Speechification

Fabulous performance from the wonderful writer James Ellroy on WYNC's Studio 360. Absolutely hilarious, whilst ably demonstrating the great American love of language.

Studio 360: James Ellroy [mp3]

Very nice little documentary on a favourite topic - walking the city in order to understand it, via psychogeography, Situationists, Walter Benjamin etc. but angled towards dead-ends in industrial canals in of South Sydney, a long way from M. Debord. Captures how tricky it is to walk Sydney, too (outside of the centre) although also reveals the benefits that await those that do. Actually, it's also the city on two wheels too, with some lovely, evocative bike-borne exploring of Sydney's Inner West. (Some nice refs. on the All In The Mind showpage below).

ABC Radio National: All In The Mind [mp3]

I don't usually go for documentaries about Australian indigenous communities on ABC Radio National. It's not that I think such matters are unimportant. Quite the opposite. It's just that there's a certain ... well, hand-wringing to much of the ABC material in question. This, however, is very different. It's a great doco from a few years back concerning Arnhem Land- up there - and its people in the context of Colin Simpson's original ground-breaking radio broadcasts from there in 1948. But it's also about radio journalism, documentary-making - particularly as regards the recording of indigenous culture, and the issues in repatriating media - and some lovely glorious sound itself.

ABC Radio National: Return to Arnhem Land [mp3]

Apologies for posting another New Yorker fiction podcast so soon, but this is just such an affecting piece: Richard Ford reading John Cheever's 1962 short story 'Reunion'. It was the magazine's first fiction podcast, before they'd acquired some theme music. I listened to this twice, and the second time nearly lost it - but then, since becoming a father as well as a son, my threshold for such things has been obliterated. This series also illustrates how good writers are at reading. That might sound obvious, but there's certainly a writerly insight at play when narrating these pieces, and Ford brilliantly performs this one.

Reunion [mp3]

Judging by the line-up of podcasts on my phone now, many of the fears the national broadcasters had a few years ago seem to have been pretty valid. It's a mix of 'speech radio'-like material from publishers, small specialised broadcasters or international competitors, with barely any from BBC Radio 4 or ABC Radio National, the national broadcasters most closely aligned with the terrain I've recently called home.

I'm now able to listen to audio closely related to my work interests drawn from all over Anglophone countries - that's a few hours a week. And then a range of generally good smart public radio, such as from New York's WNYC (Studio 360 and Radio Lab) and WFMU's Mudd Up!). Inside Europe from Deutsche Welle is always good, when I manage get to it.

But interestingly, it's increasingly dominated by speech radio offerings from what were previously print publishers. The Monocle Weekly, The Guardian, with its Football Weekly - funny, acerbic, international in focus (despite the inevitable gravitational pull of the Premier League). The Economist, after inauspicious beginnings a couple of years ago, are now really investing — and it's paying off, with a well-produced and consistently interesting range of audio, video and slideshow based shows.

And here, The New Yorker. They're really going to town on their podcasts now too. Their monthly fiction podcast, featured here, is particularly good. With an extraordinary archive to draw from, they get writers to pick a story from the mag and read it out, then have a conversation about it. That's it. But it's great. Well-produced, well-hosted, but most of all, great characters and great stories. Makes great radio-not-radio.

And interestingly, I feel more likely to buy the print magazine again now. I'd picked it up from time to time over the years, always enjoyed it, but it was a peculiarly empty pleasure - I never got through all the articles, and it's oddly vicarious to be browsing the listings for last week's gigs at the Lincoln Center, Tonic or MoMA. Now, though, I'm developing a new relationship with it. Indicates how podcasting can extend a brand, but also draw new readers back to the magazine.

I could've picked any I've enjoyed recently, such as David Bezmozgis reading Sergei Dovlatov’s “The Colonel Says I Love You”, which is just great, or Roger Angell reading the late John Updike’s “Playing with Dynamite.”, or Joyce Carol Oates reading Eudora Welty etc. etc. But I've gone for Jonathan Franzen reading a couple of humorous short stories. Both are roughly from the '80s, neither show their age.

