The Show
So, if you've never heard of the Saltcast, it's one of the most instructive podcasts out there. It comes out of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine. Rob Rosenthal is an instructor there, and an independent radio producer himself. Each week, he picks out a piece one of his students in the documentary journalism program has done and presents it, along with a bit of dissection. Well, dissection's good, but nothing compared to VIVISECTION.
The piece in this episode is called Pizza Time!, produced by a student named Alex Malmude. We get some caveats from Rob at the beginning--this piece was something of a rush-job, and there's no story. More on that later. Now the piece.
It starts with a ringing phone. A pizza dude answers and...hey! it's about a pizza delivery driver. I was a pizza delivery driver. I can RELATE to this story. How BOUT that? The pizza dude (his name is Tom) finishes taking the order and, in classic delivery-driver fashion, says "Let's rock and ride." (How many permutations of that phrase are there, by the way? There's rock and roll, lock and load, rock and ride, load and rock? what else is left?) Tom introduces himself, saying he enjoys long walks on the beach, candlelit dinners, and we know, from this, that he is a "character." His first trip of the story takes him to an Econo Lodge, where he effectively chats up the buyer, and gets a nice tip. Tom is good at getting tips. "You gotta be their best friend in like 30 seconds," he says later. Ah, so that's how you get tips. I thought silent spite was the trick. As Tom rides around he doesn't really talk about much. He enthuses about pizza ("Everybody likes pizza. Pizza is an anytime food. I could eat pizza all the time") and how to avoid getting mugged in shady neighborhoods ("Just gotta walk tall.") and the quality of other drivers ("Nobody here knows how to fucking drive.") As Rob warned us, there isn't much story, but he says it's captivating enough just with the ambiance and the character. I'm not sure I agree. This piece does have one classic rush-job characteristic, which is no narration. Not many pieces can be carried without narration, or really well-considered interview questions, so that the subject tells the story himself. This piece has neither, but it is entertaining. And it brought back good memories, of cheese, of crust, of hot boxes of cardboard that greased your hands on warm summer days. Ah, memories.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
This American Life -- 11/29/09 -- "Middle of the Night"
The Show
Have you donated money to This American Life yet? You should. If you don't you're no better than a damn, dirty thief.
Damn good episode, TAL.
We start with a good old fashioned Ira Glass story. In this case the romance of working as an all-night temp typist. Waxes poetic on the beauty of the middle of the night. Transition to a bunch of teenagers who “pile into a Honda Odyssey minivan” and drive around their northern california suburbs, kidnapping their friends. They ride around, cracking jokes, and then go out to deserted zone where they imitate the Space Mountain ride at Disneyland, music and all. Cute stuff. That hyper-specific, banal, TAL special. Gets me all misty-eyed for my youth. Thesis: night time is special. Good enough. Let's get to the show.
First piece is done by the Planet Money team and Adam Davidson and Hannah Jaffe Walt. It's a story about a late-night produce market for most of the northeast. This piece is excellent, probably among my recent favorites--not least because it really hones in and milks this just-plain-interesting dynamic of old-breed deal-makers on the hunt. The piece starts with the great line “Eddie One-Way needs some pears.” Eddie-One-Way is a buyer, and they do a great job making him a character in the story, managing to get some really great, candid audio, including one segment where he harangues (and even yells at) a guy who he's trying to make a deal with. Adam and Hannah do the back and forth narration thing exceptionally well, even varying up the length of their comments so it doesn't get too dull, back-and-forthy. Also, Adam takes on the burden of being pedantic all “supply and demand” and what-not, while Hannah gets to be more lay-speak. Not only is the piece totally gold in terms of well-placed ambience, but it's just totally spot-on in terms of using narrative to deliver information about an unfamiliar world. We are constantly kept apprised of EOW's goals, motives, as well as given context for how EOW's actions relate to the general dynamics of the market as a whole. We even get to hear about One-Way Eddie's crush on a nearby seller. Excellent, excellent piece, through and through. More Planet Money, TAL. They might be your MVP.
Next up it's a story from The Moth. TAL relies on them pretty frequently, but I really enjoy most of the stories that come from them. This one is from a woman named Jennifer Hickson, who talks about a night she jumped out of her boyfriend's car at a stoplight, met and shared a number of cigarettes with a stranger whom she got a light off of and subsequently discovered was in an abusive relationship much like her own. The telling is pretty impeccable, with an attention to detail that you'd expect to see in a short story or an essay. A damned impressive amount of practice must have gone into preparing this. What's that voice good storytellers use? It's a number of voices. It's a perfect calibration of tone to content. Tone not just in the inflection but in the rhythm, and the pauses. Really well-told story, pretty gripping throughout. The story culminates with an act of touching generosity and paean to cigarettes. Good to find someone in cigarettes' corner, after all that nay-saying on the billboards and the packages and what not, though she admits at the conclusion that she's given up smoking.
Anyone listening to the Moth radio show? How is it? Worth an entire hour of radio? Who downloads from Audible? I do. Heard some really good stuff too. Barthelme, Foster Wallace, Charlie Rose interviews...
