Mixed Media

Off the Page celebrates the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street

The broadcasting industry has always been aware of its educational potential and is often idealistic about its service to children.  In the 1946 book "Here Is Television" author Thomas Hutchinson states, "Educational or informative programs on television open vistas that virtually stagger the imagination... No longer will low paid educators teach the three R's to small boys and girls in isolated rural districts.  Instead every country school in the world will have a large screen television receiver, in each classroom." 

Hutchinson believed that "there is nothing in the world that cannot be taught by television," but as the visual medium took over the nation's living rooms it seemed that the real potential of TV to instruct both children and adults remained undeveloped while children, as is their nature, were absorbing all manner of new knowledge from programs and commercials.

There were some good kidshows during those early days of television.  "The Small Fry Club" on the short-lived DuMont Network featured an avuncular Big Brother Bob Emery with a human cast of animal characters who taught about nature, music, health and shared daily delights (it was the first TV program to be aired five days a week). It even draw an appreciative adult audience -- orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini was one of its big fans. Over on NBC-TV, Howdy Doody premiered in 1947 with Buffalo Bob Smith and a cast of marionettes.  There was also a crazy clown named Clarabelle, played by actor Bob Keeshan, who left to create Captain Kangaroo.  Many of these programs had well-designed educational content -- Captain Kangaroo and Ding Dong School with Dr. Frances Horwich ("Miss Frances") on NBC were highly regarded by educators and parents.  But it took a whole new system of broadcasting, Public Television, to bring the nation's pre-schoolers a TV show that would systematically prepare them for further education, teaching letters, numbers and relationships while they were having  a wonderful time.

"Sesame Street" premiered on PBS on November 10, 1969 and is the longest-running children's program on American television.*  At age forty it is now being watched by some of the grandchildren of those who learned their ABCs and 1-2-3s from "Sesame Street". WSKG is joining in the Sesame 40 festival with art contests, an open house birthday party at our studios and a special OFF THE PAGE broadcast with Michael Davis, author of the new book "Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street."

Sesame Street began as a flash of brilliance that struck like a bolt from the gods.  [Producer Joan Ganz] Cooney was its mother of invention, while Lloyd N. Morrisett, a well-connected vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, was its financial godfather.  Sesame's moment of conception occurred at a dinner party at Cooney's apartment, when Morrissett and his wife were discussing how their three-year-old daughter, Sarah, had become transfixed by television.  She would sit in front of a test pattern at 6:30 a.m., waiting for the cartoons to appear at 7:00.  It was the same thing millions of kids were doing all across the country that confounded Cooney.

-- from "Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street"

Several veterans of Captain Kangaroo were in the "street gang" and Davis traces the lineage of the program as well as the institutional development of Children's Television Workshop (now called Sesame Workshop) and the planning and research that ensued.  "Sesame Street" was deliberately designed to be meaningful and recognizable to inner-city children, its content easily blended with Head Start and similar efforts for minority and underprivileged youngsters.  But Davis's book is primarily a story of people working together for a TV show that could teach and entertain and be accessible at many levels.  They are as rich a cast of characters as any novel and their fates are triumphant and tragic.  "Street Gang" opens with the scene at the funeral of brilliant puppeteer Jim Henson, as untimely a death as any.  His Muppets were and are the heart of "Sesame Street".  There was also the loss of actor Will Lee, who played Mr. Hooper, the candy store owner.  His passing was noted (and his life celebrated) in a tearful "Sesame Street" episode that broached the meaning of death in terms that small children could comprehend.  "Street Gang" prints the entire script of that moving scene.

Michael Davis is a former editor of TV Guide magazine and worked as a teacher in the Head Start program in Tompkins County and was a reporter for the Ithaca Journal.  He will be joined on OFF THE PAGE by Lonna McKeon Pierce, a professional storyteller, teacher/librarian at the MacArthur School in Binghamton and the mother of five children (now grown, but all who learned their ABCs watching channel 46).  We'll also be directly in touch with Sesame Street speaking with two of the stars who were there on day 1: Bob McGrath and Big Bird.

To join in the conversation about "Sesame Street" with host Bill Jaker and his guests, call during the live 1:00 PM broadcast to 888/359-9754 or post a message here to OffThePage@WSKG.ORG.

Nabakov lecture at Cornell on November 19th

Two days after Vladimir Nabokov’s posthumous novel The Original of Laura lands in the bookstores,   Brian Boyd, a world-class expert on the legendary author, presents his lecture, “Nabokov’s Literary Legacy,” on Nov. 19 at Cornell University.

