly what I imagined!" or "I am so uncomfortable but I'm going with it." I think the marketing of the show does a great job creating excited curiosity, and the show itself harnesses that and morphs it into confused excitement and surprise (reviewers articulate this phenomenon much better that I could).
AT: In this video the intentionally black screen feels like deep space. What sounds [and techniques] are being used? Are we on a train, a space ship, in a Church? What can you [tell us] about this piece?
AS: There are so many different elements in this cue…it's one of my favorites. This cue is lead in and background to Destinee's first experience with sexual pleasure. Not to give too much away: She falls asleep and has a sex dream about Justin Bieber. I compiled a bunch of sounds that are anticipatory: a rocket launch, a train pulling into a station, a remix/slowed down version of a Bieber track. These lead into sounds that feel more harsh: alarm clocks, crumpling paper…I also wanted to translate the feeling of being woken up abruptly from a really pleasant dream…like you were being ripped out of heaven or something. It was important to reassociate for Destinee and the audience, sounds that had previously brought joy with this very confusing and painful moment, so it ends with heartbeats and church bells.
I shoved the entire arc of the show into this one sound cue. And Madeline and Kathleen let me and I love them for that.
AT: What do individuals bring of themselves when they listen to music? How is music a way of entering conversations otherwise avoided?
AS: The answer to this question is deeper than I can articulate but I'll try.
Talking about bias, race, class, even in MOM BABY GOD introducing a pro-life video blog – broaching these topics are made easier and more interesting through music. Why? I think it's because you are giving the listener multiple threads from which to sew their own tapestry…their own understanding of the thing. The changing emotions in a score, multiplicity of lyrical meaning, tempo, stage presence, on and on. If you were to just present a lecture on any one of those topics, the messages feel too stark, too heavy to be absorbed (especially to be absorbed by people who don't already agree with the lecture or are approaching that idea for the first time). Put them to music and suddenly you open up people's hearts.
As a sound designer, I have to be conscious of what people bring to their listening experience, but can't let this rule my every decision. The most obvious example is when faced with the request to use popular music. Take maybe one of the most overused classics of the 20th century, "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen. If you felt an urge just now to stop reading this interview because you really love that song and how dare I naysay "Hallelujah" – my point has been made. Songs can evoke strong reactions. If you heard "Hallelujah" for the first time while seeing the Northern Lights (which would arguably be pretty epic), then you associate that memory and those emotions with that song. When a designer uses popular music in their design, this is a reality you have to think hard about.
It's similar with sound effects. For Mixed-Race Mixtape, Fig wanted to start the show with the sound of a cassette tape being loaded into a deck and played. While I understood why he wanted that sound cue, I had to disagree. Our target demographic are of an age where they may have never seen or used a cassette tape before – and using this sound effect wouldn't elicit the nostalgic reaction he was hoping for.
Regarding how deeply the show moves people, I give all the credit to Fig's lyrics and the entire casts' performance, as well as the construction of the songs by the musicians and composers. As well as to Jorrell, our director, who has focused the intention of all these elements to coalesce very effectively. The cast puts a lot of emotion and energy into their performances and when people are genuine and earnest on stage, audiences can sense that and are deeply engaged.
I do a lot of work in the dance world and have come to understand how essential music and movement are to the human experience. We've always made music and moved our bodies and there is something deeply grounding and joining about collective listening and movement – even if it's just tapping your fingers and toes.
AT: How did you and the other artists involved come up with the name/ idea for Mixed-Race Mixtape? How did the Mixed-Race Mixtape come about?
AS: Mixed-Race Mixtape is the brainchild of writer/performer Andrew "Fig" Figueroa. I'll let him tell the story.
A mixtape is a collection of music from various artists and genres on one tape, CD or playlist. In Hip-Hop, a mixtape is a rapper's first attempt to show the world there skills and who they are, more often than not, performing original lyrics over sampled/borrowed instrumentals that compliment their style and vision. The show is about "mixed" identity and I mean, I'm a rapper so thank God "Mixed-Race" rhymed with "Mixtape."
The show grew from my desire to tell my story/help myself make sense of growing up in a confusing, ambiguous, and colorful culture. I began writing a series of raps and monologues about my family, community and youth and slowly it formed into something cohesive.
AT: I love the quote, "the conversation about race in America is one sided and missing discussions of how class and race are connected and how multiple identities can exist in one person," how does Mixed-Race Mixtape fill in these gaps?
AS: Mixed-Race Mixtape is an alternative narrative that is complex, personal, and authentic. In America, our ideas about race largely oscillate between White and Black. MRMT is alternative because it tells the story of someone who sits in the grey area of Americans' concept of race and dispels the racist subtext that middle class America belongs to White people. Because these grey areas are illuminated, I believe a wide variety of people are able to find connections with the story.
AT: In this video people discuss the connection they [felt to the music and performance] even if they weren't expecting to. What do you think is responsible for sound connecting and moving people from different backgrounds? Why are there the assumptions about the event that there are, that they wouldn't connect to the Hip Hop or that there would be "good vibes."
AS: Some people do feel uncertain that they'd be able to connect with the show because it's a "hip-hop" show. When they see it though, it's obvious that it extends beyond the bounds of what they imagine a hip-hop show to be. And while I've never had someone say they were disappointed or unmoved by the show, I have had people say they couldn't understand the words. And a lot of times they want to blame that on the reinforcement.
I'd argue that the people who don't understand the lyrics of MRMT are often the same ones who were trepidatious to begin with, because I think hip-hop is not a genre they have practice listening to. I had to practice really actively listening to rap to train my brain to process words, word play, metaphor, etc. as fast as rap can transmit them. Fig, an experienced hip-hop listener and artist amazes me with how fast he can understand lyrics on the first listen. I'm still learning. And the fact is, it's not a one and done thing. You have to listen to rap more than once to get all the nuances the artists wrote in. And this extends to hip-hop music, sans lyrics. I miss so many really clever, artful remixes, samples, and references on the first listen. This is one of the reasons we released an EP of some of the songs from the show (and are in the process of recording a full album).
The theatre experience obviously provides a tremendously moving experience for the audience, but there's more to be extracted from the music and lyrics than can be transmitted in one live performance.
AT: What future plans do you have for projects? You mentioned utilizing sounds from protests? How is sound important in protest? What stands out to you about what you recorded?
AS: I have only the vaguest idea of a future project. I participate in a lot of rallies and marches for causes across the spectrum of human rights. At a really basic level, it feels really good to get together with like minded people and shout your frustrations, hopes, and fears into the world for others to hear. I'm interested in translating this catharsis to people who are wary of protests/hate them/don't understand them. So I've started with my iPhone. I record clever chants I've never heard, or try to capture the inevitable moment in a large crowd when the front changes the chant and it works its way to the back.
I record marching through different spaces…how does it sound when we're in a tunnel versus in a park or inside a building? I'm not sure where these recordings will lead me, but I felt it was important to take them.
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You Got Me Feelin' Emotions: Singing Like Mariah
Mariah Carey's New Year's Eve 2016 didn't go so well. The pop diva graced a stage in the middle of Times Square as the clock ticked down to 2017 on Dick Clark's Rockin New Year's Eve, hosted by Ryan Seacrest. After Carey's melismatic rendition of "Auld Lang Syne," the instrumental for "Emotions" kicked in and Carey, instead of singing, informed viewers that she couldn't hear anything. What followed was five minutes of heartburn. Carey strutted across the stage, hitting all her marks along with her dancers but barely singing. She took a stab at a phrase here and there, mostly on pitch, unable to be sure. And she narrated the whole thing, clearly perturbed to be hung out to dry on such a cold night with millions watching. I imagine if we asked Carey about her producer after the show, we'd get a "I don't know her."
These things happen. Ashlee Simpson's singing career, such as it was, screeched to a halt in 2004 on the stage of Saturday Night Live when the wrong backing track cued. Even Queen Bey herself had to deal with lip syncing outrage after using a backing track at former President Barack Obama's second inauguration. So the reaction to Carey, replete with schadenfreude and metaphorical pearl-clutching, was unsurprising, if also entirely inane. (The New York Times suggested that Carey forgot the lyrics to "Emotions," an occurrence that would be slightly more outlandish than if she forgot how to breathe, considering it's one of her most popular tracks). But yeah, this happens: singers—especially singers in the cold—use backing tracks. I'm not filming a "leave Mariah alone!!" video, but there's really nothing salacious in this performance. The reason I'm circling around Mariah Carey's frosty New Year's Eve performance is because it highlights an idea I'm thinking about—what I'm calling the "produced voice" —as well as some of the details that are a subset of that idea; namely, all voices are produced.
I mean "produced" in a couple of ways. One is the Judith Butler way: voices, like gender (and, importantly, in tandem with gender), are performed and constructed. What does my natural voice sound like? I dunno. AO Roberts underlines this in a 2015 Sounding Out! post: "we'll never really know how we sound," but we'll know that social constructions of gender helped shape that sound. Race, too. And class. Cultural norms makes physical impacts on us, perhaps in the particular curve of our spines as we learn to show raced or gendered deference or dominance, perhaps in the texture of our hands as we perform classed labor, or perhaps in the stress we apply to our vocal cords as we learn to sound in appropriately gendered frequency ranges or at appropriately raced volumes. That cultural norms literally shape our bodies is an important assumption that informs my approach to the "produced voice." In this sense, the passive construction of my statement "all voices are produced" matters; we may play an active role in vibrating our vocal cords, but there are social and cultural forces that we don't control acting on the sounds from those vocal cords at the same moment.
Another way I mean that all voices are produced is that all recorded singing voices are shaped by studio production. This can take a few different forms, ranging from obvious to subtle. In the Migos song "T-Shirt," Quavo's voice is run through pitch-correction software so that the last word of each line of his verse (ie, the rhyming words: "five," "five," "eyes," "alive") takes on an obvious robotic quality colloquially known as the AutoTune effect. Quavo (and T-Pain and Kanye and Future and all the other rappers and crooners who have employed this effect over the years) isn't trying to hide the production of his voice; it's a behind-the-glass technique, but that glass is transparent. Less obvious is the way a voice like Adele's is processed. Because Adele's entire persona is built around the natural power of her voice, any studio production applied to it—like, say, the cavernous reverb and delay on "Hello" —must land in a sweet spot that enhances the perceived naturalness of her voice.