Piece about two producers visiting a Chik Fillet that's about to open, and like all new Chick-fil-A Fillet's is giving away a year's worth of free meals to anyone who waits around outside a full 24 hours before the opening. Dave Hill and Shana Feinberg, who Glass specifies are not real reporters, tell the story. Not much at all happens in the piece--maybe hence the caveat from Glass. They have trouble setting up their tent, they meet a guy who (and you can practically feel their gratitude at him for doing it) goes ahead and explains what the “typical” person waiting in line might be, and why he isn't that person. Something mildly weird happens when a Christian shows up and starts preaching to everyone waiting around. Dave talks to him and he turns out to be far less crazy than you'd might expect. This story has all the hallmarks of a failed excursion: lack of structure, urgent desire to overcome said lack of structure with “cute” moments that function on their own, a lot of emphasis on clever narration. All in all, a failure. I wasn't entertained enough to overlook their failure to uncover anything interesting going on. A word of advice for anyone embarking on a “Investigating Quirky Phenomenon That Possibly Involves Staying Out All Night/Spending Times With People Whose Motivations You Consider Strange”, it's probably a good idea to have an idea of the story you want to tell, beforehand. Otherwise it's just a jumble. It ends with a pretty lame song that Dave and Shana wrote. My vote, failure. By the way what's with all the squeaky-voiced girls on TAL? Is there some kind of quota system in place whereby they must hire 90 percent of the American population of nerdy-cute girls with nasally voices? Is there now a Sara Vowell type? What's going on here? Anyway, next story.
Interview with national guards-woman Lindsay Freedland who is stationed in Iraq. She traverses the country in convoys, and talks about the experience with producer Nancy Updike. The interview is informative, and Nancy is a really good interviewer. There's a great image at the beginning of the convoy looking like a string of “Christmas lights out at night.” There's something nice about phone sound-quality. I want to know what technology they're using because it sounds really clean--just the faintest sort of reorientation along the EQ spectrum toward the higher frequencies. But really, very clean, and something about the telephone-quality connotes, or maybe denotes, distance, which is helpful for this piece. Freedland is in Iraq during the conversation, so it's effective at giving a kind of subtly operating sense of great distance between her and us, which is a bit of what the piece is all about. Not much narrative arc, but the interview is short enough and filled with enough interesting specifics to hold attention.
The last piece is an essay from producer Jane Feltus about a time when she was 6 and suffered a major head injury. For some reason the story didn't really hold me. I guess I'm not that big on injury narratives. Also, prolonged discussion of head trauma makes me feel a little woozy. About five or so minutes in, not really being all that interested and, experiencing that wooziness I get from prolonged exposure to stories about head trauma, I turned it off. Sorry Jane. Nothing personal. I'm glad that your head healed.
And that's it for my review of “Middle of the Night,” another successful outing from the workhorse of radio. The giant is still up and strong, going around doing it's giant-y things. Good for it.
Have you donated money to This American Life yet? You should. If you don't you're no better than a damn, dirty thief.
Damn good episode, TAL.
We start with a good old fashioned Ira Glass story. In this case the romance of working as an all-night temp typist. Waxes poetic on the beauty of the middle of the night. Transition to a bunch of teenagers who “pile into a Honda Odyssey minivan” and drive around their northern california suburbs, kidnapping their friends. They ride around, cracking jokes, and then go out to deserted zone where they imitate the Space Mountain ride at Disneyland, music and all. Cute stuff. That hyper-specific, banal, TAL special. Gets me all misty-eyed for my youth. Thesis: night time is special. Good enough. Let's get to the show.
First piece is done by the Planet Money team and Adam Davidson and Hannah Jaffe Walt. It's a story about a late-night produce market for most of the northeast. This piece is excellent, probably among my recent favorites--not least because it really hones in and milks this just-plain-interesting dynamic of old-breed deal-makers on the hunt. The piece starts with the great line “Eddie One-Way needs some pears.” Eddie-One-Way is a buyer, and they do a great job making him a character in the story, managing to get some really great, candid audio, including one segment where he harangues (and even yells at) a guy who he's trying to make a deal with. Adam and Hannah do the back and forth narration thing exceptionally well, even varying up the length of their comments so it doesn't get too dull, back-and-forthy. Also, Adam takes on the burden of being pedantic all “supply and demand” and what-not, while Hannah gets to be more lay-speak. Not only is the piece totally gold in terms of well-placed ambience, but it's just totally spot-on in terms of using narrative to deliver information about an unfamiliar world. We are constantly kept apprised of EOW's goals, motives, as well as given context for how EOW's actions relate to the general dynamics of the market as a whole. We even get to hear about One-Way Eddie's crush on a nearby seller. Excellent, excellent piece, through and through. More Planet Money, TAL. They might be your MVP.
