Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: a travel guide talks to travelers and tourists
Episode duration: exactly 53:30
Frequency: weekly

Growing up in Seattle, I thought of Rick Steves as a guru for locals aspiring to European travel just as I thought of Dan Savage as a guru for locals suffering sexual complications. But even though both men initially became famous in western Washington state and continue to reside there under auras of regional heroism, they’ve eluded the attentions of that cruelest mistress, “Seattle fame.” Unlike the work of, say, Ted Narcotic, Savage and Steves’ writing has spread across pretty much the entire Anglophone world. Both have reached even wider audiences still by launching first radio shows, then podcasts. I wager that most Max Funsters already know about Savage Love (reviewed by my esteemed predecessor Ian Brill here), but stand to benefit by learning about Travel with Rick Steves [RSS] [iTunes].

Just as Savage’s sex-advice column, reliably printed each and every week in Seattle’s “cooler” weekly paper, quickly became a fixture of my adolescence, Steves’ television program Rick Steves’ Europe felt ever-present. Yet I never really sat down and watched it, since I got from some of Steves’ fans the vague impression of a certain detached, cheapskate Europhilia, the kind that obligates Joe and Jane Washingtonian to go somewhere rustic in Italy or France, marvel photographically at boulevards and cathedrals, fumble through a phrasebook, and after two weeks return essentially unchanged to Microsoft or Boeing or wherever. This impression sounds uncharitable, I realize, but surely you understand the essential distinction of in-depth travel versus perfunctory tourism. While Steves is not to blame for the attitudes of his less intellectually engaged followers, I do faintly recall seeing him, in one of his shows, provide tips on how the busy traveler can best wash his underwear in the sink. This still horrifies me.

Yet possessed of the native amiability every advice-giver needs, Savage and Steves, both highly experienced men in their respective fields, outstretch their hands to pros and novices alike. Travel with Rick Steves brings in guests, more and more famous over the years, who have become icons of worldliness: Adam Gopnik [MP3] on France, David Sedaris [MP3] on France and Japan, Bernard-Henri Levy [MP3] on France and America, Paul Theroux [MP3] on more or less the entire world. Steves tends to spend time talking one-on-one with his guests, then bring callers into the mix. Phoning in from places like Des Moines, Eau Claire, and Minot, these people have what you might call a different set of concerns and sensibilities than, say, Bernard-Henri Levy does. But the collision between the guests’ slightly world-weary public-intellectualism, the callers’ but-will-they-understand-English practicality, and Steves’ own mixture of the two creates a conversational spark I rarely hear elsewhere. In its most fascinating moments, the show brings together three disparate perspectives on approaching the world: the traveler, the tourist, and the travel guide.

The world “avuncular” has lost a few threads to overuse, but I can’t think of a more appropriate word to describe Steves’ on-air persona. He comes off like your unfailingly friendly, goofy uncle — the one we always assume we had, but probably didn’t — who happens to know a lot about Roman budget lodging. Perhaps this very quality led me to find him a little bland in my formative Seattle years. Yet as with any television or business personality, you have only to pay close attention to discover Steves’ more distinctive qualities. Listen to enough Travel with Rick Steves and you’ll notice, for instance, his hair-trigger awareness of cannabis culture (not that “hair-trigger” and “cannabis” come as naturally associated concepts). I mean, he makes correct inferences about David Sedaris’ pot-smoking years from nothing more than the way the man phrases a single particular descriptive sentence. Read up, and you’ll learn that, chief among his many activist-type pursuits, Steves advocates for marijuana decriminalization. The decision to do it so publicly must have taken no little bravery on his part, if my assumptions about the conservative, grandmotherly slant of a large segment of his audience are valid. (Hey, maybe we did have this uncle after all!)

Charmingly, Steves produces this show from the small town of Edmonds, Washington, where he grew up and still makes his home. Maybe he draws a feeling of balance from incessantly globetrotting as a career yet basing himself within shouting distance his junior high school. For a program built around senses of place, it comes as no surprise that he occasionally mentions Edmonds, but it did at first come as a surprise that those mentions triggered fond memories for me. I never had any reason to make the 25-mile drive there except to eat Korean food, but I now realize that one particular Edmonds restaurant — Ho Soon Yi, I believe — got me interested in Korean food, which got me interested in Korean cinema, which got me interested in the Korean language, which got me interested in traveling to Korea. I haven’t actually gone there yet, but that cascade of enthusiasms did its part to break my long-standing travel trepidation. Maybe I’m just waiting for a Travel with Rick Steves episode on the country. So Rick, I know it ain’t Europe, but what’s stopping you? Haven’t you tried Ho Soon Yi yet?

[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format comedian interviewing comedians (but in Austin!)
Episode duration: 12m-45m
Frequency: twice weekly

Cameron Buchholtz interviews comedians. This places him alongside several well-known podcasters, including public radio’s own Jesse Thorn (and public radio’s nearly nobody else). Cameron Buchholtz also does comedy, which places him alongside several well-known comedian-podcasters, including Marc Maron, Pete Holmes, Dave Hill, and Julie Klausner. He sets his own podcast apart in three ways, first and most obviously by giving it the delightfully punny name of CB Radio [iTunes]. (You’ll also notice its site’s sweet design.)

