It’s a great concept: a radio document of one college bathroom’s graffiti, and it is pulled off with charm, humor, fine production value, and a lack of pretension. It manages to be both anthropological and thoroughly entertaining. The level of confiding and poetry on these walls is sort of incredible. (Boy’s bathroom graffiti is just filthy in comparison…. I think the biggest difference between men and women, it would seem judging by this piece, is their graffiti.) It’s good enough to make you think a whole series should be done on graffiti all over the place-- shopping malls, prisons, high schools, construction sights, office buildings. This was like a well done experimental short film—one that, through its art, allows you to see something common place in a whole new way—a way that allows its inherent beauty to be seen. This could fit in anywhere. It’s a treat.

This is sort of like the equivalent of a radio blog. You imagine Dr. Hammerschlag sitting by himself in his doctor’s office after having seen his last client of the day, taking out his 1970’s Lloyd’s tape recorder and talking about whatever’s on his mind. In this case, he’s talking about his mother who just passed away. The opening, in its deadpan straight-forwardness has echoes of Camus’s The Outsider. It would be a challenge figuring out how to best employ this, or things of this sort. There might be something to playing these more amateur recordings at night, just a whole bunch, and letting your listener’s sift through, allowing for the thrill of discovery, like the kind you get when browsing through a thrift store-- sifting through a box of postcards and coming across a favorite-- the one with something really personal and revealing scrawled on the back that somehow touches you. “Sorry Ma” is sure to touch more than a few.

This is great radio filled with so many beautiful moments. It manages to be incredibly emotional while at the same time being almost shockingly unsentimental. And that Jeanine is a radio novice works towards making the piece feel totally new and fresh (even the fact that she felt uncomfortable getting close enough to her subject to mic him perfectly has a kind of symbolic, poetic value). It’s a kind of literary radio, too-- the way it goes back and forth between the narration and the actualities, always contextualizing and adding to what we’ve heard. In this way, the story builds, becoming so surprising as it goes that in the course of listening, most of my expectations were totally defied. Yet like many of the best stories told, it ends with forgiveness.

There is no psychologizing, no story, no anthropological perspective… it’s just about the machines themselves, and their sensory, tactile appeal. It’s sort of like listening to a recording of the wilderness. This piece is so unapologetically, joyously superficial that you just can’t help but be sort of bowled over. There is something so pure about that. Why not use this piece along with Brett Martin’s piece on prayer and gambling to create some programming on gambling… or more broadly, on the nature of chance.

I’ve never heard the story of the Jim Jones cult told from the inside quite like this. It’s great story telling, in that you feel like you’re going through it all with them. It’s so intimate and unsensational. It really brings across the way the cult must have really provided you with something soul-comforting and unnamable… something that you were always vaguely craving but weren’t quite able to put into words. Says one of the interview subjects of what it felt like afterwards, “we had holes in our heart.” With revelations like that, the decades of cultural connotation are stripped away to actually allow the stories of Jonestown survivors to sound new again… and unexpectedly universal, too. The two pieces in the show speak nicely to each other and together they leave you feeling like you’ve been given a new perspective on cults… one that isn’t all 70’s bleached out film stock creepy, but is actually human.

This starts off sounding rather like an educational filmstrip you have to sit through in school because it’s supposed to be good for you. It even has the old educational film music, which I guess is supposed to be ironic, but I’m not totally sure. But what happens is you get sucked in by the surprisingly fast pacedness of the thing and how well it is crafted. This is not exactly radio to cook by... or perhaps even to eat a sandwich to. It is radio for which you will have to sit in a chair and listen, or else you risk getting lost. But this is not a bad thing. It is sort of like being in college and having a US history teacher who gets so excited by the material that he gets up on the desk and starts to yell… in a charming way, not in a scary way. This story has gunplay, power politics and chases. It’s like The Dukes of Hazard without the cars, cross bows, yeehaws or Daisy Duke. Just Boss Hogg. Perhaps it is not like The Dukes of Hazard. But there are great stories here… straight out of a comic opera… like how, for instance, the poll watchers, who were on high alert looking for foul play, were given coffee with laxatives so they would have to leave their posts for the bathroom. In its day, the seat war made the cover of the New York Times, and now it so lost to us. “One town in Western Kansas contains all the folly of humanity” says the narrator. It was a war that should never have resulted in so many deaths, deaths that brought great sadness to the families involved, and we can still feel the weight and immediacy of this sadness. This is what makes the piece such good journalism.

