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Vital stats:
Format: interviews with Brooklyn-based experts about their expertise and how it relates to Brooklyn
Episode duration: ~30m
Frequency: 1-4 per month

When one of my peers — i.e., anyone in that vast age group, “about thirty” — tells me they live in New York, I just assume they live in Brooklyn. Thirty years ago, I suppose they would have lived in one of the more run-down parts of Manhattan, David Byrne territory. But something tells me that no “more run-down parts of Manhattan” remain. I’ve talked to the occasional youngish person who lives in Queens, but they always make it sound as remote as Guam. I’ve never encountered anyone from the Bronx or Staten Island. Then again, I live in Los Angeles, a haven for the rootless, and I suspect Brooklyn provides the same solace. You see a lot of traffic back and forth; for every Brooklynite aspiring to Angelenohood, an Angeleno aspires to Brooklynism.

“Ah, Brooklyn,” I remember Buddy Bradley, protagonist of Peter Bagge’s comic series Hate, saying upon setting foot there. “The worst place in the world.” That issue formed, in large part, my early impression of that part of New York: crowded, inconvenient, dangerous, dirty. I still haven’t visited, though I understand that, somewhere in the past fifteen years, Brooklyn made the transition from Crooklyn to something of a Portland East. Over this same span of time, though, my appreciation for the crowded, inconvenient, dangerous, and dirty has only grown, so I don’t quite know what to do. Correcting my years of built-up inaccurate third-hand impressions by listening to Ask Brooklyn [iTunes] seemed like the beginning of a solution.

The first episode of Ask Brooklyn I listened to was about a doula [MP3]. Loyal Jordan, Jesse, Go! listeners such as myself already know all about doulas, but I still found myself asking, “Wait, so we’re talking about doulas now?” A doula is a woman who provides advice and assistance to expecting mothers, and are not, so they will emphasize to you, midwives. This particular doula speaks sentences emphatically, like pronouncements, and somehow also hesitatingly, like questions, an odd tone you might remember from high school English class. Host Kate Rath, speaking to this doula over the phone, asks all about the life of a doula and what a woman engaging the services of a doula might reasonably expect. While I personally will never put this information to use, I feel somehow pleased to have heard it.

Premised on the idea of questioning Brooklyn-based experts about what they do and how they do it in the borough they do it in, the show has brought on other guests like a “wellness coach” [MP3], a therapist with recommendations for “breaking unhealthy cycles” [MP3], and the co-founder of one of those “sex-positive” shops [MP3]. Having started to wonder if Brooklyn had become a colony of Denver, I then had the same kind of epiphany I have when I suddenly realize I’ve spent the entire evening in a gay bar: this show is for women. It doesn’t get all overt about it, but then again, neither do the better class of gay bars.

But recent Ask Brooklyns have given a nod to the traditionally male practices of beer-brewing and liquor-distilling: part one with a bar’s beer director [MP3], part two with him [MP3], and one with the co-founter of New York’s first distillery since prohibition [MP3]. (So perhaps Portland really is Brooklyn’s west-coast equivalent.) The seemingly gender-neutral episodes, such as the first one about oddities in Brooklyn history like secret plane crashes and vast low-quality marijuana farms [MP3], have even more to offer. Though this sort of thing has fallen into the hands of 36-year-old ladies in synthetically advanced pants where I come from, I took a great deal way from Rath’s conversation with a teacher at one of Brooklyn’s meditation centers [MP3]. It had something to do with how they describe our constant and ill-serving impulsive search for all-consuming distractions to dull the dread and anxiety buzzing in our brain. Now more ever, we’d do well to keep as conscious of that as we can — be we of the male or female persuasion.

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

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Format: conversations (and occasional songs) between Andy Dick and his friends and colleagues
Episode duration: 1h-1h30m
Frequency: erratic

I know who Andy Dick is, and yet I don’t know who Andy Dick is. He entered my awareness as a guest on Loveline, the nightly radio program that occupied one of the larger, more edifying chunks of my time between the ages of thirteen and twenty. He had a specific reason for being famous back then, which I believe had something to do with a role on the ABC sitcom NewsRadio. I remain more or less ignorant of that show, despite its retroactive receipt of a great deal of comedy-nerd credibility, at least by the standard of ABC sitcoms. I know just as much about Less Than Perfect, the other sitcom, this time about an office, which carried his mainstream recognition into the 2000s. My curiosity has long had a place for his band, the Bitches of the Century, but mostly because of its name. I can’t get enough of that name.

Somehow, this thin experience has provided reason enough for me to download Dick’s every guest appearance on today’s interview-ish comedy podcasts and comedy-ish interview podcasts: Marc Maron’s, say, or Adam Carolla’s. As far back as I can remember, and in whichever sonic medium I can remember, a conversation with Andy Dick has always meant a conversation about drugs and alcohol, either the benefits thereof, the indignities thereof, or the vagaries of quitting them. Given his once apparently constant struggles with substance abuse and tendency toward bizarre public behavior, Dick became something of a dead man walking in the eyes of the media. Yet, like a high-personality Zelig wandering through a very specific and strikingly grim circle of show business, he displayed a hardy survival instinct while his significantly less doomed-seeming associates — actors Phil Hartman and David Strickland come to mind — met their ends.

