TheJakerblog

Wipe that transition off your face!

    In the late 19th century buildings with cast-iron facades were popular and a crowd always gathered at the site to observe the final stages of construction.  The story is told of a little boy watching the crane hoisting the ironwork who turned to his mother and said excitedly, “Look mommy, they’re putting on the architecture!”

    Now as “virtual crowds” come together at their television screens there are many who would observe the visual clutter and remark, “Look, they’re putting on the content.”

    Overloading the television screen with imagery seems to be a current sin of news programs, especially those covering business and economics, where the charts, graphs titles and boxes overflow and fall from the screen like so much peeling wallpaper.

  This is the kind of thing I'm talking about.

    Even a simple program can literally be chopped up by its own graphics.  I was watching a political discussion on a cable network during which the participants appeared on the screen in little boxes like the page of a comic book.  But the director could not simply cut from one person to another but had to slide the picture through what looked like a crumpled Wonder Bread wrapper.

    What is called a “transitional wipe” has long been part of the basic visual language of television.  Once upon a time a dissolve meant a passage of time.  A wipe was a change of time and place. But now we see pictures sliding and shuffling, bouncing about the screen with no real meaning.  How often have you missed a pitch or the swing of a bat during a baseball game because the team’s logo had to finish its slide into home plate?  Most distracting is that these wipes are supposed to also make a noise: bafoom, shuuuppp, ztgwngg… Today’s TV technology allows sound effects to hook onto images and every switch becomes a crash.

    Public Television has been a bit more restrained than our commercial brethren.  At WSKG-TV we believe we know what the viewers expect of us, and nobody really expects flying boxes of kerchunking heads talking at once.

    There has been a tremendous advance in electronic technology in recent years.  We now have digital, high-definition TV sets, DVD recorders, Tivo and IPTV.  For us in the business the toolkit is bottomless.  For the viewer there are more choices and more flexibility than ever.  But has anyone yet come up with a way for the folks at home to shut off those logos, promos, bugs and snipes that crawl all over the picture?

    The news ticker at the bottom of the screen can be especially distracting.  Someone asked me if there was a way to get rid of it.
    “Just tape the program,” I suggested.
    “You mean, record a VHS cassette?  Will that eliminate the ticker?”
    “No.  I mean just take a length of masking tape and stick it over the bottom of the screen.  It works every time”

Sumer Is Icumen In – blah!

    If you feel that winter is a welcome season of the year you probably have memories of crisp (not freezing) days, or huddling and cuddling by a warm fireplace.  It’s all cozy and cheery, a sign that you’ve got wintertime licked.

    The summer is many ways different.  Long hazy days feel like they’ll stretch endlessly; there’s no brilliant quick-frozen sunset.  A cold drink beneath a maple tree or in front of an electric fan doesn’t provide the lasting human comfort of a warm mug of something.  Can you wrap your hands around a lemonade?

    Summer suffering is upon us.  As I write this on the afternoon of Friday, the 6th of June the Natural Weather Service reports that the temperature outside is 84°, the dewpoint 71, the heat index (what was once called the “misery index”) is 89, the coefficient of ice cream melting is ŊÞ8 and the sweat proportion is 0013.6#*!(T%0.  The weekend is almost here and I’m afraid to leave the WSKG Broadcast Center, where the air conditioning purrs along because the equipment that keeps us on the cool air under all conditions has to function at about –50.

    Just grinding out all these Farenheits makes for a brutal lethargy.  The role of air conditioning in global warming is seldom mentioned, but its blessings are balanced by the power consumption, refrigerant leakage and heat exchange that make it happen.

    It is that sense of being caught in a climate trap that makes me start to feel miserable above 80 degrees and long for the wild winds of winter.

