The Transom Review
Volume 5/Issue 3
Rick Moody |
Rick Moody
(Edited by Sydney Lewis)
The Construction of Humanism in Documentary Radio (Part Two)
Syntax
I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent "bad" information from invading and suffocating the "good." Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings.
--Michel Foucault, "The Masked Philosopher"
What is to be done?
One rejoinder to my earlier remarks would of course be to say that the documentary form in contemporary radio adheres to a certain syntax . That is, a certain deployment of field recording and spot music and talking heads is the very syntax that documentary requires to do its job. Literature requires nouns and verbs and modifiers to do its job, radio requires talking heads and field recordings. This may be true, up to a point. However, when you listen to earlier periods of radio, you find a much greater tolerance for discontinuous elements, for longer quotations from the speaking subjects in the pieces, a triumph of languor over brevity, a willingness to let field recordings be field recordings. Genuine sound effects, wonder, fiction, all of these things had their essential roles in radio, in contrast to what we find now.
Which is to say that if, arguably, there are syntactical elements to a documentary approach, then these syntactical elements are not fixed in nature, but rather fluctuate according to the fashion of a moment. This is especially true, it seems to me, in the blind adherence to brevity. When I was at the Third Coast Audio Festival last year, I heard more than one producer say that one of the great dangers of radio is that someone might turn the dial . Every documentary program needs to be alert to this possibility that an A.D.D.-afflicted listener might, in the end, give this dial a spin. In this way do we give away our the whole notion of pacing to the most impatient among us. The remarks of speakers in various documentary pieces are made ever shorter, until there is no complexity of character constructed in the piece, and no room for any idea that takes longer than a few seconds to argue. Of course, you do this long enough and the listener will no longer know that there is another way of rendering the human voice in the act of speaking.
A second rejoinder might be to point out that print journalism, too, has its clichés (the New York Times , for example, just ran its annual or biennial summer photograph of children frolicking in the spume of an open hydrant). It has its hackneyed stylings, as does television news (the bastard child of the documentary arts), as does documentary cinema. Why pick on radio? The answer to this question is simply that I pick on radio because I care . And it is no rationale to say that because other media want for imagination and creativity that radio should somehow be exempted or be held to the same low standard that we might use to judge the nightly news on network television.
Having attempted to dispense with some of the criticisms, therefore, I would like to move onto some suggestions.
My first idea about how to improve radio programming is therefore to stop worrying so much about people turning the dial. If you are intending to represent humanism, if you are trying to depict people as they talk and think, these abbreviations are doing a disservice to your intention, because human life is not lived in minute-and-a-half segments. In human life, changes can arise dramatically, but they can also take place imperceptibly, over years.
Another prejudice at the Third Coast Festival had to do with fidelity to the truth. The documentarians had, in my experience, an almost cult-like belief that there is such a thing as objective truth in documentary radio, that a tape recording can be identical with an event or narrative or out there in the world, when in fact a recording, objectively speaking, is just some ones and zeroes on a memory chip. It can't be otherwise. And since perfect fidelity is impossible in this medium, since an apple is an apple and an orange is an orange, why is not subjectivity just as good? At least on occasion? This was part of the idea, it seems to me, in the early incarnations of This American Life . That a powerful personality, and a strong idea about the tragicomedy of the world can be just as "true" as the hard news.
Furthermore, if perfect fidelity is impossible, then why can't a mix of a straight-ahead documentary approach and art be a part of public radio. The public radio world certainly tolerates documentary work about art and artists and writers (these profiles being among the more formulaic spots in public radio programming), but it certainly isn't very good at collaborating with art. For example, one of the best programs out of WNYC in New York, The Next Big Thing , perennial winner of awards, and a show that younger producers have looked to with reverence and awe, had its wings clipped this year by its parent station, ostensibly for budgetary reasons. The Next Big Thing (for which I contributed a number of pieces), had a big, voracious appetite for the non-linear, the unusual, the artful. It embraced recordings of people skating in Wollman Rink without voice over at all, or long memoirs about Allen Ginsberg that seemed non-critical of his unusual romantic life, it embraced Jonathan Ames playing cards with his great aunt, etc. This seemed to me just the direction to go in.
Avoid brevity, celebrate fiction. These are two of my morsels of advice, and my third bit of advice is deliberately reverse foreground and background. The way a news story always sits on some mulch of background information. Why does it have to be like this? There's not an objective reason, beyond syntactical fashion, when oftentimes the background is the information that people need to hear. It's the mediation of the reporter's voice that is often the big lie. Accordingly, the humans in the piece can't be human, can't prompt the humanist epiphany, unless they're allowed to appear without editorial intercession.
