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| From | "Stewart Mason" <craigtorso@verizon.net> |
| Subject | Another way OT media recommendation: Too Beautiful To Live |
| Date | Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:57:15 -0500 |
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Can't help Drew with his request, since my daily blogroll runs around
a couple dozen once you factor in the apolitical ones, but it did
remind me that I wanted to make a podcast recommendation that's
tangentially pop-related at best, but I know there are some folks here
it would appeal to. Since early January, an AM news talk station in
Seattle has been running a nightly three-hour show called Too
Beautiful To Live, hosted by a guy named Luke Burbank. Burbank used
to work for NPR: I first discovered him a couple years ago doing
pieces on All Things Considered, and he later became a regular on the
weekly comedy-quiz show Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me. Last year, he helped
develop NPR's new morning news show The Bryant Park Project, but he
left the show in December mostly because he hated being away from his
hometown of Seattle, where his teenage daughter lives.
So he moved back home to Seattle and started working at an AM talk
station -- which so far is basically the plot of Frasier, now that I
think about it -- but his nightly show Too Beautiful To Live is truly
not like anything else you can hear on talk radio right now. This is
much more like talk radio used to be back in the day, when it really
was just people ruminating into microphones. There is a standing
policy that he refuses to gin up feigned outrage about anything,
shouting matches are verboten, callers don't get onto the air, and
politics and sports are only to be discussed when they're relevant:
for example, last week, there was some choice material about Roger
Clemens' slow-motion meltdown in front of a Congressional hearing, but
that led quickly into a discussion, with examples, of that horrible
moment when you get busted in a lie and everyone knows it, which for
me makes much better radio than yet another rehash of the BALCO
scandal.
Luke, his producer Jen and his engineer Sean are all pop-culture
obsessives, and so pop music does get discussed fairly regularly on
the show -- the theme song of which, by the way, is Ben Lee's "Catch
My Disease," which gives massive points in its favor just by itself --
such as during an opening segment recently where Luke and Sean
attempted a live, on-air mashup of the Vampire Weekend single and Paul
Simon's "Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes" (which really are damn
near the same song, frankly), alongside movies (Luke is obsessed with
THERE WILL BE BLOOD, and was the first media figure I heard jump onto
the "I...drink...your...MILKSHAKE!" bandwagon, playing a clip of that
line obsessively until it started getting to the point that everyone
else was quoting it as well), TV shows and other topics such as the
nightly segment Awesome/Not Awesome, in which the day's news stories
are graded according to that admirably simple scale.
There are those who will likely find the show irritatingly precious --
given that they have three hours to fill every night, a fair amount of
the show really consists of the three principals talking about
themselves at great length -- but for those on its wavelength, it's a
smart, funny, unpretentious show with a lot of charm, and I recommend
checking it out.
The podcast subscription link is on the show's website at
www.mynorthwest.com/tbtl -- oh, and don't be scared by the fact that
it's a three-hour show. Because it's on AM radio, each hour of the
podcast is more like 33 minutes since all the commercials and
newbreaks and stuff are chopped out. Between walking the dog, doing
the neighborhood errands and my gym routine, it's easy enough to keep
up to date.
S
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