Colin Marshall

Anthony asks about all this 10,000-subscriber fuss

Anthony comments on my push for 10,000 Marketplace of Ideas subscribers or bust:

Why do you need 10,000 subscribers to continue it? I realize you want to spread ideas, and that's not a bad thing, but you seem so intent on ending it without reaching a larger subscriber base.

Do you need that many people to justify its existence? Is this a self-imposed decision or was it forced upon you? I understand you're probably a freelance journalist and are busy and broke, but if you enjoy it, and your listeners enjoy it, there's no reason to push the boundaries of that relationship. If it becomes a burden then you can scale it back or pander for donations, or even end it. But begging for subscribers has always gotten on my nerves, regardless of the cause.

The only justification I can see for this is that in order to get more high-profile guests, you need an established reputation, and for a podcast, subscriber statistics are the best way to show that.

Strongly encouraging listeners to "recommend" and "share" turns me away. Nevertheless, I wish you success. I just hope you can attain it without succumbing to tired tactics that I've seen too often.

The long and short of it: because I expected to reach 10,000 subscribers years ago. At the current rate of growth, I'll die of liver spots before I can make a sustainable career out of this.

Interestingly, I haven’t had trouble getting guests of any profile; nobody’s even come close to asking for listenership figures. But while I seem able to invite any guest I want, there remain a few things I can’t do, the most urgent priority of which is to make the show without having to burn a huge chunk of my day on a job that has nothing to do with anything. To achieve that state, I reckon I’ll need at least the following:

• A five-figure podcast audience (because I keep hearing the refrain, “Don’t even try professionalizing any podcast with an audience smaller than five figures”)
• Some sort of major-city terrestrial broadcast presence (because, at its heart, I don’t see The Marketplace of Ideas as a fully “pull” medium type of show)
• Not necessarily a rapid rate of audience growth, but at least a constant rate of audience growth (as opposed to an oscillation between audience growth and decay)
• Listening enforced by law in at least 51 percent of Anglophone territories

Much soul-searching tells me that, content-wise, I have already done enough to achieve this, so the sticking point must lay elsewhere. (As Principal Skinner once said, “No, it’s the children who are wrong.”) I choose to heed the golden words of wisdom Conan O’Brien uttered during his interview on WTF (a podcast that, coincidentally, recently hit it big on public radio): “Get into situations where you don't have a choice. I believe that's the definition of accomplishing things in this life.” Hence the decision to rip myself off of whatever teat now holds me back and move to L.A., with nothing lined up, in exactly two months.

I’ve heard the question before, in various forms: “Why can’t The Marketplace of Ideas continue as a hobby?” Because nothing can. Maybe my own personal psychological weirdness causes this, but, broadcasting, filmmaking, or writing, I can’t keep any pursuit rolling viably as a hobby. But nor can I convert them into “jobs,” traditionally defined and separate from “life.” There comes a point when they must integrate with my existence itself or begone — and the clock’s ticking.

Nihon no Jyazu

I make no secret of my interest in Japanese jazz. Madelaine and I did a two-hour broadcast of nothing but on KCSB a couple weeks back, and now you can find the one-off show, which we called Nihon no Jyazu, streamable, downloadable, and explained on the Santa Barbara Independent’s site:

The first of my many mentions of this came when I went digging through the station’s vinyl shelves looking for internationally interesting music. Picking up the Terumasa Hino Sextet’s album Fuji, I consulted my copy of All-Japan: The Catalogue of Everything Japanese. “Jazz and Japan shouldn’t mix,” I quoted the book as saying. “After all, the essence of jazz lies in improvisation—a concept largely absent from both traditional Japanese music and Japanese society as a whole. Japan may adapt, but it does not improvise.” So, reason one to do an all-Japanese-jazz show: the sheer oddity of it. But I’ve also found a second reason: There’s a whole lot of the stuff!

I learned this after seizing the opportunity to use an open two-hour slot last Friday night. Its regular KCSBer couldn’t make it, so I figured I could use it to make the Japanese jazz show I’ve so often discussed a reality, if only for one night. If not now, I said to myself, when? With only a few months left before I move out of Santa Barbara, I’ve got to cram as much free-form radio goodness into my life as humanly possible. Thus, if you happened to be listening between 10 p.m. and midnight last Friday, you caught Nihon no Jyazu—which, creatively, means “Jazz of Japan” — the one-shot show with wall-to-wall playing from the Land of the Rising Sun (not to mention a goofily valedictory sort of atmosphere).

