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Vital stats:
Format: comedy, but mostly left-wing anger
Episode duration: 20m-40m
Frequency: every 3-7 days
Archive available on iTunes: last 10

Some will surely come away from The David Feldman Comedy Podcast [iTunes] [RSS] feeling as if they’ve been sold a bill of false goods. Might I suggest a retitling to The David Feldman Enervated Left-Wing Spitecast? A slightly mean way to open, I realize, but I feel the show pushed me to this point and beyond. I would’ve had the same reaction to chocolate-chip ice cream that called itself “chocolate.” The program most certainly contains comedy; that’s not in doubt. It just contains a lot more enervated left-wing spite.

Feldman’s podcast shares content with his broadcast on Los Angeles’ KPFK, and I’ll get e-mails about how that should’ve been warning enough. I’ve heard plenty of neat shows on that station — why, just yesterday I was listening to something about African electronica — but heated agreement festivals about the endless humiliations of powerlessness and the countless evils of the Republican party run rampant on its schedule. Feldman and his variety of guests tend to cover the same ground. While unlikely ever to conclusively determine if the United Nations should try George W. Bush for war crimes or for a lot of war crimes, they do claim without hesitation the unparalleled presidential suitability of Dennis Kucinich, that “it’s axiomatic that supply-side economics doesn’t work” (a rare misunderstanding of the term “axiomatic” and probably of supply-side economics as well), and that taxing the rich more will obviously right the nation’s woes.

I didn’t mean to go so hard on this show, but it opens an old wound. Were I a conservative, a Republican, or what have you, we could chalk this up to a difference of opinion and move on. But I’m not! I’m just a guy who still resents having been told that the left would offer a thinking man’s sanctuary in the low-I.Q., high-volume arena of American politics — then getting mercilessly hailed with statements like those above. Feldman and his guests are right to criticize the flimsy, buffoonish generalizations and over-reductions spouted by the high-profile right, but must they respond in kind? Fighting fire with fire has a certain ring to it, granted, but allow me to suggest water.

Still, Feldman’s a comedy writer and performer, and he does deliver laughs. His funniest and/or most interesting moments, almost meta-comedy, deal the mechanics of his jokes, the nature of the comedy business, and his own long history in the business. While not an especially sterling example, I did like how he followed a joke about Larry King Live ending “after 50,000... soiled adult diapers” with a consideration of what other humorous things he could’ve gone through 50,000 of on television. One three-way conversation about the nature of sitcom writing versus other comedy writing sticks out as enlightening, and even a few minutes where Feldman and a colleague go one-for-one with their old Reagan jokes (yes, really) definitely didn’t sound like something I’d hear on the garden variety hosted-by-a-22-year-old comedy podcast.

But jeez, it always comes back to the politics. This happens so frequently and so gratingly that I eventually found sweet relief in Feldman’s bursts of bitterness that only have to do with his career-related disappointment. Why do I find the political talk so bothersome, you ask? Why can’t I just ignore it? Maybe it’s the same reason armchair quarterbacking frustrates me. You ain’t playin’ on the team. You sure ain’t coachin’ the team. In fact, you have no way to meaningfully affect the game. It won’t make much difference in your life — your actual, real, everyday life — if your guys win or if the other ones do, so why pretend? Why hasten your heart attack about it? Most armchair quarterbacks don’t have a lot else going on, so you can’t really blame them. But what conclusion to draw about armchair quarterbacks skilled and practiced enough to make you laugh out loud, if only they felt like it?

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: live persona-based comedy
Episode duration: 1h-1h10m
Frequency: once or twice a month
Archive available on iTunes: all

I don’t have to tell anyone who hangs around this part of Internet that comedians and podcasting are the new peanut butter and chocolate. Sure, whenever we weren’t seeing them live, we got used to enjoying our comedians on talk show appearances, critically-acclaimed double albums, buddy comedies, and Private Joke Files, but this podcasting business is a whole other deal. It’s like it was crafted specifically suit the form of expression and the lifestyle of the modern man or woman of hilarity. They’re catching on to this quick, too. Does your favorite comedian not have a podcast? Wait a few weeks.