Though Dick now finds himself in a time of sobriety, you’ll hear about experiences like these on his podcast, The SHeD Show [RSS] [iTunes]. Having demonstrated such willingness and ability as a guest, he’s become one of those celebrities whose podcast you may never have heard, but whose not having a podcast would shock you. I think of Dick’s show as falling under the heading of “people I know” podcasts, which are what you get when celebrities decide they’ve accrued enough interesting and/or funny acquaintances to record an hour or two with one every so often. But it takes no more than a glance at recent episodes to reveal that he knows different people than most celebrities. In fact, I found my way to his show when I noticed that he’d interviewed Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW’s Bookworm [MP3] — literally, a person I know. And in that unflaggingly enthusiastic conversation, he admits to not even really reading books.

Other names on Dick’s guest list also surprised me: actor of unclear repute Eric Roberts [MP3], former teen-pop idol Debbie Gibson [MP3], his own son Lucas [MP3]. He gets these people in front of a microphone and talks to them for at least an hour at a stretch, often breaking into impromptu song. He often sounds surrounded, though not always obviously so, by technical assistants, band members, or perhaps functionless hangers-out. (A logical setting, for those who have always imagine him at the center of a dissolute circle, egged on.) Though Dick refers to the podcast as “The Shit Show,” Apple’s evidently stringent language policy forces him to call it The SHed Show on iTunes. The clean name comes from the fact that he lives in a shed, though he takes great pains to explain that, Tuff Shed erected in his ex-wife’s yard though it may be, he has it fixed up like something out of Dwell magazine. But he doesn’t really live there, so he often adds; he sleeps there, but lives, variously, outside, in Los Angeles, on stages, on television, in the world of creativity, in The Industry.

I’d be hard pressed to explain exactly what I find compelling about Dick’s personality, but the evidence that I do appears clearly and presently in my willingness to listen to him talk. (I didn’t come for the insight into the inner life of Eric Roberts, I can assure you.) He does, however, embody several fascinating liminalities at once: not really a comedian, but not strictly an actor; not a household name, but somehow famous enough to be one; not a showbiz casualty, but hardly unscathed; not quite gay, but certainly not straight. Despite enduring the classically troubled life of a modern celebrity, his speech, manner, and appearance retain an almost unsettling energy and heightened crispness, burnt bridges be damned. He says much of his pure drive to create and share music, film, and television — his albums, movie Danny Roane: First Time Director, the pilot he’s written with his son — and it strikes me as far more genuine than the drives of others who feel the need to say much of them. In Andy Dick, we have a creature faintly not of this Earth; in his podcast, we have a means of listening to the alien atmosphere that he carries with him, and how it affects those unpredictable few who dare breathe it.

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

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Vital stats:
Format: Portland-related gab sessions and interviews
Episode duration: 30-38m
Frequency: weekly

As soon as my feet touch Portland soil, in flood the good vibes. Every time I emerge from a car, plane, or MAX train into the fresh, cool, only slightly moist Portland air, I echo the words of Brigham Young reaching Salt Lake City: “This is the place.” These feelings only intensify when I’ve sat myself down in the nearest McMenamin’s with something locally brewed in hand. Yet I live not in Portland but Los Angeles, a city whose neighborhoods Portlanders either denounce as Portland’s moral and aesthetic enemies or deride as mere brittle simulacra of Portland. In search of convenient shots of Essence of Portland when I can’t fit in an actual trip north, I discovered a new, highly suitable-sounding podcast called The Portland Adventure Hour [RSS] [iTunes].

At first listen, the show sounds like a typical three-man gab session where you can’t tell which voice belongs to whom and don’t bother because it will peter out in eighteen months anyway. But, being Portland residents, these three men make occasional reference to the things they see and do in their fair city, which immediately ups the interest level. (Usually, this sort of production emanates from spare rooms fifteen or twenty miles outside my own fair city, not that that stops the hosts from griping about “living in Los Angeles.”) The format quickly takes on an unusual hybridity: some episodes go with the gab, while others present one-on-one interviews with Portland-resident creators and businessmen, like a comedian [MP3], a wildlife photographer [MP3], a ski-builder [MP3], and the proprietor of something called a bouldering gym [MP3].

Unsurprisingly, The Portland Adventure Hour features conversations about not just bouldering but semi-unconventional methods of kayaking, skateboarding at age thirty, reading artisanal comic books, playing vintage arcade games, and using similarly vintage video game hardware to generate entire DJ sets. The ability to act fruitfully on these impulses, so the hosts claim, is what Portland is for. I would argue that Powell’s Books is what Portland is for, but I take their meaning. Give me a day to browse those bookshelves, scale an indoor climbing wall, and pump a few quarters into Galaga, downing signature Stumptown roasts and ales all the while, and you have given me a day of Earthly Paradise. Yet, as in the early, feverishly productive years of a socialist nation, one senses faintly that, for all the evident success of this Utopian experiment, life has narrowed in a way that bodes vaguely ill.