The program features not only Japanese players (Hino, Makoto Ozone, Eiji Kitamura, Teruo Nakamura, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Sadao Watanabe) but Japanese players collaborating with Western players, Western players of Japanese ancestry, and Western players playing live in Japan. When Madelaine and I finally get to Japan — maybe next year — we I insist on organizing our trip around visits to as many jazz clubs as possible. I feel increasingly desperate to see Osaka, a city that seems musically rich, though I’ve also heard Kobe’s jazz scene specifically praised.

Why do I enjoy Japanese jazz so? I can think of three possible explanations:

1. Re-interpretation. For decades and decades, Japan has impressed the rest of the world with its penchant for taking foreign ideas, parsing them through Japanese sensibilities, then turning around and giving the results back to the world. Think of how Japanese car companies played it. Should we think of jazz differently?
2. Fervent fandom. I get the impression that, when a Japanese person gets into something, they get way into it. Though small pretty much by definition, the Japanese community of jazz listeners and players easily muster a disproportionately intense enthusiasm and dedication that results in a disproportionately rich jazz culture. cf. giant, statistic-heavy animated robots — should we think of jazz differently?
3. Filtration. Last time I visited Amoeba Music, the dreadlocked guy at the checkout counter looked up at me and said, “Damn, you got a lot of Japanese jazz.” Indeed I did, and not as a result of hours of labor. When you set out to find something as specific as Japanese jazz, I discovered, you find it either quickly and easily or you don’t find it at all. Tight browsing constraints, perhaps paradoxically, always improve my shopping experience. (Previous such constraints have included “only soul/funk/R&B from 1975-1984” and “only ECM vinyl.”)

50 ready-made media angles on The Marketplace of Ideas

I know for a fact some of you readers and listeners wield awesome media power. I also suspect you, like me, have a strong interest in bringing more in-depth, long-form cultural conversation to and hearing more in-depth, long-form cultural conversation on the radio. So why not use that awesome media power to promote The Marketplace of Ideas, thus bringing us all one step closer to a much more interesting world to listen to?

For your convenience, I have come up with 50 ready-made headlines, each with its own “angle” for use in your publication, program, pamphlet, blog, or screed. Should you choose to use one, I will make myself available to provide all necessary quotes, sound bites, photo appearances, etc.

