Natalie began tuning in to radio when she was an undergraduate at Brown University. Excited by the prospect of telling stories through sound, she attended a documentary radio program at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine. She has since worked at Rhode Island Public Radio as Assistant Morning Edition Producer. She has also spent many hours planning and hosting an audio salon called the Owl Ears Listening Party. Her work has been aired on National Public Radio, Rhode Island Public Radio, and a variety of other local stations and podcasts. She grew up in Ashland, Oregon and on the Big Island of Hawaii.

We understand that we're a microcosm of the larger alternative energy controversy nationwide (as with the corporate privatization of water) and have reached out to other organizations for guidance, such as Preserve Our Berkshires. Our annual town meeting is coming up on Thursday, May 10 and we're prepared for a likely yes vote to advance these ill considered energy plans with a back-pocket strategy of filing a referendum petition that would enable a town-wide binding vote within 14 days of the meeting. The citizens of the town were never asked about their views while the energy committee met for two years without even taking meeting minutes. They're bringing to the town meeting their proposals for a wind turbine located on a nearby mountainside near our water supply (!) and a solar array (throwing in soccer fields for the schools as a sop) on a portion of intact open space of 171 acres that could easily be re-converted to its former use as prime farmland.

We need food and water first, in these dire economic times. This is our stance. We also must educate ourselves as to the appropriate use of alternative energy projects suitable to our town. Further, why should we rush? Because tax incentives for the developers run out in a few months should not be our rationale for voting in these unwise choices.

We are not alone in facing these pressures on our community. An industrial future is a vision which other communities are rejecting here in rural New England and around the country and world.

Click here to listen to our Dasani show or download the MP3 version.

From Mary Flanagan:
Tiltfactor's Online Layoff Game
Tiltfactor's Profit Seed Game
Auditorium
Robot Unicorn Attack (have to wait for an intro ad)
The Path (downloadable but not free)

From Randy Nichols:
Games and platforms
"Rock Band"
Jason Rohrer's "Passage"
The PlayStation 3 game "Heavy Rain"
"Mirror's Edge"
"SimCity"
"The Sims"
"Minecraft"
"McDonald's the Game"
"Game Dev Story" application
"Real Lives"
"Portal 2″
Steam platform
"Flower"
"Shadow of the Colossus"

Useful video game industry links
The Entertainment Software Association
The International Game Developers Association
The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment
Gamasutra
MCV.com
VGChartz.com

For more details on these industry links, see Randy's blog. And on a side note, does SimCity have anything to do with a Republican presidential candidate's tax plan?

Thanks again to Mary and Randy and to all of our panelists and audience members this season!

click here for mp3 file

Live recording held at the café at AS220 at 5:30 p.m on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 Click here to see the images from the live recording in AS220

1981 President Reagan Fires Air Traffic Controllers A Shot Over the Bow Thirty Years Ago Lands Today in Wisconsin and Elsewhere

President Reagan's firing of the Air Traffic controllers for refusing to return to work introduced a battle with labor whose echo is still very much a part of our contemporary political discourse. President Reagan sent a message to public service unions--and to unions in general--that they would not be dictating the terms of their relationship to corporate America or to federal or state governments and that the era of labor's victories would be over.

With our panelists, Michael Downey, President RI Council 94 ASCME, Georgetown University Professor Joseph McCartin, the author of a new book on this moment, and Paul Cannon, former PATCO member, we will look at how the President's decision to punish the controllers for their walkout signaled the beginning of a new relationship between our government and organized labor. We will look at how this moment was nested into the rise of free market philosophy and how it resonates today in the contemporary conflicts in Ohio, Wisconsin and in many other states and municipalities.

Panelists

Dr. Joseph McCartin is an Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. He is an expert on twentieth century U.S. labor, social and political issues. He teaches courses in 20th Century U.S. Labor History,The U.S. Since 1945, America Between the Wars, 20th Century (and Modern) U.S. State and Society, and 20th Century U.S. Social History. His new book is Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America.

