When I was a freshman in high school I was in a choir class. I absolutely loved to sing. Fortunately for me, but unfortunately for the class, the course didn’t require try outs before signing up for the class. Although I can carry a decent note, I am not exactly the world’s best singer and I can hardly read music.
In my defense, I am not the musical one in my family. That’s my step brother. I have always been known as the brain. In choir class, I had the hardest time sight reading music. Sight reading involves being able to sing a song without even hearing the melody. You are expected to be able to know the tune by just reading the sheet music. To this day I have no idea how they do it.
At least everyone else in my group was able to sing well enough to compensate for me. We even went to regionals and managed to score a two. My freshman year was the last year I was in choir. In order to continue, I would have had to try out and sight read by myself. That would have never gone over well.
I wish I had been able to continue, but now I am able to truly appreciate how much work goes into singing in a choir. Recently, I was surfing the web and noticed Musica Sacra with Christopher Purdy features two hours of sacred choir music on Sundays at 8pm on WOSU 89.7. I look forward to tuning in to hear the beautiful sounds of the choir.
I met my fiancé Jason when I was a sophomore in high school. We both worked at the local grocery store and, while I was bagging groceries at his register one day, he asked if I wanted to see a movie with him. Our first date went off without a hitch and we have been inseparable ever since. To this day love watching movies, going to dinner, seeing plays, and anything that gets us out of the house.
When we visited COSI during the first year of our relationship, the Titanic Artifact Exhibition was on display. Earlier this summer, when I heard that the Titanic Artifact Exhibition returned to COSI, I knew we had to go back. So many things had changed since we had last visited. One of the most exciting new exhibits at COSI was the WOSU@COSI room where we learned the science behind broadcasting. It was refreshing to see so many families enjoying themselves and learning about the science behind broadcasting.
There have been lots of reports about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. We saw reports on many families taken out of the city and relocated to places all over the country, many not even sure where they would end up. Eventually once the relocation stories had run their course that was it, the media moved onto something else. That seems to be the way things go these days, we’re anxious to get onto the next thing. Sometimes I think we need to step back and take a hard look at what’s really going on. To borrow from Paul Harvey’s philosophy, what’s the rest of the story? DESERT BAYOU airing on WOSU TV Wednesday night at 10pm, gives us a look at the rest of the New Orleans relocation story.
In the wake of the Katrina devastation the government airlifted nearly 600 African Americans to Utah. Not knowing where they were going these families got off the plane in what was called a “very white state “, there was immediate culture shock. DESERT BAYOU follows several families to see if the two cultures – one black, one white – can come together or whether their differences prove too great a challenge to overcome. The people in this program tell their own story; we hear their words, their experiences. We see their frustration, their anger and over time their hope in starting a new life. Some of the choices that were made by the families and by the folks in Utah surprised me, some did not. This program draws you in and is a good contrast to the troubling FRONTLINE: “LAW & DISORDER” that precedes it at 9pm.
I hope you decide to spend the evening with WOSU TV on Wednesday night. From 8pm-10pm, three good programs worthy of your time.
Oh sure. I’m willing to admit that it’s probably just a guy thing, a wild x chromosome passed down from generations of men.
But a show called “Primal Grill with Steve Raichlen” (now in its third season on WOSU), gets my attention, as does this recipe for “Cavemen Bones” in which you put the steaks right on the coals. I suspect cutlery would be too dainty to use with this.
Just FYI, “Primal Grill” airs Saturdays at 1:30pm, and it’s impossible to watch without drooling.
Caveman T-Bones with Garlic and Peppers
Method: Roasting in the embers
Serves: 4 hungry eaters (and all cavemen are hungry eaters)
Advance Preparation: None. The beauty of this dish is its spontaneity.
Category: Meat
Ingredients:
For the steaks:
4 T-bone steaks (each 12 to 16 ounces and 1-1/2 to 2 inches thick)
Coarse salt (kosher or sea) and coarsely cracked black peppercorns
For the sweet pepper topping:
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
3 red bell peppers, stemmed, seeded, and sliced into strips (1/4 inch by 2 inches)
3 yellow bell peppers, stemmed, seeded, and sliced into strips (1/4 inch by 2 inches)
12 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
3/4 cup fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves, coarsely chopped
Other Items Needed:
A 10 to 12 inch cast iron skillet
Directions:
Build a charcoal fire and rake the coals into an even layer. (Leave the front third of your grill coal free.) When the coals glow orange, fan them with a newspaper or hair dryer to blow off any loose ash.