Second, he tends to record interviews in Austin, Texas, his city of residence. You might assume that this choice would limit him to marginal if nevertheless funny interviewees, but nope; for better or for worse, Buchholtz talks with a great many of the same comics that Los Angeles or (to a lesser extent) New York podcasters do. By catching them when their circuit — or, less often, a to-do like South by Southwest — rolls them by, he’s interviewed the likes of Jimmy Pardo [MP3], Doug Benson with Graham Ellwood [MP3], Paul F. Tompkins [MP3], Jackie Kashian [MP3], and even fellow comedian-interviewers like Pete Holmes [MP3]. I don’t need to tell you about these comics’ conversational skills; if you’ve listened to podcasts for any time at all, you already know. Holmes, in fact, somehow gets Buchholtz to publicly admit his schoolyard nickname: “Crammin’ Buttholes.” Once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.

When not taking things in that direction, Buchholtz’s guests, most of whom are just passin’ through on their way out from or back toward their New York or Los Angeles homes, comment on how “cool” or “great” or “awesome” they’ve always found Austin. Sometimes they even wistfully express a desire to live there. You can tell that none will make the move, of course, unless they get pregnant or their careers hit the skids. High-profile visitors to an Austin, or a Portland, or a San Francisco — or even a Santa Barbara, which I left for Los Angeles — can’t stop drinking in the good vibes of these places, but they know in their heart of hearts that, if they actually lived in them, the world would assume they were just “dicking around.” They won’t move to Austin or Portland or wherever because it would seem like they cared more about living in a “chill” place than honing their craft. Is this a shame? Maybe it is; I don’t really know. The fact that the Onion can’t even move to Chicago without taking a death blow to its writing staff speaks volumes, though.

Yet given that he started out in Oklahoma City, Buchholtz’s move to Austin looks like a more boldly advantageous career choice than any of us have ever made. I doubt he’d have gotten a convenient chance to record with Maria Bamford [MP3] in his old hometown. Yet I wonder: does the world of podcasting really need one more conversation with Maria Bamford? Now, I relish any and all opportunities to hear Maria Bamford speak and always will, but something inside me wouldn’t mind hearing Buchholtz really get down into it with Oklahoma City’s funniest. There remains much I don’t know about that town — and almost as much I don’t know about Austin, for that matter — and I’d jump at the chance to learn more. This would necessitate a dramatic re-framing of a show like CB Radio for accessibility’s sake, since an episode title simply announcing a guest like Joe Oklahoman outwardly promises little — yet it contains the possibility of so much.

Nearly as often as they express their frustrated admiration for Austin, Buchholtz’s guests express amused surprise at his young age. In his early twenties, he doesn’t strike me as freakishly precocious, though his consistency and prolificacy do exceed that of his podcasting peer group. Though he’s probably had a birthday or two since, I’ve heard episodes where he tells inquisitive interlocutors that he’s 22. Clearly smart and a practiced performer, the man could pass on the air for, oh, 34. But just as I’ve felt my curiosity fired up to hear him use CB Radio to embrace and express his particularly Oklahoman (or Austinite-by-way-of-Oklahoman) perspective, I feel it fired up to hear him do the same with his particularly 22-or-maybe-23 perspective. Buchholtz sets his podcast apart in a third way, by usually limiting his sit-downs to under 30 minutes — and in podcasting of any kind, that is freakish — but he holds the power to become much more interestingly different still.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: Dave Hill talking to comedians and other people he knows, bracketed by Dave Hill talking (or shredding)
Episode duration: 45m-2h
Frequency: one or two per month

I feel the time has nearly come to define a new genre of podcasting: comedians interviewing their friends and, if they seem entertaining enough, their acquaintances and friends-of-friends. Marc Maron’s Los Angeles-based WTF became a notable early example of this, though he’s found even more success by widening his mandate to include people he doesn’t much like or simply has a curiosity about. More recently, Pete Holmes gave the idea his own peculiar spin with You Made It Weird, and Julie Klausner’s How Was Your Week transplanted it into rich New York City soil. A couple years back, comedian Dave Hill launched a similar project from his own NYC base: Dave Hill’s Podcasting Incident [RSS] [iTunes].

Then again, “comedian” doesn’t quite cover it. The man also writes articles, contributes to This American Life, and plays guitar or bass in a bunch of current, former, and semi-fictional bands. He also maintains a faintly Wildean personal style, on display when he hit fashion week as a correspondent for Put This On. Hill, in other words, has made himself into a man of many skills. This would have gotten him all kinds of traction in, say, the eighteenth or nineteenth century, but in our debased modern era, this sort of thing seems to drain one’s notoriety rather than boost it. But I suspect this very range has allowed him to cultivate such a striking podcast guest list: accompanying the comedians like Tig Notaro [MP3] or Rob Delaney [MP3], we’ve got New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell [MP3], no-longer-uptight (so he claims) musician Moby [MP3], and charter Culture Club member Boy George [MP3]. See a mix of names like those, and you more or less have to download a few episodes, just to hear what could possibly be going on.