Taken Out to the Ball Game

    On May 13th OFF THE PAGE presented a program about baseball (which we don’t cover extensively on WSKG Public Radio) and about music (which we do).  It’s the 100th anniversary of the song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and Tim Wiles of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown visited to speak about his new book “Baseball’s Greatest Hit”.  We even touched on the old question of why people already at the ballpark would sing “Take me out to the ball game…” when they’re already there.  Should there be a song “I Can’t Live on Peanuts and Cracker Jack / Take me out to dinner…?”
    Going out to a major league baseball game can be an experience comparable to attending a symphonic concert by a world-class orchestra or a hit Broadway show.  That was certainly the case at Shea Stadium on the evening of 9 July 1969.  The New York Mets were playing the Chicago Cubs; Tom Seaver was pitching for the Mets.  There were 59,083 spectators in the stands, including my father and me.  Seated alongside us were a man and his young son who had come down from Toronto to see the game.  They told us that they were Cubs fans.
    Ever since their founding in 1962 the Mets had been a cellar-dwelling joke in the National League, but in ’69 they were beginning to play pretty well and that night they were looking great.  Seaver was pitching flawlessly and by the top of the 9th it looked like we would see the first no-hitter in Mets history.
    Then Cubs manager Leo Durocher (one-time manager of the departed Brooklyn Dodgers and one of those guys you loved to hate) sent up rookie outfielder Jim Qualls.  There was a conference on the pitcher’s mound – one of the Mets had once played against Qualls in the minor leagues but nobody knew for sure how Seaver should pitch against him.  Seaver was surely tired by then and when Qualls knocked a single into left-center field you could feel the agony go through the crowd.
    Except that the kid sitting next to me stood up and cheered.  His father looked shocked and I was torn between protecting him from personal harm and tearing him apart myself.
    A perfect game had been ruined.  There were two more outs, the Amazin’ Mets won 4-0 and would go on to win the World Series.  But that night we all left Shea Stadium a bit disappointed, still knowing that we’d been present for one more historic moment at the ol’ ball game.

Parlez-sie Proto, signor?

    The Voice of America is heard around the world in 45 languages. The Finnish public broadcaster YLE broadcasts the news in classical Latin. Across the USA radio stations’ search for a faithful “niche audience” means that languages from Korean to Navajo can sound from our speakers.

     But a few weeks ago, WSKG may have had them all beat. We were broadcasting (albeit briefly) in Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It was spoken about 6,000 years ago and is the root of many other languages across much of today's world, from Sanskrit to Icelandic. The “announcer” was Dr. David Anthony, professor of anthropology at Hartwick College, who was a guest on OFF THE PAGE along with his wife and fellow researcher Dorcas Brown. They came to tell about Dr. Anthony’s new book, “The Horse, the Wheel and Language”, which reveals how people in what is now the steppes of southern Russia gained power through their domestication of the horse, perfection of the wheel and of agriculture, and left their mark on today’s world and its languages.  The dominance of their husbandry, technology and poetic speech displaced many other tribal tongues.

     Linguists were able to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European by applying known rules of language change and tracing back common words in known ancient languages. No one will deliberately let a tongue-twister become everyday speech. Every language has gone through modification (some would call it corruption) over the centuries, but a surprising number of words appear to have changed little since those Proto days: the wheel rotates on an axl. Nime is name, wete became water. Another PIE word that has been preserved in English is ghos-ti-. It is the root of both “guest” and “ghost”.

    Ghos-ti-, however, is not necessarily related to the English word for the finny creatures that swim in the wete. Ghosti: gh, as in enough; o as in women; s as in corps; ti as in action. Fish. After 6,000 years you’d think we’d had enuf.

Go n-éirí do thuras leat!*

*May your trip succeed with you = Have a successful trip!
   (or as we say in English, “bon voyage”)

I spotted a misspelled word the other day, one I’d expected sooner or later to see. Writing about individuals who leave their own country to live abroad, somebody turned an expatriate into an “ex-patriot”. In fact, and in fairness, a person living abroad may continue to harbor warm and loyal feelings about the old homeland, but chooses to do so from a distant harbor.

This came to mind during the April 1st OFF THE PAGE visit from Mary Pat Hyland, who dropped by to speak about her new novel “The Cyber Miracles”, but also to speak (partly in fluent Gaelic) about Irish culture and her family’s ancestral homeland. At several times in its history conditions in Ireland had become intolerable and emigration was the most reasonable choice. But there was also a sense that Irish men and women really couldn’t be free to develop their talents while remaining on the auld sod.

On a visit to Ireland a few years ago I discovered a delightful nation going through an economic and cultural transformation. New industries were starting up, high-tech companies were running help wanted spots on the radio, Dublin’s fair city surpassed half a million in population and, for the first time in a long while, people were coming back to Ireland to stay. There were still stone castles and thatched cottages, but Ireland is now integrated into the European Community. The fiber-optic cables that connect Europe and North America all pass through Ireland and that country has become one of the most wired in the world. At the same time the road network remains largely two lanes squeezed between hedgerows. “We’ll never widen our roads,” one Irish woman proudly told me. “It’s part of our heritage.”

Often it is the ex-expatriates expecting their country to be unchanged who strive the hardest to preserve the heritage, though they are also at the forefront of the changes taking place. Mary Pat Hyland is working on a sequel to “The Cyber Miracles” in which her protagonist Maeve Kenny may make her first journey to Ireland. We look forward to sharing her impressions.

winter memory

The end of summer can be a melancholy time.  But winter's passing also takes sweet days with it.  I wrote this poem, then forgot that I'd written it and began it again, then rediscovered the original.  That may be the best way to write and rewrite.

Winter is washing away.  March backwards.
There are outcroppings of ice on the north side
    of cold rocks that will melt slowly,
    the very last trickle of winter’s heavy water – snow and ice working away.

All season long we bundled against the cold
   when we had to be outside
And stepped carefully onto and into the piles and drifts
   settling deeper, then covered over
   revising but not erasing every step of the way.
Escorting the dog, deliveries to the bird feeder,
   just walking somewhere to spend a moment in the cold looking into the woods, sensing a smooth world.
Each step pressed down toward the frozen earth.
Maybe it will all be covered
   in a final shroud, but then
The snow settles,
   and as it melts into the soil beneath
   it also brings back footsteps planted a season ago
   brave strolls in zero and below
   a step that slipped and stayed in ice.
The snow remembers its walks
   the way the grass never will
                  once it reappears.

Penny's Picture and Civil Rights

The March 18^th OFF THE PAGE interview with Gurdon Brewster about “No Turning Back” and his experience with Reverends Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta brought back memories of the 1950s and 60s “civil rights era” (that time and the drive for racial justice and equality has never really had a simple name). The resistance and controversy coming around centennial of the Civil War was framed as another conflict between North and South – although the nation would soon learn that racial equality wasn’t really a regional matter. But the segregated South, with its complicated social codes, could be shocking to those who didn’t grow up there, as it was to Gurdon Brewster. I spent some years in the South during that time and regularly felt consternation and the corrupting privilege of being on the “whites only” side of the color line.

While the immersion into a segregated society would be painful and humiliating to an African-American from the North who had never confronted it directly (the case of Emmett Till being the most infamous example), it could also be a shock to a white person. That’s how a college classmate of mine I’ll call Penny became an emblem of the nation’s racial conflict.

Penny and her friends from Long Island were on their high school senior class trip to Washington, DC – an excursion that was once as much a part of completing the high school years as the prom and the class ring – when a side trip was arranged to Richmond, Virginia. Their bus didn’t have bathroom facilities on board, so by the time Penny and her classmates arrived in the Capital of the Confederacy he first stop had to be the ladies’ room. She ran into the terminal and thought she had found the rest room when she noticed a sign beside the door: COLORED LADIES.

Penny stopped and looked around, her face revealing a pain that wasn’t simply physical. Just at that moment a photographer from Life Magazine working on a story about segregation snapped her picture and the following week she appeared in million of copies as an image of America’s discomfort.

