Radio: Russian thugs and believers

Too Much Information continues to be my favorite podcast.

There's a huge backlog of podcasts on my iPhone that I'm slowly getting through as I do my nightly walk. Listened to the August 23rd edition of TMI last night and it may have been my favorite yet.

In it, Benjamin Walker talks to photographers who have spent time in Russia photographing Siberian gangsters and Old Believers.


He also talks to a woman who runs the largest collection of Soviet-era Non-Conformist Art (read: politically and socially subversive, as well as just silly) art in the world.

And that's the the half hour. The second half is about Hilter and Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, & Chinese midgets talking about how his country runs MGM Studios.

I mean, come on. Listen already!

Oh, and here are more Old Believers photos. By a different photographer.

Radio: Declaration

I'm not much of a patriot. I'm not much of a weeper. But I felt unusually patriotic and weepy while listening to the the NPR staff reading the Declaration of Independence yesterday morning.

Can I blame lack of sleep?

Listen to The Declaration of Independence >>

Radio: A Life on Two Wheels

The Bike Show is always one of the most consistently great podcasts out there, but a few weeks ago, they swerved from their normal format of Jack Thurson presenting on this and that. Instead, production duties were handed over to Stewart Watt, who put together a very tender, ear-warming tribute to how cycling can very much influence who a person becomes.

Listen to A Life on Two Wheels >>.

Radio: Harping the Boontling

Down in California's Anderson Valley hops country (or Alsatian wine, if that's your thing), there's a homespun dialect—spoken primarily by menfolk to mask filth talk—called Boontling.

Although based on English, Boontling's unusual words are unique to Boonville, California. Scottish Gaelic and Irish, and some Pomoan and Spanish, also influenced the vocabulary of the language. Boontling was invented in the late 1800s and had quite a following at the turn of the century. It is now mostly spoken only by aging counter-culturists and native Anderson Valley residents. Because the town of Boonville only has a little over 700 residents, Boontling is an extremely esoteric dialect, and is quickly becoming archaic. It has over a thousand unique words and phrases. [thanks, wiki]

Ginna Allison produced a piece on Boontling a handful of years back. It's cool to hear a regional dialect that time and modernity is ripping to shreds. Thank god we have radio as an aural time capsule.

Listen to Harping Boontling (starts at about 5:47)

Radio: Allan Gurganus reflects on the American South

Really interesting live session - writer Allan Gurganus listening and responding to radio pieces on the American South. He has some great insight and you can tell that he really loves audio storytelling.

Subjects range from rebel yells to Thelonious Monk to catnip gardening to more.

This was recorded part of the Listening Institute that happened back in November as a collaboration between The Duke Center for Documentary Studies and Third Coast International Audio Festival.

Listen to the piece (.mp3).

Radio: Too Much Information

Finding Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything was one of the more watersheddy moments when I started listening to radio seriously a handful of years ago. It was this weird, jittery mix of things, not unlike a less broody Joe Frank. A lot of times, I had trouble discerning what was truth and what wasn't. It was a gorgeous, neurotic mess.

After TOE stopped airing, I thought Walker had evaporated into the radio waves with it.

Not so.

Late last year, Walker surfaced with a new radio program, Too Much Information, on WFMU in New York. It's just as tangential, mixing narrative and interview to tell stories just unconvincing enough that you have to trust their authenticity (yes, it's that kind of conundrum).

The Jan 4 episode, for example, spans these topics

• KKK members using Christmas lights as fake flames on crosses
  
• Gold as currency
• Religion as mental illness
• Using DDT to kill bedbugs

And that's really just the tip of a very wonderful iceberg.

Do yourself a favor &....

Go listen to Too Much Information.

(photo by flickr.com/wayneandwax)