Lately I've been realizing that all my favorite programs on public radio are the ones that feature hip-hop music from time to time: This American Life, Morning Becomes Eclectic, and my latest discovery, Pop Vultures. Have you heard of the latter? It's basically music-savvy people talking like teenagers about their favorite pop stars, with everything edited down so it sounds inane yet winds up being, at times, rather profound. There's also a lovely dramatic tension over the whole thing -- you can never quite tell how serious they are (which, given that it's produced by Garrison Kiellor, the king of mixing celebration and mockery, ain't so surprising). Listening to the first couple episodes, I couldn't tell whether I loved it or hated it, which probably suggests the former.

Anyhow, lis'n up: http://popvultures.publicradio.org/programs/

I'd suggest starting with the earlier episodes, which I think are, if not better, at least more alive with a sort of "hey we could do anything" spirit. It's always fun to see how a new show finds its feet.

[via the Ira Glass interview at transom.org]

[email fragment] Glad you've been hitting the Wodehouse and Theroux. For some reason reading the latter's always felt to me like a kind of guilty pleasure, only I don't feel so guilty and it isn't that pleasurable. For some reason the phrase that keeps running through my head is "A first-rate second-rate writer", which coming from me is uncharacteristically uncharitable, and is just the sort of thing he always had Naipaul saying about others in "Sir Vidia's Shadow". Anyway, what books? I've been reading some afrocuban folk tales, Pat Barker's WWI psychological novel "Regeneration", and Ha Jin's novel "Waiting". about a very boring extramarital affair. And about to start the Andy Warhol biography from the Penguin Lives series.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "In less than a week, a Court sitting in New Zealand is expected to decide whether commandeering a British navy ship, sailing it to a remote deserted island then sinking it amounts to a declaration of independence. The Court of Appeal of the remote Pitcairn Island -- a British Pacific territory about half way between Australia and South America -- is being asked to decide whether seven islanders should face trial. The men are facing 96 sex charges, some of which date back to the 1960s and relate to underage girls. The public defenders acting for the men say that because the island was settled by the famous mutineers of the Bounty 214 years ago, along with their Polynesian wives, English laws don't extend to the island. But observers of international law say the court is unlikely to accept that an act of mutiny is enough to elude the long arm of English law."

An NGO I've started following and supporting a little recently is called Search for Common Ground; they focus on mediation, conflict resolution, etc. -- getting Hutus to talk to Tutsis, pro-choice activists to pro-life activists, Democrats to Republicans, Israelis to Palestinians. They also support ecumenical efforts that acknowledge the real, serious differences between religions -- and so make one a lot less queasy than the "You know, deep down, we all believe the same thing" types. Anyway, in their latest article packet was an op-ed by one of their officers, an Arab American, in the Detroit Free Press, calling Arab Americans to help step up to the plate in offering leadership in the whole obviously horrendously stalled "peace process", and also offered the following aside, which I found compelling: "What remains baffling is that topics that are off-limits for discussion in the United States get a much fuller hearing in Israel itself. Compare the diversity of critical opinions that appear in Israel's major newspapers to those in the United States -- you'd think the United States had a greater stake in defending the occupation than does Israel."

Been sampling some German pop these days on iTunes.de. Right now the only artist stepping above novelty value is Nena (of 99 Luftballons fame). Some of her more recent stuff reminds me of Julieta Venegas, my current fave-en-espanyol.

"Mortally wounded, Garfield lay in the White House for weeks. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, tried unsuccessfully to find the bullet with an induction-balance electrical device which he had designed. On September 6, Garfield was taken to the New Jersey seaside. For a few days he seemed to be recuperating, but on September 19, 1881, he died from an infection and internal hemorrhage."

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/jg20.html

"Today, Garfield the comic strip appears in nearly 2,600 newspapers around the globe, and its readership is estimated at 260 million. If the readership number is right, then 4 percent of the world's population reads Garfield every single day."

http://slate.msn.com/id/2102299/

Discovery of the day: German country-Western music, specifically a guy called Tom Astor who, in addition to singing a mean "Country Roads Take Me Home", has a power-trucker-ballad called, no kidding, "Sturm und Drang", as well as a song for which I found the following possibly-poorly-transcribed lyric:

Fahr in die Redneck Riviera,
Marguaritas, icecream, Florida sunshine,
Cowboys, pick-up-trucks and Dosenbier,
Redneck girls, die gibt es nur hier.
nur in der Redneck Riviera.

I suppose all this shouldn't seem quite so bizarre -- after all, I come from a line of German Texans. And there's a genuine country-western classic called "Fraulein", about an American longing for his German lover, which I came to know from Townes Van Zandt's great cover, though just last week I heard a version of it in French, on a Quebec Internet radio station.

[email fragment] Books: Cormac McCarthey, "All the Pretty Horses", and another Wendell Berry novel, and "All Souls Day" by this Dutch guy Cees Nooteboom -- the latter quite good, a heartwarming novel of ideas with some wonderful descriptions of sausage dinners. I also found this book C.S. Lewis wrote in Spanish, something about a lion and a closet, which I'm reading in hopes that less pretension will equal greater comprehension. And this collection of Joan Didion essays from the 1960s.

"Therefore was one single man created first, Adam, to teach you that if anyone destroys a single soul from the children of Man, Scripture charges him as though he had destroyed the whole Universe -- and whoever rescues a single soul from the children of Man, Scripture credits him as if he had saved a whole Universe."

-- Sanhedren 4:5 of the Mishnah

[via the wonderful epilogue to Lawrence Weschler's A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers]