Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: philosophical “book club”
Episode duration: 40m-2h
Frequency: 1-2 per month

Take it as a heartening by-product of the march of technology or a sad sign o’ the socially atomized times, but podcasting has caught on by offering the lively, informed conversations to which listeners have lost real-life access. Sure, podcasting replaces it with only partial access, the kind that lets you listen all you please without meaningfully contributing, but whatever your area of enthusiasm, you can probably find a dozen long-running podcast discussions going on about it right now. In the same way a show like Battleship Pretension (reviewed by esteemed predecessor Ian Brill here) states its aim to conduct the kind of wisecracking, bullshitting, yet subject-engaged and intellectually fired-up conversations film students have, The Partially Examined Life [RSS] [iTunes] wants to re-create the atmosphere that arises when a few friends get together over a pitcher of beer after a philosophy seminar.

The show’s hosts know that environment well, having met as graduate students in the University of Texas at Austin’s philosophy department. But they didn’t stick around; having each ditched philosophy years ago to go his own way — to cities like Madison and Boston — they now reunite over Skype to revisit classic philosophical texts as non-required reading. You might call it a philosophy “book club”: they’ll convene to discuss Descartes’ Meditations [MP3] on one day, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals [MP3] on another, Montaigne’s Essays [MP3] on another. Read the texts yourself in advance, and you’re effectively playing the home game.

Not that you absolutely need to. The podcast’s three self-imposed rules dictate that (1) the hosts shall not assume any knowledge of the text on the part of the audience, (2) the hosts shall make arguments directly rather than simply citing the arguments of other philosophers, and (3) the hosts shall maintain as high a standard of rigor and exactitude as entertainment value allows. While these rules theoretically make for maximum accessibility for anyone interested in tuning in, I imagine they also render the resulting conversations less, not more, like what you’d overhear from a huddle of T.A.s taking a break from grading at the university pub. Not that you’ll long for the fog of inside-baseball name-dropping or laments over undergraduate sloth, but The Partially Examined Life’s discussions take on a more straitlaced form than its attitude would have you expect.

I’ll venture to say that you’ll need to pay closer, more constant attention to this show than you would to anything said in a college-town tavern or graduate lounge. While the hosts often begin episodes navigating by some broad question relevant to the text at hand — “What can we know?”, “What is justice?” — they tend eventually to get into three-way exegeses. This turns trickier in philosophy-geek conversations that it does in, say, film-geek discussions. People have a pretty consistent innate understanding of what film is, but what, to put as philosophically as possible, is philosophy? I personally navigate the cultural world by considering philosophy to be the practice of describing how we think, communicate, and experience as clearly and as precisely as possible using natural language.

Therein lies the trouble — or, if you prefer, the joy. At least three hosts at a time trying to interpret, in their own natural and thus imprecise language, a philosophical text itself composed in its own natural and thus imprecise language, opens up infinite opportunity for purely semantic argument. The show’s discussions, as with so many philosophical discussions in life, sometimes careen inexorably toward thickets of seemingly endless loops circling around what the words being used could or should mean. (See the episodes on Wittgenstein [MP3] [MP3], though that should surprise absolutely nobody with philosophy-geek bona fides.)

Don’t feel too bad if you lose the thread — especially if you listen, as I do, while performing entirely non-philosophical database work. But you’ll find fascination and even intellectual beauty in hearing human minds collectively grapple with concepts even as the concepts crumble under scrutiny. The hosts’ lives since dropping out of U of T seem to have imbued them with the distance needed to laugh at this, and even to avoid it entirely now and then. Their conversations illustrate both why philosophy remains compelling despite all this, and why they felt the need to get while the gettin’ was good.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: interviews with comedians, media figures, and pornstars
Episode duration: 20m-1h20m
Frequency: weekly

Put the question of what men like to me, and I doubt I’d come back with much of a list; outside of certain biological details, we menfolk may not really have all that much in common. Some ambitious podcasts take on the mandate of exploring the whole what-men-like territory, and most of those, like Aisha Tyler’s Girl on Guy turn into their own, more specific thing along the way. Caleb Bacon’s The Gentlemen’s Club [RSS] [iTunes], however, has stuck to manly enthusiasms for 127 episodes now — or at least it’s stuck to manly enthusiasms by the specifics of its definition of manly enthusiasms, which mainly include comedy, the media, and porn.