Additional intrigue gets stirred up by the occasional negative reaction to Hill mixed in with all the star-burstingly positive ones. “Most Annoying Man Ever,” reads the headline of one iTunes review. “Dave Hill is so deeply cloying, so far down the hipster ‘hands off’ irony hole, so removed from his own insincerity, that the only solution, it seems, is to hasten the destruction of the world, and everything beautiful in it, just so that Dave Hill no longer exists.” Scroll past dozens more breathless accolades, and you find someone declaring Hill “a boy playing a man” whose “detached, worldly style and fashion sense aren’t earned.” I quote these lines partially out of jealousy, since they’re just the sort of extreme reactions I myself have longed and failed to provoke, but also to underscore a point: if you either love or hate the monologues at the top of Julie Klausner’s show, the ones at the top of Dave Hill’s will force you into an even starker polarity.

The monologue, you see, has become as characteristic of the comedian-as-interviewer podcast as the interview itself. Before he cuts to his chat with Moby or Malcolm Gladwell or whomever, Hill talks solo into the microphone about this and that. He might fire off a few runs on his guitar or answer listener mail. Sometimes this runs on for a truly astonishing length relative to the interview, which is maybe what bothers those two iTunes reviewers so much. If you want to enjoy these segments, you first must get a handle on Hill’s monologue persona, which, like Marc Maron’s or Pete Holmes’s or Julie Klausner’s, doesn’t quite match the conversational one. Read Dave Hill’s Podcasting Incident’s episode descriptions. Observe the phrases used: “Part 1 of two incredible parts that most people can't even handle,” “we are both from Cleveland and how fucking sweet that is,” “Cancel everything as I unleash episode 31,” “Have a super day.” If you cannot handle these — and especially if you cannot handle them spoken in the style of a mid-period Matthew Broderick character — step carefully.

Perhaps I don’t need to say any of this to real Max Funsters; they probably know Hill well already from his appearances on The Sound of Young America and Jordan, Jesse, Go!. But if they don’t, they can always use Hill’s conversation with Jesse [MP3] as a gateway into the Podcasting Incident. It will give them a sense what separates this comedian-as-interviewer show from the others. Hill conducts what I would call “low-momentum” interviews, which sounds like a slam, but which I only mean as a description. Only podcasting allows a gentle meander like Hill’s, and only such a gentle meander yields moments like the interviewer getting up to use the bathroom while the interviewee sits alone, speaking into the recorder about the orange box his newly released DVD comes in. That interviewee’s name? Dick Cavett.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: discussion of the various unbelievabilities of non-respected movies with comedians — and sometimes the filmmakers themselves
Episode duration: 35m-1h30m
Frequency: biweekly (with previews on the weeks between)

When I grew old enough to watch, I began watching films. When I grew old enough to read, I began reading film criticism. I’ve never slowed in either pursuit, but only lately have I realized that I don’t care if a movie is “good” or “bad.” By that I mean not only that it doesn’t matter to me if a critic, even one I read religiously, thinks a movie is good or bad — I figured that out first — but that it doesn’t matter to me if I think a movie is good or bad. We build no more rickety structures than opinions, instinctively slapping them together in the heat of the moment on foundations of shifting sand. Thumbing a picture up or down may make for a satisfying declaration of self — “I feel this way about this movie, and moreover, I exist!” — but I need to hear more. I long to discuss film as an experience, not as a mere object of acceptance or rejection — and I suspect, on some level, that you do too.

How Did This Get Made? [RSS] [iTunes] keys into that desire, though it doesn’t announce its mission in quite those words. “Have you ever watched a movie so terrible, so unwatchable, that it actually is amazing?” its iTunes description asks. Admittedly, that question alone hardly gets my blood flowing; I felt forced long ago to, in the manner of Dave Erdman, abandon enthusiasm for the intellectual and aesthetic dead end of the so-bad-it’s-good. But I didn’t replace it with undivided pursuit of “the good,” since, when I try to get my mind around it to define it, the concept disperses like smoke. I began to conceive of all cinema as a circle, with the movies people call “good” and the movies people call “bad” meeting at one particularly fascinating point. I downloaded a slew of this podcast’s episodes when I heard Patton Oswalt, in a guest appearance on How Was Your Week?, tell Julie Klausner that its crew doesn’t just bitch and moan about movies they don’t like; they treat their widely reviled subjects as sources of interestingness equal to their most respected brethren.

This crew, by the way, comprises comedians Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas (who, we are often told, is not on Twitter). They watch recent and recent-ish releases like Sucker Punch, Gigli, and Battlefield Earth, movies whose box-office performances vary but around all of whom the stink of failure hangs heavily. They sometimes discuss them with comedy-type guests like Matt Walsh [MP3], Paul Rust [MP3], and Maximum Fun’s own Jordan Morris [MP3]. In a series of clever coups for a show not about to dole out praise, they occasionally bring in guests involved in the production of the fortnight’s film, like Greg Sestero, co-star and jack-of-all-trades on Tommy Wiseau’s immortal The Room [MP3] or — wait for it — the star of Cool as Ice, the one and only Vanilla Ice [MP3]. (For the last fifteen minutes of the episode, anyway.)