Mike Downey is the president of RI Council 94 AFSCME. He followed his father and grandfather into a career as a plumber. He went to La Salle Academy. After La Salle, he went to plumbing school, a five-year program of work and classes. Downey, of Irish heritage, lives now in Charlestown, where he was on the Town Council, but grew up in Providence and Narragansett.

Paul Cannon was an Air Traffic Controller for 13 years in Boston. He was the President of a PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) local between 1975 and 1979, stepping down to be one of the first "Choirboy" PATCO activists in New England. He resigned as a Choirboy and became campaign manager for George Kerr's bid to become PATCO president; he then participated in the PATCO strike and stayed active with the local. Later he became a business agent for Teamster Local 122.

Bibliography:

• Collision Course; Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America by Joseph A. McCartin; Oxford Press 2011
• Tear Down This Myth; The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy by Will Bunch; Simon and Schuster 2009
• There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America by Philip Dray; Anchor Press 2011

Don't forget to check out Channel 36 at 9 p.m. Sunday evenings for a pre-panel documentary

click here for mp3 file

Live recording held at the café at AS220 at 5:30 p.m on Wednesday, October 19, 2011. Click here to see the images from the live recording in AS220

1971 An American Family; Our First Reality TV Show What's Real, What's Not? Does Anybody Care?

Watch An American Family: Introduction on PBS.

When Directors Alan and Susan Raymond put their cameras--and us--into the lives of an upper middle class white family from Santa Barbara, California (the documentary was filmed in 1971 but not released until 1973), the schisms in the American Family became readily apparent. What was revealed was not Leave it to Beaver. What was introduced was, well, unreal...or was it?

With panelists Susan and Alan Raymond, Brown Media Studies Professor Lynne Joyrich and Brown History Professor Robert Self, author of American Babylon, we will look at how TV changed through the popularity of An American Family.

With the current proliferation of 'Reality TV' and its 'reality' which often seems quite suspect, we will wonder what accounts for its popularity, whether or not An American Family can be seen as its direct ancestor and ask what it might be 'preparing us for.'

Here is a chance to look more deeply at a subject that sits with us in our living rooms, brought to you by an American Family that allowed us to sit in theirs.

Marc Levitt's phone interview with Bill and Pat Loud, October 2011 (28,5 minutes)
Click here for mp3 file of this interview

Panelists:

Alan and Susan Raymond are Academy Award-winning filmmakers whose work influenced and changed the landscape of American television. In 1971, as the filmmakers of the seminal 1973 PBS cinema verite series An American Family, the Raymonds captured the daily life of the Loud family and forever changed the vision of the American family on television. Many of Alan and Susan Raymond's films are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Paley Center for Media and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in Paris. The Raymonds have created feature length documentaries about dyslexia, schools in the era of No Child Left Behind, children at war and the rise of Elvis Presley. They have been selected for the Television Academy Archives as Emmy TV Legends and received The International Documentary Association Pioneer Award in 2010 for their body of work. Their films have been broadcast on PBS, ABC News, HBO, and the BBC.

Robert Self teaches and writes on twentieth-century U.S. history. His principal research interests are in urban history, the history of race and American political culture, post-1945 U.S. society and culture, and gender in the mid-century city. His first book, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, was published by Princeton University Press in 2003. It won four professional prizes, including the James A. Rawley prize from the Organization of American Historians (OAH). He is currently at work on a book about gender, sexuality, and political culture in the U.S. from 1964 to 2004.

Lynne Joyrich is associate professor of Modern Culture and Media where she has taught film and television studies, as well as gender and sexuality studies, since 1999. She is the author of Re-viewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996) and of a number of articles and book chapters on film, television, feminist, queer, and cultural studies in various journals and anthologies. She is also a co-editor and member of the editorial collective of the media and cultural studies journal Camera Obscura.

Bibliography:

• Better Living Through Reality TV, edited by Laurie Oulette and James Hay; Blackwell Publishing 2008
  
• Reality TV; The Work of Being Watched by Mark Andrejevic; Rowan and Littlefield 2004
  
• An American Family; A Televised Life by Jeffrey Ruoff; University of Minnesota 2004
  

Don't forget to check out Channel 36 at 9 p.m. Sunday evenings for a pre-panel documentary, An American Family Anniversary Edition

click here for mp3 file

Pong introduced America to video games and now there seems to be no turning back.
Is This Why We Don't Leave Our Houses Anymore?
As more and more people around the world use video games to pass the time, to teach and learn and to create alternative realities, it is time for us to consider what its implications are and whether or not we are leading or being led--and to where.