Since Bacon runs a Los Angeles-based podcast, the comedy thing comes almost as a no-brainer. I’ve begun to think it’s more natural, if you live in L.A., to run a comedian-interviewing podcast than not to. (Having recently moved to L.A. myself, I feel certain my podcasting efforts will shift inexorably that way in due time.) The Gentlemen’s Club has thus gathered such fruit of the old Southern California Comedic Podcasting circuit as Never Not Funny’s Matt Belknap [MP3], Low Budget FM’s Mike Cioffi [MP3], and everyone from The Biggest Mistake [MP3]. Not only can you hear Bacon interview those guys, but you can hear Bacon interview a handful of specifically Maximum Fun-relevant guys as well, like Jordan [MP3], Jesse (whose episode I actually can’t find in full), and Adam “Lonely Sandwich” Lisagor [MP3]. Any Max Funster — and I believe Bacon counts himself among our numbers — will find much to download right away.

Bacon’s interviewing style defies easy description, in large part because he interviews different types of guests in different ways. With comedians and those comedy-adjacent, he aims for the humor of deliberate awkwardness and discomfort, using sudden waves of vulgarity, repeated callbacks to bizarrely minor things, and questions that border on nonsensical. His insistence on making half-jokes about the prefix “poly” actually gets Mike Schmidt [MP3] angry — yet it also gets him to say lots of interesting things! Admittedly, I can produce no evidence that all the poly-ing led Schmidt to the stories he would tell later in the interview, but it probably didn’t hurt much. Some listeners will need time to get used to this style of conversation; Bacon may not put a premium on smoothness in these cases, but he eventually gets the verbal goods.

When not interviewing comedy people, Bacon gets deeper into the nuts and bolts of his guests’ work and the paths their careers have taken. This proves especially interesting when he invites one of those media personalities you’ve seen host three dozen different minor cable shows, four of which you really liked, all of which you find yourself inexplicably interested in behind-the-scenes dirt about. Not bad for a host who, like me, doesn’t even own a television. They usually have inventive reactions when confronted with a random topic pulled out of what’s called the “gentlemen sack” (yes, really) and words of wisdom when Bacon confronts them with the tradition of giving his audience one important piece of life advice.

Some of the most unconventional of these pieces come from, as you might have suspected, the pornstars. The Gentlemen’s Club sets itself immediately apart from most podcasts, even most male-oriented Los Angeles interview podcasts, with a pornstar every five or so episodes. I admit I dragged my feet on listening to these, since pornstars aren’t generally known for their articulacy or variety of interests. (Occasionally an semi-exception like Sasha Grey draws a lot of press, but even within her I sense a howling void, as it were.) Yet Bacon, whether by native interest in the porn business or by effective interest drawn from interviewing so many of its performers, knows what to ask of them. Sure, some of them come off like the kind of Loveline callers Adam Carolla would say “don’t track,” but others, like the Belgian Eva Karera [MP3], reveal a perspective on this most common entertainment that you couldn’t get except from the inside. And her piece of live advice tells the ladies who happen to be listening how best to prepare for double penetration, so hey.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: long-form phone-style conversations, often in extended cycles
Episode duration: 10m-3h45m
Frequency: 5-10 per month

Each podcast has its own ideal listening strategy. You Podthink about a different podcast every week, you learn that. Sometimes you listen new episodes to old episodes, sometimes old to new, sometimes at random, and sometimes with an eye toward maximizing variety. But A Bit of a Chat with Ken Plume [iTunes] gave me trouble. So many guests! So many conversations! So many hours! What sample of all this talk could give the Podthinking mill just the right grist? No organizing principle seemed forthcoming, but then one appeared as if by providence: D.C. Pierson.

You may know D.C Pierson as a two-time guest on JJGO!, or maybe you’ve heard him on Get Up on This, or maybe you’ve heard him The Anytime Show, the podcast of his Derrick Comedy-, Mystery Team-, and room-mate Dominic Dierkes. Even without a podcast of his own, D.C. Pierson shows up on iTunes as having appeared on no fewer than fifteen different shows — many of which I happen to have downloaded — and that’s just the ones that spell his name right.

