Podcasts

Here's the deal. Compare it to your own.

I like information. Obviously. I also like entertainment. And I have about a half an hour drive each way to work every day. Driving is blank time, wasted in its way. I can't say I've enjoyed driving per se since I was about eighteen. Back then we had a 1959 Impala convertible. I would drive home from my girlfriend's house late on a summer's night, the top down, Jean Shepherd monologizing on the AM radio. There wasn't anything but AM radio back then, and the alternative to Jean Shepherd would be top ten stuff. Teenagers built hard callouses on their fingers from their ability to click the radio buttons across their five preset stations the very second a good song ended, in a search for the next good song. No station ever played two songs in a row, nor did any station ever play two good songs in sequence even disregarding the endless commercials. It was a hard life for a music fan, which we all were. But something like Jean Shepherd... He would ramble on, with that hypnotic style of his, riffing on whatever amused him about modern life or his childhood or the army, and you just went along for the ride. With the top down, on a summer's night.

Now, when I drive, sometimes only music will do. I carry about 20 CDs covering the gamut. At the moment, and let's not compare this to the analysis of George W's iPod, I've got, among others, Assassins, Mel Torme, Queen, the Police, Rigoletto, Gottschalk, Hot Club of Cowtown and the Beach Boys. This choice allows me to satisfy whatever craving I may have at the moment, although I will admit that certain moments have certain predictable cravings. Driving home from work is rock, driving to work is random, driving in bad weather is classical, driving with family is American songbook. The radio, as a general rule, is unsatisfying musically, much as it was in that '59 Impala, for comparable reasons. FM allows you to skip the ads (sometimes), but there's still no guarantee you'll like what you hear.

Then there's talk. Jean Shepherd is dead. I tend to gravitate to NPR news on the ride home (and following, in the kitchen, while I'm preparing dinner), so the bare mention of the name Sylvia Poggioli simply turns me to jelly. I don't like news much in the morning, considering that I've just finished reading the papers, but there's not much else. I can listen to Stern about one day in five, if he's interviewing someone interesting and isn't talking about sex (which I just find annoying -- Stern talking about sex, that is, not sex itself). It's a real crapshoot if Stern will be interesting on a given day, and I have low expectations.

So, at that point, you can listen to audiobooks, and I like doing that (unabridged, of course -- forget my job, for a minute). I've heard some great ones. I prefer books I wouldn't ordinarily read, but that's a small universe, given that I get paid to read for a living, and those books cover the spectrum of popular fiction and nonfiction. But there's always some. For instance, there was Bergdorf Blondes, which I found hilarious as a sort of chicklit take on Bertie Wooster, at least insofar as the classic "unreliable narrator" is concerned. And there's older stuff like, of course, Bertie Wooster. But the problem is, an audiobook is a bloody commitment. These things go one for disk after disc after disque. At a half hour snort at a time, it can take weeks to finish anything. And if you REALLY like something? Well, I had to run out and get I, Claudius about halfway through the second installment and read it for myself, because the audiobook just wasn't fast enough (can I recommend the Claudius books highly enough?).

Which is why I think that my recent infatuation with podcasting may turn out to be a longterm marriage. In no time I found Leonard Lopate's interviews, a daily dose of Jean Shepherd (!), Newsweek, and, of course, the ubiquitous Adam Craig. I now fill up my iPod with more daily-ride material than I can listen to on my daily rides. This is a very good thing. To be honest, I don't see podcasting as some sort of revolution to come. I do not see a world where everyone is suddenly a program producer. It's bad enough that everyone thinks they can write (I find most blogs unintelligible). But podcasts will fill a niche, I think, as real producers (like NPR) make material available on a time-shift basis. Why not? Radio does suffer from the lack of time-shifting, from the sense that it is ephemeral. TV was comparably ephemeral until time-shifting came along, but there's never been a serious attempt to apply comparable (easily available) technology to radio. Probably something to do with, as McLuhan would say, the difference between hot and cold media. Which is where podcasts come in, for those of us who like the spoken word but don't want to listen to all ten discs (really -- ten discs!) of a Jim Morrison biography. I am good, however, for ten minutes of a Mr. Mojo Risin' segment.

It will be interesting to see where podcasting is in, say, three years, vis-a-vis satellite radio.