Live recording held at the café at AS220 at 5:30 p.m on Wednesday, October 12, 2011. Click here to see the images from the live recording in AS220

Action Speaks looks at contemporary issues through the lens of history by using underappreciated dates of twentieth-century that have changed America. Join host Marc Levitt and guest panelists for some old-fashioned community exchange in the heart of down- town Providence's arts and cultural district. For Fall 2011, Action Speaks looks at how the border between conflict and amusement is disappearing and what it portends for good TV...are we all embedded?

With panelists Professor Fox Harrell from M.I.T., Dartmouth Professor/artist and author of Critical Play Mary Flanagan, Professor Randy Nichols from Bentley College and author of The Global Video Games Industry and world record holder in video games and public artist Michael Townsend we investigate the popularity of video games, their use in education, their relationship to the military and whether or not they are presaging the global expression of our utopian yearnings.

For links to video games recommended by our panelists, visit our blog.

Panelists

D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D is an Associate Professor of Digital Media; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written extensively on identity and digital culture and has published an article called Algebra of Identity; Skin of Wind, Skin of Streams, Skin of Shadows, Skin of Vapor for Theory Magazine.

Mary Flanagan, Professor of Film & Media Studies at Dartmouth College, is the inaugural chair holder of the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professorship in Digital Humanities. Dr. Flanagan is the author of Critical Play: Radical Game Design and is the inventor of the first web based digital game for girls "The Adventures of Josie True".

Randall Nichols is an Assistant Professor at Bentley University where his areas of interest are: the Political Economy of Media, New Technology, Media Industries, Video Games, Media Economics and Popular Culture. His essay, "Target Acquired: America's Army and the Video Game Industry" is in Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Mathew Thomas Payne.

Michael Townsend is a world record holder in video games and has been focused on conquering them since first introduced to Pong. He has actively gamed through the evolution of all major platforms from the Atari 2600 to the PS3. Townsend supports his gaming habit by drawing with tape as an internationally renowned public artist. He has to stop gaming this Fall to find the time to write his first book.

Click to download associated curriculum.

Action Speaks Curriculum Plan for Pong.pdf

Bibliography:

• Replay; The History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan; Yellow Ant 2010
  
• Joystick Soldiers, Edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne; Routledge 2010
  
• Reality is Broken; Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, by Jane McGonigal; Penguin 2011
  
• Critical Play; Radical Game Design by Mary Flanagan; MIT Press 2009
  

Don't forget to check out Channel 36 at 9 p.m. Sunday evenings for a pre-panel documentary

]]> http://www.actionspeaksradio.org/2011/10/pong.html http://www.actionspeaksradio.org/2011/10/pong.html Conflict and Amusement in America Current Radio Show Mon, 03 Oct 2011 02:02:23 -0500 Marc Joel Levitt continues to QB Action Speaks
10/02/2011 01:00 AM EDT
By Rick Massimo

For the 16th year, the Action Speaks discussion series, which begins on Wednesday and runs weekly through October at AS220, will bring expert commentary and audience input to a conversation of underappreciated dates in U.S. history -- events that resonate in today's culture perhaps more than most people realize. And for all those years, Marc Joel Levitt has quarterbacked the process of continuing, as he puts it, "the whole tradition of making intellectually rich ideas available to the general public, and creating a community in Providence to engage us in it." [read more]

]]> http://www.actionspeaksradio.org/2011/10/the-providence-journal-article.html http://www.actionspeaksradio.org/2011/10/the-providence-journal-article.html Blog Conflict and Amusement in America Marc Levitt Mon, 03 Oct 2011 01:39:03 -0500

click here for mp3 file

Action Speaks looks at contemporary issues through the lens of history by using underappreciated dates of twentieth-century that have changed America. Join host Marc Levitt and guest panelists for some old-fashioned community exchange in the heart of down- town Providence's arts and cultural district.