Vocal production can also hinge on how other instruments in a mix are processed. Take Remy Ma's recent diss of Nicki Minaj, "ShETHER." "ShETHER"'s instrumental, which is a re-performance of Nas's "Ether," draws attention to the lower end of Remy's voice. "Ether" and "ShETHER" are pitched in identical keys and Nas's vocals fall in the same range as Remy's. But the synth that bangs out the looping chord progression in "ShETHER" is slightly brighter than the one on "Ether," with a metallic, digital high end the original lacks. At the same time, the bass that marks the downbeat of each measure is quieter in "ShETHER" than it is in "Ether." The overall effect, with less instrumental occupying "ShETHER"'s low frequency range and more digital overtones hanging in the high frequency range, causes Remy Ma's voice to seem lower, manlier, than Nas's voice because of the space cleared for her vocals in the mix. The perceived depth of Remy's produced voice toys with the hypermasculine nature of hip hop beefs, and queers perhaps the most famous diss track in the genre. While engineers apply production effects directly to the vocal tracks of Quavo and Adele to make them sound like a robot or a power diva, the Remy Ma example demonstrates how gender play can be produced through a voice by processing what happens around the vocals.
Let's return to Times Square last New Year's Eve to consider the produced voice in a hybrid live/recorded setting. Carey's first and third songs "Auld Lang Syne" and "We Belong Together") were entirely back-tracked—meaning the audience could hear a recorded Mariah Carey even if the Mariah Carey moving around on our screen wasn't producing any (sung) vocals. The second, "Emotions," had only some background vocals and the ridiculously high notes that young Mariah Carey was known for. So, had the show gone to plan, the audience would've heard on-stage Mariah Carey singing along with pre-recorded studio Mariah Carey on the first and third songs, while on-stage Mariah Carey would've sung the second song entirely, only passing the mic to a much younger studio version of herself when she needed to hit some notes that her body can't always, well, produce anymore. And had the show gone to plan, most members of the audience wouldn't have known the difference between on-stage and pre-recorded Mariah Carey. It would've been a seamless production. Since nothing really went to plan (unless, you know, you're into some level of conspiracy theory that involves self-sabotage for the purpose of trending on Twitter for a while), we were all privy to a component of vocal production—the backing track that aids a live singer—that is often meant to go undetected.
The produced-ness of Mariah Carey's voice is compelling precisely because of her tremendous singing talent, and this is where we circle back around to Butler. If I were to start in a different place–if I were, in fact, to write something like, "Y'all, you'll never believe this, but Britney Spears's singing voice is the result of a good deal of studio intervention"–well, we wouldn't be dealing with many blown minds from that one, would we? Spears's career isn't built around vocal prowess, and she often explores robotic effects that, as with Quavo and other rappers, make the technological intervention on her voice easy to hear. But Mariah Carey belongs to a class of singers—along with Adele, Christina Aguilera, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande—who are perceived to have naturally impressive voices, voices that aren't produced so much as just sung. The Butler comparison would be to a person who seems to fit quite naturally into a gender category, the constructed nature of that gender performance passing nearly undetected. By focusing on Mariah Carey, I want to highlight that even the most impressive sung voices are produced, and that means that we can not only ask questions about the social and cultural impact of gender, race, class, ability, sexuality, and other norms may have on those voices, but also how any sung voice (from Mariah Carey's to Quavo's) is collaboratively produced—by singer, technician, producer, listener—in relation to those same norms.
Being able to ask those questions can get us to some pretty intriguing details. At the end of the third song, "We Belong Together," she commented "It just don't get any better" before abandoning the giant white feathers that were framing her onstage. After an awkward pause (during which I imagine Chris Tucker's "Don't cut to me!" face), the unflappable Ryan Seacrest noted, "No matter what Mariah does, the crowd absolutely loves it. You can't go wrong with Ms. Carey, and those hits, those songs, everybody knows." Everybody knows. We didn't need to hear Mariah Carey sing "Emotions" that night because we could fill it all in–everybody knows that song. Wayne Marshall has written about listeners' ability to fill in the low frequencies of songs even when we're listening on lousy systems—like earbuds or cell phone speakers—that can't really carry it to our ears. In the moment of technological failure, whether because a listener's speakers are terrible or a performer's monitors are, listeners become performers. We heard what was supposed to be there, and we supplied the missing content.
Sound is intimate, a meeting of bodies vibrating in time with one another. Yvon Bonenfant, citing Stephen Connor's idea of the "vocalic body," notes this physicality of sound as a "vibratory field" that leaves a vocalizer and "voyages through space. Other people hear it. Other people feel it." But in the case of "Emotions" on New Year's Eve, I heard a voice that wasn't there. It was Mariah Carey's, her vocalic body sympathetically vibrated into being. The question that catches me here is this: what happens in these moments when a listener takes over as performer? In my case, I played the role of Mariah Carey for a moment. I was on my couch, surrounded by my family, but I felt a little colder, like I was maybe wearing a swimsuit in the middle of Times Square in December, and my heart rate ticked up a bit, like maybe I was kinda panicked about something going wrong, and I heard Mariah Carey's voice—not, crucially, my voice singing Mariah Carey's lyrics—singing in my head. I could feel my vocal cords compressing and stretching along with Carey's voice in my head, as if her voice were coming from my body. Which, in fact it was—just not my throat—as this was a collaborative and intimate production, my body saying, "Hey, Mariah, I got this," and performing "Emotions" when her body wasn't.
By stressing the collaborative nature of the produced voice, I don't intend to arrive at some "I am Mariah" moment that I could poignantly underline by changing my profile picture on Facebook. Rather, I'm thinking of ways someone else's voice is could lodge itself in other bodies, turning listeners into collaborators too. The produced voice, ultimately, is a way to theorize unlikely combinations of voices and bodies.
Featured image: By all-systems-go at Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Justin Adams Burton is Assistant Professor of Music at Rider University, and a regular writer at Sounding Out! You can catch him at justindburton.com.
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The Magical Post-Horn: A Trip to the BBC Archive Centre in Perivale
Suddenly we heard a Tereng! tereng! teng! teng! We looked round, and now found the reason why the postilion had not been able to sound his horn: his tunes were frozen up in the horn, and came out now by thawing, plain enough, and much to the credit of the driver. —The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, 1865
At the BBC Archive Centre in Perivale, London, the proverbial "weight of the past" becomes literal for researchers of sound history. Housed in a massive, unattractive hangar-like building in an industrial park to the northwest of London, the archives suit their environment, one which speaks of practical and solid shapes far more than the lyrical, dainty ivory tower. And by weight, I mean by serious, and sometimes dangerous, poundage: the very first machine created to record off of radio, invented around 1930, was a steel pedestal with bus wheel-sized reels on either side. Audio Coordinator of the BBC Archives, John Dell, explained that not only was this machine laborious to load, but it used magnetic steel tape as its recording surface, which could come free from the reels and lacerate incautious operators as it unspooled and bunched.
The weight of these objects, however, is also metaphoric. The earliest recording in my personal audio drama library, sourced off the invaluable Archive.org, is a 1933 episode of Front Page Drama, a dramatized version of an American Weekly Hearst publication. The past stands monumentally huge if this type of machine, the Marconi-Stille Wire Recorder, was the apparatus that allowed those 15 minutes of 1933 to be captured and, eventually, fed into my 2015 headphones as an MP3.
I listen to much of my audio drama, whether old and crackling like Front Page Drama, or new and podcast-y, while commuting, usually on the London Underground. The episode of Front Page Drama in question I heard during a marathon session when I knew very little could or would interrupt me: on an twelve-hour transatlantic plane ride. I quite like the audio-visual play between listening to audio drama that is new to me versus the familiar but never identical sights of the commute; as Primus Luta remarked in 2012, it's rare for us to engage our full attention on the aural medium.
While listening to Front Page Drama and episodes of Lum and Abner on that flight, I had to wonder how I was prioritizing my listening time. Who had recorded these episodes from the 1930s? Who had later taken the trouble to digitize them and upload them to Archive.org? Why, for example, were these particular recordings freely available yet I couldn't find an MP3 anywhere of texts I wanted to share more widely, such as Don Haworth's On a Summer's Day in a Garden (1975) or Angela Carter's Come Unto These Yellow Sands (1978)? Both of these recordings are in the BBC back catalogue; I know, because the BBC supplied them to me—but only the basis of a visit to the archive.
Archive.org is bountiful and accessible, the Perivale archives much more exclusive, but both seem to lack curation. The only hope for accessing things like Haworth or Carter outside the British Library's Sound and Moving Image Archives is that someday a rogue MP3 or BitTorrent will show up online. The archive does seem, in Neil Verma's words, then, "transformed before dispersing in space, plucked from the air and mineralized like fossils" (Theater of the Mind, 227); like Primus Luta's weighty but playful experiment, Schrödinger's Cassette, which suspended music in concrete to be risked, or remain aurally untouched forever. This seems too often to be the impossible choice.
The BBC archive storage is eclectic and generally arranged for access by BBC staff rather than for researchers. The BBC Written Archives at Caversham are restricted to academics, and likewise, the speed of gaining access to sound files from Perivale is predicated on the amount of time BBC staff have to devote to it—naturally, the BBC's own departments have priority, such as BBC Radio 4 Extra, the archival digital radio station, whose backlog of requests for digitised material from the Perivale archive apparently covers 20 pages. The sound collections consist of commercial recordings on shellac (90 RPM records) and vinyl (78 RPMs) as well as impressively dinner-plate sized compilation transcriptions which require a special turn-table on which to play and digitize them. The BBC Sheet Music archive is in Perivale, as well, with original handwritten scores filling shelves.
The second half of the British and Irish Sound Archives conference 2015 afforded a privileged glimpse of the archive storage and technical facilities housed on site. Most of my fellow attendees were archivists of one sort or another, asking detailed questions about transcription devices, fidelity, and storage. Having recently completed my PhD from Swansea University in English in radio drama, I had made countless requests to this very facility through the British Library's Sound and Moving Image request service; now I, at long last, hoped to see where my digitised sound files were coming from. However, we weren't shown any recordings made on tape cassette or CD but instead Betamax audio-only. Unseen, too, were the data banks holding all the digitised content, but what myself and my fellow archivists had mainly come to see were the tangible objects making this content possible.
In the physical copies of the Radio Times of the 1940s and '50s, also housed at the British Library at St Pancras (and now available, like all of the Radio Times up to 2009, on BBC Genome), there can be found a little asterisk in the listings for drama, which signifies that the drama was broadcast from a recording, rather than live. The later recording machines of the '30s through '50s, upon which these recordings would have been made, did not decrease appreciably in size, though perhaps in weight. "If I were to drop this," Dell told us as he carefully handled a dark blue celluloid tube, about the size and circumference of a toilet paper roll, "it would bounce. I'm not going to drop it," he added. Then the magic began: via a custom-made device, we heard a few bars of a music hall song from circa 1900. The recording was surprisingly clear. It was agonizing when Dell turned it off after only a few seconds.
