Kenyon Gradert To Discuss Midwest Culture On NPR This Morning -- Join The Conversation!

Photograph by Robert Josiah Bingaman; via fly over art tumblr

This morning from 11 to noon Central Time, Kenyon Gradert will appear on the NPR program Saint Louis on the Air to discuss Midwest culture. Also joining host Don Marsh: Mike Draper of the extraordinary art/clothing store RAYGUN. He recently published The Midwest: God's Gift To Planet Earth. It's going to be lively and wide-ranging discussion.

If folks have questions for these guests, they can call (314) 382-TALK (8255) or send an email to talk@stlpublicradio.org.

Kenny would love to hear the questions and comments of Art of the Rural readers -- those within the Midwest and beyond. As his Course on Midwest Culture pieces suggest, this region has a particular rural ethos, and a unique rural-urban connection, that will make for an illuminating conversation this morning.

Making Connections: Community Radio In Appalachia

Making Connections reporter Sylvia Ryerson

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

This week from the Rural Arts and Culture Map, we bring a story that's floated to us on the airwaves from atop Mayking Peak in Letcher County, Kentucky: a service of Appalshop, WMMT is a radio station broadcasting a wide range of music and news throughout communities in Central Appalachia. The writing of this piece, for instance, is being fueled by volunteer DJ Old Red's early bluegrass and country show, "First Generation Bluegrass." 

One WMMT program, Making Connections: Diversifying our Future shares with its listeners stories and commentary promoting a self-sufficient, multifaceted Appalachia. Making Connections has been posting PlacesStories updates since 2010, giving voice to regional agriculturalists, artists and policy workers and exemplifying just what a group can do with the digital mapping tool. From the "About Us" website:

While coal mining will play a role in the central Appalachian economy for many years to come, the industry continues to mechanize creating a dramatic drop in jobs – it currently represents less than 2% of employment. Analysts also project that recoverable coal reserves in the region could run out in 20 years.

Now is the time to develop a more diversified and sustainable regional economy that supports the current generation of coal miners while creating new jobs in new fields. We have no shortage of strengths to build upon, including our rich cultural traditions, unparalleled natural landscape and strong sense of family and community. To move forward we must honor our past while focusing on a future that provides healthy and productive lives for our children and grandchildren.

 

Making Connections' coverage frequently highlights Appalachia's especially high rates of residents without high-speed Internet; a recent audio story entitled "Like A Car Sittin' on Bricks – Broadband in Appalachia" was created by Sylvia Ryerson and Mimi Pickering to further examine the problem. Reads the description:

The Federal Communications Commission's Eighth Broadband Progress Report finds approx. 19 million Americans, mostly rural, lack access to high-speed Internet. In Central Appalachia the digital divide is stark: in West Virginia's McDowell and Mingo Counties, upwards of three-quarters of the population do not have access; in East Kentucky over 50% in Leslie and Breathitt Counties are without it. So why is it so hard to get a good connection in the mountains? What will this mean for the future of our communities? And what can we do to change this situation?

 
An essential part of the answer is that, as with many disputes over political policy, there is significant disagreement between the haves and have-nots in a thing's true worth or function. In this case, access to high-speed Internet is still largely regarded by those who have it as an earned luxury, our heavy reliance on it an addiction by which we're jokingly embarrassed. But as Ms. Ryerson points out, quality Internet service is a vital utility of everyday information dispersal, not a superfluous iPhone app, whether combed for a student's homework assignment or used to relay local safety concerns.

As artists who try to push against traditional, institutionalized limitations on accessibility, education, and diversity of art, and who place our critiques, our manifestoes, and our subversive work onto the Web, "Like A Car Sittin' on Bricks" hits home and keeps this important issue on the table. We highly encourage readers to listen to Ms. Ryerson's reporting (if you are able), and to then expand on this conversation in your own communities. Please also explore Making Connections' other PlaceStories installments, as many fine productions come from these folks.

Weekly Feed: American Indian Heritage Month, Cross-Cultural Film, Preservation & Sustainability

Bruno Nanguka in Radio Tanzania's archives; Jonathan Kalan, NPR

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

• November is the 22nd annual American Indian Heritage Month! Follow Smithsonian Education to keep apprised of events and articles. Begin your celebration with "Deer Dance Song (medley)" from the 1965 Smithsonian Folkways album "Music of the Pawnee."

• Last week, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson declared the city "America's Farm-to-Work Capital," kicking off a campaign celebrating Sacramento's vibrant restaurant culture and the bounty of the surrounding farms and agriculturalists. "The mayor and others said their general goal is to brand Sacramento as a food capital the way Austin, Texas is known for its live music scene and annual Austin City Limits Music Festival," writes Ryan Lillis in The Sacramento Bee. 

