Hesperia city council candidates, 2010

Hesperia Rec and Park candidates, 2010

Podcasts I listen to and watch, July 2010 edition

At Liz’s request, here’s what I’m listening to and watching on my iPhone at the moment. Note that some podcasts are daily (or even more frequent), many are weekly, a few are monthly and others are just updated whenever the creator gets around to it. These can all be found via iTunes or your podcasting client of choice.

* APM: Marketplace Morning Report
* APM: The Dinner Party Download
* BlizzCast: The Official Blizzard Entertainment Podcast
* Buzz Out Loud
* Coverville: The Cover Music Podcast
* The Current Song of the Day – Minnesota Public Radio
* Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
* IndieFeed: Alternative/Modern Rock Music
* IndieFeed: Blues Music
* IndieFeed: Indie Pop Music
* KCRW’s Film Reviews
* KCRW’s Martini Shot
* KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic
* KCRW’s The Business
* KCRW’s Today’s Top Tune
* KQED’s The California Report Podcast
* Loaded (HD)
* The Loh Down on Science
* The Loh Life
* Loveline
* The Moth Podcast
* The Nerdist
* NPR’s On the Media
* NPR: Hourly News Summary Podcast
* NPR: Pop Culture Podcast
* NPR: Science Friday Podcast
* NPR: Story of the Day Podcast
* NPR: World Story of the Day Podcast
* Official Disneyland Resorts Podcast
* Onion Radio News
* Our Ocean World
* OutDPS! Hunting Party Podcast
* Peter Day Music Podcast
* PRI’s The World – Geo Quiz Podcast
* PRI’s The World – Global Hit
* PRI: The Sound of Young America
* The Roadhouse
* Shark Week 2009
* Shifted Sound
* StarDate
* The Takeaway: Story of the Day
* Tap that App (HD)
* Texas Blues Cafe
* That Sound
* Tiki Bar TV
* Today in the Past
* WNYC’s Radiolab
* The 404

I’m starting to prefer short podcasts of under 10 minutes in length. I recently found myself heading out the door each morning with nine hours of podcasts to listen to in an eight-hour day, and purged a lot of them, or traded full-length shows for highlight podcasts.

Liz Phair’s “Funstyle”

Without any warning, Liz Phair released a new album over the Fourth of July weekend, “Funstyle.” The 11-track album is available online only, via her Web site, and for a mere $5.99.

“Funstyle” was apparently a shelved false start that she decided to release online while everyone waits for the “real” album to be finished.

At least half of the tracks feature her frustration at Hollywood, labels and fans who want endless regurgitations of her debut, “Exile in Guyville.”

“Funstyle” is interesting in that it highlights both how much of the last two much-despised albums were her, and not her label (a lot of the instrumentation sounds very similar), and how much they weren’t. There’s a lot of kookiness here, for instance, which hasn’t been seen in full effect since at least “whitechocolatespaceegg.” At one point, she rhymes “genius” with “penis,” for instance (but it’s an insult, and not old school dirty talk this time around).

In fact, the whole album is very much in the vein, musically, of WCSE, although the subject matter is no longer about her dissolving marriage and her relationship with her son, but rather her career. That’s always dangerous territory, creatively: The audience for discussions and complaints about the entertainment industry is relatively small, especially for an artist who made her bones speaking about broadly understandable topics.

At other times, it sounds like she went into the studio with Cornershop, given all the references to the Indian subcontinent and the dense layering of voices and instruments on some tracks. (This works for me: I love Cornershop.)

While “Funstyle” isn’t not the best album ever, it definitely feels like we’re getting to hear her, and not what some A&R guy packaged up, and that’s a real improvement.

The podcast-listener’s dilemma

I’ve been thinking about podcasts a lot recently.

For one thing, Peter and I are talking about bringing back the Hesperia Star podcast, which ended in 2005, before most people even knew what a podcast was.

For another, I looked at my “Top 100” smart playlist in iTunes, which tracks the 100 songs I’ve listened to the most in the current calendar year, and I noticed that, other than about 28 songs or so, I’ve rarely listened to the same song more than once this year. I realized that’s because I’m now up to more than six hours of podcasts a day on my iPod/iPhone, and some days, more than 10.

I think podcasts are great, and provide the sort of democratization of broadcast media that HTML pages first provided for print media years before. Just like anyone can now write a newsletter or newspaper (even if they’re called blogs) and have it posted online, there are much fewer barriers to entry to someone who’s always wanted to be a broadcaster.

Naturally, the best podcasts are by the pros — NPR and affiliate station KCRW pretty much school everyone in the podcasting world, and even podcasting maven Leo Laporte got his start in radio — but there are also plenty of good ones, especially music shows, created by fans-turned-podcasting pros.

But there are a lot of fan or amateur podcasts that I’d love to listen to, but can’t, because they’re so, so long. I keep running into this with World of Warcraft podcasts, but, looking through iTunes, the problem seems to transcend all genres.

Far be it from me to dampen the enthusiasm of amateur podcasters, but I’d listen to a lot more podcasts if I didn’t have to commit an hour (or even up to two hours) to listening to a rambling, unfocused podcast (sometimes with all of the technical snafus left in), instead of several tighter podcasts instead.

I intend to practice what I preach: If we do revive the Hesperia Star podcast, I’ll be pushing to make it either a 15 or 30-minute production, with dedicated amounts of time for various categories of discussion. All it will take is a stopwatch and a merciless hand on the editing controls in Garage Band.