Post by Andrew Bottomley, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This is the fifth post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

Professor Michele Hilmes is retiring at the end of this Spring semester (May 2015), after a highly distinguished career of nearly 30 years in the media studies field – more than 20 of those years spent in Antenna’s home, the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. To mark the occasion, a few of her students and colleagues at UW-Madison put together this radio documentary/podcast in her honor. After all, what better way to celebrate Michele than with the very medium she has spent so much of her career investigating and championing?

Written, Produced, and Directed By:
Andrew Bottomley

Co-Producers:
Jeremy Morris and Christopher Cwynar

Editors:
Jeremy Morris and Andrew Bottomley

Sound Mix:
Jeremy Morris

Host:
Andrew Bottomley

Featuring (in alphabetical order):
Megan Sapnar Ankerson
Chris Becker
Ron Becker
Jonathan Bignell
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Norma Coates
Kyle Conway
Christopher Cwynar
Brian Fautuex
David Goodman
Jonathan Gray
Tona Hangen
Eric Hoyt
Kit Hughes
Josh Jackson
Jason Jacobs
Henry Jenkins
Derek Johnson
Michael Kackman
Danny Kimball
Bill Kirkpatrick
Derek Kompare
Shanti Kumar
Kate Lacey
Elana Levine
Lori Lopez
Amanda Lotz
Jason Loviglio
Janet McCabe
Allison McCracken
Cynthia Meyers
Jason Mittell
Jeremy Morris
Sarah Murray
Darrell Newton
Lisa Parks
Eleanor Patterson
Josh Shepperd
Matt Sienkiewicz
Lynn Spigel
Katherine Spring
Jonathan Sterne
Derek Vaillant
Neil Verma
Alyx Vesey
Tim Wall
Jennifer Hyland Wang

Music:
“Odyssey” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons BY 3.0

“Crashed” by Stereofloat
Licensed under Creative Commons BY-ND 3.0

Old Time Radio Clips (in order of appearance):
This is Your Life (TV)
The Jack Benny Program, “How Jack Found Rochester”
Martha Deane Show, “Dewey Wins”
The Burns & Allen Show, “Gracie Allen Inc.”
NBC Chimes
The Mercury Theatre on the Air, “The War of the Worlds”
The Mercury Theatre on the Air, “The Fall of the City”
Suspense, “Sorry, Wrong Number”
The Shadow, “Phantom Voice”
CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Them”
Gang Busters, “Crime Wave Special Report”
Lux Radio Theatre, “The Thin Man”
The Thin Man (film)
Hollywood Hotel, “One in a Million”
The Movie Parade, “Design for Living”
Hootenanny of the Air
Amos ‘n’ Andy, “Andy the Actor”
Fibber McGee and Molly, “Fireball McGee”
The Texaco Star Theatre (Fred Allen), “Amateur of the Month”
The Aldrich Family, “Girl Trouble”
The Chisholm Trail
Transatlantic Call: People to People, “Women in Britain”
We Hold These Truths
On a Note of Triumph
Serial (podcast)

Special thanks to Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson, as well as all the participants for recording themselves.

As From Mercury to Mars series editor Neil Verma explains in his introduction over on Sounding Out!, Pomerance presents a study of Orson Welles’s voice itself — not what it does, how it was used, or what it “represents,” exactly — but a study that tries to get at what Pomerance calls “that instrumentation [Welles] cannot prevent himself from employing except by silence.”

Click here to read Murray Pomerance’s full essay over on Sounding Out!.

This is the penultimate post in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for the series’ final installment from Jennifer Hyland Wang, which will be published here on Antenna this coming Monday, January 20th.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

Schwartz, who co-wrote the recent PBS special on the “War of the Worlds” panic, argues that echoes of the Holmes stories can be heard throughout Welles’s radio work, including his performance as the ethereal crime-fighter The Shadow. It was partly by learning from Conan Doyle’s example of great storytelling, Schwartz claims, that Welles reshaped the rules of radio drama.

Click here to read A. Brad Schwartz’s full post over on Sounding Out!.

