It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a nerd in possession of a mobile device is in wont of a good podcast. And for such nerds, it is the best of times.
Let's get our definitions clear. This category is specifically about book reviews and readings. We'll save podcasts about authors and writing for another day.
Man Booker is a name for a Dick Tracy character, not a book award.
This is a category that is close to my heart, (somewhere in the costomediastinal recess). As you may know, Americans are not eligible for the Man Booker Prize, which is why I haven't been short-listed. That and I haven't had a novel published. Yet!
In anticipation of my future literary success, I kept close tabs on my soon-to-be enemies, er, colleagues. In fact, book podcasts were my gateway drug into the seedy world of online audiophilia. It all started with the Washington Post Book World podcast. My interest in the subject outlived that winsome lass, sadly. But as gateway drugs always do, I moved on to New York Times Book Review and Selected Shorts and Libravox and Books on the Nightstand and Book Lust and and and...
What can I say? They're all great. Choosing the one essential podcast for this category, that's about as hard a task as man hath ever undertaken since the Deluge. "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
If any publication knows fiction, it's the New Yorker. Name an author and there's a sporting chance that they got their break in its hallowed pages. And it is this hallowed history that makes the podcast essential. The setup: an author who's been published in the New Yorker selects another writer's story from the archives to read aloud, followed by a discussion with fiction editor Deborah Treisman. Freakin' fantastic. My personal favorite (another Herculean task, picking that) is The Colonel Says I Love You by Sergei Dovlatov.
All you need to know about the Moldy Peaches is that they are an ultra lo-fi, mostly-defunct duo whose biggest claim to popular fame is having a song in the movie Juno.
Want more? Okay, check out these lyrics for Downloading Porn with Davo.
Now that's what I call good music!
Sleepin' in a van between A & B
Suckin' dick for ecstacy
Paid a 70 year old hooker to make out with me
Now the "get high shack" is just a memory
Downloading porn with Davo
Downloading porn with Davo
Put a latch on the door so Mama don't know
That I'm downloading porn with Davo
Tried to buy your love, but I came up short
So I fucked a little waitress in exchange for a snort
My girl's got a dick hangin' out of her shorts
Me and Eric in the bathroom with the weather report
Adam Green and Kimya Dawson formed The Moldy Peaches in the halcyon days of the Clinton era, when our only concern was making sure everyone properly dry cleaned their dresses lest they endanger the free world. They've been associated with the anti-folk music scene, and are probably best remembered for their whimsically homemade albums. After the band went on hiatus in 2004, Kimya has had a bit higher profile, releasing a children's album called Alphabutts in 2008 and popping up on soundtracks here and there. Adam Green has a number of solo albums and plays in Regina Spektor's band, which is pretty damn cool.
And here's a little trivia nugget for you: Kimya means 'silent' or 'silence' in Swahili.
NPR's All Songs Considered introduced me to this weeks M4M, The Low Anthem. If you're not familiar with All Songs Considered, and you're inclined towards music outside the mainstream, you have to check it out. Fear not, even though it's on NPR, it's not just jazz. They get into world music (which is a shit descriptor, like all the music outside of the English-speaking world is a single style), sub-genres, emerging genres, and everything in between. And their Tiny Desk Concerts really bring some of these bands to life.
The Low Anthem hits one of my happy buttons, having a mixed boy/girl line-up. On top of that, their most recent album, Smart Flesh, was recorded in a defunct pasta factory in Rhode Island. The cavernous space gives their tracks a subtlely haunting, lonely aspect that really resonates with their pained lyrics. If you read the reviews of their two studio albums, you'll see that many critics did not care as much for Oh My God, Charlie Darwinas they do the most recent release (Charlie Darwin was praised in many outlets when it was released, though). Certainly Smart Flesh is more cohesive and brings a consistent vision to the album. They clearly know their craft better. That said, I prefer Charlie Darwin. The title track is fantastic. And for my money, To Ohio is their best song. It has such a sparse, melodic presence, I will sometimes put it on repeat-1 when I'm writing or walking through the urban wasteland of Seoul.
If you're in the mood for something folk-y, you could do a lot worse than The Low Anthem.
