TV Watch: "Maron" revisited, following an absolutely terrific Episode 3

Off-the-Marc: Episode 3 (view clip at link)

Look who shows up at Marc's door! Says Marc: "The character in the show is not exactly my father. My dad's name is Barry; the character in the show is Larry. My father is more frightening than Judd Hirsch." However, Marc assures us in "Off-the-Marc: Episode 3" (here's the link again) that all the stories attributed here to "Larry" Maron, such as the incident when he ran over Marc's ankle with his car, can be properly credited to Barry M.

by Ken

I've made the point often enough: I'm suspicious when shows are said to come together only after a couple of episodes. In my experience it has usually turned out that the creators had their act together from the start, but what they were trying to do was sufficiently unexpected that I just missed it for that early while.

In this spirit I definitely plan to rewatch the first two episodes of our old Morning Sedition friend Marc Maron's new IFC half-hour comedy Maron, which I wrote about last week with something less than unalloyed joy. However this rewatch turns out, I think it's important to get on the record that this week's Episode 3, "Jeff Garlin Meets Marc's Dad," struck me as sensational. Where the earlier episodes struck me as pleasantly harmless retreads of fairly well-trod tales of a comic's neurosis and self-loathing, the new one seemed to me trenchant, inspired, and hilarious from start to finish.

As promised last week, in the new episode we were introduced to Marc's father, as played by Judd Hirsch. He turns out to be the kind of dad any of us would recoil from in horror, not least when we recognize traits of him in ourself. "Larry" is a bipolar dreamer 'n schemer, who dreams 'n' schemes in his manic phases, leaving those around him to watch the dreams and self-destruct in his crashed periods.

Suddenly this time out, working with that same premise -- that the TV Marc is a lightly fictionalized version of the real Marc, who seems to see his decades' worth of investment in a career in comedy as a bust -- all Marc's anxieties and frustrations were played out in deeply real, involving character interactions -- involving not just Marc and Larry but also Marc's podcast guest, Jeff Garlin, and Marc's loyal but none too helpful friend comic Andy Kindler.

Anyone who's watched any quantity of comedy on cable knows Andy as the pursuer of the same sort of career in comedy as Marc, and he's quite charming in this episode. Like when he's trying to lure Marc off to the gym with him to work a laundry list of muscle groups -- after which he'll never go back to the gym. Or there's a hilariously painful moment when, as the hubbub in the RV that Larry has parked outside Marc's house starts to draw a crowd on the sidewalk, Andy makes his best stab at crowd control, beginning, "My name is Andy Kindler. You might remember me from Season 7 of Last Comic Standing."

Marc has a funny-sad phone conversation about dear old Dad with his brother Josh in Arizona, which is cut short when Josh has to deal with a domestic situation. "My kids are now beating the shit out of my wife's kids," Josh reports, adding, "Did I screw up my life?"

Marc's sense of hopelessness about his career also came into clearer focus in this episode. True, he did try to sell his profoundly uninterested agent on the proposition that "podcasts are the future of television." But to his podcast audience he confided:

You'll never make a lot of money until you make someone else a lot of money. I mean, you'll make enough to survive, but if you want a vacation home on the cape, or a Sherpa to carry your coffee grinder up Everest, it's not gonna happen -- until you make yourself an exploitable commodity. Not really my thing. But I can tell you this from experience: It's easy to maintain your integrity when no one is offering to buy it out.

Wow! There are heaps of wisdom here, wisdom that I think you'll agree are by no means limited to the comedy business. As I say, I definitely plan to look at Episodes 1 and 2 again, but on the basis of Episode 3, Maron has etched a place on my "must watch" list.

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TV Watch: "Maron" -- So why not watch? I mean, it couldn't hurt you, could it?