But whereas listening to D.C. Pierson on any of those other shows might take an hour two or three over a couple episodes, listening to D.C. Pierson on A Bit of a Chat demands nearly ten hours over four episodes. The format stays pretty rigorous that whole time, too: host Ken Plume calls up the actor/comedian/novelist on Skype and they talk about old-time radio announcers, Snood, box-set rock-rarity compilations, grandparental high school theater attendance, the difficulties of imitating everybody except Rip Torn, F for Fake, early Nickelodeon programming, the myriad disappointments of NYU, the myriad disappointments of the more recent Star Wars films, existentialist Pokémon, and Ed Wynn.

Ignore all the podcast trappings, and you soon realize that Plume and D.C. Pierson are doing exactly what you do on two- to three-hour phone conversations with your friends: tellin’ tales, crackin’ wise, brainstormin’ ideas. In other words, bullshittin’. The inherently voyeuristic quality of this kind of listening separates this show from others in the one-on-one conversation category, and the fact that certain guests reappear so often and at such length almost makes it feel like it has a different form entirely. If you like Paul F. Tompkins, you can get an hour of him and Ken Plume in January 2009, another hour in August 2010, and another hour on top of that from last month. Or maybe your poison’s Tom Scharpling? In that case, get ready to hear over five hours of him talking to Ken Plume over the past couple years.

Listen to the guests that turn up most often — five visits from Molly Lewis, four from Cassie St. Onge, four from Mike Phirman, four from Rebecca Watson — and you develop an ear for the particular shapes, patterns, and themes that recur in their conversations. Ken Plume’s talks with D.C. Pierson, for example, tend to inevitably work they way back to the stories of D.C.’s high school relationships that went awry. But since you get different details, jokes, and fanciful tangents about these failed young courtships every time, you kind of start to feel like those proverbial blind men collectively feeling out the shape of an elephant, but through earbuds.

So who is Ken Plume, anyway? I still don’t really know. I gather that he produces SModcast — one of those shows that hasn’t featured D.C. Pierson — that he’s probably in his mid-thirties, and that he has no inhibitions about displaying his thorough knowledge of wonky details about mainstream movies, music, and television of the late seventies and early eighties. (You may have encountered this type of personality in podcasting before.) If you want to hear his skills put up against longtime celebrities, why not listen to his less epic one-offs with guests like Ricky Gervais [MP3], Paul Feig [MP3], and Ernest Borgnine [MP3]? Is it realistic expect Ernest Borgnine to return to A Bit of a Chat several more times and gradually pour his heart out by way of ill-fated dating stories? Yes it is.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: expert, semi-expert, etc. consultation about all matters doing-related
Episode duration: 12-20 m
Frequency: weekly

Every episode of How to Do Everything [RSS] [iTunes] runs within the range of 12 and 20 minutes. In the studio, its hosts have an almost unnaturally snappy, overlapping- and interruption-free way of bantering with each other — yes, legitimately bantering. Outside of the studio, they go around and produce actual field pieces. The show sticks unfailingly to short segments that allow no possibility for extended tangents. Neatly edited-in music cues keep the pace up. In short, what kind of podcast is this?

I initially picked up the same vibe of suspicious professionalism from hosts Ian Chillag and Mike Danforth that I picked up from The Dinner Party Download’s Rico Gagliano and Brendan Francis Newnam. That show — though it’s really more of a segment itself — airs on “real” public radio, but I don’t think How to Do Everything does... yet. The plot thickened when I realized that every e-mail address I heard announced on the show ends in “npr.org,” so I bet the hosts have the connections to do it. Why, I even saw Peter Sagal plug the show on his Twitter feed. “@waitwait producers Chillag and Danforth,” eh? That means these guys... these guys are insiders!

This goes some way toward explaining why, according to my wild-@$$ guess, this show works like it does: Chillag and Danforth hold the keys to the cabinets. This must make it easier for them to produce a program where they regularly consult a public radio-grade little black book of experts, semi-experts, and all but irrelevant quirksters who happen to have a lot of availability — everyone from Padma Lakshmi to an eccentric spider dude. Our intrepid hosts either ring these people up with their gleaming public radio telehybrid boxes or check out a hefty public radio field production package and record on their turf, putting the questions of the day to them: How to I stop a charging rhino? How do I tell which subway door will open? How do I tame a beard itch? How do I walk across America? What does “goodbye” mean? What is hockey?