1. 26-Year-Old Public Radio Interviewer “Throws Down the Gauntlet” To All Public Radio Interviewers Over 26
2. In Wasteland Of Radio, Actual Interestingness (NYT edition)
3. Southern California Public Radio Personality Interviews 150 Luminaries At Length, All Without Ever Owning Garbage Disposal
4. Area Public Radio Broadcaster “Mad As Hell” And “Not Going To Take It Anymore”
5. Young Achievers: Colin Marshall, Microphone-Talker
6. A Rising Public Radio Star’s Quixotic Mission To Perceptibly Rise To Public Radio’s Equivalent Of Stardom
7. Host-Producer of “Most Fascinating Show on Radio” Eats Peanut Butter Sandwiches Every Single Day
8. A Newish Thing For Radio: Actual Conversation
9. Delusional Young Man Makes Content
10. Devil-May-Care Radio Interviewer Does Not Edit Out 80 Percent Of Conversations
11. He Does Radio And Office Nihilism
12. Public Radio Maverick Produces Program On “Non-Insane” Budget
13. Santa Barbara Man Has Nonsensically Interviewed Michael Silverblatt, Tyler Cowen, Momus, Steve Wozniak, And Charles Murray All On One Show
14. “He Seemed To Have Read My Book,” Claim Shocked Authors Interviewed By Marginal Public Radio Personality
15. Local Man Regularly Speaks To Own Heroes at Length, Cannot Afford Hamster
16. “Why Is This My Life,” Says Radio Host, 26
17. Marketplace of Ideas Broadcaster Declares Fatwa On Four-Minute “Nothing” Interviews
18. In Act Of Raw Impudence, Radio Interviewer Publicly Desires Career
19. “I Bring Up Abbas Kiarostami Almost Every Week”: An Interviewer On The Rise Talks Techniques
20. A Man, A Plan, An Ear Canal: The Marketplace of Ideas
21. “Be About Something”: A Fledgling Show’s Controversial Manifesto
22. Young Host Pledges To Create Richest Richest Interview Program in Existence — But Can He Do it Without Temping?
23. Starkly Experimental Radio Program Discusses Only “Interesting” Books, Films, Music
24. Public Radio Meany Refused to Promote Ephemeral Trend Piece-Turned-Book, Claims Aggrieved Publicist
25. The Marketplace Of Ideas’ Battle To Become A Known Entity: Impossible Or Highly Improbable?
26. Point: Radio Needs More Thoughtful Long-Form Conversations; Counterpoint: Isn’t A Stream Of Jittery Nonsense Enough?
27. Santa Barbara Public Radio Interviewer Attains Positive Net Worth (purely speculative)
28. Discovering Own Unemployability, California Radio Personality Left Only One Choice: Creating Worthwhile Things
29. Meet Colin Marshall: Public Radio Host By Night, Nihilistic, Motionless Desk-Sitter By Day
30. Versatile Radio Host-Producer Interviews Authors, Musicians, Filmmakers, Bloggers, Scholars — Pretty Much Everyone Except Entrepreneurs, Who Keep Being Dicks About Scheduling
31. Scandalous Radio Program Discusses People and Things You Haven’t Heard of Yet
32. “Kept to Himself, Mostly,” Say Neighbors of Apocalyptically Frustrated Public Radio Gunman
33. “Intellectually Engaged” Public Radio Interviewer Holds “Question Sheet Bonfire” in Town Square
34. Santa Barbara Program Contains Fewer Than 15 Resets Per Hour; “Insane,” Says Mainstream Public Radio Representative
35. Bitter Drought of Broadcast Conversations About Robert Walser, David Hume, and Kobo Abe Reaches Merciful End
36. Brazen Radio Host Programs For “Attentive” Audience
37. “He Does Interviews Designed To Be Relevant Even Next Week?” Ask Bewildered Public Radio Bigshots
38. Santa Barbara Public Radio Host Announces Goal Of 10,000 Listeners; Listener Count Drops Vertiginously
39. Public Radio Establishment On Up-and-Coming Interviewer Who Talks Only To Guests He Wants To: “You Can’t Do That”
40. Destitute Public Radio Professional Charged In Social Security Scam; “What Choice Did I Have?” Cries Disgraced Host
41. Literary Modernism, Experimental Film, Wang Chung: Do These Topics Belong On Our Radios? (op-ed)
42. Shamefully Unprofessional Interviewer Refuses To Write Rigid, Uncomprehending Questions Beforehand
43. Headless Public Radio Host Found in Topless Bar
44. “I Want To Make A Halfway Respectable Show,” Says Hopeless Radio Host-Producer
45. 26-Year-Old Interviewer The Future of Public Radio, Such As It Has One
46. Even In State Of Extreme Despondency, Heroic Public Radio Host Manages To Interview Prominent Literary Translators
47. Freakish Public Radio Program Wholly Ignores Politics, Racism, Youthful Weltschmerz, And Ambient Sounds of The Barrio
48. Embittered Public Radio Host Renounces World, Begins Broadcasting Exclusively To Own Shack
49. “I Don’t Mind A Small Audience, As Long As It’s Smart,” Says Quietly Weeping Radio Interviewer
50. Respected Radio Interviewer Reveals Interviewing Secret: “Actually Be Interested”

In Our Timelessness

Twitten: How the New Science of Social Media Rewires our Cognitive Love Centers and Why it Matters Now More than Ever — to name one book I’d never talk about on The Marketplace of Ideas. I made that particular title up, but only trivial differences separate it from real ones. My mailbox endure a steady stream of unsolicited books like these, sent in hopes that I’ll interview their authors. I sell them, but not without regret: regret over the waste of postage, regret over disappointing a publicist, regret over encountering yet another unwanted reminder of human triviality.

This gets me thinking: why don’t I feature certain books on The Marketplace of Ideas? (You’d think I could sooner answer the question of why I do feature certain books on the show, but I hit the wall much quicker and harder on that one.) I’ve noticed patterns, in the form of words or phrases that move me to list the book on Half.com immediately. Besides the one-made-up-word title and the lengthy subtitle — flapping red flags both — the fictitious example above contains these strongly disrecommending words/phrases:

• “the New Science”
• “Social Media”
• “Cognitive”
• “Why it Matters”
• “Now”

While I obviously have nothing against science, “New Science” runs the risk of turning out not to be anything at all. The term “Social Media” gained currency in, like, 2005, so I fear a conversation about it will sound as ridiculous to listeners of 2045 as a conversation about lawn darts would sound to us. “Cognitive” doesn’t bother me in itself, but I think someone in publishing just found out that you shift more units with “Cognitive” or “Neuro” in the title, momentarily rendering the words little more than cheap polish. This rule has exceptions, but if you must announce that something “Matters”, then it probably doesn’t. As for “Now”... well, I don’t care about now.

This sounds like an extension of the rule about clothes inspired in part by William Gibson’s Cayce Pollard: the further into the past you could have worn an it, the further into the future you can wear it. (“She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000.”) I can point to only one unifying principle of my aesthetics: timelessness. Or maybe non-timeliness. Or even less grandly, “chronological unclarity.” “Achronologicality,” maybe. Put even more simply, I like stuff where you can’t readily identify what time it comes from — clothes, sure, but also visual art, film, music, “design” — and I especially like it when you mix a bunch of that stuff together. Like anything in aesthetics, this attraction extends far, far beyond aesthetics — as far as, say, books and radio shows.

You know who else likes aesthetic achronologicality? Chaz Bundick, the founder of Toro y Moi, far and away my favorite musical project of the 21st century. We talked directly about this when I interviewed him on The Marketplace of Ideas. He, too, seems driven in music and elsewhere by a desire for achronologicality. Seems to have worked for him. I mean, just look at this shot-in-Super 8 music video!

Some people — radio people, specifically — might scoff at my ideal of recording interviews meant to stay good the day after they are, let alone to remain valuable decades and decades on. But in moments of doubt, I need only remember the league this potentially puts me in: Bookworm, Entitled Opinions, The Treatment, with some titular irony In Our Time — and, in another arena, Toro y Moi.

In conclusion:

Cat and dog media

I trust you’ve heard pet owners’ pointless arguments about the merits of cats versus the merits of dogs. As a non-pet owner — isn’t the whole idea of civilization to keep hair and poop out of our homes? — I listen to this unresolvable debate from the sidelines. Nevertheless, I spent childhood more than partial to cats, forming pleasant memories poring over page-a-day cat calendars and books about the various breeds (favorites: the Scottish Fold, the Japanese Bobtail, the swimming Turkish Van, the water bottle-textured Sphynx). I loved the aesthetics of cats, which felt tied up, somehow, in their behavior: they liked your appreciation, but they didn’t seem to need it.

Contrast that with dogs, who, according to the “dog people” lobbying in their favor, rush elatedly up to meet you when you come home. I get that, in the abstract, but I can’t help quoting Meet the Parents: “You need that assurance, do you? You prefer an emotionally shallow animal?” And I see the contrast between these animals as having even more relevance to movies than that. Doesn’t film, television, music, literature, radio, the web — doesn’t all media — break down along cat-dog lines? Either it dashes right up to you, tongue out, pleading for your attention, or it strikes a pose wherever it happens to sit, meeting you halfway if you care to approach — and not particularly minding if you don’t?

Of the myriad possible cinematic sins, only one strikes me as unforgivable: giving in to and thus baldly expressing terror that the audience might stop watching. I figured this out while watching Slumdog Millionaire, a movie constantly crapping its pants over the slightest possibility that you’ll look away. This syndrome breeds countless other ills, including but not limited to the tiresome “hyperkineticism” of cinema’s past 25 years and the blunt melodrama of its last hundred. While I no longer have any skin in the cat versus dog game, I care deeply about the cat versus dog media game.

Cat media: Bookworm. Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Charlie Rose. Jim Jarmusch. Entitled Opinions. 3:AM Magazine. Experimental video. In Our Time. David Lynch. New Directions Books. With Hidden Noise. Editions of Contemporary Music. A Piece of Monologue.

Dog media: Jerry Bruckheimer. Reality television. Hot-talk stations sweatily eyeing their Arbitron numbers. Fully SEO’d Social Media Hubs. 24-hour coverage of celebrity dating. Designed-to-be-viral videos. Gawker. Cable news broadcasts crammed with scrolling sub-screens. Dan Brown. The Black Eyed Peas. Maxim. “Productivity” pr0n. Turbocharged tips to jack your strat.

Yes, I admit to the simplification of presenting two extremes on an actual spectrum. But consider the core idea: cat media knows it’s good, and thus doesn’t mind if you don’t seek it out right away. Dog media doesn’t care if it’s good, as long as you’re absorbing it. I only want to experience media that has the confidence of a cat, media that doesn’t care whether or not I like it, media that refuses to fall all over itself in the mad scramble for my attention, my ticket sales, my quarter-hours spent listening, my page views. (Bonus points if it goes in the water, if it’s hairless, if its ears fold down, or if it’s got a cool poofy tail.)

Undeniable Mitchellness

My main concern in life right now is that Elvis Mitchell may not be getting sufficient props. I first came to know of him as the host of KCRW’s The Treatment, which you might call the Bookworm of film and style. Like Michael Silverblatt, Mitchell conducts not interviews, with all the question-prewriting and formal rigidity that term entails, but conversations. (Also like Silverblatt, he’s restricted to half an hour, but I’ll take what I can get.) He writes film criticism in print and has done so since the eighties — thus doing his part to break down that bothersome wall inexplicably constructed between criticism and all other pursuits — he’s hosted various television programs, he’s lectured at colleges, and he possesses two-foot dreads.