A fourth suggestion, along similar lines, would be to make the music central to the work, perhaps even "diegetic," to use the cinematic term. Let the music endanger or preclude the narration. Because the narration, ideally, is really just a kind of music, seen in the correct light, and its privileged position is, as I've said, arbitrary. If the privileged position of content-oriented language is disturbed, new kinds of ideas are generated, and new possibilities for meaning.
Which leads me to venture a suggestion about language itself. Language, words, the music of language are what documentary news is made of (in part), the same language that makes poetry or excellent prose, or drama, etc. Why so dull and flat? And here we are obliged to recall the original section of this manifesto, the section about literature. It's hard not to conclude that just as there is a resistance to musical prose in contemporary writing there is a resistance in radio to an artful or even marginally creative use of language, as well. In addition to the humanist epiphany, which radio tries to summon in just the way the apocryphal monkey taps on the button in the corner in cage in order that he might procure his opiates, radio and literature both, in their mainstream evocations, rely on a diminished idea of language.
My suggestion is to think against the content-oriented language that is used for most documentary radio, and to try to think a little bit about how a more encyclopedic, kaleidoscopic language mirrors the more encyclopedic and kaleidoscopic world. A language of celebration and mutability is more about the human spirit than an ostensibly objective news language that is not, in fact, objective at all. And, of course, the narrower the vocabulary, the narrower the horizons ahead of us in the landscape, for all of us. The fewer words we use, the simpler sentences, the more difficult it becomes later to call up the complex means to render a more complicated world.
So, as regards documentaries: avoid brevity, celebrate fiction, abbreviate the role of the narrator, play with foreground and background, make music central, utilize the spirit of the arts, make the language sing. Play in general . At one time, radio was noted for drama and serial narrative. At one time, people gathered around the radio to hear the weekly updates of serial fiction programs. It's unlikely this will ever happen in the same way again, but does that mean that radio must abdicate its former glory entirely?
Collage
There are many glimmers of hope, I think.
There is, on the one hand, the hegemony of the formulaic in public radio. There is the wiping out of shows that feature alternatives, like The Next Big Thing . Obviously, I find these developments dispiriting. But there are glimmers of hope.
The revolution has to come from out of the mainstream. The mainstream is controlled by money, power, and politics, and as such is suspect. At one point, "Morning Edition," was the revolution, but as with many revolutions, it got soft, and it began accepting a repetition of tried and true programming ideas, instead of looking to the margins of radio for the possibility of ongoing innovation. Of course, the industry leader has no reason to change, no matter what the field, unless there is genuine pressure from another direction.
And maybe there is pressure. I'm thinking not only of the Web, where sites like Kenny Goldsmith's UbuWeb (and of course Transom) serve as repository for new sounds and new ways of thinking about audio. And there is Internet radio in general. And there is satellite radio, which, at least for the moment, is willing to investigate niche-programming opportunities long forsaken for by the dinosaurs of Infinity, Clear Channel, and National Public Radio. But I'm also thinking of podcasting, which is used regularly on the Transom site, and elsewhere. The iPod makes inevitable, or at least very likely, certain new ways of listening. For one, the iPod listener is in control of the when and where of the broadcast, with the result that the listening can take place when the audience is maximally equipped for concentration and receptivity. Second, the iPod listener in most cases is extremely tolerant of collage-oriented programming, since he or she probably makes regular use of the shuffle capability on his or her device. Certain commercial radio formats are already said to be catering to this temperament of the iPod habitué. How would a public radio programmer think like an iPod user?
Well, first, this programmer, this documentarian, might be thinking more creatively about collage and about non-linearity. The iPod arrives at a moment when sampling, in Hip Hop and electronica, have become regular parts of culture. Culture, in this era, is recombinant, and it is probably recombinant because (in a time of global interdependence) there is no difference between the cultures of the developing world and the industrialized world. Culture is all thrown together now, and as with the stew of subatomic particles that makes up matter and the fundamental forces, little bits of things are always annihilating their opposites, existing only briefly enough to leave traces and allusions behind. This collage-oriented and non-linear way of viewing the world, therefore, is the humanism of this moment, it's how the people live and breathe, and if documentary radio would harness the spirit of humanism, it would capture it in the style in which this humanism is lived.
