Folkstreams Blog

Yesterday on NPR’s Newhour, I heard this essay on the ways of the Amish.
Tom Davenport, Folkstreams.net project director.

***
We have spent our week as heartbroken voyeurs of a way of life foreign to almost of us. The simple life of the Amish — no cars, no cell phones, no electricity — a life so unfathomably simple to so many of us. Quaint — kids in hats, women in bonnets, horse drawn buggies. But what is most unfathomable of all is something that became apparent as the Amish community struggled this week with the ghastly schoolhouse murder of five young girls by a deranged, distraught father who then took his own life.

The modern media world descended en masse into this rural enclave as if dropped back through time, poking and prodding the grief of the families and of the community as a whole. And what they found and what we hear from that community was not revenge or anger but a gentle, heart-stricken insistence on forgiveness. Forgiveness, that is, of the shooter himself. The widow of the shooter was actually invited to one of the funerals, and it was said, she would be welcome to stay in the community.

In a world gone mad with revenge killing and sectarian violence, chunks of the globe self-emulating with hatred, this is something to behold — this insistence on forgiveness. It was so strange, so elemental, so… otherworldly. This, the Amish said, showing us the tender face of religion at a time and in a world where we are so often seeing the rageful face. This was Jesus’ way, and they have Jesus in them — not for a day, an hour, not just in good times, but even in the very worse. “The freedom contained in Jesus’ forgiveness,” wrote the German philosopher Hannah Arendt, “is the freedom from vengeance.”

We have seldom seen this in action. So many tribes and sects in a froth of revenge from Darfur to Baghdad and in our own country so many victims and victims’ families crying out in our courthouses for revenge.

To this the Amish have offered a stunning example of the freedom that comes with forgiveness –a reminder that religion need not turn lethal or combative.

I for one as this week ends, stand in awe of their almost unfathomable grace in grief.

Ann Taylor Flemming.

Folkstreams will soon be streaming “Catching the Music” a PBS film featuring Stephen Wade whose “Banjo Dancing” performance ran for nearly ten years at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC. Stephen Wade now contributes pieces on traditional music for NPR’s “All Things Considered” . He will be performing a tribute to Hobart Smith at the Birchmere in Alexandria, VA Oct 13 and 14.

“These shows, written especially for the Birchmere’s audience, explore one of America’s greatest traditional musicians, Hobart Smith (1897-1965): his inspired virtuosity and startling range of skills, his upbringing in rural Virginia, and the broader musical worlds he inhabited. The program includes banjo, fiddle, guitar, piano, pump organ, harmonica, mandolin, percussive dance, and singing with musicians Mike Craver, James Leva, and Zan McLeod. Similar to Stephen’s past theater pieces, the evening is threaded with the spoken word, and includes a special slide presentation drawn from Hobart Smith’s letters, family photos, and scenes from the Saltville of his youth and his travels late in life to make a new music for us all.”

What media player should I use?

Folkstreams films are streamed using the Real Video format. Excerpts of films are provided in Quicktime format to provide an opportunity for visitors to view a high quality stream even if they have a low bandwidth connection. Folkstreams only supports the Real and Quicktime players.

I have cable/DSL broadband but video is poor quality.

If you move from dialup to broadband and your streaming image quality does not improve, you may have neglected to tell Real Player about your new bandwidth. Like most Real Player users, I assumed that with modern adaptive streaming technology (Sure Stream), the player would adapt automatically to my faster connection. However, this is currently (Real Player 6.0) not the case.

Although Real Player will attempt to negotiate a higher bandwidth stream, it appears that it retains the “decoder” best suited to 56K dialup bandwidth resulting in poor image quality. The image quality is about the same at broadband speeds as it is with 56K dialup. This is why it is important to update your Realy Player “Connection” setting to the correct bandwidth when changing connections.

When there is a mismatch between the bandwidth available and the connection setting, you will notice slowing, jerkiness, blockiness, blurriness and motion breakup in the video. Restarting the stream after making changes to the Connection settings in Real Player will result in a crystal clear broadband image.

To be sure your Real Player is correctly configured after moving from dialup to broadband (or when increasing bandwidth, such as moving from a lower speed service to a higher speed service):

1. Go to the toolbar in Real Player. Select the Tools menu.
2. Select Preferences from the menu.
3. Locate the Connection entry in the preferences. Select it.
4. The Bandwidth section contains settings for Normal bandwidth and Maximum bandwidth.
5. Open the pull down menu, select the setting that most closely matches your new broadband connection. Be sure to check with your provider to know what speed your connection is. Many High Speed Internet cable providers are at 1.5Mbps and moving rapidly to 3Mbps connections, so you would want to select DSL/Cable (400 Kbps and above) at minimum if you have such a connection.

The Connection setting in Real Player can easily be misread. It has two settings, which look at first like minimum and maximum bandwidth. But in reality, one is the “normal” bandwidth and the other maximum. “Normal” is actually the desired bandwidth.

(Please note the instructions are for RealPlayer 6.0, you may have to look somewhere else in your settings.)

How do I make screenshots or capture screen images?

To make a screenshot on the PC using Windows. hit the Print Screen key. If you have trouble making a screenshot, see the instructions below.

RealOne Player:

1. In RealOne Player, click the Tools menu and choose Preferences.
2. In the Category panel, click Hardware.
3. On the Hardware panel, click to clear the Use Optimized Video box.
4. Click OK.
5. Exit and then restart RealOne Player.