The talk with involved parties, a raid on the store of curiosity-satiating behind-the-scenes details they possess, highlights the best instincts driving How Did This Get Made? While certain films feel distant and thus somehow malevolently shoddy, reducing the panel to bouts of angered dismissal — Battlefield Earth comes back to mind — others provoke a richer question: no, really — how did this get made? The conversations usually revolve around what the Internet kids call “WTF moments”: the inexplicable events, actions, and creative choices these selections offer in spades. The show’s most memorable times come when Scheer, Raphael, Mantzoukas, and guests don’t just point and gawp in astonishment but genuinely try to figure out what they’ve seen, why they’ve seen it, and how it came to be seeable in the first place. Some of these questions have no answers. Perhaps none do, but grappling with them casts light on so much about how movies work and how different viewers engage with them in different ways.

But I don’t want to make this sound too heady. How Did This Get Made? adheres to several old showbiz commandments like the one about leavin’ ’em wantin’ more, which it does by usually ending on or before the 45-minute mark, and the one about keepin’ it light, which it does with invitations for the listeners to submit Love Guru character names of their own invention. I don’t know if Vaudeville had anything to say about reading aloud Amazon.com reviews by the semi-literate, but if it did, Scheer and co., with their recurring segment “Second Opinions,” have pulled off a hat trick. Yet I would submit that they ignore the cinematic brain trust of Netflix user-reviewers at their peril. About Ran, for instance, one Netflicker lamented that “there was too many horsehoof beats.” Not that any Kurosawa film would ever land on the chopping block of a show like this. But it makes you wonder: wouldn’t a movie podcaster face the greatest of challenge of all not in actively watching and discussing not the Sucker Punches of the world, nor the Rans, but the vast desert of apparent unremarkability between? CineMediocrity: one of you, please, take this idea and run with it. If you can bear it.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: Julie Klausner talking to comedians and other people she knows, bracketed by Julie Klausner talking about her week
Episode duration: 40m-1h30m
Frequency: weekly

Besides the red hair and gay fanbase, do I have any reason to think of Julie Klausner as “the good Kathy Griffin?” Undoubtedly not, but I can’t force the label out of my mind. Among their countless points of dissimilarity, Griffin lives in Los Angeles, while Klausner remains insistently New York-based. I say “insistently” because of how many comedy people seem to glide inexorably toward Los Angeles these days, as if on rails. Even if you actually do it out of pure inertia, staying in New York always strikes me a choice — as a stand, even. Oh, and Klausner does this acclaimed podcast called How Was Your Week? [RSS] [iTunes], which Griffin doesn’t. That’s a big difference.

Listen to How Was Your Week?, and you will hear all about Klausner’s insistently New York life. Sometimes her weeks involve suffering poor customer service at the hands of a sneering, transgendered Uniqlo employee; sometimes they simply culminate in bed, ice cream, and eleven episodes of something. She offers these details in the solo segments that come at the beginning and end of each episode, which usually bracket an interview. It plays a little like what Marc Maron does on WTF, leading into the day’s conversation with a life’s vicissitudes-inspired improvised monologue, but Klausner gives you more monologue and less conversation. Each installment showcases Klausner the speaker roughly one half of time, and Klausner the interviewer in the other half.

On some days, though, it feels like Klausner the speaker stretches out to overtake most of the runtime. This will delight some and make others wince, since I get an audience-polarizing vibe from the persona she uses alone at the mic, which heavily involves the comedic technique of spinning out a sentence to just a few words too many, or clarifying just a little too much. She might drop a reference to some oft-referenced element of pop culture, for instance, and follow it up with a singsong “Ref-erennnnce!” Or she’ll describe her attempt to end an e-mail argument with a nutty enraged stranger and then add, “You know what didn’t work? That.” Or she’ll mention her “bodarino — because that’s what I’m calling my body now.” I imagine listeners, depending upon their disposition, either eating this up or fasting it forward, though Klausner’s tendency to follow all oratorical lines to their fizzling end does produce moments of what I would call brilliance. That e-mail argument had to do with women who she feels manically affect elements of youthful sloppiness: purple nail polish, Smartie necklaces, rompers, in which Klausner wonders aloud how you’re supposed to urinate. “Are you naked on the toilet?” she asks.

Rompers actually provide some of the most socially relevant subject matter covered in these stretches, when Klausner typically sticks near-exclusively to the aggressively inconsequential: upper-arm flab, Nancy Grace’s appearance on Dancing with the Stars, Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp, Michael Keaton. Early on, I felt like this left me with little to show for my time spent listening, but the more episodes of How Was Your Week? I hear, the more I come to see it as, consciously or unconsciously performed, an act of balance. When Klausner brings on her guests, she rarely wastes time getting right into the substantial stuff. It doesn’t take long for her talk with David Rakoff [MP3] to turn to cancer, AIDS, and Jewish cakes; nor can she and Patton Oswalt [MP3] resist launching into fascinating discussion of the psychological mechanics of writing. And by now I’ve heard so many thoughtful chats when Tom Scharpling [MP3] guests on podcasts that I find myself on the verge of rolling up my sleeves and plowing into all the Best Show lore I assume I must master before listening to it.