Greg Proops got with the program, as it were, in October. Remembering him as surely one of my top 25 favorite Loveline guests of all time — though I couldn’t quite remember why — I hopped immediately on his podcast, The Smartest Man in the World [iTunes]. Then I had to wait a few months for a substantial episode stock to build up, since he only puts out one or two a month. But they’re elaborate! You get over an hour! Recorded live! Audience Q&A and everything! The show, you see, takes on a form that’s recently gained a lot of traction in the podcasting comedian community: the recorded live show. As near as I can figure, Proops puts on a live show in L.A. every few weeks, records it as what he calls a “Proopcast”, then releases it to his worldwide Proops nation using the magic of the internet. Straightforward stuff, but with Proops, the personality delivers the complexity. Or I guess I should say the persona delivers the complexity, since it’s hard to imagine him going around like this all the time in real life.

From his Loveline appearances, I’d remembered Proops as funny and crisply well-spoken, but not wildly out of the ordinary. Either I’ve misremembered him or he’s ramped it way up in the intervening years, because — jeez, how do I even describe his demeanor? He holds court with a manner of speaking that’s part old-school cartoon Englishman, part gay caricature, part regular Joe’s impression of an egghead, and part stoned Southern California surfer. He combines surprising-in-a-comedy-context historical references with impressively well-remembered quotations with deliberate malapropisms with pop-culture name checking that’s much more obscurantist in tone than in content.

You’re probably either thinking this sounds grippingly fascinating or deeply insufferable. You are right and wrong, all at once. I’m no comedy nerd, but it seems to me that much of the way Proops performs exists outside the normal spectrum of comedic expectations. He walks the thinnest imaginable like between irony and sincerity; sometimes blasting the audience with a thick, gooey spray of vaguely multisyllabic adjectives, deadly maladies of centuries past, and lines from Antony and Cleopatra; sometimes simply connecting with a story or an opinion that’s cleanly, uncomplicatedly his own and doesn’t need the extra layers of delivery flavor.

But it’s not always easy to tell which is which! At any given point in a Smarest Man in the World episode, you’re hearing, I suspect, a certain percentage Greg Proops the made-up character and a certain percent the genuine dude. Never is he 100 percent one and zero percent the other. As an audience for comedy, confusion isn’t a terrible state of mind to be in, but I have to say I come down solidly in favor of real Proops rather than crazy Proops. It’s best, I suppose, when the he cuts the former a little bit with the latter, but he risks a style takeover by his worst tendencies. It’s like, dude, I don’t much admire George Bush or Dick Cheney either, but those unhinged Mr. Hyde screeds aren’t doing either of us any favors. There are superlatives that apply to the sort of people who make a habit of those, but “smartest” isn’t one of them.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: 8- and 16-bit video game music showcase
Duration:~1h
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: all

When I first heard about The Legacy Music Hour [iTunes], a (a) podcast (b) devoted to video games but (c) mostly 20-year-old ones and (d) entirely to their music, I said the idea was so geeky that it almost comes around the other side to normal. But listening, I realized that, insanely geeky or just pretty geeky, it’s just the show me and the other members of a certain specific generational subgroup have been waiting for.

The program hosts, Brent Weinbach and Rob F., spend each hour trading off selections of video game music they’ve found particularly interesting in the past week. They will have spent that week searching for tracks from the games of certain developers, like role-playing titan Square [MP3]; certain composer, like Mari Yamaguchi [MP3] or Junko Tamiya [MP3] or “elevator” music [MP3]. And it's not just any old video game music; everything comes from what these guys consider "the golden age of video game music," the time of 8-bit and 16-bit consoles, roughly 1985 to 1995. (Golden age of video games themselves, if you ask me.)

The elevator music episode really started me thinking. Like so many Americans in their mid-twenties, I got into music itself by way of the music that happened to play in the video games I loved. This happened, of course, during Brent and Rob's golden age. Back then, game developers couldn’t just hire “real” musicians to record “real” music; their composers had to work with within very — often very, very — specific hardware constraints, resulting in a wide array of highly distinctive sounds and styles that are only now coming into real fashion. Except for the hosts’ voices, there’s absolutely nothing recorded with a microphone on The Legacy Music Hour: it’s all the razor-sharp arpeggios of the NES; the compressed yet sweeping samples of the Super NES; the forceful thumps and buzzes of the Genesis; the gritty washes of the Turbografx-16.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, the only music I liked as a little kid was video game music. I usually latched onto the kind of tracks Brent and Rob discuss in their surprisingly insightful breakdown of what constitutes the much-maligned “elevator” style. I’d never thought it about it before, but this show made me understand: I never played video games to win; I played almost purely for the aesthetic experience. It was about the graphics, the design, the sound effects, but most importantly, the music. I suspect a bunch of us 8- and 16-bit habitués have come to realize the same thing.

