The Spark

Highlights from this past week's show! 

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The Central Pennsylvania film commission is Non-profit organization that specializes in Film, Arts, Culture, and Tourism Specialist. It is designed to attract film and video production to the Central Pennsylvania region. The commission serves as a general resource and clearinghouse for information throughout the Central Pennsylvania region and assists with the following services: Logistical information regarding crew, talent, facilities, stages, equipment, and support services, Tax Incentive Navigation, and Regional scouting services, just to name a few.  

Film Commissioner Johntrae Williams joins us on The Spark to discuss Central Pennsylvania Film Commissions recent efforts, and how they are planning on brining big budget films to the Midstate. 

Empowerment Summit:
Harrisburg University Of Science & Technology

Friday October, 20th Starting at 9am

Registration Opens at 8:30 am

Don't miss this opportunity to learn more about film's economic impact and its connection to hundreds of jobs while networking with stakeholders and decision-makers from the Central PA region, including, but not limited to, local and state government, tourism offices, small businesses & supportive services, schools, colleges, universities, and the filmmaking community.

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In a world that is fast-paced and often full of division and stress, music is one thing that can bring people together. Whether it’s at a performance or concert, sitting back listening to music or playing or singing, music can have a significant impact on us.

With that in mind, Empowered Music Education is a new studio that has opened in Camp Hill that the founder Dani Fiori, says is welcoming to all students for a variety of reasons,"Empowered Music is different from your traditional standard classical music education because we offer some things that you wouldn't normally find in those almost laboratory type classroom environments where you just read the notes on the page and and go home. Or maybe you have a recital and and that's it. What we do is we offer performance opportunities that are very different. We like to put students in front of a live audience with real professional musicians and give them those opportunities. And then also inside the classroom, we're doing a lot more than, like I said, just reading the page. We're getting into it's confidence building. We're getting into practical skills that aren't usually taught in classrooms, like how to use your equipment, how to adjust your mic stand, how things are supposed to feel when we hear them, or how we express what we feel when we hear them."

Fiori said they have students who are beginners to advanced music students but he really appreciates the new music students,"I love starting from the ground up with a student because what I like to do is to make sure that above all it's fun. Make no mistake, learning an instrument is hard. It's difficult. It takes work, it takes patience. And those are barriers that can stop someone, especially if it's not fun, that can stop someone from continuing their music education because they're like, This is too hard. It's not even fun. Why am I doing this? So from the ground up, we can create an atmosphere that is accessible and welcoming and allows you to not only make mistakes, but celebrate your mistakes, celebrate your differences, and make it feel like, Wow, you know, I might not feel like I did great today, but this is fun, so I'm going to keep trying. So that's why I think I really love working with beginners the most, because I want to give them a foundation that makes music education safe."

Fiori said music is more than music to him,"There's so many challenges day-to-day whether we're going to school, whether we're going to work. We're getting bogged down by a lot of things in life, and music can be a refuge from all of that. Music can take us places. It can take us anywhere you might know from. If you put on a song that you grew up listening to and it connects you to your childhood, right? We're really going back in our feelings. And so, we can we can use music as a tool, not just as a thing that's outside of us. We can get it inside and use it to maybe we're using rhythm to manipulate our our state of mind to help us with clarity or with sleep. This is this is really something that can go deep physiologically within us."

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The Harrisburg Book Festival will be held at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore starting next Wednesday, October 18th and running through October 22nd.

Throughout the festival there will be best-selling authors, a tent sale, a children’s day and blind date with a book.

With us on The Spark Thursday was Alex Brubaker, the New Book Buyer and Program Coordinator at Midtown Scholar Bookstore.

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Pennsylvania’s rural areas are expected to lose population over the next 27 years or by the year 2050. That’s according to new data from the Center for Rural Pennsylvania.

An aging population coupled with younger people moving away will contribute to the trend, unless something changes.

What needs to change and why is it important for rural areas to maintain their population?

Kyle Kopko is the Executive Director of the Center for Rural Pennsylvania and was on The Spark Thursday.

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In the 1800s, in what was then the western United States, many Americans traveled long distances on the rivers. The goods and products that were made or grown or dug from the ground were often shipped down by flatboat to the Mississippi River and on to New Orleans to be shipped elsewhere.

Today, the Mississippi is still full of tugboats and barges filled with what the nation and the world consumes.

Best-selling author Rinker Buck wanted to go back in time and travel down the Mississippi to New Orleans on a wooden flatboat like our ancestors did. Buck had a flatboat built, assembled a crew and left from Elizabeth, Pennsylvania on the Monongahela River, made his way to Ohio River and then onto the Mississippi.