The show’s answers, taken as a whole, deliver one part genuinely useful information, one part genuine but practically useless information, and one part pure yuks. I would have expected Chillag and Danforth to use the answering-questions framework as a point of departure for conversation, but they don’t really allow themselves enough time in the show to get into a conversation. But if their designs for the podcast include turning it into a widely distributed public radio segment, maybe they’ve got the right idea; it already sounds, if relatively tame in sensibility by podcast standards, dangerously irreverent by the standards of the average public radio program director.

While I wouldn’t quite say “Go listen to this podcast, it sounds really professional,” I will say that, whenever I listen to a regular public radio program, I constantly think it could use some of the spirit of podcasting, and whenever I listen to a podcast-y podcast, I constantly think it could use some of the spirit of public radio. So I guess my question to Chillag and Danforth goes as follows: how do I combine the best worlds into one production? I’ve been knocking my head against that question without Padma Lakshmi’s advice for far too long.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: film podcast satire
Episode duration: 2-5m
Frequency: 3-5 per month

“Hey, welcome back, we’re talking On Cinema. I’m Tim Heidecker, your host. We are talking and celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Ghostbusters. With me is film buff Gregg Turkington. Gregg, thanks for being on the show.”

“Thank you, it’s great to be here.”

“So, Ghostbusters. Ivan Reitman, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd...”

“Yeah, that film’s a classic, by the way.”

“Yeah, I mean, it hits all the notes: it hits comedy, it hits sci-fi, it hits adventure... it’s a landmark film. It’s one of the great films of the eighties, in terms of comedies.”

“And a lot of people don’t realize how popular it was, ’cause it was just that popular.”

“You know, I watched it recently and was struck by how funny it is, and also how original it was, because there wasn’t a lot of movies like that at the time.”

“That was the first movie like that, and there was a sequel, but other than that, there’s never been anything like it.”

“Alright, well, any Academy Awards for that? I don’t think it won any, but that’s not...”

“The Academy, you know, sometimes they make the wrong decisions.”

“Right, well, thanks for joining me, and we’ll see you next time.”

And there you have a complete transcription of the first episode of On Cinema [RSS] [iTunes], the new film podcast hosted by Tim and Eric’s Tim Heidecker and perpetual guest and “film buff” Gregg Turkington. From there, these two cinephiles have gone on to hold very similar discussions about movies like The Shining, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Carlito’s Way, and Run Lola Run. That last one comes live from Oktoberfest.

Anyone expecting in-depth, rigorously researched cinema talk might have certain objections to Heidecker and Turkington’s production sensibilities: their compulsion to bring up the Academy Awards without knowing which movies won them, their inability to determine whether Run Lola Run came out in 1999 or 2004 (it came out in 1998), or Turkington’s insistence that Carlito’s Way “didn’t come out on video” or that Star Trek II is “the one in San Francisco.” Also, none of their conversations has yet run even five minutes long.

So On Cinema sounds like an entertainingly goofy conceptual stunt, sure, but extreme brevity aside, how far does this apple really fall from the tree of “real” film podcasts? Now, I love film podcasts. Some of the most important elements of my listening life have been film podcasts. But, perhaps alongside the almighty Two Twenty/Thirtysomething White Guys/Girls Bullshitting About Culture, the genre produces some of the laziest, least engaging shows imaginable. If Podthinking my way through iTunes “Film and Television” directory in search of the diamonds in the rough has taught me anything, it’s taught me that the world teems with guys who own microphones, have a couple buddies, have seen a few movies, and will tell you what they think of them when they feel like it.

