Third stone from the sun, which airs on www.area24radio.com, live every other sunday 6 pm to 7.45 pm. Also posts of political articles and entertainment in the hudson river valley. Enjoy.......
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
January 24, 2011
Low-Power FM Radio to Gain Space on the Dial
By BRIAN STELTER
OPELOUSAS, La. — When John Freeman turned on his car radio one recent day and tuned to KOCZ, the voice he heard was a 2-year-old girl’s.
It belonged to Nyla Belton, the daughter of the afternoon D.J., Craig Belton. She’s better known on the air as “D.J. Scribble” and sometimes speaks up between songs.
Mr. Freeman, the station’s executive director, chuckled and pointed to the radio. “That’s what’s special about low-power FM,” he said.
KOCZ’s signal is a mere 100 watts, so low that its reach is only 10 to 15 miles. Mr. Freeman cannot even tune in from his home. But the station has become an unlikely lifeline in this town of 22,000, helping promote local artists and church events in ways that commercial stations either cannot or will not.
Advocates for low-power FM, or LPFM, as it is called, say the stations are a slight corrective to the consolidation of commercial radio. Soon there will be more: this month President Obama signed the Local Community Radio Act, which repeals restrictions on such stations and allows the Federal Communications Commission to give out more 100-watt licenses.
Freeing space on the radio dial for local voices might seem a moot point in an age when anyone can start an Internet radio station. But the appropriation of the public airwaves remains a vital and, for some, very emotional issue.
A majority of Americans “still get their news and culture over the broadcast dial,” said Hannah Sassaman, a longtime advocate of community radio. For Ms. Sassaman and others, this month’s bill signing was the culmination of 10 years of lobbying for more access to the airwaves. “I care about this because I have seen these stations light people up and cause political coverage, local music and community organizing to happen around the country and the world,” Ms. Sassaman said.
KOCZ, for instance, helped to bring zydeco music back to the radio dial in this part of Louisiana. Zydeco, a potent blend of Cajun, rhythm and blues and, among a younger generation, hip-hop, often features accordion and washboard and is a passion of people in the region. It is played on KOCZ every day between 6 and 8 p.m.
“It helps promote that culture — and that’s something that’s very significant for the African-American community here,” said Mr. Freeman, who slyly added that he thought commercial stations had started playing more zydeco since KOCZ started broadcasting in 2002. “They know that we make them better,” he said.
Mr. Freeman describes KOCZ as “a mission.” A retired executive for Bell South, he calls himself a “corporate guy” who became a convert to low-power radio, thanks to Ms. Sassaman and other community organizers. Low-power stations are designated for noncommercial uses, so many are licensed to churches and schools. KOCZ is licensed to the Southern Development Foundation, a civil rights group that grants scholarships and runs a business incubator but has fallen on hard times. The foundation treats the station as a 24-hour form of community outreach.
Shows are hosted by about 20 volunteers like Mr. Belton, who plays R&B and hip-hop on weekday afternoons, and Lena Charles, the chairwoman of the foundation board, who hosts a weekend talk show and held candidate forums for the local elections last year.
“Politically, some people don’t talk to other people,” Ms. Charles said. “But we talk to everybody. We’re a bridge sometimes.”
Each show depends on the underwriting of local sponsors like funeral homes and beauty salons. “Without them, we’d be pretty much shut down,” Mr. Freeman said. Recently three microphones at KOCZ were out of order, forcing guests to share the one remaining mike with the host.
Now low-power stations are few and far between and exist mostly in rural areas, squeezed in among the commercial stations. It isn’t always comfortable. KOCZ has been moved around the dial by the Federal Communications Commission a number of times, mirroring the larger struggle to gain more space for small stations.
The community radio act was passed during the lame-duck session of Congress last month. After President Obama signed the act, Julius Genachowski, the chairman of the F.C.C., called it a “big win” for radio listeners.