For all its evident affection for the city, Portlandia has forced us all to stare hard at our Portland-related delusions. “The dream of the nineties is alive in Portland,” sang that show’s cast; the line refers equally to Generation X’s eclectic idealism as to its bitter complacency. Portland, in both the most positive and most negative senses of this word, enables: in the dream of the nineties, you escape the meaningless pressure of a normal career and find near-automatic support for even your most obscurantist efforts, but you do it in insular, uncomfortably monocultural (I once heard a Portland-based writer refer to his town as “Lord of the Flies with urban whites”) settings in thrall to troublesome ideologies of their own. We’ve heard this story before, as a myth which Richard Lloyd Parry summarizes best: “It is like one of those fairytale undersea realms where the simple fisherman follows his water nymph, only to realize after a few years of bliss that he can never return to the air.”

You can hear The Portland Adventure Hour realize it during a discussion of the meth-heads of Chinatown [MP3]: this complicated, uneasy Portland may not trigger that special endorphin release, but it holds much more interest in the long run. Just beneath the Portland of Portlandia lays the the Portland of Gus van Sant’s Paranoid Park. Both van Sant and Chuck Palahniuk seem able to reside in this Portland and remain internationally relevant creators, a trick few others seem able to pull off. Living in any of Portland’s realities, while fun, seems to get a lot of people branded in the wider culture, often with good cause, as not particularly serious about their craft. Will this show wind up as yet one more of Portland’s half-attempted, prematurely contented projects with a withered inclination (or indeed capacity) to reach beyond the walls of its hometown? Something in these guys’ lively speech, their active curiosity, and their ability to keep episodes under forty minutes makes me believe they can realize their idea's higher ambitions.

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

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Format: the literary WTF
Episode duration: 1h-1h30m
Frequency: weekly

Damn, are ever there a lot of novels to read. I get this mixed rush of excitement, gratitude, incredulity, and hopelessness whenever I plug into an outlet of contemporary literary culture. In one hour, I’ll hear of dozens of authors and hundreds of books I might want but will never have the lifespan to read. How did this Jenga tower rise? When will it fall? Imagine what a comparable situation in the auto industry: respectable, productive new car companies appear every week; comfortable, well-built new models enter the market every day; lots teem with more vehicles than the entire driving population could reasonably buy and use, let alone fit onto the roads at once; time-tested old cars, some of the finest ever produced, remain abundant and far cheaper than their curiously pricey modern counterparts. Yet automotive design and engineering schools continue pumping out waves of expectant graduates each year, and everyone else seems less and less eager to drive.

From Other People [iTunes] [RSS], a literary version of Marc Maron’s WTF, I get vibrations of this same psychodrama. Host Brad Listi, a novelist-interviewer/novelist interviewer to Maron’s comedian-interviewer/comedian interviewer, sits down with the very people who write all these worthy recent novels to compare notes about growing up, pulling a writing career together, and physically doing the work, in sessions spiced with various opinions and anxieties. After having heard a sizable chunk of the archive, I can assure you that these episodes all have much of interest to offer: rich stories, sudden laughs, ponder-worthy observations, memorable strategies for living. The show’s conversations deliver just what I confidently imagine their participants’ actual books do. But where to start listening?

Selecting Other People interviews to download presents the same seemingly insoluble problems and obscure strains of guilt as selecting novels to read. Browsing Listi’s 77-strong backlog, I muttered to myself the thinnest of justifications: “Jerry Stahl? [MP3] Seemed interestingly ragged when I saw him on that one panel. Ben Marcus? [MP3] I remember some sort war of words about experimental writing between him and Jonathan Franzen where it looked like he was defending my reading interests, but then I only ever read Franzen’s side. Elna Baker? [MP3] That Mormon I heard on The Sound of Young America, and Mormon stuff weirds me out in a way I kind of enjoy. Rex Pickett? [MP3] Seems like we all know strangely little about that guy, considering he wrote Sideways. Vanessa Veselka? [MP3] Someone had me write about her novel once. Heidi Julavits? [MP3] Is that the same as Vendela Vida?” (And of course I grabbed all the ones with people I’ve interviewed myself — Reality Hunger manifesto assembler David Shields [MP3], literary blogger Maud Newton [MP3] — as every interviewer denies doing.)

For the most part, I threw up my hands and chose which Other Peoples to listen to the way I choose which books to read or, frankly, the way I choose pretty much everything: socially. In a world whose sheer number of options renders all of them effectively unevaluatable, picking whatever you happen to know people involved with or want to become like the people involved with at least lifts a burden. Sure, this guarantees that the simple meritocracy for which we clamored as sixteen-year-olds will never come, but we should’ve abandoned that idea long ago. Listi and his guests do seem aware, on some level, of this condition. They also directly acknowledge the bizarre structure of the literary fiction market now and again, though usually in passing. In one of his WTF-style pre-interview monologues, a shaken Listi describes the scene at the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference as “Darwinian.” I’ve gone to those; I know what he means. The chat there, while all kinds of stimulating, tends to float on a bitter current of spite. Let it seep to the surface, and it destroys you.

Listi, to his credit, lets little of this spite seep into his interviews. I come away from Other People remembering mostly what has the least direct relevance to the half-masochistic practice, performed with grim resignation and without apparent incentive, of writing novels: the roach-tainted cheese toast of Newton’s childhood; the questionable warning the college-bound Baker received from her mother about NYU’s roving gangs of lesbians; Veselka’s having emerged from the womb of Nick News W5’s Linda Ellerbee; Marcus’ dreams of college waterskiing. “Introduced” to many of these writers by Listi’s program, I now feel like getting to know them better, and if that means getting their personalities mediated through some fictional narrative, so be it. Maybe it just works this way now: you “meet” someone on a show like Other People, and you can, if you like, get further “acquainted” by reading their books. I would bang out a line here about how the work ought to stand for itself, but I think we’re all feeling a little tired these days.

