| Public Appearances 2007 & 2008 Saturday, September 15, 2007 – University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA. Saturday, September 29, 2007 – DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN. Contact:www.wvpe.org Tuesday, October 2, 2007 – Barnes & Noble 1630 Sherman Ave. Evanston, IL 60201 – 7PM reading from new book “The New Kings of Non-Fiction.” Sunday, October 7, 2007 – New Hope Church in Clackamas, OR (near Portland, OR), presented by Oregon Public Broadcasting. 7PM onstage interview of Ira Glass For info call 503-293-1963 or www.opb.org Saturday, October 13, 2007 – Silver Center for the Arts, Plymouth State University, Plymouth , NH Wednesday, October 24, 2007 – Cuyahoga County Public Library, Cleveland, OH Evening onstage “performance” of a live-scored monologue by David Rakoff & Ira Glass followed by onstage interview with host. Saturday, November 3, 2007 – Chico, CA . Chico State University. Sunday, November 4, 2007 – Santa Barbara, CA. UC Santa Barbara . 4PM Lecture Saturday, December 1, 2007 – Scottsdale, AZ. Scottsdale Center for the Arts. Sunday, December 2, 2007 – Salt Lake City , UT. 2PM talk at Kingsbury Hall, SLC. |
I think the style is a deliberate choice (he has talked about this on the show), but I'm not sure it's dishonest. However, making a deliberate choice about how you speak in certain situations is the first step towards affectation, isn't it?.. (is this how he talks normally?).
ReplyDeleteSometimes I want very much to dislike TAL and Ira and Sedaris and all of them (and on some rare occasions I do) but I have a very difficult time holding my grudge..
I remember listening to one of your rants about Mr. Glass a few years back. When I started listening, his style was the first thing I noticed; like a teenager trying to drive a stick shift, so much jerking, halting, starting and stopping. Now I wonder why I thought that. I barely hear it now. It can't be that our persception has changed; Ira must have taken speech therapy.
ReplyDeleteAre you going to go?
I will probably go, although tickets range from 25 to 50 bucks! Yoiks.
ReplyDeleteI am the opposite. I want to like him, I do like him, and yet, I'm sick of him. I think it's that, when he started (so long ago!), he was working against the dominant paradigm in radio and now he's become the dominant paradigm. See: McSweeneys. I hate the self-important reflection, "and then I realized"____________ (insert meaning here). Oh! I know what it all means.
ReplyDeleteI prefer people who say, "I don't know what it means, either then or now, but it's interesting to think about."
Although I love that one guy's voice. (I do love Sedaris, but I think he's become a parody of himself). David Rakoff. I love that guy. Maybe because he's mostly making fun of himself.
Everyone else I'm done with. I'm over TAL. I want something new to replace it.
I hear you, Dr. Write. I go through phases with TAL. I think my recent enjoyment of it is because they were playing a lot of old stuff over the summer.
ReplyDeleteI'm not exactly sure what an affected prick is, if I did maybe I'd agree. But I do love TAL. Although, I'm a fairly new convert and could still be considered a zealot. However, I will admit that it bugs me when he prefaces things with "is sort of like.." He does that a lot. His guests do that a lot. Even Doug Fabrizio is doing this a lot too. Maybe I do this a lot too. Maybe you do too.
ReplyDeleteIt's sort of like... natural, you know?
I've been a long-time NPR listener but never TAL because of when it comes on. So...I'm just now getting into it with podcasts. For now he doesn't bother me. Well, at least he didn't until I read this post. While the show does employ the old, "then I realized..." and "it's sort of like..." (very funny comment btw Spontaneous), I do enjoy the disparate themes and not so explicit connections. Maybe this too becomes cliche, but it seems rare that any program of any type has open-ended juxtapositions. Instead we get chronological narrative at every turn. This difference I appreciate about TAL.
ReplyDeleteI have to say too that after watching the Simpsons movie AT THE MALL, I am really on guard at viewing things in public that I normally view in private. The Simpson movie was totally ruined by the audience around us, who gave a standing ovation when the Alvin & the Chipmunks trailer came up, and they laughed at all the wrong parts of the Simpsons movie itself. It was totally annoying.
ReplyDeleteSometimes on TAL when they are short on material they'll include David Sedaris performing live at one of his readings. He gets huge fawning laughs after every line. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. The essays are fine, I guess, but its the perfomance of them that bothers me.
So a live event with Ira can't possibly come to anything good.