Again, I hesitate to single out film podcasts, some of which have given us so much, but the lesser among them represent a broad area of podcasting where empty opinion meets aggressive trivia-jockeying meets general ignorance. From their repeated use of howlingly empty proclamations like “great” and “classic” to their obscurantism-flavored bickering over obvious nonsense to their unrepentant judgments rendered from at best threadbare knowledge, Heidecker and Turkington nail this area with a satire that borders on savage. Are they shooting fish in a barrel? Maybe, but after all these years of Podthinking, I feel relieved to see a few fish shot.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: one-on-one conversation, usually with guys, sometimes about “guy stuff”
Episode duration: 1-2h
Frequency: once or twice per week

What do I know about Aisha Tyler? Not a whole hell of a lot, though I do know she’s spent decades as a comedian, which, through the prism of my own special brand of comedy fandom, means I’ve heard a lot of her on the radio and on podcasts. She became a favorite Loveline guest of mine by coming to the show with interesting things to say, unlike almost everyone else in that rogue’s gallery of, as Adam Carolla remembers it, “drunken rockers, stupid actresses — a who’s-who of retards.” The age of podcasting has dropped the means of audio-entertainment production straight into the hands of most of the cut-above Loveline regulars, and their shows usually reveal, as Tyler’s does, that they can do more than I thought.

I would say that Tyler’s podcast, Girl on Guy [RSS] [iTunes], reveals that she can host, but it seems the world already knows that. From what I can gather from what she says about her career, she seems to have done time in the hosting trenches already, working the sort of television gigs where she had to add comedic or intellectual value to segments of clips of, er, questionable value themselves. I could be wrong, though; she could have easily gotten experience with richer host-y projects than that, since she drives her podcast not just as a presenter, but as a conversationalist.

How to distinguish genuine conversationalists from garden-variety clip-plumpers and list-goer-downers? The latter, for one, won’t sit down with their guests and get in-depth for an hour, for an hour and a half, for nearly two hours. Which topics make up the meat of these heartily meaty conversations? The show’s branding, from its logo image of a suited Tyler smoking a cigar to its description as “a rant about stuff guys love: video games, action movies, comic books, fast machines, sex, small batch spirits, bar fights, and blowing sh*t up,” suggests a certain specificity. And to an extent, Girl on Guy does function as a forum for Tyler to discuss her less-girlish pursuits — brewing beer, watching expensive classic cars race each other, inheriting her dad’s Kawasaki Ninja, fearing reproduction, playing Fallout 3 — with a suite of highly dudeish dudes. This concept appeals to me in the same sense that I enjoy eating, say, Chinese food at restaurants that cater to Lebanese customers, but her mission hasn’t taken long to broaden (as it were).

When fellow comedians and entertainment-industry people like Chris Hardwick [MP3] or the non-guy Jackie Kashian [MP3] come on, for instance, the talk takes frequent turns toward exactly what it’s like to hone one’s on-stage persona, or exactly what it’s like to get buffeted around by the windy whims of the film-and-television executive class. Yet Tyler seems motivated mainly by curiosity to hear how exactly her guests got to where they are in life; when she talks with Adam Carolla [MP3], she drills down into the specific means by which a dirt-poor, semi-illiterate young carpenter from the Valley goes about capitalizing on his sense of observational humor. By the same token, when she brings wounded Army Corporal Jeremy Kuehl on the show [MP3], she wants to know about every step of what he went through in wartime.

Tyler gets ahead of other long-form interview shows by, consciously or unconsciously, asking only questions whose answers she actually wants to hear. (As 101 a skill as that might seem, it turns out to be surprisingly rare in this game.) This might come as a by-product of inviting only people she knows she can get pumped about interviewing, whether because of friendship, because of pre-existing creative or social connections, because of let’s-compare-notes experience in career and/or craft, or because of pure fandom. As an example that hits a few of these points at onc, I recommend Tyler’s conversation with Questlove [MP3] — or “?uestlove,” whichever’s cooler. For well over 90 minutes, Tyler engages Quest/?uest with an established rapport, a working knowledge of the scenes they both run in, and a hell-of-a-lot-better-than-working knowledge of his music. I know almost nothing about the Roots upon pressing play on the interview, but I think listening somehow allowed Tyler to transmit her enthusiasm right over to me. I think I’ll go listen to it again now.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: conversation about auteurs, one movie at a time
Episode duration: 30m-1h30m
Frequency: three or four per week

Does this count as Podthinker bribery? First, these couple of guys go and make a podcast. Hey, I listen to those! Then they go so far as to make it a film podcast, and boy, do I love nothing more than sitting down to a fine film. But wait! Then they decide to talk not about film in general, but about film directors — and not just any old journeyman directors, but auteurs. Know, by way of background, that I possess a consciousness so consumed with thoughts about auteurhood that when TheAuteurs.com changed their name to MUBI, I stopped going.