There is something incredibly seductive about old recordings. In "The Recording that Never Wanted to Be Heard and Other Stories of Sonification," from The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, Jonathan Sterne and Mitchell Akiyama question the desire for "sonification" of ever-older recordings, especially when such desires manifest in the creation of a digital sound file in 2008 for "the world's oldest recording," a phonoautogram from 1860, which was nevertheless never intended to be played back—the phonoautograph was intended as a device to make the aural visual (555). Radio drama writer Mike Walker really summed up the seduction of old recordings for me in his 2013 BBC Radio 4 ghost story The Edison Cylinders, with a character who is seduced as a scholar and as a participant in a time-traveling mystery by old recordings: a sound engineer in need of money, she agrees to digitize what seem like boring diary entries from a British imperialist, only to be intrigued by his Victorian domain beyond her rather empty modern existence. Unfortunately for her, these particular recordings are reaching beyond the grave to try to kill her.
Although they do reach out from the grave, most early sound recordings aren't out to kill you. They do however, present common and vexing issues of authenticity. By this, I mean specifically the provenance of the recording—is the recording of who or what it says it is? On the first day of the conference, Dell regaled us with tales of two cylinder recordings surfacing in the mid-twentieth century, of William Gladstone giving a speech. The words of the speech were identical, but the voices were completely different. Who was the real Gladstone? How could you authenticate the voice of a dead person? Dell further deepened the mystery by telling us the tale of two boxes of wax cylinder recordings in the Perivale archive, whose provenance is torturously (and tantalizingly) unclear. We glimpsed these mysterious, yellow-cream-colored cylinders, somewhat wider and fatter than the celluloid tubes, in situ, but were they original Edison cylinders from the 1880s? The piercing desire to believe these cylinders might contain the voices of Gladstone, the future Edward VIII, or even Henry Irving, are potentially "perils of over-optimism," as Dell puts it.
All the archivists at this event referred to the serendipity of discovering surprises on recordings. Simon Elmes, whose official title reads "Radio Documentarist, Creative Consultant, and Former Creative Director, BBC Radio Documentaries," made this manifest as he discussed a subject treated in his documentary from 2005, Ambridge in the Decade of Love. The Archers—an exceptionally long-running BBC radio soap which conjures up visions of rural Englishness and persists among a very dedicated, though mostly older, fan base—like much radio drama and emblematic of gendered attitude toward radio soaps, was not recorded in its first few decades.
Likewise, anyone researching radio drama before the 1930s is playing a game of roulette; whether any scripts survive will depend entirely on the literary reputation of the author who may have had enough clout to publish them in book form. Even in the case of Lance Sieveking, the acknowledged creative aesthete behind early BBC radio drama, we lack concrete evidence of his most important work, The End of Savoy Hill (1932). And The Truth About Father Christmas (1923), the first original drama written specifically for British radio? Forget about it—it was made for children's radio.
To return to The Archers, though daily 15-minute scripts were being churned out by Ted Kavanagh from the first years of the 1950s, the broadcasts themselves went missing into the ether (after all, no one suspected the show would still be going after sixty years). Transcription discs, meant for an overseas market, were found in a box in the BBC Archives, giving a reasonably complete overview of The Archers during the 1950s and '60s. Elmes was ebullient about this discovery.
While I got the general sense that the other archivists at the conference were amused but indifferent toward this particular trove, to me it was inspiring. I believe the future of audio drama will rely more and more on serials, so the rediscovery of these Archers episodes epitomizes to me the past, present, and future of audio drama in that it speaks of audience involvement and even audience interaction or co-production, which seems key for audio drama going forward, and the aspect of serialization which has vastly overtaken the single drama on television if not on radio.
Nevertheless, even if pursuit of these aural rainbows is a foolish one, such desire also enables scholarship. The hope of finding "originals" inspired me personally to discover the birth of what can conceivably called audio drama. Having researched audio drama from the first known broadcast dramas in English (the adaptations: 2LO London's Five Birds in a Cage in 1922, WGY Schenectady's The Wolf in 1922, British Broadcasting Company's Twelfth Night in 1923; original drama: WLW Cincinnati's When Love Awakens in 1923, British Broadcasting Company's Danger in 1924), I was astounded to learn that listeners from World War I might have enjoyed short, dramatized stories on the celluloid tubes (according to Tim Crook, the first audio drama of this nature is a war drama from 1917). While archives such as the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project of the University of California at Santa Barbara care for these recordings in the same way they do for musical and speech recordings, there is a significant lack of scholarship on them.
If commentary on specific pre-radio audio drama is scarce, it is heartening to read dissections of the performative aspects of "actuality," such as Brian Hanrahan's anatomy of Gas Shell Bombardment, 1918. Wonderfully, in discussing the "staging" of this war-time recording, Hanrahan brings in traditions from theatre and silent film in addition to the phonograph. Professor David Hendy has persuasively argued that some of the organizing tenets behind the British Broadcasting Corporation, whose management was by and large made up of ex-soldiers, was predicated on a desire for silence and calm, ordered, managed sound after the cacophony of war. Perhaps "cylinder" drama, then, is not really of its time and properly belongs to earlier, or later, cultural milieux.
The ephemera of the medium presents a recurring problem in radio drama studies, a weighty feeling of doom. With the future of the BBC's existence currently perilous, one wonders what the consequences will be for archives like those housed at Perivale. If the internal function of the archives (for the BBC to make use during Radio 4 Extra broadcasts, for example) disappears, will the archives be opened to wider use? Or will material without commercial potential simply be discarded? Who would make the decision as to what was commercially viable and how would they make such decisions?
And the problem with the medium seemingly begins with wax cylinders. A beautiful, lyrical story from Baron Munchausen—alias Rudolph Erich Raspe, a German author who created a fictional travel writer and chronic teller of tall tales based on a real nobleman infamous for his boasting—cited by many of those fascinated with sound recordings is worth repeating here: the Baron is traveling in Russia in a snowy landscape and desires the postilion to blow his horn to alert other travellers that their sleigh will be coming around the bend. Unfortunately, the cold makes the horn incapable of any audible sound. Disappointed, they make their way to an inn. Diedre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson cite the "Frozen Horn" from their online Museum of Imaginary Instruments: "After we arrived at the end inn, my postilion and I refreshed ourselves: he hung his horn on a peg near the kitchen fire; I sat on the other side." Warmed by the fire, the horn now begins to play its reserved tunes.
With a little leap of the imagination, it's not difficult to see the parallels with the reality of sound recording limitation. The wax cylinders could only be played a few times before the sound degrades completely. Tin cylinders are not much better. This is the reason why the two Gladstone voices could be both "real" and "fake." Celluloid is more durable, yet witness the reluctance of Dell to play one for longer than a few seconds, for preservation reasons.
Sound recordings are only as good as the medium on which they are recorded, a fact that surprisingly holds true even today. We were told by our BBC hosts that discs of shellac, vinyl, and acetate whose contents have already been digitised will not be discarded—digital recordings are ultimately taken from these physical originals.
In the future, we might invent means of reproduction and playback which could provide more fidelity to the original event lifted from the physical recording, in which case it will be the MP3s that will be redundant. There's something both very modern and very old-fashioned about this. Once at a dinner party, I launched full-force into my postdoctoral rant about the eventual possible degradation of the MP3 as a recording format, that it was not infallible as we had been led to believe. I was surprised that I was wholly believed; furthermore, the older people participating in the conversation rued the disappearance of their CDs, tape cassettes and, vitally, their LPs, for the oft-cited reasons (which Primus Luta distills as the pricelessness of old recordings to one's personal history, and the "fuller" sound ans weighty materiality, one resonating with one's emotional past).
I admit, before I came to the UK and experienced the never-perfect but always interesting presence of BBC Radio, I treated radio as a background medium. I suppose recorded sound had always interested me, and I had had a strong relationship with local, classical music radio (Classical KHFM Albuquerque). However, I could not have predicted ten years ago that I would become a passionate proponent of audio drama and sound studies more generally. I'm almost embarrassed now at my excessive love of audio drama; I make almost no distinctions between "high" art like Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard and fan fiction radio serials like Snape's Diaries as produced by Misfits Audio: I listen to almost anything.
And, truly, the future of audio drama is only assured if people keep listening. The digitisation and availability of cylinder recordings makes study of them more accessible, so the way is paved for further studies of the earliest audio drama. It is imperative that researchers continue to request sound recordings from the BBC, even if they have to use the relatively inconvenient system currently available.
There are signs that things are improving and that more people than ever before want to access such materials. As Josh Shepperd puts it brilliantly, "Sound trails continue where paper trails end." As Director of the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress, his efforts have underlined the fact that often it is the local and the rural whose radio or audio history vanishes more quickly than the national or the metropolitan. This would historically be the case with the BBC as well, which for a long time privileged London sound above regionalism (and, some would argue, still does). Since 2015, the British Library (and the Heritage Lottery Fund) have invested significantly in the Save Our Sounds campaign, positing that within 15 years, worldwide sound recordings must be digitized before recordings degrade or we no longer have the means to play the material.
Out of curiosity, I downloaded the more than 600-page listing, the Directory of UK Sound Collections, assembled rather hastily through the Save Our Sounds project in 20 weeks, and comprising more than 3,000 collections and more than 1.9 million objects. This document makes for fascinating and eclectic reading, ranging as it does between a Sound Map of the English town of Harrogate to the archives of the Dog Rose Trust, which mainly provides recorded tours of English cathedrals for those who are blind. Undoubtedly, there are wodges of local or forgotten drama in these archives, too. The linking up of these archives and making them more widely accessible suggests how important sustained, collective effort is to unfreezing radio's archival post-horn, delivering more of its unique tunes.
Featured Image: "The Route to Open Data" at BBC Perivale, Image by Flickr User Hatter! (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Leslie McMurtry has a PhD in English (radio drama) and an MA in Creative and Media Writing from Swansea University. Her work on audio drama has been published in The Journal of Popular Culture, The Journal of American Studies in Turkey, and Rádio-Leituras. Her radio drama The Mesmerist was produced by Camino Real Productions in 2010, and she writes about audio drama at It's Great to Be a Radio Maniac.
REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Only the Sound Itself?: Early Radio, Education, and Archives of "No-Sound"–Amanda Keeler
"Share your story" – but who will listen?–Fabiola Hanna
SO! Amplifies: Indie Preserves
The Sound of Radiolab: Exploring the "Corwinesque" in 21st Century–Alexander Russo
Alan Lomax's Southern Journey and the Sound of Authenticity
Welcome back to 100 Years of Alan Lomax, Sounding Out!'s series dedicated to remembering, rethinking and challenging our understanding of this crucial figure in folk music history.