As you can see, Klausner’s New-Yorkiness also results in a somewhat different guest list than those of all the Los Angeles-based comedians-talking-to-people podcasts. Sure, sometimes she records in Los Angeles and sometimes Los Angeles people come to her in New York, but How Was Your Week? remains the only show I know of equipped to offer Ira Glass and his wife [MP3] and Sandra Bernhard [MP3] within four months of one another. And I realize I must now sound like one of those insufferable coastals who assumes that Los Angeles and New York are the only places to live in the United States, but hey, if you can show me another American city that inspires such fear and loathing, be my guest.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: Canadians talking about everything and nothing, continually ratcheting up the stakes of elaborately unappealing sex or general disgustingness, usually in public
Episode duration: 30m-1h30m
Frequency: 3-9 per month

“A bunch of guys get drunk at a bar, and some dickhead keeps recording it.” The prospect does not immediately appeal. Several of you may find the deal sweetened if I reveal the identity of that dickhead as Keith McNally, the podcast auteur behind XO, one of the shows I’ve respected the very most in all my years Podthinking. XO repays your listening time with both its high-caliber production — some of the most intricate craft I’ve heard in a podcast that doesn’t also air on the radio — and its seemingly untrammeled access to the psyche of one not-particularly-inhibited young man with a lot on his mind, a high-intensity way of saying it, and the inexplicable ability to combine those qualities without descending into obnoxiousness. A real marriage of the raw and the refined, you might say, which most conceptually strong podcasts officiate in one way or another.

The Vinyl Countdown [RSS] [iTunes], now. This show sits on the opposite end of the production spectrum from McNally’s other brainchild: a bunch of guys get drunk at a bar, and some dickhead keeps recording it. For half an hour, an hour, two hours, two and a half hours, you can hear McNally and a handful of dude- or lady-friends gross each other out; reminisce about antics past; swirl the ice in their glasses; and speculate about what, in a series of made-up realities, each with their own rigid rules, does or does not count as gay. His friends have names like “Robocop Craig” and “Mustard Mike.” When something or someone comes up a lot in these conversations, McNally will occasionally splice together an episode illustrating it, as when he made one out of Louis C.K.’s visits to Opie and Anthony [MP3] (hosts whose manner, worn to a featureless dun by years upon years of morning-zooishness, makes you especially grateful for a challengingly personal program like this one).

To think this began as a video game show. I hadn’t actually started listening back when — if — McNally and his coterie stuck to that agenda; when I first tuned in, things had clearly long fallen into the kind of free-for-all that, listened to from certain angles, almost sounds like chaste formalism. But catch me on a good day, and I just feel delighted at the very fact that, at the touch of a button, I can listen in on a couple hundred hours of some Canadians talking about everything and nothing, continually ratcheting up the stakes of elaborately unappealing sex or general disgustingness, usually in public. I tend to think that certain types of podcasts have grown popular because they give us a line to the sort of conversations that have fallen out of our lives; it certainly hasn’t fallen out of these guys’.

I’ve made this show sound simple, much simpler than it is. The dedicated Vinyl Countdown fan will discover a world of Tolkienesque complexity where countless threads of memory, story, inside joke, and life event link together all the episodes and everyone who has ever appeared in them, primary, secondary, and tertiary players alike. And that doesn’t even account for all of the connections and resonances between this and every other product of McNally’s shoestring internet empire, from XO to I Have a Ham Radio to Shitty Comics to his appearances on Keith and the Girl. The Robocop Craigs and Mustard Mikes of his world have tales to tell, sure, but McNally’s personality remains a presiding force of every minute of audio uploaded under his banner. It wouldn’t work for everybody, and maybe it won’t always work for him, but for that reason, I’ve always given his productions a chance.

We may just have to make peace, dear readers, with the fact that you’ll either find McNally inherently compelling or you won’t, and either way you can’t confidently pin down why. If you’ve never heard a show of his but read this review closely, you might ask, isn’t he base? Well, yes and no; he may compulsively return to base topics, but he doesn’t do it in a base way. If you’ve only heard the shows where he talks about not having a job and just looking at porn and hanging out with his pals all day, you might ask, isn’t he unambitious? Well, yes and no; just look at the volume of internet media he generates, which by almost any standard seems superhuman. If you’ve listened to his screeds du jour and read a few of his tweets, you might ask, isn’t he a troll? Well, yes and no; if he’s a troll, he’s one of those rare trolls who changes his mind a lot and listens to what other people have to say. I’ve dragged my feet on writing about The Vinyl Countdown because I assumed I couldn’t describe it accurately before hearing just a few more episodes, but these thoughts never resolved themselves into answers. And so you read the questions here today.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: one-on-one comedy/sex/God conversations
Episode duration: 50m-1h45m
Frequency: 3-7 per month

You’ve surely heard the name Pete Holmes resonating through the halls of alternative and/or podcast-y comedy lately. The words themselves could, by their broad pan-American nature, gain only the loosest purchase on anyone’s memory — far less than the evangelical fervor with which some speak them. Even if that piques your curiosity, casual investigation reveals only one more head in the endless perp walk of white, early-thirties, college improv-bred, sitcom-writing Los Angeles standup comics by way of New York. Yet everyone, as another noted comedy podcaster I recently interviewed put it, seems to be boarding the Pete Holmes bus.