This post is the tenth in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for Antenna’s next installment from Jennifer Hyland Wang on Monday, January 20th.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

Smith argues that “Hell On Ice” stands out as a proto-environmental critique. It contemplates the catastrophic collapse of human society, not unlike the Mercury Theatre’s famous “War of the Worlds.” But whereas the “War of the Worlds” broadcast was a science fiction thriller that tapped into anxiety about the looming war in Europe, the “Hell On Ice” show (which aired three weeks earlier) used historical fiction to dramatize the error of human attempts to master the globe. Smith writes, “That makes it perhaps the best companion to ‘War of the Worlds,’ a play in which the thwarted invader is no alien – it’s us. Listening to the play today, ‘Hell on Ice’ is not only a masterpiece of audio theater (among fans, the most beloved of all Welles’s radio works) but a powerful ‘eco-sonic’ critique as well.”

Click here to read Jacob Smith’s full post over on Sounding Out!.

This post is the eighth in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for Antenna’s next installment on Monday, December 16th.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

Follow @WOTW75 and tweet along with us at #WOTW75.

7:00-8:00 PM EST: An all-new audio documentary hosted by Brian Hanrahan (Cornell) and featuring critical reflections from a dozen prominent radio historians, including Kate Lacey, Kathleen Battles, Jason Loviglio, Damien Keane, Alex Russo, Tom McEnaney, and Antenna’s own Shawn VanCour and Josh Shepperd.

8:00-9:00 PM EST: The re-broadcast of the original “War of the Worlds” radio play (1938).

9:00-10:00 PM EST:  Hosted by Sounding Out! editor-in-chief Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman (Binghamton University), this hour includes live post-broadcast chats with Keane, McEnaney, and VanCour, and experimental soundscapes and drama produced by Binghamton University students and community members.

Looking for the end of the world? Don’t panic, you’ve come to the right place. Our #WOTW75 project invites you to listen to and live-tweet Orson Welles’ classic “War of the Worlds” radio play tonight alongside hundred (thousands?) of others. This page has all you will need to participate.

When to Listen: Our project starts at  7:00 PM EST on Wednesday, October 30. Our goal is to keep in sync across listening sites everywhere.

How to Listen: Click here to stream our broadcast in your web browser from WHRW in Binghamton, New York. If this feed won’t work or goes down, see Alternative Listening Options below.

How to Respond: Use Twitter, Instagram and post on our Facebook group page using the hashtag #WOTW75. Be sure to follow @WOTW75 on Twitter and reply to one another. Posting a comment here on this page is another option. Want to follow the conversation as a whole? Try our hashtag in tagboard.

Alternative Listening Options:  There are several other listening options available. You can stream the play from wellesnet, YouTube, or archive.org. These should be suitable to play on an iPod, phone, or laptop. Please keep these links handy just in case something goes wrong with the WHRW feed (although we don’t anticipate this).

Public Radio Options: Want a real radio experience? KPCC Southern California Public Radio has generously given a feed out for free to a variety of public broadcasters, so check your local NPR, BBC, or college radio station. KPCC will have its own broadcast on Pacific time. They are sharing our hashtag, too. Here is a link with more information.

How to Help: All we need are your ears and keyboards, but if you want to help build the project, add your friends to our Facebook group and post items from that feed to your wall.

How to Document: Doing something creative while listening? Installing WOTW on a streetcorner, in a bar, an observatory? Roaming rural New Jersey with a flashlight? We need images and artwork. Snap a few for us and send them our way. Your responses will archived both digitally and in print.

There’s more: Here is a link to the most recent entry in our ongoing From Mercury to Mars web series about Welles and radio, for which #WOTW75 is the centerpiece. Also, here is a link to Howard Koch’s WOTW script, in case you’d like to read along. Here is a recent radio play contest, and here is a recent episode of the Aca-media podcast on WOTW. Check out PBS American Experience, which aired a major documentary on Tuesday night. Also, here is a new version of the story by Campfire Radio. Visiting New Jersey? There are live events out there in the moonlight, check out Raconteur Radio. Many more events and news items for the anniversary are up on wellesnet.

Thanks for joining in on the fun. We’re eager to read your tweets and posts, and proud to annihilate the world before your very ears.

Questions, ideas? wotw75@soundingoutblog.com

[Re-posted from our partners at Sounding Out!]

#WOTW75 will revolve around a 3-hour live broadcast streaming online from WHRW, SUNY Binghamton’s student radio station. The first hour of the broadcast (7:00-8:00 PM EST) will feature critical reflections from radio scholars and media historians discussing the legacy of the infamous “panic broadcast.” The second hour (8:00-9:00 PM EST) will consist of a rebroadcast of the original 1938 “War of the Worlds” program. And the third hour (9:00-10:00 PM EST) will include a panel discussion with additional media scholars mixed together with “War of the Worlds”-inspired experimental music and drama performances from Binghamton University’s Radio Drama Division.

