I'm a huge fan of This American Life. I download the podcast almost every week, hoarding them for those long line-ups, layovers and other periods of travel tedium (the stuff no one talks about when they romanticize being 'on the road'- the waiting). Still, as much as I love TAL, lately it's been falling a little flat for me. There will be a good act, followed by a boring bit, and sometimes I don't even make it to the end. This, coming from someone who used to treat TAL as a bedtime story, who would curl up every night in bed and listen with warm and geeky anticipation...*So, with 3 hours to kill in the Manila airport, I'm glad I picked a good one today. The episode is called Human Resources, and it is really bloody interesting/funny/thought-provoking from beginning to end. In a nutshell: where NYC teachers go when they've been bad, gentrification and displacement, and chimpanzee retirement homes.
This American Life is the way that public radio should be: interesting, well-produced and FREE. I try to donate when i can to keep it that way.
Ok, and to tangent (or to follow this thinly shared theme of gentrification), I also saw a really great film recently called Home, by Swiss director Ursula Meier. The film centers around a family who've built a house in the idyllic fields at the edge of an abandoned highway. Their carefree lives are upended when news hits that the highway will finally be opened. The cars and traffic become an unnerving source of noise and pollution, driving the family to take increasingly drastic measures to preserve their home and way of life.Home weilds the displacement metaphor like a blunt object, and the series of blows it deals, as the family goes from coping with positive thinking and tight smiles to trying not to completely lose their shit, are crushing and emotionally raw. It helps that it's also amazingly well-acted, especially by Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher) as the mother and Kacey Mottet Klein, who plays little Julien. I feel a little out of the loop- I'd heard nothing about this film and only chanced upon it when a friend invited me out. It was a really pleasant surprise and exceptionally well done for a first-time feature. I says "Check it out, yo."
*I know, I know. There are other great radio shows deserving of praise. Radio Diaries is awesome, radiolab's ok, and DNTO for some down home canadianness. But... I don't know, I think it's Ira Glass' voice. It's so matter-of-fact. Most radio personalities tend to come off sounding a little too theatrical, literary, contrived. Ira's voice is totally the secret to TAL's success. I'm convinced that new contributors secretly have to attend Ira training, where they learn to imitate and perfect his style of pause and nuance. And I swear that at least one of their producers was hired purely on account of the fact that he sounds just like him...