Conflict and Amusement in America: How Can it hurt if it's so much fun?

For Fall 2011, Action Speaks looks at how the border between conflict and amusement is disappearing and what it portends for good TV...are we all embedded?

October 5: 1961 President Eisenhower's Military Industrial Complex Speech Did a Fox Guarding the Hen House Get it Right and If So, How? 

Live recording held at the café at AS220 at 5:30 p.m on Wednesday, October 5, 2011.
Click here to see the images from the live recording in AS220

President Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War 2 warned us, in his 1961 Farewell Speech, of the potential perils for the United States if the military dictates policy and government investment.

Panelists

Francis J. "Bing" West is an author and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Reagan Administration. His book The Strongest Tribe is a history of the Iraq War that was a New York Times Bestseller and was ranked by Foreign Affairs Magazine as #7 among the top foreign policy books of 2009. His 2004 book The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the First Marine Division, written with United States Marine Corps General Ray L. Smith, was awarded the Marine Corps Heritage Prize for non-fiction, as well as the Colby Award.

Neta Crawford is Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Boston University where her teaching focuses on international ethics and normative change. Crawford is currently on the board of the Academic Council of the United Nations System. She is the author of Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, Humanitarian Intervention, which was a co-winner of the 2003 American Political Science Association Jervis and Schroeder Award for best book in International History and Politics.

Roger Stahl is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia, with interests in rhetoric, media, and culture. His 2010 book Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (as well as his 2007 documentary by the same name) traces this relationship in recent years.

Bibliography:

• Unwarranted Influence; Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military Industrial Complex by James Ledbetter, Yale University Press 2011
• Militainment, Inc; War, Media, and Popular Culture by Roger Stahl; Routledge 2010
• Prophets of War; Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military Industrial Complex by William D. Hartung; Nation Books 2011
• Virtuous War; Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network by James Der Derian; Routledge Press 2009
• Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century. 
A Report of the Project for the New American Century, 
September 2000
• Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy
edited by Robert Kagan and William Kristol, 
Encounter Books, 2000
• The Complex; How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives by Nick Turse; Metropolitan Books 2008

Read the interview with Roger Stahl, an associate professor of communications at the University of Georgia and author of Militainment Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture, On the rise of militainment. Action Speaks! By DAVID SCHARFENBERG, The Providence Phoenix, September 28, 2011

]]> http://www.actionspeaksradio.org/2011/09/eisenhower.html http://www.actionspeaksradio.org/2011/09/eisenhower.html Conflict and Amusement in America Current Radio Show Tue, 27 Sep 2011 09:59:04 -0500 Our media partner, Rhode Island Public TV (Channel 36) is again showing films on Sunday night at 9 in October to stimulate your interest in our live AS220 forum. Here is the list of films.

Live forum on October 5:  President Eisenhower's Military Industrial Complex Speech
NOVA #3602 Spy Factory - Sunday, 10/2 at 9:00 p.m.
For the first time on television, NOVA exposes the hidden world of high-tech, 21st-century eavesdropping carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA). Today, the NSA is the world's largest intelligence agency, three times the size of the CIA and far more secret. Its mission is to eavesdrop on the world - from cell phones in Europe to pay phones in Afghanistan to email messages from Pakistan to Baghdad. But since 9/11, it has also turned its giant ear inward, listening in without warrant on thousands of American citizens, many of whom are on the government's secret watch list, now more than half-a-million names long. Based on the latest best-seller by journalist James Bamford, "Inside the Spy Factory" is a gripping investigation of the NSA, from its tragic failures leading up to the 9/11 attacks to its secret listening rooms currently installed in the nation's telecom networks. The program presents groundbreaking new evidence about how the agency listened in to the phone calls of key 9/11 plotters, yet failed to realize they were located in the U.S. To show how current eavesdropping technology works, NOVA traces the path of an email sent from Asia to the U.S. via fiber optic cables on the Pacific sea floor. From a beach in California, the email then travels to a telecom switching facility in San Francisco, where the cables are covertly duplicated, with one copy of everything - including the original email - going to the NSA's secret room and the other transmitted to its proper destination. This is a suspenseful and eye-opening report on the threat to privacy and the effectiveness of high-tech surveillance in the age of terrorism.

