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.