I really started to suspect premeditation upon finding out the identities of the fellows behind all this: Rudie Obias, formerly of The Criterioncast, and West Anthony, currently of Radio Conelrad. I’ve enjoyed both those shows! If someone’s going to pick up the mantle dropped by the long-defunct Watching the Directors (reviewed by my esteemed predecessor Ian Brill here), it might as well be Obias and Anthony. For the last four months, they’ve fired up Skype (one’s in New York, the other in L.A.) and talked their way, sometimes with a guest, picture-by-picture through the filmographies of Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Sergio Leone, BBS Productions, Tim Robbins, and Cameron Crowe on The Auteurcast [RSS] [iTunes]

Permit me to point out a few unusual qualities of their method. Rather than recording one episode per director, they record one episode per film, moving in chronological order through the director’s career. Obias and Anthony’s journey to the center of Tarantino takes them twenty days and seven episodes; their inquest on Robbins takes them eleven days and four episodes. Obsessive cinephiles should feel a slight tingle, realizing as they do that Tarantino has made only six movies and Robbins as has made only three. Those extra ones represent another of The Auteurcast’s formal innovations: a whole-career recap episode that comes to whatever conclusions can be come to, distilling the thoughts thrown out during the preceding discussions of individual films.

Seems like a can’t-lose combination of concept and procedure for execution, so imagine my surprise when I saw all the harsh, low-star reviews peppering the podcast’s iTunes page: “This is not a good show,” “I’m not sure if I’ll keep listening,” “so disappointing,” “not much here.” Had these reviewers hit the nail on the head, we could call it a day here and now, but the other reviews shoot right over to the five-star end: “each episode is full of insight and relevant movie talk,” “invaluable and highly comprehensive,” “the possibilities are endless,” “download!” Clearly, Obias and Anthony know something about the occult art of generating controversy.

But are either the lovers or the haters right? The Auteurcast remains too new to validate any judgments so extreme, but I hear a great deal of promise in the show. Obias introduces each discussion by rattling off a loose list of questions related to the film or filmmaker at hand (e.g., “Can a movie like Jerry Maguire exist in these cynical times?”), and more directly addressing these and questions like them could help the show steer around the mire of free-floating film-yammer than most movie podcasts cheerfully plunge straight into. Some of Obias and Anthony’s conversations, especially the early ones, lack a focus on driving questions of directions of investigation — they run the risk, in other words, of playing tennis without a net.

And while I rarely recommend this, I get the sense that a more rigid time limit — half an hour per film discussion, say, even if the oeuvre recaps stay unlimited — could improve the show even more by adding a shot of urgency, a feeling that most podcasts, film or otherwise, sorely lack. Without it, even the most stimulating conversations about the most stimulating films ultimately just sort of peter out — like this review.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: conversation based on advance and belated notice of cool cultural stuff
Episode duration: 1h30m-2h
Frequency: weekly

Don’t people consume media — whether that media be podcasts, television shows, status-update feeds, those Japanese half-book-half-magazines, or what have you — mainly out of a desire for word of cool stuff? What thought haunts young and youngish first-worlders more than the suspicion that that they might be missing out on cool stuff right now, even as they mess around with slightly less cool stuff than they could be? And so we have the primary shaping force of Get Up on This [RSS] [iTunes], a podcast about recognizing cool stuff before it becomes popular, then circling back and savoring the cool stuff you’ve overlooked.

So while the show delivers no small amount of freeform chat — and with episodes that often approach two hours, how could you avoid it? — it maintains that driving force of awareness: preferably advance awareness, but belated awareness works too. Cool stuff so far gotten up on in the show includes Spotify, humblebragging (I can’t believe I didn’t know there was a word for that), Attack the Block, Asterios Polyp, Instagram, Das Racist, Martin Scorsese’s documentary on Fran Lebowitz, Chinatown, Chick-fil-A, and the Jay-Z/Kanye West collaboration Watch the Throne.