This #WOTW75 collective listening experiment is the centerpiece of the six-month long project From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio After 75 Years, which is being produced by Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog.

More details about how to listen and participate will be posted here on Antenna and also on Sounding Out! on the day of the event. In the meantime, please follow the #WOTW75 Twitter account and check out the Facebook group page, where blank posters and e-cards can be downloaded if you wish to host a listening party in your area.

Click here to read Kathleen Battles’s full post.

This post is the fifth in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for Antenna’s next installment on October 14th, featuring Shawn VanCour on the aesthetics of the “War of the Worlds” broadcast.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

In this post, Cohen argues that Welles’s production reclaimed and exploited the media-consciousness of Bram Stoker’s original novel, a feature occluded in the play and film versions. She also asserts that Welles’s production of Dracula introduced several of the radio innovations we’ve come to associate with the Mercury Theater (and The War of the Worlds in particular): first-person retrospective narration, temporal coding, the strategic use of media reflexivity. Click here to read Debra Rae Cohen’s full post.

This post is the third in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for Antenna’s next installment on September 17th.

Miss the first two posts in the series? Click here to read Tom McEnaney’s thoughts on the place of Latin America in Welles’s radio work. And click here to read Eleanor Patterson’s reflections on recorded re-releases of the “War of the Worlds” broadcast.

The Velvet Light Trap has extended the deadline for its forthcoming “On Sound (New Directions in Sound Studies)” issue to September 1, 2013. Though the initial call was very successful, the Editorial Board especially welcomes any additional submissions that address sound-related issues and topics in radio, television, video games, digital/new media, and other non-film media.

The medium of sound, long placed in a secondary position to the visual within media studies, has experienced a considerable increase in scholarly attention over the past three decades, to the point that “sound studies” is now a distinct field of scholarship. Within media studies, sound-related research today expands well beyond the film and television score or soundtrack to include a broad range of scholarship on radio and popular music.  And while sound studies still tends to cohere around media studies departments, an increasing amount of sound media research is interdisciplinary in nature. A “sonic turn” is under way across the humanities and social sciences with sound studies work now coming out of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, science and technology studies, cultural geography, American studies, art history, and cultural studies.  Recent issues of differences (2011) and American Quarterly (2011) and anthologies like The Sound Studies Reader (Jonathan Sterne, 2012) are just a few examples of this expanding range of interest.

This issue of The Velvet Light Trap aims to build upon many of the new lines of inquiry that are coming out of this intersection between sound media and various other scholarly perspectives. In that spirit, we are seeking essays for an issue on the research and study of sound in and across a range of media.

Potential areas of inquiry may include, but are by no means limited to:

• analysis of music, voice, and sound effects in film, radio, television, video games, podcasting, and other digital or “new media,” including significant developments in audio aesthetics and style
• convergence of sound and visual media
• sound art and experimental forms of sound media
• materiality of sound, including sound reproduction and other technologies of sound
• media industries, production cultures, and issues related to sound labor, audio production practices, or the commodification of sound
• histories of audio media and archaeologies of mediated sound
• aural representations of identity, power, difference and the politics of sound media
• mediation of voices and language, noise and silence, and muteness, deafness, and other issues of the body and disability
• listening practices and sound media in perception and everyday life
• psychoacoustics and cognitive studies of sound media
• architecture, acoustics, and space, including “soundscapes” and sound media in relation to public health and public policy
• theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of sound media

Submissions should be between 6,000–7,500 words (approximately 20-25 pages double-spaced), formatted in Chicago style. Please submit an electronic copy of the paper, along with a one-page abstract, both saved as separate Microsoft Word files. Remove any identifying information so that the submission is suitable for anonymous review. The journal’s Editorial Board will referee all submissions. Send electronic manuscripts and/or any questions to thevelvetlighttrap@gmail.com. All submissions are due September 1, 2013.

The Velvet Light Trap is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal of film, television, and new media studies. Graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Texas-Austin coordinate issues in alternation. Our Editorial Advisory Board includes such notable scholars as Charles Acland, Richard Allen, Harry Benshoff, Mark Betz, Michael Curtin, Kaye Dickinson, Radhika Gajjala, Scott Higgins, Barbara Klinger, Jon Kraszewski, Diane Negra, Michael Newman, Nic Sammond, Jacob Smith, Beretta Smith-Shomade, Jonathan Sterne, Cristina Venegas, and Michael Williams.