Veronica Geng (which is a great name, as Franzen explains) delivers a funny, yet rather arch piece, an entire Raymond Chandler-parody based on a challenge - that nobody actually issued as a challenge - of combining the words 'Reagan' and 'read Proust' in the same sentence as frequently as possible. Yet the second story, Ian Frazier's piece 'Coyote vs. ACME', is rather more wonderful, being a law-suit issued by Mr Coyote against the ACME company. Beautifully done, slyly undercutting the emerging culture of personal litigation its utter absurdity at first seems to rob the colour and vitality from the masterful original works, yet ultimately builds to a loving and artful tribute, triggering numerous flashbacks of Wile E Coyote's quotidian yet relentless glorious failures. Both pieces are 'extreme writing' as the title implies, even essentially avant-garde in form as Franzen illuminates, yet both are as smart, sophisticated and accessible as New York City itself.

There are still a couple of ABC Radio National podcasts in the mix, and while broadcast speech radio is probably still doing fine, it's going to be increasingly tough for them - and the BBC - to be going toe to toe with the likes of The Economist, The New Yorker, The Guardian etc. week after week, as well as new players and international competitors, and not really being able to move onto their terrain at all. It's great for us, the listener, but they must be thinking they live in interesting times.

Extreme Writing, The New Yorker [mp3]

"What is it about Queenslanders (the house, not the people)? They're cold in winter, hot in summer, prone to white ant attack and in need of constant work, but many thousands of people wouldn't live in any other kind of house"

A great documentary about the unique domestic architecture of Queensland (here are a few of my photos of Queenslanders from a couple of years ago; or the Wikipedia definition if you prefer), but this is really about stories, memory, domestic life, families, Australia, and so on. Somewhat nostalgic, but that's how people feel about these things - rarely is a city, and state, so uniquely entwined with a particular kind of building. Very nice work by Tony McGregor. (Listen out for the crows, and also for Steve Godstone, with whom I have shared several good conversations about David Peace and Liverpool vs Spurs, but here talks beautifullly about building, structure, Australian hardwoods and suchlike.)

ABC Radio National: 360: An almost practical guide to living with Queenslanders [mp3]

Another in the Australian Landscape series, here looking up to the sky. Floating between radio waves, flying doctors (not the soap), Indigenous dreaming, cubist painting, and the magnificent women and their flying machines of early aviation, this is another great, far-reaching doco from the ABC. 

Big Sky Stories [mp3]

Continuing my attempt to disorientate the Northern hemisphere - or at least its Speechification listeners - with tales of dry, distant lands, here's another fine ABC Radio National doco. This one follows in the footsteps of W.O Hodgkinson, who led the last government funded expedition into Australia's Simpson Desert in 1876, attempting to find the source of 'Pituri', a valuable native narcotic. Tracing the journals of Victorian explorers is a well-worn format, but almost always fascinating. This one no exception, and pitched in front of an evocative soundscape.

Hindsight: Along the Pituri Trail [mp3]

My offering for the Christmas season at Speechification may be a little different to that of my friends in the North, though I'm sure a few ex-pat listeners have also experienced Christmas in Australia and found the experience enjoyably surreal. Padding through a mall in shorts and flip-flops, past a queue for Santa, while 'Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow ...' plays over the tannoy. The last time in snowed in the centre of Sydney was 1836.

It's wonderfully hot over the festive season in Australia, and much of the place shuts down for a couple of months, as the peculiar circumstance of an imported European culture introduced to the local climate means that summer holidays coincides with Christmas. Most civilised. So I'm writing this from Brisbane, where I've decamped for the week from Sydney, and the overwhelming experience 'up here' is sub-tropical heat and humidity. (As I type, its still 28 degrees at 11pm and a rather well-fed cockroach just scuttled past the keyboard.) ABC Radio National broadcast a great documentary about the cultural experience of heat as part of the Australian landscape about a year ago, which I'm reposting here as my belated contribution to the Christmas week at Speechification. Hope you all have a bloody hot New Year.

ABC Radio National: Hindsight: The long hot summer - heat [mp3]

A wonderfully atmospheric doco on the lamed vav tzaddikim, the 36 beings who keep the world turning according to Jewish tradition. There's a lovely associated photo gallery here, featuring photos by Todd Weinstein, and nice sound work from sound engineer Russell Stapleton.

ABC Radio National: Radio Eye: Double Life [mp3]