In contrast to the first post in the series by Mark Davidson, which looked at how we have branded Alan Lomax, Parker Fishel's post considers how Alan Lomax fashioned himself—as both a collector and a publisher of other peoples' music. The complexity of this task is inherent in the social and political ramifications of "saving" sound by making it "ours," both in terms of singular ownership of singular recordings that had previously "belonged" to a community as well as the extent to which this practice brought these sounds to the wider culture.
Here, Fishel invites the reader to consider this complicated history that surrounds collecting and copyrighting folk music, what (and whom) the practice has excluded as well current performers who have been inspired by this preservation of our sound culture to perpetuate the practice: making it "theirs" and "ours" once again.
— Guest Editor Tanya Clement
The more one listens, views, and reads the work of pioneering folklorist Alan Lomax, the more inscrutable it becomes. Even if we set aside the sheer size and diversity of his collection, we are still left with a set of materials that eludes easy interpretation. Too mainstream for the academics and too academic for the mainstream, Lomax's defiant, passionate quest to bridge the two worlds pioneered the study of sound as an embodiment of social and community dynamics. Yet in promoting American vernacular culture, Lomax also fashioned himself a folk hero, leaving us a legacy where the collector threatens to overshadow the collection. As arguably the world's most famous folklorist, Lomax is responsible for much of the sound understood as authentic Americana.
Consider one vignette of many: the "Southern Journey," a 1959-1960 recording trip that Alan Lomax undertook with Shirley Collins throughout Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. A world unto itself, the story of the Southern Journey reveals how these tensions shaped Lomax's work and, to an extent, our understanding of a national cultural heritage.
To begin with, the Southern Journey sounded different than previous collecting trips due to the technological sophistication of the field recording set-up. Starting with a 1933 trip accompanying his father John A. Lomax, Alan Lomax's previous recording expeditions in the South had relied first on Edison cylinders and then on disc-based recorders that had particular weaknesses in terms of fidelity. Surface noise obfuscated certain frequencies and reminded the listener that his or her experience was mediated. During the Southern Journey though, open reel magnetic tape, excellent microphones, and a mixer were employed to make what Lomax, in his tendency towards self-aggrandizement, claimed to be the "first" stereo field recordings in the South. Whatever the reality, the recordings were early efforts to use stereo in the service of field recording to capture more detail and nuance of a performance and its context.
Writing of the opportunity stereo presented for folklore, Lomax noted that "Folk music which, in its natural setting, is meant to be heard in the round, comes into its own with multi-dimensionality, for more than concert music, designed to project from the stage into an auditorium." According to this reasoning, a good recording in stereo is more inclusive, grounding the listener's position inside the soundscape of folklore's community-based practice.
Yet, by nature folklore recordings have certain limitations. As jazz record producer Orrin Keepnews noted, "Our job is to create what is best described as 'realism' — the impression and effect of being real — which may be very different from plain unadorned reality." This murky dividing line is problematic in the context of ethnographic documentation. In the case of Alan Lomax, it's further complicated by multiple motivations and goals that transform this line into a shifting set of markers.
Luckily, through diligent scholarship and Lomax's own documentation, we are fairly aware of how this "realism" tension shaped his recordings in real-time performance and its public reception. Lomax sometimes auditioned performers when arriving in a new area; his book The Land Where The Blues Began (in part an reconstruction of the Southern Journey) was written 30-plus years after the fact from memory and a few scribbled notes on the back of tape boxes. However this knowledge impacts the supposed reality of the field recordings, it would be a mistake to reduce the extensive documentation of Lomax's decision-making process to debunking. Rather, it is an aid for understanding what we're hearing. By accounting for ethnographic and popularizing tendencies, what is really being developed is a guide for critical listening.
Part of that involved bringing in the recording industry. Starting with the 1939 Musicraft release of Leadbelly performances on 78-RPM discs, Lomax consistently used record companies as one means of bringing folklore to a wider audience. Commenting on the flurry of activity that accompanied Lomax's 1959 return to the United States after nearly a decade abroad, noted folklorist Roger Abrahams commented, "To this writer it would appear that Mr. Lomax stayed up nights thinking of ways to sell folk-things to publishers, record companies, etc., ergo to the public."
The Southern Journey was one such project, bankrolled by Atlantic Records. From nearly 80 hours of recorded material, Lomax curated two sets of releases in 1960, a seven LP Atlantic Records collection named the "Southern Folk Heritage Series" and the 12-LP "Southern Journey" series for Prestige International. In notes for reissues of the Atlantic set, Lomax admitted, "The set reflects, to some extent, what the Erteguns [Ahmet and Nesuhi, founders of Atlantic] felt might best reach their pop audience." Examining how these recordings became canonical is to look at how new modes of cultural transmission affected folklore traditions.
We can hear another tension being negotiated in the way Lomax celebrated performances, which today justly rank alongside those of the Great American Songbook. Yet, to see them that way negates the core strengths of folklore: flexibility to situation and contingency to community. In the field, Lomax asserted that "every performance is original, a fresh and intentionally varied re-creation or rearrangement of a piece." At the same moment, however, Americanizing processes were transforming these flexible local improvisatory practices into fixed inscriptions of national character. With his public visibility and prestige, the pieces in Lomax's books and records carried weight as definitive versions – claims Lomax perpetuated in order to unify some of his cultural theories. (It also didn't hurt that the practice of early folklorists was to copyright these compositions, giving them a financial stake in perpetuating those performances as examples of exceptionalism.) As a result, the public adopted a set of arbitrary songs and sounds as markers of authenticity.
These concerns remain important in the music's continuing, living traditions. Groups like the Carolina Chocolate Drops or The Ebony Hillbillies perform the full, eclectic spectrum of early African-American string and jug bands traditions. While Jerron 'Blind Boy' Paxton forges similar terrain using the African-American songster and blues singer as a model, Frank Fairfield addresses Anglo-American folk traditions. All of these projects remind listeners of the arbitrary divisions of authenticity forced on musicians practices by the race recording industry, which partitioned sounds as white and black and led to our modern taxonomy of genres. These performers use folklore to expose parts of the under-documented past, re-appropriating musical styles and often re-creating that world through the adoption of early 20th century language, clothes, and mannerisms.
Other contemporary performers handle these issues differently. Megafaun, Fight The Big Bull, and Justin Vernon (of Bon Iver) form the nucleus of Sounds of the South, a "loving reinterpretation of the sound, structure, lyrics, and spirit" of the Southern Journey recordings. Engaging both the African-American and Anglo-American traditions documented on that trip, the group finds its sound in their overlap. This a space shaped in part by the popularizing processes Lomax set in motion, a space where generations of listeners have been introduced to Mississippi Fred McDowell through a Rolling Stones cover. Approaching the music from this perspective and not from the background of a Forest City Joe or an Almeda Riddle, authenticity necessarily exists in a different realm: re-interpretation. The resulting arrangements, such as that of Estil C. Ball's sacred composition "Tribulations," give one illustration of how these dynamics play out sonically within the world of folklore and music that Lomax left behind.
For this particular piece, the words and melody of Ball's "terrifying meditation on the end of days" are kept as links to the original recording. This frees the ensemble to follow its muse into the musical landscapes of the intervening 50-plus years, shaped as they were by the introduction of the vernacular into the mainstream (and vice versa). Ball's melody evokes an archetype, the high lonesome sound of Appalachia; a trope it inspired in the first place. Yet, in this cultural confluence, there is also space for something like Matthew E. White's soul-influenced electric guitar. In introducing of a style, tradition, and sound beyond the original recording, a color line is crossed that, while maybe not explicitly heard, was certainly present in the Jim Crow context of the Southern Journey. For Sounds of the South, authenticity exists beyond mere re-creation.
What might Lomax's reaction to the Sounds of the South project be? Reflecting on the 1960s folk scene, Lomax wrote, "The American city folk singer, because he got his songs from books or other city singers, has generally not been aware of the singing style or the emotional content of the folk songs, as they exist in tradition." On the other hand, Lomax might be heartened that many, whether cultural heritage institutions or record labels, are following in the footsteps of his own Association for Cultural Equity. Working on the scale that digital resources facilitate, these organizations are providing access to field recordings and their context in ways never before possible. (What remains to be seen is how this might impact the process of codification discussed above.)
In another way, the Sounds of the South marks a return to tradition. While the Southern Journey recordings are the primary inspiration, Sounds of the South member Joe Westerlund describes the project as something larger: "We wanted to include everything that we're into, not just the traditional folk music that's on this box set…We're doing our whole experience as musicians." That experience involves collaboration with folk artists like the Blind Boys of Alabama and Alice Gerrard, as well as investment in their local cultural communities of Durham, NC, Richmond, VA, and Eau Claire, WI.
Lomax's pedagogy of folklore situates authenticity as a function of these very types of activities. "Folk song lives in a rather mysterious world close to the heart of the human community and it is only through extended and serious contact with living folk traditions that it can be understood." The particular tradition in which one participates makes little difference; rather emphasis is on the process of engagement and contact, which replicate older patterns of folklore transmission. So even if Lomax may have claimed there was a bit too much bel canto to suit his tastes, one can imagine his appreciation for Sounds of the South's dedication to the meaning and spirit of the music.
Considering Alan Lomax, his work, and his legacy is a complex and often frustrating enterprise. Yet amidst parts that give us pause, there remain bits of enduring wisdom. Addressing a gathering of folklorists, Lomax asserted that "Underneath we are all morally, emotionally and esthetically involved with our material, and so all of us are artists and cultural workers, and there is no escape from that."
Few of us devote ourselves to this kind of music (or any kind of music for that matter) as a detached academic exercise. It can take an example of the living tradition like Sounds of the South looking backwards and forwards to remind us of the full scope of our responsibilities. I can't think of any more fitting tribute on the occasion of his centenary than to re-commit ourselves not to Alan Lomax, but to what caught his ear in the first place: the transcendent experience of sound.
Parker Fishel is an archivist, writer, and researcher living in Brooklyn, New York. Presently he is the archivist at Grey Water Park Productions and an occasional DJ on WKCR-FM. As co-founder of Americana Music Productions, Parker is the producer of a forthcoming set of music, photographs, and scholarship documenting the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. He is also at work on Georgia Griot, a bio-discography of jazz musician Marion Brown. While getting an MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, Parker worked with the UT Folklore Center Archives and the John Avery Lomax Family Papers at the Briscoe Center for American History.
Featured image: "This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender" by Flickr user Bee Collins, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
"Ain't Got the Same Soul" — Osvaldo Oyola
On the Lower Frequencies: Norman Corwin, Colorblindness, and the "Golden Age" of U.S. Radio — Jennifer Stoever
Six Years in Nodar: Sound Art in a Rural Context — Rui Costa