You’ve probably heard of that last one already, maybe because Jay-Z and Kanye West seem to have already “gotten popular” — or they define what modern popularity is, or something — but even more likely because you’ve heard that Maximum Fun’s own Jesse Thorn spent two full hours of Get Up on This considering Watch the Throne in a track-by-track breakdown featuring both song clips and mini-interviews with people actually involved in the making of the album. Hearing such an elaborate, enthusiastic, and (in the best way) serious-minded production made me wonder if something important wasn’t going on in this podcast. Had I been, dare I say it, missing out?

Not that an informed/informative hip-hop conversation shouldn’t come as a surprise on this show. Across from Jesse sat host Jensen Karp, a Los Angeles pop-cultural gallerist who originally came up from Calabasas to become Hot Karl, a satirical rapper with a bad record-label experience. No surprise either that Karp’s previous podcast Hype Men dealt entirely in hip-hop talk — or so I’ve heard, since I failed to get up on it. But I like hearing him use his connections to interesting people outside hip-hop and, even more so, people you didn’t realize would be interesting. One particularly striking example comes right in the very first episode [MP3], in which Karp sits down with Mike Shinoda, a founder of Linkin Park. However you’re imagining him, you’re probably wrong.

But if it makes the most evaluative sense to talk about what Get Up on This has led me to personally get up on, we need to talk about D.C. Pierson. While his two appearances on JJGO! certainly rose to the ranks of my recent favorites, his time with Karp [MP3] pushed me over the fandom edge. Hearing him on a show like this — which admittedly does much the same thing as a standard Two Twenty/Thirtysomething White Guys/Girls Bullshitting About Culture, but with enough direction and purpose to rise to a higher league — I realized that he combines the two qualities essential for attaining (at least with me) and maintaining fame through podcast appearances: having the personality of the fellow I’ve always wanted to hang out with, while actually being good at stuff, like comedy-doing, novel-writing, and one-man-showing.

But I’ve gotten up on one D.C. Pierson project above all others: his First 100 Days of L.A., a blog which documents exactly that. I don’t know if it’s because I just moved to L.A. myself or because I just like the casually dry refinement of Pierson’s writing style, but damn, I can’t stop reading it. This alone repays all the fast-forwarding through the five-minute blocks of ads that, as with every SModcast network program, precede each Get Up on This. I mean, five minutes? What the.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: New Yorker contributors and the web editor in conversation
Episode duration: ~15m
Frequency: weekly

I can’t quite get my mind around the idea of the New Yorker entering podcasting. Yes, this after I Podthought about their fiction podcast two years ago, but still — it’s the New Yorker, for cryin’ out loud! (Wait until I find out about all that stuff they’ve cranked out for the iPad.) While the fiction show bears the mark of an “old media” outfit’s “new media” venture by taking much of its material directly from the magazine’s back pages — but doing it well, I might add — another of their podcasts, Out Loud [RSS] [iTunes], delivers all original talk. Rest assured, in other words, that The New Yorker Out Loud offers something much more interesting than literally that.

This podcast does indeed feature New Yorker people talking out loud about New Yorker pieces, but with a very clear element of added value: they give you the background, the extras, the stuff that didn’t make it into the text itself. Each week, a host, usually web editor Blake Eskin, takes aside one contributor from the current issue and spends fifteen-ish minutes asking about what they’ve written. While a form that short cuts off the possibility of in-depth conversation and while I remain unsure whether you do best to listen to these episodes before reading the relevant article, after reading the relevant article, while reading the relevant article, or instead of reading the relevant article, I find myself consuming them like potato chips.

Part of this mild addictiveness surely springs from the sheer variety of topics. If you find yourself unengaged with shoplifting [MP3], video games [MP3], or Super Sam Fuld [MP3], just wait fifteen minutes (or less!) and you’ll hear about Harvard’s bells [MP3], say, or medical marijuana [MP3], or the slaughter of songbirds in Europe [MP3]. Sometimes you’ll hear from well-known luminaries who only occasionally show up in the magazine discussing these subjects: your Nicholson Bakers, your Gahan Wilsons (drawing, of course, counts as contribution) your John Adamses. Most of the time, you’ll hear from the hardworking cultural journalists who regularly fill its pages, like Joan Acocella, Alex Ross, James Wood, and David Denby.