Generously, and I mean generously, season the steaks on both sides with salt and cracked pepper. Place the steaks directly on the embers about 2 inches apart. Grill until cooked to taste, 4 to 6 minutes per side for medium-rare, turning with tongs.
Using tongs, lift the steaks out of the fire, shaking each to dislodge any embers. Using a basting brush, brush off any loose ash and arrange the steaks on a platter or plates. Let the steaks rest loosely tented with aluminum foil, while you make the sauce.
Make the pepper topping: Heat the olive oil in a cast-iron skillet directly on the embers on the side burner of a gas grill or on the stove. When the oil is hot, add the peppers, garlic, and parsley. Cook over high heat until the peppers and garlic begin to brown, 2 minutes. Immediately pour over the steaks and serve at once.
I prefer to read fiction instead of non-fiction. Some of my favorite types of novels to read are based on ancient Rome and Egypt. The best thing about historical fiction novels, aside from the fact that they give the reader an idea of what it would be like to live during a different time period in history, are they usually end on a happy note.
Two of my favorite books are Michelle Moran’s Nefertiti and The Heretic Queen. These two novels tell two stories from the same dynasty in Egypt. Both books are able to turn sour events into happy endings.
My addiction to these novels began recently. While I was roaming through the aisles at Barnes and Nobel, I came across Mistress of Rome by Kate Quinn. I was hooked from the moment I picked it up. It tells the extremely compelling story of a Roman slave girl, while accurately depicting the historical events that occur.
Michelle Moran’s Cleopatra’s Daughter is my newest purchase. It is a retelling of the story of the lives of Cleopatra’s children. In only a few short weeks I should know a bit more about what life was like living in ancient Rome.
“Salt” from POV airs on WOSU TV at 11pm on Sunday, August 22.
About six years ago, Murray Fredericks, an award-winning Australian photographer, began making five-week annual trips alone to remote Lake Eyre and its salt flats, the lowest point in Australia. He went, he says, in search of “somewhere I could point my camera into pure space.” He discovered a boundless and beautiful land where sky, water and land merge in extraordinary vistas and surprisingly spectacular colors. He also discovered a harsh place where a lone individual might easily find himself pushed to his physical and mental limits. SALT is the video diary, made in collaboration with Michael Angus, of Fredericks’ pilgrimages to Lake Eyre, a dramatic counterpart to his stunning, stark and surreal photographs.
Q&A with Photographer Murray Fredericks
The subject of SALT talks about how he got the idea to make a documentary about his trips to the Lake Eyre, his other photography work, how he worked with filmmaker Michael Angus and more.
POV: When and how did you first discover Lake Eyre?
Murray Fredericks: Every schoolchild learns about Lake Eyre at school in Australia. It’s the largest lake in Australia and is usually dry. It was mythologized by the early European explorers as possibly the great inland sea of Australia — which does not exist. Whenever the lake floods — which happens on average once every 10 ten years, and it has filled completely only three times in 200 years — it makes news all over the country.
POV: What sort of photography did you do prior to your trips to Lake Eyre?
Fredericks: Prior to the Lake Eyre project I produced three large volumes of work from the Himalayas, Patagonia and Southwest Tasmania. Those landscapes were very complex, mountainous and feature rich. In 2003 I decided it was time for a change and decided to move away from literal, more traditional landscapes. I took on space itself as a subject. The inspiration came from a visit to a salt lake in Bolivia.
POV: Has your experience at the lake each year been spiritual or meditative in any way? If it has, how so?
Fredericks: That’s a question I have been asked frequently, but no, the experience itself was not necessarily a spiritual one and that was certainly not the aim of the project. I find that day-to-day living, dealing with the demands of a large family and the fiscal reality of an artist’s life, provides more of an opportunity for personal growth than these trips.
POV: Have you ever brought another person to Lake Eyre with you, or do you always travel alone?
Fredericks: On a very early short trip, my wife and young boys came to the lake, and a couple of friends visited me out there in early stages of the project when I was based on the edge of the lake for short stays. Once I realized that I needed to spend continuous long periods out on the lake, I always went alone. Michael Angus joined me on one trip to gain an understanding of the process — but no footage from that trip was used in the film.
POV: Where did you get the idea to create a documentary about your trips to Lake Eyre, and how did you come to work with Michael Angus?
Fredericks: In 2005, I borrowed a small DVCAM to document a couple of aspects of the trip for the master’s degree I was pursuing at the University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts in Sydney. When I returned and started showing friends and colleagues some of the very rough footage to explain what I was doing, they had very strong reactions. What had become almost mundane to me was of great interest to others who had never experienced it. I spoke to Michael about the footage, knowing he was a documentary filmmaker and he was very interested in exploring whether or not there was a full documentary to be made on the project. Once he saw the footage he recognized the potential, and it evolved from there.
I knew Michael through friends, and over the years we had had a few conversations regarding the artistic process where we felt a genuine connection.
POV: Do you plan on going back to Lake Eyre indefinitely? Or will this project end in the foreseeable future?
Fredericks: The Lake Eyre project essentially is finished. I will probably head back there for a visit at some stage, as I feel quite attached to the place. However, the driving sense that there is much more to shoot is gone.
POV: What equipment did you use to photograph Lake Eyre?
Fredericks: The bulk of the still images were shot on an 8-by-10-inch view camera. In the final year of the project I started experimenting with a medium format digital back on a digital view camera to employ stitching as a method of capturing a wider field of view. The time-lapse cameras were Canon digital SLR cameras and the video camera was a Panasonic P2.
POV: What advice would you give young photographers and other artists searching for inspiration?
Fredericks: Having a good knowledge of art history and the history of your particular medium is essential. Art is a form of communication and to communicate effectively you require knowledge of the language. The language of your particular medium can be understood and learned through its history. During the process of learning the history of a medium, people may find the potential to create something new. This potential and the excitement it creates are a kind of inspiration.
Somewhere along the way, we’re all faced with a situation we’re not quite sure how to handle. I loved my grandfather very much and cherished our time together but he was a proud man who was always right no matter what! I on the other hand have second guessed some of my decisions more times than I care to admit. In the end, my feeling has been if I’ve listen to all viewpoints and can still defend my decision then I have to believe it was the right one. This belief is challenged in the new series JUSTICE: WHAT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO? airing on WOSU TV Tuesday evenings at 10pm.
Harvard University professor and author Michael Sandel has been teaching one of the most popular classes at Harvard for years. He presents his students with an ethical dilemma – some hypothetical, others actual cases – then asks them to decide “what’s the right thing to do?” When I viewed the first episode I, like the students in the program, was very sure of my response to the situation presented. Professor Sandel would listen to the arguments, make a few comments and then very expertly throw a “what if…” out there, and all of a sudden things didn’t seem so clear. This program makes you think and truly tests some of your long-held beliefs. Every week the class tackles different topics and the discussions are straight forward, controversial and at times humorous. I give a big thumbs up to whoever decided to turn these classroom discussions into a program series! I always say MODERN FAMILY is the fastest half hour on TV. I think JUSTICE: WHAT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO? is the fastest hour on TV.
FRONTLINE will be back on the schedule this fall, but until it returns this series is a good place holder. Give it a try, Tuesday’s at 10pm on WOSU TV with a Wednesday, 10pm repeat on WOSU PLUS.
StoryCorps Radio Histories Coming to Television -By BRIAN STELTER
Some of the stirring oral histories recorded by the radio series StoryCorps are being transformed into animated television segments. The PBS program “P.O.V.” announced on Tuesday that the first of six animated shorts would be shown alongside its feature films starting on Aug. 17.
The shorts illustrate some of the most memorable stories captured by StoryCorps since its founding seven years ago. The nonprofit group has recorded the oral histories of more than 60,000 participants to date. One recording is featured each week on NPR, but until now they have not been brought to television.
“P.O.V.” said one of the animated shorts is based on a conversation between a 12-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome and his mother; an infantryman’s memories of the Battle of the Bulge; another is based on an interview of the author and radio host Studs Terkel, who died in 2008.
http://www.pbs.org/pov/presumedguilty/ A documentary film by by Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete. Directed by Roberto Hernández and Geoffrey Smith. Airing on Sunday, August 15, 11:00 pm on WOSU TV; Future Air: 08/20/10, 1:30 am WOSU TV.
Imagine being picked up off the street, told you have committed a murder you know nothing about and then finding yourself sentenced to 20 years in jail. In December 2005 this happened to Toño Zúñiga in Mexico City and, like thousands of other innocent people, he was wrongfully imprisoned. The award-winning Presumed Guilty is the story of two young lawyers and their struggle to free Zúñiga. With no background in film, Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete set about recording the injustices they were witnessing, enlisting acclaimed director Geoffrey Smith (The English Surgeon, POV 2009) to tell this dramatic story.