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Online dating really isn't all that different from real life dating. There are unspoken rules and your behavior can have an effect on people's lives. When it comes to online dating, you may think you can throw all etiquette out of the window. But just because someone is behind a computer does not give anyone license to treat this like a game. Here are some online dating etiquette tips everyone should follow.
Respond to messages within 24 hours
If you received a message from someone who seems interesting, make sure to respond within 24 hours. Doing so keeps the line of communication open while it's still fresh in their mind. Waiting any longer could signal that you're not interested. If you want to take etiquette to the next level, respond to all messages, even those you are not interested in. Be upfront by sending a simple "thanks but…" note. It takes little time and allows that person to move on instead of holding on to hope that you could be interested.
Give the other person time to respond
With the instant gratification we get from online communication, we know it can be hard to wait for a response. Remind yourself that people have lives and things can get busy with work, hobbies, and just life. Try to hold off on following up immediately after sending a note. Sending a second message shortly after the first one can make you seem needy and desperate. It could also decrease your chances of getting a reply.
Be selective
Don't send messages to any and everyone just for the sake of. Reach out to those who have really piqued your interest. When you start communicating when them you'll sound more authenticate and genuine versus having it feeling forced.
Let the other person talk
Yes, your potential date wants to hear all about you and who you are. But they also want time to tell their story. Don't dominate messages or conversations with information solely all about you. Your date wants a chance to showcase who they are too. And you should make time to listen in order to assess the match.
Be honest and be yourself
Although you always want to show yourself in good light, don't embellish too much. Don't lie about your occupation, don't cut your age by a decade and don't use a photo that was taken 5 years ago. The truth will eventually come out. Be who you are and be proud of it!
Etiquette basically boils down to one thing, treat everyone online how you would like to be treated. Be respectful, truthful, and don't say anything you wouldn't say to their face.
The post Online Dating Etiquette Tips Everyone Should Follow appeared first on FirstMet.com Blog.

