Vital stats: Format: Q&As, often post-screening, with directors, writers, writer-directors, and other filmmakers Episode duration: 40m-2h30m Frequency: often weekly, though it varies I moved to Los Angeles for the filmgoing, sure — how many other cities offer the chance to experience all eras of cinema, theatrically, pretty much every week? — but also for the [...]
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Vital stats: Format: interviews with writers and editors of long-form articles Episode duration: ~45m-3h Frequency: erratic “TV Made Fresh Daily”: that, to me, remains the core product of the FX network. Then again, I haven’t watched since about the turn of the millennium, but so many of my pleasant televisual memories come from tuning in [...]
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Vital stats: Format: interviews with writers and editors of long-form articles Episode duration: 35m-1h Frequency: weekly Say 3:00 a.m. has rolled around. I’ve walked my lady home, downed whatever wine remained in the night’s bottle, sent the day’s last few dangling e-mails, read two or three page-downs on Twitter, glanced at Facebook, and checked the New [...]
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Vital stats: Format: two expats on the news from Japan, especially of the irksome variety Episode duration: 35-55m Frequency: erratic They call it “Seidensticker Syndrome”, in a tribute of sorts to famed translator and Japanologist Edward Seidensticker. Seidensticker, to put it far too uncomplicatedly, had a love-hate relationship with the country and the people who [...]
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Vital stats: Format: reading/exegesis/celebration of one sentence to one paragraph of James Joyce’s Ulysses Episode duration: 5m-25m Frequency: weekly If you described the medium of podcasting to an aspirational American of sixty years ago — the kind with a complete shelf of Mortimer Adler-approved Great Books of the Western World, purchased whole — they’d imagine [...]
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Monday, February 11, 2013
Vital stats: Format: poor and/or freakish writing found on the internet, then read aloud Episode duration: ~1h, plus the occasional special short Frequency: weekly, in theory The internet offers more of a chance than we’ve ever had to engage with the written word and with others who share our interests. As much fruit as this [...]
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Vital stats: Format: moderated conversations between an author and an audience Episode duration: ~30m (except when Douglas Adams comes on Frequency: monthly Despite having grown up in America, I’ve cultivated an overwhelmingly British, or at least British Empire, roster of favorite writers: Anthony Lane, Geoff Dyer, Pico Iyer, Clive James, Ian Buruma, Jan Morris — [...]
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Saturday, January 12, 2013
Vital stats: Format: independently produced documentaries, mostly from Los Angeles and the U.K. Episode duration: ~30m Frequency: weekly It’s not easy to title a show, granted, but avoiding fiction strikes me as a mark of no particular distinction in public radio. Indeed, in more judgmental moments I pin the blame for the creative malaise afflicting [...]
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Sunday, December 30, 2012
Vital stats: Format: on-location segments all over the world about “the people and ideas shaping our urban lives” Episode duration: ~50m Frequency: weekly I know very few people without a conflicted relationship to Monocle magazine. My own began some five years ago, when I happened upon an early issue on a Barnes & Noble rack. [...]
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Sunday, December 16, 2012
Vital stats: Format: Danny Baker, his co-host, his callers, and a bunch of (mostly British) celebrities talk football — but mostly go on tangents therefrom Episode duration: ~1h30m Frequency: erratic “Because all of the subjects are British, there are qualities that leap out for an American viewer,” Roger Ebert once wrote about Michael Apted’s Up documentaries. “One is [...]
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