text:
The Firesign Theatre are the only group that can claim among its devoted fans both Thom Yorke and John Ashbery; who have an album in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress and also coined a phrase now used as a slogan by freeform giant WFMU; and whose albums were widely distributed by tape among U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, and then sampled by the most selective classic hip hop DJs, from Steinski and DJ Premier to J Dilla and Madlib.
Formed in 1966, they began their career improvising on Los Angeles’s Pacifica station KPFK, and went on to work in numerous media formats over their four-decade career. They are best known for a series of nine albums made for Columbia Records, records that remain unparalleled for their density, complexity, and sonic range. Realizing in an astonishing way the implications of the long playing record and the multi-track recording studio, the Firesign Theatre’s Columbia albums offer unusually fertile ground for bringing techniques of literary analysis to bear upon the fields of sound and media studies (and vice versa). This is a strategy that aims to reveal the forms of political consciousness that crafted the records, as well as the politics of the once-common listening practices binding together the disparate audiences I have just named. It is no accident that the associative and referential politics of the sample in “golden age” hip hop would have recognized a similar politics of reference and association in Firesign Theatre’s sound work, in particular in the group’s pioneering use of language, time, and space.
The Firesign Theatre is typically understood as a comedy act from the era of “head music” — elaborate album-oriented sounds that solicited concerted, often collective and repeated, listening typically under the influence of drugs. But it may be better to understand their work as attempting to devise a future for literary writing that would be unbound from the printed page and engaged with the emergent recording technologies of the day. In this way, they may have crafted a practice more radical, but less recognizable, than that of poets —such as Allen Ginsberg or David Antin, both of whose work Firesign read on the air — who were also experimenting with writing on tape during these years (see Michael Davidson’s Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, in particular 196-224). Because their work circulated almost exclusively on vinyl (secondarily on tape), it encouraged a kind of reading (in the strictest sense) with the ears; the fact that their work was distributed through the networks of popular music may also have implications for the way we understand past communities of music listeners as well.
The period of Firesign’s contract (1967-1975) with the world’s largest record company parallels exactly the recording industry’s relocation from New York to Los Angeles, the development of multitrack studios which made the overdub the dominant technique for recording pop music, and the rise of the LP as a medium in its own right, a format that rewarded, and in Firesign’s case required, repeated listening. These were all factors the Firesign Theatre uniquely exploited. Giving attention to the musicality of the group’s work, Jacob Smith has shown (in an excellent short discussion in Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures that is to date the only academic study of Firesign) how the group’s attention to the expansion of television, and in particular the new practice of channel-surfing, provided both a thematic and a formal focus for the group’s work: “Firesign […] uses channel surfing as the sonic equivalent of parallel editing, a kind of horizontal or melodic layering in which different themes are woven in and out of prominence until they finally merge. Firesign also adds vertical layers to the narrative in a manner analogous to musical harmony or multiple planes of cinematic superimposition” (181). But more remains to be said not only about the effect of the Firesign Theatre’s work, but about its carefully wrought semantics, in particular the way the “horizontal” and “vertical” layers that Smith identifies were used as ways of revealing the mutually implicated regimes of politics, culture, and media in the Vietnam era — at the very moment when the explosion of those media was otherwise working to disassociate those fields.
The group’s third album, Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers is typically understood as their first extended meditation on the cultural phenomenology of television. Throughout the record, though there is much else going on, two pastiches of 1950s genre movies (High School Madness and a war film called Parallel Hell!) stream intermittently, as if through a single channel-surfing television set. The films coincide in two superimposed courtroom scenes that include all the principal characters from both films. By interpenetrating the school and the war, the record names without naming the killing of four students at Kent State and two students at Jackson State University, two events that occurred eleven days apart in May 1970 while the group was writing and recording in Los Angeles. Until this point rationalized by the framing fiction of a principal character watching both films on television, the interpenetration of the narratives is resolvable within the album’s diegesis—the master plot that accounts for and rationalizes every discrete gesture and event—only as a representation of that character’s having fallen asleep and dreaming the films together, a narrative sleight of hand that would testify to the group’s comprehension of literary modernism and the avant-garde.
The question of what may “cause” the interpenetration of the films is of interest, but the Firesign Theatre did not always require justification to elicit the most outrageous representational shifts of space (as well as of medium and persona). What is of more interest is the way rationalized space — the space implied by the “audioposition” of classic radio drama, as theorized by Neil Verma in Theater of the Mind— could be de-emphasized or even abandoned in favor of what might instead be called analytic space, an aural fiction in which the institutions of war and school can be understood as simultaneous and coterminous, and which more broadly represents the political corruptions of the Nixon administration by means of formal and generic corruption that is the hallmark of the Firesign Theatre’s approach to media (35-38).
While the techniques that produce this analytic soundscape bear some resemblance to what Verma terms the “kaleidosonic style” pioneered by radio producer Norman Corwin in the 1940s — in which the listener is moved “from place to place, experiencing shallow scenes as if from a series of fixed apertures” — even this very brief sketch indicates how radically the Firesign Theatre explored, deepened, and multiplied Corwin’s techniques in order to stage a more politically diagnostic and implicative mode of cultural interpretation. Firesign’s spaces, which are often of great depth, are rarely traversed arbitrarily; they are more typically experienced either in a relatively seamless flow (perspective and location shifting by means of an associative, critical or analytical, logic that the listener may discover), or are instead subsumed within regimes of media (a radio broadcast within a feature film which is broadcast on a television that is being watched by the primary character on the record album to which you are listening). According to either strategy the medium may be understood to be the message, but that message is one whose horizon is as critical as it is aesthetic.
The creation of what I am terming an analytic space was directly abetted by the technological advancement of recording studios, which underwent a period of profound transformation during the years of their Columbia contract, which spanned the year of The Beatles’s Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (arguably the world’s first concept album, recorded on four tracks) to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here (arguably that band’s fourth concept album, recorded on 24 tracks). Pop music had for years availed itself of the possibilities of recording vocals and solos separately, or doubly, but the dominant convention was for such recordings to support the imagined conceit of a song being performed live. As studios’ technological advances increased the possibilities for multitracking, overdubbing, and mixing, pop recordings such as Sgt. Pepper and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966) became more self-evidently untethered from the event of a live performance, actual or simulated. In the place of the long-dominant conceit of a recording’s indexical relation to a particular moment in time, pop music after the late 60s came increasingly to define and inhabit new conceptions of space, and especially time. Thus, when in 1970 Robert Christgau asserted that the Firesign Theatre “uses the recording studio at least as brilliantly as any rock group” (and awarding a very rare A+), he was remarking the degree to which distortions and experiments with time and space were if anything more radically available to narrative forms than they were to music.
The overdub made possible much more than the simple multiplication and manipulation of aural elements, it also added depth and richness to the soundfield. New possibilities of mixing, layering, and editing also revealed that the narrative representation of time, as well as spatial element I’ve just described, could be substantially reworked and given thematic meaning. In one knowing example, on 1969’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All, an accident with a time machine results in the duplication of each of the narrative’s major characters, who then fight or drink with each other.
This crisis of the unities is only averted when a pastiche of Franklin Delano Roosevelt interrupts the record’s fictional broadcast, announcing the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and his decision to surrender to Japan. On a record released the year the United States began secret bombing in Cambodia, it is not only the phenomenological, but also the social and political, implications of this kind of technologically mediated writing that are striking: the overdub enables the formal representation of “duplicity” itself, with the gesture of surrender ironically but pointedly offered as the resolution to the present crisis in Southeast Asia.
To take seriously the Firesign Theatre’s experiments with medium, sound, and language may be a way of reviving techniques of writing — as well as recording, and of listening — that have surprisingly eroded, even as technological advances (cheaper microphones, modeling software, and programs from Audacity and Garage Band to Pro Tools and Ableton Live) have taken the conditions of production out of the exclusive purview of the major recording studios. In two recent essays in RadioDoc Review called “The Arts of Amnesia: The Case for Audio Drama Part One” and “Part Two,” Verma has surveyed the recent proliferation of audio drama in the field of podcasting, and urged artists to explore more deeply the practices and traditions of the past, fearing that contemporary aversion to “radio drama” risks “fall[ing] into a determinism that misses cross-fertilization and common experiment” (Part Two, 4). Meanwhile, Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett’s live performances from their excellent World According to Sound podcast are newly instantiating a form of collective and immersive listening that bears a resemblance to the practices that were dominant among Firesign Theatre listeners in the 1960s and 70s; this fall they are hosting listening events for Firesign records in San Francisco.
It is tempting to hope for a wider range of experimentation in the field of audio in the decade to come, one that either critically exploits or supersedes the hegemony of individualized listening emblematized by podcast apps and noise-cancelling headphones. But if the audio field instead remains governed by information-oriented podcasts, leavened by a subfield of relatively classical dramas like the very good first season of Homecoming, a return to the Firesign Theatre’s work can have methodological, historical, and theoretical value because it could help reveal how the experience of recorded sound had an altogether different political inflection in an earlier era. Thinking back to the remarkably heterogeneous set of Firesign Theatre fans with which I began, it is hard not to observe that the dominant era of the sample in hip hop is one where it was not the Walkman but the jambox — with its politics of contesting a shared social space through collective listening — was the primary apparatus of playback. However unwished- for, this determinist line of technological thinking would clarify the way media audiences are successively composed and decomposed, and show more clearly how, to use Nick Couldry’s words in “Liveness, ‘Reality,’ and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone,” “the ‘habitus’ of contemporary societies is being transformed by mediation itself” (358).
Featured Image: The Firesign Theatre (ice cream baggage claim): John Rose, courtesy of author.
Jeremy Braddock is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University, where he specializes on the production and reception of modernist literature, media, and culture from the 1910s throughout the long twentieth century. His scholarship has examined the collective and institutional forms of twentieth-century authorship that are obscured by the romanticized figure of the individual artist. His book Collecting as Modernist Practic— a study of anthologies, archives, and private art collections — won the 2013 Modernist Studies Association book prize. Recent publications include a short essay considering the literary education of Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus and an essay on the Harlem reception of James Joyce’s Ulysses. He is currently working on a book on the Firesign Theatre.