subset: commoncrawl


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Some ideas for the metal clayer in your life…
More clay to work with!
New materials to try out and be inspired by!
A sketchbook to capture ideas in.
Encouragement to enter that craft show.
A gift certificate to your local bead store.
Registration for a conference: Synergy 2, PMC Conference, Bead and
Button, or a mini-retreat, a class, even an art cruise.
Books are always good, see my reviews here.
Clay play time! A work space of one's own!
That's 8, what would you add? Tell everyone in the comments, thanks!
Oh, and need some wrapping ideas? Here's my prank wrapping job from last year: How to Hide a T-shirt in a Cake.


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Lower Three Acres, Cranbrook, Exeter
2 Bedroom Semi-Detached House
£749 pcm
A Beautifully presented TWO bedroom Coach house located on the edge of Rockbeare near Cranbrook. Tucked away at the end of a quiet cul de sac the Property features include gch, Dg windows and doors, a Modern kitchen, living / dining room, bathroom with W/C, Garage and allocated parking. No pets. EPC D. Council tax band B. Available July.
Bedroom 1
13' 3" x 12' 3" (4.04m x 3.73m) Good sized double bedroom, with Dg window to front elevation, built in storage cupboard, gch radiator, multiple power points.
Bedroom 2
8' 10" x 6' 7" (2.70m x 2.00m) Single bedroom, Dg window to front elevation, gch radiator, multiple power points.
Living Room
17' 9" x 10' 10" (5.42m x 3.31m) Open plan living/dining room, Dg window to front elevation. 2 x Gch radiators, multiple powerpoints .
8' 6" x 6' 7" (2.60m x 2.00m) Open plan kitchen with fitted electric oven and hob with extractor over, ample fitted cupboards, 1.5 kitchen sink, Washing machine and fridge freezer.
Good sized bathroom with bath with shower over, wash hand basin, low level w/c. Obscure dg window to rear.
Single garage directly beneath property with electrical supply.
Misrepresentation Act 1967 - These particulars are believed to be correct but their accuracy is not guaranteed nor do they form part of any contract.


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As an example, a 75,000-word manuscript (excluding ToCs, reference list and appendices) can take six to eight days for one copyediting pass (Option 1), thesis formatting (Option 4), and reference formatting (Option 5), with a further six to seven days for a second pass (Option 2). The cost of this can range from $1,500 to $3,000, depending on the options you choose. Options can be tailored to your requirements, so it's best to contact me to find out how I can help.
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All Australian universities are recommended to follow these guidelines, and universities usually now include them in their information for higher degree research students. Per the Guidelines, students are requested to obtain written approval from their principal supervisor to use a professional copyeditor and to provide this to their copyeditor before they start work. The supervisor should also confirm they have reviewed your full draft manuscript and it is ready for copyediting.
For universities outside Australia who do not have ethics guidelines in place, the Australian guidelines are generally regarded as industry best practice.
Contact me for a quotation, to ask a question, to discuss a project or to book my services.
Option 1 ~> Copyedit (one pass)
One read (or 'pass') of sentence-level editing, which includes my recommendations using tracked changes, flagging any issues or queries by way of a comment in the margin. This option requires you, upon return of your manuscript, to review each of my recommendations and accept or reject each change. It will not be returned to me for any further work.
During this comprehensive first pass, I will
- ensure appropriate use of language such as grammar, syntax, punctuation, spelling (e.g., Australian, UK or US) and clarity of expression
- ensure consistent use of language (capitalisation, hyphenation, abbreviation, etc.)
- flag and fix where possible overly wordy sentences, tense issues, passive voice, repetitions and redundancies (see also Option 2)
- crosscheck in-text references to your reference list, flagging inconsistencies and errors
- ensure adherence to the American Psychological Association's Manual of Style (6th/7th edition) or preferred style guide
- create an editorial summary and style sheet, which records my decisions made with regard to language and style issues.
This option does not include
- any items in Options 3A or 3B (although I will flag any issues I notice)
- manuscript preparation (see Option 4)
- reference formatting (see Option 5)
- rewriting, restructuring, or substantive editing
- research or fact checking.
Option 2 ~> Copyedit (two passes)
The second pass is for less routine matters that can often be better addressed only after a full read of the manuscript. Following your careful review of my queries, comments and recommendations made during the first pass, your manuscript will be returned to me.
During the second pass copyedit I will
- further tighten your writing by revising overly wordy sentences, ensuring tense issues have been fully addressed, reviewing the use of passive voice over active and removing repetitions and redundancies
- iron out any remaining inconsistencies
- pick up anything that may have been missed during the first pass.
The second pass tends to take less time than the first due to familiarity with the manuscript, and I usually quote at 65% the cost of the first pass.
Option 3A ~> Full proofread
Proofreading assumes that at least one copyediting pass has taken place (usually by another professional copyeditor) and is the final check that your manuscript is ready for publication. During the proofread, I will
- ensure no errors have crept through from previous rounds of copyediting or formatting
- look at visual elements (typography, heading hierarchy, page layout, figures, tables and captions)
- review formatting (widows/orphans are eliminated, tables are not split unnecessarily, page layout)
- ensure integrity (that all the thesis elements are present and in the correct place).
If budget doesn't allow full proofreading, see the lighter version, Option 3B, below.
Option 3B ~> Page proof **New service**
Designed with the budget-conscious writer in mind, the page proof is a lighter version of Option 3A (Proofreading) as many clients often like the Detail Devil to undertake a final check with fresh eyes before the manuscript is finalised. It incorporates most of the elements of Option 3 but without the actual read-through:
- visual elements (typography, heading hierarchy, page layout, figures, tables, captions)
- review formatting (widows/orphans are eliminated, tables are not split unnecessarily, page layout)
- ensure integrity (all elements are present and in the correct place).
The page proof will take up to half a day, depending on the length of your manuscript.
Option 4 ~> Manuscript preparation ~ formatting ~ styling
The Detail Devil takes great pride in styling your manuscript so that it presents professionally and beautifully. Full formatting will
- create and apply Word styles to every part of your document, including headings, body, block quotes, tables, table/figure captions, bulleted/numbered lists, references, appendices, glossary and any other style you might need, ensuring adherence to your preferred style guide
- ensure correct table, figure and appendix numbering throughout, with styles applied
- create the Table of Contents, Lists of Tables, Figures and Abbreviations, and compile Appendices (including theses by publication)
- ensure correct page numbering (with preliminary pages using Roman numerals), applying section breaks where required
- assemble all parts of your manuscript and check all the elements are present and in the right place
- ensure your manuscript presents professionally and beautifully.
Option 5: Reference formatting
Your reference list will be formatted to your preferred referencing style.
Contact me
for a quotation, to ask a question, to discuss a project or to book my services.