He wrote about it in his latest book, Life on the Mississippi An Epic American Adventure.

On The Spark Wednesday, Buck said he got the idea for traveling by boat down the Mississippi when he wrote a previous book about the Oregon Trail and how Conestoga wagons crossed rivers on flatboats.

Buck found a man in Tennessee to build a flatboat,"It was actually a replica of a flatboat. Most of the flatboats came along before the era of the daguerreotype and tintype and photographs and stuff. So we have to rely on paintings and sketches and stuff. But I was able to find a lot of those...it was a real flat boat, except the drift to floating of the old days was replaced by a 125 horsepower mercury motor." The motor was needed so the flatboat, named Patience, could get out of the way of the large shipping vessels on the rivers.

Buck and his crew didn't have modern navigational equipment so how did they find their way down the rivers without it,"Just really what they call straight pilotage. Pilotage means looking at what's on the river that you can see and then confirming it with your maps. On the Mississippi have mile markers and day markers. But the Coast Guard doesn't maintain the system very well, so they get washed away. But there was always a visual and I'm very used to navigation...I'd done a lot of navigation without radio support. My rule was, while I was running the boat, somebody else was full time navigation or I let somebody else run the boat and I was full time navigation. And the reason is if a tugboat push in 15 barges comes along and he can't get out of your way, you got to steer his way."

Buck was asked about the places he liked best along the rivers,"My favorite towns were places like Brandenburg, Kentucky, of Lawrenceburg, Indiana, Newburgh, Indiana. And, of course, Natchez, Mississippi, which anybody listening. If you haven't seen Natchez, Mississippi, you've got to get down there. It's like a mini Savannah. It's one of the most well-preserved antebellum towns in America. But that was one of the big surprises of the trip, which is that these gorgeous river towns along the Ohio, which you don't think of, the Ohio as beautiful country, you think of it as sort of industrialized space and stuff. But in fact, it is. And it's very, very rural. There's very long stretches of just national forest and so forth. But those old river towns continue to have a relationship with the river, even after the railroads came in and sort of took away a lot of the barge traffic."

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Through the medium of a serialized comic, award-winning graphic novelist Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, has amplified and highlighted the importance of telling stories about Puerto Rico’s history, exploring present-day social and environmental issues, and celebrating the diversity of the Puerto Rican diaspora. La Borinqueña launched in 2016 under Miranda-Rodriguez’s studio, Somos Arte, where he serves as Creative Director and is a noted philanthropist. The story came at a pivotal moment for Latinx and Hispanic communities as political tension and a series of natural disasters rocked the Caribbean. 

Alex Schaufele Director of Exhibitions at PCAD says, "So it's really beautiful about what Eduardo has done with this project, with this series of books and novels. He works with so many different artists to bring his vision and his storytelling to life. And Pennsylvania College of Art and Design is an art college. We teach a variety of different media, including illustration, graphic design, all of which are components of going into a graphic novel. So it was two-fold. It was a great story, but it also helped kind of show our students, well, you can do things like this, and it also helps to show the community like there's more that goes into making a book than just all of a sudden there being a book, right? Like especially an illustrated book. And so the exhibition really showed all the components of making that happen, and it was really exciting. And so that's that's kind of what started it and launched it coming to Penn.  

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The calendar says October and fall is in the air. That means leaves are or will be changing color soon.

Pennsylvania is one of the best states in the country for leaf peeping. Last week, Marketplace.com ranked Route 6 in the norther tier of Pennsylvania as the third best place in the country for fall foliage.

This time of year is when many people travel throughout the back roads of Pennsylvania to find the most colorful spots.

On The Spark Tuesday, Ryan Reed, a natural resources specialist in the Bureau of Forestry at the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources said there were 177,000 visits to DCNR’s Pennsylvania Fall Foliage Reports webpage last week — a record. Ryan added that he has done 28 media interviews on leaf-peeping this fall compared to just seven a few years ago. Both figures show there is growing interest in viewing the colorful leaves throughout the state. Previously, DCNR has said that more people were enjoying the outdoors during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and it appears that trend has continued.

Reed listed where the most vibrant leaves can be found right now,”You’ll find the best color right now in the northern tier across, say, Potter, Tioga, Susquehanna, Wayne Counties, and then extending southward across the central Appalachians up onto the Allegheny Plateau and even down into the Laurel Highlands in southern Pennsylvania, where the elevation really drives that color change.”