In Mexico, those arrested are, in practice, considered guilty until proven innocent — with predictable results. The great majority of the accused never see a judge or even an arrest warrant.
At present, a person who commits a crime in Mexico has less than a 2 percent chance of being caught and punished, in part because police often ask a person who reports a crime to pay for the case to be solved; a person who refuses risks becoming a suspect him or herself, which discourages cooperation with police. A study released in 2008 indicated that Mexican citizens had extremely low confidence in police action and efficiency, which causes them to shy away from reporting crimes.
With violent crime, particularly crime related to drugs, rampant in Mexico, police are under pressure to make arrests. Rather than being evaluated on the accuracy of arrests, however, officers and even prosecutors are judged solely on the number of incarcerations, meaning that there’s little incentive for them to spend time seeking out a crime’s actual perpetrator. It is estimated that in nine out of 10 cases, an arrest is made without any scientific evidence — such as fingerprints or DNA — whatsoever; Mexico has no comprehensive fingerprint database, and police have little access to forensic equipment. In more than six out of 10 cases, suspects are arrested within three hours of the crime, suggesting that little to no serious detective work could have taken place.
Furthermore, an arrest is often made without the victim having identified the accused. Instead, an initial police investigation identifies the person believed to have committed the act. (This measure is meant to protect the victim, particularly in the case of rape or kidnapping, or when the victim is a minor.) Even when witnesses are called to give testimony, more weight is placed on the paperwork filed before the trial than on live statements.
However, the law does allow a procedure called a careo (short for careo probatorio), in which a defendant may confront his or her accuser face-to-face. The meeting, which must be requested by the suspect, takes places at the penal courts in the jail where the suspect is being held, in the presence of a penal judge, a public defender and the prosecuting and defense attorneys. The suspect, who remains behind bars, may question the victim, with the goal of clarifying any contradictory or confusing testimony and coming to a unanimous truth. The presiding judge may ask questions and may also encourage witnesses to rethink or correct their testimonies.
Often, however, actual practices differ from what’s laid out in the law. According to the current constitution, for example, a suspect may be held for a maximum of 48 hours without being charged with a crime, but a 2002 study found that officials adhere to that rule less than half the time. Once a person has been charged, a judge has 72 hours to decide whether a suspect should be tried or released; this limit, too, has been found to be surpassed in more than half of cases.
These abuses, combined with the lack of a proper bail system, mean that many suspects are held without having been given a proper trial: According to a study by the New York-based nonprofit Open Society Institute, as many as 42 percent of Mexico’s inmates, or about 90,000 people, have been held without trial.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America. Our family was very involved in scouting, my mother, sister and I were in Girl Scouts and my dad and brothers were in Boy Scouts. I’m proud to say my younger brother fully embraced the experience and is an Eagle Scout.
Camping always seems to be a big part of the scouting experience. As a Girl Scout we stayed in camp buildings, which suited me just fine. I’ve camped in a tent and hiked and have decided at this point in my life, if I can’t plug in a blow dryer or order room service I’m not going. But I was fortunate enough to have the camping and scouting experience and after viewing BOY SCOUTS OF HARLEM 759, I knew it was a program I wanted to get on the air.
Here is a group of young men from Harlem heading off to summer scout camp. Some have been there before and know what to expect and some are brand new, full of excitement but then find they’re a little homesick. What I really liked about this program was watching the change in the boys as they spend more time with each other discovering their potential. The boys are guided by two very wise Scout Masters, one who happens to be one of the boy’s grandmother. Every scout troop has its own identity. It’s the commonality of the scouting experience as a whole that takes each troop out of its normal day to day routine for two weeks in the summer to learn they’re all out there working for the same goal, to build confidence in themselves as individuals and a group. Obviously I’m a fan of scouting but ultimately that is not why I chose to put this program on the air. In the end it’s a charming program that tells a good story and that’s why it is scheduled.
I hope you’ll tune in to WOSU TV at 9pm on Tuesday, August 17 to watch BOY SCOUTS OF HARLEM 759, a perfect program to celebrate one hundred years of the Boys Scouts of America.
Oh sure. I’m willing to admit that it’s probably just a guy thing, a wild x chromosome passed down from generations of men.
