Podcast of the Week: WTF with Marc Maron

As soon as I became aware that podcasts were really, truly a thing -- which was last spring at the Transom workshop -- I heard about WTF with Marc Maron. It's a true podcast -- not a radio show and definitely not a public radio show. But when people were talking about their favorite podcasts, this one came up a lot.

I've hesitated to listen to it, not because I didn't think I would like it. I liked the bits I've heard of Maron (like his great segment on this This American Life episode about drugs -- by the way that whole episode is worth listening to). But I resisted listening to this podcast. Because it is really long. Really, really long. Like an hour and a half long. That's a commitment.

Recently, though, I gave it a try and what do you know -- everyone is right. Maron is great. He's like a funny, profane therapist or life coach. He's like that guy you knew in college or your friend's older brother, who could be kind of an asshole (see, the profanity is already influencing me!) but was also a guy you know you could call if you were in trouble. I liked listening to him talk for 90 minutes, though it wasn't all him -- a lot of his podcast is his guests talking.

Those guests are generally people from the entertainment world: comedians, actors, musicians. But they're talking about their lives. The first one I listened to was the episode with Allie Brosh, because I love her blog and book, Hyperbole and a Half. But the one I probably enjoyed the most was the recent one with Julia Sweeney. I always liked her but never knew a lot of detail about her life, other than that she'd dealt with some extremely bad stuff after her short stint on Saturday Night Live. She was fantastic -- funny, smart, kind, candid. She and Maron do different things and have had very different career arcs but connected just enough to have a great conversation -- it was like eavesdropping on the most interesting party conversation ever. I can't say I'll be listening to every WTF episode. There are just too many of them and they are too long. I have a lot of comic book-based TV shows to keep up with! But I'll be listening regularly. You should, too, or at least give it a try.

Podcast Press

Serial continues to occupy a lot of this space. For example,

In non-Serial podcast press:

Past recommendations:

Podcast of the Week: Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!

This week's podcast recommendation is Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!, a radio show from NPR (and WBEZ) -- so, not that new or edgy in the grand scheme of things. But exceedingly well done -- thanks, largely, to host Peter Sagal whose wit is both quick and sharp -- perfect at going exactly as far as he can or should on a public radio program without pulling punches.

Wait Wait seems especially good, to me, in its choice of panelists who offer a varied but funny wiseacre take on the news. And it seems especially good in comparison to other quiz shows on public radio.

But when you need a break from public radio's earnest sincerity, or just want to hear Paula Poundstone or Roy Blount, Jr., getting off some good lines, this will give a solid hour's entertainment. And the show's MC's have been perfect choices, from NPR veteran Karl Kassel to Chicago/A&E newsman Bill Curtis, who may as well have been the model for Troy McClure, the anchor on the Simpsons voiced by the late, great (sob!) Phil Hartman.

Podcast Press:

Even when Serial takes a week off, it still dominates the podcast press. Some examples from this week:

  • Serial's appeal for funds raised enough to pay for a second season. Yay, for radio storytelling and good luck meeting all those raised expectations!
  • The New York Times' David Carr writes a very smart piece about Serial that not only looks at that individual podcast but at how podcasting in general could affect the public radio environment generally and stations in particular.
  • Suddenly the Times can't get enough: Sarah Koenig is the subject of this week's Magazine interview.
  • Smart piece from Vulture (New York Magazine's culture department) about "the strange intimacy of Serial." Written from a place of both admiration and hesitation about why we are all enjoying this so much.
  • Entertainment Weekly gets on the bandwagon.
  • Gawker has a really interesting piece by a racial and economic justice attorney called "What Serial Gets Wrong." Her basic premise is that you can't "solve" the crime by just re-reporting the facts of the case, and that the answer to whether Adnan Syed is really guilty or not more likely lies in the actions of the Baltimore police and prosecutors -- who were unbelievably shorthanded and overwhelmed at the time of this crime. Which I have no doubt believing to be true. However ... the journalist in me feels defensive of Koenig & co. because while they are setting out to try to figure out what happened, they are also setting out to tell a story and that, they are obviously doing very well. And while I accept Duffy's premise I don't know how you would tell that story. Even as fine and determined a journalist as David Simon had to turn to fictional drama to show how messed up those institutions are.