Reed indicated that autumn leaf colors are more than pleasing to view,”The interest in the season gives us a chance to reflect on the state of the health of the forest. And so many regions throughout Pennsylvania, unfortunately, will suffer. Some onslaughts from certain invasive insects — think things like spongy moth formerly called gypsy moth, emerald ash borer. And so those threats can diminish our overall quality of color. But fortunately, our forests are by and large, very, very healthy and very well cared for, especially the public forests like those that we maintain in the Bureau of Forestry. So yeah, it’s an important thing to consider when leading into fall foliage season. How healthy have our our trees been and what have been the conditions leading up to the season? If you’d asked me in May what I thought about this year’s fall foliage season, I might not have given you a very good, good answer.” Reed said that’s because last May was so dry.

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Last Friday was the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin arriving in Pennsylvania. Franklin set foot in Philadelphia October 6, 1723 arriving from Boston. The then 17-year-old got three loaves of what he called “puffy buns” and set off through what would be his adopted city.

That began a life that would not only have a great impact on Pennsylvania and what eventually became a new nation, but the world.

The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission is commemorating Franklin contributions with displays at the State Museum of Pennsylvania and the Governors Residence in Harrisburg.

We’re joined on The Spark Monday by Curt Miner, Chief of Interpretation for the PHMC and David Gary with the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, who told us how Franklin's arrival date was only discovered in 1980 on the back of a letter,"We know that from a letter from a batch of scrap notes that Franklin wrote on the back of a letter that his French banker sent to him in November of 1783. You can see the scratches. It's a columns of numbers and some abbreviated place names. And in 1980, someone from Yale published Benjamin Franklin papers came to the APS, has to look at this document, read the French letter about banking regulations, turned it over and saw these scratch notes, and was able to interpret what they really meant. It starts September 25th in Boston, and then it rolls down at the bottom. You see Philadelphia. He arrives on October 6th, 1723."

Miner said that Franklin was a man of many interests and he tried to improve upon what was already known,"That was a word he used. It was improvements. We often think of Franklin as an inventor, and that kind of conjures up someone sort of sitting alone in a room studying. And he certainly did that. But he was out in the world and he was identifying problems that needed to be solved in what would become this new young nation, then a colony. Of course, what we found interesting when you look at Franklin that way, you see, traditional narratives of his discovery of electricity and the kite and lightning were those are interesting and important. But what was his aim ultimately? Well, can I discover something useful that can be applied? And what we have found in our own collections is a humble iron, sharp pointed lightning rod. That was the outcome of Franklin's experiments with electricity and the practical application. If I can attract lightning from the sky, from the cloud, as he would say, and put it on top of a building at its highest point, I can save a lot of these structures, which were all wooden structures in colonial Philadelphia from burning to the ground. One of his great practical applications from the 1750s."

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A growing number of Americans are celebrating Indigenous People’s Day rather than Columbus Day Monday. Dickinson College is opening a Center for the Futures of Native Peoples and also honored an indigenous woman with the college’s environmental activism prize.

With us on The Spark Monday was Tara Houska is a citizen of Couchiching First Nation and a tribal attorney, land defender, environmental and Indigenous-rights advocate. Houska is the recipient of this year’s Rose-Walters Prize for Global Environmental Activism at Dickinson, who was asked what Indigenous people's Day meant to her, "To me, Indigenous Peoples Day means truth telling. It's recognizing the original peoples of this land and, uh, asking, you know, an entire nation to consider that, to recognize that, to respect that and reflect on that."

Also on the program was Darren Lone Fight, the founding director of Dickinson’s new Center for the Futures of Native Peoples (CFNP) and citizen of the Muscogee Nation and an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa and Sahnish Nation), who talked about the Center, "One of the things that I think often happens to Indigenous peoples is that we're historicist, we're sort of trapped in the past tense for non-Indigenous societies. So one of the things that I think is really critical is that we'd be looking towards the visions and dreams of the Indigenous future from the myriad sort of myriad tribes that create those visions. In addition to that, I think that the center is really designed as a forceful retort to the damage that was done by the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The Carlisle School was intent on through these kind of assimilate of programs. It was functionally a reprograming camp. It was attempting to erase language, the grammar and of a people. It was attempting to erase Indigenous history and Indigenous ways of being in the world. And so in whatever way possible, the center is looking to reconcile with that history and Dickinson's involvement with it and to advocate forcefully for an Indigenous led, Indigenously envisioned future."

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