Since this podcaster said that in response to my own salvo of Pete Holmes-related evangelization, perhaps I can offer some explanation. To truly “get” Pete Holmes, I submit that you must see Pete Holmes, like I did at a live Risk! taping. In the aftermath of his punchlines, watch the man twist his open, wholesome features — his name made flesh — into those of a lower-tier Midwestern politician on the brink of a flop sweat, the pressure from a desperate tap just inches too far down into his well of theatrical affability forcing open the stress fractures that will hasten his undoing. A subtle element of Holmes’ performance, yet a harrowing one; it would surprise me if even he fully understands how or why he pulls it off.

Then again, as his podcast You Made it Weird [RSS] [iTunes] reveals, I may vastly underestimate his capacity for (or compulsion toward) self-scrutiny. The show’s simple format drops Holmes into one-on-one conversations with friends, colleagues, and friend-colleagues, like a WTF without the confrontation. The resemblance between the two podcasts actually runs deep enough so as to get tough to explain; suffice it to say that, when Holmes brings Marc Maron on [MP3], the resulting episode could have fit just as well into one show’s feed as the other’s.

I want to say that You Made it Weird has more of a defined premise than does WTF, and I feel like I’ve even heard Holmes lay out that premise a few times, but far be it from me to remember it. Holmes’ interviews, which usually happen on the back of such a pre-existing rapport that they turn immediately into full-blown, two-way conversations (as interviews should), supposedly have a mandate to make the guests talk about subjects including but not limited to comedy, sex, and God — the subjects that, when broached in everyday chat, “make it weird.” This would indeed make weird an interview program with, say, airline executives, but I feel like a lot of these comedian guests, a lot of these Sarah Silvermans [MP3] and Doug Bensons [MP3] and Moshe Kashers [MP3], would’ve gone there anyway.

Hence the show’s greater interestingness — hence most comedic productions’ greater interestingness — during the times it moves away from direct joke-making to discuss the logic, psychology, and pathology of joke-making from oblique angles. I’ve especially relished the times when Holmes and his guests don’t really talk about joke-making at all. The Pete Holmes neophyte finds out sooner or later that, in addition to using his standup to make people laugh, Holmes has drawn New Yorker cartoons to make people laugh — or whatever people do when they express appreciation for New Yorker cartoons. Allow me to express my own great appreciation here for his recording of a three-way commiseration [MP3] about the brutal mechanics of submitting New Yorker cartoons with fellow cartoonists Matt Diffee and Alex Gregory.

And then we have the fact that Pete Holmes asking about God means something different than a “normal” alt-comic asking about God. While not a Christian in the sense we coastals understand the concept from the Huffington Post reblogs we forward, he seems to have grown up immersed and deeply shaped by that distinctively American subculture of guitar-strumming, promise bracelet-exchanging, youth group-going Bible-readers who, given the chance, will totally invite you to the beach barbecue. Large fragments of the “Sparky” demeanor you’d expect from such an upbringing still glint in his comedic persona, but he’s left that world behind. He hasn’t gone totally apostate, but nor has he not gone apostate. He doesn’t bemoan the vestigial prudishness that has left his bedpost with so few notches, but nor does he not bemoan it.

You wouldn’t necessarily expect this struggle within the soul of a modern comedian, least of all on a podcast. But then, would you expect the strongest jokes to come straight out of the very topics these conversations reach when steering away from comedy? As Holmes quotes himself as saying, “Expectation is the enemy of comedy,” a line that swiftly crystallizes every reason I’ve ever folded my arms and harrumphed at the mere idea standup, sitcoms, or one-liners. It also explains why my very being gives way to unstoppable chuckling at discussions of, as you’ll hear on You Made it Weird, theology, brain hemorrhages, sexual guilt, and Full House. As the hale green shoot sprouts from the stale muck, so the funny rises from the comedically intert.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall, formerly of the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas, now hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: interviews with bigtime skeptics
Episode duration: 30m-1h
Frequency: weekly

“In-KWAI-ree.” That’s how the hosts of Point of Inquiry [RSS] [iTunes] pronounce, sometimes with great deliberateness, the final word of their program’s title. Does this sound strange? Not terribly. Is it even not the standard pronunciation? Admittedly, I don’t know. But at certain moments, the word as uttered on this podcast sounds saturated with the sterile moisture of pedantry. Most of the time, I feel comforted to hear the speaker taking such pains. But other times — few times, but telling ones — I feel a flood of desire to shake him down for his lunch money.

The show belongs to the genre of podcasts on skepticism, one which took off with surprising force early in the medium’s emergence. Its name, despite my complicated feelings about how announcers say it, strikes me as a paragon of dignity compared with those its swarm of brethren have taken up: Skepticality, Skeptiko, Skeptoid, Skepchick. Truth to tell, had Point of Inquiry’s sponsoring organization the Center for Inquiry called it, say, Skeptacular or Stupid SkepTricks, you probably wouldn’t be reading a Podthought about it. But by today, skepticism shows have multiplied to the extent that no pun, no matter how goofy, can set a show apart.

