Podthoughts by Colin Marshall: The Saltcast

Posted by Maximum Fun on 27th June 2010



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.]