#radio documentary

[pastdaily]

Protest In 1968: The Young Rebels - Past Daily After Hours Reference Room

Coffee works too: https://pastdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/the-young-rebels-1968.mp3 NBC Radio – Second Sunday: The Young Rebels – 1968 – In case you forgot or weren’t around at the time, 1968 was a tumultuous year in our history. It was the year just about everything fell apart. From the war in Vietnam, to assassinations of much-loved leaders, to an entire country going out on strike.…

[dronescapesvideos]

Sgt. Arthur L. Smith, Radio Gunner of B-17 "Our Gang", Takes A Look At At The Machine Gun Before A Mission. England, 1943. ➤➤ B-17 VIDEO: https://youtu.be/F03u5GrIuk4

[bebop-station]

Shostakovich and Aziraphale

I was thinking (and talking to @balance-of-probability endlessly) about the choice to have Shostakovich's fifth symphony feature so heavily in S2 ep 1, and how it struck me as a little odd as there are a bunch of composers Aziraphale loves mentioned in the book and Shostakovich isn't amongst them.

Backstory: In 1934, Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk premiered to huge popular acclaim, which was very briskly walked back in 1936 after the Stalinist newspaper Pravda published an article denouncing it.

Actually more than denouncing it, condemning it. It wasn’t credited but was authored by a guy called David Zaslavsky who was almost definitely scribing for Stalin himself. Lady Macbeth was banned in the USSR until 1961.

Anyway by 1936 Shostakovich had written his fourth symphony, which he withdrew from public performance until 1961 because it was more of the same thing that had made the Soviet leadership cancel Lady Macbeth – it was unconventional, anti-patriotic, and indicated that Shostakovich was a “bourgeois formalist”.

So he shelved it and started working on Symphony No. 5 which is, on the surface at least, Soviet as fuck. And that’s what we hear Aziraphale listening to in S2E1.

(Sidebar this story is told in Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time which is either a literary wank soup or a masterpiece depending on how cranky you are when you first read it)

So basically what Dmitri Shostakovich did in those years between the fourth and fifth symphonies was something that might be familiar to S2E6 enjoyers/agonisers: he decided to toe the party line.

Kind of.

Listening to the finale of the fifth symphony (and if you want to listen along it’s the recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic, it’ll be called something like Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47; iv. Allegro non troppo) without the context of the rest of the symphony or in fact Shostakovich’s life is like ah yes that’s a bit of a Soviet battle anthem let’s march into Leningrad or whatever.

But it is, as critics have increasingly understood in the years since Shostakovich demurely described it as “a Soviet artist's no-nonsense response to fair criticism”, dripping with irony. This man reviled the Stalinist line on art and life – he takes the Soviet anthem and turns it into a sort of fucked up evil clown march. The whole thing gives me this vibe:

(gif from @goodomensedit)

There’s a lot of stuff about that time in Shostakovich’s life that is extremely hard to verify. There’s a “memoir” which is for sure at least partially fabricated called Testimony in which there’s an alleged quote from our man saying that final movement is a parody, that “it's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, "Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing", and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, "Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing"."

Whether or not Shostakovich said that (some of his friends who outlived him support that reading, including Rostropovich who conducted a bunch of his work) you can definitely hear it in the piece and you can definitely see how it gives us a clue into the decision Aziraphale makes at the end of the season.

What Shostakovich had to decide back in the 1930s was whether he would a) flee to somewhere like the US, where many other artists targeted by Stalin went; b) stay and become a public nuisance, leading almost definitely to an off-the-books execution; or c) become a party-approved Soviet Artist and hope for change. Even nudge it along in a subtle way. Even get on the inside and work to bring it down. We don’t know how true that was for old mate Dmitri and we don’t yet know exactly what Aziraphale has planned. But yeah:

tl;dr: Shostakovich 🤝 Aziraphale

          Staying inside a rancid and destructive militarised culture in the hope that it can change

[musicdocs]

Meet Me in the Bathroom (2022)

[aeolianblues]

Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense, a promotional copy sent to us by Sire Records in 1984. Printed on the back are the credits and an FAQ about the live documentary: ‘Why Stop Making Sense? Why a movie? Why tour?’

Also included are notes to performers, with stills from the shows.

There are other notes too: work, travel, money, the future and space.

Life on Earth, living with other people, the space people, world travel, money, in the future, work, growing up.

[pagan-stitches]

This was fun

[frumentariae]

maybe someday someone will draw arcade like he’s actually a 35 year old nerd who is too old to be a twink and looks like he’s an evergreen doaner to PBS and listens to NPR

[sunshineandlyrics]

📻 Louis' All Of Those Voices documentary was mentioned as part of the quiz question asked by Greg James, on his BBC Radio 1 Breakfast show this morning, 10 February 2023 x

[journalsouppe]

Just like my OOT 3D I goofed up and wrote in here before taking a pic oopsies fjdkasfj;

BUTTTTT!!!!!!! JET SET RADIO FUTURE!!!!!! MY BELOVED MY CHERISHED MY BEAUTIFUL GIRLFRIEND JSRF!!!!! I grew up playing this with my childhood best friend who I'm still best friends with to this day. This game has shaped everything about me and this is still one of my all time favorite games :'). I've been meaning to play it again but no better time to get back into it than after jet set 3's announcement and bomb rush cyberfunk's release!!

Do you understand the concept of love?

[piecanl]

I have a fun qTubbo backstory idea but idk how well it would tie into pre-existing lore so bare with me.

So you guys know how the French arrived by a plane (crash)? And how Tubbo has a Special Interest in aviation? And how he's good with the create mode + has asked for the create extension which adds planes?

What if he was hired as a plane engineer for the company that had the French's plane as a part of their fleet (example: if the plane belonged to AirFrance, he'd be an AirFrance engineer).

He was a one of a kind, akin to a child prodigy, a miracle for his age (at the time maybe around 17-18), a genius. However he was the one responsible for the quality checks of the navigation tools on that specific flight. Unfortunately for him, he had missed something.

As the chicken appeared on the navigation screen, there were no verbal call outs by the system, leading to the pilot's writing it off as a stray cloud instead of an object creating a collision coarse.

This lead to one of the engines, the left engine, to collide with the chicken and cause a rapid descent. The pilots, suffering from fatigue, could not react fast enough. They made many wrong inputs, and in the end when they tried to land on a flat field, they crashed with the wall of Quesadilla island. All but 5 passengers perished in the crash.

Tubbo, after being discovered as the engineer behind the system's quality check-up, was arrested and thrown into prison, as we know it: the Ice bunker. It was a very shady prison, more akin to a testing ground/a laboratory full of lab rats than an actual prison.

The treatment of the inmates was brutal and inhumane, until they all for unknown reasons were frozen over, either as a cover-up or because they had served their purpose, it was unknown.

And with that, there lied the story of Tubbo. A previous child prodigy with a bright future to a prison inmate in a questionable prison.

(I want to mention, I know at one point the Qsmp members took on an expedition to retrieve the black box of the plane, however I cannot find a clip of that so I do not know what exactly happened in the planes cockpit. If someone has a clip or can recall what it said that would be appreciated, thank you!)

[2mello]

Had a blast doing an interview for this really well-made, feature-length Jet Set Radio Future documentary by kayisthey that's free to watch on YouTube. Check it out!

[radiokathryn-if]

Wait... opening the show was illegal? Why?

Because it started as a pirated show by a bunch of teenagers who didn't have a broadcasting licence!

[phantom-retrospective]

Future Translation & Documentary Projects

Hey guys, just touching base on the various things in the works.

I know I've way missed the original timeframe I gave for the translation of the 60s French radio drama but it is still coming, in fact it's been in a complete state for some time just waiting for me to give it a final once over before deciding on releasing it now or later. There's many reasons for this, not least of all just the way my brain tends to bounce around projects and of course being busy with work as well. But I'm going to see if we can hopefully release it in the near future.

As far as other ongoing projects, nothing that has been previously announced (and indeed, things that haven't yet been announced either...) are not cancelled, just paused. There are a few things that have just initiated that I am not ready to talk about just yet, but hopefully things move along enough that I feel comfortable doing so in the near future.

[youarcade]

JET SET RADIO FUTURE -SEGA

[aeolianblues]

I’ve only just watched the first episode of the new Taskmaster today, and the thing is, everyone’s rightfully cracking up at John’s line about the 2 hours spent working out health and safety and insurance with the producers, it’s very funny, but it genuinely took me a little while to remember how funny it is. It’s the John exposure. As a regular listener to the Elis and John radio shows over the years, you just know that this is genuinely how John is. He’ll mention—and probably even get excited to go over the nerdy details of what counts in the car insurance, I can swear he’s done that on Radio X before. He’s the guy that will do an hour long standup special concerning slotted spoons (with a side of anxiety). He’s wildly funny, but to listeners of the Elis and John shows, this is just Friday afternoon.