Next up it's a story from The Moth. TAL relies on them pretty frequently, but I really enjoy most of the stories that come from them. This one is from a woman named Jennifer Hickson, who talks about a night she jumped out of her boyfriend's car at a stoplight, met and shared a number of cigarettes with a stranger whom she got a light off of and subsequently discovered was in an abusive relationship much like her own. The telling is pretty impeccable, with an attention to detail that you'd expect to see in a short story or an essay. A damned impressive amount of practice must have gone into preparing this. What's that voice good storytellers use? It's a number of voices. It's a perfect calibration of tone to content. Tone not just in the inflection but in the rhythm, and the pauses. Really well-told story, pretty gripping throughout. The story culminates with an act of touching generosity and paean to cigarettes. Good to find someone in cigarettes' corner, after all that nay-saying on the billboards and the packages and what not, though she admits at the conclusion that she's given up smoking.
Anyone listening to the Moth radio show? How is it? Worth an entire hour of radio? Who downloads from Audible? I do. Heard some really good stuff too. Barthelme, Foster Wallace, Charlie Rose interviews...
Piece about two producers visiting a Chik Fillet that's about to open, and like all new Chick-fil-A Fillet's is giving away a year's worth of free meals to anyone who waits around outside a full 24 hours before the opening. Dave Hill and Shana Feinberg, who Glass specifies are not real reporters, tell the story. Not much at all happens in the piece--maybe hence the caveat from Glass. They have trouble setting up their tent, they meet a guy who (and you can practically feel their gratitude at him for doing it) goes ahead and explains what the “typical” person waiting in line might be, and why he isn't that person. Something mildly weird happens when a Christian shows up and starts preaching to everyone waiting around. Dave talks to him and he turns out to be far less crazy than you'd might expect. This story has all the hallmarks of a failed excursion: lack of structure, urgent desire to overcome said lack of structure with “cute” moments that function on their own, a lot of emphasis on clever narration. All in all, a failure. I wasn't entertained enough to overlook their failure to uncover anything interesting going on. A word of advice for anyone embarking on a “Investigating Quirky Phenomenon That Possibly Involves Staying Out All Night/Spending Times With People Whose Motivations You Consider Strange”, it's probably a good idea to have an idea of the story you want to tell, beforehand. Otherwise it's just a jumble. It ends with a pretty lame song that Dave and Shana wrote. My vote, failure. By the way what's with all the squeaky-voiced girls on TAL? Is there some kind of quota system in place whereby they must hire 90 percent of the American population of nerdy-cute girls with nasally voices? Is there now a Sara Vowell type? What's going on here? Anyway, next story.
Interview with national guards-woman Lindsay Freedland who is stationed in Iraq. She traverses the country in convoys, and talks about the experience with producer Nancy Updike. The interview is informative, and Nancy is a really good interviewer. There's a great image at the beginning of the convoy looking like a string of “Christmas lights out at night.” There's something nice about phone sound-quality. I want to know what technology they're using because it sounds really clean--just the faintest sort of reorientation along the EQ spectrum toward the higher frequencies. But really, very clean, and something about the telephone-quality connotes, or maybe denotes, distance, which is helpful for this piece. Freedland is in Iraq during the conversation, so it's effective at giving a kind of subtly operating sense of great distance between her and us, which is a bit of what the piece is all about. Not much narrative arc, but the interview is short enough and filled with enough interesting specifics to hold attention.
The last piece is an essay from producer Jane Feltus about a time when she was 6 and suffered a major head injury. For some reason the story didn't really hold me. I guess I'm not that big on injury narratives. Also, prolonged discussion of head trauma makes me feel a little woozy. About five or so minutes in, not really being all that interested and, experiencing that wooziness I get from prolonged exposure to stories about head trauma, I turned it off. Sorry Jane. Nothing personal. I'm glad that your head healed.
And that's it for my review of “Middle of the Night,” another successful outing from the workhorse of radio. The giant is still up and strong, going around doing it's giant-y things. Good for it.
The Moth -- 12/7/09 -- Teri Garr
The Show
Ok, I kind of hate the new Moth music. I should have said this sooner, but I didn't have a blog when it started so I'm saying it now. It cuts about 3 points off my mood every time I hear it. It does not promise fun storytelling. It promises anguish. It is aural anguish. I like violins. Just, not...not like this. Not this violin. Not now.
Also, continuing the hate, Dan Kennedy needs to give up that over-precious "doing the intro without notes thing". For one, he's probably done it so many times he could rattle off a perfect take without notes, so the fact that he insists on sort of ad-libbing his way through it, when really we just want to hear the requisite introduction and get to the story--I don't know. Too precious. Just rattle it off and let's get to the story.
That's a lot of complaints! Maybe I'm in a complainy mood!
