From Mercury to Mars – Antenna http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu Responses to Media and Culture Thu, 30 Mar 2017 23:48:47 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.5 From Mercury to Mars: Vox Orson http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2014/01/16/from-mercury-to-mars-vox-orson/ Thu, 16 Jan 2014 18:19:07 +0000 http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/?p=23414 WelleswTower_squareV2In this eleventh installment of our ongoing From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio After 75 Years series (in conjunction with Sounding Out!), Murray Pomerance provides an analysis of Orson Welles’ voice, which was without question one of the signature dramatic instruments of the twentieth century, and today retains a compelling power to instruct, to hypnotize and beguile.

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 YearsStay 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.

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From Mercury to Mars: The Shadow of the Great Detective: Orson Welles and Sherlock Holmes on the Air http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2014/01/10/from-mercury-to-mars-the-shadow-of-the-great-detective-orson-welles-and-sherlock-holmes-on-the-air/ Fri, 10 Jan 2014 13:57:22 +0000 http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/?p=23289 WelleswTower_squareV2In this tenth installment of our ongoing From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio After 75 Years series (in conjunction with Sounding Out!), A. Brad Schwartz explores the connection between Orson Welles and Sherlock Holmes. From his earliest experimentation with radio as a student to his final radio performance in the 1950s (a BBC production of “The Final Problem”), Welles regularly turned to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.

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 YearsStay 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.

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#WOTW75 — It’s Time for “War of the Worlds”! http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2013/10/30/wotw75-its-time-for-war-of-the-worlds/ Wed, 30 Oct 2013 14:49:59 +0000 http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/?p=22513 Click here to stream our broadcast in your web browser from WHRW in Binghamton, New York, beginning tonight at 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time!

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.

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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 TwitterInstagram 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!]

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From Mercury to Mars: “Welles,” Belles, and Fred Allen’s Sonic Pranks http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2013/10/01/from-mercury-to-mars-welles-belles-and-fred-allens-sonic-pranks/ Tue, 01 Oct 2013 14:00:32 +0000 http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/?p=21991 welleswtower_squareThe latest post in our From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years series (in conjunction with Sounding Out!) finds Kathleen Battles focusing on the humorous side of Welles. Specifically, the relationship between Welles’s post-“War of the Worlds” fame and how it was lampooned by Fred Allen, one of the great absurdist comics in modern entertainment and perhaps the most creative radio comedian of his era. Battles discusses how Allen made a career satirizing the cultural conventions of the day, with the radio industry itself being one of his favorite targets. The auteur genius figure of Welles was simply too rich a subject for Allen to forego.

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 YearsStay 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.

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