• The Life of a Language, a documentary short directed by Paul Donatelli, is one of many new films screening at the American Indian Film Institute 2012 Film Festival:

• "Wendell Berry, the farmer/writer from Kentucky, is perhaps our nation's best-known advocate for small and mid-sized farms. In a recent lecture, Berry talked about how our rural landscapes have often been replaced 'with a heartless and sickening ugliness.' He offered what is needed to counter that ugliness: Affection." Here's the full op-ed written by Practical Farmers of Iowa Executive Director Teresa Opheim.

• PBS recently aired Rafea: Solar Mama, "a documentary funded by Sundance's Documentary Film Program and The Skoll Foundation's Stories of Change. This film is one of the first honored by the Hilton Worldwide LightStay Sustainability Award, an award created to acknowledge documentaries that showcase the connections between sustainability, economic growth and community development."

Brooke Shelby Biggs of the Independent Lens Blog discussed the making of Solar Mamas with producer Mette Heide; find the interview here.

• As the election loomed, Ray Ring of High Country News looked at the impact of the Latino/a electorate in the West: "When Sen. Jon.Kyl, R-Ariz., announced his retirement in 2011, pundits predicted the GOP would easily hold the seat this November. After all, Arizonans last chose a Democrat for Senate in 1988, when as The Wall Street Journal reminisced, 'gasoline cost less than 90 cents a gallon ... and stirrup pants were in.' Yet Democrat Richard Carmona – a former Surgeon General and Spanish-speaker of Peurto Rican descent – is running neck-and-neck with Tea Party Republican Jeff Flake, even though it's Carmona's first high-profile race and Flake is a six-term congressman."

• "Radio Tanzania was the country's only station from its birth in 1951 until the mid-1990s, when competing stations came on the air and state-controlled radio became irrelevant. The station's archives include poetry, drama, speeches and loads of the music now known as zillipendwa. The word translates literally to 'the ones that were loved'; a looser translation would be 'golden oldies.'" Listen to NPR's recent story about the Tanzania Heritage Project and its co-founder, Rebecca Corey of Dar es Salaam University, and the efforts to preserve some of Tanzania's most memorable sounds.

The Weekly Feed: January Twelfth

Wendell and Tanya Berry in The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater; Ralph Eugene Meatyard

• Lisa Pruitt of Legal Ruralism - an Ozark native and a law professor at UC-Davis - visited Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art on its opening day, and she contributes this reading of what the space offers, and what it might lack:

[Ada Smith of The New York Times] mentions an interesting gap in the Crystal Bridges collection--indeed an ironic one: "the almost complete lack of paintings by largely self-taught or folk artists."

This omission is especially noteworthy because rural America is so often associated with the common man, as well as with other connotations of folksy.

And, indeed, the museum is reaching out to the "common man" or--more precisely--the common child. Smith notes the museum's "ambitious education program, which will reach out to more than 80,000 elementary students in the area."

• Producers Hal Cannon and Taki Telonidis of the Western Folklife Center and the What's In A Song project recently shared this moving story about a singing group formed by friends of folklorist Barre Toelken to help him re-learn the nearly 800 songs he lost after his stroke. The piece originally aired last weekend on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, and can be heard here. 

"I used to know 800 songs," Toelken says. "I had this stroke, and I had none of these songs left in my head. None of them were left."

But, Toelken says, he soon discovered that, with a little positive reinforcement, he could remember some of the forgotten music after all.

"A little bit at a time, I realized I still had the songs in my head," he says. "So now I meet with this group of friends once a week a week, and we sing.

• Kyle Munson of The Des Moines Register is one of our favorite journalists - he covers the wide panorama of Iowa with great insight and creativity. This week he traversed the state on a "full Grassley" tour of all 99 counties, taking stock of the state of Iowa after the Republican primaries and the fallout from Stephen Bloom's article in The Atlantic. Folks can read his latest report from the road here; his Facebook page also contains extra photographs from this Midwestern Odyssey.

I’m following the shortest possible path through all 99 counties, roughly counterclockwise around the state with the start and finish line both in Des Moines. As I type this Tuesday afternoon, I’ve hit 15 counties — or about 406 out of 2,738 miles on the official GPS itinerary.

Unlike a presidential candidate, I don’t have the benefit of a hired driver, plush bus or quick-fire stump speech. It also takes time to pry introspective views from Iowans in each county with persistent questions.