“Low-power FM stations are small, but they make a giant contribution to local community programming,” he said in a statement. Notably, the act may make it possible for some low-power outlets to sprout up in urban areas, where they could reach more listeners than a station like KOCZ does. Now it is up to the F.C.C. to start accepting applications for new licenses.
The station in Opelousas has led Mr. Freeman to conclude that bigger is not always better. For KOCZ, smaller is better, because smaller means more local.
One day last year when Mr. Belton was on the air, a woman walked into the station (located in an otherwise unremarkable white-paneled house in the middle of town) and asked for an announcement to be broadcast about her lost dog.
“She was able to get her dog back the next day,” said Helen Pickney, the station manager, still marveling at the story.
KOCZ doesn’t know how many listeners it has, since it is too small to be rated. Mr. Freeman instead cites a different sort of rating: the waiting list for people who want to host a show. There are more than 20 on the list, he said — enough to start a second station.
Low-Power FM Radio to Gain Space on the Dial
By BRIAN STELTER
OPELOUSAS, La. — When John Freeman turned on his car radio one recent day and tuned to KOCZ, the voice he heard was a 2-year-old girl’s.
It belonged to Nyla Belton, the daughter of the afternoon D.J., Craig Belton. She’s better known on the air as “D.J. Scribble” and sometimes speaks up between songs.
Mr. Freeman, the station’s executive director, chuckled and pointed to the radio. “That’s what’s special about low-power FM,” he said.
KOCZ’s signal is a mere 100 watts, so low that its reach is only 10 to 15 miles. Mr. Freeman cannot even tune in from his home. But the station has become an unlikely lifeline in this town of 22,000, helping promote local artists and church events in ways that commercial stations either cannot or will not.
Advocates for low-power FM, or LPFM, as it is called, say the stations are a slight corrective to the consolidation of commercial radio. Soon there will be more: this month President Obama signed the Local Community Radio Act, which repeals restrictions on such stations and allows the Federal Communications Commission to give out more 100-watt licenses.
Freeing space on the radio dial for local voices might seem a moot point in an age when anyone can start an Internet radio station. But the appropriation of the public airwaves remains a vital and, for some, very emotional issue.
A majority of Americans “still get their news and culture over the broadcast dial,” said Hannah Sassaman, a longtime advocate of community radio. For Ms. Sassaman and others, this month’s bill signing was the culmination of 10 years of lobbying for more access to the airwaves. “I care about this because I have seen these stations light people up and cause political coverage, local music and community organizing to happen around the country and the world,” Ms. Sassaman said.
KOCZ, for instance, helped to bring zydeco music back to the radio dial in this part of Louisiana. Zydeco, a potent blend of Cajun, rhythm and blues and, among a younger generation, hip-hop, often features accordion and washboard and is a passion of people in the region. It is played on KOCZ every day between 6 and 8 p.m.
“It helps promote that culture — and that’s something that’s very significant for the African-American community here,” said Mr. Freeman, who slyly added that he thought commercial stations had started playing more zydeco since KOCZ started broadcasting in 2002. “They know that we make them better,” he said.
Mr. Freeman describes KOCZ as “a mission.” A retired executive for Bell South, he calls himself a “corporate guy” who became a convert to low-power radio, thanks to Ms. Sassaman and other community organizers. Low-power stations are designated for noncommercial uses, so many are licensed to churches and schools. KOCZ is licensed to the Southern Development Foundation, a civil rights group that grants scholarships and runs a business incubator but has fallen on hard times. The foundation treats the station as a 24-hour form of community outreach.
Shows are hosted by about 20 volunteers like Mr. Belton, who plays R&B and hip-hop on weekday afternoons, and Lena Charles, the chairwoman of the foundation board, who hosts a weekend talk show and held candidate forums for the local elections last year.
“Politically, some people don’t talk to other people,” Ms. Charles said. “But we talk to everybody. We’re a bridge sometimes.”
