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seekingferretI had a lot of hours in the car this past weekend as I drove to Gloucester, MA for my cousin's wedding. I could've gone with my parents, but decided to go alone so I'd have my car, which was a good choice. It gave me the ability to jaunt back to Somerville to see ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
speckled_llama and thefieldsbeyond, and just generally gave me a little more space from my parents, which I valued.
On the drive up I listened to the full season of "Running from Cops", a journalistic podcast about the way the TV show Cops is made and what its impact is on the way policing works in America. It was fascinating and I highly recommend it.
Needless to say, Cops presents a highly manipulated vision of police work. In the final episode, the reporter is given a copy of the unedited original footage from one ten minute scene from the show, a closely guarded piece of media that emerged in the discovery for a lawsuit against the police department involved. It's stunning to see what gets left out, how it gets reshaped, how it is forced to conform to a narrative that the producers know will sell.
On the drive home, I listened to most of the first season of "I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats", afterbrainwane has been pushing me to listen to it for ages. It's so good, I'm sorry I waited. I've already subsequently finished listening to season 1 and am a few episodes into Season 2.
It's a podcast where Joseph Fink, one of the writers of Night Vale, interviews John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats. Each episode focuses on just one song, and they discuss how the song works, what the process of creating it was like, and then tangent off in all directions talking about art and life. In the first season, which covered the classic Mountain Goats album "All Hail West Texas", each episode ended with a newly commissioned cover of the song. Many of these covers are stunning.
But beyond that, it's just a really enlightening series of conversations about what it is to make art. The co-hosts have great chemistry that deepens as the show progresses. Darnielle in particular is fascinating, the way he makes himself so vulnerable and seemingly transparent and yet continues to hide and obfuscate himself. The combination of interiority and exteriority that art requires is so fascinating to think about.
I also listened to one episode of "Everyone's a Critic", a podcast about, ahem, Reading the Comments on The Internet. It did not go on my list as a must-listen, but it entertained me well enough. People are amazing.
speckled_llama and thefieldsbeyond, and just generally gave me a little more space from my parents, which I valued.On the drive up I listened to the full season of "Running from Cops", a journalistic podcast about the way the TV show Cops is made and what its impact is on the way policing works in America. It was fascinating and I highly recommend it.
Needless to say, Cops presents a highly manipulated vision of police work. In the final episode, the reporter is given a copy of the unedited original footage from one ten minute scene from the show, a closely guarded piece of media that emerged in the discovery for a lawsuit against the police department involved. It's stunning to see what gets left out, how it gets reshaped, how it is forced to conform to a narrative that the producers know will sell.
On the drive home, I listened to most of the first season of "I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats", after
brainwane has been pushing me to listen to it for ages. It's so good, I'm sorry I waited. I've already subsequently finished listening to season 1 and am a few episodes into Season 2. It's a podcast where Joseph Fink, one of the writers of Night Vale, interviews John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats. Each episode focuses on just one song, and they discuss how the song works, what the process of creating it was like, and then tangent off in all directions talking about art and life. In the first season, which covered the classic Mountain Goats album "All Hail West Texas", each episode ended with a newly commissioned cover of the song. Many of these covers are stunning.
But beyond that, it's just a really enlightening series of conversations about what it is to make art. The co-hosts have great chemistry that deepens as the show progresses. Darnielle in particular is fascinating, the way he makes himself so vulnerable and seemingly transparent and yet continues to hide and obfuscate himself. The combination of interiority and exteriority that art requires is so fascinating to think about.
I also listened to one episode of "Everyone's a Critic", a podcast about, ahem, Reading the Comments on The Internet. It did not go on my list as a must-listen, but it entertained me well enough. People are amazing.
Yay!
Date: 2019-07-14 02:52 pm (UTC)Could you talk a little about how you interpret that Darnielle "continues to hide and obfuscate himself"? I am curious.
Also, remind me whether you ever tried out the podcast audio drama "Wolf 359"?
Re: Yay!
Date: 2019-07-16 11:40 am (UTC)So I think this crystallized for me while listening to the live show episode. Darnielle's first evasion is always "I don't know how to talk about my creative process, I just sit down and write and whatever happens happens." And then there are deeper evasions: he talks, I think in the episode about "Jenny", about this post-facto process where he listens to a song he's written and decides "Oh, this one is about Jenny," in the sense that it conveys some of the themes and character movements that are consistent with a Jenny song, or whomever. He might've said this about the Alpha Couple. And again this makes it seem like creativity just comes from a magic well of his subconscious that he can't process until after the fact. And there's the repeated obfuscation of his insistence that he just talks incessantly about whatever comes to his mind, because of nervousness, as if he's not thinking out what he's saying.
But in the live show episode, talking about "Steal Smoked Fish", Darnielle starts out with a bunch of these evasions, and eventually Fink manages (possibly inadvertently) to goad Darnielle by minimizing the morality of stealing smoked fish until he outright admits that this is a song he wrote about a few of his friends from Portland, who were desperate, drug-addicted sex workers who died of AIDS about a year later. And steal smoked fish isn't a metaphor, it's not a line that just came to him when he was working that spoke of a deeper truth, it's a thing that literally happened to real people he knew.
And it became clear to me in that moment that there is an outright deliberation and awareness in Darnielle's writing that he spends most of the show trying to pretend isn't there. With good reason, I wouldn't want to talk about my dead friends on the radio for thousands of people to hear. There's an incredible vulnerability to that. But, I mean, this is a show ostensibly about the creative process, and at that moment you get a little crack and I think Darnielle reveals more than he had planned to reveal, and it goes against what he's otherwise been saying about his song-writing process.
But the more I listen the more it seems like a lot of what he says is calculated in terms of that push and pull about how much he's willing to be vulnerable about his artistic process. There's a scene in the most recent episode I listened to, the interview with Reply All's PJ Vogt, where Fink and Vogt have been talking about the nitty gritty of the timing of podcast production for a while and Darnielle hasn't been able to much participate in the conversation, and all of a sudden he blurts "Should I buy a sword?" The episode plays it as signifying their exhaustion and punchiness, and I don't doubt their punchiness, but I think it's typical of Darnielle's instincts that his response to his punchiness is a carefully timed interruption to the conversation that makes it all about him. Some of the time Darnielle is fascinatingly vulnerable and honest, and some of the time he is talking to distract from the fact that he's not saying anything, but all of the time, he is being a Performer with a capital P.
So, I mean, when in the episode on "Sicilian Cross" where he spends the whole episode denying there's any significance to the title other than that it's a phrase he wrote down in a notebook, I don't exactly believe him. I think that's a performative stance. In the end, I don't care all that much, the song has to stand on its own regardless of what the writer says about it, but in terms of I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats being a podcast for deep dives into the meaning and construction of these specific songs, I believe there is a lot that Darnielle self-edits to leave out of his explanations.