Each week we choose a theme

When trying to figure out what one can do with the medium of radio beyond delivering generic dreck for the fictional "average" listener, it's impossible to go past the extraordinary decade-plus output of This American Life. I've never actually blogged about the show, because no analysis or interpretation I could apply might actually reflect the simple beauty and transcendent quality of its storytelling -- I could try and explain how it effortlessly merges the political and the personal, uses the intimate space of radio in a way for which it was seemingly invented, while returning to a storytelling tradition long lost in other more popular mass media. I could talk about how stories of alcoholic mothers and bad memories of summer camp intermingle with tales from Guantanamo Bay and Baghdad, but still, it wouldn't be worth it. It wouldn't explain things any better than Ira Glass's intro, every week: "each week we choose a theme, and bring you stories about that theme."

This week's episode does exactly what the best episodes do - it slips in with an innocuous theme, competitiveness and failure in the art world, only to have you, somewhere between stories of balloon-animal maestros, New York locksmiths, Philip K. Dick and terrible music-based scams of the 1960s, wrenched apart by a simple, common thread: in the creative world, and in every world we live in, people have particular skills and particular talents, yet those are so very rarely the ones we wished we had. Though our balloon animals are incredible creations, we never really saw ourselves as a maker of those. We really play guitar. This is just, you know, for now.

Until we've got the time to give it a serious crack.

Listen through to the last story of a locksmith, a Hawaiian guitar player and a saxophonist, who can't play a lick, on a way to a wedding, down under Manhattan bridge. Try slipping something that simple past a producer round these parts.

One day I'll figure out how to use radio like these guys do. Meantime, here's a new website I made. It's pretty nice.

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