Each show depends on the underwriting of local sponsors like funeral homes and beauty salons. “Without them, we’d be pretty much shut down,” Mr. Freeman said. Recently three microphones at KOCZ were out of order, forcing guests to share the one remaining mike with the host.
Now low-power stations are few and far between and exist mostly in rural areas, squeezed in among the commercial stations. It isn’t always comfortable. KOCZ has been moved around the dial by the Federal Communications Commission a number of times, mirroring the larger struggle to gain more space for small stations.
The community radio act was passed during the lame-duck session of Congress last month. After President Obama signed the act, Julius Genachowski, the chairman of the F.C.C., called it a “big win” for radio listeners.
“Low-power FM stations are small, but they make a giant contribution to local community programming,” he said in a statement. Notably, the act may make it possible for some low-power outlets to sprout up in urban areas, where they could reach more listeners than a station like KOCZ does. Now it is up to the F.C.C. to start accepting applications for new licenses.
The station in Opelousas has led Mr. Freeman to conclude that bigger is not always better. For KOCZ, smaller is better, because smaller means more local.
One day last year when Mr. Belton was on the air, a woman walked into the station (located in an otherwise unremarkable white-paneled house in the middle of town) and asked for an announcement to be broadcast about her lost dog.
“She was able to get her dog back the next day,” said Helen Pickney, the station manager, still marveling at the story.
KOCZ doesn’t know how many listeners it has, since it is too small to be rated. Mr. Freeman instead cites a different sort of rating: the waiting list for people who want to host a show. There are more than 20 on the list, he said — enough to start a second station.
January 24, 2011
What Africa Brought to the Table
By DWIGHT GARNER
HIGH ON THE HOG
A Culinary Journey from Africa to America
By Jessica B. Harris
Illustrated. 291 pages. Bloomsbury. $26.
“You hear a lot of jazz about soul food,” Eldridge Cleaver wrote in “Soul on Ice,” his 1968 prison memoir. Cleaver didn’t want that stuff on his plate every night. “The people in the ghetto want steaks. Beef steaks. I wish I had the power to see to it that the bourgeoisie really did have to make it on soul food.”
Cleaver’s lines came back to me recently while I was sitting in Red Rooster, the new Harlem neo-soul restaurant owned by the Ethiopian-born celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson. The menu at Red Rooster — after the collard greens, the shrimp and grits, and the “fried yard bird” — ends with this showstopper: a $32 “uptown steak frites” with truffle béarnaise. Cleaver, who died in 1998, would have enjoyed this.
I thought about Cleaver’s lines, too, while reading Jessica B. Harris’s absorbing new book, “High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America.” Ms. Harris zeroes in on what she sees as the two divergent strands of African-American cooking. The first reveres homey staples like corn pone, fried chicken and chitterlings (a pig’s small intestines), and embraces those cooks who can, as she writes, “put a hurtin’ on a mess of greens.”
The second strand is aspirational and omnivorous. Historically, it includes recipes from, she says, “Big House cooks who prepared lavish banquets, caterers who created a culinary cooperative in Philadelphia in the 19th century, a legion of black hoteliers and culinary moguls and a growing black middle and upper class.”
Ms. Harris belongs, firmly, to that black upper class. She’s a respected cookbook writer — her many books include “The Africa Cookbook” (1998) — who divides her time, according to the book’s dust jacket, among New York City, Martha’s Vineyard and New Orleans.
In “High on the Hog” she branches out into narrative nonfiction, with mostly toothsome results. Her plain, gently simmering prose will not make you forget Michael Pollan’s. But Ms. Harris has an eye for detail and an inquisitive manner on the page, qualities that take any writer a long way.
“High on the Hog” covers a lot of territory in terms of African-American eating habits. (Ms. Harris refers to those eating habits, widely construed, as “foodways,” and I wish she wouldn’t. It’s a vaguely sanctimonious term that’s caught on among food historians, especially Southern ones, in recent years. I await the books on sexways and toiletways.)