Point of Inquiry’s form also exhibits an uncommon poise. Many skepticism podcasts divide themselves into a distracting array of segments, compulsively gin up uncomfortable confrontations with suspiciously dopey adversaries, or loose slightly-too-large casts of panelists into a frenzy over the delusion of the week like bored jungle cats upon a limping wildebeest. This one has evolved into straightforward interviews with luminaries who have carved out careers staring down particular skeptical bugaboos: Brendan Nyhan on political spin in the media [MP3], Michael Shermer on evidence-free beliefs [MP3], Steven Pinker on traditional notions of human nature [MP3], Jonathan Kay on 9/11 “Truthers” [MP3], the late Christopher Hitchens on God [MP3]. Somebody behind these scenes wields wide-ranging connections, slick booking skills, or both; no skeptical podcast I know gets consistently heavier hitters on the phone.

Few passive pursuits feel as satisfying to me as absorbing the authoritative tones of these famously rigorous thinkers on the page or through the earbud. I fall into the habit of considering it a sort of cognitive sanitation, of mental housecleaning that might blow a cobweb or two of nonsense out of my consciousness. I soon grow convinced that nobody could ever reasonably object to my engagement in this. These skeptics have all devoted their lives to perceiving the truth, thinking about the truth, and snatching the truth from the clutches of liars. And truth equals good, doesn’t? If we don’t operate from the axiom that truth equals good, what do we have in this world?

And yet, for all the sensations of pleasure and ever-swelling moral rightness I draw from the skeptical conversation, sooner or later I get overwhelmed by a kind of defeat. This all starts to feel like masturbation, especially in its ultimate effects on my actual world. I suppose the mental stimulation from listening to somebody smart argue against psychics or religion or conspiracy theories is nothing to scoff at, but I wasn’t particularly concerned with psychics or religion or conspiracy theories before, and I’m not going to do anything different today because I’ve heard what I’ve heard. Truth for truth’s sake seems like a noble enough thing to seek, but take it too far and, paradoxically, you start to look nuts; one day you just want to hear spoon-bending debunked, and the next you’re going to library-basement meetings in your sweatpants.

But if you can bear these dangers in mind, you’ll find few classier sources of skeptical listening material than Point of Inquiry. Its hosts get right to the heart of these issues with public intellectuals you’d be embarrassed not to know about, and its archives go back years and years. Just make sure you have another hobby, too. Dance the tango or butcher your own beef or join a roller derby league. Don’t turn into a weenie.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes], which is now Kickstarting its first season.]

Tweet

Vital stats:
Format: Skype conversations between Merlin Mann and John Roderick
Episode duration: 50m-1h30m
Frequency: weekly

Time was, Merlin Mann’s followers — a square-framed group in which I count myself — suffered a perpetual drought. You’d get your luminary’s guest appearances on podcasts now and again or, on extra-special days, recordings of his speeches at tech industry conferences and company retreats. Though half of these would slice off into the rough of open-source application minutia or techniques for executing semi-documented five-keystroke Mac OS commands, Mann would still work in incisive and eerily useful observations about life, work, and the overlap between them. These came propelled by his rocket-fueled Gen-X wit, guided by cultural landmarks on maps printed by independent record labels of the early nineties. Out its back blew a noxious vapor trail meant to cloud and choke the forces of internet-enabled hucksterism and complacency. To what scraps we received, we paid the attention of Talmudic scholars.

Now, even the most compulsive admirers surely struggle to keep up with more Merlin Mann media than they can handle. Those who always approached his output buffet-style, paying attention to his indictments of certain things and ignoring his indictments of others, must see this as a boon. Those who desire only his thoughts about using your mind to create things that actually matter in a less twitchy, fearful manner can stick to Back to Work with Dan Benjamin. Those who prefer Mann’s rapid-fire cracks — not fully orchestrated jokes, exactly, but something subtler, more tonal, and further askew — about German sex tourism, fruit cocktails, John Wayne Gacy, and insistently ragtag but highly educated guitar bands hailing from the first Bush administration — now have something to download as well.

This new arrival, Roderick on the Line [RSS] [iTunes], presents a weekly Skype conversation between Mann and his longtime pal John Roderick. You might know Roderick from The Long Winters, the rock band he leads, or from his time playing with Harvey Danger, or from — and here I lean on Wikipedia — his musical associations with the likes of Death Cab for Cutie and Maximum Fun favorite Jonathan Coulton. I understand he has also made his presence felt at MaxFunCon, so I’d have personally known his raw charisma by now, had I but managed to scrape together the price of admission. I recognize him from something infinitely cheaper: his occasional contributions to the Seattle Weekly, the paper I read when I grew up near that city.

A Seattleite by birth and current residence with a mother lode of stories about his Anchorage adolescence, Roderick sits dead-center in the “Northwest People” circle of my social brain’s Venn diagram. I’ve somehow placed Mann, who connects with Roderick from his San Francisco home and matches him spiky-reminiscence-for-spiky-reminiscence with tales of Ohio and Florida, in the same circle. Maybe, to a defector to central Los Angeles such as myself, San Francisco simply counts as the Northwest. But as Roderick on the Line explicitly reveals, both men share a well-considered yet faintly savage distaste for such classically Northwesterly compulsions as fleece, metallically iconic architecture, Gore-Tex, and a brand of easy superciliousness I’ll call Whole Foods Liberalism.

