Posts Tagged ‘entertainment’
To be played at maximum volume
July 4th, 2010 at 8:59 am
What better way to celebrate the Fourth than to listen to BBC Radio documentaries?
I spent yesterday afternoon resetting bricks in the patio and listening to my iPod. First up was last week’s episode of In Our Time, the history/literature/philosophy/science/math Radio 4 series hosted by Melvyn Bragg. The topic was Athelstan:
Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred the Great, came to the throne of Wessex in 925. A few years later he unified the kingdoms of England, and a decade after that defeated the Scots and styled himself King of all Britain.
As well as being a brilliant military commander, Athelstan was a legal reformer whose new laws forever changed the way crime was dealt with in England. Unlike his predecessors, he pursued a foreign policy, seeking alliances with powerful rulers abroad. And unusually for an Anglo-Saxon king, we know what he looked like: he’s the earliest English monarch whose portrait survives.
This is the quintessential In Our Time topic: so English it predates the Norman Conquest. If that doesn’t fire up your patriotic juices, I don’t know what will.
Second was a two-part Radio 2 documentary on the slightly more contemporary—though no less British—topic of glam rock. I liked the show overall, but suggest you fast forward through the first 20 minutes or so. That section is dominated by the reminiscences of producer Tony Visconti, and it’s unbelievably dull—yes, far duller than the discussion of Athelstan’s victory at the Battle of Brunanburh. Visconti has flat, affectless voice and it sounds like he’s reading from his 1970 diary: “Then Marc came over to my flat on Tottenham Court Road, and we had a curry.”
Fortunately, it picks up after that. American listeners may be surprised to hear that there was a real competition between Marc Bolan and David Bowie. There was no T. Rextasy on this side of the Atlantic, where Bowie was far and away the dominant figure.1
Glam was more about the look than the sound, and the documentary spends a lot of time describing the bands’ outfits—a topic you’d think would be more suited to TV than radio. But somehow it works.2 The interviewees (with the exception of Visconti) are funny and interesting, and the music is always playing under the talking. One surprising omission is that no mention is made of glam’s obvious influence on hair metal of the ’80’s.
The two episodes of The Glory of Glam are available for listening (or recording via Audio Hijack Pro or Wiretap Studio) for a couple of days. The Athelstan show can be downloaded directly from the In Our Time archive.
-
And gave this post its title. Google the phrase if you don’t get the reference. ↩
-
It’s sort of like Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy’s success on American radio in the ’30’s and ’40’s. Hard to imagine a ventriloquist act could work on the radio. ↩
Podcast cannibalism
June 21st, 2010 at 7:06 am
Well here’s an unfortunate bit of convergence. The Science Show, a radio show about—you guessed it—science from ABC Radio National in Australia, has decided to rebroadcast episodes of Radiolab, a radio show about science from WNYC in New York. This is great for Science Show fans from the antipodes who listen over the air, because Radiolab is an excellent show. But it’s unfortunate for me1 because I listen to both shows via podcast, and now there’ll be less original content.
It’s not that The Science Show will stop producing its own stories and be given over entirely to old Radiolab programs, but that’s what happened this week, with a rebroadcast of the “Parasites” show, and is scheduled to happen next week, with a rebroadcast of the “Stochasticity” show.
A story in the “Stochasticity” episode, about coin flipping and the odds of generating runs of consecutive heads or tails, was of particular interest to me, ultimately inspiring four separate blog posts. Worth listening to, if you haven’t already.
-
And me is all I really care about. ↩
The things you do endear you to me
June 5th, 2010 at 3:33 pm
John will always be my favorite Beatle, but I’m enjoying Paul a lot more than I did when I was a young man. This sort of thing might even get me to forgive him for wasting his huge talent on crap like “Silly Love Songs.”
McCartney thanked Obama for the honor and, in a short political comment, said that he and “billions” of others supported what the president was doing in the face of many challenges. Later, McCartney ended the night by saying, in reference to the prize from the Library of Congress, it was good that after the last eight years, America had a president who knew what a library was.
Not quite as cool as taking a cross-country trip on Route 66 just like a normal person, but pretty cool nonetheless.
Far better than what Paul said was the rise it got out of John Boehner.1
Like millions of other Americans, I have always had a good impression of Paul McCartney and thought of him as a classy guy, but I was surprised and disappointed by the lack of grace and respect he displayed at the White House,” Boehner told HUMAN EVENTS. “I hope he’ll apologize to the American people for his conduct which demeaned him, the White House and President Obama.
I imagine Boehner up late at night in his room, deleting all the Wings songs from his iPod and weeping uncontrollably. “How could he be so demeaning? He was the cute one!”
(Note on the title: It is an inviolable journalistic rule that any story about a Beatle, a Rolling Stone, or Bob Dylan must include at least one line of a song, preferably in the title or the lead paragraph. Try to find a counter-example.)
-
You insult me, sir, if you think it mere coincidence that “rise” and “Boehner” are in the same sentence. ↩
Exile radio documentary
May 24th, 2010 at 9:32 pm
Last week, the BBC aired an hourlong radio documentary on Exile on Main Street, coinciding with the album’s reissue. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, you have two days to listen to it—or record it via Audio Hijack Pro or Wiretap Studio—through the BBC’s Listen Again service.
I listened to it on my iPod while riding home from work today. I don’t think I heard anything I didn’t already know, but there were several interesting bits, and it made a hot, humid ride go faster.