Podcasts. Billions and billions of podcasts (say this in Carl Sagan's voice). In our lifetime, we cannot hope to listen to one tenth of one percent of extant podcasts. And every second, new podcasts are uploaded to the vast infrastructure that is the internet, several hundred hours of audio every day. Whole universes of knowledge and humor and pathos and crap, so so much crap.
We turn our ears to the speaker and yearn for sound waves to excite the thousands of cilia in our cochleas. When the podcast suits our tastes, the neurotransmitter dopamine is released, giving us a feeling of reward. Not unlike what happens with sweet and fatty foods, alcohol, and cocaine. Assuming we have a fairly typical mesolimbic system in our brain, the feeling of reward will increase our desire for good aural stimulation. The more we consume, the greater discernment most of us will apply to listening. Low quality work, boring narratives, repetition, unwarranted crassness, tension without payoff, these will not satisfy us.
Now, for many of us, we will experience a great deal of reward when we listen to something both entertaining and educational. Learning and fun, these are well established recipes for greatness. And what can be more educational than science? Fortunately, there are many, many science-related podcasts in our sliver of the universe.Unfortunately, we do not have an infinite amount of time in which to partake of them. So we must discern those that will cause us the most dopamine release. We can speed that process up through recommendations and reviews. Or by merely accepting what we say here (recommended).
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Okay, so Carl Sagan-y shenanigans aside, picking the essential science podcast has presented quite a challenge. There are a number of good science efforts, and there are a number of things that might be considered in the science category, like RadioLab and Professor Blastoff. What about skeptics' podcasts? Are they science? They cover science to quite a degree. Something like Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is almost entirely science, but they are technically approaching the subject from a skeptical point of view.
So, with this in mind, I've decided to do a separate entry for Essential Listening: Skeptics.
Without further ado, a tie...
Essential Listening: Science
This Week in Science - An irreverent review of the week's science and technology news, with neuroscientist Kirsten Sanford and Justin Jackson.
Star Talk - Neil deGrasse Tyson's podcast, and nothing Neil deGrasse Tyson does is not completely awesome.
Based out of L.A., Dengue Fever is fronted by Cambodian karaoke legend Chhom Nimol, who was recruited by brothers Ethan and Zac Holtzman. She sings most of their original music in
Dengue Fever is spread by mosquitoes and social media.
Not every song on their 7 albums works, especially when Zac takes a more central role. They're at their best when the songs cleave more closely to the heyday of Cambodian rock, though oddly enough 2 of my 3 favorite songs are in English.
If you've never listened to them or heard Carter-era Indochina rock&roll, you owe yourself a listen, if only to see what it's all about.
This happened awhile ago, around 2009, give or take. Back then, if I had my earbuds on, I was listening to music. And I had my earbuds in a lot. There were just so many things around me that I didn't want to hear, from the freaky-permed ahjummas popping gum in their mouths, to the incessant saccharine drone of K-Pop painting every sidewalk in the city, grating scooter honks, pigeons cooing, neighbors fighting: the white noise of city life.
A moth. The Moth.
Then something happened. Maybe I was listening to an archived episode of This American Life. Maybe I heard an interview with someone involved. Maybe it just permeated the ether. The details are fuzzy; there was a lot of drinking back then. Somehow or other, I became aware of The Moth. People telling true stories, live (when they were recorded), and without notes. Some were funny, some were vulnerable, some were enlightening, all were pure ear candy. It would not be terribly hyperbolic to say it changed my life. Well, that might be a bit hyperbolic, but I can say without reservation that it had a deep impact on me.
Immediately, I got hooked. I hit Subscribe in iTunes and probably listened to at least ten episodes that first day. Very quickly I had exhausted their archives and, like every addict, I started scrounging every nook and cranny for more. I was jonesing hard. I found a few more recorded segments here and there. I read interviews and transcripts. There was nothing I hadn't uncovered, distilled, and consumed. I still needed more. I turned to other sources, hoping for the same high. There was Risk! with ex-State alum Kevin Allison. It was good, occasionally better than The Moth, but different in its focus and tone in some ways. Every episode of The Moth consisted of segments from their live shows in New York and elsewhere. By contrast, Risk! began as a podcast and featured stories recorded in studio, at least initially. It has now grown into workshops and live shows and a host of other ventures.