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

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Format: talk about all aspects of cycling and cycling culture
Episode duration: typically ~30m, with occasional longer specials
Frequency: weekly

London’s Resonance FM broadcasts not what we would think of as straightforward talk programming, and not what we would think of as straightforward music programming, but something called “radio art.” This broad label turns out to cover a badly underutilized patch of radio’s philosophical spectrum, one safely distant from both bland jukeboxing and tiresome politicking. Eschew traditional news, sports, hits, and complaints, and you open up the creative space for shows a thinking listener might actually enjoy. This I realized when I Podthought about the podcast of every Resonance FM broadcast available in that form. I’d previously written up The Wire magazine’s Adventures in Modern Music, the most straightforward music show I’ve heard on Resonance (and The Wire has R. Stevie Moore on its cover this month). Now I’ve cycled back around, as it were, to listen hard to a program no other station has produced, or possibly could produce: The Bike Show [RSS] [iTunes].

When first I heard The Bike Show, host/producer Jack Thurston impressed me not only with his professionalism and stealthy production skill — qualities not immediately associated, alas, with freeform radio — but a dedication that had him not only chatting in the studio but recording out in the field, on long trips, and even while riding. (These signature “rolling interviews” have their own page on the show’s site.) But back then I lived in Santa Barbara, where cycling meant only an idyllic way to commute. Now that I’ve dropped myself into the vast complexity of Los Angeles with my old brown Nishiki as primary means of transport, cycling has taken a rather more essential place. An encounter with David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries made me consciously grasp a fact my lifestyle had already incorporated: no more efficient, absorbing, and intellectually or aesthetically connected form of urban transportation exists. I had much to learn; I had to catch up on The Bike Show immediately.

You might find yourself in a similar position, but, especially if you live in the United States, you might not turn to this show’s guidance out of two fears: one, that Thurston gears it toward other Londoners, and two, that he gears it toward other, er, gearheads. Resonance’s location does mean that The Bike Show and its guests tend to discuss cycling in Engand and continental Europe. But I don’t mind that, since cycling across the pond seems locked into less of a garrison mentality than it does here; cultural changes are indeed underway, but America’s legacy of marginal, abrasive, spandex-coated car-loathing eccentrics dies hard. London, by comparison, would seem to boast a robust population of well-rounded, normally dressed, non-aggrieved riders, yet Thurston and his coterie bring up concern after concern about their city’s lack of sufficient infrastructure and basic regard for the two-wheeled. Denmark and the Netherlands, where toddlers and octogenarians alike ride helmetless and fearless for their every errand, come up again and again as the consummately bike-friendly countries against which all others must be judged. The term “Copenhagenize” sees much use.

Los Angeles, it will shock you to learn, has taken few pains to Copenhagenize. Happily pedal though I may over these 500 square miles — especially when we’ve got a CycLAvia going on — it only takes hearing a conversation between Thurston and the British and European bike enthusiasts, bike builders, bike racers, bike collectors, and bike writers he brings into the studio or connects to by Skype to suspect I might lack something in the way of accommodation. But thanks to Thurston’s enthusiasm, the briskness of his operation, and the variety of perspectives he brings tgether, this doesn’t actually discourage me. Quite the opposite, in fact; the next time I feel burnt out after a long, loud, lonely ride down one of this city’s bike routes in name only — Venice Boulevard, say — I’ll click on an episode or two of The Bike Show for an instantly revitalizing shot of cycling culture. I can’t listen at home without wanting to get right back on the streets, inhospitable as they may sometimes feel.

And this brings me to address that second fear: cycling culture, on this program, means more than ranking derailleurs. Thurston occasionally invites guests who sound like they’d gladly rank derailleurs for the duration of the broadcast and beyond, and perhaps he himself longs to do the same, but The Bike Show sounds dedicated to not drilling too far into any one subtopic. This is not a show about the mechanics of cycling, the business of cycling, the science of cycling, the sport of cycling, the history of cycling, or (heaven help us) the politics of cycling: it’s a show about all of them and everything else besides. As driving a car steadily becomes a stodgier, more expensive lifestyle choice, the humble bicycle has its chance to recapture the imagination of a large, able, willing, developed-world population outside of Copenhagen. But to do so, it needs as few monomaniacs as it can get. Every skillful essayist treats their chosen subject as a nexus of all subjects; in each episode of The Bike Show, we have from Jack Thurston and his collaborators a skillful essay indeed.

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

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Vital stats:
Format: sound-oriented radio fictions
Episode duration: 9-18m
Frequency: 2-3 per month

“I thought there would be a revival of fiction and theater on the radio,” says science-fiction author Terry Bisson, “and I’ve been very disappointed that it hasn’t, kind of, worked out that way.” You and me both, brother. I say this as someone who, in childhood, obsessively collected bootleg tapes of old-time radio shows like Amos & Andy and X Minus One and had the newer, more internationalist productions of the ZBS Foundation playing on infinite loop. I dreamed of re-introducing “movies for your mind,” in the words of one radio-drama survivor whose tapings I attended as a kid, to the dead airwaves of my benighted time. Bisson made his lament to producer Jonathan Mitchell on an episode of Mitchell’s podcast The Truth [RSS] [iTunes] which adapts Bisson’s story “They’re Made Out of Meat” [MP3]. I bet Mitchell went through similar youthful befuddlement, wondering what made all those cool old shows go away and hoping — knowing, in some quasi-messianic sense — that they would return. It hasn’t, kind of, worked out that way.