Keith Richards has nearly completed his transformation into Ken Shabby, ending every sentence with a wheezing, mumbling laugh:
Mick Jagger still gives a wicked quote:
Charlie Watts also gets interviewed for the show, and I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that he says nothing memorable.
But at least Watts is acknowledged. Bill Wyman is mentioned a few times, but is name-checked less often than Nicky Hopkins. And I would swear Mick Taylor’s name doesn’t come up at all.
The interviews make it clear that Jagger is ambivalent about Exile’s high status among the Stones’ albums. It’s always been considered more of a Keith album than a Mick album, and Mick doesn’t like looking second best. This is the guy who, by all accounts, held onto the Rock and Roll Circus film for almost 30 years because the Who gave a better performance than the Stones did.
While I like Exile, I’ve always thought it had too much filler; a single album’s worth of tunes puffed out into a double album. Sort of like the White Album on the Beatles side, which is often rated higher (by the public, not critics) than the much superior Revolver. Some people weigh art by the pound.
At the end of the show, there’s a promo for a show on Memorial Day1 called Jagger’s Jukebox, which will play songs selected by Mick for their influence on the Stones in general and Exile on Main Street in particular. I’ll be setting up Audio Hijack Pro to record that one, too.
-
OK, the Brit’s don’t celebrate Memorial Day, but that’s the day it’s on. ↩
Head links
May 18th, 2010 at 11:42 pm
Links, of course, make the web go round. They put the Hyper in HTML. But today the links I found were made in my head, the old-fashioned way.
The day started with me riding in to work listening to The Science Show podcast from ABC Radio National. That’s ABC, as in Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the folks who bring you Dancing With The Stars. I’m not sure why the Commonwealth countries can’t come up with more original network names, but there you go.
One of the stories in the current Science Show episode is about climate change’s affect on mountain-dwelling reptiles and amphibians in Madagascar. Chris Raxworthy of the American Museum of Natural History has been studying how certain populations have been gradually shifting their habitats to higher elevations as temperatures have increased. The concern is that eventually they’ll move to the tops of the mountains and have nowhere else to go. Wait a minute, I thought, didn’t I just read about this? Yes, it’s the same problem discussed by Chris Clarke in his most recent Coyote Crossing post, although the mountains he talks about are in the American Southwest. My first link of the day.
Another current Science Show story is about a highly portable chemical analysis instruments developed by Emily Hilder of the University of Tasmania. Much of the story is about the use of these devices by bomb squads, but there’s a later mention of using them for early detection of Tasmanian devil facial tumor disease (DFTD). As an American, when I hear about Tasmanian devils, I can’t help but smile and think of Warner Brothers, but this disease, a facial cancer that looks horrible, has killed 80-90% of the devil population in some areas. Where’s the link here? Patience.
(This Science Show episode also has an audio essay by David Attenborough about salamanders. I can’t think of any connection to salamanders, so it doesn’t fit in with the theme of this post, but the essay is informative and entertaining in that way Attenborough always seems to be, so I felt I had to mention it. Best line: “Salamanders I’m afraid are not really very quick on the uptake.”)
By the time The Science Show had ended, I was at work, where I spent eight or nine hours doing things of no interest to anyone. Then it was time to ride home, and I fired up the most recent episode of Radiolab, the sciencey radio show/podcast with Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad. The current episode is entitled “Famous Tumors,” and one of the stories is about, yes, Tasmanian devil facial tumor disease.1 The description of the disease is both fascinating and creepy. Apparently, tumors taken from different devils are genetically identical—the cancer is, in effect, a single organism that grows by spreading from one host to another.
So, two podcasts created on opposite sides of the world. I listen to both of them on the same day and they both talk about tumors on Tasmanian devils. Weird.
The final Radiolab story is about Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cells—which came to be known as the HeLa line—taken during a biopsy, were the first human cells to be successfully grown and maintained in a laboratory. It’s based on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a recent book by Rebecca Skloot, who does some of the narration. The Radiolab story and the book cover not only the importance of the HeLa line to medical advances in the 20th century (it was heavily used, for example, in the development of the polio vaccine), but how the knowledge that Henrietta’s cells lived on after her death affected her family.
I haven’t actually read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, but it’s on my list of books to read because it’s been praised often by Tom Levenson on his Inverse Square Blog, one of my favorite RSS subscriptions. He’s also the author of Newton and the Counterfeiter, an excellent book I have read,2 because most of my professional life—that eight or nine hours we skipped over—involves adapting and applying Newton’s Laws, and I have a longstanding interest in Newtoniana.
The Henrietta Lacks story ended as I arrived home, where I expected to be greeted by James Burke.
Backslash backlash
April 14th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
Although I think it’s a year or two late, this xkcd strip matches my feelings exactly. And, as with most computer-related irritations, the tendency of people to say “backslash” when they mean “slash” can be blamed on Microsoft. It may be that some earlier operating system used backslash for directory separation, but DOS put the word in everyone’s mouth. And the really annoying part is that people who misuse backslash think they’re being smart.
A closely related irritation for me is “forward slash,” with its thoroughly unnecessary adjective. For months, if not years, Melvyn Bragg’s introduction to the otherwise wonderful In Our Time podcast has been
Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to bee-bee-cee, dot-coe, dot-you-kay, forward slash, radio four. I hope you enjoy the program.
which always set my teeth on edge. I kept hoping he’d switch to the more British “stroke.”