Popular Frontiers

Friday, November 19, 2004  | 

If we're thinking in terms of travel metaphors, podcasting is like teleportation. Here, then there. Nothing in the middle, no journey, nothing to see along the way--just the destination. The radio is like taking a walk through a city or across a country. Static is the place where there isn't much--abandoned buildings, fog, cotton fields forever--but the absence has a presence. There's sound in the silence, like the wheel grind and tape hiss in a Mountain Goats song. You might stumble across something mysterious or horrifying or unknowable along the way: a murder, a circus, a stabbin' hobo, a funeral, a church service, a demagogue: something that has the possibility of taking you out of yourself and making you experience the world in a new way rather than something that simply validates and affirms the perspective you already have. There is no danger that you'd ever have a confrontation with something as weird and alien as The Conet Project in a podcast.

I'd love to think I'm at least partly to blame for one of my new daily reads, Popular Frontiers.