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The New Wave: On Radio Arts in the UK–Magz Hall
This is Your Body on the Velvet Underground–Jacob Smith
“Happy Homes Have Gramophones” –Gender, Technology, and the Sonic Restaging of Community Before and After the Partition of Bengal
Our listening practices are discursively constructed. In the sonic landscape of India, in particular, the way in which we listen and what we hear are often normative, produced within hegemonic discourses of gender, class, caste, region, and sexuality. . . This forum, Gendered Soundscapes of India, offers snapshots of sound at sites of trans/national production, marketing, filmic and musical texts. Complementing these posts, the accompanying photographs offer glimpses of gendered community formation, homosociality, the pervasiveness of sound technology in India, and the discordant stratified soundscapes of the city. This series opens up for us the question of other contexts in India where sound, gender, and technology might intersect, but, more broadly, it demands that we consider how sound exists differently in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Afghanistan. How might we imagine a sonic framework and South Asia from these locations? —Guest Editors Praseeda Gopinath and Monika Mehta
For the full introduction to the forum, click here.
To read all of the posts in the forum, click here.
“She compelled respect at once by refusing on any account to be phonographed: perhaps she thought, amongst other things, that if she committed her soul to a broken piece of wax it might get broken…my subsequent experiences showed that it was only too likely,” wrote the British musicologist A.H. Fox-Strangways in 1910 about Indian female singer Chandra Prabha, while remarking on the harsh reactions to the gramophone in India (90). Such deep-rooted discomfort with the gramophone speaks to the cognitive, perceptual and experiential challenges faced by a listener/performer when a new auditory technology substitutes familiar terrains of musical production.
In this post, I revisit the decades prior to and following the 1947 Partition of Bengal, a phase singularly volatile not only in India’s political but also its musical and technological histories. I examine how the introduction of European harmony/polyphony in the aural imaginary of Bengal negotiates ideologies espoused by the nationalists in the (re)constitution of gendered space post-Partition by transforming relations of consumption. The production of gendered domesticity was vitally related to rigid conceptions of physical space and its allocation in colonial Bengal which, further, influenced music reception in ways worth probing.
The auditory regimes prior to the emergence of recording/radio-broadcast typified public modes of listening based on live performances engendering affective flows and presupposed human proximity. This culture of aurality is inextricably tied to communal modes of consumption and performance, be it the high-end salon-tradition of the Bengali modern song, the hard-hitting agitprop strains of the Bengal wing of the IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association) or even the stylized elite classical genres. The collective nature of musical practice conjures up traditional connotations of masculine spaces, especially in the case of the elite Bengali household where the gendered ideology of spatial orientation relegated the respectable Bengali woman (bhadramahila) to the interiors of the house (antahpur/andarmahal). The delights of salon-music were to be relished by the man of the house (babu).
Thus, the communitarian character of musical practice often made it elusive to respectable women. However, the emergence and subsequent sophistication of auditory technologies ushered a radical transformation to such a dynamic by dissociating music from the human performer. Besides leading to the obvious technological alienation in the listener, the privatization of the listening experience was accompanied by a condition of a penetrating solitude and interiority, a state speaking to the voices and /sounds emanating from the phonograph. At the sociological level, the entry of recording technology redefined long-held divisions of domestic space and the gendered dynamics thereof by not only democratizing musical consumption but also forging provisional collectivities of listeners often cutting across gender, class and caste. Besides, traditional associations of musical genres with specific loci- classical music with the salon/concert space for instance- gave way to a more fluid conception of domestic space assuming multiple sonic/musical identities depending on what the gramophone played. The phonographic interface, thus, radically reconfigures listening practices and produces a different paradigm of self, sound, community, and gender.
What is at stake here is not some covert form of linear technological determinism, but a more nuanced detour around auditory-technologies, spaces of consumption, and the affordances thereof that calibrate auditory experience along new registers. What merits contemplation is how (if at all) these technological innovations in the commercial arena complement and usher formal nuances and sonic innovations in the musical works they mediate. The gramophone renders problematic the uncritical conflation of the sonic and visual registers typical of live musical performance and, in the process, sets in motion a unique dynamic of interacting with musical sound. Severed from its visual footholds in live performance, phonographic sounds often provoke the listener to imagine the singing/performing body which, in turn, informs the way the sounds are processed mentally.
Indian music has traditionally been based on a single melody which, in its skeletal grammar, is an individual mode of expression, even when performed by a group. The intrinsic form of Indian and traditional East Asian music in general exhibits a non-harmonic character. The concept of musical harmony proper is considered a European import. European harmony, polyphony, and counterpoint are in their very essences a set of disparate tonal registers forging a gestalt which impresses on the mind of the listener an overarching unity. At an experiential level, the polyphonic form embodies a distinct sonic ontology and a novel dimension, as it were, and thus cannot be reduced to merely a stylistic import. It induces a new auditory condition, a new register of being-in-listening (the lecture snippet from 57:08-.1:02:07 effectively demonstrates the morphing of the basic melody of a song into its polyphonic equivalent). The new auditory condition conjoins the familiarity of the melody with the markedly different yet complementing registers of the polyphony, creating a novel sensation for the uninitiated Bengali listener.
Among the very early records to employ musical polyphony in India were two iconic musical works of the mid-20th century, one devotional in intent– Aham Rudre from Mahishasurmardini (1931) composed by the legendary music director Pankaj Mullick–and the other, a professed experiment in introducing polyphony in Bengali music, Shurer Ei Jharna (1958), by the noted composer Salil Chowdhury.
In the current context, it is important to note how the sonic dimension of musical polyphony in Aham Rudre and Shurer Ei Jharna embodies and substitutes notions of aural communities and restages a communitarian character. Notably, the creation and circulation of these works paralleled the establishment of commercial state-radio in India (1930) and the first microgroove record in Kolkata in 1958 by the Gramophone Company.
The Gramophone Company in Calcutta marketed its records with the Bengali tagline “Shukhi Grihokon Shobhe Gramophone/Happy Homes Have Gramophones,” projecting the phonograph as the symbolic ideal of the domestic idyll and in the process confronting gendered spatial demarcations head-on by invading the auditory horizons of the secluded Bengali women. The striking presence of the gramophone in the iconic Gramophone Scene (1:35:17-1:35:28) in Satyajit Ray’s movie Ghare Baire–set in the backdrop of the 1905 Partition of Bengal–beautifully illustrates the sorority forged by the gramophone which, notably, draws even the marginalized widow Bouthan within its field of influence.
However, the gramophone superseded its commodity-character to serve not only in crass exhibitionism but also as an index of a masculine, elite consumerist culture where “serious music” and musical connoisseurship often became synonymous with the gramophone and recorded sound. A new breed of “record-collectors” came into existence, mainly belonging to the upwardly-mobile/elite classes whose passion for records was their most prominent identity-marker in the domestic realm, occasionally outweighing even their professional concerns.
But even as the radio and phonograph transcended the hitherto gendered character of musical reception by entering the women’s quarters and dissolving time-honored segregations of auditory spaces within the household, it had to contend with a deep-seated psychological discomfort in the listener, a fundamental unease with befriending technology that substituted the human. I argue that the newly insulated character of the radiophonic auditory experience was counteracted by significant efforts, conscious or otherwise, at sonically restaging and reclaiming the community lost in technological mediation.
Given pet notions of musical anthropology and the chronological coincidence between the early uses of harmony and the entry and sophistication of technologically mediated music in Bengal one could, at the risk of slight oversimplification, posit that the import of the harmonic form at this significant juncture sonically compensates the auditory solitude induced by radio/phonograph by recreating a modified and idealized Platonic (Platonic here is used as an allusion to ‘music of the spheres’ to point towards how musical harmony since medieval times has been associated with ideal public) community and restaging it within the confines of the constitutive plurality of the polyphonic mode. As an aside, the initial introduction of polyphony in Shurer Ei Jharna (1958) garnered flak from a large section of the audience who cognized it as a group of amateur performers ‘singing out of key’ (Salil Chowdhury’s lecture from 30:31-31:15). Over the next few decades, however, this form was trans-culturated and seamlessly assimilated within the sonic vocabulary of the Bengali/Indian masses, so much so that without the regular vocal/instrumental counterpoint, commercial songs nowadays are often felt to be lacking hue.
The sonic changes that I have been investigating preceded or followed the Partition of Bengal, which informed the gendered patterns of popular musical consumption. It is well-known that the exigencies of the Partition proved emancipatory for women in that they were exposed to the vagaries of the workplace, leaving the confines of their quarters. It is with an often uncritical celebratory fervor that the Partition is credited with fashioning the independent, self-reliant and educated middle-class Bengali working woman, on occasion emerging as the sole bread-earner of the family. Jasodhara Bagchi says that the “partition accelerated the earlier trends of the twentieth century of abolishing the ‘purdah that had confined the Bengali bhadramahila to her antahpur (private quarters)…The same stroke that brought this flood of uprooted marginalised women to Calcutta also opened the door to many new opportunities for Bengali middle-class Hindu women. They came out of the private domain of domesticity and child rearing to take up public duties.’”(8) Uditi Sen, however, in her revisionist reading of the celebratory impulse argues that “situational aberrations” notwithstanding, the Partition did not lead to “a transformation of social norms or any substantive change of women’s ideal role within the bounds of the family.”(16)
In the aftermath of the Second World War, which had also witnessed the entry of women into the professional/public sphere, the USA launched a propaganda war to restore women to their hearth, revivifying the “cult of the housewife,” deploying films and popular music to promote the trope of the ideal housewife. Redefining domestic spaces as woman’s space had also been in the cards for the Indian state post-Partition, which had to a large extent been governed by patterns of popular media consumption. Arguably, the coincidental emergence of musical harmony and sophistication of private auditory technologies in the years following the Partition contributed to efforts to restore women to their private quarters, by compensating the lost professional community of the self-reliant working woman with the poetic/sonic community embodied by the polyphonic form, in the process enlivening her insipid lived quarters. Popular media technologies often employ innovation in content to revivify clichéd formats; musical harmony coupled with sophisticated audio-reproduction provides a classic instance of inaugurating a new sonic dimension in popular music which provides a powerful and enthralling form of domestic leisure.
Thus, in the context of early 20th century Bengal, the gramophone was a significant import which not only reconfigured perceptual registers and musical cultures but also listening practices by entering the interiors of elite Bengali households. Besides democratizing the listening experience, which till then had largely been restricted to male constituencies, the gramophone privatized musical consumption. It was through the introduction of musical polyphony, which is intrinsically ‘public/ communal’ as regards its sonic character, that this impulse was counteracted. As mentioned earlier, these technical/musical innovations widened the scope and impact of musical performance and arguably contributed to the reconstitution of gendered domestic space post-Partition which points to subtle and complex relations among technology, (musical) genre and gender.
Featured Image: Screen Capture from by SO! Ed. Satyajit Ray’s Ghare Baire