What to blame? Maybe the increasingly utilitarian slant of modern American radio, which either feeds listeners’ anxiety over not having the latest news and information or numbs them completely with three-minute shots of anesthetic familiarity. But I get the sense that, deep in the minds of even dedicated tuners-in, radio just isn’t for fiction. They may express great admiration for the idea of new radio drama, and they may even bemoan the past 50 years’ lack of it, but they’ll keep turning the dial if they suspect what they’re hearing isn’t true. I doubt they do it for strictly gray-flannel-suit reasons; they probably just fear that they can’t keep up with a fictional narrative on the radio, or that they’ve already missed some plot point critical to understanding what happens next, or that they’ll get where they’re going before the big twist ending when everything falls into place. Or they just assume the story won’t give them much to talk about at the water cooler.

Today’s radio fictions often try to pull listeners in with intricate production, artful editing, and heavy (to use a program-director term) sound-richness. But this tends to simply fill listeners with guilt about not paying attention: “Man, somebody worked hard on this piece. What a shame.” This American Life has built one of public radio’s most startlingly successful brands by refining their particular sensibility with intricate production, artful editing, and heavy sound-richness, but then, they run a Journalistic Enterprise of Facts — unless, of course, they wedge a bit of fiction into the week’s theme. (Or unless someone pulls a Daisey.) Some listeners feel faintly ripped off when Ira Glass announces a short story, skit, or dramatic monologue coming up, but a few minutes in, don’t they get caught up in it just the same?

They certainly seemed to when This American Life aired The Truth’s “Tape Delay” [MP3]. The piece, a tale of a lonely man who edits and re-edits a phone conversation recorded with a failed blind date, showcases a sonic awareness that separates Mitchell and co. from other radio fictionalists. At its strongest, The Truth takes sound not just as its tool, and not just as its medium, but as its subject. The New York story “Interruptible” [MP3] juxtaposes the snappy, authoritative media presence of an FM relationship-advice guru with her real, boozy, yet no less sensible physical presence. The other New York story “Everybody SCREAM!!!” [MP3] — actually, they’re almost all New York stories, and they satirize just the kind of neuroses that make me live in Los Angeles — pits twitchily human thoughts in a struggle with the driving thump and chintzily amplified barking of a “spin” class. Bisson’s all-dialogue “They’re Made Out of Meat” becomes what sounds like a two-way transmission between alien intelligences evolved to the point of disembodiment.

If you have ears to hear, you will respect The Truth, and not just because its mission seems so Quixotic. It aims for the world of listeners we’d like to be: attentive, empathic, adventurous, unfailingly engaged, aesthetically discerning, and appreciative of the technical points of soundcraft. You’ll come away from most of its episodes feeling seriously impressed by their inspiration, their construction, and their humanity. But whenever you go to play another, that little voice inside will always object: “What, you’re going to listen to something made up? Are you sure you’ve already listened to every real podcast you have?” Jonathan Mitchell must understand this. His program’s very title must reference this. But if any show can finally fire up that revival of fiction and theater on the radio, The Truth can. I admit that I ultimately tend to put my money on people who don’t need human nature to change — but I myself am probably not one of those people.

Comment or suggest a podcast on the Podthoughts forum thread

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

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Vital stats:
Format: interview-conversations about “the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl”
Episode duration: 12m-1h20m
Frequency: weekly

Suburbia sucks, and ever-rising energy prices will soon destroy it. There you have the collected ideas, in caricature, of self-styled public intellectual James Howard Kunstler. For twenty years, he’s worked the city-planning, architecture, transit and urbanism/New Urbanism beats, territory where self-styled public intellectuals have been known to tread. Perhaps you’ve read the work of activist-journalist Jane Jacobs, to whom Kunstler often gets compared. When her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities grew famous and influential, the caricature of her ideas developed as follows: modernist urban planning (i.e., freeways and function separation) sucks, and if you let it happen, it will soon destroy you. These caricatures fail to convey the depth and nuance of Jacobs and Kunstler’s writing, as caricatures do. Alas, it seems that public intellectuals, especially self-styled ones, pay the price of caricaturization to find purchase in the zeitgeist.

If you wish to know more about precisely why Kunstler thinks suburbia sucks, allow me to suggest The KunstlerCast [iTunes] [RSS]. Taking a more unusual form than it might at first seem, the podcast presents a weekly conversation — more formal than a two-sided gab session, but looser than an interview — between Kunstler and co-host Duncan Crary. Aside from the occasional field trip to real streets and malls and such, each episode has Crary asking Kunstler for his thoughts on a certain subject, be it a city he’s recently visited like, say, Portland [MP3]; the work of another urbanist like, say, Jane Jacobs [MP3]; or even the very definition terms as basic as “urban” [MP3]. This may sound a tad technical or academic, but Kunstler, neither an academic nor a technician, seems constitutionally unsuited to letting conversations go dry. The man comes armed with judgments, often swift and harsh, about which cities he finds livable, which cities he finds hellish, and which cities he feels certain that energy crises will simply sweep away.

Kunstler premises many of his opinions, if not all of them, on his observation that the end of cheap energy — the “peak oil” crowd has taken to him, and he’s reciprocated — means the end of the energy-burning lifestyles dominant in America since the Second World War. Your detached, single-family, lawn-surrounded McMansion? Your hour-long freeway commute? Your 11-miles-per-gallon SUV? (Or your hybrid SUV, for that matter?) Prepare to kiss ’em goodbye, warns Kunstler. He worries that the country has fallen into hopeless denial about all this, but I feel no particular anxiety. If you, like me, grew up in a remote bedroom community dreaming of the ability to go to a building that wasn’t a house, you probably have the maracas out and ready for your dance on suburbia’s grave. Suburban energy inefficiency didn’t really bother me, but crushing suburban tedium sure did. Like the rest of a wave of twentysomethings Kunstler at times acknowledges (and whose presence I notice more and more in Los Angeles), I’ve made a flight, perhaps permanent, to density, diversity, and carlessness.

Listening to The KunstlerCast therefore gives us urbanites the buzz of having our suspicions spoken back to us, although Kunstler and Crary can get themselves into such acerbic feedback loops about suburbia that the show starts feeling like an echo chamber. As these guys beat up on the defenseless ’burbs, I sometimes want to cry out like the kid who watched Homer Simpson beat up the Krustyburglar: “Stop, stop, he’s already dead!” Much more interesting conversations happen when Crary gets Kunstler going on the hows, whys, and whats of suburban development: how did so much of the United States wind up so sterile, same-y, and inconvenient? Why did we let it happen? What physically makes these cities so undesirable? Kunstler does his best, in other words, when generating less heat and more light. I’ve thus found Kunstler’s descriptions and analyses of various cities, heighten them though he may, the most fascinating of all. (Though I admit to wincing when he exaggerates about places I know, as when he flatly speculates that it must cost Angelenos “a thousand dollars a week” just to park their cars [MP3].)

Unfortunately, people seem to like to pay Kunstler, as they like to pay most public intellectuals, to talk about the future. Forced into prognostication, a mug’s game if ever there was one, even the best tend to fall back onto an uneasy mixture of untestable provocation and squirrely hedging. Kunstler doesn’t wallow in that, but I get the sense that his proclamations on the coming age, some of which border (if only psychologically) on the apocalyptic, serve more as potential memes than tools of enlightenment. Murmurs of “James Howard Kunstler says peak oil will turn women back into homemakers” or “James Howard Kunstler says we’ll travel only on rivers by 2030” may not accurately represent either the future or Kunstler’s idea of the future, but I suppose they get him attention. And attention, I note with a sigh, seems to be the name of the public intellectual’s game.

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

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Vital stats:
Format: elucidation of oft-name-checked but thinly understood ideas
Episode duration: 9-20m
Frequency: monthly, almost

My brain has filed Benjamen Walker, host and producer of WFMU’s Too Much Information, as one of our time’s major public radio martyrs. Yes, the man seems alive and well, but public radio martyrdom doesn’t require literal death. He can go on breathing, eating, sleeping, and working, making intricate audio pieces for which people express great admiration on the internet; he simply must symbolize the bizarre thanklessness of crafting fine sonic media. When Bill McKibben wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books on just this phenomenon a couple years back, he quoted Walker directly:

[Too Much Information is] good enough that 240,000 people have downloaded some of the twenty episodes he’s made so far. That’s a lot of people, but it’s zero money, since podcasts, like most websites, are by custom given away for free. Walker’s previous show, a similar effort called Theory of Everything, was widely promoted on the Public Radio Exchange, and six public radio stations across the country actually paid for and ran it. “I think I made $80,” he says. “If I thought about it too hard, I would just quit. It’s much better not to think about it.”

This brings to mind Memory Palace creator Nate DiMeo’s alternately encouraging and debilitatingly discouraging article on public radio production. Walker commented with a j’accuse against stations willing to pay for digital consultants, brand consultants, and “content executives” instead of, uh, content. A bold declaration, you might think, although I personally would have tossed in an indictment of stations’ badly limiting and increasingly shameless tendency to pander to, and only to, listeners’ fear of having their ignorance exposed at the office water cooler. No surprise, then — or not so much of a surprise, anyway — that Walker’s latest high-profile project comes not in collaboration with a traditional public radio outfit, but with the British newspaper the Guardian. Together they bring you The Big Ideas [RSS] [iTunes], a podcast on just those.

Though new, the show has already attracted an engaged following. Just look at the robust commenting going on below its posts at the Guardian’s site, especially those about Nietzsche’s declaration that “god is dead” and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” By “big ideas,” The Big Ideas clearly means the ideas you hear referenced every day, but of which — let’s face it — you’ve probably never sought a full understanding. Conventional media wisdom surely endorses not only this podcast’s method of using what many people feel kinda-sorta familiar with as a “hook,” but also its episode length short enough for any attention span. You’ve heard how Marshall McLuhan said that “the medium is the message” and don’t quite grasp what he meant, right? Well, you got ten and a half minutes? [MP3]

The program’s iTunes page reveals a certain listenership overlap with the BBC’s In Our Time (reviewed by my esteemed predecessor Ian Brill), another venture dedicated to the elucidation of semi-known concepts. Think of The Big Ideas as In Our Time Walker-ized: still made up of conversations with scholars of the day’s subject, but artfully cut together and compressed with music, historic sounds, and a unifying sense of humor rather different than any you’d hear on Radio 4. The show’s constructive critics tend to complain about the fact that no episode, even the ones on especially complicated or relatively obscure ideas, runs longer than about twenty minutes. They’re not wrong to do so, since Walker’s skills have shone brightest in his long-form productions, but I do admit that, in my ideal radio world, all shows would resemble the most recent installment of Too Much Information: 57 minutes with the guy who draws Zippy the Pinhead. Alas, I suspect that sort of thing meets limited immediate acceptance in our bite-oriented, post-99% Invisible soundscape.

Still, I enjoy 99% Invisible as I enjoy Too Much Information as I enjoy In Our Time as I enjoy The Big Ideas — let a thousand flowers bloom. DiMeo actually cites 99% Invisible as the rare bright, shining star in the chilly emptiness of podcast-to-radio professionalization. McKibben named Ira Glass as a similarly respected (and thus imitated) force for creativity in the radio-to-podcast direction. Long ago, I heard that Glass once toiled and toiled for only $60,000 a year and furrowed my brow at the injustice of it all. Now the forbidden thought of ever making that much — or half that much — triggers my wildest, most opulent fantasies. With The Big Ideas, Benjamen Walker offers us a hybrid of In Our Time and 99% Invisible while playing the Glassian combined role of guide, audience surrogate, interviewer, and auteur. I hope he’s well-compensated these days. If not, I hope he’s read McKibben describe radio in England and Australia — “new programs appear regularly,” “how literate and engaged the programming” — and considered setting sail for greener, more appreciative broadcasting pastures.

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

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Vital stats:
Format: interviews about politics, history, science, and culture, both Canadian and non-
Episode duration: 8-28m
Frequency: 10-20 per month

Though it strays more often than it used to, I do keep an eye on Canadian politics. I do it for the same reason I keep an ear on Canadian media. The products and actions of a country with fewer than 53 million people and little direct influence on world affairs may strike you as less interesting, by definition, than those of a country with over 312 million people and arguably too much influence on world affairs. But since the small country doesn’t face nearly as harsh a glare of attention as the large country does, it can to that extent provide a setting for items of greater interest. So as marginal as Canadian politics and media can seem, I enjoy both because things exist within those systems that feel like they couldn’t exist in the States. Here, burdened with the need to appeal to hundreds of millions of people at once, politics and media get “blanded down.” They certainly haven’t produced anyone like Allan Gregg.

Neither a straight-up politician nor a traditional media figure, Gregg often gets called a “pollster” or a “pundit.” He’s advised politicians and parties, but he’s also run a record label, co-managed several bands, chaired the Toronto International Film Festival, and written magazine columns. But you read about him in Podthoughts today because of his talk show, Allan Gregg in Conversation [RSS] [iTunes]. Though produced as a television show for the Ontario public station TVO, it goes out as an audio podcast as well, and nothing I’ve heard on it suggests that I’m missing out by not getting the visual. From what I can tell, Ontarians sit down every Friday night for a half-hour program comprising a conversation or three between Gregg and noted writers, politicians, artists, and academics. The podcast feed distributes these conversations individually, and sometimes throws in a curveball of a talk from five, ten, even fifteen years ago. Ready to cast your mind back to the personal and professional failings of Bill Clinton? [MP3] [MP3]

Wait a while, you might say. Wasn’t this supposed to be a Canadian show? So where do they get off having spirited discussions about Bill Clinton? Fair enough; perhaps you’d prefer Gregg’s interviews about Jack Layton [MP3] or Pierre Trudeau [MP3] or Brian Mulroney [MP3]? Or perhaps you’d like to skip to the tour de force, Gregg’s sit-down with Jean Chrétien [MP3], the former Prime Minister who once bore the brunt of an infamous attack ad launched by Gregg himself? I don’t know about you, but when I listen to conversations like these, the same fascination centers of my brain light up as when I hear people discussing sports I rarely see played or fictional universes to which I have only occasional exposure. You might call it the intellectual thrill of partial information, as opposed to the dull intellectual throb of too much, a saturation level many Americans have long since reached about, say, George W. Bush.

So I don’t want to front like too much of a universally engaged world citizen here, since I mostly turn toward this Canadian stuff simply because it feels kinda different. And Gregg concerns himself with much more than Canadian politics or even Canadian affairs, inviting onto his program such true world citizens as Pico Iyer [MP3], Salman Rushdie [MP3], and Kazuo Ishiguro [MP3]. Douglas Coupland, the interviewee whose two appearances [MP3] [MP3] brought me aboard the show in the first place, has one foot on each side of Gregg’s guest list. Since writing Generation X those twenty years ago, he’s become both a proud icon of Canadian culture (just look at the line he designed for Roots, festooned with literal icons of Canadian culture) and a much-translated author popular across the world. Something about his manner, on this program and elsewhere, gets at exactly what draws me in about the Canadian sensibility, as it manifests itself in politics, in media, and — for all I know — forms beyond.

