This was such fun to listen to—completely entertaining. The progression of answering machine messages is such a satisfying structural device. I was a little disappointed that the end point was farcical, because some of the emotional places the story goes to feel genuine. Anyway, I can imagine the format of the sequential answering message becoming a whole genre unto itself. There’s so much to be done with it. It’s sort of the closest you can get to the panel-by-panel sequence of a comic book on radio. Valentine’s Day is coming up and a story like this would offer such a nice counterpoint to all the romantic stuff that’ll be going on.
Review of Beep
Jonathan Goldstein
Posted on February 01, 2004 at 06:42 AM
This was such fun to listen to—completely entertaining. The progression of answering machine messages is such a satisfying structural device. I was a little disappointed that the end point was farcical, because some of the emotional places the story goes to feel genuine. Anyway, I can imagine the format of the sequential answering message becoming a whole genre unto itself. There’s so much to be done with it. It’s sort of the closest you can get to the panel-by-panel sequence of a comic book on radio. Valentine’s Day is coming up and a story like this would offer such a nice counterpoint to all the romantic stuff that’ll be going on.