These are hopeful developments, developments that put radio back in the hands of the user, that empower the listener with respect to the medium of radio, instead of leaving this listener passive at the apprehension of an increasingly successful, but increasingly detached public radio, one that is, in fact, estranged from the lives of its listeners. The collage-oriented nature of The Next Big Thing , Radio Lab , and Soundprint suggests what's going to happen next, but if radio outlets on the Web can make themselves felt to a larger public, the results in the future are even more potentially interesting. For documentary makers on the ground the possibilities ahead may well be far more exciting than they are now.
Jackson Braider - August 5, 2005 - # 25
...I love the way Rick gently lobs a hand grenade among pubrad devotees. I admire the desire of colleagues to protect the people who speak to us.
So let me start with a simple question: how do you define the line between noise and content in your reporting?
Rick Moody - August 5, 2005 - # 26
I love noise. Or maybe I don't believe such a thing exists. If you listen properly, as I believe John Cage said on a number of occasions, everything sounds beautiful. I could go on this way at great length, but then I would, for certain, be missing the great virtue of much of Cage's output: compaction.
Chris Ho - August 7, 2005 - # 27
We seem to be at a point in time where we are lingering in a post-postmodern funk. The pendulum between the necessity of substance and the purity of form can only reach so far before it swings back. And round and round we go.
In the wake of this motion, the devices we discover become adopted and implemented until the new tarnishes once again to the norm...but this action keeps our little slice of 'now' from gathering too much grass.
Brecht's attempt to satirize the ultimate form of his time led to his creation of the "Threepenny Opera"; the musical score poked at the convention with a discord of profanity, and his sets created a space which he hoped would remove the 'fourth wall' of the play.
But much to his chagrin, songs like "Mac the Knife" made it into the popular consciousness. People simply liked the tune. Brecht saw this as a failure, but this failure resulted in an extremely popular play that we now hold up to the light as modernism.
Dale Short - August 9, 2005 - # 28
...The true avant-garde in any field serves an important function, but how much of it remains relevant and memorable as art?
To me, it's not a question of WHETHER to shape material, but of recognizing how much shaping is too much, and seeing warning signs that we're overdoing or underdoing that orderliness. I'd be interested in hearing your suggestions as to spotting those red flags, and also more examples of radio pieces (and of fiction, for that matter) that you and others feel is productively pushing the envelope in that regard. I've learned a lot from the samples posted so far.
Also, could you please elaborate on two suggestions you make in Part 2: "A willingness to let field recordings BE field recordings" and "think against content-oriented language"?
Rick Moody - August 12, 2005 - # 29
...I imagine that letting field recordings BE involves less intrusion, less editing, less context. In the unedited long version of the essay, I spoke a little bit about the theory of the "long take" in cinema, and how this syntactical notion was meant to approximate how we see things in life. (Another good example might be the excellent documentaries of Frederick Wiseman.) I mean something similar: if a recording of kids playing at the housing project doesn't have the guy speaking over it about how violent the project is, well, then you learn something much more interesting about these kids. The kids are no longer wallpaper and can conceivably be seen in some more true light.
Content-oriented language is language that believes that it has no style. There really is no such language. But for the sake of argument, let's say that there kind of IS a flat, unornamented NPR house style for narration. To the extent that this is true, this style is about slaying language, dumbing it down, making it less than it actually is in all its glory, both high and low. I am advocating avoiding dumbing down the language. I am advocating grandiosity and solecism and poetry and colloquialism.
Laura Vitale - August 13, 2005 - # 30
As a beginning producer who has found herself wondering if there is a place for ambitious but "artsy" work in the current radio climate, this discussion has been educational and uplifting.
As educated and uplifted as I am now, though, I still feel ignorant about outlets for creative work in the US and internationally. The Next Big Thing was where I looked first for creative work, but it died...
Jonathan Mitchell writes that he has faith that good work will find an audience. Rick, maybe you disagree, but producers like me don't really have a choice but to make stuff without a possibility for broadcast. Do you disagree? Where should I pitch my weirdo ideas? Jonathan, which are these audiences that have ultimately received your experiments?
I´d love to find more potential outlets for creative work, whether it's in NY or some corner of Europe.
I thought that the Audible Picture Show was an exciting part of the last Third Coast Festival. http://www221.pair.com/mhulse/audiblepictureshow.html Thanks to all who have posted.
Dale Short - August 13, 2005 - # 31
In addition to the resources here at Transom, I've found the Public Radio Exchange (www.prx.org) a good place to hear a wide range of producers' work, traditional and otherwise. You can upload samples of your stories, and stations audition and license them for a modest fee. The Association of Independents in Radio (www.airmedia.org) is a great clearinghouse for places to pitch your ideas.
Like you, I hated to see "The Next Big Thing" bite the dust. Two other shows I listen to with interest, though they're not necessarily as up-front experimental as TNBT, are PRI's "Weekend America" (available as podcast, www.weekendamerica.org) and "Studio 360" (www.studio360.org). I'm told that both are very receptive to pitches from new talent.
Jonathan Mitchell - August 14, 2005 - # 32
in response to Laura Vitale's questions/comments...
I think it all depends on the nature of the work you want to create, and your expectations for who might want to hear it.
You could always start your own website or blog, and advertise it by putting a link at the bottom of your emails. Link to friends' sites from yours, and have them link to yours in return. This might generate a small audience among friends, especially if you update your site regularly. As examples, check out these blogs by radio producers:
And there are great website venues (that you probably already know about): Transom, Third Coast, and Hearing Voices are some of my favorites. The content on these sites is curated, so you can't just put things up there. But the stuff that's there is always worth hearing.
Another promising resource is PRX, where stations might choose to license your piece (although the money you'd get is negligible, a token really). It's also a great place to get feedback from people you've never met, which I feel helps in developing a sense of community. It also puts your work in a place trafficked by all kinds of radio folks, so you never know who might hear it.
If you'd like to get your work aired on a show, a lot of them take pitches. The thing with shows is, they tend to have a fairly defined sense of purpose. They have an idea of what their audience wants and expects, and they will need you to conform to that if your work is to be of any use to them (and rightly so, in my opinion). Some people find conforming to a show's needs to be too limiting, and it probably is for what they really want to do. I happen to enjoy the challenge. When working for a particular show, the more you know about it's needs, the better off you are. It also takes having a good sense of what you have to offer, and how you can turn that into something useful for the show you're pitching.
John Barth - August 15, 2005 - # 34
I'll second the pitch for PRX (I work there) (prx.org)--we delight when pieces and docs come in that push sound, push structure, composition and style and open ears to new ways of listening. Sadly, there is--as Rick points out--an NPR sound that IS flat, boring and smug (my words).
It is sad that so many older NPR listeners refer back to the brilliance of Robert Krulwich. Quick, point out someone on NPR now who has that ear, that courage to upend 'established' style and look and hear the world in a different way (and in a defining way).
I get asked frequently to coach, edit and shape producers. It is very uncomfortable. I don't have a lock on this stuff--I can help people become better reporters and perhaps better producers (getting people to just LISTEN is a challenge). But a new producer has to have the courage within themselves to define the world, reveal their feelings--construct the complex and engaging world. It doesn't all fit in a linear narrative.
As the traditional broadcast outlets for new radio work shrink (really, is there a difference between the sound and approaches of NPR and MPR?), producers who are very creative need to reset their ideas of success. Getting on NPR isn't it, if I can be so bold. Finding a station, a listener, an editor, a podcast, an outlet (like PRX) that permits you the range of production vision is THE most important goal.
There was a story on NPR yesterday or today about Rwanda wanting to become an information economy. I'm sorry, but the whole story seemed absurd--and cruel. I thought "who sold the government on this nonsense when people need to eat, need clean water, schools, roads..." And then I wondered why the producer (a very good one) and layers of editors didn't ask harder questions, too. The story was so straight it felt like a piece of propaganda. As does much of what I hear.
Good radio, really good radio, demands risk, authorship (and that is where the art comes in), courage. An audience won't always follow. But integrity is never about who takes notice of what YOU do.
Jackson Braider - August 15, 2005 - # 35
The Rwandan piece was surreal. In a land where the real is tenuous, the notion of building a virtual, service economy transcends the absurd.
Then again, we (and no doubt other listeners as well) came away with this feeling, so maybe the producer was doing his job, albeit in a very nuanced sort of way...
Having said all that, it feels as if programs and programming entities are rushing headlong into the concoction of "successful" "branding" through the quick establishment of particular "formulae" that identify the produced content as part of the "branded" program...
Here's the weird thing: proponents of "branding" think that it is the formula that's important, as if the formula had something to do with content. But as the bards show us, formula merely covers the transitions between the bits of content.
There is a point where the formula, the brand become little more than noise -- and I'm not talking about the sound of a great party, either.
Rick Moody - August 15, 2005 - # 36
Hey you guys, the conversation has taken a nice turn in my absence. I was, to explain my silence, taking a workshop on the voice with Meredith Monk, up in Rhinebeck. This experience got me thinking quite a bit. Maybe it got me thinking because Monk's whole approach was founded on the notion of listening more carefully. For example, she kept saying about vocal collaboration, "If you can hear yourself you're singing too loud." She also emphasized that what she does has to be orally transmitted (it can't be notated in the usual way that music is preserved). All of this got me thinking more about what's "human" in radio recordings, and my flash of insight was in the form of a hatred of perfect audio fidelity. My recognition, that is, was that I would have included a little more of a critique of the notion of "fidelity" and "good tape" in my manifesto had I had more time to think all of this through more. Or, to put it another way, ProTools and high-end audio equipment, etc., create a standardized sound to radio these days (compression on NPR is a good example: you find the signal really, really compressed, and that means less drama, as I see it), that is not at all a perfect transmission of the initial event being recorded. "Good" audio is just another idea of how to render or represent "reality." I would therefore make a plea for the idea of "bad" audio. A little bit of hiss, more dynamics, the occasional "bad" edit, as a metaphor for the arbitrariness of "good" audio. The likeliness of this happening, I imagine, is nill, but just as the Beats, in the first-thought-best-thought way, spawned the idea of the beauty of the mistake in literature, so it might be possible to mount a defense of the "mistake" in realm of radio reportage as a way of rendering the human more human.
In the meantime, a lot of very interesting points have been made in my absence, and I agree with Dale who I believe extolled the virtue of "Weekend America." A very good show.
kimberly kinchen - August 15, 2005 - # 37
...As an aspiring producer, I appreciate a lot of what's been said here. I think I'm still in the sort of learning the rules stage, and curious about how to break them and get away with it.
But, as a listener, I'm less appreciative. No one has really mentioned The Listener, and how to tap into what listeners like, want, expect. I remain really disappointed that TAL removed its discussion boards, and I will never buy the reasons that decision was made. (I think when someone agrees to be interviewed, they implicitly agree to put themselves into the sometimes mean light of public opinion and whatever consequences that brings. The lack of willingness of more and more of us to do that is part of what's wrong with us right now) More to the point I'm trying to get at is that the kind of discussions that happened on that board could be seen as a sort of instant listener response system, where you potentially get very rich sense of the experience you're giving your listener...I'm talking [about] what pieces draw the most interesting, strongest or complex reactions, even if from relatively few listeners? Discussion boards seem like one way to get at that.
So, my question to Rick Moody and the rest is - how do you listen to your listeners, and how can public radio listen to its listeners?
Rick Moody - August 15, 2005 - # 38
Don DeLillo said once he didn't have an ideal reader, he had a set of standards. That's good enough for me. If you treat the audience like they are brilliant and engaged, they will respond in kind. The more responsibility you give them, the better they will feel about their participation in the process. The contrary notion: deracinating by reason of anxiety, well, we know where that leads.
Eric Vos - August 16, 2005 - # 41
Schindler's List employed dramatic music. As if we needed a cue to realize "oh, this is the dramatic moment." As if we could have failed to appreciate the loss of six million plus souls sans wrenching violins. NPR's musical cues and crunching gravel are merely just another articulation of those artistic fears. As if the listener isn't going to get it unless you hurl it at his head. Really hard.
If you look to the heady days of radio, despite the awe inspiring audio special effects employed, so much was demanded of the listener. Each man, woman and child, all of whom were glued to crackling radios, were asked to summon up entire worlds. Without the listener's imagination, their participation, this once loved medium would have never captured the country's imagination. Radio today seems to have no concept of the immense skill employed by all those pre-t.v. radio junkies. Or frankly what drew them to the radio. Think of Symphony Space and their readings. So good and employs so little but for good stories and listener's imagination.
Modern literature seems to have fallen into the same place. Many of the revered magazines now read like People. Hiaasen's newest best seller requires little more than the reader turning the friggin page. Read the simple tale of an old man fishing off Cuba and all you can do is ask questions. As if the author receded and asked the reader to do all the heavy lifting. Additionally, many are sick of the Milan Kunderian style. Give us the story and let us ask the profound questions. Don't wrap it all in desperately intense articulated insights. Stop holding my brains hand! We don't need deep wordy insights which we may later quote at cocktail parties.
Pretty pictures are nice to look at. Yet, abstract impressionism begs us "come find me." It screams "I'm nothing without you." I think your grade school teacher called it "audience participation."
Break your medium down to the bare essentials. Let the listener construct the rest. Give us half the story. Our finishing touches will amaze you. Ask us and we will come. Don't you dare whine of us being multi-taskers and unable to settle in. That is a sad cliché which ignores the thousands of people stranded in their cars, which are idling in their driveways, in fear of missing their favorite radio show. A show which seems more and more intent on abandoning us.