Ronit Ghosh is a postgraduate student at the Department of Art and Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark. His research interests include aesthetic philosophy, critical sound studies and the sociology of Indian popular music. He has published articles on sound studies in the International Journal on Stereo and Immersive Media and The Rupkatha Journal and has an article forthcoming in the Journal of Sonic Studies. He is a classical violinist and an aspiring music composer.
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Pushing Play: What Makes the Portable Cassette Recorder Interesting?—Gustavus Stadler
Hearing “Media-Capitalism” in Egypt–Ziad Fahmy
**This post was co-authored by forum co-editors Praseeda Gopinath and Monika Mehta
A note on the collection: Our original Call For Posts was for “Gendered Sounds of South Asia,” as we hoped to use this de-center India and explore terrain beyond cinema. However, the submissions that we received compelled us to recalibrate the framing of this forum, which will now focus on cinema and sound in India. It occurred to us once we received the pitches that there were structural reasons for the paucity of submissions on both South Asia and sound beyond cinema. The listservs on which the CFP circulated as well as the ways in which the CFP framed sound shaped the submissions. Intersecting sound with gender immediately invokes the female voice, since gender still signals the female. This invocation leads to the next term, “Indian film,” which dominates the region. That said, it is also possible that gender may not be a key lens for analyzing sound in current work on South Asia; noise regulation, caste, religion, ethnicity, and region might be more salient at the moment. We curated the current forum, “Gendered Sounds of India” to expand the terrain of what constitutes sound and voice in India, and through this means, these articles also offer new modes of listening.
Praseeda Gopinath: My childhood is lived soundscapes. It’s revelatory to think about memory and self through the paradigm of sound, because it is only now that I realize that some of my abiding memories are shaped by sound, film, and voice. Urban Indian childhood meant inhabiting layers of sound, and learning to separate and parse the various layers in order of situational importance: the call of the ice-cream man from the call of the peanut-seller, depending on what you were in the mood for; raucous playful yelling of friends from your mother yelling to check on where you were; and of course, the ubiquitous sound of radios and televisions from various homes in your neighborhood. Your ear heard the professional cadences of the radio announcer or television announcements, but you were waiting for the film’s songs you liked, or the dialogue delivery of your favorite actor. If we heard Amitabh Bachchan’s distinctive baritone—the undisputed and worshipped Hindi film star of 70s-80s—we immediately stopped whatever we were playing at and listened to his voice as it drifted out on to the aether. He was the gendered voice of power and glamor emanating from invisible radios or televisions and seeping into our childish brains, defining sound, stardom, and most importantly, cool.
Our listening practices are discursively constructed. In the sonic landscape of India, in particular, the way in which we listen and what we hear is often normative, produced within hegemonic discourses of gender, class, caste, region, and sexuality. Today’s entry in the forum, Claire Cooley’s entry on the The Lor Girl (1933)–a film collaboration between Iranian expatriates and The Imperial Film Company–unpacks the ways in which the gendered voice and accent of the female protagonist become symptomatic of modernity in Bombay and Tehran. Class and modernity are rendered through the transformation of her voice and accent. In the process, gendered modernity is also produced and circulated through the film’s soundscape; The Lor Girl offers a lesson in listening, what and how to listen to gendered voice, sound, and accent. It reveals how the ear is trained to identify class, region, and the modern, discourses that continue to shape listening practices in contemporary India.
Similarly, Pavitra Sundar’s article on Falguni Pathak, a sought-after vocalist for heternormative and religiously-inflected Navaratri celebrations, reveals how Pathak’s vocalic body challenges heteronormative ideas about sexuality and gender and consequentially heteronormative listening practices. Sundar asks us to think about how “queerness” might sound in Indian public culture, and indeed, how this aural queerness might not necessarily align with the “queer timbre” theorized in Euro-American queer theory. Perhaps what seems most intriguing about Sundar’s analysis of Pathak is not just her elusive queer voice, but that it is this elusiveness, Pathak’s ability to slip between and across heteronormative aural spaces, that makes her vocal queerness both pervasive and difficult to label.
Monika Mehta: When I think of sound, an image surfaces of my mama (maternal uncle) reclining on a bed and cradling a transistor by his ear. The time is the late 1970s and the location, Railway Colony, Kishan Ganj, New Delhi, my maternal grandparents’ home. Thinking back, the transistor must have provided a sense of privacy, perhaps, even facilitated cultivation of a private self in a middle-class, bustling joint family; in such a family, home was not a private place. For better or worse, most things were shared. These shared objects included the radio, and later, the television, both of which were ensconced in the living room and functional, bulky, and ornamental, signaling middle-class status.
Unlike the radio and television, the transistor and the two-in- one were portable; they could be moved and held. The two-in- one was often transported to a grill-window of a bedroom where another mama (maternal uncle) loved listening to Talat Mahmood songs on it. While most Hindi song aficionados were fans of the playback singer Mohammed Rafi, he preferred Mahmood’s voice. For him, the cassette player enabled the cultivation of pleasure and fandom. What appears curious now was that it was mostly, if not exclusively, the male members of the family who were attached to the transistors and the two-in- ones. Similarly, in bazaars, on sidewalks, nears shops, men would cluster around these audio technologies, riveted by a cricket commentary, or at times, enjoying film songs. These technologies produced a sense of male privacy at home, and homosociality outside.
Technology is often imagined as a neutral entity, unaffected and unrelated to socio-economic divisions. Priva Jaikumar and Ronit Ghosh’s posts challenge this normative assumption by examining the relations amongst sound technology, gender, and the public.
Jaikumar discusses how the adoption of sync sound recording by Bombay filmmakers in the 1990s generates new forms of labor that are divided along lines of class and gender. Bouncers and sound-security personnel are drawn from lower-class migrant men, whereas the sound artists and engineers are recruited from the middle and upper classes. In both cases, women are excluded from working with or on sound. Ghosh demonstrates how the introduction of new recording technology in India in the 1930s privatizes listening experiences. If the consumption of live music occurred in public spaces, which could only be accessed by male audiences, then this new technology, not only provided a new listening experience, but made music available to middle-class female audiences. Both Ghosh and Jaikumar’s posts show that consumption, or the labor of sound in public, is masculinized whereas private sounds, or ones that require private labor, are feminized.
On a closing note, the posts offer snapshots of sound at sites of trans/national production, marketing, filmic and musical texts. Complementing these posts, the accompanying photographs offer glimpses of gendered community formation, homosociality, the pervasiveness of sound technology in India, and the discordant stratified soundscapes of the city. This series opens up for us the question of other contexts in India where sound, gender, and technology might intersect, but more broadly, it demands that we consider how sound exists differently in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Afghanistan. How might we imagine a sonic framework and South Asia from these locations?
To read all of the posts in the forum, click here.
Praseeda Gopinath is an associate professor of English at SUNY Binghamton and author of Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire (University of Virginia Press, 2013).
Monika Mehta is an associate professor of English at SUNY Binghamton and author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema (University of Texas press, 2011).
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Sounding Out Tarima Temporalities: Decolonial Feminista Dance Disruption–Iris C. Viveros Avendaño
Suddenly we heard a Tereng! tereng! teng! teng! We looked round, and now found the reason why the postilion had not been able to sound his horn: his tunes were frozen up in the horn, and came out now by thawing, plain enough, and much to the credit of the driver. —The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, 1865
At the BBC Archive Centre in Perivale, London, the proverbial “weight of the past” becomes literal for researchers of sound history. Housed in a massive, unattractive hangar-like building in an industrial park to the northwest of London, the archives suit their environment, one which speaks of practical and solid shapes far more than the lyrical, dainty ivory tower. And by weight, I mean by serious, and sometimes dangerous, poundage: the very first machine created to record off of radio, invented around 1930, was a steel pedestal with bus wheel-sized reels on either side. Audio Coordinator of the BBC Archives, John Dell, explained that not only was this machine laborious to load, but it used magnetic steel tape as its recording surface, which could come free from the reels and lacerate incautious operators as it unspooled and bunched.
The weight of these objects, however, is also metaphoric. The earliest recording in my personal audio drama library, sourced off the invaluable Archive.org, is a 1933 episode of Front Page Drama, a dramatized version of an American Weekly Hearst publication. The past stands monumentally huge if this type of machine, the Marconi-Stille Wire Recorder, was the apparatus that allowed those 15 minutes of 1933 to be captured and, eventually, fed into my 2015 headphones as an MP3.
I listen to much of my audio drama, whether old and crackling like Front Page Drama, or new and podcast-y, while commuting, usually on the London Underground. The episode of Front Page Drama in question I heard during a marathon session when I knew very little could or would interrupt me: on an twelve-hour transatlantic plane ride. I quite like the audio-visual play between listening to audio drama that is new to me versus the familiar but never identical sights of the commute; as Primus Luta remarked in 2012, it’s rare for us to engage our full attention on the aural medium.
While listening to Front Page Drama and episodes of Lum and Abner on that flight, I had to wonder how I was prioritizing my listening time. Who had recorded these episodes from the 1930s? Who had later taken the trouble to digitize them and upload them to Archive.org? Why, for example, were these particular recordings freely available yet I couldn’t find an MP3 anywhere of texts I wanted to share more widely, such as Don Haworth’s On a Summer’s Day in a Garden (1975) or Angela Carter’s Come Unto These Yellow Sands (1978)? Both of these recordings are in the BBC back catalogue; I know, because the BBC supplied them to me—but only the basis of a visit to the archive.
Archive.org is bountiful and accessible, the Perivale archives much more exclusive, but both seem to lack curation. The only hope for accessing things like Haworth or Carter outside the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image Archives is that someday a rogue MP3 or BitTorrent will show up online. The archive does seem, in Neil Verma’s words, then, “transformed before dispersing in space, plucked from the air and mineralized like fossils” (Theater of the Mind, 227); like Primus Luta’s weighty but playful experiment, Schrödinger’s Cassette, which suspended music in concrete to be risked, or remain aurally untouched forever. This seems too often to be the impossible choice.
The BBC archive storage is eclectic and generally arranged for access by BBC staff rather than for researchers. The BBC Written Archives at Caversham are restricted to academics, and likewise, the speed of gaining access to sound files from Perivale is predicated on the amount of time BBC staff have to devote to it—naturally, the BBC’s own departments have priority, such as BBC Radio 4 Extra, the archival digital radio station, whose backlog of requests for digitised material from the Perivale archive apparently covers 20 pages. The sound collections consist of commercial recordings on shellac (90 RPM records) and vinyl (78 RPMs) as well as impressively dinner-plate sized compilation transcriptions which require a special turn-table on which to play and digitize them. The BBC Sheet Music archive is in Perivale, as well, with original handwritten scores filling shelves.
The second half of the British and Irish Sound Archives conference 2015 afforded a privileged glimpse of the archive storage and technical facilities housed on site. Most of my fellow attendees were archivists of one sort or another, asking detailed questions about transcription devices, fidelity, and storage. Having recently completed my PhD from Swansea University in English in radio drama, I had made countless requests to this very facility through the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image request service; now I, at long last, hoped to see where my digitised sound files were coming from. However, we weren’t shown any recordings made on tape cassette or CD but instead Betamax audio-only. Unseen, too, were the data banks holding all the digitised content, but what myself and my fellow archivists had mainly come to see were the tangible objects making this content possible.
In the physical copies of the Radio Times of the 1940s and ‘50s, also housed at the British Library at St Pancras (and now available, like all of the Radio Times up to 2009, on BBC Genome), there can be found a little asterisk in the listings for drama, which signifies that the drama was broadcast from a recording, rather than live. The later recording machines of the ‘30s through ‘50s, upon which these recordings would have been made, did not decrease appreciably in size, though perhaps in weight. “If I were to drop this,” Dell told us as he carefully handled a dark blue celluloid tube, about the size and circumference of a toilet paper roll, “it would bounce. I’m not going to drop it,” he added. Then the magic began: via a custom-made device, we heard a few bars of a music hall song from circa 1900. The recording was surprisingly clear. It was agonizing when Dell turned it off after only a few seconds.
There is something incredibly seductive about old recordings. In “The Recording that Never Wanted to Be Heard and Other Stories of Sonification,” from The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, Jonathan Sterne and Mitchell Akiyama question the desire for “sonification” of ever-older recordings, especially when such desires manifest in the creation of a digital sound file in 2008 for “the world’s oldest recording,” a phonoautogram from 1860, which was nevertheless never intended to be played back—the phonoautograph was intended as a device to make the aural visual (555). Radio drama writer Mike Walker really summed up the seduction of old recordings for me in his 2013 BBC Radio 4 ghost story The Edison Cylinders, with a character who is seduced as a scholar and as a participant in a time-traveling mystery by old recordings: a sound engineer in need of money, she agrees to digitize what seem like boring diary entries from a British imperialist, only to be intrigued by his Victorian domain beyond her rather empty modern existence. Unfortunately for her, these particular recordings are reaching beyond the grave to try to kill her.
Although they do reach out from the grave, most early sound recordings aren’t out to kill you. They do however, present common and vexing issues of authenticity. By this, I mean specifically the provenance of the recording—is the recording of who or what it says it is? On the first day of the conference, Dell regaled us with tales of two cylinder recordings surfacing in the mid-twentieth century, of William Gladstone giving a speech. The words of the speech were identical, but the voices were completely different. Who was the real Gladstone? How could you authenticate the voice of a dead person? Dell further deepened the mystery by telling us the tale of two boxes of wax cylinder recordings in the Perivale archive, whose provenance is torturously (and tantalizingly) unclear. We glimpsed these mysterious, yellow-cream-colored cylinders, somewhat wider and fatter than the celluloid tubes, in situ, but were they original Edison cylinders from the 1880s? The piercing desire to believe these cylinders might contain the voices of Gladstone, the future Edward VIII, or even Henry Irving, are potentially “perils of over-optimism,” as Dell puts it.
All the archivists at this event referred to the serendipity of discovering surprises on recordings. Simon Elmes, whose official title reads “Radio Documentarist, Creative Consultant, and Former Creative Director, BBC Radio Documentaries,” made this manifest as he discussed a subject treated in his documentary from 2005, Ambridge in the Decade of Love. The Archers—an exceptionally long-running BBC radio soap which conjures up visions of rural Englishness and persists among a very dedicated, though mostly older, fan base—like much radio drama and emblematic of gendered attitude toward radio soaps, was not recorded in its first few decades.
Likewise, anyone researching radio drama before the 1930s is playing a game of roulette; whether any scripts survive will depend entirely on the literary reputation of the author who may have had enough clout to publish them in book form. Even in the case of Lance Sieveking, the acknowledged creative aesthete behind early BBC radio drama, we lack concrete evidence of his most important work, The End of Savoy Hill (1932). And The Truth About Father Christmas (1923), the first original drama written specifically for British radio? Forget about it—it was made for children’s radio.
To return to The Archers, though daily 15-minute scripts were being churned out by Ted Kavanagh from the first years of the 1950s, the broadcasts themselves went missing into the ether (after all, no one suspected the show would still be going after sixty years). Transcription discs, meant for an overseas market, were found in a box in the BBC Archives, giving a reasonably complete overview of The Archers during the 1950s and ‘60s. Elmes was ebullient about this discovery.
While I got the general sense that the other archivists at the conference were amused but indifferent toward this particular trove, to me it was inspiring. I believe the future of audio drama will rely more and more on serials, so the rediscovery of these Archers episodes epitomizes to me the past, present, and future of audio drama in that it speaks of audience involvement and even audience interaction or co-production, which seems key for audio drama going forward, and the aspect of serialization which has vastly overtaken the single drama on television if not on radio.
Nevertheless, even if pursuit of these aural rainbows is a foolish one, such desire also enables scholarship. The hope of finding “originals” inspired me personally to discover the birth of what can conceivably called audio drama. Having researched audio drama from the first known broadcast dramas in English (the adaptations: 2LO London’s Five Birds in a Cage in 1922, WGY Schenectady’s The Wolf in 1922, British Broadcasting Company’s Twelfth Night in 1923; original drama: WLW Cincinnati’s When Love Awakens in 1923, British Broadcasting Company’s Danger in 1924), I was astounded to learn that listeners from World War I might have enjoyed short, dramatized stories on the celluloid tubes (according to Tim Crook, the first audio drama of this nature is a war drama from 1917). While archives such as the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project of the University of California at Santa Barbara care for these recordings in the same way they do for musical and speech recordings, there is a significant lack of scholarship on them.
If commentary on specific pre-radio audio drama is scarce, it is heartening to read dissections of the performative aspects of “actuality,” such as Brian Hanrahan’s anatomy of Gas Shell Bombardment, 1918. Wonderfully, in discussing the “staging” of this war-time recording, Hanrahan brings in traditions from theatre and silent film in addition to the phonograph. Professor David Hendy has persuasively argued that some of the organizing tenets behind the British Broadcasting Corporation, whose management was by and large made up of ex-soldiers, was predicated on a desire for silence and calm, ordered, managed sound after the cacophony of war. Perhaps “cylinder” drama, then, is not really of its time and properly belongs to earlier, or later, cultural milieux.
The ephemera of the medium presents a recurring problem in radio drama studies, a weighty feeling of doom. With the future of the BBC’s existence currently perilous, one wonders what the consequences will be for archives like those housed at Perivale. If the internal function of the archives (for the BBC to make use during Radio 4 Extra broadcasts, for example) disappears, will the archives be opened to wider use? Or will material without commercial potential simply be discarded? Who would make the decision as to what was commercially viable and how would they make such decisions?
And the problem with the medium seemingly begins with wax cylinders. A beautiful, lyrical story from Baron Munchausen—alias Rudolph Erich Raspe, a German author who created a fictional travel writer and chronic teller of tall tales based on a real nobleman infamous for his boasting—cited by many of those fascinated with sound recordings is worth repeating here: the Baron is traveling in Russia in a snowy landscape and desires the postilion to blow his horn to alert other travellers that their sleigh will be coming around the bend. Unfortunately, the cold makes the horn incapable of any audible sound. Disappointed, they make their way to an inn. Diedre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson cite the “Frozen Horn” from their online Museum of Imaginary Instruments: “After we arrived at the end inn, my postilion and I refreshed ourselves: he hung his horn on a peg near the kitchen fire; I sat on the other side.” Warmed by the fire, the horn now begins to play its reserved tunes.
With a little leap of the imagination, it’s not difficult to see the parallels with the reality of sound recording limitation. The wax cylinders could only be played a few times before the sound degrades completely. Tin cylinders are not much better. This is the reason why the two Gladstone voices could be both “real” and “fake.” Celluloid is more durable, yet witness the reluctance of Dell to play one for longer than a few seconds, for preservation reasons.
Sound recordings are only as good as the medium on which they are recorded, a fact that surprisingly holds true even today. We were told by our BBC hosts that discs of shellac, vinyl, and acetate whose contents have already been digitised will not be discarded—digital recordings are ultimately taken from these physical originals.
In the future, we might invent means of reproduction and playback which could provide more fidelity to the original event lifted from the physical recording, in which case it will be the MP3s that will be redundant. There’s something both very modern and very old-fashioned about this. Once at a dinner party, I launched full-force into my postdoctoral rant about the eventual possible degradation of the MP3 as a recording format, that it was not infallible as we had been led to believe. I was surprised that I was wholly believed; furthermore, the older people participating in the conversation rued the disappearance of their CDs, tape cassettes and, vitally, their LPs, for the oft-cited reasons (which Primus Luta distills as the pricelessness of old recordings to one’s personal history, and the “fuller” sound ans weighty materiality, one resonating with one’s emotional past).
I admit, before I came to the UK and experienced the never-perfect but always interesting presence of BBC Radio, I treated radio as a background medium. I suppose recorded sound had always interested me, and I had had a strong relationship with local, classical music radio (Classical KHFM Albuquerque). However, I could not have predicted ten years ago that I would become a passionate proponent of audio drama and sound studies more generally. I’m almost embarrassed now at my excessive love of audio drama; I make almost no distinctions between “high” art like Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard and fan fiction radio serials like Snape’s Diaries as produced by Misfits Audio: I listen to almost anything.
And, truly, the future of audio drama is only assured if people keep listening. The digitisation and availability of cylinder recordings makes study of them more accessible, so the way is paved for further studies of the earliest audio drama. It is imperative that researchers continue to request sound recordings from the BBC, even if they have to use the relatively inconvenient system currently available.
There are signs that things are improving and that more people than ever before want to access such materials. As Josh Shepperd puts it brilliantly, “Sound trails continue where paper trails end.” As Director of the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress, his efforts have underlined the fact that often it is the local and the rural whose radio or audio history vanishes more quickly than the national or the metropolitan. This would historically be the case with the BBC as well, which for a long time privileged London sound above regionalism (and, some would argue, still does). Since 2015, the British Library (and the Heritage Lottery Fund) have invested significantly in the Save Our Sounds campaign, positing that within 15 years, worldwide sound recordings must be digitized before recordings degrade or we no longer have the means to play the material.
Out of curiosity, I downloaded the more than 600-page listing, the Directory of UK Sound Collections, assembled rather hastily through the Save Our Sounds project in 20 weeks, and comprising more than 3,000 collections and more than 1.9 million objects. This document makes for fascinating and eclectic reading, ranging as it does between a Sound Map of the English town of Harrogate to the archives of the Dog Rose Trust, which mainly provides recorded tours of English cathedrals for those who are blind. Undoubtedly, there are wodges of local or forgotten drama in these archives, too. The linking up of these archives and making them more widely accessible suggests how important sustained, collective effort is to unfreezing radio’s archival post-horn, delivering more of its unique tunes.
Featured Image: “The Route to Open Data” at BBC Perivale, Image by Flickr User Hatter! (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Leslie McMurtry has a PhD in English (radio drama) and an MA in Creative and Media Writing from Swansea University. Her work on audio drama has been published in The Journal of Popular Culture, The Journal of American Studies in Turkey, and Rádio-Leituras. Her radio drama The Mesmerist was produced by Camino Real Productions in 2010, and she writes about audio drama at It’s Great to Be a Radio Maniac.
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“Share your story” – but who will listen?–Fabiola Hanna

domain: library


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Faith, Hope, and Love
And now abide faith, hope, love, these three, but the greatest of these is love....
I am so delighted that you have come to my page!
I would love to work with you to create beautiful customized images that will last a lifetime!
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domain: artistic


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Quantity: 1 available
115pp. Frontispiece printed on Indian paper. Map, plan and 19 tinted lithographs (complete). The binding is waterdamaged but the very handsome plates are in good condition and tissue-guarded. Printing by Hallmandel.
Title: Illlustrations of Jerusalem and Mount Sinai; Including the Most interesting Sites Between Grand Cairo and Beirout. From Drawings By F. Arundale, Architect, With a descriptive Account of His Tour and Residence in Those Remarkable Countries.
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: London, Henry Colburn 1837: 1837
Book Condition: Good
Item: 1.00 Item
Book number: 26617
Keywords: Palestine,Israel,Topography,Middle,East,Engravings,Plate Books


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Architecture + Design
INSPIRED BY TRADITION AND MODERN CONCEPT
Wisma Atria Interior has recently launched their furniture collection by ARTEBROTTO from Italy. The collection consists of meticulously designed and carved sideboards, dining table and bed to accent Italian touch into your abode. Each piece is made of wood with the concept behind its designing in different shades and textures of natural wood to give your home vintage and rustic appeal. The pieces of this collection are authentically been made in Italy.


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, NAIROBI, Kenya, Oct 19 – Thousands of Kenyans born with intersex conditions continue to suffer in silence, having to bear the burden if not being recognised socially or legally under Kenyan laws.
Persons with the condition are mostly hidden and unaccounted for in the official census report.
Gamafrica Foundation’s Gathoni Muchomba said the challenges facing intersex people have resulted to many committing suicide due to prejudice from the society which lacks awareness and understanding of the condition.
“It is that bad that some of the kids at teenage level are committing suicide, I am most saddened with the death of two boys between the ages of 11 and 16 from Meru and Bungoma counties that committed suicide,” said Muchomba.
Intersex is a complex biological form where children are born with either two sex organs (male and female) or one visible organ while the other is hidden, malformed or deformed but present.
Child Rights International Network Conservatively estimates that there are 20,000 intersex people in Kenya.
Twenty-five year old James Karanja who has the condition, explains vividly of the hardships he faces everyday in the quest to gain recognition and identity in the country.
Karanja was pronounced a girl by doctors when born and was called Mary Waithera.
It wasn’t all joy and festivity to the family as his father later abandoned his mother upon knowing of the condition, leaving her with the task of taking care of him as an infant.
“When I was born, my father couldn’t tell whether I was a boy or a girl. He saw this as a curse and so took off,” said Karanja.
“After my father left, the community also stigmatised us by telling my mother that she was cursed which was evident by my birth,” said Karanja.
“The issue took a toll on my mother and as we speak she is currently admitted at the Mathare Hospital with a mental disorder,” he stated.
With no one to protect the family and Karanja in school, his mother was raped and as a result of the assault became expectant.
“My mother got sick because she couldn’t handle the pressure from the society all because of my condition, no one understood this taboo as they would call it, leave alone want to discuss it. No one wanted to be associated with us and so we had to fend for ourselves,” said the aggrieved Karanja.
Karanja lived his life as a girl and even attended a girl’s boarding school for his O-levels.
“I attended both primary and secondary school as a Girl. I used to wake up at 3am to take a shower so that my fellow students wouldn’t notice that my genitalia were different from theirs,” noted Karanja.
Things didn’t get any easier for him for many are the times he would be sent home on claims that he was a lesbian.
“Every now and then I would be sent away from school as teachers thought I was instigating lesbianism in school.”
With all the hardships, Karanja managed to score a B- in his Kenya Certificate for Secondary Examination (KSCE), sufficient enough to have him enrolled in a university.
But that wasn’t the case, as Karanja found it difficult to integrate with the community as people expected her to transition from a girl to a lady of which the opposite was what was taking place.
“My voice was deepening, I was more masculine and that’s when I realised the intensity of my condition.”
Since Karanja has now transitioned to a man, the challenge lies in changing his documentation which indicates his sex as female to male to enable him have access to the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF), education, employment, and access to public services which all require one to clearly indicate their sex.
“I can’t get an Identification Card, a birth certificate because every time I go the registry they think I am an impersonator,” said Karanja.
Karanja is the voice of the many intersex persons who go through life’s struggle in silence.
Among the recommendations put forward by the Kenya National Commission on Human rights to Attorney General Githu Muigai is that of identifying an organ that’s tasked with generating a data system that will record the number of people with the intersex condition.
“People with the condition carry the task of proving their identity in a society that isn’t aware and lacks understanding of the condition,” said Commissioner Jedidah Waruhio.
Muchomba also highlighted on the need to amend the children’s act as well as other acts that affect intersexual children to accommodate their basic needs especially in legal recognition.
Other recommendations include:
The Department of registration of persons takes immediate administrative action to recognize the Intersex persons by adding a marker on birth notification and birth certificates.
The Ministry of education should appraise the National Assembly with information on the number of students who have dropped out of school because of their condition and what measures have been put in place to retain such children in school.
For the Inspector General of Police to ensure that human rights violations against intersex people are investigated, alleged perpetrators prosecuted and the victims receive redress.
The National Assembly through the committee to direct that the Registrar of Persons, Kenya Bureau of Statistics and the Ministry of Health provide statistics for all intersex persons, if not available to embark on measures that would ensure such statistics are captured.
Kenya will for the first time hold the inaugural recognition of the Intersex Awareness Day on October 26 to break the silence and create awareness and understanding on matters around Intersex children through the initiative dubbed “Let Me, Be Me”.

