Swooooooooon.
Some of you cute little radical conservatives out there might know him as "that gay liberal on NPR sometimes" (actual quote). Well, he's not gay and he has no political agenda, but his show This American Life is on NPR sometimes (and by sometimes I mean every Saturday and Sunday).
I first fell in love with Ira somewhere in the-middle-of-nowhere-Idaho about 5 years ago. This was around the same time that I realized I didn't like listening to music on the radio, but I loved talk radio (nerd alert). As I was driving by myself on this desolate road 5 years ago, I had two channels that were coming through in my radio in my little '97 toyota corolla. One was some family values Christian la dee dah snooze fest, and the other was this soft, effeminate male voice telling a story which was interspaced between cuts of groovy beats.
And basically the rest is history.
When I found out Ira was coming to lecture in Utah, I was ecstatic. My generous friend Jack bought he and I tickets for my birthday and we made an evening out of it, complete with mix-tapes provided by Jack for the ride up to Salt Lake and back to Provo.
Although I was excited as we walked to our balcony seats, I was sort of expecting Mr. Glass to be a pretentious, King of the Hipsters type, who would spout off some scripted deal while not making eye contact for fear of mingling with the lowly Utah commoner. Holy eff, I was wrong. His down to earth lecture was one of the best things I've ever heard in my life. Ira was so personable, I felt as if I was sitting in his living room eating frozen pizza in my pajamas. The lecture was full of uncontrollable laughter as well as moments of cathartic poignancy. What I learned during the 2 hours I spent engulfed in Ira Glass and his reflections on his craft gave me a great new perspective on understanding my own art.
His show started with a dark stage and a story about a mother and her children caught in the Joplin tornado. Ira paused for a moment and then apologized for the delay. His iPad from which he was cueing the sounds bits from kicked him off the network and wanted the password for him to continue.
It was one of the most genuinely hilarious things I've ever witnessed. Picture a packed house hanging on every heartbreaking word of this story in a completely black auditorium, and everything stops because Ira's iPad wants the network password. It's already annoying enough when this happens while your trying to waste life on Facebook, let alone when you're Ira Glass trying to orchestrate an entire show for hundreds of paying audience members.
He cracked some jokes but seemed relatively unfazed at this glitch. He sheepishly apologized, went off stage, got it squared away, and started again. This time with a different story.
In the (yet again) dark theater, he first talked about that thing he loved most about radio: the intimacy of the voice. When he first started in radio, he interviewed inner city gang kids. He knew it was important to give them a voice because people wouldn't love them them if they saw them. But because audiences heard only their voices, they would be able to hear the humanity without the distractions of aesthetics, and would love them. This concept of "if they saw these children, they wouldn't love them" struck me hard. My whole art is based on seeing with no voice.
Ira then went on to talk about how bland journalism is because it's all cliched. Turn on any news station and you'll basically see the exact same concept on every channel; the delivery, the graphics, and tempo, the lack of humanity. He said there are no surprises in this journalism and it's surprise that creates emotion.
Over the past few days, I've been thinking almost nonstop about the concepts and ideas Ira talked about and how they apply so perfectly to creative troubles I've been having lately. He talked about a number of other beautiful things like story structure, but for the sake of leading into my next blog post, I'm going to leave you with that.
To be continued...
I love when you are feeling moved! Brava sister!
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