This American Life

[Chuck Nessa]

I guess this is the most appropriate forum to post this message.

The above titled NPR show is a favorite - very different each week. The reason for the posting is to get you to go to their site HERE and look for a program called "Music Lessons". It is episode #104 from the broadcast of June 5, 1998. You can listen online. The David Sedaris story called "Papa Was Not A Rolling Stone" is a classic. Everyone I play this for laughs 'til tears run down. The other stories are good too, but my family see's me in the Sedaris story. I must order the cd soon.

[Jim Alfredson]

I love this program. I listen to it as much as I can. Haven't heard this one... listening now... pretty funny!

[Peter Johnson]

This program is amazing. Have you guys heard the story about the production of Peter Pan?

[Brandon Burke]

Never miss it. My buddy is in post-production on a documentary about summer camps based on the summer camp episode of TAL from last year. (Hunt that one down too. It's especially good.)

[BruceH]

Chuck, the Sedaris story you mention is a big deal to my kids. It's in one of his books (Me Talk Pretty One Day, I believe) so I read it out loud to the family, and the kids said I'd better not act like THAT Dad. So one day I'm driving and I hear Sedaris reading that story on the radio. Then I said to the kids, who were also in the car at the time, "Hey, YOU guys should really play some instruments and start a band--" They screamed and yelled. Then I got a book-on-tape version of Me Talk Pretty out of the library. Great for driving, because the whole thing is read by Sedaris himself. Played parts of it over and over. The upshot of it is that I only have to say something like, "You know, you guys should learn a jazz instrument; it would be great, you could really swing..." to get my boys to scream in mock horror. Ah, the innocent joys of parenthood.

Funny as the story is, I really feel for the father. He discovered jazz all on his own and had a real passion for it. But it sounded like nobody else in his life gave a crap about it.

[DrJ]

Chuck, you're dead on - THIS AMERICAN LIFE is a killer show, and that Sedaris bit is a classic. I posted about the Sedaris piece some time ago (may even have been back on the BNBB), just about wrecked the car one Saturday afternoon while listening during a drive with my wife. ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY is a fantastic book, full of stories many of which are almost as hilarious ("Don't Fuck With the Rooster," which is about his younger brother, is one of my personal faves).

I love the way THIS AMERICAN LIFE is put together, with the music interludes during Glass' pauses. Really atmospheric.

Edited February 23, 2004 by DrJ

[Big Wheel]

("Don't Fuck With the Rooster," which is about his younger brother, is one of my personal faves).

Mine too (think it's actually titled "You Can't Kill the Rooster.") It features the classic line, "when shit brings you down, just say, 'fuck it,' and eat yourself some motherfucking candy."

[BruceH]

Words to live by.

[Jim Alfredson]

Did anyone ever hear the one about the poor kid who tried to commit suicide by dousing himself in gasoline in the shower and lighting a match? God, it was horrible. I was on my way somewhere and just sat in the car once I got to my destination for the entire 1/2 hour listening to that story. Amazing and very disturbing.

[clifford_thornton]

Words to live by.

Yup...

[Dr. Rat]

I must step in and say that this show is not distributed by NPR, but is distributed rather by PRI, Public Radio International. Needless to say, we get that all of the time. I use the royal we as an employee of that company.

TAL is one of the few shows of the last several years in radio that has reset everyone's ideas about radio. Each week is an adventure. I might recommend two episodes--"Squirrel Cop" and the one where they made the worst song possible by putting together things in music that people are repulsed by. Love it.

The funny thing about sitting in meetings with Ira Glass is that he uses that same cadence of speech when talking about anything. He is a very generous man and has done a tremendous amount for the public radio system.

Disclosure: I work for an unaffiliated public radio station--TAL runs on the competing station.

Anyhow, I've had this feeling about TAL, that it's been, oh, I don't know, commodified. That it isn't as good as it was when it was a struggling little sideshow.

This is a bit from an American Journalism Review piece on the show

WHAT HE'S SAYING: "I do leave a bit to be desired." He is talking about his voice, his persona, the character he has created for both the radio show and--equally important to the nation's public radio station managers, maybe even more important--the incredibly effective fundraising spots Glass produces, funny and even moving bits in which he does things like promise to deliver pizza to your door if only you will phone in a pledge.

"The voice of the host is the voice of the show. I think my character has to be a certain kind of person to make the stories go. What is he? He's not as irritable as I am, to start. Anybody who writes does a version of himself, only thinking a lot more. The character is me at my most interesting and curious, with a level of intensity that nobody could sustain.

"He's never really mean. He's better than me in every possible way. One of my failings as a performer is the manneredness--I'm trying to sound like I'm just talking."

WHAT VOGUE MAGAZINE CALLED HIS RADIO VOICE: "The aural embodiment of Sensitive Guy Who Is Friends with All the Girls."