domain: news


Mar 18,2009 00:00
WINNIPEG, Manitoba -- Canadian communities along the Red River in southern Manitoba are under a serious flood warning threat and busy making sandbags and breaking ice jams.
A winter's worth of heavy snow in North Dakota and the spring thaw are swelling the north-running river that empties in Lake Winnipeg, officials in Winnipeg said.
In that city, officials said in a worst-case scenario this year, some 300 properties would require about 760,000 sandbags, the Winnipeg Sun reported.
The city has a "floodway," or canal system circumventing the city, and permanent dikes have also been built in many places.
Meanwhile, ice-breaking machines are being deployed to the north in anticipation of the flood swells, said Water Stewardship Minister Christine Melnick.
"When we get ice jams there can be a real backup of water," she said. "This way we're helping Mother Nature do her job of moving the ice out into Lake Winnipeg."
The province is scheduled to issue its flood forecast Friday and Winnipeg will follow suit next week, the newspaper said.
The city was completely flooded by the river in 1950 and also badly saturated in 1997.
Copyright © 2009, by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.


By James Ferguson
Jan. 15, 2014
One after another, the names were announced – Paper Lions, Black Moor and Death Valley Driver among them. Each was nominated for an award and will perform across P.E.I. during the East Coast Music Awards week April 2-6.
Performances by Kayo and Meaghan Blanchard highlighted the ECMA news conference on Jan. 14 in Charlottetown.
Mayor Clifford Lee said Charlottetown is excited to host the East Coast Music Week.
“Music and culture play an important role within our community and the city will come alive with all of the featured venues and events.”
East Coast Music Week has a huge impact and leaves a significant imprint, and she’s excited to work with ECMA and the music and corporate communities in Charlottetown, said Jennifer Evans, manager of Ocean 100.3 and Hot 105.5 radio stations.
“Celebrating ECMW on P.E.I. in 2014 is thrilling as the province pays tribute to 150 years of the Charlottetown Conference (The conference was the birth of confederation in Canada).”


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Netflix’s wrestling comedy GLOW is back, with more sass, style and hairspray than ever. But just focussing on the spandex ignores a huge part of what makes season two special.
The show’s central story about a group of women trying to make it in Hollywood has taken on even more urgency post-Weinstein and mid-#MeToo movement, as the stars of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling try to navigate their way through hazardous gender politics and TV power games.
“I think a theme of the show has always been about women empowering themselves, finding themselves in new roles and trying to define their own roles,” star Alison Brie tells RadioTimes.com.
“In season two it’s even more of a challenge. They’re realising as women how much they’re capable of, what their desires are, allowing themselves to have those desires – and very quickly being penned in by the men around them.”
- Meet the cast of Netflix’s GLOW season 2
- GLOW season two doles out pleasure and pain in equal measures
In season two episode five in particular, that pressure comes to a head. Alison Brie’s character Ruth finds herself in a private hotel room with a network executive, the man who holds the fate of her show in his hands.
The ‘meeting’ quickly turns highly uncomfortable: first the exec asks her to put him in a wrestling headlock, to ‘show him the moves’ as it were, before inviting her to try the jacuzzi bath. Ruth, thankfully, makes her escape.
But that’s not the end of it: later Ruth’s co-star and producer on the show Debbie (played by Betty Gilpin) discovers that they are being moved to a late night time slot: “They’re burying us,” she says.
When Ruth reveals how she was harassed by the exec, instead of supporting her, Debbie turns on her: “How could you be so f***ing stupid? You’re in a hotel room with the head of the network, he comes on to you and you run away?” she says incredulously.
“That is how this business works,” she adds. “Men try shit, and you have to pretend to like it until you don’t have to anymore.”
As both of them explain in the video below, that scene in particular was a unique and difficult challenge to film.
“Scenes like that hotel scene which have happened forever, we’re now seeing that for the first time,” Gilpin says. “I think that’s what’s so great about [GLOW creators] Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch’s writing is that where some projects the camera would stay with the man while the woman goes off into the hallway, we follow the woman and we see the stories that were secondary or not told in previous projects.”
Gilpin admits that her ‘stomach turned’ when she read her character’s reaction to Ruth’s cry for help for the first time: “When I read Debby’s reaction to that episode my stomach just turned. I was like, ‘Please no, let her support Ruth.’ But that’s a huge part of that story too, women encouraging each other’s shame so that they can keep working.”
Brie says that the idea for the scene had been in place for some time even before the Hollywood revelations of last year: “I think they had always planned on putting something like that in our show, women’s movement aside, and obviously it’s more relevant than ever,” she says.
“It’s something that actresses have always faced and have faced for a long time, and we’re so lucky to be living in a time right now where people are talking about it in such a major way.
“Women are realising the power we have when we all come together, and it feels like actual change could be happening – rather than maybe in the past when women were talking about these things but in sort of a smaller way, and made to feel that their experiences were very unique and weren’t happening across the board to most women.”
Watch the full video above, where the pair also discuss their experience of feeling “replaceable” as actors, signing away power in show contracts and more.
Glow season two is available to watch on Netflix now


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The Silken Thomas hotel was the proud recipient of the Knorr Great Irish Roast award in the hotels category back in 2018, on the back of nearly 20 years’ hard work and dedication from the food and beverage team.
The Kildare hotel has long been noted for its excellent roast. Brian Flanagan, owner and General Manager, said: “It meant so much to us at The Silken Thomas to win the great Irish roast. Our carvery was nearly 20 years in operation when we won, and the win was vindication for our efforts during that 20 year period. We were particularly delighted for the team involved in its daily preparation and service. It gave the team a tremendous lift.”
The competition is back for 2021 and entries are now open. This year there are two categories – Meat Roast, and Vegetarian or Vegan Roast. Each category winner will receive a number of valuable awards, including a €3,000 voucher, 50,000 Chef Rewards Points, and national and local PR. All entrants will receive 500 Chefs Rewards Points.
For The Silken Thomas, timing is everything to ensure the final plate can truly be called a great Irish roast. “When the food is plated, the different components need to be as fresh as possible, be that in the raw product or the cooking process. It takes time to get this process right. You don’t want elements of the dish produced to far in advance,” said Brian.
Fresh, quality ingredients are crucial. “Ingredients are the key,” continued Brian. “Fresh produce cooked correctly will never disappoint. We are so fortunate to have beef of the highest quality here in Ireland, it just needs to be treated with respect, and the flavours will come through. Homemade gravy cannot be overlooked, it is essential to get this right.”
It all adds up as well – thanks to a combination of ingredients, timing, and the dedication of the team, The Silken Thomas sells an average of over 1,250 roast dinners a week.
The Silken Thomas reopened its food operation when outdoor dining was allowed to resume earlier this year, on the 7th June. “We are delighted with how the business has performed since reopening,” said Brian. “It has been more challenging operating under current guidelines and restrictions but our team here at the Silken Thomas has done a great job adapting.”
While closed as a result of the lockdowns, the team used the opportunity to make various improvements to the property which have been well received by customers. They also expanded their outdoor offering, so much so that most customers are still choosing to dine outside. “We now find with indoor dining back, the majority of our customers still want to dine outside, which is a great vote of confidence in our outdoor offering,” said Brian.
The Knorr Great Irish Roast competition is open to any business that serves roasts to the public. This includes pubs, hotels, restaurants, cafés, golf clubs, leisure venues, and garden centres.


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PFS hosts 'Rooms for Rent'
Tonight will be the final performance of Poteau First Assembly's "Our Family Christmas: Rooms for Rent," an original tragicomedy written especially for the holiday season."Our Family Christmas: Rooms for Rent," is a non-traditional church Christmas play. Although it is set during Christmas and includes a Christmas “message,” the play focuses primarily on modern, “real life” family issues, which include both moments of hilarity and sobering dysfunction.The production is a musical with a live band and singers performing songs about personal struggle as characters seek to resolve their differences and “bridge the gaps” caused by estrangement, divorce, societal pressures and familial conflict. The play's message is one of hope; there are practical and spiritual directives on how to approach personal struggles in our own lives.The play's director, Aaron Williams, said this year's show will be different than past OFC productions. “This year, every show was a little different,” he says. “Sunday and Monday's vocal performances featured differing song selections. Tuesday night's vocal performances will be determined by the votes of Sunday and Monday night attendees.”The performance begins at 7 p.m. at Poteau First Assembly of God. Admission is free and open to the public. For directions or information, call (918) 647-3040.