Had enough? Some of these other posts use Serial as their jumping off point but are not focused on that podcast:

Past recommendations:

 

Podcast of the Week: Gravy

We were on the Serial thing early -- but Podcast of the Week is even earlier to this party. Check out Gravy, the new podcast from the Southern Foodways Alliance and you'll be in on the first course. Or the appetizer. You'll be one of the first at the table.

OK, you get it. Gravy's first episode debuted yesterday and it's a good listen. Perfectly timed for Thanksgiving, Gravy tells the story of the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina. I'd never heard of the Lumbee Indians, more shame on me, and I learned about food and culture and history, without feeling like I was being force-fed educational matter. And I'm really glad it was audio, because hearing the actual voices made it so much stronger. I'm looking forward to hearing what these guys come up with next.

Podcast press

Serial gets its own category in this section, since so much of the podcast press is driven by coverage of that show. For example:

OK! There were a few other pieces of podcast press that were *not* about Serial, though it sneaks a mention in some of them, if only as the starting base for alternative suggested listens.

Past recommendations:

Starring Alicia Zuckerman, Judy Blume & Miami Beach as itself

I’m not going to the Miami Book Fair this year, which makes me sad — especially since I’m going to miss my friend and editor/producer Alicia Zuckerman’s event with Judy Blume Saturday afternoon, about the Sally J. Freedman Reality Tour, a project Alicia worked really hard on. While Judy is best known for books like Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, Forever and the Fudge series, Sally J. Freedman is her most autobiographical book. It’s set in Miami Beach in the late ’40s, the same time Judy lived there as a kid. It’s been close to 40 years since I read it and I can still remember details like the fear/dread/excitement of Sally’s conviction that one of their neighbors was actually Adolf Hitler in disguise — and the pain of being stung by a man ‘o war jellyfish.

Even if you can’t make it to the event, check out the story online at WLRN’s website — along with the slide show and the accompanying tour of Judy’s Miami Beach. It’s good stuff, and more than just nostalgia especially if you know and love Miami Beach.

I also wanted to post a couple of recent book reviews I wrote for The Miami Herald. The first was the final book in Philippa Gregory’s Cousins War series, The King’s Curse.* More recently, I wrote about The Forgers by Bradford Morrow, a fine crime novel especially for those who like books about books and fans of 19th century gothic dread. And may I once again sing the praises of my alma mater, The Miami Herald, and editor Connie Ogle for continuing to publish book reviews and news about books and even pay local freelancers to write them? Many a larger newspaper has given up the effort entirely and just runs wire. Like the Book Fair and the great bookstore Books & Books, Connie and her team are irrefutable evidence that South Florida is a far more literary place than you’d guess.

* I liked this book a lot and the series as a whole has helped lead me to more of an interest in the Wars of the Roses, the run-up to the Tudor era. My favorites were probably The White Queen, about Elizabeth Woodville who married Edward IV, and The Lady of the Rivers, about Woodville’s mother Jocasta. Others, especially The Red Queen, about Margaret Beaufort, and The Kingmaker’s Daughter, about Anne Neville, I found more of a slog — probably because the women who were telling the story seemed so unhappy and powerless. Well, Beaufort wasn’t exactly powerless — she did successfully maneuver to get her son, Henry Tudor, on the throne. But she was just a drag to live inside of for a couple hundred pages. I wound up watching the Starz mini-series based on the books, The White Queen, and got into it eventually. I’d recommend it for anyone who’s jonesing for the next season of Game of Thrones, especially since George R.R. Martin has repeatedly said that his Song of Ice & Fire books are rooted in the Wars of the Roses.

What's Up, Docs

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Thanks to a last-minute decision to show up at a trivia contest, my husband and I won a total of 20 tickets to movies at the Key West Film Festival. This is the festival's third year and we've never made it before to any of the events. This year we had no excuse.

