Vital stats:
Format: L.A.-centric newsy culture segments
Duration: 20m-90m
Frequency: on average, weekly
Archive available on iTunes: all

There’s a lot to say about how podcasting and public radio have interacted in Our Brave Age of New Media, but most of it would bore people. Public radio, alas, has had a much stronger effect on podcasting than podcasting has had on public radio, but the effects are interesting to think about nonetheless. At minimum, though, it’s pretty great that most public radio programs podcast. This enables you to, for instance, remotely scope out a city’s public radio situation before you move to that city. I’ll probably move to Los Angeles in the next year or two, so naturally, I’m submerging myself into all kinds of L.A.P.R. podcasts.

KPCC’s Off-Ramp [RSS] [iTunes] is one of the richest of these. I don’t quite know how to describe it except by the very, very dopey genre name “magazine show.” For those not into public radio, a magazine show assembles a bunch of loosely associated short pieces with lowish-medium to highish-medium newsiness value, unites them with a host’s voice, and calls it an hour. Off-Ramp’s concept is to keep more or less within the confines of Los Angeles, focusing on Los Angeles stuff: hidden wineries, anime conventions, Chicano rockers, “entertainment legends,” Phil Spector.

It actually seems to be a pretty amusing, informative, effective guide to Los Angeles culture, to the extent that there can be an “effective guide to Los Angeles culture.” I do not say this because I’m a displaced, embittered New Yorker who demands to know if you call this a bagel. I say this because L.A. contains so freakishly many types of culture that most attempts at making a Baedeker are doomed from their very conception. Fortunately, Off-Ramp doesn’t strain to be comprehensive, instead picking a series of cultural entities that might be interesting: a conversation with an obese nude model here, a search for L.A.’s most fêted hot dog jonts there. (There are even segments from The Dinner Party Download included, which remains, I’m saddened to inform you, just a bit too slick.)

While I can totally see how this radio kaleidoscope of neat L.A. stuff would be what you want to hear while driving around town, I can’t help but sometimes be irked by the short length of the individual segments. I’d normally have no choice but to rue whatever seems responsible at the time, but the Off-Ramp podcast feed provides longer versions of some of the show’s interviews and other reportage. The most fascinating stuff I’ve heard on the show comes in these “extras,” which includes an extended-mix around-the-picnic-table conversation with contributors to the L.A. literary journal Slake [MP3] or an uncut version of host John Rabe’s interview with the co-creator of Columbo [MP3], who’s evidently still writing new Columbo stories.

I am thus left in the awkward position of wishing that public radio would start to sound a little less like Off-Ramp and a little more like Off-Ramp’s podcast. Perhaps magazine shows could morph into, oh, novella shows, at least? While all the radio version’s quick hits about novelty food and entertainment-industry eccentrics reinforce my desire to move down there, but it’s the long-form stuff that really seals the deal.

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

Vital stats:
Format: Skype talks about genre stuff
Duration: 20m-90m
Frequency: on average, weekly
Archive available on iTunes: all

I worry that Podthinking might lead me into a cultural hall of mirrors from there is no return. So many podcasts aren’t things, exactly; they’re about things. Countless are the net-dwellers who pick up microphones, realize they like and dislike certain things they’ve read, watched, or listened to, and say, “Hey, I could podcast about that!” Though this seems to be one of the most popular class of podcasts, I’ve somehow never known what to call it. But while listening to The Chronic Rift [RSS] [iTunes], a name occurred to me: “Here’s Some Stuff We Consumed”.

Not that The Chronic Rift is run-of-the-mill in this sense; far from it, for a few reasons. This show drives “Here’s Some Stuff We Consumed” to the limit, where it becomes a form of conceptual art. Clocking in around an hour and a half at top flight, its nearly 100 episodes form a veritable avalanche of opinions on, discussions of, and arguments about various books, games, films, and television series. You get roundtables on British sci-fi television [MP3]. You get updates on teen summer reading [MP3]. (One of the Rifters is a librarian for junior-high kids.) You get interviews with someone from Buffy [MP3]. You get chats about Pepsi Throwback. [MP3]. You get a bunch of podcast reviews. (One moment I was sure I had fallen into the void came when they reviewed Edgy Podcast Reviews, meaning I would be reviewing a podcast that reviewed a podcast that I once reviewed that reviews podcasts.)

Eventually, I began to perceive a distinct sci-fi/fantasy/horror slant to the hosts’ cultural selections. My ability to fairly review a podcast turns out, unfortunately, to be inversely proportional to how deeply concerned that podcast is with sci-fi, fantasy, horror, etc. Summer replacement television shows, the Justice League, Doctor Who, zombies: in my grumpier moments, I feel these subjects require no further attention. But just as the creators and fans of The Chronic Rift enjoy their time spent in alien, futuristic, surreal, or otherwise fantastical worlds, I admit that I sometimes quite like to glimpse a realm of bizarre inversion where genre entertainment is the interesting kind.

Yet it’s not always pure discussion of genre, mythos, and the continuity of -verses. The show engages in occasional goofy flights of audio drama fancy as well, which is always fun to hear, though I suppose it does take a very specific sort of person to fully appreciate one that merges H.P. Lovecraft and P.G. Wodehouse [MP3]. There are also big chunks of off-topic talk about cats, work, and how we’re not as young as we used to be. Depending on your podcasting perspective, that’s either indiscipline of an endearing look into the host’s personalities; both, I think, are valid points.

So while what The Chronic Rift discusses isn’t exactly what gets me going, I realize there are millions of others for whom it is. To them: excelsior! What I can tell you is that, as a public access television enthusiast, I’m very much drawn by something that sets the show well apart from the other friends-on-Skype affairs. It first began twenty years ago on New York public access television, and now those old shows are being video podcast on iTunes. The distinctive visual effects of early prosumer video gear, the unconventional tonsorial choices, the being from 1990: it’s everything I’ve ever looked for in a podcast. A+, would publicly access again.

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

Vital stats:
Format: transatlantic Skype conversations
Duration: ~30m
Frequency: weeklyish
Archive available on iTunes: all

Something about this project doesn’t sit quite right with me, though I’d be hard pressed to tell you exactly what. Like the previously Podthought-about Arrive Having Eaten (which now appears to be podfading), My Favorite Stranger [RSS] [iTunes] is assembled from Skype conversations between a fella and a lady who have never met. But while Arrive Having Eaten’s Ben and Erica eventually crossed paths in real life, My Favorite Stranger’s Ahm [sic] and Craig have declared their intentions to avoid each other in the meatspace entirely. Easy vow to make, one assumes, since Ahm’s in Los Angeles and Craig’s somewhere in Holland.

Yet I am still kind of weirded out. Again, there’s no articulable reason why this format seems vaguely unsavory. All available evidence suggests this particular podcast is totally and utterly un-unsavory. Having collided in some sort of highly amiable internet argument — highly amiable by internet standards, anyway — Ahm and Craig came to discover that, despite substantial differences of location, nationality, education, and gender, they’ve got the same set of physiological quirks and psychological neuroses deep down. They’re both Myers-Briggs INTPs. They both have unusually wide feet. They’re both socially anxious. They both sweat profusely. Hands across the water!

This is actually kind of daring, in its way, since Ahm and Craig began recording their chats for podcasting purposes surprisingly early on in their e-friend/strangership. You get to hear them find things out about each other that, under other, more reasonable conditions, would have been assumed, already known, implied, or never, ever brought up at all. Given Craig’s English-ness and Ahm’s American-ness, there’s also plenty of opportunity for cross-cultural comparison and contrast. Sure, maybe we’re all the same sweaty, socially anxious, wide-footed INTPs under out different skins, but the inner similarities throw the differences into contrast and thus make them more interesting as well.

While I wouldn’t normally Podthink about a show under two months old with only five episodes to its name, My Favorite Stranger seems to have done an uncommonly efficient job of building a fandom. In a sense, this is perfectly understandable. Stripped of all the usual conversational crutches like local goings-on, national politics, nerd stuff, or even the weather, Ahm and Craig are forced to head straight to the bedrock of their humanity, which, dear readers, is the bedrock of all our humanity. This actually exemplifies a quality of which I’d like to see a great deal more in podcasting. I’m interested in learning about the people behind the mics, just like these hosts are interested in learning about one another. It’s a relief not to have to decoct epic soliloquies on Lost to do so.

Still, I can’t shake the unsettling twinge that comes from not being quite sure why they’re doing this. Though Ahm and Craig do use an episode to tell their “origin story” [MP3], confusion remains. Why would an Englishman and an Americawoman who barely even internet-know each other Skype so often in the first place? Does not compute. But maybe that’s the other part of their podcast’s appeal: we’re ceaselessly curious about that which we cannot quite explain. (Hence, I guess, all those other shows’ epic soliloquies on Lost.)

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

Vital stats:
Format: thematically linked, host-commented-on personal stories
Duration: ~55m
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: all

I’d been wondering what happened with the Public Radio Talent Quest, a higher-brow American Idol-style affair a couple years back meant to seek out the new generation of public radio personalities. This is just the sort of contest that excites a radio dorkus such as myself, so when the PRTQ turned up not one but two winners — one dude with dreadlocks, one dude with a shaved head — I eagerly awaited their respective projects. Then time passed, and I just sort of forgot.

Over the past month or so, I’d heard a bunch of people mention a new NPR show called Snap Judgment. My Podthinker’s curiosity piqued, I pulled it up and discovered it was the project of none other than Glynn Washington — the aforementioned shaved-head dude. Everything about the show screams “huge undertaking,” from the lush-sounding production to the elaborate-by-radio-standards web site to the big publicity push that’s gotten the program so far up in the zeitgeist so early in its life. I get the whiff of the Big Deal about it.

But after listening to all the available episodes, I’ll still be damned if I can tell you what it’s about. “Storytelling with a beat” is the show’s tagline, and the promise is delivered on, to the extent that (a) its segments are all stories told and (b) Washington, in the role of Snap Judgment’s Ira Glass equivalent, often talks over (pretty surprisingly good) beats. I’d hoped every story would be literally told to a beat, but no dice. They’re told, arhythmically, by the people who experienced them, augmented by Washington’s questions, commentary, interjections, and framing.

You’ve no doubt noticed that “storytelling” is in vogue right now, especially on the radio and podcasts, what with shows like Risk! and The Moth doing pretty well for themselves. But jeez, I’m a little storied out. Telling stories sounds like an infinitely wide mandate — everything’s a story, right? — but it’s far from the only way to get ideas across, and often not the best one. Sure, I’ve heard all the talk about how narrative is a primal human need second only to food, shelter, reproduction, etc., but making stuff into a narrative turns out to demand so, so much pulling of standard tricks — suspend, twist, reveal, double twist — and hammering into standard shapes.

Snap Judgment does this as well as it’s ever been done, though I don’t know how much remains in communal narrative barrel. I was entertained by the participants’ (and Washington’s own) tales of desperate searches for schizophrenic friends in unfamiliar cities, unexpected kindness in Iranian restaurants, startling meetings with obscure religious leaders, and freaky encounters with radio stalkers, but I didn’t come away feeling that I’d heard anything as new and different as the buzz seemed to promise.

The standard critique of new public radio efforts leveled by those not embedded in the public radio world is that, while a lot of it sounds different, almost none if it, at its core, is different. Washington ostensibly won the Talent Quest by being something fresh, and he does have a reasonably fresh manner. He comes off as a guy you’d really want to hang out with, which not everybody seems to think about most public radio personalities. But I’m not sure if this show allows him to be different, especially as long as it insists on short-form skimming across the top of a handful of thematically related human experiences. How about spending the entire hour, every hour, drilling down deep into a single story, say? That’d be new and different, but would public radio be down with it?

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

Vital stats:
Format: short-form slacking, usually with musical accompaniment
Duration: 2m30s-20m
Frequency: erratic
Archive available on iTunes: all

Now, I don’t know the man or his work, but this podcast is either the absolute best or absolute worst way to get acquainted with Steve Agee. The Wikipedia tells me he’s a 41-year-old California dude with Riverside roots who acts, does comedy, and appears regularly on The Sarah Silverman Program. Other credits include The Andy Milonakis Show, Superego, and a Twitter stunt. Not as credentialed as some comedic podcasters, sure, but way more credentialed than most.

In fact, you might call his show Uhhh [RSS] [iTunes] the work of a pretty well credentialed comedic podcaster which inhabits the form of the show of a viciously uncredentialed comedic podcaster. Representative content of its episodes, which range from two and a half to twenty-ish minutes, include Steve Agee freestyle rapping to pre-made beats with whomever he happens to be hanging out with, Steve Agee making up ridiculous songs as he wanders the fretboard of whatever instrument he happens to find nearby, Steve Agee talking through the most irritating vocal filter possible for eight straight minutes, and Steve Agee belching.

There’s a certain admirable improvisatory quality to all this. Is “Dada” too strong a word? “Dada” is probably too strong a word. But still: some podcasters passively let their podcasts grow slack and purposeless, but Steve Agee is fiercely committed to actively exploring the slackest, least purposeful territory in the entire medium. This is much more entertaining than it might sound, owing in part to the show’s sometimes extreme brevity. (In at least one episode, he reveals that he started the podcast in reaction to all those other medium-to-long podcasts out there.)

Surely the setup, such as is, also comes off better than you’d expect because Steve Agee is a bona fide Famous Person. Here’s a real-life celebrity, a guy who does movies and TV, sitting at home at 10:00 in the morning and burping on mic just like you and me. Having originally come to L.A. as a musician, he also brings musical talent to the arena, only a small measure of which (I assume) is on display on the podcast. Tip of the iceberg. I mention these qualities to keep as many anonymous Basement McQuarterlifes out there from listening to Uhhh, laughing, then getting ideas about replicating its model. You probably can’t. What works for Steve Agee I can’t see working for anybody else, since it so suits his particular qualities. I could say the same about the creators of all the best podcasts.

Yet as better than us as Steve Agee is at firing off a few half-remembered bass riffs and rembering aloud his Jane’s Addiction fandom, he still has the edge of what I’ve come to think of as the L.A. Podcasting Crying Clown. As with a show like WTF, you’ll hear the host and his compatriots occasionally lapse into the moaning anomie that apparently afflicts nearly every Southern California comedian with a copy of GarageBand: “Fuck, the rent is due soon,” “Fuck, here I am, a fat fuck,” etc. I mean, jeez. You guys are, like, on a whole bunch of screens! Aren’t you living the dream or something?

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

Vital stats:
Format: three brothers doling out comedic advice
Duration: 30m-60m
Frequency: weekly, usually
Archive available on iTunes: all

Podcasting’s gotten to where, if you want to get a bunch of dudes on Skype on the regular, you need a good reason. The McElroys, Justin, Griffin, and Travis — how about that for a suite of Gen-Y names, by the way — are already brothers, so that’s a head start. Even without a podcast, maybe they’d be holding the occasional Skype-ference call anyway. (They’re not called Skype-ference calls.) But lo, they’ve also got themselves some server space, an RSS feed, and, most importantly, an angle.

My Brother, My Brother, and Me [RSS] [iTunes] is the result, a weekly meeting of the McElroy minds meant to solve the world’s problems. Though I realize they must have existed since the dawn of the medium — I think Savage Love may qualify as a pioneer — this is actually the first advice podcast I’ve heard. While this seems like the natural next step in advice media, I still feel as if the problem of advisor authority has never really been solved.

In short: how does an advice columnist, advice radio host, advice blogger, advice podcaster, etc. establish and maintain credibility? It’s not even clear how the form’s titans, such as history’s various Ann Landerses, have done it. Is it just about giving advice for a long time, then pointing to how long you’ve been given advice? Is there some independent evaluative board that periodically checks your advice’s effectiveness? The brothers McElroy wisely steer around this thorny issue by somehow establishing their advice-giving authority through their lack of advice-giving authority. It’s credibility through non-credibility.

Or maybe three non-credibles make a credible. Theoretically, three minds addressing a question are better than one, and any especially incorrect impulses on the part of one McElroy could be balanced out by the other two. On the flip side, they might just egg one another on toward the worst possible solution to their supplicants’ problems. But I’m not sure how often this actually happens. For brothers, they all sound and act surprisingly different — not that I can reliably tell which one is which yet, though it helps that the oldest has some kind of odd regional accent — so the danger of groupthink is minimized.

Yet, on a show like this, sometimes groupthink, bad answers, and eggings-on are exactly what the advice columnist ordered. Besides the authority inherent in non-authority and in sheer numbers, the McElroys also aim to establish the kind of sacred advisor-audience trust that only hilarity can build. This process is greatly aided by the way they get their questions. It seems like a mixture: some are submitted by members of the audience, while others are apparently gathered from such other non-podcast founts of wisdom as Yahoo! Answers.

You probably won’t remember the bulk of the questions themselves, since so many lie along the how-do-I-know-he-likes-me/should-I-make-out-with-my-buddy’s-girlfriend/what-is-sex spectrum. But the way G., J., and T. McElroy tag-team them will stick with you. And as comedically focused as the show is — if you need a rule, I wouldn’t recommend following the bothers’ dictates — they sometimes bust out surprisingly useful insights, especially if you need to how how you know he likes you, or if you should make out with your buddy’s girlfriend, or what sex is.

And actually, some of these questions, the ones that put an extra challenge to the McElroys, are memorable. I’m thinking specifically of the guy who requested a list of the most useful kicks. He already knows about front kicks, side kicks, and roundhouse kicks.

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

Vital stats:
Format: probing of economic and financial issues
Duration: 15m-25m
Frequency: every 2-4 days
Archive available on iTunes: last 10

If, like me, you’re an enthusiastic This American Life listener, you’ve noticed a few trends on the show in recent years. One is that they’ve done more foreign stories, especially in the Middle East. I consider these episodes of a separate, slightly lesser series, which I call This American Foreign Policy. Another, more successful thread is their coverage of economic and financial issues. I, for one, never would have gone to a program like TAL to explain the health care industry’s structural problems — until, that is, they did it.

Those episodes were good in large part because they brought one of the show’s distinctive strengths to an issue that mainstream news usually covers. This strength is the understanding that the world’s problems are rarely, if ever, the fault of some shadowy individual or group, not can they usually be solved by some virtuous individual or group. This applies deeply to the parts of life that involve markets — and you could well argue that they all do — but most economic news doesn’t frame it that way. Most high-profile economic news is all about the finger-pointing, implicitly of explicitly. If any sector needed a This American Life-ing up, it’s that one.

Markets, of course, are just a whole bunch of individuals inadvertently working together through trade. Nobody controls them. (Unless you happen to be a conspiracy theorist, in which case, somebody controls them.) Most money-centric TAL episodes work from this premise, and they seem to all be co-productions with the show’s “friends at Planet Money.” It turns out that Planet Money [RSS] [iTunes] is also its own podcast, covering economic issues and economic issues alone. Sometimes it takes on the same broad subjects as its co-productions with Ira Glass’ team, but examine them more closely across a wider range of episodes.

You might expect Planet Money to play like a series of economically focused This American Life stories, but it’s pretty far from that. It’s more like those stories minus about half of their specifically TAL-esque qualities. While both shows do a great deal of field reporting and interviewing and (as I will be only the 256,395th public radio geek to point out) Alex Blumberg sounds like Ira Glass’ marginally reedier clone, PM goes much lighter on the narrative. This is actually a good thing, I would submit, since the reckless imposition of narrative renders most news reporting, and especially economic reporting, just this side of useless. Here, you get the facts and their relationship to one another, but it’s not typically hammered into the shape of a simple morality of the Hero’s Journey or whatever.

Planet Money’s chief value is in providing context. You hear this in microcosm every time, at the top of each episode, when a correspondent provides a certain economic indicator. This will be something like “$4.2 trillion,” “$128,000 per week,” or “seven.” Then the conversation that follows fills in the context behind the number, giving it meaning and relatability. The show touts itself as explaining economic issues in language anybody can understand, and for a long time that set off my intercranial alarm that warns of oversimplification ahead. But the program’s correspondents seem to know this, and will often acknowledge when they’re in danger of cranking down the complexity too far.

But by language anybody can understand, I think they really mean that they offer up a context that anybody can understand. A lot of reporting on the goings-on in the realm of money, even the high-quality stuff, takes so much context as assumed that it only seems linguistically impenetrable to the nonspecialist. Wags might question what something that comes from an entity like NPR, which seems to exist outside any structure you could call a traditional market, might know about buying and selling. A fair point, perhaps, but what are you going to listen to instead? Jim Cramer’s primal screams?

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

Vital stats:
Format: lightly comedic pop culture talk
Duration: 1h-1h15m
Frequency: “bi-weekly(ish)”
Archive available on iTunes: all

If podcasting has a dominant subject, it’s pop culture. Easy to see why: we’re all immersed in it, whether we want to be or not. Therefore, we can all talk about it. Any given developed-world citizen, if they strain hard enough, could slap together an opinion about, say, Justin Bieber’s hair. This makes for pretty thin conversational gruel, though it’s one everyone can eat. This is especially true in the realm of comedy: assemble a few comedians or public “personalities” of other stripes, get ‘em talking about reality TV, and bam, podcast.

That seems to be the thinking behind the uncommonly upfront Pop My Culture [RSS] [iTunes], a show about “movies, music, television, cebrity gossip, etc. without all those pesky ‘serious’ topics like politics, religion and the environment.” The hosts, SF Sketchfest co-founder Cole Stratton and actor/writer/comic Vanessa Ragland, go around to the houses of various pop-cultural figures from the last 30 years and chat with them about their own careers (about which they even quiz them) and whatever happens be in the zeitgeist at the moment. There’s a slant toward actors, though many of their guests (though, technically, Stratton and Ragland are guests in their guests’ houses) seem pulled from the Greater Southern California Comedians’ Podcasting Circuit: Mo Collins [MP3], Paul F. Tompkins [MP3], Chris Hardwick [MP3], and so on.

The conversations tend to skitter across the surface of entertainment, media, and technology like a skipping stone. As much as I might have extolled pop culture’s accessibility two paragraphs ago, there turns out to be a lot to know even in such surface-y kind of talks. In an uncomfortable paradox, I found myself having to look up about three times as much as I do in an average prim, erudite BBC sort of thing. Crystal Bowersox, for instance. Had to Google her name once when the hosts brought her up, and again now to remember how to spell her name. And I stand on the humiliating precipice of needing to look up Brett Michaels a third time.

But if you know bout Bowersoxes from your Michaelses, perhaps this is the podcast you want. Perhaps it’s a sterling example of pop-cultural discourse. Yet I fear that the show’s most interesting episodes, to my mind, might constitute violations of the rules of pop culture talk. Matthew “Cereal Killer” Lillard [MP3] gets into some of the ambitious despair and oddly hopeful hopelessness of the modern acting industry, which I found quite interesting, though you can tell he felt apologetic about maybe getting too “heavy.” To be fair, Stratton and Ragland don’t discourage this kind of thing, though it happens less often than I’d like.

Almost all of Pop My Culture’s best moments come from going there, “there” being to that place where entertainment types take long, hard looks at themselves, brows furrowed. In the massive amounts of pop culture podcast-listening I do in this line, I routinely catch glimpses of a strange sort of self-loathing on the part of so many actors and comedians. I’d like to hear that self-loathing and its associated thoughts probed a little more deeply. Marc Maron’s WTF is probably the apex of this specifically for comedy, but there are so many more of entertainment’s sub-industries that I’d like to see get unflinchingly reflective. Maybe that really is too heavy for show like this, but it’d be a way through the thick, undifferentiated pop-culture-jokin’ fog.

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

Vital stats:
Format: short ancient history documentaries framed by artifacts
Duration: ~15m
Frequency: every day or two or three
Archive available on iTunes: all (which, for the BBC, is astonishing)

We might divide the world of podcasts into two groups: those you have to pay a lot of attention to, and those you don’t have to pay a lot of attention to. My years of Podthinking have taught me that most podcasts are the latter. Most podcasts are driven by jokes, tone, personality, things like that; they’re more like content slurries, and thus don’t need you to follow them closely. The set of podcasts that demand the whole of your awareness is thinner on the ground and asks you to exert a more deliberate listening effort. But it repays that effort and then some; the best material in podcasting stands in those ranks. The BBC’s A History of the World in 100 Objects [RSS] [iTunes] is a prime example.

It will come as no surprise to hardened podcast-listeners that this show is a production of BBC’s Radio 4. No matter how atrocious, say, BBC TV gets, somehow Radio 4 keeps quietly chugging along untainted, putting out some of the finest radio (and thus finest podcasts) in the world. They’re best known (by me) for In Our Time, an academic roundtable on the history of ideas that ranks among my personal favorite things ever. A History of the World in 100 Objects is a shorter, more production-intensive affair, and presumably a limited edition: each day or three, it’s a nearly fifteen-minute documentary about a certain ancient artifact from the British Museum. The first was the Mummy of Hornedjitef [MP3]. Then you’ve got your bird-shaped pestle [MP3], your Mold gold cape [MP3], your Hoxne pepper pot [MP3], your Japanese bronze mirror [MP3], and so on and so forth.

That framing device is as fascinating as it sounds, and given the BBC’s resources, each episode reaches impressively far and wide for its voices. Any given object will bring together the show’s narrators, several experts on the object’s time and/or place, journalistic and institutional types who have encountered it, and “extras” like, for example, the people who first discovered the thing. They’re all united by a rich mix of music and sound effects which, though sometimes hokey — I swear I have heard a gong used to invoke things Asian multiple times — it gives the show an intriguing sonic depth, which you might say matches its informational depth.

That informational depth is a great asset of this show, as it is of most any full-attention-needing podcast. It’s also a strange sort of liability since, well, it needs your full attention. While I’d never claim that asking for a listener’s full attention is in itself a bad thing, it does somewhat limit the settings in which you can enjoyably listen. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve had to restart an episode after needing to focus on something in the “real world” for a moment and later realizing that I don’t know who’s speaking or quite what they’re speaking about. What’s this about Vikings? The monument to the who now? Buried where? Maybe this is why the production is so dense: so you don’t mind re-listening to the first five, ten minutes over and over. You hear different stuff every time in those layers upon layers, even besides gongs.

I doubt this would happen in the don’t-need-much-attention podcasts. You could lose a few minutes in the middle of Never Not Funny, say, and still be just fine. Not so with anything Radio 4 puts out, or many of the most admirable shows I’ve covered in this column before. So where and when, then, should we listen to these tightly constructed, information-dense, miss-a-moment-and-you-miss-it-all sort of shows? I’ve had decent luck on buses and trains, or just before going to bed. But it’s still awfully limiting. Maybe it’s high time we all just went back to gathering ‘round the wireless, heads cocked in rapt attention at a speaker.

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

Vital stats:
Format: listening to and dissection of Public Radio Documentaries
Duration: 9m-40m
Frequency: biweekly
Archive available on iTunes: last 10

“Narrative arc,” “payoff,” “emotional release” and “sound-richness”: these are among the qualities that public radio program directors put next to godliness. The whole list is kind of scary in its programmatic Robert McKee-ishness, and it’s maybe why the the current growth of public radio’s audience ticks some distance under explosive. The Saltcast [RSS] [iTunes] provides an important service in using terms like these in a substantially less robotic context. It’s all about picking apart public radio and public radio-style documentary pieces and seeing what makes them tick, whether or not they fulfill slot machine-y buzzwords.

It’s tempting to draw a This American Life comparison to the pieces the show examines, but it’s more accurate to say that they and TAL descend from a common ancestor. This is the Public Radio Documentary, a form whose U.S. origins lie somewhere in the hazy 1970s, when receptive broadcasting venues and reasonably usable recording and editing technologies collided. It weaves together narration, interviews, field recordings and music in the service of exploring some topic. At best, PRDs illuminate interesting corners of society with the degree of art and intimacy that only radio can deliver so well. At worst, they preach, talk down to their audiences, hold death grips on their own threadbare tropes or grind political axes.

Since most pieces discussed on The Saltcast come from students of the titular Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Maine, they do all that stuff, good and bad. This makes the podcast as helpful for aspiring PRD producers as DVD commentaries are for aspiring filmmakers. Host and Salt instructor Rob Rosenthal also gets into PRDs of historical value or other lasting importance in the tradition, like David Isay’s 1993 Ghetto Life 101 [MP3].

It’s worth noting what else, in this context, jumps out as particularly intriguing. While Rosenthal doesn’t usually slide his own pieces under the Saltcast microscope, he discusses Nothing Predictable [MP3], a short documentary in which he kayaks up to an iceberg, because he feels it exemplifies narrative arc. Now, when I hear something “exemplifies narrative arc,” I start hovering my finger over STOP. But it turns out that Rosenthal’s piece applies the McKee stuff so lightly that it actually turns out excellent. It helps that it’s about something unusual (by public radio standards); better a kayak and an iceberg than foreign strife and sobbing oldsters, I suppose.

It’s especially telling that one of the show’s best recent pieces was one Rosenthal admits he thought wouldn’t work. In Just Another Fish Story [MP3], student Molly Menschel simply drove up to a town where a whale beached itself a decade ago and started asking around about it, tape recorder in hand. She wound up with a truly extraordinary collage which isn’t so much about the whale as it is about the nature of memory and the emergent nature of local history. By contrast, another piece about a family hacked up with machetes [MP3] just misses this boat. Hearing a quote late in the piece from the case’s judge, who saw herself as standing between the citizenry and pure evil, I thought, there’s the really fascinating stuff: a Hobbesian meditation. That may well have been more memorable than testimony about the (admittedly stiff) difficulty of being hacked up with machetes.

Menshel’s case would seem to be one of learning the rules to better break them, which, in my humble opinion, is pretty much the only reason to learn the rules. Salt students seem like a hope for the future, a future where public radio docs evolve faster, break existing forms, and thereby reach a wider audience than, as Merlin Mann said when I interviewed him on my own public radio show, “middle-aged people in fleece who don’t have much of an emotional life.”

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