There's a kind of Lush

I take my radio very seriously. I can't remember a time when I didn't listen to the radio. The fact that it's free makes it just inherently democratic. And everyone I know listens to the radio.

But this doesn't mean that all radio is created equal. In the words of George Orwell, some are more equal than others. I like my radio station to play good music, minimize the incessant and inane chatter that passes off as entertainment, and have as few ads as possible (although enough to keep it afloat, I suppose...) Oh, and I hope it isn't too much to ask that it also be clever and funny. And when I say clever, I don't mean serious; just a radio station with presenters who don't treat listeners as a vacuous, mindless mass. I don't want to hear rivaling jostling voices talk about the merits of dehydrated beer or bantering co-hosts debate whether falling down in slippery public toilets is really funny. Just play decent music and talk to each other (and by extension, me) as intelligent, thinking individuals. With a sense of humor. Is that too much to ask?

Thank god for Lush 99.5 FM. I chanced upon them while channel surfing the car radio in exasperation a couple of days after we bought our car and I haven't listened to anything else since. They play AMAZING music- Glen Hansard, M83, The Radio Dept,, Chairlift, Grimes, Nina Simone, and so much wonderfully more. My grouse with the other English music radio stations in Singapore is that they all sound homogenous. No matter how much they claim to target different audience (teens, working adults, women, etc), they all seem to play the same generic music. They could swap station addresses and I wouldn't be able to tell them apart. And don't get me started on the DJs- in the words of our friend, Tym, listening to some of the insipid rambling makes her want to stab her eardrums out.

Which is why I love Lush so much. Apart from the fact that they promise to air no more than two commercials back to back, I could listen to their DJs all day (and would if not for the fact that they actually don't talk much and just allow the music to speak for itself...) Joe Augustin and Petrina Kow are hilarious in the morning. They make me laugh at least once every morning, like today when Joe likened a predicted worldwide shortage of diapers (after an explosion at a Japanese chemical plant) to someone bombing all the True Blood factories around the world. I'm glad no one else was in the car with me- I think the cars going at 70km/h next to me could have heard me guffaw... The two of them have wonderful rapport and an uncanny ability to put a clever (and often funny-- note, not silly) spin on current happenings in Singapore and around the world.

Lush's roster of DJs and the creative team also reads like the who's who of the Singapore radio I grew up with- people like Dahlia Z, Georgina Chang, and Chris Ho, whose show on Lush, Clubscape, incidentally, was the only radio show in Singapore to be nominated at the recent International Radio Festival.

There's apparently some radio ratings survey going around and it seems Lush isn't doing too great relative to the other more popular and aggressively marketed music stations. I'm not sure how much the survival of the radio station is dependent on this survey or if there's some other way radio listenership is measured. But for the sake of preserving interesting and entertaining radio in Singapore, please listen in to Lush and keep it going. Hopefully you'll fall in love with it as immediately as I did.

Radio on the TV

It was a weekend pretty much defined by This American Life. Jude and I finally finished watching Season 1 of the TV series on DVD and today, on my last long run before the Half, I thought it might be interesting to listen to podcasts of the radio show to see if it'll be better than just random mixes of music of 2 hours. And it was. For the most part.

On the one hand, because you're listening to the stories so intently and because you somehow get emotionally invested in these people- as one invariably does every time you watch or listen to the show- your mind doesn't think about the pain and tedium of the run as much. But on the other, precisely because you're so focused on the pain and pleasures of these ordinary folk, and their simple, funny, poignant predicaments that could have so easily been yours, you find yourself wanting to laugh or even cry along, and that's hard to do when you're hot, sweaty and at Mile 7 of an 11-mile run. Like at the story of the mom who had to make a life-changing decision on behalf of her Down Syndrome daughter, or the dad whose six-year-old son wanted him to “pinky promise, to seriously and forever promise,” that he and his partner will always love each other and stay together. At so many points during the three shows I listened to, my body hurt from literally- as in physically- choking back tears or stifling laughter. All this while running.

I adore Ira Glass- me, and every other NPR-listening woman who wants him as their radio boyfriend. But really, the show- TV or radio- is about stories. Stories we tell ourselves, stories we have to tell other people. Or just stories we need to hear so we know we're not the only crazy, fallible, lovable, and human people out there. Two of our recent favorites and absolute must-listens, #328: What I Learned from Television and #339: Break-Up.

This American Life? Is that that show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are?
-Summer (Rachel Bilson), The O.C.

Nom Nom Nom Nom?

Just saw this photo on the BBC news website and thought it eloquently exemplifies the latest in Internet speak - "Om nom nom nom" - a sound of ravenous eating made popular by the Sesame Street's Cookie Monster. Also check out this endearing interview between NPR's Elizabeth Blair and Cookie Monster.

This American Life ... on TV!!!

Serene and myself are big fans of the National Public Radio Chicago Public Radio program, This American Life. (Check out their official website as well) We love the little memoirs, narratives, interviews and field recordings that emerge each week with this program. Thus, the both of us are greatly anticipating the debut of This American Life (TAL) on the Showtime Channel tomorrow. However, while on Boing Boing today, I was delighted to find out that not only is there a viral teaser out there on the internet, also one of the segments has been entirely illustrated by Chris Ware, a favorite comic artiste of mine. Click on the link above and you'll get to view the entire teaser segment. After watching this, all I can say is that I can't wait to see how they translate what is a very successful radio program on to the boob tube :)

Update:
I should have looked more carefully, but there are a bunch of trailers for TAL on their website. I've embedded them below. Also, I thought that I didn't really articulate why I liked this show so much. I think that it's a combination of things - Ira Glass's superb production and editing, the soundtrack that they use and the little stories that they tell. At the end of the day, I think that TAL presents to us tiny 'ethnographies' of everyday life and continues Studs Turkle's tradition of interviewing everyday people to get a better picture of how society functions.

