Speechification

I’m a little late with this, but things pertaining to Sir Arthur C. Clarke tend to have a timeless quality. Just after his recent death, ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live show re-broadcast an interview with Clarke from 2001. It’s a gentle listen, as host Philip Adams carefully and respectfully coaxes memories out of Clarke - on such matters as working with Stanley Kubrick, science and religion, marriage, writing, pondering death and satellites, and so on. We also discover that 2001 is one of the Pope’s favourite movies. All of this quietly and humbly revealed in Clarke’s warm Somerset burr, still detectable over a crackly line from Sri Lanka to Sydney.

Late Night Live: Arthur C. Clarke [mp3]

Another episode of The Night Air blows into town, with a breezy little two-parter. The first part is collage-based, with some lovely tunes, but the second part is something else again, featuring some quite extraordinary recordings from Cyclone Tracy that hit Australia at Christmas 1974, devastating the city of Darwin. The sound is quite fearsome. Then the a deadly silence, punctuated by reports of the surreal visions that follow such events. Then the faintly comical attempts to reassure the “general populace” by broadcasting English-sounding types over ABC radio. That may not have helped as much as they hoped. You’ll also wonder what a ‘willy willy’ is.

The Night Air: Windy [mp3]

Apologies for my second, er, challenging listen in succession, but this is a stunning, moving bit of radio. You know you’re in for a harrowing time when Arvo Pärt’s Fratres is playing during the intro …

000 is Australian for 999 or 911, and this is a documentary about calls to 000 in Melbourne. A simple enough description, but as with Don’t Hang Up, the drama suspended between two sides of a phone call can be compelling and fearful. In an emergency situation, though, this suspension is so precarious and fragile that you almost catch your breath hoping for the connection to be retained, for the static to clear, for the mobile signal to remain strong, for the other person to answer …

As the show’s synopsis notes, it’s a psychological portrait of Melbourne as well as of the astonishingly together teams that handle the calls. It’s the sound of life - chaotic, visceral, raw - and I suspect this programme will stop you in your tracks.

Radio Eye: 000 Ambulance (mp3)

Australia is increasingly seeing itself as an Asian country, switching focus from the US and UK to the giant markets on its (extremely large) doorstep. This is certainly a good thing, enabling a rich cultural exchange (as well as untold riches in trade too of course). Yet it can sometimes be an uncomfortable relationship, and this programme is sometimes an uncomfortable listen accordingly. It concerns the contemporary so-called ‘yellow fever’; or rather the nature of white Australian men who are persistently drawn towards ‘Asian women’. Some of the attitudes on display here are more neanderthal than oriental, you have been warned.

Masako Fukui, the producer and narrator, bravely puts herself in the frame too, wondering if she might even be part of the problem, but also “fearful that there won’t be much left of me … if I rid myself of my exotic identity.”

It’s not necessarily the most academic investigation of a slice of psychology that could either be fathoms deep or impossibly shallow, yet it’s a frank, sometimes funny, exploration of a particularly awkward genre in human relationships.

(Oh, and the ABC are syndicating the exemplary and moving Don’t Hang Up, as you’ll hear on the end. Remember, you heard it first(-ish) at Speechification. Don’t touch that dial etc and so forth.)

Radio Eye: The Madame Butterfly Effect (mp3)

Presented by Natasha Mitchell, All In The Mind is ABC Radio National’s weekly psychology programme (or, “the mind, brain and behaviour”), and is always worth a listen. This particular episode featured an interview with Jonah Lehrer, who wrote last year’s popular science bestseller Proust was a Neuroscientist. The book essentially argues that certain artists and writers anticipated some of the great discoveries about the mind and brain that took place in the early 20th century. Lehrer - something of an over-achiever himself, and editor-at-large for SEED magazine - looks at the work of Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Auguste Escoffier, Gertrude Stein, and Paul Cezanne, and what, with a bit of imagination, they might have foretold about perception, representation, memory and the nature of the psyche. It’s a fascinating discussion.

(And though Proust was in no way a neuroscientist, of course, his implicit understanding of the power of smell and taste recalls the 2007 Boyer Lectures we blogged about here, featuring Prof. Graeme Clark’s work on contemporary understanding of the senses. Oh, and All In The Mind also has its own blog, where Mitchell wrote about this episode.)

All In The Mind: Proust was a Neuroscientist (mp3)

The Night Air can be a frustrating little programme. Sometimes too clever for its own good, the echoed, layered montage approach can lead to rapidly diminishing results. However, it’s experimental radio on the mainstream channel of a national broadcaster, so deserves to be on a loose leash. And this little show, on the world’s railways - something of a current obsession - is pretty good, with some lovely atmospheric moments … and some just plain silly. Personally, I can’t condone the slightly sniffy attitude to the greatest train service in the world, the Shinkansen, but it rather nicely covers many of the world’s other great train networks, with a sly Aussie irreverence crossed with a good solid dose of Kraftwerk.

ABC Radio National: The Night Air: Loco (mp3)

A typically classy Studio 360 programme, in their ‘American Icons’ series, about a building and a man, but a whole lot more - the Lincoln Memorial, and Abraham Lincoln, but also America itself. Highlights? A scratchy recording of Frank Lloyd Wright not exactly sparing the rod when describing the memorial, the moving recollections of Dr. King’s justly legendary speech and Marion Anderson’s less well known but almost equally significant performance, and the music includes phrases from one of my favourite pieces, Aaron Copland’s ‘Billy the Kid’.

Studio 360: American Icons: The Lincoln Memorial (mp3)

You wouldn’t expect much direct connection between South Australia and Finland perhaps, save the odd bit of migration. Yet this edition of Hindsight tells tall tales of the tall ships that sailed between the top and bottom of the world (or vice versa, depending on your point of view.) The ‘windjammers’ carried grain from Cape Victoria up to the Aland Islands and to keep the journey economically viable, they raced via Cape Horn, perhaps the most dangerous waterway in the world.

Running as late as 1949, when steam ships finally took over, the tall sailing ships were manned by young Australians often with little or no experience of sailing at all, never mind racing up and down such a precarious route. So lash yourself to the mast and hold tight for memories of majestic ships heaving through giant waves in freezing seas, and some pig blood pancakes.

Hindsight: The Cape Horners (mp3)

An absolutely fascinating piece, this. Scary, but fascinating. And leaves you wondering quite why it feels scary (I think I know).

Professor Julian Savulescu, an eminent ethicist at Oxford University, on why it might benefit society as a whole to allow genetic modification and enhancement of humans. Simplifying, his arguments are relatively straightforward: ignoring the fact that we already enhance - via ritalin, say, or even coffee and alcohol - if we could genuinely and safely improve IQ, behaviour, even morality through tweaking genetics and pharmacology, shouldn’t we do that? The impact on everything, from architecture to sport to law to relationships, is barely capable of being comprehended - at least, without the sharpener of modafanil and Ritalin that US airforce pilots use when flying over Iraq.

The image I’m left with, however, is that of a rabbit that had a fluorescent gene from a jellyfish transferred into it. Perfectly safely, apparently. Thus, a fluorescent rabbit, and Savulescu points out that there’s no reason we couldn’t make a fluorescent human right now, the same way. At least they’d have each other.

Background Briefing: Stronger, smarter, nicer humans (mp3)

The ‘Summer Season’ on ABC Radio National - for it is summer down here below the equator, hello! - essentially means a chance to repeat a load of old shows while everybody goes on holiday. Which is fine by me. This show’s had a little bit more effort applied, though. They’re lovingly compiled finds from deep, deep in the archive.

‘Scope’ was a magazine show, running from 1958 to early 1976, “under the guidance of ‘frequently-dishevelled, wild-eyed’ producer, Donald Ingram-Smith” it says here. Each week tackled a particular theme, and rather delightfully this show from 1967 focused on ‘Communication’ itself. Stand by for lots of rapid-fire cut-up fragments, talk of Telstar, the bleep-bloop of barely digital computers, and some great, groovy library music. These semi-nostalgic ‘reviews’ are set up by one of the show’s original presenters, Barry Anthony, who has an absolutely corking radio voice (here, simply drenched in reverb for maximum effect). Honestly, it’s so dated that you wander whether it is in fact some kind of elaborate hoax. Let’s assume it isn’t. It both serves as self-parody and is good value either way.

The Night Air: Reviewing Scope: Communication (mp3)