I just finished a video to accompany the radio profile I made on my friend Marigold during January. I filmed dozens and dozens of pairs of hands holding eggs over the past week, including the hands of Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Díaz, a 95-year old woman, and Marigold herself. Enjoy!
Marigold from Molly Bennett on Vimeo.
Photo Credit: Christopher Cousins for Bangor Daily News
This piece features Amber Lambke and Michael Scholz, who are converting the Somerset County jail building in Skowhegan, Maine into a grist mill as part of a grain-growing revival in Maine. This piece was produced for WMHB Waterville.
Read more about the grist mill and the Kneading Conference.
Photo credit: Cheryl Senter for the New York Times
Chuck Lakin is a Waterville, Maine woodworker. This is his story. This piece was produced for WMHB Waterville.
And here is a link to Chuck’s website, where you can find more information about home funerals:
http://www.lastthings.net/
Last week I posted a sound file on my school’s online forum, the Digest of Civil Discourse. My post read:
Hi there Colby,
On Tuesday evening, a small group of students got together to talk about, among other things, instances of aggression and microaggression on this campus. We made this short recording to share with the student body. Please take a listen (it’s shorter than a Kid Cudi song!) and respond if you feel compelled. Keep in mind that the voices you hear here are real students sharing real stories and emotions.
And here’s the audio piece
On Sunday, my friend Marigold and I sat in a car for half an hour and recorded a conversation. This is Marigold’s story.
Listen here, folks, if you would like to hear things I made in the past.
Last January I made audio pieces in the desert! And on a train!
http://railtalesofmolly.blogspot.com/
And here is something I made for the Third Coast Audio Festival’s annual Short Docs competition.
http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/library/783-chain-of-missing-links-3
Thus far, it seems the Daily Earful has not been quite as daily as I would have hoped. But better late than never, here is the second installment.
When I took out my voice recorder to work on the first Daily Earful piece, I noticed that I had a bunch of old audio files I had never uploaded to my computer. I listened to them and found recordings from two very different human gatherings I attended last June. The first was my younger sister’s high school graduation. The second was a most unusual barbecue.
At the beginning the summer, I visited a squatter community in southern California called Slab City. I’d been there a few times before. Slab City is only about forty miles north of the Mexican Border, so you often see the border patrol driving through the area. While a few of my friends, all year-round residents of Slab City, were grilling pork steaks, a border patrol car pulled over a would be barbecue-goer and asked to search his car. Because the border patrol pulled him over not a hundred yards from the barbecue, everyone left their grilling positions and went to investigate the scene. Residents of Slab City are famously anti-authoritarian, and they were less than gracious to the border patrol. In fact, they began yelling “Illegal search! Illegal search!” I took some audio.
I knew I wanted to use the graduation and barbecue audio for something, but I wasn’t certain what would be the best way to weave these two rather unrelated events together in sound. Eventually, I decided to make a sound collage with archival audio. I spent many hours sifting through the Prelinger Archives today, and I eventually I came up with this, a sound collage of human gatherings:
