Vocalo

A mellow piece about those moments when a smell or taste or sound floods back memories. The smell of onions frying takes me back to a moment of family belonging... but also a moment when independence and adulthood was just around the corner...

I keep coming back to Jack Kerouac for inspiration.

He was kind of a Buddha for the Beat Generation (except that he, uh, drank himself to death at an early age... oops). He cultivated both spontaneity and craft. He became an icon to thousands of kids with road fever but could have equally been a role model for the serious pursuit of any skill (his pile of notebooks, his endless revisions) -- except for the, uh, methamphetamine part).

Here is the text of his Belief & Technique for Modern Prose: 

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Is it ever too early to start thinking about St. Patrick's Day?

I always thought "I've Been Floating Down The Old Green River" was an Irish song. Turns out it isn't, although it possesses a certain Irish, uh, spirit.

Anyway, my dad sang us to sleep at night with his "Irish" songs like this, so even if it's more Tin Pan Alley than Galway Bay, it's part of me being the lucky charmer am I today.

I continue to experiment with story, voice, and background sound.

This little piece looks closely at a rug from Afghanistan -- a strange relic from an earlier war. Things that make you go "hmmm."

For more information on these rugs, I posted some links here.

Oh, gosh. A walk on my dark side.

I guess it's good to have parents around who can actually pull you from the pit of wickedness.

1955 saw the birth of the Civil Rights Movement and the beginning of school desegregation. They were unsafe and worrisome times, especially in big cities like St. Louis, where white neighborhoods experienced an influx of poor rural black folks.

his short-short story recounts a single moment in time. Valentine's Day, 1955. My mother had given me valentines only for the white children in my class and, at the age of seven, I faced the terrible dilemma of what to do when a girl with a brown face reached out to get a card from me. Obey my mother or be kind to another child? In movies and books, children are often portrayed as wiser than adults. But in real life children are little mirrors of their parents, who in turn are often only playing out the larger issues of their society. It was a cruel moment.

n animated version was screened at the 2003 United Nations Association Film Festival at Stanford University and Monterrey CA. The radio version has been aired in stations across the country, in Ireland, and the Philippines. It is useful for starting conversations.

The rumors had swirled around the family for years. But here, finally, in the archives of the 22nd Precinct, were the facts about Moses R. Flanagan.

This is a true story -- or at least a genuine memory. I don't think there's a "message" here -- it seems to be about the things that swirl around us in childhood that we don't get. And the stories we pull together from our memories once we know the ending.

It was originally designed to start a conversation about gender issues.

After some feedback, I revised it 2/20/08 from the fake dialogue I started out with (me doing both voices) to this more straightforward monologue. I enjoy experimenting. The crows are from my neighborhood.

The "Respectacle" sound project was prepared for the ShortDocs event of Chicago's Third Coast Festival, 2006. It is in mockumentary style: children in a behavior program speak up about respect, against the metaphorical soundscape of the Institution.

There is often a difference between what we assert and what we experience in the world around us — what we teach children and what they really hear.

The children's voices in the production posted here are genuine — full of hope despite their histories of "disrespect" — and were recorded as part of another project. Their voices contrast with a simulated institutional background — chaotic, ironic — a metaphor for the clash of innocence and dismay.

Third Coast's "99 Ways to Tell a Story" was an experiment in documentary radio style and execution inspired by the French literary group Oulipo, in which constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration. The constraints: (1) Produce a piece that starts: "To begin with, they never got along." (2) Incorporate 3 specific sounds (pre-recorded voice, a rhythmic noise, an exclamation). (3) Limit to 2 min 30 seconds.