“We’ve separated the idea of vocation from the fullness of life, and narrowed it to career. This impoverishes women and men.”
~Krista Tippett. Wisdom seeps out of Krista — even through her Twitter feed.
(Photo by Chris JL / Flickr, cc by-nc-nd 2.0)
The response to this week’s show with Seth Godin has been overwhelming. And, we’re finding that a lot of folks are listening to the unedited interview right after they finish listening to the produced podcast. So why wouldn’t I offer it up to our Tumblr friends to reblog/download/share!
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Never Give Up Doing What You Love
by Karen Albert, guest contributor
This is my dad’s canola field. At 82 he is doing what he loves, taking pride in growing healthy bountiful crops.
All his life he worked a demanding full-time job and farmed at the same time. He is retired from his job now, and some people say he should give up farming too. I say what does age have to do with it? Never quit doing what you love.
Jacqueline Novogratz’s Favorite Teachers
Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer
In response to Krista’s interview with Mike Rose, many people shared stories of teachers who noticed a talent or interest and encouraged their students to develop it in ways that opened up doors of possibility. Likewise, Jacqueline Novogratz, an upcoming guest on SOF, tells stories about three of her most influential teachers on My Teacher My Hero.
Novogratz runs the Acumen Fund — a philanthropic venture capital fund that invests in scalable entrepreneurial businesses in developing countries. Krista’s interview with Novogratz will serve as the next installment in our evolving “Ethics of Aid” series. We had our pre-edit listen yesterday and are planning to put the show on the air in late January, so stay tuned.
I look back at the fork in my road and often wonder if I should have, could have, taken the vocational, farming route. But, at the time, nobody valued that route. Everyone valued ‘education.’
— Michael Sanchez, a chemical engineer living in upstate New York who grew up on a farm in east Texas, in his lovely reflection on “The Meaning of Intelligence.”
Trent Gilliss, online editor
Collecting Sound in a Dining Car
Chris Heagle, producer/technical director
As we listened to the rough version of this week’s show with Mike Rose, the idea came up to drop one of the readings, which describes working in a restaurant from the server’s point of view and what it takes to be a good waitress. Sure, the reading was evocative, but we realized that since Mike spoke with such detail in our interview about his mother’s waitressing career, we might have the makings for a little sound montage. What would happen if we cut his descriptions up a bit and added some found sound of a working diner to layer in?
Fortunately for us, our studios are located two blocks from a classic American diner: Mickey’s Dining Car. A last-minute lunch was arranged and we were off to get chocolate malts and collect sounds.
When I am out looking for ambient sound for a piece, I try to think in layers, much in the same way a composer would approach a blank sheet of staff paper, and I get as many elements as possible. I know I’m going to need a foundation, something to provide continuity and serve as a base on which to add accents.
In this case, it was simply burgers frying and the din of (hopefully) unintelligible conversations. Short sections of this audio were looped to establish a steady, continuous sense of the location. With that layer in place, I added our interview clips and searched for accents from the location recording that could help support his points — things our waitress said, plates clattering, or the the ringing of the old-time cash register.
All of this seemed to work fairly well, but we also needed a bridge to take us in and out of that location. The solution came from my music choice for the original reading — the fifth movement from Bach’s Partita No. 5. Weaving in this music helped create the sense of a dance and melded well with Mike Rose’s descriptions, which, to me, really illustrated the marriage of precision and creativity that is present in those who excel at restaurant service.
+ LISTEN (here is a bit of the raw audio I recorded at Mickey’s Diner)
+ LISTEN (and here is the finished piece from the show).