Ms. Harris examines West African staple foods in the centuries before slavery; she details the grim slop captives were fed during the terrors of the Middle Passage. She explores the life of George Washington’s revered black cook at Mount Vernon, Hercules, and Thomas Jefferson’s talented cook, James Hemings, the brother of Jefferson’s slave, Sally Hemings, who some historians believe was Jefferson’s mistress. She dilates on black cowboys and Pullman porters and the authors of the earliest black cookbooks. Her true topic is, as she puts it, “the Africanizing of the Southern palate,” and ultimately of the American one.
I especially enjoyed the chapters that cover the second half of the 20th century and beyond. She quotes Ralph Ellison, in “Invisible Man,” describing a food cart “from which a stove pipe reeled off a thin spiral of smoke that drifted the odor of baking yams slowly to me, bringing a stab of swift nostalgia.” Ms. Harris loves this sentence. Yet she gently reproves Ellison, letting us know that he was almost certainly describing not yams, but sweet potatoes.
She lists the restaurants where important players in the civil rights movement liked to eat big. She detours into the dietary strictures of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, who urged his followers to get off the “slave diet.”
Muhammad wrote: “Just stop eating the swine flesh, and your life will be expanded. Stay off that grandmother’s old-fashioned corn bread and black-eyed peas, and those quick 15-minute biscuits made with baking powder.” So what did Muhammad eat? A lot of bean pies, Ms. Harris writes.
She is outraged at the “culinary apartheid” she found in some urban neighborhoods in America. “We were getting stuck with overprocessed foods, low-quality meats and second- or third-rate produce,” she writes. “It is a lesson I will not forget.”
She casts an appraising eye at the recent crop of black culinary trailblazers. She mourns the early death, in 1998 at 42, of Patrick Clark, a black chef who made his name at Manhattan restaurants like Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg and Tavern on the Green. She explores the careers of Edna Lewis, Sylvia Woods — the owner of Sylvia’s, the popular Harlem restaurant — and the New Orleans Creole cook Leah Chase.
Ms. Harris flips on the TV and discusses, excellently, Pat and Gina Neely, the lively hosts of the Food Network show “Down Home with the Neelys.” This couple, she writes, “have become arguably the best-known African-American cooks in the country,” and thus worthy taking seriously.
Ms. Harris seems to approve of the Neelys, sort of, though there were bumps along the way. “At the show’s inception, most viewers were outraged by everything from the dishes prepared on the air to the dialogue,” she writes. “A strawberry cake prepared with cake mix, Jell-O, strawberries and whipped cream came under particular fire, as did the family’s ‘loud and boisterous’ manner.”
She goes on about the Neelys: “The level of sexual innuendo in the couple’s banter and the personal style of Gina Neely were other points of dismay. African-American viewers were particularly concerned that the show not be a throwback to behavior considered stereotypical and not a representation of the diversity and sophistication of African-American lifestyle and cooking.” She concludes, “Changes were made.”
Black cuisine is still too often viewed as “unhealthy, inelegant and hopelessly out of sync with the culinary canons that define healthy eating today,” Ms. Harris writes. She notes that most black families restrict those artery-clogging meals to Sundays, holidays and family reunions. And she declares, wistfully and yet with optimism, “The cooking of Africa has yet to have its moment on the foodie radar.”
More in Books (2 of 43 articles)
Books of The Times: Odd, Odd Case of Bobby Fischer
Read More »Close
What Africa Brought to the Table
By DWIGHT GARNER
HIGH ON THE HOG
A Culinary Journey from Africa to America
By Jessica B. Harris
Illustrated. 291 pages. Bloomsbury. $26.
“You hear a lot of jazz about soul food,” Eldridge Cleaver wrote in “Soul on Ice,” his 1968 prison memoir. Cleaver didn’t want that stuff on his plate every night. “The people in the ghetto want steaks. Beef steaks. I wish I had the power to see to it that the bourgeoisie really did have to make it on soul food.”