Nabokov taught at Cornell from 1948 to 1959. During those years he wrote Lolita and Pnin and conceived Pale Fire; conducted research on Lepidoptera (an order of insects comprising butterflies and moths); wrote the English and Russian versions of his autobiography, Conclusive Evidence and Drugie Berega; and prepared annotated translations of two pieces of Russian literature: The Song of Igor's Campaign and Eugene Onegin.

With the publishing of The Original of Laura, readers will have a fresh view of Nabokov’s unparalleled brilliance. After Nabokov died in 1977, his heirs were instructed to the burn the incomplete manuscript of The Original of Laura – all written on index cards. The cards were never burned. Now the manuscript – arguably an oncoming, literary tidal wave – will be published and distributed to bookstores on Nov. 17.

Boyd is a noted expert on Nabokov. His major works include Nabokov's Ada: The Place of Consciousness; Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years; Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years; Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery; and Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings.

Boyd will give his lecture, "Nabokov's Literary Legacy," on Thursday, November 19th at 4:30 p.m. in the Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University.

Stories within stories; Paul Auster's Invisible is powerful

by Jane Ciabattari

Paul Auster's fans know that beginning with his earliest work — his 1985-86 New York Trilogy, which revolves around a detective named Max Work — he has drawn upon the fast pacing, structure and noirish sleights of hand common to detective stories. He starts off with a mystery, sprinkles his pages with clues and constructs numerous elaborate scenarios in which Auster-like narrators find themselves randomly drawn into moments of violence or sexual pleasure.

His latest novel, Invisible, continues this tradition. It begins during the Vietnam era, a time of political turmoil and sometimes violent intergenerational conflict, when espionage and skulduggery infiltrated intellectual circles and university campuses.

Like most Auster novels, Invisible nests stories within stories. The first of four sections is set in 1967 and narrated by Adam Walker, a young poet studying at Columbia (Auster's alma mater). After a chance meeting, Adam is lured into a sexual triangle by an older man, a charismatic French visiting professor, Rudolf Born, and his girlfriend Margot.

Adam is aglow with youthful ambition, lust and self righteousness. His instinctive reaction to the enigmatic Born is to find him repellent. Yet he agrees to edit a literary magazine Born has offered to fund. Their enmeshment is in place when a random act of street violence triggers Adam's outrage at Born. His search for truth bedevils Adam for decades.

This first section of Invisible, it turns out, is the beginning of a memoir Adam is writing about his disturbing relationship with Born. In 2007, dying from leukemia, he has contacted Jim, a college classmate who became a successful author, and has asked for advice. Jim agrees to read the forthcoming sections of the memoir and is drawn into Adam's struggle to decipher the riddle of Rudolph Born.

Throughout the novel, Auster makes sure we are complicit in that search. We're with him, sifting through conflicting information, wondering who is telling the truth. Adam? Or Rudolph? After 40 years, can anyone's memory be trusted?

Some of Auster's novels are so solipsistic as to be virtually unreadable. And, indeed, there are scrappable moments in Invisible, as when Jim offers writing advice to Adam: "By writing about myself in the first person, I had smothered myself and made myself invisible. ... I needed to separate myself from myself, to step back and carve out some space between myself and my subject (which was myself) ..."

But Invisible won me over. Underlying Auster's game-playing is a powerful moral imagination. And he is superb at illuminating the ongoing reinvention of the self, and the subtle ways in which we collaborate with those who would seduce, deceive and betray us.

Read an excerpt of Invisible here.

"Spectacle Spectacular" at the Handwerker Gallery

Dawn Hunter

— whose “Spectacle Spectacular: Cautionary Tales and Other Stories” is on display at Ithaca College’s Handwerker Gallery — will give an artist’s talk in the gallery on Wednesday, Sept. 30. Free and open to the public, the event will begin at 4:30 p.m.

 

Featuring Hunter’s drawings and paintings, “Spectacle Spectacular” explores the relationship between popular culture and gendered identity.

“I’ve conducted extensive research on fashion photography in the latter part of the 20th century,” Hunter said. “I’ve been particularly struck by the persistence of one particular seductive promise: that by recognizing their bodies as malleable objects that are always capable of improvement, women can attain greater status and power, and lead richer, more exciting lives. . . . My goal is to make the myth-building work of popular culture and its various paradoxes and contradictions more visible.”

“Spectacle Spectacular” will remain on display until October 11. For more information, contact Cheryl Kramer, gallery director and assistant professor of art history, at (607) 274-3548 or ckramer@ithaca.edu.