Getting on Off the Page

Whenever anyone asks about an appearance on OFF THE PAGE one of my first questions is, “Do you [or the author you’re representing] have a phone number starting with 607?”  I’m not necessarily looking for contact information at that point but it’s the quickest way to determine who is a “regional author”.  WSKG Radio’s primary coverage area fairly duplicates the 607 area code, albeit with some spillover into 315, 845, 585 and – not limiting ourselves to New York State – Pennsylvania’s five-seventy.

Occasionally I’ll go beyond the Southern Tier and adjacent lands if a book or author is of special regional interest, but otherwise I’m simply looking for well-written fiction and non-fiction, poetry and history and anything else created by a writer from our region.  Sometimes the most important activity going on in a community is happening in solitude and in one person’s mind.  We’ve discovered an abundance of good writing here in these hills.

One question I regularly receive is, “Do you read the entire book for an OFF THE PAGE interview?”  I certainly do, usually with a speedy re-read just before the broadcast.  There are some people who think you can get the idea of both style and substance by reading only the first and last chapters, but that seems to me like simply eating the crackers without the cheese in the middle.

A book can be itself an object of beauty, but there’s an old saying about not judging a book by its cover and it is literally true.  Some of the best books I’ve seen lately were cheaply printed and bound, perhaps by the author himself.  That should not detract from interest in the writing within.

An increasing number of authors choose to self-publish, often because they simply don’t want to take the time to hassle with agents and publishers.  Especially at the beginning of a writing career DIY publishing is a sure way to get into print.  But it may be more difficult to get into the bookstores, or even on-line sellers, especially if someone has written an especially personal book or one that deals with their own community.  That should make such a book all the more relevant to the WSKG audience, for it means that on OFF THE PAGE you’re regularly learning about a first edition right from the person who wrote it, and possibly published it.

These days even well-established publishing houses are turning to print-on-demand and the invention of the e-book has made it possible for anyone to get their words into distribution.  OFF THE PAGE will continue to concentrate on the content and quality of books by authors in our part of the country, how their mind and spirit was conveyed to us, with less concern about the system that made it happen.

Thank you for joining us

One of the important habits we’re supposed to adopt early in life is verbal etiquette.  So if a person says, “how do you do”, you respond with “pleased to meet you” or just a simple “hello”, not “how do I do what?”  When somebody sneezes, you should observe ancient practice and say “God bless you!” or cheerfully wish them good health in German with a “gesundheit!”, which sounds sort of like a sneeze itself.  And of course, when someone says “thank you” say, “you’re welcome.”  It’s just polite.

So what are you supposed to say when you’ve been interviewed on the radio and the interviewer expresses appreciation for your time and words of wisdom? Current practice seems to indicate that the interviewee must end the conversation with the words,“Thank you for having me.”

That expression turns up most of the time at the conclusion of radio interviews (less so on television, for some reason). It suggests that the guest is grateful for the opportunity to expound for a few moments in the mass media, time which could have just as easily been bestowed upon someone else.  The phrase is a relative of “thank you for taking my call” which turns up regularly on phone-in programs, spoken by a listener who apparently didn’t expect to get through.

But as a way of saying “you’re welcome”, “thank you for having me” implies a function of the media beyond the control of the person who actually gave substance to the past few minutes of airtime.

I’m not sure how that expression got started.  Some years ago I heard a radio interview with comedian and songwriter Alan Sherman.  In conclusion, the interviewer expressed appreciation for having him on the show, to which Sherman replied, “I enjoyed being had.”

So what’s the smoothest way to avoid sounding snookered, dependent or otherwise taken in?  (Smoothness is a high virtue in broadcasting). “You’re welcome” still suffices and shows good breeding.  “It was my pleasure” can be gracious even as one appears to be boasting,“I got more out of this than you did.” “That’s okay” is, well, okay.  For complete honesty an interviewee could react to a final thanks with, “Was that it?  Are we out of time?  You never asked me about my trip to the Brazilian rain forest where I composed this beautiful song about my friend Lucrezia and the Eskimo children that we rescued from the hands of unscrupulous advertisers…”

Thank you for reading me.