When you google ‘podcasts’, you get exactly 103 million results. I’ve fairly recently become very interested in podcasts. I have this romanticized view of old radio, like soap operas and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and podcasts feel like the last hope of a dying breed. People always say that today’s generation and daily life requires a shorter attention span, but podcasts challenge that. People will sit down and listen, if it’s something worth listening to for them.
I didn’t think I would enjoy this medium when I first fell into it. The only podcasts I had ever listened to were opinion pieces done by youtubers whom I was already used to enjoying visually as well as audibly, and interviews done with the talented and famous, which I personally think watching an interview is much more interesting than listening to one. But.
That was before.
The reason I started this new medium of podcasts was because I found out about this ‘fantasy’ storytelling/news broadcast, Welcome to Night Vale. Every time I try to explain Night Vale correctly, I never end up doing it justice. Night Vale is a small town in the Southwest deserts of America. Welcome to Night Vale is never what you expect. It’s supernatural while being rooted in fact. It’s ironic because that fact is fact in the story, not to you. Someone in Night Vale saying “There’s an army preparing for war against our small desert town with a hole leading down to their underground city under Lane 8 at the bowling alley” while being completely serious about it is completely unheard of for us. The fact that sometimes statements like this turn out to be true blows us out of the water even further. It’s all told through the voice of the community broadcaster, Cecil Baldwin. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
But I found out about Night Vale a month or two ago, so I think I should talk about the new one I’ve come across. It’s called All the Faces of the Moon by Mike Daisy. In the city, currently, Mike Daisy is performing a new monologue every night at seven p.m. until October 3rd (when I found out about it at first, I just wanted to go to a performance. Now I want everything). It’s going to conclude with there having been 29 separate monologues performed. Each monologue is performed minimalistically, using only a desk and a chair. Mike doesn’t really move. There is also a different oil painting present every night to go with each monologue, the artist being Larissa Tokmakova. He is telling stories of his life, which is now having him referred to as “the modern day Scheherazade”.
I actually love the story of Scheherazade. For those of you who don’t know, the story goes that there was this Prince in Persia who would marry a virgin every night and have them beheaded the next morning, after his first wife was unfaithful. One night, he took Scheherazade as his bride. But, in a tactical trick to save her life, she told him a story so wonderful that had such a cliffhanger that he had to keep her alive another night. After she’d finish one the next night, she’d start another and the cycle would continue. After 1,001 nights, and 1,000 stories, she told him she had no more stories. They were together for so long that they had children, and after so long, he had grown to love her. She is the speaker of the classic One Thousand and One Nights, alternatively titled Arabian Nights. I learned the story after reading a poem with ‘Scheherazade’ as the title, and I was interested.
But back to the podcast. The point is, All the Faces of the Moon, named because over the month every night a different face of the moon will show, is being uploaded every night after it is performed onto iTunes under the album name ‘All Stories are Fiction’. I’ve only gotten through one full episode so far, not counting the preface, because the episodes are thick intellectually and require you to pay attention, as well as being around an hour and a half long as opposed to about 20-30 minutes of Night Vale, usually separated around minute 15 or 20 by a song. I’m really excited to listen to all of them, though. I’m hooked. If anyone has any more suggestions for new podcasts, I’m totally open.
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