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Favorite Rock Songs of the 90's
There's a lot of good songs that came out of the 90's, some rock and some not. I'm a big fan of a lot of songs, bands and artist's from the 90's. However, rock will always be my favorite genre of music. So, I complied a list of some of my favorite rock songs from the 90's. Some of these bands have more then one song I like, but I just put the one that's one of my favorite's. And, one of these songs isn't necessarily rock but, I took a risk and put it on the list anyway.
So, here's my list.
1. Red Hot Chili Peppers- Under the Bridge (Year 1995)
2. Radiohead- Creep (Year 1993)
3. Blur- Song 2 (Year 1997)
4. Lit- My Own Worst Enemy (Year 1999)
5. Len- Steal my Sunshine (Year 1999)
6. Toadies- Possum Kingdom (Year 1994)
7. Spacehog- In the Meantime (Year 1995)
8. Alice in Chains- Man in the Box (Year 1990)
9. Bush- Comedown (Year 1994)
10. Live- I Alone (Year 1994)
That concludes my list, feel free to share your thoughts on my list and what your favorite 90's rock songs were.
What Guys Said 7
Nice take. Those are some great bands.
Smashing Pumkins... Pearl Jam... Soundgarden...
Great take! Great songs as well.
YES! I love these songs (and I know you have more takes on 90s rock so I won't rant on the missing bands lol)
My favorite song to head-bang to in the car is Spoonman by Soundgarden. Came out in '94.
My favorite song (from my favorite band too) from the 90's would be Everlong by Foo Fighters. Came out in '97. It has a great story behind it, interesting music video, and catchy too. Overall a great song.
My favorite slightly less known song of the 90's is from Neutral Milk Hotel, a truly great band haha. I would say Aeroplane over the Sea, but that is not super rock sounding, so I'll list Holland 1945 for here.
What about Nirvana, Green Day, Perl Jam, Foo Fighters, Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots etc. Both Nirvana and Green Day are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
What Girls Said 3
"woooooooh we're halfway theeere WOOOH LIVIN' ON A PRAYYAAAHH take my hand we'll make it I sweaaar WOOOH LIVIN' ON A PRAYAAAHHHHHHH"
"With the liiiights out , it's less dangerouuuss
here we are noon ENTERTAIN UUUUUUS
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now; ENTERTAIN UUUUUUUS"
*bows and waits for applauses*
Great take but... No Pearl Jam?
Albatross - Corrosion of Conformity
Stoner Witch - Melvins
Arrow - Candlebox
Snap Your Fingers Snap Your Neck - Prong
Her Black Wings - Danzig
Come Touch the Sky - Trouble
Come Out and Pkay - The Offspring
Click "Show More" for your mentions

domain: hobby


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Experienced cultural competency begins by making our guests aware of how everyone carries some level of implicit cultural bias; then asking them to answer a series of character trait questions about an unfamiliar person presented as a point cloud.
1. Edo-Tokyo Museum
This museum explores Tokyo (Edo)’s rapid transformation into its sky-scraping capital via architectural models and life-sized recreations of key buildings. You can touch, enter and even enter buildings for yourself!
This exhibit traces the transition of feudal peasant town districts into modern city centered around Edo Castle, featuring miniature and life-size models of peasant houses, kabuki theater, and much more.
English-speaking volunteer guides are available to explain the exhibitions. However, these should be booked in advance as the museum will be undergoing extensive renovation from 2022-2025.
2. National Museum of Nature and Science
As a national museum, it collects/preserves specimens and materials, conducts research into natural history and technology histories, presents exhibitions and educational activities to raise public awareness, as well as explore ways for both nature and humanity to coexist together in harmony.
There’s plenty to see here, from the Global Gallery’s primer on biodiversity and evolution, to a large gallery devoted to human inventions, Forest of Discovery or an aromatic herb garden on the roof – each offering their own special treat! Timed-entry tickets must be obtained for entrance.
3. National Museum of Art
Kaleidoscope of Creativity – Art + Activities
The National Museum of Art offers exhibitions, education programs and events focused on modern and contemporary art from Milton Avery to Romare Bearden, Willem de Kooning and Georgia O’Keeffe in this Philip Johnson-designed building on the campus of Purchase College State University of New York. Furthermore, special gender bias exhibits are hosted online along with educational resources that highlight women artists.
This event is open and free to the public.
4. Georgia Museum of Art
The museum continues to honor Alfred Heber Holbrook’s vision by hosting exhibitions from across the United States and worldwide. Additionally, its staff organizes their own displays as well as hosting traveling ones from other institutions.
The High’s photography collection showcases images from across the South in a global context, while their holdings also include notable European prints and an impressive assortment of Southern decorative arts.
The museum is open and accessible to the public and hosts a permanent collection as well as 20-25 temporary exhibitions annually. The bright galleries with blonde wood floors provide the ideal space for curators to display whatever pieces they choose to exhibit.
5. Georgia Museum of Natural History
The museum features eleven distinct collections that explore various aspects of state, region and global history. For example, their anthropology collection boasts over three million artifacts while their zoology and botany collections contain endangered or extinct species.
Fernbank offers larger-than-life exhibits (such as dinosaur skeletons) and interactive elements to teach children about nature in an enjoyable manner. It boasts an IMAX theater and planetarium for the children to visit; they even host sleepovers similar to Night at the Museum movie! Established in 1978, its collections go back as far as 1801!
6. Georgia Museum of Art & Archaeology
Established in 1948 as part of the University of Georgia, this museum serves both as an academic and official art museum of Georgia. Its collections include American paintings; works on paper; Southern decorative arts; the Samuel H. Kress Study Collection of Renaissance and Baroque art; as well as Asian arts.
Archaeologists use even tiny fragments of ancient pottery as clues to reconstruct long-defunct civilizations. Atlanta’s Emory University provides graduate degrees recommended by the Archaeological Institute of America while their undergraduate anthropology program places special emphasis on field work and foreign language study.
7. Georgia Museum of Art
GMoA is an international museum with collections that reflect our world and its peoples, expanding upon traditional art historical canons.
Photography Collection. The photography collection emphasizes images from the American South, such as works by Eugene Atget, Dawoud Bey and Sally Mann.
Established in 1948 as part of the university library’s basement, the museum has since moved into a modern structure within the Visual Arts Complex on campus and currently features 25 temporary exhibitions each year in addition to offering one of Southeast’s premier collections of American paintings (mostly 19th and 20th century), European and Asian works on paper as well as Southern decorative arts.
8. Georgia Museum of Art
Alfred Holbrook began a legacy of educational outreach when he packed works of art into the trunk of his car for Georgia schoolchildren to see. Today, that tradition remains strong at Georgia Museum by offering both academic study of art history as well as popular exhibitions.
Its collections encompass American painting, particularly 19th-century works; American, European and Asian works on paper; Southern decorative arts; the Samuel H. Kress Study Collection of Italian Renaissance paintings; as well as an expansive self-taught art collection.
The museum hosts 20 to 25 temporary exhibits each year and also features an expansive sculpture garden.
9. Georgia Museum of Art
Alfred Holbrook traveled from New York with art in his trunk, in 1945, hoping to enrich Georgia’s cultural life. Now housed within UGA campus is Georgia Museum of Art – both academic museum and official state art museum in one building.
Strengths include American painting, works on paper and Southern decorative arts collections; scholarship is supported through its European initiative and Henry D. Green Center for the Study of Decorative Arts. Furthermore, up to 25 temporary exhibitions may also be featured throughout each year at this museum.
10. Georgia Museum of Art
Since its founding in 1982, GMoA has seamlessly combined academic study of art with its official state museum status in Georgia. Now located within UGA’s Performing and Visual Arts Complex on East Campus, its home remains contemporary yet relevant.
Staff from GMoA still travel throughout the state sharing their expertise with schools. Donations have added new works to its collection and broadened its audience, including generous gifts from Larry and Brenda Thompson of works by African American artists (along with funds to endow a curatorial position focused on African American artists). Furthermore, this museum has earned international renown due to its collections of modern art.


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Fun and fabulous!
Great job! The edges are so fun and I love the Mooka in the middle. I wish my mooka could look so nice. Love it!
wow - this is gorgeous!!
This is wild and wonderful! I love the playful wisp shooting out from the outer points. Mooka in the middle works very well too.
Your Zendala took me on a merry chase of wonderment!
Love it! So alive with movement!
Love the mooka in the middle and the streamers flowing from the edges! Great!
Gorgeous. I love all the swirls on the outside!
This one looks very organic to me. Lovely movement!
I love how the hollibaugh and weave look like balls of yarn! Very nice zendala!
I love this!! I like how you've gone outside the mandala template.