So it makes sense that I’d fall right into The Legacy Music Hour’s target demographic, but I insist there are also widely fascinating issues at work here about the interaction between aesthetics and technology, between compositional creativity and electronic limitations. Brent and Rob know this, and you can hear it when they occasionally find their way into serious examinations of what, musicologically, makes these tracks tick. I wish they’d do it for every piece they play, even if it means they have to play fewer of them. After all, these compositions, once largely written off as a bunch of childish bleeps and bloops, shaped a big part of this generation’s musical Weltanschauung. I know it shaped mine.

(And yes, JJGO listeners, they play stuff from Herzog Zwei.)

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: psychotheraputic and meditational explorations
Duration: 25m-50m
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: all

Followers of Adam Carolla’s major radio and podcast enterprises haven’t gotten a particularly positive image of his father, Jim Carolla. According to Carolla fils’ memories, Carolla père was always too busy with divorce, depression, cheapskatery, and an overwhelming tendency against activity of any kind to be much of a dad. Even today, the elder seems unable to remember or even acknowledge the accomplishments of the younger. (Offered a $10,000 check for a correct answer, he couldn’t spell or cite the dial position of the station that carried Loveline.) Having established his own content-hungry podcasting network, Adam nevertheless gave Jim the opportunity to host a show of his own.

Even as a reasonably enthusiastic Adam Carolla fan, saying I didn’t know what to expect from Life Lessons with Jim Carolla [RSS] [iTunes] puts it mildly. I’d heard Adam mention that Jim was some sort of psychoanalyst, so I figured that would influence the show’s content. I guess I was aware that he also played the trumpet professionally, but hearing him bust it out here came as a surprise. As for his soaringly comedic lounge singing and the presence of Adam’s high school buddy Ray Oldhafer... well, some things are unforeseeable.

Those same Carolla fans who’ve built up strong advance suspicion about Jim can’t be much more charitably inclined toward Ray. In the vast majority of Adam’s many, many tales of adolescent and adult tomfoolery with his “idiot buddies from the Valley,” Ray comes off as the maniac among maniacs. And to be a clear as possible about the context, we’re talking about a bunch of dudes who didn’t think twice about urinating on one another in the car. (More recently, and for reasons that remain oblique, he put a turd in Jimmy Kimmel’s desk.) Perhaps he’s just the sort of troubled soul who’d have spent the past fifteen years undergoing therapy sessions with — you guessed it — Jim Carolla. Doubling his role as Jim’s real-life patient, Ray does the job of his co-host on the podcast.

The complicating factor is that, on Life Lessons, neither of these guys come off as dumb or even very weird. One is a middle-age builder from a chaotic immigrant family, plagued by a weakness for beer and cigarettes, and can’t quite get out of his own way; the other is a near-octogenarian therapist from a chaotic immigrant family who’s found a means of holding it all down, in his way, with heavy doses of reflection and meditation. A larger discussion about the struggles of existence they have in common runs through the episodes, framed by terms like “the power of attention” [MP3], “the archaeology of the self” [MP3], and “a higher level of consciousness” [MP3]. Knowing only what Adam’s said about Jim and Ray, it’s hard not to come away favorably impressed with their calm articulacy and good humor (even if Jim often fails to get Ray’s jokes).

Still, you can’t deny that Ray is a bit of a screw-up and Jim a bit of a goof. Ray openly acknowledges his screw-uppiness, though — that’s why he’s on this couch in the first place — and Jim embraces his own persona, which allows for the use of words like “podcasters” (meaning the podcast’s listening audience) and “computerize” (meaning to send an e-mail). Combine this with all the Freudian-type talk about concepts whose very names sound discredited and you get a hard affair to take seriously. But like those times David Lynch starts going on about transcendence, it’s also hard to take unseriously. Ray’s probably right to seek out solutions to both his self-destructive impulses and his irritating minor twitches; Jim’s probably right to raise his awareness to help him find them. We’re lucky they’ve chosen to do this on one of the most interestingly bizarre podcasts I’ve ever heard.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: Freakonomic investigations
Duration: 5m-40m
Frequency: biweekly
Archive available on iTunes: all

It’s about time for a Freakonomics podcast, fans of the book might grumble. I won’t call the complaint invalid; Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s bestseller came out half a decade ago, and even then podcasting was a thing. A podcast feels like a natural outgrowth of the Freakonomics brand, which has already racked up years in, for example, the blogosphere. I read Freakonomics back when it hit (though I haven’t made it around to the sequel, Superfreakonomics) and found myself pretty damned entertained by journalist Dubner’s description of the economist Levitt’s investigations into human behavior in such exotic, data-rich settings as sumo tournaments, Israeli daycares, and crack dealers’ moms’ apartments. So why not try out Freakonomics Radio [RSS] [iTunes]?

I recall a bunch of the grumpier economics bloggers giving Freakonomics a hard time, even going so far as to accuse it of having nothing much to do with economics. Despite having cultivated an interest in the subject, I was never quite able to figure out whether that charge stuck. (I admit that Levitt’s title, “Rogue Economist”, may oversell his distance from the mainstream.) A similar backlash met Freakonomics Radio’s debut earlier this year, though it was less about the proper rigors of social science than the proper regularity of podcast production. To their credit, Levitt and Dubner took to the mics and addressed these issues in an episode [MP3], promising more and better.

They have indeed gone on to deliver some and good. With a huge-name, massively-downloaded podcast like this, I’ve been conditioned to expect a rigid regularity of format. There’s not a lot of that here; episodes vary between a few minutes of Levitt and Dubner talking about what’s to be learned by applying the Freakonomic method to the World Cup [MP3] and a big, rich, This American Life-type documentary thing on the similarities between the suckiness of public schools and the suckiness of commercial radio stations [MP3]. They even do two-parters, including a recent one on the challenges facing a saving-incentivizing type of bank account which works like a “no-lose lottery” [MP3] [MP3]. This sometimes elaborate sound richness (as they call it in public radio) surprised me at first, but then I found out that the show isn’t just any old podcast. It’s actually an agglomeration of Freakonomically literate audio entertainments, some of which air on “real” radio — shows like Marketplace — all co-produced with WNYC, the public radio station of choice for many a public radio geek. No surprise this all took so long to come around, then.

One of the complaints Steven and Stephen quoted asked for “more Levitt, less Dubner.” Some of the the aforementioned econ bloggers have said the same. I myself have never known quite how to feel about the journalist-presents-researcher format, tried and true on the bestseller list and ridden even harder in the popular economics book boom that was Freakonomics’ aftermath. Part of me wants more direct access to a mind like Levitt’s; part of me is happy not to have it. There was a particularly fascinating 19th-century sense in which Dubner presented Levitt as something of a freak show — as it were — who finds even freakier things under the socioeconomic logs he overturns himself. The book form worked well enough for this sort of thing, but what I’ve heard so far makes me think the podcast/radio form could work even better. It grants the right kind of directness: you get to hear from the actual economic actors involved in these situations, plus you get both Levitt and Dubner’s voices discretely. Dubner was servicable as Levitt’s P.T. Barnum, but he’s better as his interlocutor.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: arts-and-culture magazine
Duration: ~50m
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: last 20

KUSC is, as you may know, a classical music station in Los Angeles. I’m not revealing a secret here: it’s got “USC” right there in the call letters, and it’s almost without exception referred to as “Classical KUSC”. If you’re outside Southern California and/or don’t care about classical music, you’re probably gearing up to blow right past the rest of this review, but hold up; I’m going to talk about the one show of theirs that’s got a wider mandate than you’d imagine.

Of course, I myself chose to write up Arts Alive [RSS] [iTunes] because, as Podthoughtreaders know, my relocation to L.A. is imminent. Well, ”imminent” in about a year, but still, it’s never too early to orient yourself in your next home through its film, its literature, its radio, and its podcasts. For this reason and others, I’ve been a KUSC listener for a while via its repeater in Santa Barbara. Arts Alive airs on Saturday mornings, and I’ve come to realize it’s just about the exact thing I want to hear on Saturday mornings.

The program is what you might call a “magazine show,” a bit like KPCC’s Off-Ramp, about which I previously Podthought for similarly L.A.-related reasons. Admittedly, much of its content has some kind of Southern California connection, even if tenuous, and an equally sized slice has a lot to do with classical music, but those are merely its dual entry points into the larger cultural world. Among the segments this description would not immediately lead you to expect are a conversation with Paul Giamatti [MP3], another with experimental novelist Mark Z. Danielewski [MP3], and one with Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan about what’s wrong with the new Harry Potter movie [MP3].

Turan drops in as one of the program’s regulars, as does KUSC’s Alan Chapman, who hosts my other favorite program on the station, the 20th-century-centric Modern Times. (I sit around wishing that show would podcast, too, but I’m sure record-label litigiousness will keep that from happening for, oh, at least a year or two.) USC Thornton School of Music dean Rob Cutietta shows up every time for a feature called “Ask the Dean”, where he does his best to address listener questions about, the state of classical music today, the relationship between music and mathematics, and whether ghosts live in practice rooms. Though both the one-off and regular features are immaculately well-produced, they’re often cut in such a fashion that you don’t hear the questions: the announcer summarizes what the guest is going to say, then you hear the guest say it. What an odd way to edit.

Despite the fact that it undergirds a substantial portion of Arts Alive’s content, I hesitate to say too much about the show’s relationship to classical music. This has much to do with my squirreliness about the very concept, which I won’t be able to articulate any better than Alex Ross did in the New Yorker: “I hate ‘classical music’: not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past.” But when this show talks about classical music, it doesn’t do so with the kind of weird off-putting fixation associated with the form’s hardcore fandom. Nevertheless — and this is going to come off pretty grand — I’m glad to have a general arts-and-culture show that’s shaped by the better elements of the classical-music sensibility. If that makes any sense.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: jokey stump-the-panel game show
Duration: 30m
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: last 163

Take Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me. Get it off the road and plop it down in Detroit. Yank out the comedians and replace them with academics. Forget about current events; ask questions about all manner of subjects. Toss that desk bell and use the campus clock tower instead. Now you’ve got a pretty fair approximation of Ask the Professor [RSS] [iTunes].

But that’s an unfair comparison for a number of reasons, one of which is that Ask the Professor came first. Like, way first. By some counts, it might well be one of the longest-running radio programs in the United States, august-to-the-extreme institutions like the Metropolitan Opera aside. It seems to have experienced, over the course of its 50 seasons, quite a variation in profile: sometimes it’s been a strictly local show, sometimes it’s been heard on radios all across the country, and now it’s got a global reach by way of the medium known as podcasting. Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me seems pretty bulletproof and all, but damn, this thing’s a survivor.

One respect in which the comparison isn’t unfair: though ostensibly game shows, both programs are concerned less with rigorous score-keeping and rule-adherence than with cracking jokes and having a high old time. You might think this would be the theater of Wait Wait’s decisive victory, since academics, to put it charitably, are not comedians, but if podcasting has revealed one thing to me, it’s the charms of nonprofessional humor. Sure, a lot of the jokes made by the rotating panel of professors fall flat. Sure, a lot of them won’t be 100 percent intelligible to listeners not employed at the University of Detroit, Mercy, from whence the show broadcasts. But there’s such a reality to all of it.

In the field of audience participation, Ask the Professor receives higher marks than Wait Wait. Even though ATP doesn’t get listeners on the phone to compete, it does draw all its questions from what I’ve come to think of as the Professor Nation. Listeners, many of whom mention that they’ve been tuning in religiously since nineteen-dickety-two, mail or e-mail in questions about Shakespeare, hockey, Egyptian geography, Star Trek, the Canadian government, the Periodic Table of the Elements, or what have you. They also send in the answers; the idea is to stump the raw tenure-power collected in the studio. I don’t know which challenge is more interesting: the professors’ often comical struggle to answer, or the question-submitting listeners’ attempt to strike just the right balance of generality and obscurity.

The facts undergirding the questions can be surprising and the quest for the answers is usually chuckleworthy, but what I find particularly fascinating about the show it how it plays with its own history. References aplenty are made to past episodes, past hosts, and past stumpings, but each program also features a clip from the archives. This past summer, the producers even re-aired decades-old episodes in their entirety. I don’t know if it’s just a psychological effect of slightly degraded audio tape, but there’s something especially rich about these back broadcasts, even those from an era as recent as the late 1980s. Are they more theatrical? More deliberate? More radio-y? A question to confound even the smartest panel, I’m certain.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: dudeversation, I’ll call it
Duration: 30m-1h30m
Frequency: biweekly
Archive available on iTunes: last 30

“This is the food episode,” said either J.D. or Thunder. Though this only happened on one particular installment of their podcast, Stack of Dimes [RSS] [iTunes], every single other I heard had something to do with comestibles as well: halloween SweeTarts, sketchy fish restaurants, pizza cupcakes, the malt liquor energy beverage Four Loko. This might be a coincidence, but damn.

In any case, Stack of Dimes isn’t a food podcast. Describing what it is requires me to drag out of the mothballs that dreaded designation, TTWGBAC: Two Twenty/Thirtysomething White Guys Bullshitting About Culture. I have been uncharitable to these in the past — never without cause, I would submit — but have more recently resolved to look a little kindlier on podcasting’s dominant format. That’s good news for this show, whose Thirtysomething White Guys almost purely Bullshit About Culture. Whether the issue happens to be food, drink, television commercials, jeggings, or awful late-eighties kids’ movies, J.D. and thunder have opinions. If you subscribe, they will tell you them.

I admit that this is just the kind of show — the kind composed equally of disposable Gen-Y references and sheer complaint — that once would’ve sent me to straight the bathroom. (Then it would send me back to the iPod to replenish myself with the nourishing manna that is In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg.) But it’s recently dawned on me that they’re necessary — a strategic national resource, even. This realization came, as a result of writing up Dong-il Shin’s film My Friend and His Wife.

That movie has a lot to do with the distinctive nature of dude friendship, and thinking about it led me to the uncomfortable realization that few dudes really get into friendships anymore. As I wrote in the aforelinked post, none of the young male products of middle-class America I know really even have friends. They might have had their circle of dawgs in childhood and adolescence, but sooner or later they get siphoned off by girlfriends and wives and then descend into private hells of isolation where nothing can possibly satisfy except the next unsatisfying woman to come around the bend.

That’s where a podcast like Stack of Dimes comes in. One of the hosts seems to hold a day job in commercial radio, so it’s sprinkled with an enjoyable dusting of satire (or just plain jabs) at that sad industry. Both of the hosts are based in Seattle, so a listener like myself who happens to have grown up there will thrill to the constant name-dropping of marginal Washington state places like Everett, Yakima, Leavenworth, Chehalis, and Lake City Way. But the general value is all in the rhythms of dude conversation and the hard-to-describe but deep moments of recognition they deliver. Even when I wasn’t into the topics under discussion — and they’re usually so trivial that they’re probably not conventionally get-into-able — I appreciated being able to listen in on such talk. Really, I just appreciated that it was going on at all. For some listeners, I’m sure it’s the only connection to dude discourse left them.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: food talk, but specifically eating talk
Duration: ~20m
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: all

Sporks march shamefully in my Gen-Y internet perp walk right alongside monkeys, robots, pirates, and ninjas. The presence of any is usually a strong disrecommendation in and of itself, a red flag of sensibility, tone, or (worst of all) “irreverence” mechanically prioritized above substance. Then again, The Sporkful [RSS] [iTunes] is hosted by Dan Pashman and Mark Garrison of public radio’s “short-lived but much-beloved” The Bryant Park Project, public radio being the busiest intersection of belovedness and cancellation. Despite having never caught that program, I’d heard it was kind of neat, so I figured I’d put my spork-related qualms aside and give their new food show a chance.

Though The Sporkful is podcast-only, Pashman and Garrison have evidently retained a good deal of that distinctive energy radio-y radio beats into you. They speak rapidly and forcefully, as if with eyes fixed on the ticking clock. (The especially nice thing about podcasting, I’ve always thought, is that there is no ticking clock, but hey.) As a firm believer that podcast episodes should be no shorter than my favorite Tarkovsky film, I admit to having eyed their twenty-minute episode lengths dubiously. How on Earth to cram a nuanced discussion of poutine into such a compressed time frame? Bit here’s the thing: the hosts aren’t food critics; they’re sports commentators.

Now, as an aficionado of public radio and Tarkovsky, I have no idea what sports commentary sounds like, but, culinary content aside, this is how I imagine it. The rapid-firing Pashman (who sounds like a second cousin of Stop Podcasting Yourself’s Graham Clark) and Garrison are opinionated, argumentative, and all about the action, the down/dirty physical realities of food and eating. They bill the show as “for eaters, not foodies,” and that’s about right, especially given the sheer number of debates they get into about how best to bite into various comestibles. Occasional guests, like Radio Lab’s Robert Krulwich on sandwiches [MP3] or Marc Maron on coffee [MP3], can get pretty het up about these matters.

To top pumpkin pie or not to top pumpkin pie; the optimal coffee-dunking speed of a yeast donut; the hosts’ eternal struggle about bite consistency versus bite variety: these are important questions to anyone who eats, and that most of the media’s food conversation ignores them comes as a surprise. This isn’t a show concerned with exotic ingredients or elaborate preparatory flourishes; it’s all about being the best, most pleasure-extracting eater you can be. Whether this is more or less hedonic than all those foodie tracts about Belgian endive and Azerbaijani puff pastry I have yet to resolve, but it turns out to be one of the very few stripes of populism I can get on board with.

The most recent peak of The Sporkful’s usefulness, for my money, comes in its episode on buffet strategy [MP3]. (If we’re going to speak populistically, we might as well take it to the limit.) Though Pashman and Garrison’s techniques differ in the details, they agree solidly on one thing: when you approach the buffet, in the name of all that is good and pure, blow past the landslide of starches restaurants always place at the beginning and survey the whole thing before you take any food. That way, you can load up on the precious, expensive proteins rather than, say, potatoes, which is just what the management — your enemy — wants you to do. File this discussion in the Why-They-Hate-Us folder if you must, but it’s more relevant to the landscape we actually navigate every day than the last hundred hours of election analysis you listened to.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: “contemporary art talk”
Duration: an hour, on average
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: all

As a title, Bad at Sports [RSS] [iTunes] was funny, I’m sure, for at least 150 episodes. As for the following 120, I wonder. It’s a podcast about art, so the truth of those words is undeniable — if you’re looking for common ground among art students, that scrap may be as common as they get — but the observation seems less sharp than it could be. As with what it names, I find myself both impressed on the conceptual level and slightly disappointed by the muddle on the practical one.

Let’s be clear: this is a damned ambitious show that more than delivers on its promise. That promise, specifically, is of “contemporary art talk,” and boy, is there some contemporary art talk in here. Each weekly episode comes nears or exceeds an hour, delivering long-form conversation with an individual artist or a set of associated artists (or curators or critics or professors or what have you) plus extra segments on various goings-on in contemporary art. Though Chicago-based, the empire of Bad at Sports contributors seems to have reached both coasts of the country as well as into the wider world. There’s a lot of parochialism in podcasting; to see it a bit of, er, tri-coastalism, let alone internationalism, is heartening in itself.

The show also strikes a blow — has struck many blows, ever since 2005 — for the interview of substance. Occasional bouts of distractingly glitchy editing aside, the conversations adhere to both the rhythms and durations of, y’know, actual conversation. The correspondents’ enthusiasm for the works of and concepts in visual art under discussion is usually obvious, as is their genuine desire to hear and learn from the answers to their questions. (You’d be surprised how rare this actually is in the interview-y arts.) They’re not afraid of digression, either, which may lay some conversations defenseless to charges of indiscipline, but which — by definition, I suppose — takes them in delightfully unpredictable directions.

So far, this sounds like a pretty perfect podcast — a “Triple-P”, I call it — especially if you happen to be into the visual arts. Yet there’s a problem with the execution, a wily and amorphous one, that I’ve been trying to pin down for quite some time. At this point in my examination of the program, I can only conclude that it’s the same syndrome that afflicts contemporary art conversation in general: nobody’s quite sure how seriously they’re supposed to be taking it.

The Bad at Sports crew ostensibly takes pride in their ability to flip back and forth between the concrete and the abstract, between deep critical discussion and fart jokes. There’s no doubt that they can do that, but the transitions aren’t seamless; they’re marred by the low-level but ever-present discomfort of someone out at sea and only somewhat sure what to do about it. They talk to an astonishing variety of today’s artists, most of whom sound as if they are or could be doing interesting things, but lingering, unsettling issues about the value, relevance, direction of the entire artistic enterprise sap the edge from their confidence. “Oh, should I be asking you about how you actually make your work?” they seem to be thinking. “Or is that dumb? Should I be asking about the theories behind it? Or wait, does none of this matter? Should I make a fart joke?”

This isn’t always a dealbreaker, though, and it’s entirely possible that I’m reading too much into a slight uneasiness. To be honest, I could simply be projecting the epic frustration I harbor about the nutritionless mash of verbiage that often passes for assessment in contemporary art, or, worse, the tenure-hungry academic yammer about Gender (Dis)loc[a/u]tion that’s staggered on, zombielike, since 1992 or so. Bad at Sports is actually a bit better about keeping such nonsense out of this show than most venues in the wider art conversation, but that’s a low bar. It seems to be the show is enough of a force to get down to work on the noble task eradicating it entirely.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]