Further evidence of Mitchell’s undeniability:

• (from Popdose) “I’ve never been in a situation on my radio show or when I filled in for Charlie Rose where I’ve had a list of prepared questions given to me. I just can’t think that way. I’ve always found when you’re sitting in front of somebody and you’ve got a list [of questions], their eyes go to the list, they’re not looking at you, they’re trying to see what the questions are and trying to count the questions so they can get done with this and go meet somebody for a drink or go make their flight.”
• (from Undercover Black Man) "When I walked into the restaurant, Elvis was in there smoking a cigar. I thought they shot people for that in L.A. Elvis said it was cool. 'They know me here.'"

• “I went back after being out of school for six months and not wanting to go work in an auto plant. ’Cause I knew that I was basically too shallow to be a real working man for a living.”
• “I don’t have a publicist. You would’ve thought I did, but I don’t.”
• (from Film.com) “[James Lipton] sits down with that stack of questions, and like a prosecutor he never asks a question that he doesn't know the answer to. And for me that's where it gets interesting, where I want to start is the question that I don't know the answer to and with any luck they don't know the answer either, and it becomes a conversation about that. You know, there's a kind of connection you make when people are just weighing things out. Sometimes it gets to be that moment when somebody says ‘I've never said this before,’ because in conversation we tend to not say that kind of thing. But, you know, that's the kind of thing that happens.”
• (from New York magazine) “Mitchell is known for his opportunism as much as his talent, and he has a great ability to generate opportunities for himself. Often too many, to the point where it could be an editing adventure to track him down to get him to file.”
• “‘Elvis has this sort of Candide-like air about him,’ says Outside executive editor Jay Stowe, who edited Mitchell at Spin (yes, he worked there, too). It’s not naïveté, exactly, but an aura of doing what he wants and seeming surprised, in all innocence, when people take offense.”
• “He often invites his students to the Enormous Room, a campus-area bar on Massachusetts Avenue, to see one of his teaching assistants D.J.”
• (from Wikipedia) “On April 27, 2008, Mitchell was returning from Toronto to Detroit when border guards found Cuban cigars and $12,000 in cash on him.”

The Marketplace of Ideas: 10,000 in 2011 or bust

This will be The Marketplace of Ideas' final year. That is, unless the show reaches 10,000 podcast subscribers by the end of 2011. I'm still figuring out how to properly interpret my statistics, but getting to 10,000 surely requires somewhere between a doubling and a quintupling of the current subscribership. If you're reading this, you may well subscribe already, but you can still help ensure the program enters 2012 and run well beyond. How, you ask?

Blog/tweet/Facebookify about the show. If you enjoy a particular interview, please don't hesitate to write a little something about it on whichever social media outlet you prefer. Most of the stuff I currently like came from recommendations found on blogs, in tweets and what have you — less so from Facebook status updates, but hey, they're still important — and I do hope others can come to like (or "Like") The Marketplace of Ideas in a similar fashion.

Review the show on iTunes. This seems like it wouldn't do anything at all, I realize, but the iTunes staff move in mysterious ways. Each new review raises the show's profile within the iTunes podcast directory, which sometimes leads to appearances in featured spots. This gives the old subscriber count a certain shot in the arm — not that most of 'em stick around. (Why is that, anyway?) All you have to do is pull up The Marketplace of Ideas' page in the iTunes store, click "Write a Review >", and leave a few choice words and (ugh) a star rating.

Recommend the show to a friend. Simple as that. A sharp listener like you certainly has plenty of friends who are looking for something engaging to pipe through their earphones, to play in the car, or to put on the stereo during afternoon tea. You — you! — can improve their lives by pointing them toward this one such engaging thing.

Wield your awesome media power. Write for a paper? Have a radio show? Do a podcast? Responsible toward any kind of media outlet that demands a flow of interesting stories? You might consider one about The Marketplace of Ideas. Some fascinating facts about the show include that (a) I do it on one seriously low budget, (b) I've nonetheless featured guests like New Yorker book critic James wood, marketing mastermind Seth Godin, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, critic Clive James, Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly, NPR's Peter Sagal, pop alternastar Momus, KCRW Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt, and public philosopher Alain de Botton, and (c) I'm, uh, gunning for 10,000 in order to bring cultural conversation of unparalleled depth to the airwaves and the iPods alike? (And if you do some kind of interview-y type thing, I'll almost certainly be on it.)

Tell me what you think. Anything you want to hear more of on the show? Anything you want to hear less of? Guests, subjects, sensibilities, formal quirks: I want to know what you think about every aspect of The Marketplace of Ideas. This information helps me tweak the formula in ways that help the show evolve into something even more enjoyable, informative, immersive, edutastational, etc.