Cleaver’s lines came back to me recently while I was sitting in Red Rooster, the new Harlem neo-soul restaurant owned by the Ethiopian-born celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson. The menu at Red Rooster — after the collard greens, the shrimp and grits, and the “fried yard bird” — ends with this showstopper: a $32 “uptown steak frites” with truffle béarnaise. Cleaver, who died in 1998, would have enjoyed this.
I thought about Cleaver’s lines, too, while reading Jessica B. Harris’s absorbing new book, “High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America.” Ms. Harris zeroes in on what she sees as the two divergent strands of African-American cooking. The first reveres homey staples like corn pone, fried chicken and chitterlings (a pig’s small intestines), and embraces those cooks who can, as she writes, “put a hurtin’ on a mess of greens.”
The second strand is aspirational and omnivorous. Historically, it includes recipes from, she says, “Big House cooks who prepared lavish banquets, caterers who created a culinary cooperative in Philadelphia in the 19th century, a legion of black hoteliers and culinary moguls and a growing black middle and upper class.”
Ms. Harris belongs, firmly, to that black upper class. She’s a respected cookbook writer — her many books include “The Africa Cookbook” (1998) — who divides her time, according to the book’s dust jacket, among New York City, Martha’s Vineyard and New Orleans.
In “High on the Hog” she branches out into narrative nonfiction, with mostly toothsome results. Her plain, gently simmering prose will not make you forget Michael Pollan’s. But Ms. Harris has an eye for detail and an inquisitive manner on the page, qualities that take any writer a long way.
“High on the Hog” covers a lot of territory in terms of African-American eating habits. (Ms. Harris refers to those eating habits, widely construed, as “foodways,” and I wish she wouldn’t. It’s a vaguely sanctimonious term that’s caught on among food historians, especially Southern ones, in recent years. I await the books on sexways and toiletways.)
Ms. Harris examines West African staple foods in the centuries before slavery; she details the grim slop captives were fed during the terrors of the Middle Passage. She explores the life of George Washington’s revered black cook at Mount Vernon, Hercules, and Thomas Jefferson’s talented cook, James Hemings, the brother of Jefferson’s slave, Sally Hemings, who some historians believe was Jefferson’s mistress. She dilates on black cowboys and Pullman porters and the authors of the earliest black cookbooks. Her true topic is, as she puts it, “the Africanizing of the Southern palate,” and ultimately of the American one.
I especially enjoyed the chapters that cover the second half of the 20th century and beyond. She quotes Ralph Ellison, in “Invisible Man,” describing a food cart “from which a stove pipe reeled off a thin spiral of smoke that drifted the odor of baking yams slowly to me, bringing a stab of swift nostalgia.” Ms. Harris loves this sentence. Yet she gently reproves Ellison, letting us know that he was almost certainly describing not yams, but sweet potatoes.
She lists the restaurants where important players in the civil rights movement liked to eat big. She detours into the dietary strictures of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, who urged his followers to get off the “slave diet.”
Muhammad wrote: “Just stop eating the swine flesh, and your life will be expanded. Stay off that grandmother’s old-fashioned corn bread and black-eyed peas, and those quick 15-minute biscuits made with baking powder.” So what did Muhammad eat? A lot of bean pies, Ms. Harris writes.
She is outraged at the “culinary apartheid” she found in some urban neighborhoods in America. “We were getting stuck with overprocessed foods, low-quality meats and second- or third-rate produce,” she writes. “It is a lesson I will not forget.”
She casts an appraising eye at the recent crop of black culinary trailblazers. She mourns the early death, in 1998 at 42, of Patrick Clark, a black chef who made his name at Manhattan restaurants like Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg and Tavern on the Green. She explores the careers of Edna Lewis, Sylvia Woods — the owner of Sylvia’s, the popular Harlem restaurant — and the New Orleans Creole cook Leah Chase.