Before Tom Fisher had to return to the US his friend took him to York to enjoy high tea at Betty’s famous tearoom, and we get to tag along. The premise is that simple, yet the results are utterly charming. From the writing to the production, it’s just good radio. The brief history of high tea is interesting, but it’s the many pleasing little humorous details—like the incomprehensible sound of voices over the train PA on the train ride there, the bizarre names of the tea time confections-- that makes this more than merely educational. It actually leaves you feeling happily in the mood for tea. This could be dropped into programming about food or travel.

Addict has a straight-talking quality that you don’t always hear on the radio. It’s not often you hear an addict come on the airwaves and owe up to the fact that doing drugs is a lot of fun. So when he gets around to the laundry list of problems that his addiction created—no money, strained relationships—you feel that he can be trusted. The interview style is a rapid fire back and forth and the questions are simple, straightforward and skip all the clichés of drug addiction discussion. This would fit in nicely with programming for teens. Smart adolescents will appreciate the b.s. free exchange.

Hipsters having subway crushes is cute, but it would have been nice to have had a story that presented some kind of drama… some kind of story that followed through. Just the same, Missed Connections is sweet, and by the end of it, you start thinking about something as mundane as riding the subway in a new way. Plus, St. Valentine’s day is only four and half months away. Programmers, open up your hearts and let the subway in.

Poetry is a difficult proposition on the radio. TS Eliot spoke of it as being a secret language for a select few, and public radio has such a different mandate. Poetry can shove people away with its difficultness, rather than pull them closer, which is what good radio should do. But “If you see…” not only pulls you closer, it holds you there, riveted. If you are listening while doing the dishes, you will stop doing the dishes. It is poignant and moving. It is both political and intimately personal. It makes poetry on the radio feel like a natural fit.

Edgar Bergen did ventriloquism over the radio, so why can’t Marconi do magic? Marconi pays homage to the great old radio days with a magic show for the radio that’s as clever as it is absurd. Magic tricks for the radio is such a great concept, and it’s pure pleasure to hear Marconi perform. In so doing, he draws your attention to the inherent magicalness of the medium itself and allows you to marvel at it whether you’re a kid or not. There’s one trick he does that involves cutting himself in half that’s a total gem. Why not do some child-oriented programming for Halloween and make Marconi a highlight?

I like Kessler’s politics and he makes a fine point. He’s a good political satirist, in the old school sense. I like his fast-talking, too-- it’s just that sometimes he’s just too fast to properly enjoy the full breadth of his thoughts. As always, these super short essays would make a nice drop in to a morning show. His speed would make such an interesting contrast to a lot of slower deadpan readers on the air.

Homeboy industries employs ex-gang members. It sounds like a very worthwhile project, and the virtues of the program are extolled, but It would have been great to hear some actual stories about what lead certain kids into the gangs in the first place. We know the gangs must hold some allure, even if it’s one born of self-destructiveness. There’s hardly any of that, in concrete terms, so things tend towards being a bit public servicy. The announcer sounds a lot like one of the reporters from The Daily Show—which made me think, why can’t a piece like this have an element of humor to it, too? “As one life tragically ends, another starts,” says the announcer, and it just sounds a little pat. Too much Easter Sunday, and not enough good Friday. Still, the message is a positive one, and the original score is lovely.

Jamie O’Shea’s Olfactograph turns objects into smells. The sense of smell is so intimately connected to memory, that it’s like he is creating a potion that acts as a nexus to the past. He has even distilled the scent of a bath toy down to a liquid. For the most part, the sound in the piece interacts nicely with O’Shea’s voice, creating a rather impressionistic, cinematic effect. What I would have enjoyed is more about how he became so obsessed with smell that he decided to create such an oddity. It would have given the whole thing a more personal dimension. Still, an audio piece about smell does show moxy. This could fit nicely in to a magazine show.

“Birkenstock doesn’t make cars,” O’Connor says to his seventies era feminist girlfriend as she gets into his Jag with some trepidation. It’s in this hard-boiled style that O’Connor unapologetically documents his car fetish. This is fairly macho stuff, but also a sort of pining valentine to the lost Springsteen album mentality of youth. It’s auto worship as autobiography.