Fairly Straight And Thoughtful

If you go visit WMFU’s Speakeasy archive, you can listen to host Dorian Devins’ interview with The Onion’s AV Club editor Stephen Thompson from this past Monday. I think that The Onion AV Club is probably the best arts/entertainment publication currently being published in the United States, there’s a level of quality in their interviews and reviews which I find very rare elsewhere, particularly in the film section. The interview primarily concerns the publication of The Tenacity of the Cockroach, a compilation of The AV Club’s interviews.

There’s also a good interview with photographer Gregory Crewdson from early January which I quite like, but it’s pretty dry and quite possibly a huge bore to anyone who doesn’t have an interest in photography.

She’s Got The Radio Active And It Makes Me Feel Okay (I Don’t Feel Okay)

I received a copy of Sarah Vowell’s Radio On yesterday as a gift, and I’ve been reading through it in brief little stops and starts since it arrived yesterday afternoon. The book is basically Vowell keeping a diary about what she was hearing every day on the radio between 1994 and 1995; and though I do like Vowell quite a bit, and I am very interested in radio, the book is mostly interesting just for how very dated it is. This is never more apparent than when she writes about rock radio, still in the midst of the mid-90s alt-rock revolution. It’s amazing how quaint it all seems now, that the worst things she can complain about on the radio are the Spin Doctors and Weezer. I remember being frustrated back then, but compared to the way things are now in this Clearchannel world, it sounds as though she’s describing experimental freeform. When was the last time you heard Pavement or Sonic Youth on your local edge station? On the first page of the book she writes about hearing songs by the both of them on the radio as being a rather ho-hum experience. In 2003, it’s almost inconcievable to imagine bands one fourth as great or unique getting airplay.

I miss the mid-90s. Things really did seem a lot more optimistic back then, and at least some parts of mainstream culture were making some attempt at being progressive, for whatever that’s worth. All the big rock stars from my youth were (at least in public) sensitive folks with a healthy distrust of corporations and a sense of social conciousness. God help the teens of the 00s, you know?

Sarah Vowell also writes a lot about conservative daytime radio in the book, with a similar naive tone of disbelief and polite indignation. We all know how that all worked out since 95, but I can feel where she’s coming from very well. Everything that she writes in the book is tinged with this sense of impending doom; she can see where it’s all going but is trying to convince herself that it won’t really turn out so badly. I know what that’s like; that’s how I was for all those years; I’m still like that now. It’s the same kind of thinking that allows earnest young left-leaning people to rationalize the outcome of the 2000 election by saying “well, once Bush wrecks the country, people will be lining up around the block to vote against him!” Well, no. Optimism can be a wonderful thing, but boy does it ever set a person up for a huge disappointment. Reading Radio On in 2003, the book seems less about its subject matter and more about a beautiful, idealistic optimism, the kind of optimism that led to the inevitable disappointments of the years since the book was published.

Best Kept Secretions

Soulseek users should note that Soulseek is switching providers and will be offline for another day or two. (Thanks to The Rub)