Trend/Countertrend

I'm writing tonight from the 34th floor of the Seattle Crowne Plaza, with a gorgeous nightlit view of the Space Needle and the harbor, so a certain Olympian perspective can be expected, I suppose. NPR station KPLU is providing the inspirational jazz, and the Integrated Media Association is providing the food for thought in its annual examination of the state of the online art. The morning's keyote sessions provided a disturbingly dystopian view of the media future, characterized by crumbling support models, diminishing attention span, abandonment of locality, fragmentation of audience, and a voracious appetite for all the information, all the time, everywhere. The future of public conversation, some say, will look more like Times Square, and less like the campfire.

But as the mainline trend in media leaves behind the communities people actually inhabit, to serve the notional communities of our desires, it creates a growing opportunity for public broadcasting to serve within the vacuum created when the spotlight of mass attention moves elsewhere. Our communities of residence retain the needs they have always had, for the information they need in order to function as citizens of a particular locale, for the cultural space that distinguishes one place from another. Our society has never needed to invest in the most popular forms of media--they always find a path to the deep part of the revenue stream--but we often find we have to invest in the most useful forms of media, those that serve to define and inform the institutions that enrich community life. Public broadcasting finds itself at another of the choosing points in its history--whether to follow the trend, or to help create the countertrend.

That's Good Eatin' Two

My mother came from the Susquehannah Valley in northern Pennsylvania, where the woods and farmlands hosted numerous hickory trees. No visit south in my childhood was complete without a brown paper bag full of hickory nuts to take back home. As the youngest and hungriest, it was my job to crack the small and fiendishly hard nuts and extract the tiny but savory meats for family baking. Two hours with a hammer and a nut pick on the back porch would yield enough for a cake, so long as I didn't eat them as fast as I cracked them. The usual recipe was a chocolate layer cake with hickory nut filling between the layers, and peanut butter frosting decorated with the few nut halves that came out of the shell intact. My old friend Allie, hearing of my weakness for the nut, went on a cracking expedition of his own, and yesterday delivered a hickory nut and raisin bar that tasted exactly like July 1959. Bless you Allie.

FYI: Last week's call-out for signature North Country dishes netted some toothsome results. Check out the recipes and comments.

A Grand and Hooty Opening

If you're a fan of Chinese revolutionary ballet, or whatever it is that 50,000 North Korean schoolgirls do with flags and scarfs in that enormous square in Pyongyang, the opening ceremony of the winter games was a special treat. The theme of passion was introduced by a percheron-shaped man in red rubber pounding flames out of Vulcan's forge with a giant hammer. Fire shot out of the heads of speed skaters, an apparent tribute to everyone who died immediately after saying, "Hey, watch this!" A spendiferous tribute to the Alps featured ice dancers in cow-dappled livery, creepy tree-people, Europe's entire supply of lederhosen, and a bunch of guys smoking something from 20-foot-long pipes. The Italian flag was raised by men inexplicably dressed in costumes borrowed from The Nutcracker Suite, and a very sweet nine-year-old sang the Italian anthem which, though my Italian is a little rusty, seems to contain a lyric that translates as "Why did my mom make me wear this?"

High fashion was everywhere in evidence, from the Armani-designed white tunics for the Italian Olympic veterans, which made them look like the Council of the Wise from a 1950s Sci-Fi thriller, to the floor-length jaggedy Alp gowns of those leading in the national delegations. Since I switched over to Battlestar Gallactica somewhere in "Gs," I missed the torch-lighting and the rest. My overall impression was of Lawrence Welk on acid, mixed with Woody Allen spoofing Fellini, as reenacted by Cirque de Soleil. Wish I could have been there.

That's Good Eatin'

NCPR, like all civilized workplaces, has a functional and well-used kitchen, and like most friendly workplaces, we recognize birthdays and other milestones in collegial life. And no--email greeting cards don't count. Today, while we gathered around a Boston cream pie in celebration of Gregory's advancing decrepitude, the topic of signature regional dishes was tabled, so to speak. What's ours? French fries and gravy is just "poutine--hold the cheese." We consume everything from Mongolian buffet to Buffalo wings, but it all seems to originate somewhere else. Yet every self-respecting village in Europe has its own distinctive cheese or wine or sausage or something. How does this lack affect our claim to a distinct regional identity? Clearly, something needs to be done. The floor is open for nominations for an original signature North Country dish. Send in a recipe for a traditional candidate, or invent a new one from scratch, and tell us a little about how your dish can represent us to the world.

Big Voice, Little Voice

When some communities come together, the speaker gets to hold a stick, and say her piece, then hand the stick on. The stick makes its way around to everyone, and everyone has their say. With the anomaly in community discourse called broadcasting, the stick rarely gets passed very far. The community is divided between the few and professionally loquacious, and the silent many--to the distortion of all our relationships.

NCPR is making a bet that new media technology can help to reduce the distortion that results from the "big voice, little voice" limitations of traditional broadcasting. And that there is much that can be done within broadcasting to level out the power between those who "Got Bandwidth?" and those who don't. And that there is more that we can do as a community of media producers among our many communities of service to bring forward unheard voices, to create opportunities to have conversations that otherwise would never make it beyond the counters of diners and the front porches of small towns.

This bet will be played out over the next year or so in major changes at ncpr.org, in our broadcasts, and in our relations with and among North Country communities. The costs could be large, the opportunities to fail could be many--and kind of epic in scope. But it should be pretty interesting. Got Panic?