RADIO BUZZ

Satellite radio has buzz, with Howard Stern, Eminem, Maxim magazine signed to host shows for big bucks, and now moviemeister Robert Evans signing up. But the great radio medium is already here. It's on the Web, and it's not part of any commercial hype.

For instance, Alternative Radio lets you to hear Arunditi Roy speaking about "Public Power in the Age of Empire," or giving an interview entitled "Seize the Time," or Bill Moyers on "Journalism & Democracy," or John Sayles on his latest film, or Howard Zinn on "Resistance & the Role of Artists." And fellow ArtsJournal blogger Kyle Gann's Postclassic Radio" offers the latest in contemporary serious music that you'd never hear anywhere else.

I mention all of that by way of introducing Doug Gordon's terrific new program "New Audio Showroom" on Wisconsin Public Radio, which is available on the Web. There have only been three broadcasts so far, and the title is not the greatest. (It sounds like an auto dealership.) But I'm hoping the show becomes a mainstay.

Gordon is a longtime radio producer who has great taste in pop culture. It's a gas listening to Monty Python's Eric Idle sing "That's Death" à la Sinatra's "That's Life" in his interview with Gordon on the first broadcast, "The Rumpus Room" (scroll down and click to listen); or hear Idle singing the lyrics of another song:

Always look on the bright side of death
Just before you draw your terminal breath

Idle does a great little sketch about his dead mother à la Joe Orton, and Gordon gets him talking about mockumentaries, a genre he believes he originated, and about his upcoming Broadway musical, "Spamalot."

The hour-long show also includes an exquisite film chat by drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs, whose latest book, "Profoundly Disturbing," features 15 essays on flicks "your momma didn't want ya to see." What makes them disturbing, Briggs says, is "they're movies that went farther than movies before them. Bottom line, they rearrange our view of what constitutes normal or acceptable."

Examples? The first slasher-gore film. "'Blood Feast' -- definitely not acceptable in 1953," Briggs says. He includes "And God Created Woman," because "Brigitte Bardot was not accceptable in 1956" and the film "changed women." The gore film "changed punk bands." Profoundly disturbing films "work on the culture in different ways," he says. "Some of 'em bubble up from the underground and some of them have a direct effect on the way we talk, dress and act."

Speaking about "Crash," the 1996 flick directed by David Cronenberg, Briggs claims it's the first sex movie that avoids gratuitous sex. In other words, it has a lot of necessary sex. Here's part of the interview:

'Crash' is very disturbing. It disturbs me. Even people who like it find it really hard to deal with. It's about a world in which people have been so drained of emotion and ability to feel that the only way they can feel is through mutilation carried to the extreme -- and in this case, car crashes. Now it sounds like a silly idea when you first hear it. And, in fact, it was treated like a silly idea by most of the critics who reviewed it.

It's based on a novel by J.G. Ballard, but what [Cronenberg] has done is he's filmed it so pristinely and so coldly and directly that it's trancelike, It really pulls you in. ... What's interesting to me is that critics forever have been saying, "Well, you can always just take the sex scenes out of a movie and the movie's still there. Sex is always gratutitous." ... David Cronenberg makes a movie in which almost every scene is a sex scene, and if you remove any of the sex scenes you lose the whole thread of the movie. Every sex scene is integral to the plot. It's integral to telling the story. ...

The movie starts with three sex scenes, one after another. Hardly any dialogue. And when the public first watched it they were sort of, like, disoriented. What's going on here? When is the movie going to start? Well, the movie had started. You were learning a lot about these characters from the way they have sex. Now he didn't get any credit for this. He had made the first sex movie without any gratuitous sex in it. In fact, he was vilified for this movie.

The second broadcast, "This Canadian Existence" (scroll down and click to listen), has Canadian author Sara Vowell talking about "Cowboys vs. Mounties," Kyle McCulloch on his job writing for "South Park," comedian Dave Thomas on the SCTV characters he created (Bob and Doug McKenzie) and others discussing what it means to be a Canadian, or how it feels to live there as an American expatriate.

The third broadcast, "Audio Mavericks" (scroll down etc.), profiles "people who have discovered innovative ways to use sound, whether it's music, spoken word, ambient noise, or perhaps even the sounds of silence." They range from John Linnell and John Flansburgh of the alt-rock duo They Might Be Giants discussing their "Dial-A-Song" phone service to Steve Nieve on "music he has made with, and without, Elvis Costello."

Forget working today, listen at your desk and make believe you're furiously trying to out-produce your neighbor in the next cubicle. Before you know it, the boss will come over and pat you on the head to thank you for doing such a great job.