Rick Moody - August 16, 2005 - # 42
I suppose I haven't said enough how impressive this conversation has been to me. I'm grateful for it, you guys. I like Eric's plea above. I agree with its substance and its form too.
Miguel Macias - August 19, 2005 - # 46
...I join the group of fans of Eric. And for one reason in particular. He attacked what I think is one of the fundamental problems with public radio documentary... the content. We could talk forever about the endless number of clichés that are used in the form of these pieces. But I have heard pieces that do not use those clichés and that are terribly disappointing as well... why? It's a difficult topic to talk about, I believe. How do you measure the complexity on the content of a piece?...
In my opinion radio documentaries are particularly unrevealing these days. They do not offer original ideas, or surprising approaches to topics. Reporters investigate and investigate more, conduct interviews and find out about all "the facts" (interesting concept this one of the "the facts"). But that is what I would call the first stage in the production of a piece. That is the stage where you find out what you can read in a book, or what others can tell you about something, what experts know or what you can "prove" (another interesting concept this one of "proving"). But how many times do we get to listen to a piece that offers a theory, a perspective created by the producer? The producer who has done a unique research, who has been in unique places, unique situations, analyze in unique ways, talk to unique people, go beyond the "facts" and say what they actually think. Something that provides an insight and encourages discussion and more thinking...
David Shorr - August 20, 2005 - # 47
...I have spent an entire career in the echo chamber of people just like myself who think about international issues all day (and offer pearls of wisdom to the media). With the way things are going, some of us have woken up to the need to engage the public more effectively and try to bring them along with us.
A year ago, a new resource on communicating about intl. policy was published called "The US in the World." The report highlighted the sizable gap between specialists and the general public and offered advice on how to overcome it. I recognized myself as part of the problem immediately.
So here I am now, trying to hone a message having to do with the big current push to reform the UN. It's complicated stuff I have to tell ya -- I sort of yearn for the days of US-Soviet arms control, a much simpler narrative.
All of which to say that I applaud Rick's plea for diversity and creativity, but I've become convinced that it's not unreasonable to ask folks like me to make their point in, say, less than a minute.
I'm sure this will provoke responses about not respecting my audience of fellow Americans, but I think it's rather a question of not being presumptuous. My organization (The Stanley Foundation) happens to be a producer of radio documentaries (in another department), and my counterpart in our communications department said the way for a wonk to talk to the public is to "strip out the process stuff" -- i.e. all the details of the negotiations... An editor I work with at The Globalist web journal says, "we don't talk about 'dumbing down,' we prefer to think of it as being straightforward."
Rick Moody - August 20, 2005 - # 48
I suppose my problem with the question of audience is that I have two distinct and perhaps opposed responses to it.
One reply, and I'm just going to be completely honest about it, is the Nabokovian response, and that response is, frankly, audience be damned. Nabokov, I think, would have said that it was not his job to provide easy access for those who are underexposed to art. It was the job of those who are underexposed to bone up. This may, on the face of it, seem like an elitist position, but if so, then Michelangelo and Nijinsky and Stein and Woolf and, well, Ernie Kovacs were elitists, and while this may be true, had they not bothered to be uncompromising we would all be the less for it.
The contrary position, in fact, the notion that there is some ideal audience member out there who is so fearful and liable to TURN THE DIAL that we must do whatever we can to appeal to him or her, actually appears to me to be the MORE elitist position, because this position elects to know the truth about people in all cases. This position is, strictly speaking, condescending, because it imagines that we, the programmers, are up here at some lofty level, and those guys down there, the audience, need to be given a soft surface to land on, sort of the way a parent would walk the house babyproofing it for a two-year-old. Not a level playing field, any way you diagram it, and, hence, condescending.
Another angle: audience is brilliant and wants more. Audience is not ill-informed, sentimental, attention-deficit-disordered, but, rather, responds incredibly well to being treated with dignity and respect, which, for example, the ugly music they always use on the Story Corps pieces, does not do. What happens if you assume that your audience is hungry for new textures, for formal diversity, for range, in what they listen to?
This, in a way, would be my reply to David Shorr (with whom, full disclosure, I went to college). Yes, it's true that your radio documentaries, if you are a pundit, might be direct and straightforward if they would be "effective" and "tendentious." But fortunately not all of radio is about persuasion, nor does it need be. That rhetorical mode is just one possibility, as I have been saying, and if it can more often be just one mode among others, it will have force for being less predictable.