So, the story:
Teri Garr finds out her boyfriend has been cheating on her and goes to his house to give him his things back, and "return" his hammer. Said hammer is used to smash boyfriend's windows. Boyfriend calls cops, Teri goes to an art gallery. Teri describes what she has just done, eliciting similar stories from other women, including one who cut just the left leg off her boyfriend's fancy suits, and another who shaved her name, or maybe someone else's name, in the back of his dog. Teri makes some remarks about LA being a place where this happens because it's a place with a lot of "sordid weird people seeking fame and fortune for nothing." She makes a Laci Pederson joke that gets groans. Ditto on the Robert Blake, with just a bit more spirit in it. She talks about her parents (who were somewhat sordid, and somewhat weird) coming to LA to seek their fame and fortune. She ends with this advice, regarding cheating boyfriends: getting "just up to the part where you're going to kill, and then not doing it".
Not bad, Teri. The description of breaking windows at her boyfriend's place with the hammer is very funny. LA people talking about LA in all it's sordid weirdness is usually a good thing. I liked her in Ghost World too!
Ok, I kind of hate the new Moth music. I should have said this sooner, but I didn't have a blog when it started so I'm saying it now. It cuts about 3 points off my mood every time I hear it. It does not promise fun storytelling. It promises anguish. It is aural anguish. I like violins. Just, not...not like this. Not this violin. Not now.
Also, continuing the hate, Dan Kennedy needs to give up that over-precious "doing the intro without notes thing". For one, he's probably done it so many times he could rattle off a perfect take without notes, so the fact that he insists on sort of ad-libbing his way through it, when really we just want to hear the requisite introduction and get to the story--I don't know. Too precious. Just rattle it off and let's get to the story.
That's a lot of complaints! Maybe I'm in a complainy mood!
So, the story:
Teri Garr finds out her boyfriend has been cheating on her and goes to his house to give him his things back, and "return" his hammer. Said hammer is used to smash boyfriend's windows. Boyfriend calls cops, Teri goes to an art gallery. Teri describes what she has just done, eliciting similar stories from other women, including one who cut just the left leg off her boyfriend's fancy suits, and another who shaved her name, or maybe someone else's name, in the back of his dog. Teri makes some remarks about LA being a place where this happens because it's a place with a lot of "sordid weird people seeking fame and fortune for nothing." She makes a Laci Pederson joke that gets groans. Ditto on the Robert Blake, with just a bit more spirit in it. She talks about her parents (who were somewhat sordid, and somewhat weird) coming to LA to seek their fame and fortune. She ends with this advice, regarding cheating boyfriends: getting "just up to the part where you're going to kill, and then not doing it".
Not bad, Teri. The description of breaking windows at her boyfriend's place with the hammer is very funny. LA people talking about LA in all it's sordid weirdness is usually a good thing. I liked her in Ghost World too!
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Numbers -- Radio Lab
The Episode
Generally:
This is a review of the Radio Lab podcast "Numbers" which I listened to on my drive back home for winter break. Overall it's pretty good--Radio Lab doing what it does best, which is pleasantly tickle your ears while delivering radically simplified science in fairly effective (occasionally poignant) narrative form. This week is four stories/pieces about "Numbers"--something I get the sense Jad and Robert believe is anathema to their listeners. Dig the promo: "Radiolab dedicates this hour to an exploration of numbers. Those pesky little things on the chalkboard. Where do they come from and what do they really do for us?" Ick, math. They keep it simple though--can they do anything but?--and managed to tell me interesting things I didn't already know. There's no big revelation capping the episode, nor do the stories/pieces really add (ha ha) up to anything. But the show managed to keep my attention pretty much the whole way, and only do one thing that pissed me off, so good on them. Onward to the specifics.
Introduction:
So, the job of an intro, as far as I understand it, is twofold: hook the listener's interest, and justify the importance of the topic. In typical Radio Lab fashion, the hook is a purely sonic one, the scratch of old vinyl. Robert's voice enters, telling Jad to listen, and we hear the beginning of the Johnny Cash song "25 Minutes to Go": "Well they're building a gallows outside my cell I've got 25 minutes to go," Cash sings. Jad identifies for the less musically-versed that it's Cash singing the song, and Robert tells us why we should care: because it's "a song about the deep importance of mathematics in your life." Grand. Jad, rather densely (but hey, that's the role he has to play sometimes) disagrees that there's any math in the song, and Robert says something nice to the effect that Cash is calibrating the move towards his own extinction. Jad wonders, somewhat aghast, whether they're going to have to listen to the song all the way down to minute one. They are, and to fill this space they have a rather inane argument, with Jad insisting that he could live without numbers (Jad says he just trusts the clerks behind the counter to make proper change when he buys his m and ms). It's real nice of Jad to be a voice for bored 8th graders in geometry asking "Why do we have to know this?" but it's a little patronizing as a justification for a whole show on numbers. I found myself in the rare spot of finding Robert's stance spot-on, and being annoyed at Jad. Oh well, it's their model, and I guess they have to stick with it. But it would have been nice to hear a slightly more interesting argument about the role of numbers, one, maybe, with some kind of grounding in reason. Anyway, Robert and Jad finish their tiff, the Cash song ends with Johnny swinging at the end of a rope, and Robert tells us this was all made possible "by the disciplined use of numbers". Cue sound effect for emphasis (some kind of low engine-y scraping), cue introductions, show preview, and onto the break. A pretty mediocre intro--well produced as always but short on punch.