Having grown up in that region, I can’t stop my mind from resonating on these same frequencies. Nor can I suppress my instinctual reaction to the “cool guy older than you” vibe from these two fellows, born about sixteen years before me and possessed of such immediate knowledge about (and given to such a rushing current of references to) the legitimately alternative young adult’s zeitgeist that prevailed throughout my childhood. When they get together, the conversational energy between them encourages a sort of cultural criticism. Roderick in particular goes on jags that, at first, wouldn’t sound out of place coming out of the mouth of a conservative AM-talk host, but soon take on a life all their own. His early lament about how Americans have become, in their own minds, “300 million of the most important people who have ever lived,” or how we’ve accidentally thrown out the rules that kept society running because we got our panties in a twist junking everything originally imposed by colonialists and/or dead white men, would strike a chord with me anyway. But few, I wager, would predict how Roderick fills out his theses.

Mann, naturally, summons his usual withering glare at the meaningless ephemerality of an era fixated on social-media fame. Without hesitation, he commiserates with Roderick about the distrust and disgust he feels in a world where you don’t know if the last good thing you read came from someone who genuinely wanted to write something good, or who just wrote something pseudo-good to drive you to a Tumblblog full of ads. What’s worse — I rush to explain after quoting the man I once demanded explain why I don’t have any money — we twentysomethings don’t even want to pull that kind of crap. We loathe ourselves for it, but we see no other option. We feel deep, gnawing fear. Besides, it’s that or a day job.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall just quit hosting and producing 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: Oxford-style debates, lectures, and interviews
Episode duration: 15m-2h
Frequency: erratic

I’ve found interesting podcasts by simply typing the names of personalities I enjoy into the iTunes search box. I’m no logician, but I any podcast that’s recorded with one of my guests of choice will have recorded with other people who fascinate, even if I don’t know who they are yet. After pulling a few of my old P.J. O’Rourke books off the shelf — for enlivening the fifteen-minute breaks I spent in the humor section of Borders back when I worked at the Gap in high school (and back when there were Borders), he forever earned my gratitude and disciplehood — I figured I’d check if he’d made the podcast rounds. Yes, I know I can hear him on Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me; he makes much of his anointment as the program’s designated conservative. But what’s this? Here he is on a show called Intelligence Squared [iTunes]. “P.J. O’Rourke: The funniest man in America,” so they’d titled his episode.

Of course, since Intelligence Squared comes out of England, “the funniest man in America” probably sounds as meaningful as “the tallest midget.” Many consider the traditions of English humo(u)r the finest in the world, not without cause, and I doubt you can gin up much respect for Yank comedic journalists if you came up over there. But the live forum where the show recorded O’Rourke gave him an hour and a half of what sounded like solid attention and a series of non-cranky, actual-question questions at the end. It brought out the best and most thoughtful in him, while momentarily relieving him of his worst impulses — his current worst impulse being to dilute his humor with half-hearted one-liners about “Obamacare” and “Obamamobiles” in an attempt, I suspect, to please what he sees as his Republican reader base.

How excited I felt, perusing the archives further, to find talks like Clive James on the city of Florence, Edward Tufte on information design, Iain Sinclair on “grand” urban redevelopment projects, and Stephen Bayley on object design. Even an conversation, if a slightly muffled one, with subject-independent literary auteur (and one of my own favorite people to interview) Geoff Dyer! A playlist almost tailor-made for a certain subset of my own interests, and you’ll know how jazzed it got me if you happen to share them. Even the lectures not aimed directly at my own taste seemed awfully promising. I don’t hold strong opinions either way on Bernard-Henri Levy, Slavoj Žižek, or Niall Ferguson, but I looked forward to listening to them discuss the state of the left, ideological symbolism in last year’s Oscar winners, and the six, respectively, to maybe learn why others do.

But Intelligence Squared hasn’t made its name on lectures. Its producing organization gained prominence as the premiere presenter of something called “Oxford-style debates,” which involve putting a “motion” out there and letting a couple luminaries lay out the arguments for and against it, with rebuttals. The podcast feed features debates both high- and low-profile, from celebrity debaters in before large audiences to a couple of semi-knowns duking it out over Skype. I actually gave the NPR version of Intelligence Squared debates a shot a few years ago, but their production sounded suspiciously busy and its topics strangely inconsequential. The original opts for a rougher-and-readier style, zeroing in on motions whose very descriptions entertained me: “Enough money has been spent saving Venice,” “Long live Tesco,” “Children deserve better than Harry Potter,” “Prince Charles was right.”

User reviews on iTunes complain about the sound quality, and they’ve got a point. Some podcasts here sound just fine, while others, like the Geoff Dyer interview, sound incorrectly mic’ed, and others, like too many of the Skype debates, sound irritatingly glitchy. The enjoyment and intellectual stimulation come primarily as a function of who the speakers/debaters/participants are. I’ll always want to hear, say, Will Self speak, even if through a layer of pops and buzzes. An inconclusive debate about the social effects of Twitter or the repercussions of Lady Gaga on the very concept of feminism... perhaps less so. No matter the issue, one person stating their opinion on it, another stating their counter-opinion on it, the first stating their counter-counter opinion on it, and the second stating their counter-counter-counter opinion on it inevitably leaves a “So what?” feeling behind. Part of me itches for an answer. Perhaps that sounds so very American of me, but hey, I already pretty much admitted that your guys’ jokes are funnier.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall just quit hosting and producing The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]