There's a loophole in all of this, and that is that I think it's impossible not to write, make art, produce, do almost anything, without thinking about SOME ideal listener/reader/viewer. I think without this you are in a vacuum. I remember seeing the great novelist Stanley Elkin interviewed one time. He was asked who his ideal reader was, and he answered William Gass. So now you know it! Stanley Elkin novels were written so that William Gass would be amused. Among other things.
Therefore, I believe that everyone thinks about audience a little bit. And when I was making "Pirate Radio," I did. In fact, there's an interesting story here (which will come up at this years Third Coast Festival, because they're using "Pirate Station" as a test case for a session on editing). The producer/genius I worked with on the piece, Sherre DeLys (you should all go search out some of her work), came up with a first cut of the piece that was so dense with sound and texture that it was a little bit hard to hear the story itself, because it was so heavily illustrated by what was going on. Some of this ornament was oblique too. Fascinatingly oblique, but still oblique. I actually LOVED Sherre's "Antipodean" mix of the piece, but I DID think that it was worth trying to see if a little more silence (a resource I have not described enough in these remarks), a little more air, wouldn't make the piece tell it's story even better. This was also the feeling of the excellent Emily Botein at The Next Big Thing, and the two of us, Emily and I, went and sweated over a computer for a morning remixing some of all the great work that Sherre had done. In the end, we went with the American mix for the broadcast, because it let John Lurie, the reader, out into the open some, and because, when compressed, some of Sherre's brilliant effects were going to be hard to make out on a car radio.
I don't happen to think the result is sentimental, or easy, or anything else, especially since, above, someone has posted wondering if I thought anyone who wasn't acquainted with pirate radio would get the piece at all. But I did compromise, a little bit, in the production of "Pirate Station. In retrospect, I very much like BOTH mixes, and I am working on a new piece with Sherre right now, in which we have gone even further along the difficulty axis than we did on "Pirate Station."
Let it never be said that all compromise is useless, because if you don't compromise, ever, you never learn anything. And audience be damned.
Jonathan Mitchell - August 21, 2005 - # 49
I think of myself as being a member of many different audiences. I have a kind of "sphere of taste" that overlaps with other peoples' spheres, but never completely covers the same area as another person. Where it overlaps with lots of people is where an audience exists. But the trick is I can never know where exactly another person's sphere is, I can only sense it by listening to other people's work and ideas. But if I can manage to intuitively sense where that audience hovers, I can work with it, play into it, subvert it, even contradict it if I choose. The key for me is in identifying personally with the role of audience.
Eric Vos - August 23, 2005 - # 53
First, there is nary a story one may tell which we have not heard. You may not trump past tragedies or injustices. There is no story of joy we have not seen in one form or another. In sum, we have heard and seen it all. Sorry.
Yet, your telling of a new story provides you with a chance to help us see the stories of our past, and future, in new and unique ways. The narrator may want to see his/herself as a ground breaking cubist. The same human face with a new simplified interpretation.
It was interesting to see some people were concerned about the audience "feedback." I suspect that must be a concern. Yet, if you worry about the audience, when you create, who are you worrying about? Is there a particular person, a face, an ethnicity or a socio-economic strata? You are the "artist" and you should be the only voice during the creative process and not let "us" constrain you. Do not worry - your voice is our voice. The rainbow of data, which we have all received, has entered your senses and will now flow out in new pure light - which is unique to the artist. Please do not see "rainbow" as some floral idea. Rather, think of it as data, which is broken up, and returned to purity by the artist who acts as a reverse prism. If you allow the audience to interfere, you diminish your voice and litter the work with faceless persons and their supposed expectations.
Free yourself of us. It is this freedom, and simplicity, which will create the perfection. That is why simplicity is key - for it creates a common language and idea which we may all glom onto. You are taking the mass of confusion, the rainbow, and reworking it into simplicity, pure light.
Think of your new story as a Roseta Stone to our past and future. It is scary no doubt. Yet, the greater the leap the farther you will take us with you...
Aaron Sarver - August 17, 2005 - # 44
Just wondering a bit more about the audience question, not so much about standards or what NPR listeners are used to in terms of tone, but about cultural references and how they may alienate or pull in your audience. I listened to your wonderful piece "Pirate Station" at a gathering and afterwards the conversation drifted into wondering how an NPR audience would relate, or not, to the piece. Most of the group had in some form been involved in pirate radio, but I assume a vast majority of Morning Edition folks don't have a pirate radio background and therefore don't relate to the piece in the way our group did and miss most of what makes the piece great: namely the humor and wonderful sounds that pirate radio produces, accidentally or not.
And how does specific cultural knowledge by groups of people affect your decisions when making a piece for a general audience?...How do you make decisions about pieces when you have an audience of 3 or 4 generations that have a vastly different reference points for understanding American culture?
danielferri - September 7, 2005 - # 61
I'm finding this discussion of the audience a bit wearing. The audience is what it is.
Art does not depend on an audience, communication does. Art is too selfish to accept compromise, but if we want to communicate we must either meet the audience where they are or create work so compelling it takes them for a ride. No one owes us their ears, we are asking to borrow them.
Public radio has created new audiences; ATC, Prairie Home, This American Life, all created new audiences for radio by doing something good that engaged the audience in a way they had not been engaged before.
We don't learn by thinking about the audience, we learn by thinking about the work and what it can do to the human spirit. Good work creates good audiences.
Rick, when I heard "The Boys Came In" on the radio my body couldn't decide whether to dance, cry or piss my pants with joy that something could transport me so, through a boyhood, through a family, through the linking of one generation to the next.
How did you turn words on a page into sounds that made a middle aged man weep? How did you twist one media into another to make something so lovely?
How did it get made? How does it get from pencil to Pro Tools?
How did the work happen? Huh?
Rick Moody - September 8, 2005 - # 62
..."Boys" was produced for "The Next Big Thing," Dean Olsher's excellent radio program, and probably because Dean asked me what I would do on radio if I could do anything. My answer to this was that I would collaborate with Meredith Monk, the excellent extended-vocal range composer, whom I have admired for many years. (It's worth saying here that if Dean had not approached me, I probably wouldn't be here shooting my mouth off about radio at all. One thing led to another and I have done a number of radio pieces since, with much enthusiasm, and in a great spirit of learning.)
The story "Boys" already existed at this point, having appeared in my short fiction collection, DEMONOLOGY (Little, Brown, 2000). I figured it would be a good text for radio, for the simple reason that like a few other things I have written, it is all about sound, perhaps as much as it is about content.
Once we selected the text, Dean broached the idea to Meredith, whom I knew a tiny bit, and she said that it would be fine for us to use existing recordings of her work, but that she was too busy to write anything new. However, a few days later, Meredith called back to say that she had sketched out a few small things on 4-track, using the word "boys" and if we wanted to go into the studio to record them, that would be fine.
I decided at this point that I didn't want to be the reader of the text for the recording, because in truth the story is narrated (in a very elusive way) by the mother of the boys who are its protagonists. So I contacted the best woman reader of fiction I know, Julia Slavin (whose recent novel CARNIVORE DIET you should all read). She became the voice of the mother. We recorded Julia reading the story, and then I roughed out some ideas on Acid (my only sound editing program at that point) as to how we might use Meredith's existing stuff underneath some of Julia's reading.
Then Dean, Meredith, Meredith's engineer Scott (I think that was his name), and I all went into the studio together, and we did a marathon six-hour session, in which Meredith amazingly recorded three short multi-tracked pieces of herself singing (and playing Jew's Harp), and we did a rough mix of the whole, which Dean and Emily Botein (his producer) then tweaked slightly for broadcast.
For my own part, it was a magical night, because I got to watch Meredith Monk up close. It was also my first prolonged experience with Pro-Tools in the studio. Therefore: a gigantic learning experience. I take some credit for the overall sound of the piece, because I had a lot of ideas about how the existing Monk pieces might go under the text, as alternatives to the new recordings we did that night, which only totaled up to a couple of minutes. Having said this, it was a manifestly collaborative piece, with me serving as neophyte.
In retrospect, it's a radio piece that I am quite proud of. I always like the mix of the comic and the melancholic. And I like how some of the sound kind does an ersatz-descriptive thing that reminds me of old time radio drama. In fact, "Boys" sounds to me now like a slightly post-modern take on radio drama, which is good, as far as I'm concerned.
Rick Moody - September 30, 2005 - # 64
Jay has alerted me that this thread is now going to end officially. So let this be my punctuation mark. I had a great time on here, and I learned a ton, and the whole exchange really helped me to articulate my feelings about radio. I haven't exactly changed my mind about anything. Not at all, in fact. But I certainly learned a lot about how others think about these issues, and that was exciting and energizing. I'm working on a couple of new radio pieces, one with Sherre DeLys, as well as a sort of series of pieces with a couple of great younger producers, Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler. These projects have been much informed with the back and forth of the above. And one last observation: even the disagreements and moments of snark have been a lot more collegial here than in the book world. I thank you all for listening, understanding, and considering. |
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