Both Coupland and Gregg speak in a manner that at first seems mild, subdued, measured — beige, almost. And if you don’t look or listen closely to Canada as a whole, much of it, too, can seem beige. But give your close attention, and it resolves into a highly unusual, nuanced shade of beige indeed. On their surfaces, Coupland, Gregg, and other pillars of Canadian media like Ideas or The Signal exude a calmative force. That in itself I value, but they also carry a payload of secret interestingness afforded by their northern provenance. Alan Gregg would appear to follow all the standard rules of interviewing — read the guest’s book, play devil’s advocate when necessary, “keep things moving” — but he does so with a subtly individual style and a seemingly genuine curiosity. The cumulative effect of these qualities over hours upon hours of listening to Allan Gregg in Conversation has led me to think of him as one of the most quietly incisive general-interest interviewers of our time. Show me the American pollster who can transcend talking-head status to achieve that — or would even want to.

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

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Vital stats:
Format: one young writer interviewing others
Episode duration: 30-50m
Frequency: weekly, in series of ten episodes

If you’ve passed through an institution of higher learning in the last twenty years, you twitch, almost imperceptibly, when you hear a word like “subaltern.” You do the same when upon hearing the terms “hegemony,” “rearticulation,” or “(dis)loc[a/u]tion.” You twitch because you remember feeling plunged into insoluble confusion, right where you sat in the lecture hall: you didn’t know whether to believe your professor was feeding you these whole verbal grapefruits in the good-faith service of important points, or whether they were just screwing with you. Maybe, as certain high-profile academics argue, their complicated arguments could only find honest expression in a vocabulary whose very comprehension demanded a mental struggle. But maybe, having themselves started out as wide-eyed undergraduates with an unquenchable love for novels or a pang in their hearts over the world’s injustices, these professors ultimately found themselves marooned in an academic hellscape of fear, insecurity, and obfuscatory self-justification. Maybe they knew only one way to rattle the bars of their cage: to make you share their painful bewilderment.

Imagine my relief, then, to find that The Subaltern Podcast [RSS] [iTunes] comes not from a haunted-eyed lecturer but from a hard-tweeting novelist. This novelist, a certain Nikesh Shukla, seems to have written a book called Coconut Unlimited, about some young British Indians who form a collectively inept hip-hop trio. I would like to read this book, just as I would like to read the many hundreds of other books that new writers all over the Anglosphere (and, in translation, beyond) are putting out as we speak. But how to choose where to begin? Even the most dedicated readers suffer under the burden of many, many thousands of exciting novels they could never hope to live long enough to crack, and that doesn’t even include the countless undoubtedly brilliant ones to be published over the rest of their lifetimes. This problem surely weighs even heavier on Shukla and his Subaltern interviewees, all reasonably young writers who must compete against every novel ever written for vanishingly scarce readerly attention.

No wonder the faces I see at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conferences look freighted with such woe. Yet I remember a reading at one of them from a someone seemed entirely, or at least relatively, free of despair: the Israeli short-story writer Etgar Keret, whom Shukla interviews in The Subaltern’s seventh episode [MP3]. Despite never having read Keret, I’ve caught enjoyable impressions of his personality in the literary zeitgeist, just as I have those of Colson Whitehead [MP3] and Teju Cole [MP3], two of Shukla’s other guests, both of whom write critically acclaimed novels, both of whose writing I know primarily from Twitter. Most of the other writers on the show appeared as, and remain, unknown quantities to me. Perhaps they publish only in the United Kingdom? Even Coconut Unlimited looks not to have gotten a release here. I imagine a United States publisher trying to figure out how to explain to American readers that, in Britain, “Asian” doesn’t just mean Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, then just shrugging and saying “screw it.”

I downloaded all of Shukla’s pub-, hotel room-, and Skype-recorded conversations after getting word that he’d interviewed Cole, whose debut novel Open City caught my eye last year. Random House, as Cole tells Shukla, mounted a strong media strategy for the book, which culminated in a capture of that literary golden calf, a review from the New Yorker’s James Wood. Referencing diaristic prose, Iain Sinclair, urban internationalism, unjudging gazes, and W.G. Sebald, this article fired me up in a way that nothing about any new novel has done in years. This led me to Cole’s Twitter feed, an exercise in reinterpreting the “small fates” described in the newspapers of modern Nigeria and old New York, which led me to The Subaltern. My collected knowledge of Cole and his work enriched the listening experience — even the parts of it mainly about Mos Def.

Alas, my lack of knowledge of many of the others on Shukla’s guest list might have hurt my listening experience. I come away from these interviews having gotten all sorts of vibes of irreverence and intellectual energy, but also regretting that I hadn’t spent time familiarizing myself in advance with whatever it is they actually, y’know, write. Even without laying the usual explanatory groundwork, Shukla draws out many an insight into their writing processes and the cultural pursuits — zombies, viral videos R. Kelly — that drive them. And hey, this is, after all, The Subaltern, whose site defines that term as “persons socially, politically and geographically outside the hegemonic power structure.” I should accept, amid my twitching, that I’ll occasionally have to do my own research. Or maybe I’ll have to stop doing most of my listening while riding tipsily home on the Blue Line. One night, I looked across the aisle and noticed another fellow, also with headphones in, and what was he reading but Open City. Even I haven’t gotten around to that!

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