Pulitzer-prize winning poet will give free reading at Ithaca College

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Philip Schultz will give a free public reading at Ithaca College on Tuesday, Sept. 15. His presentation, which is sponsored by the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series in the Department of Writing, will take place at 7:30 p.m. in Clark Lounge, Egbert Hall.

Schultz is the founder and director of The Writers Studio, a private school for fiction and poetry writing based in New York City. He has been called by Norman Mailer “a hell of a poet, one of the very best of his generation.” Despite its name, Schultz’s collection of poems titled “Failure” was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize “for distinguished volume of original verse.”

Other honors for Schultz’s poetry collections include the Lamont Poetry Selection award from the Academy of American Poets for “Deep Within the Ravine” and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for “Like Wings.”

Schultz has been awarded Fulbright, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as the Levinson Prize from “Poetry” magazine. His poems have been published in the “The New Yorker,” “Partisan Review,” “Paris Review” and “New Republic,” among other magazines.

Also giving readings in the Distinguished Visiting Writers series this fall will be National Book Award finalist Charles Baxter on Tuesday, Oct. 6, and essayist Jo Ann Beard on Wednesday, Oct. 28.

Strep throat may have led to Mozart's death

The death of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the age of 35 may have been caused by complications stemming from strep throat, according to a Dutch study published on Monday. Since the composer's death in 1791, there have been various theories about the cause of his untimely end, from intentional poisoning, to rheumatic fever, to trichinosis, a parasitic disease caused by eating raw or undercooked pork.

On his death certificate it was officially recorded that the cause of death was hitziges Frieselfieber, or "heated miliary fever," referring to a rash that looks like millet seeds.

But researchers from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands said studies on his death have generally been based on less-than-reliable evidence, like accounts from people who witnessed Mozart's final days, written decades after his death.

Their new study, reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was based on information from official death registers for Vienna in the winter of 1791 that places Mozart's death in a wider context. He died in Vienna.

"Our findings suggest that Mozart fell victim to an epidemic of strep throat infection that was contracted by many Viennese people in Mozart's month of death, and that Mozart was one of several persons in that epidemic that developed a deadly kidney complication," researcher Richard Zegers, of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, told Reuters Health.

Zegers and his colleagues said this "minor epidemic" of step throat, or streptococcal pharyngitis, may have begun in the city's military hospital.

According to witness accounts, Mozart fell ill with an "inflammatory fever," which is consistent with strep throat, Zegers and his colleagues wrote in their report.

The composer, who wrote more than 600 works during his life, eventually developed severe swelling, "malaise," back pain and a rash, consistent with a strep infection leading to kidney inflammation known as glomerulonephritis.

Zegers said it was also possible that Mozart had scarlet fever, which, like strep throat, can be caused by infection with streptococcal bacteria, but this was less likely because witnesses said Mozart developed a rash near the end of his illness and with scarlet fever, the rash appears early on.

(Reporting by Amy Norton from Reuters Health, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)

A capella Africa

This video is making the internet rounds and since it's a slow Monday, it's worth sharing.

What are some of your favorite music videos?

Vivaldi: A Man For All Seasons

   Known as the "red priest" because of his hair color and his membership in the clergy, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) was the most original and influential Italian composer of his generation. He wrote more than 500 concertos, which make up the bulk of his output, and the techniques he used to keep these works interesting and lively — deftly varying the texture and figuration, and favoring angular, energetic rhythms that packed extra punch — were adopted by composers all over the continent.

The concertos of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, published in 1725, demonstrate a wealth of effect using nothing more than string instruments. Their imagery — of birds in the spring, storms in summer, huntsmen in autumn and icy landscapes in winter — remains as vivid today as on the day the notes were penned.

Vivaldi wrote an illustrative sonnet as a guide to each of the concertos. Accordingly, "Spring," in the bright key of E major, celebrates the sounds of "joyful bird song," briefly interrupted as "gentle breezes give way to a passing storm." In the slow movement, a shepherd sleeps in the "pleasant flowering meadow," while a dog (the solo viola) barks. Nymphs dance a graceful gigue through the finale as the sun emerges from behind the clouds. It's all there in the sonnet Vivaldi wrote, and it's there in the music as well.

Read the full article by Ted Libbey here.

Blues legend Koko Taylor died at 80

by Cheryl Corley, Morning Edition

Her name is synonymous with Chicago blues, and her voice was growling, thunderous and full of soul.  Grammy Award-winning blues artist Koko Taylor died Wednesday at the age of 80.

Born in 1928 on a sharecropper's farm near Memphis, she was called "the Queen of the Blues." Her given name was Cora Walton, but she acquired the name Koko due to a love of chocolate. During an interview with NPR in 2000, Taylor said she and her five siblings would sing gospel music on Sundays, but on Mondays it was the blues.