Join the mailing list. I’ve just started a mailing list geared toward the truly elite Marketplace of Ideas listener. It delivers weekly updates on the program’s current and future broadcasts as well as related internet interestingness. I think you’ll find it the most efficient and entertaining possible way to stay on the vanguard of The Marketplace of Ideas’ grand quest to bring long-form cultural conversation to its proper place of prominence. Want to join? Simply let me know your preferred e-mail address to add at colinjmarshall at gmail. We will march on a road of bones.

Three years of ideational marketeering

After I aired the first few Marketplace of Ideas interviews, I figured this e-mail was, give or take a few months, well on its way:

From: Public Radio Bigshot
To: Colin Marshall

Colin,

You have flawlessly reintroduced lively, intelligent conversation to the airwaves. To allow you to continue doing this without compensation of any kind would truly be a crime. I am prepared to offer practically enough money to sustain a decent existence.

But the town belle doesn’t just jump on her first suitor. I figured this e-mail would follow shortly thereafter:

From: Another Public Radio Bigshot
To: Colin Marshall

Colin,

I cannot, in good conscience, let any other public radio bigshot claim you as their own. I would be remiss in allowing the depth and seriousness conferred by a program like The Marketplace of Ideas to accrue to any other public radio network. I am prepared to offer enough money to not only sustain a decent existence, but to rent an apartment with a garbage disposal.

I would be tempted — who wouldn’t? — but I would hold out a week or two longer for this e-mail:

From: A Third Public Radio Bigshot
To: Colin Marshall

Colin,

You have created a program that, once listened to, cannot go unlistened to. Clearly, you are the life force that will revitalize public radio, that will make it vital and engaging to millions. I am thus naturally prepared to offer a lavish compensation package, including a paycheck each month of an amount sufficiently high that some money will remain even at the beginning of the next. We will march on a road of bones.

I understood the real bidding war would be much larger, uglier, and more complicated; the imagination always streamlines these things. But strangely, as The Marketplace of Ideas enters its fourth year, I haven’t even gotten the first of these messages. I assume the public radio bigshots are getting my address wrong. It’s colinjmarshall at gmail, guys. Colinjmarshall. There’s a j in the middle.

So while they straighten that out, I’ll continue the yearly tradition of naming my five favorite MOI interviews of the past twelve months.



Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think about something I discussed with Nick Currie, also known as Momus, back in February. We somehow managed to cover about thrice as many topics as I usually do in an hour — old computers, boarding school, creating parallel words with lies where those lies are true, North Korea, Japan, Plato’s cave — all from the launching point of talking about the closure of his Livejournal, of all things. He shuttered it on his 50th birthday, the same day I aired the interview, so it was a pleasing coincidence of big events.



I got into North Korea in much more depth the very next week, when I talked to Brian Reynolds Myers about his book on understanding North Korea’s mindset through its propaganda. The conversation became very popular when I transcribed it for 3Quarksdaily. Distancing myself from the role of interviewer an reading or hearing it just as someone fascinated by North Korea — most people are — I can see why it’s fascinating. I especially like how Myers also gets into bits and pieces of his own background, especially regarding his drive to study closed societies. Yet this one didn’t seem to win me too many new subscribers, which I can’t quite explain. I wanted to tell these single-serving fans, “But all the interviews go this deep!”



If, when I was fifteen, you told me that in ten years I’d be talking to Wang Chung’s Jack Hues, I’d have freaked in the best possible way. (If, however, you told me that a t-topped vehicle would still remain nowhere in sight, I’d have freaked in the worst possible way.) You know those stories people tell about finally talking to creators whose work they’ve long admired and coming away disappointed? This was the exact opposite of that. If anything, he was even smarter, more candid, and more articulate that I could ever have allowed myself to expect.



This is what I find fascinating about our long tail-y media: a guy in a band that’s been a household name for 25 years is a celebrity to me, but so are two guys about my age who talk about movies in a North Hollywood apartment every Thursday. Whether or not this is the Age of Personal Celebrities, I met two of mine, Tyler Smith and David Bax of the movie podcast Battleship Pretension, by interviewing them. I wanted the conversation on my show to be as funny and freewheeling — “double-F,” I call it — as an episode of theirs, and I got my wish. But we also got surprisingly incisive about what cinema is as an art form (and how cinema is never not an art form).



Maybe this is recency bias, but I think my conversation with KPCC’s John Rabe might turn out to be one for the ages. The genius revelation dawned on me not long ago that, if I’m going to be a radio personality, it might be advantageous to include some of my personality in my radio ventures. Rabe and I got in touch after I reviewed his show Off-Ramp on Podthoughts. Our on-air talk that followed seems to me like a new high point in the “actually be a two-person conversation” aspect of MOI’s mission. It helps that we talked about stuff I can speak to, like the city of Los Angeles and the bizarrely low assumed audience engagement level of most radio programs.