But where, oh where, is Anthony Lane? I long for the day that the fadeout of The New Yorker Out Loud’s Gary-Numan-with-a-cellphone-near-an-unshielded-speaker theme music gives way to the plummy accent of not only the Anglosphere’s funniest living film critic but this podcast’s most glaring absence. We’ve heard him on Bookworm and Charlie Rose; we know he makes for a good interview. I can’t give you a precise episode count, but at some point, producing a New Yorker-related podcast without including Anthony Lane verges on perversity.

Or am I simply lobbying for a personal preference? Would I feel the same delight at hearing Anthony Lane on an episode as I did when I buzzed through the archives and selectively downloaded conversations about Haruki Murakami [MP3], Abbas Kiarostami [MP3], and poutine [MP3]? I consider the New Yorker one of mankind’s most effective tools against this awful cherry-picking tendency, a generalist publication of such quality as to achieve near-total subject independence. If that sounds like a high-flown description, let me bring it down to Earth with a question. This is what the New Yorker — and indeed, The New Yorker Out Loud — sternly asks at its very best: “You mean you’re only interested in what you’re interested in? Lame-o.”

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: two guys, rotating guests, funny lists, and an odd recurring Michael Jackson impression
Episode duration: ~30m
Frequency: twice a week

Once, for reasons I can’t quite explain, I wrote up a bunch of similar podcasts more or less in a row. I have a hard time remembering much about them except their broadest shared quality: being TTWGBACs. For those new to Podthoughts, this ugly set of letters stands for Two Twentysomething/Thirtysomething White Guys/Girls Bullshitting About Culture (“White” broadly defined), the dominant podcast genre of our time. Why I would listen to so many? Let me assure you that you can have an engaging artistic experience with TTWGBACs if you approach them as you would sonnets: expect almost no formal variations, but revel in the tiny ones you do hear.

While I’d rather not actually read old Podthoughts — the temptation delve into irrelevantly late revision pulls strong — I distinctly recall enjoying Low Budget FM more than its stylistic compatriots. Maybe I had more fun because the show introduced the word “chaunch”; maybe I had more fun because the resulting column attracted seven (count ‘em!) comments. Either way, when I got wind that Perry has something new going in the podcasting world, I felt compelled to check it out.

But wait. Didn’t Perry, back on Low Budget FM, say something about how his wife gives him an allowance? Does writing about this man’s podcasts constitute endorsement of that practice, which weirds me out to no end? Even if I’m not misremembering this, though, it might not matter. Could such a public admission identify him as not only just open enough but just unusual enough to consistently generate good podcast talk? Only by listening to Far Out [RSS] [iTunes] could I know for sure.

The seasoned TTWGBAC enthusiast won’t get any surprises right away. They’ll hear a pair of conversationally comic hosts — former “KECC Radio Club President” Buck Perez takes the seat next to Perry’s — and they’ll hear a guest. But they’ll come to find that the guest situation makes one of Far Out’s several departures from its genre’s established way of doing things. Each episode of the program brings on not a new guest but one of a rotating cast of regulars, almost semi-hosts themselves. Sometimes one of them will say something and their last word will simultaneously echo and fade out like they’re talking through a midcentury Jamaican sound system. I still don’t know how they do that, but I can’t stop loving it.

Other sonic niceties include surreally decontextualized snippets inserted at the very top of the show; clips from “bad” bands that the hosts nonetheless love; and swear-intensive movie lines bizarrely dubbed over by network television. That last one comes from one of the many games invented and played on the show. Other regular conversational engines include lists found on the internet (“Top Ten Worst Office Workers” [MP3], “How to Show Up Goth Without Looking Like a Poser” [MP3]), opening listener mail, marveling at a Russian news story, (often) discussing a recent embarrassment or, I don’t know, a read-aloud from Perry’s high school diary.

But, weirdly, one choice above all others gives Far Out a different feel than other podcasts in its class: new episodes go up twice a week instead of the usual once, and each one runs about half an hour instead of the usual hour or two. Now, I love long-form shows and I love podcasting for its fostering of long-form shows, but this show’s position between short and long gives it something I can’t pin down. Perhaps semi-brevity and frequency really are the souls of wit. Shakespeare wrote that, right? Can’t argue with someone that good at sonnets.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]