HIS ACTUAL VOICE: There's a slight stutter, not a speech defect, but a verbal tic, a device. There aren't a lot of complete sentences. Many of the attempts, especially when he's in boss or editor mode, begin with the words "I feel like...," as in "Um, I feel like you're, um, like that word wants to be, well, you know, I feel like you have to play that pause, um, let that thought happen."

MOST PROFILES OF GLASS and This American Life focus almost obsessively on Glass' meticulous and absolute command over every tiny morsel of sound or silence on the program--how he stretches a pause, clips a word, adds a breath, insists on an intonation.

That is the heart of Glass' production method. But the heart of This American Life are the stories, and especially the reported pieces. The best shows take you someplace you've never been and make you see something you've always seen, but never noticed.

The show's weekly story meeting is a two-hour bull session, Glass and three producers yakking about, reveling in and dismissing stories, writers, entire realms of American life. Ideas are floated: Domino's Pizza sales shoot up during national tragedies (maybe), a person who advises churches on marketing themselves (only if it's about which theology sells, rather than how to be more family-friendly), a New York waiter who tries to sell actual garbage to customers by making it sound chic. ("That's very, very beautiful," Glass says.)

When one story strikes Glass as phony, he trashes it with a one-liner: "That's so Hydrox, man."

The weakest parts of the program are those that sound too self-obsessed, too indulgent, too much a product of our tell-all, look-at-me-I'm-a-victim society. For every couple of breathtaking tales of some cluttered alley of the nation's life, brought to life in captivating voices, there is a whining, pointless memoir by the likes of the show's resident cloying artiste, Sarah Vowell. There is a bit much of a rock aesthetic to a show that is essentially a jazz form--a highly controlled performance that sounds utterly improvised but is actually based on strict rules and firm tradition.

"We are so bombarded by manipulated narrative--every ad, every movie, every TV show," Glass contends. "So it's hard for people to get out from under that. So of course people are reading from their diaries in public. They want something real."

The real pours in daily at the studios of WBEZ, the Chicago station where Glass is based. This day's mail brings a large package from a New York man who has sent Glass the originals of his entire correspondence with his ex-wife, all their love letters, every scrap documenting the rise and fall of a marriage.

"Utterly banal, nothing new," Glass concludes after sifting through the packet. "It's hard to see what we'd do with it. Send it back."

Now Glass is looking to expand the franchise. There's a new CD of the show's greatest hits. He says he's doing Hollywood, meeting with network executives, talking about putting TAL on TV.

TV? How can that be? Can Glass' quirky, quiet manner translate to the big brash world of the tube? Could he succeed in a medium of four-second sound bites, a medium that Glass says "does not trust the power of narrative"?

"You can just feel the money on TV, the huge apparatus," Glass readily concedes, adding that, of course, he doesn't actually watch TV. "Whereas people hear the radio and it just sounds like a bunch of people talking. But I have an idea for a TV show that would be really, really good."

He proposes to do the same kind of stories he does on radio, using a tiny, handheld camera with no light, in the hopes that the camera will not alter events. Maybe the TV show will happen, maybe not. Glass professes not to care. "Opportunities are being offered to me, and I don't really see any reason to do anything but radio. But I don't want to wonder later what might have been."

Glass has not acted on most of the offers, in part because he loves the relative anonymity of radio. Radio, a fixture of our solitary commuter lives, operates more as a subculture than as the defining cultural force that television is. And if the proliferation of media on the Web, on cable and at the newsstand has undermined the sense that the country has one clear, common culture, that's OK with Glass. "When you have no one dominant thing," he says, "it's easier for a subculture like this show to exist."

Like many editors, Glass sometimes wonders whether he wouldn't be happier going back out on the street. But like many journalists, he's had his moments of thinking that perhaps there is nothing left to conquer. In the end, though, there are still enough moments out there: "I feel the stories in my heart. There's still a huge, undiscovered country."

I've listened to the show on and off for a while.

Lately when I hear the show it sounds kind of precious to me: I've gotten so used to Glass's rhythms, I can predict them. And he doesn't seem to alter them--the way he speaks, the way shows are paced, the technique: it sort of reminds me of watching the Ken Burns Jazz series--where you've become familiar with how this kind of story-telling technique works and it starts to get in the way of the story.

The "offbeat" stories seem calculated to surprise me, and they (therefore?) don't surprise me. There seems to be something deeply self-congratulatory going on in the realtionship he's establishing with the listenership.

So much of the show now seems so far from real. Like reality TV is so far from real.

Of course, there are still good shows--great ones, as good as anything on the radio. But there seems to be some real ossification going on, too, to me.

Though I might just be bitter and jealous,

--eric

[BruceH]

I was on my way somewhere and just sat in the car once I got to my destination for the entire 1/2 hour listening to that story.

This is the mark of a really good radio show!

I don't listen to This American Life all the time, but occassionally it will strike me like that (usually the more depressing stories).

As the show has gained notoriety, more people have praised Glass's anti-announcer voice, that nerdy, affectless monotone of his. I don't know... There are times when I could use a more "normal" voice, a Ray Suarez type voice for a change.