By the time you read this, I’m pretty sure those public radio bigshots have gotten on the whole e-mailing thing. But until then...

The Experimentalismist

I totally knew this wouldn’t win McSweeney’s 2nd Annual Columnist Contest — it didn’t even come close — but I submitted it anyway. Some of the titles of the winners’ columns are In These Deserts: War Stories from Afghanistan, Balls Out: A Column On Being Transgendered, and (runner up) Diversity in the News. Mine is about some radio shows experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage did in Colorado (I first typed "Coloradio") in 1982. It was what I felt like writing about at the time.

* * *
 

Narrative-eschewing, sternly bearded, and even kind of fearsomely named, Stan Brakhage seemed to embody what people who don’t watch experimental film suspect experimental film is. His is a cinematic oeuvre to which you can lead friends — most of his movies are quite short, some are available on the net, and the rest come in handsome Criterion Collection packages — but from which they won’t necessarily drink. And that’s okay. You have to settle into a very particular mental space to enjoy dozens upon dozens of silent films made of paint, scratches, abstract visual artifacts, and no few discernible representations of the human world. (But when you get there, boy howdy.)

An article on Brakhage’s work would, I suppose, make a decent beginning for a column on avant-garde culture — “The Motion Pictures of Stan Brakhage: No, Really, They’re For Watching”, I could call it — but it would also make a predictable one. Much more interesting to focus on the year this luminary of purely visual film had his own radio show. His goals on the air turn out to have been the same as mine are on this digital page: find something odd and lead your audience through it in as friendly and real-person a way as possible.

For 23 years, Brakhage taught at the University of Colorado. (Two of his students were South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but that’s another column.) In 1982, KAIR-FM, the campus station, offered Brakhage the opportunity to try his hand in perhaps the medium furthest from his own métier. In these 20 half-hour broadcasts, collectively titled The Test of Time, DJ Brakhage (not that he goes by that name, but some temptations are irresistible) spins the most personally meaningful pieces of recorded sound in his collection, providing copious interstitial commentary all the while. In the same way a Brakhage fan might invite a few buddies over to finally check out his favorite parts of Dog Star Man or the Songs cycle, Brakhage himself sits you down and plays what he finds terribly exciting while telling you exactly why he thinks it is.

You may have guessed that he doesn’t drop the needle on anything particularly Top 40. This is a program that invariably begins with Gregorian chant — “almost church militant,” as Brakhage describes it — and ends with a little something atonal from Charles Ives. Brakhage’s playlists include Chinese music from between 206 B.C. and 618 A.D., microcassette field recordings of street musicians playing goatskin bags, Tennessee Williams speaking lines from The Glass Menagerie (“I hear a terror in that flat reading”), Glenn Gould complaining about his early recording of The Goldberg Variations, and James Joyce reading Ulysses under a thick layer of cylinder hiss.

This could be insufferable if Brakhage presented himself as an anointed emissary of the avant-garde, here to tell an artistically benighted America what’s what. He instead takes the tack of an enthusiastic, sometimes bumbling (if supremely well-spoken) cultural traveler — an outsider even to the outside. “I have to be free in doing this kind of program to be nothing but personal, which is to say, sometimes — often, maybe always — a fool,” he admits early in the series. “I’ll mispronounce things and falter now and again, and my knowledge is one that is amateur, in that sense of ‘lover.’” Despite being out of his domain, he doesn’t seem to actually get much wrong. But that disclaimer, and his manner throughout The Test of Time, struck me as pretty thoroughly disarming nonetheless.

Yet Brakhage had the same attitude within his domain, proudly calling himself an amateur filmmaker, a producer of home movies, reverence of the cinephile community be damned. As an old taped conversation with poet/critic Parker Tyler in episode twelve reveals, he disliked the terms “experimental” and “avant-garde,” finding them badly wanting for descriptive value. Remembering the work of eighty or so filmmakers at a recent exhibition in Brussels, he says, “There were only between twenty and thirty that I would call artists in film. And out of that twenty or thirty there were only maybe ten that I felt had accomplished anything.”

Brakhage’s baby daughter cuts through this high-minded back and forth, and the wailing gives him a good excuse to stop the tape. Coming back on the studio mic, he explains how pained he was by the conversation at the time, how he could never bear to listen to it between then and now. “Yet as I go back to it,” he continues, “it’s the clearest expression that I have ever been able to make of the beginnings and the continuities of my feeling. Parker brought that out in me, however annoying he was in the process.”