Piece 1:
Hey it's a baby! Gurgling sounds from Jad's month-old baby Emile (Emille?) greet us, and Robert asks if Jad thinks his baby "has a numeric sense at all." Jad says no. We hear an insistent "wellllll" from their producer Lulu Miller. As is often the case, it's difficult to know just what "sound-space" we're on. I'm sure Emile/Emille was recorded separately--but are Jad Robert and Lulu in the studio at the same time. I need to know! Damn you RL for distorting my sense of space and time. Anyway, Robert gets us into the meat of the piece by saying how they sent Lulu off to find out where number sense comes from and how soon it arises in a person.
Sounds of baby toys, a "Hello?" The subject is a mathematician named Stanislas Dahen (sp?). It begins with typical RL-style pre-interview noises presented in the context of the reporter (Lulu) giving background to Jad and Robert. It's all very precisely edited to give the effect of casualness. I feel like this is an RL trademark(--ever see Space Ghost: Coast to Coast? It kind of reminds me of that, but replace absurdity with earnestness.) What it does, I think, is keep us grounded in the Jad-and-Robert host space as home base, so to speak, from which we venture out to hear the stories. Unlike a This American Life style piece, in which each piece creates its own world, in RL the host-space usually stays foregrounded. This necessitates a higher degree of management over the audio, but it has the advantage of coddling the listener, who never has to worry that his/her familiar hosts are ever far away. Anyway, the piece, or at least Stanislav, contradicts the "blank-slate" idea that babies are born without any pre-existing concepts in their minds. When Stanislav asserts his disagreement we get an avant-garde-y snippet of plucked violin to draw our attention to the fact that this is AN INTERESTING MOMENT, followed by single bowed note reverbed out into the void and then back to the host-space. After this it's a cute, well-scored, excursion into the logistics of baby-experimentation, sonified pretty interestingly, capped off with the revelation that babies can discern a difference between 8 ducks shown on a screen, and 16 ducks shown on a screen. Sounds effects abound, clips of baby laughter. It's classic RL and it's pretty well done, because in this case it serves to make an interesting point--namely that babies come into this world with an understanding of quantity. After some more explanation, scene-setting, the piece delivers it's payload information, which is that babies understand quantities logarithmically, whereas humans understand quantity in terms of integers. In other words, to a baby, the difference between 1 and 2, is far greater than the difference between 9 and 10, because 2 is twice the size of 1 whereas 10 is only 10/9 greater than 9. And this logarithmic sense of quantity is also present in human cultures that don't have very many numbers (in experiments they consistently say 3 is halfway between 1 and 9...) There's a pretty good sound moment, where Lulu Miller says that, for babies, the distance between 1 and 2 is "huuuuuggeeee" and there's some reverb and some light echo and a little bit of wind--and I feel like it actually reinforced the meaning in a pretty interesting way. This is getting long so I'll wrap up by getting to the end. (I'm glossing over another expert who is introduced, who basically states that, when it comes to numbers, babies don't really know shit past one until they're like 3 years old). Anyway, it all concludes in this pretty effective moment at the end, where Lulu and Jad and Robert sort of simmer in this idea that integer number sense is "artificial" compared to our inherent logarithmic sense, and from there reach the idea that there's something sad in learning numbers, because it means leaving behind something we were born with. Robert, continuing his role of the one with reason on his side, points out all the great things we can do with our acquired number sense, like build rocket ships, and play with "deeply abstract, beautiful thoughts" and Jad and Lulu have to concede. Jad says it's comforting to know that numbers are "made up" and reaches out to the audience of "logarithmic people". A pretty rad number-spouting futuristic chorus of women backed with a hip-hop beat comes in and brings us to the first break.
Wow! That took a really long time. I hope it wasn't boring to read. I'm going to be way more condensed from now on. Promise.
(Dig their transition music)
Piece 2:
Robert promises us that if "we learn to embrace numbers and give them a hug wonderful things can happen." We meet a South African named Mark Nigrini, a business professor. More pre-story casualness. We learn that he's a "number detective." Brief PERSONALITY-REVEALING story about finding stories at the gas pump. Flashback co-told with Mark and Robert about the discovery of Benford's Law, which basically says that across a random distribution of numbers, there will be more 1s, 2s and 3s, than 7s, 8s, and 9s. I don't understand why, but apparently it's true. So, this held my interest for a while, but just when it (my interest) starts to give out, after all this back-story, Jad chimes in to ask "So what?" Thanks Jad. Robert laughs, and gives us the gravy, or the meat, or whatever: Benford's Law can be used to detect accounting fraud. Cue Dragnet music. Pretty exceptionally well-used music throughout this segment. Varied, subtle, thoughtfully-placed. Less on the sound FX-yness worked well in this piece. Soon we meet a Darrel Durrel (?) who uses Benford's law to bust fraud-doers. A few minutes on this aaaannnnddd....not much else going on in this piece. Onward.
Piece 3:
Reporter Ben Calhoun goes to a math conference at CUNY and learns about a special kind of number called the Erdős (not sure what kind of punctuation mark that is) number. Basically it's like 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon but with this mathematician. If you published a paper with Paul Erdős, the most prolific mathemetician ever, your number is 1. If you published a paper with someone who published a paper with him your number is 2. Etc. We get back story on Erdős, his traumatic, mostly dysfunctional life, and his mathematical promiscuity (he would do math with anyone, even if they sucked at it (or, I guess, sucked for a professional mathematician)). History, history, history. Close with "touching" thought about how many lives he touched. Kind of like how when you have sex with one person, you're having sex with everyone that person had sex with. Well, it's like that with Paul Erdős except with math, and I don't think any fluids are involved in that. Anywyay, all in all, there are like 200,000 people with Erdős numbers, blah blah blah, one person making a big contribution. Hopeful post-rock in the background. I feel tears gathering in my upper eye-corners. Onward.
Piece 4:
Catch Jad's groan when Robert reminds us that the topic is "mathematics, mathematics, mathematics"!
So this last segment is a story that doesn't go anywhere! This is the piece that pissed me off. Lots of promise, a good set-up, and...falls flat. The story involves mathematician and friend of the show Steve Strogatz's correspondence with his high school math teacher. The piece is really heavy on nested sound-space, as in Jad and Robert bring their producer Soren Wheeler in, to tell the story of his interview with Strogatz. So, (as with Lulu Miller and Ben Calhoun) we're constantly shifting between layers. I don't know what effect this has on you, but I think my liking it is contingent on a factor I can't yet identify. More thoughts to come in future posts. Anyway, the story as it emerges is that Strogatz develops a friendship with this teacher of his, Strogatz goes off to college and exchanges letters with this teacher that consist almost entirely of math puzzles; at several points, the teacher makes gestures at introducing topics from their real lives into the letters but Strogatz always ignores it, ignoring the death of the teacher's son; finally, after hearing that his teacher has had a stroke, he goes to visit him, where he finally asks him about his son; we go deeper, sound-space-wise, hearing a tape-recording that Strogatz made of the occasion; the teacher touchingly reflects on his son's life; Strogatz and teacher go off to the beach, where they discuss waves and a certain particular problem whose solution relies on something about waves that don't repeat, and Soren says that "to deal with those kinds of waves, you need a different kind of infinity, not the kind where you just keep adding and adding and adding numbers, but the kind that just sits in the space between two numbers" and Strogatz adds "this higher kind of infinity than Don [his teacher] had thought about before". Cue up ambient melody as we reflect on...what? I can't kind figure out how that last image relates to the story, but whatever, Strogatz has a book to sell, called "The Calculus of Friendship." Yawn. Dud. If anyone wants to enlighten me about why "higher kinds of infinity" is anything but a cop-out, half-baked lyricism to end a story with little point (other than a maybe...mathematics was the core of their friendship and in the end they returned to it sense), I would be happy to be enlightened.
So that was "Numbers." Not the strongest RadioLab piece, but definitely somewhere in the middle of the pack. Onward, to the Grip-O-Matic.
The Grip-O-Matic give "Numbers" a....
QUITE OFTEN GRIPPING.
Keep checking back in for more reviews of your favorite podcasts.
Out,
Charlie
Generally:
This is a review of the Radio Lab podcast "Numbers" which I listened to on my drive back home for winter break. Overall it's pretty good--Radio Lab doing what it does best, which is pleasantly tickle your ears while delivering radically simplified science in fairly effective (occasionally poignant) narrative form. This week is four stories/pieces about "Numbers"--something I get the sense Jad and Robert believe is anathema to their listeners. Dig the promo: "Radiolab dedicates this hour to an exploration of numbers. Those pesky little things on the chalkboard. Where do they come from and what do they really do for us?" Ick, math. They keep it simple though--can they do anything but?--and managed to tell me interesting things I didn't already know. There's no big revelation capping the episode, nor do the stories/pieces really add (ha ha) up to anything. But the show managed to keep my attention pretty much the whole way, and only do one thing that pissed me off, so good on them. Onward to the specifics.