But Risk! was not enough either. I found Storyworthy. I found Story Collider. I found podcasts that were quite different but still had strong narrative structure, like RadioLab and 99% Invisible.
Still not enough! I began considering how to organize something like The Moth here in Seoul among the expat and English-speaking community. Luckily, someone else got to it before I had to do it myself. Thus far, I've done two live storytelling events. While I was not the best storyteller of either night, I was also not the worst. Perhaps more importantly, those experiences changed the way I view storytelling in my fiction writing as well. And that is, in the end, what I am here to do.
Last week, we looked at my favorite band, Victorian cello-rockers Rasputina. In the same vein, let's talk about another band that I <3: The Dandy Warhols.
I hesitated before choosing The Dandy Warhols, as they are not nearly as obscure as most of the bands we chronicle in M4M. At the risk of damaging my hipster credibility (ha!), I can honestly say that The Dandy Warhols are worthy of a listen. And since their new album, This Machine, is coming out on Tuesday, it just feels right.
You haven't heard of them? What?! They've been around since freakin' 1997! They've had hits, been in ommercials, done theme songs for television programs...Okay, I'll admit that I didn't discover them until 2006, when I ran across their single Bohemian Like You, a mere five years after its release. I might have known about them a year earlier, when my co-worker Courtney (a real-life manic pixie dream[ish] girl) gave me a mix CD that included a few of their tracks, if I'd actually listened to it. She claimed that all people named Courtney share an unbreakable bond, so she and Warhols' lead singer Courtney(a boy) Taylor-Taylor were cosmically bound. But the first couple of songs on the CD were Ani DiFranco and Dar Williams, and I just was not in the mood for so much estrogen.
When the band first came together, they gained fame and notoriety around Portland, Oregon for their nudity-laden performances, apparently. I don't know, I wasn't there. Certainly there was full frontal nudity in their video for
Bohemian Like You . And while Bohemian remains their most popular song, their first hit was Not If You Were The Last Junkie on Earth. Many people learned about the Warhols thanks to Veronica Mars, which used We Used to Be Friends over opening credits. For some reason, the show used a shitty remix for the third season; and then they got cancelled? Coincidence?
The Warhols have put out eight studio albums and are working on a ninth as we speak. Of those eight, 2009's The Dandy Warhols Are Sound is the only one I can't recommend. The album is their original version of the tracks that went into 2002's Welcome to the Monkey House; they felt that Monkey House didn't capture the feeling and tone they wanted to convey. Personally, Sound sounds inferior to Monkey House. But then again, they're talented musicians and I'm...very much not. So their opinion deserves some consideration.
Imagine if you will, a young person living in an era of excess. Where nearly any want or need can be filled with relative ease, almost regardless of social class. The kind of era where people are not starved for information, but drowning in it. Now picture this young person attempting to filter out the white noise from the good stuff. It's just about impossible; sure he or she could look to peers for insight, or trust the reviews of strangers. But at the end of the day, he or she's gotta just dive into the flood of information and see which resonate. And maybe, if they're lucky, they'll find a few coral reefs out of the sargasso seas.
But if that young person is looking for history podcasts, they're in a virtual dead zone. The coral reefs and pockets of life are few and far between. But if they swim far enough, if they can hold their breath long enough, they'll eventually come across one, just one. That one is Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.
Yes, there are others. Stuff You Missed in History Class, which drops on a much more regular schedule, is nice and generally interesting; as the name suggests, they try to cover things that are overlooked, especially women's perspectives that don't always find much space in other history venues. But HH brings such a degree of knowledge, passion, and insight, it's difficult to compare anything to it.
Case in point, Carlin's 6 part series on the end of the Roman Republic. The only word that describes those episodes is epic. The final episode is over five hours(!!!) long. You might think this is excessive, even navel gazing. You might picture a rambling old professor droning on, following random tangents. Nope, not at all. As long as that episode was, you wanted it to be longer.
Man Booker is a name for a Dick Tracy character, not a book award.
Dengue Fever is spread by mosquitoes and social media.