But also unlike a candidate, I’m not using these 99 counties as a steppingstone. My simple goal is to glean a more precise, updated sense of the state at the start of a new year.

• In the land where the pastoral genre began over two millennia ago, young Greeks are leaving Athens and returning to the rural. Here's Rachel Donadio writing in The New York Times:

Nikos Gavalas and Alexandra Tricha, both 31 and trained as agriculturalists, were frustrated working on poorly paying, short-term contracts in Athens, where jobs are scarce and the cost of living is high. So last year, they decided to start a new project: growing edible snails for export. 

As Greece’s blighted economy plunges further into the abyss, the couple are joining with an exodus of Greeks who are fleeing to the countryside and looking to the nation’s rich rural past as a guide to the future. They acknowledge that it is a peculiar undertaking, with more manual labor than they, as college graduates, ever imagined doing. But in a country starved by austerity even as it teeters on the brink of default, it seemed as good a gamble as any. 

• We learned from The Rural Blog of Honest Appalachia, a wikileaks-inspired site working to increase transparency in Appalachia and "to assist and protect whistleblowers who wish to reveal proof of corporate and government wrongdoing to citizens throughout the region."

• The National Council For The Traditional Arts posted video to their Facebook page of Los Texmaniacs, who "combine a hefty helping of Tex Mex conjunto, simmer with several parts Texas rock, add a daring dash of well-cured blues, and R&B riffs," as these musicians describe their unique groove:

• The Big Read Blog offers some links to consider the presence of immigrants in Willa Cather's My Ántonia:

When Cather published My Ántonia in 1918, the book was a major departure from the literary trends of the day. She not only strayed from the urban settings and themes that were fashionable at the time, but her characters were also new to contemporary American fiction—they were common folks and, even rarer for the time, many of them were immigrants, all presented with genuine dignity.

The links above include an audio guide and documentary that also features the perspective of the real-life Ántonia's granddaughter.

• If you are currently digging out from the first winter snow of the year, then Sara Jenkins's article in The Atlantic on the art of picking olives in an Etruscan hill town will be a welcome respite. On the subject of rural-international terroir, folks may be interested in Extra Virginity, a new non-fiction book on the history, culture, and industrialization of olive oil by Tom Mueller. NPR's Fresh Air sat down for a fascinating conversation with him in November; a trailer for the book project is included below:

• The header image for this Weekly Feed comes from Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972), a prolific photographer born who was born in Normal, Illinois but spent the majority of his life in Lexington Kentucky. He worked as an optician during the week, but, when the weekend came, Mr. Meatyard produced some of the most singular photography of the last century: intimate, irreverent, and at times terrifying. 

The artist collaborated with many members of that era's extraordinary arts scene in Kentucky - folks such as Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, and Guy Davenport. Much of his photography used the abandoned homes and farms as settings, and Mr. Meatyard also collaborated with Mr. Berry on The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge. 

After news of a cancer diagnosis, the photographer devoted the remainder of his days to The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, which featured his children and his friends wearing plastic masks and posing in normal situations. Though the idea of such a series might sound bizarre, the totality of this project offers a moving meditation on friendship, family, and mortality.

Unfortunately, though Mr. Meatyard's photography is becoming more widely known, no central site yet exists in which to discover the breadth of his work. The International Center for Photography housed and exhibition in 2004 that offers the best resources yet - and a little research here, as well as a Google image search, will reveal startling results.

Standing Up For Local Radio And Local Culture

photograph by Kelly Kress of Learn NC

Yesterday afternoon NPR's All Things Considered presented a feature on "The Merry-Go-Round," a weekly live music show broadcast out of Mount Airy, North Carolina on WPAQ radio. "The Merry -Go-Round" has been their Saturday morning staple since the station first went on the air in 1948; in fact, the station has remained true to founder Ralph Epperson's original mission, despite its place in an era where radio is increasingly pushed to follow homogeneous programming standards. Here's how WPAQ describes its relationship the community:

Fortunately for his friends and neighbors, Ralph Epperson believed in individualism and he had a mission in mind:  to serve his community.  In his application to the Federal Communications Commission, the young man pledged to reflect the cultural and musical values of the people in his station’s listening area.  He said he would present local talent, and he made good on that promise from the start.  Unlike many other station owners, however, Epperson largely stuck to his mission over the next six decades.  Live music by local musicians is still presented each Saturday on WPAQ’s Merry-Go-Round program.  Epperson himself hosted another program, the Blue Ridge Spotlight, on Saturday afternoons, on which he presented early recordings from the WPAQ archives and other recordings of area musicians and WPAQ’s weekly play lists are peppered with recordings of local musicians.  Preachers still hold forth on weekday mornings and nearly all day Sunday.  Announcers read the obituaries at least three times a day, and the Pet Patrol helps listeners get back together with wandering critters from blue tick hounds to hogs and heifers.  The music lurches from old time and bluegrass to easy listening after the evening news.  Ralph Epperson explained his philosophy to reporter Michelle Johnson of WFDD this way as she prepared a story about WPAQ for National Public Radio: “If people are doing the same thing in 25 places up and down the radio dial, why should I be number 26?”

If "The Merry-Go-Round" stands as one of the last live (and local) music shows on radio, at least in the old-time genre, then it is as much a testament to how Pete Seeger's belief in technology's ability to sustain traditional music can exist even after the culturally-deadening effects of the Telecommunications Act of 1996--the legislation that, with the sweep of President Clinton's pen, removed regulatory protections for local broadcasting outlets. 

However, we can now hear WPAQ live online from any location in the country, with unfettered availability as long as Net Neutrality is not a concept that meets an end similar to many small-market broadcasting outlets after 1996. In many ways, what the story of WPAQ presents to us is how such seemingly distant regulatory issues are rural issues, and how they can forcefully alter the contours of the rural arts. Listening to WPAQ, hundreds of miles from Mount Airy, it's hard not to be moved, to feel the need to work in our own finite and individual ways to spread the word about Net Neutrality--and to protect our access to treasures like WPAQ and "The Merry-Go-Round."

What other local radio stations are our readers listening to, either on the radio or on the internet? Feel free to drop us a line or comment on our Facebook page; we would love to follow up with more features on these stations, and to add them to our Rural Arts Map.  

Also, many thanks to Lisa from Legal Ruralism for alerting us to the NPR feature.

Coming of Age in Rural America, Without Health Care

I don't think any position I'm going to get out of college will come with health insurance. I don't know a single friend from college who has a job like that. A sick workforce only intensifies an already sick economy. It's hard to work when you can't afford eyeglasses for your astigmatism, dental work for your rotting teeth, or medicine for pneumonia. We're constantly being told we are the future of the country, but we're starting out a step behind.

As Congress continues to craft health care legislation, and the ideological arguments and talking points persist everywhere from the cable networks down to the local coffee shop, I think that we would be well-advised to hear this essay by Brittany Hunsaker recently broadcast on NPR.

The piece was produced by Ms. Hunsaker (in conjunction with Youth Radio) while she was interning at The Appalacian Media Institute, an organization in partnership with Appalshop that gives young people the opportunity "to use video cameras and audio equipment to document the unique traditions and complex issues of their mountain communities." The AMI site offers visitors a number of videos and audio pieces on a diverse range of subjects.

A Minnesota Minute and Carl Gawboy

image by Carl Gawboy

The Blandin Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting rural Minnesota, created a series of one-minute television spots last year to commemorate the state's 150th birthday and to celebrate its natural history. These pieces were produced in conjunction with The Bell Museum of Natural History and ran on local television stations during the prime-time viewing hours. The Minnesota Minute series was recently recognized with a regional Emmy Award.

These two organizations sponsor this site for the series, from which all 13 Minutes can be viewed and enjoyed. Below, Minnesota Minute features Carl Gawboy, a painter and a member of the Bois Fort Band of the Minnesota Ojibwe.

The excellent Minnesota Artists site offers both a slideshow and an interview with Mr. Gawboy. Here's interviewer Suzanne Szucs introducing the artist:

And then there’s Carl Gawboy. Son of a Finnish mother and Ojibwe father (his parents fell in love over books), Gawboy grew up the youngest of 8 children in Ely where his mother inherited a farm. Trilingual in his youth (English, Finnish, Ojibwe) Gawboy began to draw before he could walk and knew he wanted to be a professional artist when he was four. His upbringing was “rural and woodsy” although he went to a “modern” school where he studied “interesting” things. An epiphany came when harvesting rice – “it was as interesting as it gets and my most Indian of experiences.” He decided his work needed to use his own experiences to tell the stories of his heritage. His images would emphasize the everyday experiences of Indians, not dwell upon romantic notions of an idealized people.

“Everything that I paint I actually did or saw… sometimes what I’ll do is move it back in time. It’s something that I have a part in or would try to do it so that I would know what it was like. These things [like getting together a group of students to make a birch bark canoe] gave me insights that I don’t think other people got. My work shows the culture and landscape of the region.”

Minnesota Public Radio also offers in its Voices of Minnesota series a visit with Carl Gawboy and Helen Blue-Redner, the former chairwoman of the Upper Sioux Community.