Introduction:
So, the job of an intro, as far as I understand it, is twofold: hook the listener's interest, and justify the importance of the topic. In typical Radio Lab fashion, the hook is a purely sonic one, the scratch of old vinyl. Robert's voice enters, telling Jad to listen, and we hear the beginning of the Johnny Cash song "25 Minutes to Go": "Well they're building a gallows outside my cell I've got 25 minutes to go," Cash sings. Jad identifies for the less musically-versed that it's Cash singing the song, and Robert tells us why we should care: because it's "a song about the deep importance of mathematics in your life." Grand. Jad, rather densely (but hey, that's the role he has to play sometimes) disagrees that there's any math in the song, and Robert says something nice to the effect that Cash is calibrating the move towards his own extinction. Jad wonders, somewhat aghast, whether they're going to have to listen to the song all the way down to minute one. They are, and to fill this space they have a rather inane argument, with Jad insisting that he could live without numbers (Jad says he just trusts the clerks behind the counter to make proper change when he buys his m and ms). It's real nice of Jad to be a voice for bored 8th graders in geometry asking "Why do we have to know this?" but it's a little patronizing as a justification for a whole show on numbers. I found myself in the rare spot of finding Robert's stance spot-on, and being annoyed at Jad. Oh well, it's their model, and I guess they have to stick with it. But it would have been nice to hear a slightly more interesting argument about the role of numbers, one, maybe, with some kind of grounding in reason. Anyway, Robert and Jad finish their tiff, the Cash song ends with Johnny swinging at the end of a rope, and Robert tells us this was all made possible "by the disciplined use of numbers". Cue sound effect for emphasis (some kind of low engine-y scraping), cue introductions, show preview, and onto the break. A pretty mediocre intro--well produced as always but short on punch.
Piece 1:
Hey it's a baby! Gurgling sounds from Jad's month-old baby Emile (Emille?) greet us, and Robert asks if Jad thinks his baby "has a numeric sense at all." Jad says no. We hear an insistent "wellllll" from their producer Lulu Miller. As is often the case, it's difficult to know just what "sound-space" we're on. I'm sure Emile/Emille was recorded separately--but are Jad Robert and Lulu in the studio at the same time. I need to know! Damn you RL for distorting my sense of space and time. Anyway, Robert gets us into the meat of the piece by saying how they sent Lulu off to find out where number sense comes from and how soon it arises in a person.
Sounds of baby toys, a "Hello?" The subject is a mathematician named Stanislas Dahen (sp?). It begins with typical RL-style pre-interview noises presented in the context of the reporter (Lulu) giving background to Jad and Robert. It's all very precisely edited to give the effect of casualness. I feel like this is an RL trademark(--ever see Space Ghost: Coast to Coast? It kind of reminds me of that, but replace absurdity with earnestness.) What it does, I think, is keep us grounded in the Jad-and-Robert host space as home base, so to speak, from which we venture out to hear the stories. Unlike a This American Life style piece, in which each piece creates its own world, in RL the host-space usually stays foregrounded. This necessitates a higher degree of management over the audio, but it has the advantage of coddling the listener, who never has to worry that his/her familiar hosts are ever far away. Anyway, the piece, or at least Stanislav, contradicts the "blank-slate" idea that babies are born without any pre-existing concepts in their minds. When Stanislav asserts his disagreement we get an avant-garde-y snippet of plucked violin to draw our attention to the fact that this is AN INTERESTING MOMENT, followed by single bowed note reverbed out into the void and then back to the host-space. After this it's a cute, well-scored, excursion into the logistics of baby-experimentation, sonified pretty interestingly, capped off with the revelation that babies can discern a difference between 8 ducks shown on a screen, and 16 ducks shown on a screen. Sounds effects abound, clips of baby laughter. It's classic RL and it's pretty well done, because in this case it serves to make an interesting point--namely that babies come into this world with an understanding of quantity. After some more explanation, scene-setting, the piece delivers it's payload information, which is that babies understand quantities logarithmically, whereas humans understand quantity in terms of integers. In other words, to a baby, the difference between 1 and 2, is far greater than the difference between 9 and 10, because 2 is twice the size of 1 whereas 10 is only 10/9 greater than 9. And this logarithmic sense of quantity is also present in human cultures that don't have very many numbers (in experiments they consistently say 3 is halfway between 1 and 9...) There's a pretty good sound moment, where Lulu Miller says that, for babies, the distance between 1 and 2 is "huuuuuggeeee" and there's some reverb and some light echo and a little bit of wind--and I feel like it actually reinforced the meaning in a pretty interesting way. This is getting long so I'll wrap up by getting to the end. (I'm glossing over another expert who is introduced, who basically states that, when it comes to numbers, babies don't really know shit past one until they're like 3 years old). Anyway, it all concludes in this pretty effective moment at the end, where Lulu and Jad and Robert sort of simmer in this idea that integer number sense is "artificial" compared to our inherent logarithmic sense, and from there reach the idea that there's something sad in learning numbers, because it means leaving behind something we were born with. Robert, continuing his role of the one with reason on his side, points out all the great things we can do with our acquired number sense, like build rocket ships, and play with "deeply abstract, beautiful thoughts" and Jad and Lulu have to concede. Jad says it's comforting to know that numbers are "made up" and reaches out to the audience of "logarithmic people". A pretty rad number-spouting futuristic chorus of women backed with a hip-hop beat comes in and brings us to the first break.
Wow! That took a really long time. I hope it wasn't boring to read. I'm going to be way more condensed from now on. Promise.
