natural sounds

I recently hosted an episode of the wonderfully sublime Hearing Voices radio show. (But if you’re going to nitpick, it’s actually the rebroadcast of a special I did for Hearing Voices (pre-weekly show) back in the summer of 2007.)

Besides featuring my own favorite piece that I’ve ever done, there’s some great desert field recordings and what may be my favorite radio piece of all time, by Scott Carrier.

If you got a spare hour, I highly recommend it. You can download it by clicking here.

From the Hearing Voices website:

Hearing Voices from NPR®
066 Desert Air: Audio from the Arid Regions
Host: Ben Adair of American Public Media
Airs week of: 2009-08-05

“Desert Air” (52:00 mp3):

Hot & dry Summer stories and soundscapes (see Dave’s Deserts for photos from the American West):

Coyotes, owls, frogs and songbirds are part of Desert Solitudes, recorded by Bernie Krause and Ruth Happel in the Sonoran and Chihuauan deserts, part of New Mexico’s panhandle.

Host Ben Adair heads down to the ghost towns, Opera Houses, century-old abandoned mines, and billion-year old boulders along Death Valley’s “Mojave Road.”

Kraut-rockers Faust dial in “Long Distance Calls in the Desert,” from their album Rien.

The Quiet American (Aaron Ximm) sound-captures the forbidding warning signs rattling in a harsh wind and “Desert Sun” outside the nuclear Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas.

Back in the early 1990s, SLC producer Scott Carrier found the Basin & Range, near Nevada”s “Battle Mountain,” beautiful, lonely, dreary, and full of sagebrush, solace and stories. And more Desert Solitudes.

Joe Richman from Radio Diaries sent an email out to his list today.

Friends of Radio Diaries,

Some of you may have already heard the sad news that our friend and diarist Thembi Ngubane died a few days ago.

I’ve had a hard time finding the right words for this moment.

Thembi thought about death almost every day. Yet she was the most alive person I’ve ever met. She sometimes asked me why I chose her to do an audio diary about her life. But I feel like she chose me.

Thembi had been struggling off and on with TB. A week ago she learned that she had multi-drug resistant TB. She died Thursday night in the hospital. She was 24.

Thembi gave me, and many of us, a lesson in courage and in embracing the craziness of life – good and bad. She was brave and open about living with AIDS at a time when most South Africans were quiet about the epidemic. She thought the virus should be scared of her, rather than the other way around. She drew pictures of her virus. She talked to it in the mirror. She gave it orders.

Thembi had a short life. But it was a full one by any measure. She had a child. She found a soul mate in her longtime boyfriend, Melikhaya. Her story was heard by millions of people in a dozen countries and five languages. On her tour of the United States, she met Bill Clinton and then-Senator Barak Obama. She traveled to Germany and India as a Unicef ambassador. She was a contestant in an African reality TV show. In South Africa, she became a role model for young people living with HIV. She experienced the hard edges of life in ways that I still find hard to fathom.

But there are a few poignant moments that will never make it into her obituary.

I remember a high school outside of Durban where Thembi was speaking. It was radical for someone – a young person especially – to stand up in front of a crowd and say, “I have AIDS”. When she finished speaking, the students crowded around her, wanting an autograph. With no paper in sight, arms and legs were thrust forward and Thembi signed each one with her pen.

I remember when Thembi was invited to address the South African Parliament. “Accept that AIDS is here,” she told the country’s leaders. But life is a mix of cosmic and mundane. The next day, Thembi was back to her normal life: standing in line at the clinic for antiretroviral drugs, caring for her baby, and hoping for a job.

By now, we are all so familiar with the statistics. More than 5000 people die every day from AIDS. Somehow, it never seemed Thembi would be one of them. Thembi embodied great ambition to be heard and seen. She thought it was important to speak out against stigma and discrimination. But she was also motivated by fear: she didn’t want to be anonymous… or forgotten.

Thembi we heard you.

And we miss you.

Joe Richman
Radio Diaries

We put together a remembrance that aired on NPR. You can listen on our website: http://www.radiodiaries.org

“Seeing people who were losing hope, who were on the death road, made me realize that there is no time to waste. People needed to be aware. I felt like maybe some of the way AIDS has been portrayed hasn’t helped them. Maybe people don’t feel the messages, maybe they don’t hear them. Maybe people
need someone they can relate to, someone who is just like them, to spell it out to them. I felt like I owed it to everyone to just be heard.”

- Thembi Ngubane

We will be remembering and honoring Thembi’s life at her funeral in South Africa this Saturday.

If you would like to make a contribution in her honor, please consider a donation to:

The Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa. They have been tireless advocates for treatment for all and Thembi was a member.

Doctors Without Borders/MSF. They launched a pilot program in 2004 to distribute Anti-Retroviral drugs (ARVs) in Thembi’s township, Khayelitshia. The program directly impacted Thembi’s life. Through MSF, Thembi was able to get the right treatment at a time when the South African government was doing very little.

Thembi leaves behind her four-year old daughter, Onwabo. Many of you contributed in the past to Thembi’s family, helping them to purchase their own house in the township. Radio Diaries is setting up a fund to help with the continuing care of Onwabo. To contribute, please follow this link:
Thembi’s AIDS Diary Fund.

Photographs by Thembi’s boyfriend, Melikhaya Mpumela.

I’ve just posted my New Year’s 2009 mix tape to the podcast page. Please do take a moment to check it out!

You can subscribe to the podcast here.

And while my 2009 has already been pretty darn crazy, I wish you all the best — love, growth, renewal and rewards.

PS: if you’d like a CD, please send me your address through the about page.

Barrett Golding recently reminded me of an old public radio favorite of mine, the venerable, mercurial Carmen Delzell, who seems to subsist in places where everybody thrives … and thrive in places where everyone around her is only subsisting.

Carmen’s the type of person you used to hear a lot from on public radio, right in the middle of shows like All Things Considered (back when people like Joe Frank used to host, I guess), but  now appears only on the rare one-off special (like the excellent Stories from the Heart of the Land) and some very occasional appearances on This American Life.

Producer-extraordinaire Jay Allison included her in his Life Stories series, a few of which ended up on The Savvy Traveler, a show I edited and produced way back when, as “postcards” Carmen sent to program host Rudy Maxa. It was a conceit that never really worked for the show — Carmen’s melancholic way of life never meshed with Rudy’s “up and at ‘em” attitude and the show’s consumer-oriented focus.

But I sure liked them.

This story, in particular, called “Carmen’s Boyfriend,” with its slow, minor-key guitar, and its slow, minor-key pacing and delivery steals the romance from travel and replaces it with a mournful longing that, I think, more than a few of us feel.

This is great, I told myself, as I wandered through the market pretending not to look for him. “Who needs him,” I’d say as I peeked into the cantinas where no women are allowed, but I knew he’d sold his guitar and wasn’t playing anymore. I even drove to the Red Cross homeless shelter to see if he might be there.

But then the brakes went out of my Isuzu and I demolished the small aluminum car in front of me. Since I had no Mexican insurance I had to leave my car as collateral until I paid the damages.

Suddenly I felt very far from home.

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I saw Carmen a few years later.

She was passing through LA on her way back to Mexico from India. Some flashy gentlemen she’d met had paid her way and she turned the trip into a money-making business expedition. Her trunk was full of silk saris, bangles and earrings she was going to sell in flea markets all along the US-Mexico border.

I wish I could remember more of what we talked about then. It was the last time I ever spoke with her.

(Thanks to Jay, for letting me repost the piece, which, he’d like to add, was made possible by the Open Studio Project with funding from the Corportation for Public Broadcasting.)