The near-superstitious exhumation of the long-buried recording; the frustration with limiting, marginalizing labels; the crying baby — they all exude Brakhage’s humanness. This isn’t the work of a steely, uncompromising artist-philosopher caricature whose every incomprehensible piece speaks only disdain for the insufficiently evolved human race that ignores it. This is the work of an honest appreciator — a lover — who wants to share the visceral thrill he gets from “odd and strange things, records that are out-of-print, poets reading poetry.” (Besides, I’m pretty sure you need a mindset like this to open a broadcast with lines like, “Hi, I'm Stan Brakhage, and today I feel like talking about love of women.”)

Brief, dreamlike, and almost wholly about their own form, Brakhage’s films are often and rightfully compared to poetry. Given his love of actual poetry evident in these broadcasts, perhaps that’s no surprise. What I did find a potential Deep Insight Into the Mind of the Artist is that he approaches pretty much every other type of art he shares on the show as poetry too. Letters from a young Jackson Pollock? Poetry. Fellow film artist Bruce Baillie rambling into a tape recorder as he wends his way through a 1960s road trip of obscure purpose but desperate motivation? Poetry. Orson Welles lampooning Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society? Poetry.

In Program 13, Brakhage discusses his love of James Joyce. “Surprise, surprise,” those still unconvinced might say, “that guy who made those movies nobody understands is a fan of that guy who wrote those novels nobody understands.” Brakhage includes his response in the broadcast: “Certainly, most people find Finnegans Wake impossible, but I don’t, because I always start with just the music, the beautiful sounds of it, and then let whatever it is that will come to me arise from that.”

Or, as one astute YouTube commenter (to whip out a possible oxymoron) typed into the reply section below a clip of Dog Star Man, “Dude, it's not about metaphors, symbolism, or storylines. That's the mistake people make — they think he's trying to make snooty ‘high brow’ art. He's not. His art is primal, not intellectual and certainly not narrative. In other words, Brakhage isn't making ‘movies,’ he's creating a purely sensory experience that stimulates and invigorates your brain.” Couldn’t we use more filmmakers, broadcasters, and cultural curators who do the same?

Systems analyst

This week’s Marketplace of Ideas, just up today, is a conversation with Chris Guillebeau, the dude who writes the blog The Art of Non-Conformity (which is now the book The Art of Non-Conformity). He’s the best kind of guest: a creator whose work fascinates me and is pretty much exactly what I need at the moment. He’s all about encouraging you to scrap pre-made life templates and do your own thang, but he exudes absolutely none of that sketchy cellphone-salesman vibe I tend to get from the bottom eight-ninths of the “lifestyle design” internet crowd.

A big part of what I drew from his book is that, while it’s all well and good to aspire to the life well lived, you could use at least a semi-clear idea of what that might be to you. A surprising number of people, no matter how often or intensely they fantasize, seem wrong-footed when confronted with the question of what, if all the constraints of time and money were lifted, they would actually do. I leapt straight to my wrong foot, anyway, when I asked myself that. I seem to recall Chris writing something in his book about how few people would really be satisfied by buying yachts or sipping poolside margaritas all day. I know I wouldn’t; I suppose I know it so well that I’ve never even bothered imaging those things.

There’s a bit in The Art of Non-Conformity about imagining your ideal day. It’s a decent hack — oh yes, I’ve signed onto that term — to figure out the broad directions in which to engineer your very existence, a scale not easy to force your mind straight into. I tried writing my own ideal-day qualities down, and they’re equally interpretable as ideal-life qualities, given that the day is in some sense life’s microcosm:

• Creating media (be it writing, sound, image, film, video, radio, etc.)
• Being in a place that I’m not in the majority of the time (and the swifter among you realize the implication: I wouldn’t be in any one place a majority of the time)
• Exercising in some form (running, cycling, yoga, climbing, what have you, though I haven’t climbed in quite some time and my bike’s front wheel is doing this weird thing where it pushes its brakes back and forth)
• Communicating with neato people (in whatever form it takes, and preferably in more than one language, meaning the fire under my drive to attain bare-bones competence in more than one language needs all the wood it can get)
• Working on several projects that are chronologically discrete (i.e., they don’t stretch out open-endedly and indefinitely toward the grave)
• Learning in some previously unexplored subject area, sub-subject, or sub-sub-subject-area (by reading, visiting, eating, listening, talking, Googling — hell, any method’s fair game)
• Engaging in one or more ongoing “life experiments,” which Chris writes about in his book but which Boing Boing founder Mark Frauenfelder and I will discuss in next week’s MOI, so more on these later (suffice to say that they’re about placing certain unusual conditions on your own life and seeing what happens — he moved to the South Pacific, for instance)

Clearly, there is only one life for me: the life of the systems analyst.