I saw eight movies in four days, half of them documentaries and, as usual, the documentaries impressed me the most. Maybe it's a nonfiction writer's prejudice but I  know how hard it is to turn factual information and real people into a compelling story. In these cases, they pulled it off. If any of these films make it to an art house cinema or an online platform near you, they are worth catching.

My favorite was probably No No: A Dockumentary about Dock Ellis, the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher from the 1970s who threw a no-hitter ... while tripping on acid. Apparently there's some doubt about that, though from Ellis' story it seems pretty clear that he was tripping his brains out the day before. The film is actually an in-depth, sympathetic but not hagiographic portrait of Ellis, who died in 2008. He made it to the major leagues in the late 1960s and was part of the post-Jackie Robinson generation that helped bring a new generation's attitudes to the baseball field -- and helped the Pirates win the World Series. There was lots of great baseball history and some interesting cultural history, too. And plenty of plain talk about the drugs; just about all the players took them (mostly "greenies," or speed) that should help provide some context for those who like to be all shocked, shocked about more recent doping in baseball ... or cycling or any other sport you'd care to examine closely.

Another good one was Point and Shoot, a profile of Matt VanDyke, a would-be adventure filmmaker who decides to embark on a "crash course in manhood" by riding a motorcycle and shooting digital film around the Middle East like a modern Lawrence of Arabia. He eventually winds up hanging out with U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and then, even more dangerously, joins up with Libyan rebels during the Arab spring. Reviews of this movie in Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times* were positive about the movie but very contemptuous of VanDyke, comparing him to Timothy Treadwell, subject of Werner Herzog's great documentary Grizzly Man. My husband and I had the same reaction -- we didn't find VanDyke anything like the egomaniacal delusional Treadwell. In fairness, we were about 10 minutes late to the movie so we missed the opening part about him being a selfish, spoiled son and boyfriend. But his account of himself as a filmmaker, which the reviewers seemed to hate, seemed fairly straight-up. And I could not help but admire a guy who, despite having absolutely no preparation and a pretty severe case of OCD, just plunges into a world about which he knows nothing ... and grows to love it so much that he risks his life. He struck me as naive but sincere, and not as self-aggrandizing as plenty of people I've met in real life who have done things much less impressive.

The last full-length documentary I saw was The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest, which I noticed because of this Miami Herald story by Cammy Clark. Here's a fairly positive review from Variety, too. It's a perfect documentary subject and exceedingly well told, with interviews with DeFriest, vintage films of the facilities where he was held and animations illustrating parts of his story in engaging yet haunting ways. Most chilling, to me, was the footage of the shrink whose testimony helped DeFriest get a life sentence after escaping from a mental hospital. DeFriest's original prison sentence was four years, for charges that stemmed from his "theft" of tools he believed his father had left him. The estate had not yet been probated, and DeFriest's stepmother called the cops. He was 19. He was also a MacGyver-like mechanical genius who could pick locks, fashion keys and weapons and destroy jail cells -- all of which he did, repeatedly, both in escape attempts and out of pure defiance. Whether he is mentally ill or not, it is a tragic waste of an intelligent life to keep a nonviolent offender locked up -- mostly in solitary -- for decades. The filmmakers are on a campaign to help win him probation. That's where the shrink comes in -- he's decided he was wrong all those years ago and is now testifying on DeFriest's behalf. But the shrink looks decidedly shifty, with bitten-to-the-quick fingernails, shaking hands and badly-dyed hair. It's just unsettling, and more than unsettling when you realize the impact this man has had on DeFriest's life .. and probably many more. And that DeFriest's fate is now dependent on him more than ever. This film makes you proud to be a Floridian. Not.

So thanks for the tickets, Film Festival! I saw a bunch of really interesting movies (the dramas were good, too: The Salvation, Alex of Venice, The Zero Theorem and The Imitation Game). I'll be back next year, paying for my seats this time.

* The New York Times review of Point and Shoot is worth checking out if only for its epic correction. As my husband said, "Did that guy even see the movie?"