We’re Taking a Break!

Posted on September 11, 2014 by ActionSpeaksRadio Producer in Action Speaks Blog

After 18 years, Rhode Island’s national live forum radio show, AS220 and Marc Levitt’s Action Speaks is taking a break. Our host, Marc Levitt, is now helping to take care of his newly born twin boys(!) while also working on a documentary film about the 13th Century preserved Narragansett village. Because of this, we felt it was a good time to take a temporary break this fall from production to work on diversifying the show’s development efforts and to plan for future series.

We will resume production in the fall of 2015 and we will keep our website www.ActionSpeaksRadio.org, as well as our Facebook and Twitter pages active so please check them out for more info. Be sure to check out our show’s archive on our website and streaming on PRX to listen to all the shows online.

We are very sorry to disappoint our supporters who, last year, and for many years, have packed the performance space at AS220 and have added so much to our show’s vitality. We also thank, as well as apologize to all of our stations and their listeners around the country, over two hundred station in the last ten years. Finally, we’d like to thank all of our show’s sponsors for their commitment and generosity including the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, Providence Phoenix, RIPBS, Creative PR, Joseph White Attorney/Robinson and Cole and many others who have helped us over the years.

You can always get in touch with host, Marc Levitt at marcjoellevitt@gmail.com or info@actionspeaksradio.org to suggest new topics, wish us well, and/or sit on a newly organized fundraising board to ensure long term sustainability.

See you in 2015!

Marc Levitt Host & Co-Executive Producer
Umberto Crenca Co-Executive Producer, AS220 Artistic Director
Jacqueline Frole Managing Producer

action speaks, archive, bert crenca, break, facebook, jacqueline frole, marc levitt, prx, radio, twitter

Your Fridge and YOU!

Posted on July 15, 2014 by ActionSpeaksRadio Producer in Action Speaks Blog

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We dutifully and happily do our farmer’s market shopping trip at least once, if not twice a week. We eat what we can eat in a day or so and put the rest in the refrigerator. What we didn’t eat co-habitates with everyday perishables like milk, eggs, butter, and refrigerator elders like half-used condiments and ‘rescue’ bread and crackers (‘rescued’ that is before furry molds threatens their usable life) and gifted and uneaten small cakes or jars of locally made half eaten jams. Whatever we put inside our big electric rectangle is 1943-01-19-Icebox automatically sent into battle, in a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ fighting with others for space, nudging aside big containers of sentimentally held yogurt, cheese, tofu and kefirs that no longer even pass the ‘it’s probably OK’ sniff test.

I would love to hear this war once the refrigerator doors are closed. Old occupants aligning with each other against the ‘newcomers’. Salsa threatening to spill their heat on leftover brownies. “We’ll see how you like a little red sauce, buster!”
In the ‘old days’ this Tokyo subway rush hour jam wouldn’t have happened. Ice boxes (I still call our refrigerator an ice box!) were smaller, much smaller and were cooled by big blocks of ice, ‘farmed’ from nearby ponds or later created in ice houses. With the invention of the home refrigerator in 1913, all of this changed…shopping choices, store sizes, the famous or infamous leftover meals…oh and TV dinners. il_340x270.540429083_m86c

As we enter into the heat of summer, here’s a good article about about the refrigerator’s invention that might, if nothing else, inspire you to get rid of that slimy, now unrecognizable leaf in the vegetable cabinet and to clean that unidentifiable brown slime from the bottom ‘fridge’ ‘floor’.

- Marc Levitt, Host & Co-Executive Producer

fridge, icebox, invention, jezebel, marc levitt, refrigerator, Teja Pristavec

Air Con: Can we live without AC?

Posted on June 10, 2014 by ActionSpeaksRadio Producer in Action Speaks Blog

air conditioners, singapore, ac, technology

In Singapore, a sweltering swamp of a city, temporarily disguised as an international financial capital, there is a main boulevard lined on either sides by shopping malls. Fashionably dressed men and woman and bubble gum colored teens walk past, in and out. To enter and exit you never open a door. They are always open. Why? Because the air conditioning blasting from the stores and onto the street is a seduction, beckoning to passersby with the promise of artificially cool comfort while giving those of us who are not interested in shopping (at the moment anyway) the illusion that not too long ago, mosquitos, lizards and colorful plants were not actually the real occupants of this sticky consumer paradise.

In another city is a hot summer night. We can barely stand the clothes on our body. “Let’s go to a movie!”, someone suggests. Do we have keys? “Yes!” Do we have money? “Yes”…Do we have a sweater?…Whoops. Not until we are inside the theater do we realize that, no, we don’t have one and we spend the entire evening feeling as cold as the icy soda we’ve bought in our prior heat-induced delusion.

air conditioner, air conditioning, action speaks, underappreciated date, history

One summer, my wife and I rented a small apartment in Astoria, NY as she did an internship at MoMA. Astoria is a glorious mix of folks from all over the world and the apartment was right in the center of it all. We were ecstatic. The bedroom looked out into what you might called a ‘courtyard’ if you were a real estate agent but in actuality it was a small, enclosed outdoor space for garbage cans. There was no air circulation! I lay awake at night breathing the same air that I had taken in and expelled each night. I lay there unable to move without working up a sweat, unable to sleep in this blanket of staleness. A few days later, I put an air conditioner in and presto, my version of heaven appeared.

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Yes, we all have different, complex and contradictory feelings about air conditioners…about what they provide, what they cost, what they permit and what they disguise. But summer is here and the heat is, once again, creeping up on us. For this reason, I’ve decided to focus on the invention of the air conditioner as an under-appreciated date in history by showcasing this wonderful article, “How to live without air conditioning“ by Leon Nefakh in the Boston Globe.

In 1902, of the first modern electrical air conditioning unit was invented by Willis Carrier of Buffalo, NY to cool printing machinery as they ran. By 1945, the process of temperature control and cooling had been mass produced into portable air conditioning window units. Think of all that has come about as the result of this now universally deemed, at least in the United States, necessity. It opened up new regions to live, architects no longer had to consider wind flow, landscape architects no longer had to consider tree placement. And how about the disappearance of the porch? All cool? Well, maybe not…

- Marc Levitt, Host & Co-Executive Producer of Action Speaks Radio

air conditioner, air conditioning, architecture, heat, leon nefakh, marc levitt, summer, underappreciated date

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