Astros respond to Yankees by dealing with Red Sox
The Boston Red Sox and Houston Astros have struck a deal as Christian Vazquez joins the AL West.
The Sox were in clear sell mode as they entered the trading deadline. And since Vazquez was on an expiring contract, going forward made sense.
Vazquez didn’t seem bothered either, who mentioned over the weekend that he wouldn’t be surprised if he was transferred.
well what do you know It happened.
Christian Vazquez trade details: Astros and Red Sox
C, Christian Vázquez
Vazquez goes to Houston, where he takes on (at least part of the time) catcher Martin Maldonado, who hits well below the Mendoza line.
As much as Houston’s pitchers like Maldonado, he’s no playoff-caliber backstop. Vazquez, meanwhile, cut .282/.327/.432 with eight home runs and 32 RBIs in Boston.
The timing of this game was fun with Vazquez starting for the Red Sox as they faced the Astros in Houston.
The Red Sox drafted Vazquez in 2008, but he didn’t make his debut for the team until 2014. He missed the 2015 season due to surgery by Tommy John and then worked his way up to regular status by 2017. In 2018, he helped Boston win the World Series.
Full trading details have yet to be announced. We’ll have more on this story as it becomes available.
https://fansided.com/2022/08/01/christian-vazquez-trade-details-astros-red-sox/ Astros respond to Yankees by dealing with Red Sox


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According to Hooper's report, the Eels see Milford as an ideal acquisition on the eve of finals, with the two-time Queensland representative potentially being utilised as a bench utility for Parramatta.
Milford's time at Red Hill is set to expire at season's end, however an immediate deal with the Eels now looks to be gaining momentum.
Reports broke earlier this week of the 27-year-old having signed on with an NRL club from 2022, with any rumoured link up with the Super League being brought to a halt.
The Rabbitohs and Titans were understood to be the two clubs chasing Milford's signature, with the Eels now in consideration.
A move to the blue and gold No.14 jumper could be the spark both parties are after, with Milford failing to land minutes at NRL level with the Broncos, while the Eels look for a more consistent run of form heading into the post-season.
According to Hooper, Parramatta have ramped up their interest in Milford across the past week, with club general manager of football Mark O’Neill the instigator in Parramatta's inquiry into the Samoan international.
NRL clubs have until August 1 to finalise their roster for the remainder of the 2021 season, with a deal now needed to be agreed upon between the Eels, Broncos and Milford in the next fortnight.


The exhibitor & product database of IWA OutdoorClassics 2021 shows all exhibitors who were registered for this exhibition. [status: 24.11.2020]
Classic Lines, Kimber Craftsmanship. Meet the rifle that will become your most trusted tool on your next hunt: the Kimber Hunter. This American-made rifle features a lightweight stock, match-grade adjustable trigger and a removable box magazine that allows for quick and easy loading and unloading.
Standard features of the Kimber Hunter include:
- Sub MOA Accuracy Standard – 3 shots, 100 yards, 1-inch group or less
- Weighs under 6 lbs.
- Mauser-style controlled round feeding
- Stainless steel barreled action
- 3-position wing safety
Distributor for KIMBER in Germany is Waffen Ferkinghoff (www.waffen-ferkinghoff.com). All info on the website is available also in English.
Visit KIMBER in the Waffen-Ferkinghoff booth Hall 1-438.


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Education Law Guide, Resources & information
One government function is education, which is administered through the public school system by the Department of Education of the states of the every countries worldwide.The states have primary responsibility for the maintenance and operation of public schools.
Each states are required by its state's constitution to provide a school system whereby children may receive an education. States legislature exercise power over schools in any manner consistent with the state's constitution. Many state legislatures delegate power over the school system to a state board of education.
There is a strong concern with equality in education. Within states this leads to efforts to assure that each child no matter where he or she is situated receives an adequate education.
Parents have a fundamental right to direct the education of their children, including the right to choose a private school. However, states have the power to regulate private schools. That power is limited because the majority of private schools are religious institutions.
For children with disabilities special education is available. To qualify for special education a child's disability must adversely affect the child's educational performance.
Homeschooling is an option for some families.
Know your rights and exercise them for a safe, better future.

domain: law


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2421 Pinetree Drive
Commute to Downtown Trenton
Some errands can be accomplished on foot.
Minimal bike infrastructure.
2421 Pinetree Drive has a Walk Score of 52 out of 100. This location is Somewhat Walkable so some errands can be accomplished on foot.
This location is in Trenton. Nearby parks include Affolter Park, McLouth Park and Kennedy Park.
Explore how far you can travel by car, bus, bike and foot from 2421 Pinetree Drive.
This location is in the city of Trenton, MI. Trenton has an average Walk Score of 40 and has 18,853 residents.Learn More About Trenton

domain: geography


Aviation of World War II
|Specification Ba.65 with A 80 engine|
|Wing span, m||11.90|
|Wing area, m²||23.50|
|Piston radial engine FIAT A / 80 R.C. 41 power, hp||1000|
|Maximum speed, km/h||352|
|Cruising speed, km/h||305|
|Service range, km||544|
|Service ceiling, m||6,300|
|4 × Breda-SAFAT machine guns in the wing: two 12.7 mm and two 7.7 mm, bombs, kg||200|
Technical description. "Breda" Va.65 - single-engine cantilever monoplane of all-metal construction with retractable landing gear, one or two-seat multipurpose combat aircraft.
Power plant, two-row air-cooled radial engines of three types: 14-cylinder Isotta-Fraschini K14 with a capacity of 880 hp. - on the early series of aircraft for the Italian Air Force; 18-cylinder Fiat A80 RC41 1000 hp - on most Italian Ba.65, as well as on export vehicles for Iraq and Portugal; 14-cylinder Piaggio P.XI RC40 1000 hp - on Chilean aircraft.
The fuel system consisted of two main gas tanks with a total capacity of 650 liters, installed in the fuselage, behind the cockpit. If necessary, an additional 370 liter tank could be mounted in the bomb bay. All three tanks are sealed.
Armament: four Breda-SAFAT machine guns in the wing: two 12.7 mm and two 7.7 mm, in the bomb compartment up to 100 kg of bombs, on underwing bomb racks up to 200 kg, usually 4x50 kg. The letnab's cockpit was equipped with a 7.7 mm defensive machine gun mounted on a compact retractable turret or on a Breda type M shielded turret.
Almost immediately they abandoned the standard placement of large-caliber bombs on the internal suspension, since this made it impossible to dive. In the standard version, the aircraft carried a pair of 100-kg bombs on underwing holders, dropping them from a dive at an angle of 30-35 degrees.
Another common bomb load was 2 kg fragmentation bombs. The aircraft took up to 168 of these ammunition in four cassettes installed in the bomb bay. In this case, "peas" were poured at the exit from the dive when climbing, see the photo below, the control circuit was triggered by a trigger on the pilot's control stick. On the second approach, the pilot "processed" the target with the fire of four wing-mounted machine guns.
In 1937, the command of the Italian Royal Air Force (Regia Aeronautica), having analyzed the experience gained, put forward the requirement for Breda to create a specialized reconnaissance aircraft based on the Ba.65, capable of operating both at tactical depth and, as they said in those years, “together with the army.” ". When issuing the specifications, the Regia Aeronautica command believed that the new aircraft would operate in close contact with the Ba.65 or escort fighters during combat missions. The aircraft alone was supposed to perform only long-range reconnaissance flights.
The company's designer, engineer Giuseppe Panzeri, in the new aircraft used a power plant from the Ba.65, a modified wing and tail unit, and a semi-monocoque fuselage similar in design to the previous aircraft. In terms of dimensions, the new aircraft was approximately 20% larger. The design of the Ba.75 was all-metal, the only non-metallic element was to be the aileron skin (dural was to be used as the rudder skin).
However, conceptually the Ba.75 was different from its predecessor; it was a mid-wing (although more likely even a high-wing) with a well-glazed lower part of the fuselage in the area of the observer's cabin, in which it was possible to place not only a camera, but also another - third - crew member - a gunner, who could control a movable machine gun to protect the lower part rear hemisphere and for possible shelling of ground targets. The pilot's cabin was well glazed and its flattened shape resembled an iron. A movable machine gun was provided behind the cockpit to protect the upper part of the rear hemisphere; the observer had to fire from this machine gun.
The main landing gear was the only design element in which the Ba.75 was strikingly different from its predecessor. These were tall, non-retractable pyramidal supports rigidly attached to the fuselage with fairings mounted on wheels.
The fixed armament of the aircraft consisted of two 12.7-mm Breda-SAFAT machine guns with 200 rounds of ammunition per barrel located in the wing outside the propeller sweep zone. Under the wing there were holders for hanging up to 500 kg of bombs.
The power plant was a fourteen-cylinder two-row radial air-cooled Isotta-Fraschini K.14 engine (produced under license by the French Gnome-Rhône 14K), developing a power of 900 hp. (662 kW) and a rotating three-bladed metal propeller. The engine was covered with a typical “Italian” hood with teardrop-shaped protrusions over the cylinder heads.
The first flight of the Ba.75 prototype took place in the summer of 1939 under the control of factory test pilot A. Colombo. Although the tests were successful, the multi-role Ba.65 with which the new aircraft was supposed to interact was outdated. The ideas of the Regia Aeronautica command regarding the use of close support aircraft have also changed. Development of the aircraft was suspended, and at the beginning of 1940 the Ba.75 program was officially closed. The aircraft, which was assigned the military register number MM.301, never entered service with the Italian Air Force. Likewise, other aircraft created for these purposes, such as the American Curtiss O-52 and North American O-47, the German Arado Ar 198, etc., were not widely used. The designers of successful aircraft of the same class - the British Westland Lysander and the German Focke-Wulf Fw 189 - went to their goal in different ways, and, ultimately, the combat use of these vehicles was somewhat different.
Unfortunately, the Breda Ba.75 is one of the least known and least documented Italian aircraft of the Second World War and therefore its data is approximate and rounded.