Update#2:
If you check the comments, WD45 has corrected me that TAL is not produced by NPR but by Chicago Public Radio and distributed by PRI international. My apologies for that mistake. That's what you get for growing up in a country where all radio is owned by the government in one way or another. I must admit that I had the misconception that all public radio in the US was controlled or associated by NPR in some way. My bad :(

Don and Drew no more

I am sorry to have missed this radio show in Singapore. I have been somewhat peripherally aware of the Don and Drew show for some time now. However, I never really took the time to listen to it. I just found out a couple of days ago that the show's been pulled off the air a couple of months ago and I think that it's a crying shame. It's one of the best things to happen to Singapore radio in a long time. Sure they're rude and make fun of everybody and everything. But these guys write, produce, and even compose music for their own shows. This is more than can be said for most radio stations that are all tangentially linked to the government and all seem to employ the formula that pretty young actors and actresses would make good radio DJs and hosts. How is Singapore going to attain the title of the regional IT and media hub when there is little tolerance for difference and creativity? I am not trying to defend Don and Drew because they can be extremely rude. But you have to admit that they had the balls to enact some change in the Singapore radio scene. And besides they were one of the first people to use podcasts as a means to draw in an international audience for a radio industry that is really quite parochial.

As I've said, my lament for this show perhaps comes too late. (and I should even admit that I know Don's brother & Drew's wife) But I do like their weird irreverent humor and making fun of all things local. Check out their inspired Ramly Burger Rap.

For those of you not familiar with what a Ramly Burger is, there's a wikipedia entry on it and I have attached a photo below for good measure.



It's a burger with a fried egg on top. I do miss it dearly. And the best approximation for a Ramly Burger for me is a triple with a fried egg and onions from Blimpy Burger. But I digress. You can listen to Don & Drew's last show below. Check out especially the last 10 minutes of the show. It's inspired and the saddest ending to a show I've heard in a long time.

This I Believe

In my lifetime, if I can write half as well as her, with half as much heart, humor and humanity, I would be happy. Sarah Adams- not a Pulitzer Prize winner or a New York Times bestselling novelist, but a simple English teacher from Washington state- on why we should all be cool to the pizza dude:

Be Cool to the Pizza Dude

This is part of a collection of audio essays from NPR's This I Believe, a project started in the '50s by Edward R. Murrow to engage Americans and encourage them to share the things which guide them through life. These essayists aren't famous people, they aren't celebrities with an image to sell; they are people like you and I, writing about people like you and I- people from red states, blue states, fly the Dixie flag, the rainbow flag, swear by Kanye, only listen to Carreras, splurge on organic, can only afford processed. Just people.

Listen, and feel your heart strangely warmed...

In the words of my wise husband, nothing beats a good public radio station.

In the big pizza wheel of life, sometimes you're the hot bubbly cheese and sometimes you're the burnt crust. It's good to remember the fickle spinning of that wheel.
- Sarah Adams

Spring Break

So how much of a spring break are we on?
1) We woke up at 11.00 (which meant 12 hours of sleep for me since for some incomprehensible reason, I fell asleep before 11pm last night, right in the middle of Battlestar Galactica when Jude was trying to explain to me the evolution of the Cylons...);
2) Drove 45 minutes to Troy to look at a Toyota Matrix we were interested in getting;
3) Listened to NPR's hilarious Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me all along the way (they had Jeopardy's Ken Jennings on who by the way, knows EVERYTHING, including what to do when you wake up next to a naked woman with no recollection of who she is... and he's from Utah to boot!...);
4) Came within a hair's breath of being conned into trading in our 2004 Hyundai for $4700 (did they think we were a pair of math-impaired dimwitted Asian morons???);
5) Walked fruitlessly around Somerset Mall and reconciled ourselves to the depressing fact that we were probably the poorest people in the entire complex and about 10 years away from being able to afford anything from the shops there;
6) Decided to pitch lower and go to Loehmann's instead where they sell discounted branded goods;
7) Had even less retail luck at Loehmann's;
8) And are now sitting in Panera Bread doing what we do best, drinking coffee, eating in the middle of the day, reading our notes, and being poor.

If you need a break...

...like we do, here's some of the latest archived shows on Morning Becomes Eclectic. I just spent more than an hour attempting to de-stress, going through the videos and sound clips with my dinner propped precariously on my lap, trying to feed myself, flipping my notes, and clicking the mouse at the same time. Talk about a multi-sensory, multi-tasking experience.

Enjoy!

1) My Morning Jacket
2) Joe Henry
3) Broken Social Scene
4) Imogen Heap
5) Tracy Chapman
6) Teenage Fanclub
7) Keane
8) Sigur Ros
9) Death Cab for Cutie
10) Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah
11) Michael Penn
12) The New Pornographers
13) David Gray
14) Turin Brakes

Announcement

Finally, KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic is podcasting!