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Pride in Service
Click here for the 2019 CSX Pride in Service Impact Report
The CSX Pride in ServiceTM program is one way we demonstrate our companywide commitment to honor and serve our nation's veterans, active military, and first responders. Many of the communities we touch have high concentrations of military families, and we have deep connections to and gratitude for the first responders in and around all of the areas in which we operate.
We are also incredibly proud that more than 3,700 veterans, active duty military and first responders have chosen to work right here at CSX. Together they form nearly one fifth of the CSX workforce.
The CSX Pride in ServiceTM program honors and rewards military personnel and first responders for the sacrifices they make in the name of service. They and their families have chosen a difficult life so that we may have an easier one. For that, we are eternally grateful.
Through a number of grant programs, as well as partnerships with incredible organizations dedicated to the same cause, we sincerely hope that we can provide these selfless individuals with the support and recognition they deserve.


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Welcome to the Pretty In A Minute Social Media Page where you can share your Pretty In A Minute experience to our outlet of professionals and consumers on Facebook, Instagram and 'In A Minute' Blog.
Today, we know Social Media is everything… it's the latest and easiest way to help build your business.
Share your Pretty In A Minute experience with our followers and grow yourself, your business.
All you have to do is use the form to the right and upload your media (pictures or videos).
You never know where the next opportunity awaits!
Our brand of premium hair care products and hot tools are available to Cosmetologist, Consumers, Students and Salon Owners within the USA. We believe in a premium quality product that gives everyone the Flawless Hair they deserve. Pretty In A Minute offers a complete menu of hair care products and hot styling tools to achieve the ultimate luxurious experience.


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1. El Deguello
2. I Thank You
3. Waitin For The Bus
4. Jesus Just Left Chicago
5. Precious & Grace
6. Manic Mechanic
7. Lowdown In The Street
8. Heard It On The X
9. Fool For Your Stockings
10. Cheap Sunglasses
11. Arrested For Driving While Blind
12. Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers
13. La Grange
14. Sloppy Drunk
15. Bar-B-Q
16. Dust My Broom
17. Jailhouse Rock
18. Tush
|ZZ TOP were Headliners at both Rock Super Bowl's IX and XVIII.
ZZ TOP had evolved into a full stadium SELL OUT act ! On their "Expect No Quarter" tour
promoting their "DEGUELLO" album they opened each show with a cover of Sam & Dave's "I
Thank You" which often segued into "Waitin' for the Bus" and "Jesus Just Left Chicago". The
band performed in coliseums from 1979 through 1981. Unlike the previous Worldwide Texas
Tour, the Expect No Quarter Tour's stage set was simple and featured a drum riser with an
animated screen of the band's logo. The tour saw band members Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill
sport chest-length beards.
The "Expect No Quarter" Tour had three legs and consisted of 79 shows. The tour took ZZ
Top to Europe for the first time. Their set list of songs included material from Degüello and their
previous albums, along with several covers. A concert in Essen, Germany was filmed as part of
the Rockpalast German television series, and was included on the ZZ Top DVD Double Down
Live released in October 2009.
|1979 two years after the plane crash that killed Lynyrd Skynyrd lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, new guitarist Steve
Gaines, and his sister, backup singer Cassie Gaines, surviving members Gary Rossington and Allen Collins
(guitars), Leon Wilkeson (bass), and keyboardist Bill Powell decided to try working together again, this time
fronted by singer Dale Krantz. They were trying to be something other than a Lynyrd Skynyrd clone, although as
the latter group had expressed the musical leanings of all concerned quite honestly, they also weren't moving far
from the tree that had spawned them. Krantz had previously been a backup singer behind Donnie Van Zant,
Ronnie's brother, in .38 Special, which itself owed something to Skynyrd's sound. With Barry Harwood bringing a
third guitar to the table and Derek Hess taking the drummer spot, they pulled their sound together fast, and
waiting in the wings was MCA Records. The latter company was still reaping gold and platinum record awards
from the release of Lynyrd Skynyrd outtakes and compilations, and was very interested in any viable performing
group that could tap into that audience, and there was no one better suited at the time.
Rossington Collins Band, as they came to be called, were more than a cash-in effort. With three powerful
guitarists and a rhythm section the envy of anyone in rock, a strong singer fronting them, and the combined
talents of several good in-house songwriters, they were a solid hard rock outfit with a soulful edge. Fans flocked
to them in the second half of 1980 when they issued their first LP, Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere, which made it to
the Top 20 and earned a gold record award with help from the single "Don't Misunderstand Me." The group might
have been able to build on that beginning but for events in Allen Collins' life starting late that same year -- the
loss of his wife was only the beginning of a tragic series of events that ultimately destroyed his career and took
his life; it was enough to remove him from most of the creative aspects of the band's music, and he was barely
visible as a composer on the group's next album, This Is the Way (which was dedicated to Katy Collins'
memory). The album was surprisingly good considering the circumstances behind its recording and release,
rising into the Top 30.
|Pat Travers started playing the Guitar at age 12 after he saw Jimi Hendrix perform
in Ottawa, Canada. Travers began playing in bands early in his teens with bands
the Music Machine, Red Hot, and Merge, which played in clubs in the Canadian,
Quebec area. Pat Travers is best know for is audience interaction and the hit song
"Boom Boom Out Go The Lights" which always seems to be the first Rock n Roll
song that always includes the audience members to complete the song....wow now
thats Rock n Roll !


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It is said that your shadow never leaves you but what if you find it has – even if just for a while?
{ZSD season 2017 for India begins 10th of April when people Kanyakumari
will observe the first ZSD.
Click here for other places in India for the ZSD date. }
Well this is exactly what can be experienced by those at a tropical latitude – between the two tropics – the tropic of Capricorn (-23.5°) and the tropic of Cancer (+23.5°). For them, twice every year there comes a day when the Sun passes directly overhead at noon. Shadow falls directly below and seem to have disappeared. The point directly overhead is called Zenith.
For observers on that latitude – it is a Zero Shadow Day (ZSD)
For an observer in the northern hemisphere, between winter solstice (Dec 21/22 ) and vernal equinox (March 20/21) the shadow of a vertical object at noon always points 'north'. After ZSD the shadow at noon points south. After the summer solstice (June 20/21) once again there is a ZSD and after this day then the shadow at noon points north again.
Exactly opposite happens for those in the southern hemisphere. For them the ZSD is between autumnal equinox (June 22/23)
We may note here that those north of +23.5° latitude will never see ZSD and for them the shadow at noon will always point due north and for those south of -23.5° latitude the shadows at noon will always point due south.
Observing ZSD
The phenomenon itself is quite enjoyable and it carries a high value of edutainment. It is very exciting to watch ones shadow or that of any vertical object to become smaller and smaller and then to disappear for a few tens of seconds and then to reappear again on the other side.
The Sun subtends an angle of half a degree at the Earth and thus takes a minute to travel half its angular diameter across the sky. The phenomenon is observable for a minute or so.
The event can be used to discuss the curvature of the earth and how Eratosthenes found the circumference of the Earth.
ZSD – when and where
IITian Alok Mandavgane (MTech in Mathematics and Computing ) is a Android and Web Developer. Alok has developed an excellent app and page for finding ZSD for a given location on the Earth. Please visit this link. He is a serious amateur astronomer and Joint Secretary at Aryabhat Foundation.
For those who want some quick ready info – Click here.
Here are some examples. These pictures are taken on the Zero Shadow Day at time when the Sun is exactly over head or at Zenith.
|A stainless steel box that has a bigger cap
|A flash light – its strap will of course cast its shadow
|A marker pen that was made to stand on its narrow part
The effect is quite dramatic with a vertical hollow pipe —
|The girl is holding a plane sheet of glass right over the pipe
|At the time when the sun is right over head she see the bottom of the pipe.
|The picture above was taken soon after the picture to the left was clicked.
The sequence of images below show the progress of the shadow as the sun passes over head. You can see that almost for two minutes the shadow of the hollow tube and the glass tumbler are perfectly circular.
12:10 12:15 12:20
12:25 12:26 12:27
12:28 12:29 12:30
12:40 12:45 12:50
|If you are going to take a sequence of pictures of this event then it is good to remember that you will be standing in the Sun that will be right over head. Have a big umbrella and a hat over your head – keep the camera on a tripod and bottle full of cold water – it will become warm in no time.
What started about 2005 or so as a part of summer programme for the school students at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, India, (IUCAA) became quite very popular with the press and general public.


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The South Korean government set next year's budget for official development aid at 3.5 trillion won (US$3.16 billion) on Friday, with a focus on projects aimed at helping developing countries stand on their own feet, officials said.
The decision was made during a meeting of the government committee on official development assistance presided over by Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon. Next year's budget represents a 14.5 percent increase from this year's 3 trillion won.
Of the total, about 2.26 trillion won, or 65 percent, will be spent on projects supporting the United Nations' sustainable development goals designed to lay the foundations for developing countries to stand on their own feet, officials said.
About 154.4 billion won will be spent on food provision and other humanitarian crisis response projects.
The government will train ODA experts and provide them with jobs, officials said.
The budget will be divided among 1,472 projects, up from this year's 1,312.
About 60 percent of the budget will be spent on projects for Asian and African nations in areas where South Korea has a competitive edge, such as transportation, healthcare and education, officials said.


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Porno Pete was on and they actually gave a shout out to this blog, of course they never mentioned the name of the blog but you could tell from Amy's comments that reads every post including the comments section. Oh, they also had on the "Ex-gay" Stephen Bennett who talked about his "hit and run" accident which prevented him from attending that nasty forum two weeks ago in Acton.
One of the more interesting aspects of this show was Porno Pete talking about his trip half way across the country to attend the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco. This guy, who comes off more as your nosy, busy body, cares about everyone's business but their own, old maid aunt, sounded downright giddy at retelling the sites he saw in California. Do the people who contribute to his organization know that they are funding this erotic trips? Amy posted about the Folsom Street Fair last week. Included threats such as "Soon coming to the streets of Boston. Torture, flogging, public nudity." Of course she neglected to mention that the fair has been going on for 25 years (how long are we supposed to wait until it gets here?) or that heterosexuals were also participating in the Fair. Somehow this is supposed to be linked to sexual orientation and gender identity but I didn't get her linkages.
I would suggest you read one article/letter concerning the Acton Forum on the Laramie Project. It was online in the Acton Town Online Newspaper:
ACTON, MASS. - A forum that was billed as a concerned parents' discussion of the high school drama department's production of the controversial play "The Laramie Project" focused mainly on what panelists said were the dangers of homosexuality.
There is also a letter to the Editor from a parent and a school teacher in the Acton school system.
It still boggles my mind why a parent who is supposedly so against the play and the message behind the play would allow their child to be a part of it. What kind of mixed messages is the child going to get?


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Stowe provides further details about her story based on actual events in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Chapter 15:
The character of St. Clare represents a certain class of slaveholder in the South. Stowe includes a letter from Patrick Henry in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which reflects a similar view of slavery as that of St. Clare. Henry believes that slavery will come to an end some day. If his generation could not reduce slavery he states, "…let us treat the unhappy victims with lenity." (pg. 62) Stowe created the character of St. Clare "with enthusiasm and with hope."
The full story of this connection can be read in Chapter IX, "St. Clare" of A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin.


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Posted Monday, July 30th, 2018
Games, Races, Tours in Honor of the Prolific and Versatile Veggie
In honor of 'National Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor's Porch Day,' the Morris County Park Commission will celebrate this versatile vegetable with an afternoon of zucchini-themed fun on Sunday, Aug. 5. Zucchini car races, squash toss games, garden tours, and scavenger hunts will be some of the activities planned at the Frelinghuysen Arboretum.
The event will run from 1 – 4 p.m. The cost is $2 per person. The arboretum is located at 53 E Hanover Ave, in Morris Township, directly acros from the Morris County Library.
'National Sneak a Zucchini Onto Your Neighbors' Porch Day' was created by radio host Tom Roy, to be celebrated each year on Aug. 8. For a unique way to celebrate, join the horticulture education staff at the Frelinghuysen Arboretum for their 2nd annual Zucchini-Palooza, a fun-filled event focused on this versatile veggie!
Create and race zucchini cars, design unique art at the 'Zucchini Baby' station, or try the Squash Toss game to see if you can hit the target and win a prize. See squash fly with the Zucchini Catapult, and learn how to grow summer squash, save the seeds, and plan for next year's garden. Make your own Zoodle salad with a vegetable spiralizer, tour the Vegetable Gardens while gaining tips from the gardeners, and enjoy a squash-themed scavenger hunt.
A bit of zucchini trivia, from Wikipedia, to help you better enjoy the county event: Zucchini, like all squash, has its ancestry in the Americas. However, the varieties of green, cylindrical squash harvested immature and typically called "zucchini" were developed in northern Italy, as much as three centuries after the introduction of cucurbits from the Americas.
It appears this occurred in the second half of the 19th century, although the first description of the variety under the name zucchini occurs in a work published in Milan in 1901. Early varieties usually appended the names of nearby cities in their names.
Zucchini is very easy to cultivate in temperate climates. As such, it has a reputation among home gardeners for overwhelming production. The part of the plant harvested as "zucchini" is the immature fruit, although the flowers, mature fruit, and leaves are eaten, as well. One good way to control overabundance is to harvest the flowers, which are an expensive delicacy in markets because of the difficulty in storing and transporting them. The male flower is borne on the end of a stalk and is longer-lived.
While easy to grow, zucchini, like all squash, requires plentiful bees for pollination. In areas of pollinator decline or high pesticide use, such as mosquito-spray districts, gardeners often experience fruit abortion, where the fruit begins to grow, then dries or rots. This is due to an insufficient number of pollen grains delivered to the female flower. It can be corrected by hand pollination or by increasing the bee population.
As of 2014, the world record for the longest zucchini is held by Giovanni Batista Scozzafava of Niagara Falls, Ontario, for a squash measuring 99 inches, or 8-feet, three-inches!!


text: We begin the dismissal of car riders at 2:30. We begin calling parents of students not yet picked up at 3:00. Please make sure that you arrive to pick up your child between those times. Please make sure that you keep a yellow name tag in your car when picking up your child. This ensures a quicker dismissal process.


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Bachelor of Education Student Resources
For current and prospective students of the 16-month post, post-degree Bachelor of Education (BEd) program at UBC's Okanagan School of Education.
Graduate Student Resources
For current and prospective students of the Master of Education (Bed), Master of Arts (MA) in Education or PhD (Interdisciplinary).
Awards & Scholarships
Undergraduate and graduate program award and scholarship opportunities for Okanagan School of Education students.
Mentor Teachers
Help shape future educators growth. Join our Mentor Teacher Program and become part of the Scholar-Practitioner Community.
Meet the staff
Have questions or need advice? We're happy to help you navigate through your UBC Okanagan experience. Please don't hesitate to reach out to us or pay us a visit!
– Kristin Schuppener, Faculty Administrator


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Thursday, August 24, 2017
NEWS: Pure Steel Hollowfest USA 2017
Supporters of traditional-conservative heavy metal music will surely have something to attend in October in Ohio, the capital of what some Europeans affectionately call "U.S. metal," a general sound in which guitar rules all and everything. We don't know all the bands listed below, but the majority of this concert certainly looks like traditional heavy metal for the fanatics who must have it this way. Take a look at the flyer for more information and get yourself a map, people, because you need to find where Ohio is located.
Posted by Metal Bulletin Zine at 2:32 PM
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


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- Grab your current read
- Open to a random page
- Share two (2) "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page
- BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn't give too much away! You don't want to ruin the book for others!)
- Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teaser
The Other Life by Susanne Winnacker
3 years, 1 month, 1 week, and 6 days since I'd seen the daylight. One-fifth of my life.
So, I really can't say much about this book, seeing as I literally just began it. However, I'm a fan so far. I really love the writing, and it's fascinating, seeing how the main character's been driven out of her mind to the point that she counts every last detail of every last thing. I'm hoping this one will be as great as it sounds.
What are you reading this week? Leave a link in the comments and I'll be sure to check it out.


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New Balance have kicked off the new year merging two of their most coveted silhouettes in one hell of a hybrid with the 991.9. With a 991 up top and a 990V3 underneath what more could you ask for? Well premium suedes, a hit of 3m reflective, and Flymby's crafted in England craftsmanship. If that wasn't enough this clean hybrids touts a respective black, teal, and red colourway topping it all off.
This M9919SCF is now available in store at our Lower Grounds Basement 15 McKillop street location as well as online.
Sizes US8 through to US12 (whole sizes only) are available for $260.
For all of the finer details continue reading after the jump and head in store and online now to check out all of our latest arrivals from New Balance...Read More


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Please Wait 20sec and Click on play button
94.3 The Drive is an online and FM radio station of Canada. It is broadcasting live from Winnipeg, Canada. 94.3 The Drive is Playing 60's, 70's & 80's and found on your dial at 94.3 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It is 24 hour 7 day live radio. Official website address of 94.3 The Drive is www.943thedrive.ca