(Dig their transition music)
Piece 2:
Robert promises us that if "we learn to embrace numbers and give them a hug wonderful things can happen." We meet a South African named Mark Nigrini, a business professor. More pre-story casualness. We learn that he's a "number detective." Brief PERSONALITY-REVEALING story about finding stories at the gas pump. Flashback co-told with Mark and Robert about the discovery of Benford's Law, which basically says that across a random distribution of numbers, there will be more 1s, 2s and 3s, than 7s, 8s, and 9s. I don't understand why, but apparently it's true. So, this held my interest for a while, but just when it (my interest) starts to give out, after all this back-story, Jad chimes in to ask "So what?" Thanks Jad. Robert laughs, and gives us the gravy, or the meat, or whatever: Benford's Law can be used to detect accounting fraud. Cue Dragnet music. Pretty exceptionally well-used music throughout this segment. Varied, subtle, thoughtfully-placed. Less on the sound FX-yness worked well in this piece. Soon we meet a Darrel Durrel (?) who uses Benford's law to bust fraud-doers. A few minutes on this aaaannnnddd....not much else going on in this piece. Onward.
Piece 3:
Reporter Ben Calhoun goes to a math conference at CUNY and learns about a special kind of number called the Erdős (not sure what kind of punctuation mark that is) number. Basically it's like 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon but with this mathematician. If you published a paper with Paul Erdős, the most prolific mathemetician ever, your number is 1. If you published a paper with someone who published a paper with him your number is 2. Etc. We get back story on Erdős, his traumatic, mostly dysfunctional life, and his mathematical promiscuity (he would do math with anyone, even if they sucked at it (or, I guess, sucked for a professional mathematician)). History, history, history. Close with "touching" thought about how many lives he touched. Kind of like how when you have sex with one person, you're having sex with everyone that person had sex with. Well, it's like that with Paul Erdős except with math, and I don't think any fluids are involved in that. Anywyay, all in all, there are like 200,000 people with Erdős numbers, blah blah blah, one person making a big contribution. Hopeful post-rock in the background. I feel tears gathering in my upper eye-corners. Onward.
Piece 4:
Catch Jad's groan when Robert reminds us that the topic is "mathematics, mathematics, mathematics"!
So this last segment is a story that doesn't go anywhere! This is the piece that pissed me off. Lots of promise, a good set-up, and...falls flat. The story involves mathematician and friend of the show Steve Strogatz's correspondence with his high school math teacher. The piece is really heavy on nested sound-space, as in Jad and Robert bring their producer Soren Wheeler in, to tell the story of his interview with Strogatz. So, (as with Lulu Miller and Ben Calhoun) we're constantly shifting between layers. I don't know what effect this has on you, but I think my liking it is contingent on a factor I can't yet identify. More thoughts to come in future posts. Anyway, the story as it emerges is that Strogatz develops a friendship with this teacher of his, Strogatz goes off to college and exchanges letters with this teacher that consist almost entirely of math puzzles; at several points, the teacher makes gestures at introducing topics from their real lives into the letters but Strogatz always ignores it, ignoring the death of the teacher's son; finally, after hearing that his teacher has had a stroke, he goes to visit him, where he finally asks him about his son; we go deeper, sound-space-wise, hearing a tape-recording that Strogatz made of the occasion; the teacher touchingly reflects on his son's life; Strogatz and teacher go off to the beach, where they discuss waves and a certain particular problem whose solution relies on something about waves that don't repeat, and Soren says that "to deal with those kinds of waves, you need a different kind of infinity, not the kind where you just keep adding and adding and adding numbers, but the kind that just sits in the space between two numbers" and Strogatz adds "this higher kind of infinity than Don [his teacher] had thought about before". Cue up ambient melody as we reflect on...what? I can't kind figure out how that last image relates to the story, but whatever, Strogatz has a book to sell, called "The Calculus of Friendship." Yawn. Dud. If anyone wants to enlighten me about why "higher kinds of infinity" is anything but a cop-out, half-baked lyricism to end a story with little point (other than a maybe...mathematics was the core of their friendship and in the end they returned to it sense), I would be happy to be enlightened.
So that was "Numbers." Not the strongest RadioLab piece, but definitely somewhere in the middle of the pack. Onward, to the Grip-O-Matic.
The Grip-O-Matic give "Numbers" a....
QUITE OFTEN GRIPPING.
Keep checking back in for more reviews of your favorite podcasts.
Out,
Charlie
Giving Podcasts the Lip
Welcome to my blog. It's a good thing you're here because the world of audio transmitted via internet is quite overwhelming and filled with tedious, pointless stories that ask your attention and give nothing back in return. I'm here to guide you through that world. Think of me as an ally in the the war against boring podcasts. As the audio vivisectionist, I'll listen to all the sound wannabes and already-ares that cross my ear-space regularly, plus interesting new stuff that I stumble across or get recommended. I'll plunge into it with nary a tremor, and come back here to report on what I've found--what succeeds and what fails; what you should listen to and what you shouldn't touch with a ten foot ear-pole. If you agree with me, let me know. If you disagree with me, let me know. And if you have anything to recommend, why, I'm only an e-mail away.
Godspeed,
Charlie
Godspeed,
Charlie
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