Ms. Harris flips on the TV and discusses, excellently, Pat and Gina Neely, the lively hosts of the Food Network show “Down Home with the Neelys.” This couple, she writes, “have become arguably the best-known African-American cooks in the country,” and thus worthy taking seriously.
Ms. Harris seems to approve of the Neelys, sort of, though there were bumps along the way. “At the show’s inception, most viewers were outraged by everything from the dishes prepared on the air to the dialogue,” she writes. “A strawberry cake prepared with cake mix, Jell-O, strawberries and whipped cream came under particular fire, as did the family’s ‘loud and boisterous’ manner.”
She goes on about the Neelys: “The level of sexual innuendo in the couple’s banter and the personal style of Gina Neely were other points of dismay. African-American viewers were particularly concerned that the show not be a throwback to behavior considered stereotypical and not a representation of the diversity and sophistication of African-American lifestyle and cooking.” She concludes, “Changes were made.”
Black cuisine is still too often viewed as “unhealthy, inelegant and hopelessly out of sync with the culinary canons that define healthy eating today,” Ms. Harris writes. She notes that most black families restrict those artery-clogging meals to Sundays, holidays and family reunions. And she declares, wistfully and yet with optimism, “The cooking of Africa has yet to have its moment on the foodie radar.”
More in Books (2 of 43 articles)
Books of The Times: Odd, Odd Case of Bobby Fischer
Read More »Close
Friday, January 14, 2011
Friday, January 7, 2011
Monday, January 3, 2011
Brother from the 3rd stone: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/there...
Brother from the 3rd stone: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/there...: "http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/there-s-no-substitute-for-washington-1.334418"
Tasty!
Asparagus with Roasted Garlic Olive Oil and Red Onions
Ingredients
1 large garlic bulb
1 ½ tbsp olive oil
1 medium red onion
1 tsp fresh thyme
1 tsp fresh basil
1 tsp fresh parsley
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
½ tsp sea salt
1 large bunch of asparagus, trimmed
Pre-heat oven to 325 degrees.
Cut the top of the bulb of garlic and rub with small amount of olive oil. Wrap with tin foil and roast in oven for 30 minutes.
Julienne the onion and sauté over medium heat with a small amount of olive oil until they start to caramelize, about 10–12 minutes.
When the garlic bulb is roasted, squeeze the roasted cloves from the skin into a bowl. Mince the fresh herbs and add to the roasted garlic along with the cayenne pepper, sea salt, and remaining olive oil. Combine together with a spoon and crush the garlic into pieces.
Bring a small pot of water to a boil. Cook the asparagus in the water for 3–4 minutes or until tender. Remove the asparagus and place on a platter or plate. Top with caramelized onions and then with the roasted garlic and fresh herbs.
Makes: 4 servings
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 35 minutes
-->
Ingredients
1 large garlic bulb
1 ½ tbsp olive oil
1 medium red onion
1 tsp fresh thyme
1 tsp fresh basil
1 tsp fresh parsley
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
½ tsp sea salt
1 large bunch of asparagus, trimmed
Pre-heat oven to 325 degrees.
Cut the top of the bulb of garlic and rub with small amount of olive oil. Wrap with tin foil and roast in oven for 30 minutes.
Julienne the onion and sauté over medium heat with a small amount of olive oil until they start to caramelize, about 10–12 minutes.
When the garlic bulb is roasted, squeeze the roasted cloves from the skin into a bowl. Mince the fresh herbs and add to the roasted garlic along with the cayenne pepper, sea salt, and remaining olive oil. Combine together with a spoon and crush the garlic into pieces.
Bring a small pot of water to a boil. Cook the asparagus in the water for 3–4 minutes or until tender. Remove the asparagus and place on a platter or plate. Top with caramelized onions and then with the roasted garlic and fresh herbs.
Makes: 4 servings
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 35 minutes
-->
Saturday, January 1, 2011
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