Now hit Alt and Print Screen to take the screen shot.

How do I test my broadband connection speed?

There are several websites where you can test the speed of a broadband connection. Some charge a fee, but TestMy.net currently offers a free test. Choose the Download test to find out how fast your connection is for streaming from our site.

We have had reports from users that they are unable to watch the MPEG-4 video on Folkstreams. If you cannot watch the MPEG-4 version of our video, please post a comment here. You will need to register to post a comment. (You may also use our contact form link at the bottom of every page.)

Please tell us:

* The title of the film you were watching.
* Operating System (Apple OX 10, Windows XP, etc.)
* Media Player (Real, Quicktime, etc.)
* Internet Access (Dialup, Broadband)
* Web Browser

Thank you,

Folkstreamer

Folkstreams appears in the article “Streaming Flicks of Punks and
Potters” by Margarite Nathe in Endeavors Magazine, covering research and creative activity at the University of North Carolina, Spring 2006.

Reference: http://research.unc.edu/endeavors/spr2006/folkstreams.php

Folkstreams appears in the “Best of Web” from LearnNC K-12 teaching and learning directory, from University of NC, School of Education.

Reference: http://www.learnnc.org/bestweb/folkstreams

A folk culture is clearly emerging on video sharing websites such as the well-known YouTube, which demands exploration by folklorists and others. Out of the chaos of exaggeration and inanity, the mundane and bizarre, a vernacular visual style and vocabulary will undoubtedly emerge coherently enough to be recognized as a folk way.

One person sharing a crazy video may represent a work of art, and if weird or wonderful enough, perhaps represent a work of “outsider art,” or if it represents the creation of a mundane but well made artifact, a work of folk craft. Call it what you like, but when thousands of people start doing the same thing, undoubtedly a folk idiom will emerge, ugly and monstrous from the black lagoon of of the monitor screen.

YouTube does by default what documentary folk filmmakers have done by intent for decades. When people make videos of how they live, what their interests are and create visual stories, they are documenting their folk culture and creating folk artifacts. The folk documentary filmmaker may be more sensitive to discovering the important things to record, take a more academic or “neutral” approach to documenting folk culture, but YouTube content represents both the creation of folk art and culture as well as documenting of the culture. Moreover, it enables people to document their own culture without an intermediary, as most folk documentary work has been done, through the auspices of a folklorist.

This tension between the folklorist and the people they study has led to distrust between the folklorist and their subjects, as well as anger by the subjects who perceive they are being used or the folklorist somehow profits by the culture they created. Enabling people to be aware of and document their own folk culture may have its flaws, but it also opens up interesting new possibilities. It is certain to democratize the study of folk culture. However, it fits with the process of “amateurizng” that has been going on since the middle of the twentieth century, starting with the rise of amateur astronomy and gaining huge momentum with the web. Increasingly, fields of study are under the influence of this “amateurizing” process and amateurs will play a role in academic pursuits whether the academics like it or not.

YouTube enables a “self-documenting” folk culture, in which elements of commercial culture are drawn into folk culture (when video makers spoof television advertisements or incorporate commercially produced culture into their own cultural artifacts). Folk song has a precedent for this, wherein a song published as a commercial “broadside” would be played by people for so long they would forget its commercial origins and begin to change the lyrics to suit their own lives, thus producing a “folk” song. This interplay between commercial culture and the culture people create and use in their daily lives goes on continuously. Between the official culture and ordinary culture, between commercial culture and ordinary culture, creating folk culture and feeding folk culture back into commercial culture (when a folk artist becomes popular enough to be commercial…this process is seen in rap music).

YouTube represents the emergence of a moving picture folk culture on the web, both as expression (folk art) and as documentary (an unconscious amateur folk record). It may be that some of those under the YouTube effect, will decide to point their cameras at folk culture intelligently and consciously and start down the road to becoming a collector of folk life. This has the potential for many more eyes on the culture, catching it earlier and more deeply than a lone “song catcher” wandering through the folk collecting songs just before they disappear (watch Afro-American Work Songs in a Texas Prison on Folkstreams for a folk art that vanished just after it was filmed).

An interesting aside to the emergence of YouTube as a possible location to collect folk culture, is Brock Read’s comments on the ubiquity of digital content, which may far exceed the commercial production of content. Whether this will be any more artistically meaningful than vernacular photographs far outnumbering art or commercial photography remains to be seen. It does mean have significance for those who value the vernacular and is more evidence folklorists and historians will be mining this trove for decades to come.

Cellphone cameras and digital-video devices have turned college students into campus watchdogs and have made YouTube a household name. In doing so, the tools have generated an amazing amount of digital content.

It would take 161 billion gigabytes of storage space (or, for those who like their standards of measurement more tangible, an equal number of iPod Shuffles) to hold all the digital material created in the last year, according to a new study. The study, conducted by IDC, a firm specializing in tech-related market research, argues that digital information is growing ever more democratic. By 2010, the company says, more than 70 percent of existing digital content will have been created by consumers. –Brock Read (original post).

Folkstreams will be at the The American Film Institute Silver Theater for a screening of the film “Catching the Music,” about musician Stephen Wade followed by a live performance by Wade and several younger players. This event takes place at 2 PM (first day of daylight savings time) Sunday March 11, 2007 at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. Tickets

Recently, our project director, Tom Davenport was interviewed on the Kojo Nnamdi show, a popular radio program in the Washington, DC area broadcast on WAMU. Listen to the interview in Real Audio.

Or visit the station’s website.