Live forum on October 12: The Birth of Pong and Video Games
Video Games Live - Sunday, 10/9 at 9:00 p.m.
Video Games Live is the greatest video game music of all time performed by a full symphony orchestra and chorus. What makes it really unique is that the music is completely synchronized with massive video screens, rock and roll lighting and stage-show production. "I like to describe Video Games Live as having all the power and emotion of a symphony orchestra performance, combined with the energy and excitement of a rock concert, mixed together with all the cutting edge visuals and fun that video games provide." says Tommy Tallarico, co-creator and host of Video Games Live. Captured in New Orleans this past April in High Definition with 5.1 audio surround sound, the concert featured the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by VGL's co-creator, Jack Wall, a 34-person chorus and number of soloists including pianist Martin Leung, flautist Laura Intravia, and singers, Vangie Gunn, Kendrew Heriveaux, Ron Ragin and Cindy Shapiro, a rock band featuring Tommy Tallarico on guitar and a full compliment of state of the art lighting, lasers and effects.

Live forum on October 19: The American Family; Our First Reality TV Show 
An American Family Anniversary Edition - Sunday, 10/16 at 9:00 p.m.
In 1973, television viewers watched dramatic life events unfold in the home of an American family in Santa Barbara, California. "An American Family: Anniversary Edition" is a compilation of the original 12-hour public television series that made TV history.

Live forum on October 26: President Reagan Fires Air Traffic Controllers 
From Wharf Rats to the Lord of the Docks: The Life and Times of Harry Bridges - Sunday, 10/23 at 9:00 p.m.
Directed by Academy Award winning director and cinematographer Haskell Wexler, this is the film of a truly unique event - Ian Ruskin performing his one-man play to a packed house of 1000 longshore workers in San Pedro, California. The result, with appearances by Elliott Gould, Edward Asner and members of ILWU Local 13, and with music by Jackson Browne, Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Tim Reynolds, Ciro Hurtado, and others (including the world premiere of Woody Guthrie's song about Harry, sung by his granddaughter Sarah Lee Guthrie) is an inspiring story. It is an intimate exploration of the life and times of this extraordinary man - "a hero or the devil incarnate, it all depends on your point of view" - full of the high drama and biting humor that ran through his life. And it is a springboard into understanding the parallel issues - globalization, global responsibilities, wars on terrorism, surveillance and privacy, and the widening gap between rich and poor that we face today.

]]> http://www.actionspeaksradio.org/2011/09/films-schedule2011.html http://www.actionspeaksradio.org/2011/09/films-schedule2011.html Conflict and Amusement in America Current Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:32:59 -0500

October 5: 1961 President Eisenhower's Military Industrial Complex Speech.
Did a Fox Guarding the Hen House Get it Right and If So, How?
President Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War 2 warned us, in his 1961 Farewell Speech, of the potential perils for the United States if the military dictates policy and government investment.

October 12: 1972 The Birth of Pong and the Rise of Video Games.
Is This Why We Don't Leave Our Houses Anymore?
Pong introduced America to video games and now there seems to be no turning back.

October 19: 1971 An American Family; Our First Reality TV Show.
What's Real, What's Not? Does Anybody Care?
In 1970-71 a camera was rolling in the house of an upper middle class Santa Barbara family. What was revealed was not Leave it to Beaver. What was introduced was, well, unreal...or was it?

October 26: 1981 President Reagan Fires Air Traffic Controllers.
A Shot Over the Bow Thirty Years Ago Lands Today in Wisconsin and Elsewhere
President Reagan's firing of the Air Traffic controllers for refusing to return to work, introduced

Click here for the pdf file of the poster

Click here for the pdf file of the press release

]]> http://www.actionspeaksradio.org/2011/09/action-speaks-2011-season.html http://www.actionspeaksradio.org/2011/09/action-speaks-2011-season.html Conflict and Amusement in America Current Tue, 20 Sep 2011 23:19:15 -0500