"My younger brother made himself a harmonica out of a corncob, and I didn't need no microphone," she said. "And we'd be back there singing and playing."

Later, Taylor would move to Chicago with her soon-to-be-husband. She worked as a cleaning woman, but says she and her husband would frequent nightclubs on nights and weekends. She told NPR in 1991 that musicians would invite her to join them on the bandstand.

"One Sunday, I was sitting in," she said. "And Willie Dixon happened to be in the audience. And when I finished, he says to me, he says, 'My God, I ain't never heard a woman sing the blues like you sing the blues before in my life. Where did you come from?' I said, 'Memphis.' "

Dixon, already a celebrated bluesman, helped Taylor sign with Chicago's Chess Records and wrote a song for her that became her signature. Sales of "Wang Dang Doodle" would reach a million, and Taylor hit the road to blues and jazz festivals around the country and abroad. When Chess Records went out of business, Taylor signed with Alligator Records.

Alligator president Bruce Iglauer was Taylor's manager for more than 30 years. He says the Queen of the Blues didn't fit the traditional image of a blues singer.

"She didn't party. She didn't live a wild life at all," he says. "What she did do, that was so much the essence of the blues, is that she sang directly from the soul."

Taylor also appeared in film and on television, and she more than held her own in the male-dominated blues industry, sharing the stage with other major blues stars such as Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf and Buddy Guy. Iglauer says Taylor knew she had to be tough, and she absolutely ruled her band.

"She would stomp out the beat with her right foot and, boy, the drummer better play Koko's beat," Iglauer says. "When she told them to bring it down, they better bring it down to a whisper. Because she was determined that she was going to make it and that nobody was going to say, 'Well, she's good — for a woman.' "

During her 40-plus-year career, the woman who could blast songs like a hurricane from her lungs won a plethora of awards, including a Grammy in 1984. She was inducted into the Blues' Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1997. Last month, Taylor was named Traditional Blues Artist of the Year at the Blues Music Awards in Memphis.

The Mighty Queens... on Off thePage

by Bill Jaker

Reading a biography, autobiography or personal memoir allows us to add someone else's life to our own.  We can follow them through the pages and share their struggles and pleasures, victories and defeats. Through autobiography we can get to know someone well, even strike up an intimate relationship with a great person, a Helen Keller, Ulysses Grant or Charlie Chaplin. 

Sometimes their cautionary tales will be so good that we learn to avoid similar mistakes. In her new memoir, "The Mighty Queens of Freeville," Amy Dickinson recounts the stresses and analyzes the forces that took her through marriage, divorce and raising a daughter as a single mother -- all experiences common in our society.  

During her marriage she lived in London, and later moved to Washington, DC with daughter Emily.  She also worked her way through several jobs (including, at one point, receptionist and then a commentator at NPR) and went through periods of unemployment. But Amy emerges steady and victorious.  Today she writes a nationally-syndicated advice column.  She's now a regular on NPR's news quiz "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" (heard on WSKG Radio Saturdays at 11 AM) and on "Talk of the Nation" (WSQX 91.5 FM, weekdays from 2 to 4 PM).  But it's clear that she might not have landed with her feet on the ground if that ground hadn't been in the village of Freeville, NY, about fifteen minutes up the road from Ithaca.

Amy's family has lived and farmed in upstate New York since the 1790s.  The family history has lately not been easy.  "In my family," she writes, "the women tend to do the heavy lifting while the men -- well, the men are nice and fine and they love us for a time.  Then at some point, it seems that they tire of their indeterminate role in our lives, so they wage a campaign of passive resistance, and then they leave."  Her father suddenly left the family, and then in another act of abandonment sold off their herd of Holsteins.  But the women pull together.

The women of my family taught me what family is about.  They helped me pick up the pieces when my life fell apart, and we reassembled them together into something new.  They celebrated my slow recovery, witnessed my daughter's growth and development, and championed my choices.  The women in my life showed Emily and me in large and small ways that they would love us, no matter what.  They abide. 
                                                                  --from The Mighty Queens of Freeville

The wisdom and support Amy feels from the women in her family shows through in her daily column "Ask Amy" , which replaced the late and legendary Ann Landers, now appears in over 200 newspapers nationwide through the Chicago Tribune syndicate (in this area in the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin, the Ithaca Journal and the Elmira Star-Gazette).

Amy Dickinson joined Bill Jaker on OFF THE PAGE to talk about coming home again, drawing on the strength of family and sharing that with the nation. Click here to listen to the program online.