"There's no such thing as a career in comedy," Marc informs his mother (Sally Kellerman), who has mastered the technique of talking to her son without actually listening, in Episode 2 of Maron, "Dead Possum." No, this isn't an actual embedded clip, but you can view the clip here. I'm sorry I couldn't embed the clip for you, but when I did, I lost all my paragraphing in the whole post. (I'd like to see some manager or software nitwit at our bloghost killed for this. If nothing else, it would teach him/her -- though I'm guessing it's a him -- a lesson. But does anybody care what I'd like to see?)

by Ken

As longtime readers know, back in the days of Air America Radio (does anyone remember Air America Radio?), I had a pretty intense involvement with comic Marc Maron as cohost and comedic driving force of the network's brilliant morning show, Morning Sedition. AAR was such a miasma of managerial arrogance and incompetence that it's easy to forget that it put some pretty decent programs on the air, in particular that dazzling morning show, which was hilarious as well as politically dead on target. And despite the truly stupefying ineptitude of the people who ran the network -- who surely deserved to be executed, several times if possible -- the show was building a fan base most everywhere it was heard, despite the best lack-of-effort of said managerial nincompoops.

The nincompoops, being too stupid and broadcast-illiterate to have any glimmering of the caliber of property they had under their roof, did their best to dilute it and make it a conventionally dimwitted morning radio show. And then they did the only even stupider thing they could think of to do: They canceled the show. These were people so ignorant, they had no clue how hard it is to develop such a property. Since that was the point at which it would have needed overseers who knew how to nurture it and make it grow, naturally the cause was hopeless. The only thing the lowlifes knew, apart from stealing the money they were paid for their stunning incompetence, was how to destroy what could have been a cornerstone of their franchise. All they had to do was pull the plug, and that was one thing they knew how to do.

The show's demise left a lot of us fans angry and bereft. In the years since, I've seen Marc Maron's name a number of times involved in projects of one sort or another, and when I was able to sample them, they seemed to me okay but nothing I needed to involve myself with.

Now IFC is giving us a half-hour show called Maron Fridays at 10pm -- and, judging from a quick search on my online cable guide, pretty much any other time of the week you'd care to watch. If you check your listings, you can probably still catch both episodes that have aired so far, "Internet Troll" (with guest Dave Foley; no, he's not the Internet troll) and "Dead Possum" (with guest Denis Leary, who's also a producer of the show). You can also watch full episodes online.

The premise is this Marc Maron character in the show is a fellow in mid-life who pursued a career in comedy which didn't quite turn out the way he had hoped; ditto for both of his marriages. He found himself not only single once again but reduced to doing a podcast in his garage in the L.A. area, which caught on and began attracting celebrity guests. As Marc himself explains in any media forum to which he can cadge access (including on-cable behind-the-scenes features), the TV character is pretty much himself, the major difference being that on the show he's acting.

He also notes that the casting of Judd Hirsch as his father (that comes up in Episode 3, next week) gives him a better father than he has in real life, something he assures us he has reported to his real-life father, who was apparently a little jumpy about the show. It seems unlikely that that made Dad less jumpy.

In Episode 1, Marc was freaked out to find out that he had that Internet troll, whom he tracked down with the sidekickish assistance of podguest Dave Foley. In Episode 2, podguest Denis Leary enabled him to track down the source of the mysterious stench he had noticed in his house: a dead possum in the crawl space under the house. (The concept of a crawl space, it turned out, was new to Marc.) I've found both episodes entertaining enough to continue watching, though I have to say the neurotic-self-loathing-comic thing seems awfully famjiliar, from maybe about a zillion sources, a number of which struck me as funnier. Still, the show is pleasant enough. I do have to wonder, though, if "pleasant" is where a show like this really wants to be going.

As I thought back to my one incandescent Marc Maron experience, Morning Sedition, it occurred to me that however personal Marc may have allowed himself to get on MS, the show was never about him, and he was almost always hilarious, with all that neurosis being released so dazzingly into the political cosmos. I can see where he might think that the one thing he has left which is uniquely his is his own life. However, I'm thinking that perhaps the last thing he might want to be doing is a show that is entirely about himself. Hey, it's just a thought.

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Bill McKibben on innovative public radio

This American Life's Ira Glass

by Ken

Given a long enough weekend, I hold out the possibility, at least, that a person's (meaning "my") mind may slowly resume functioning. Over the weekend, facing a medium-length subway ride, I armed myself with a New York Review of Books issue that -- like most of them for me these days -- was incompletely read, and stumbled across an interesting piece (in the Nov. 11 issue) by Bill McKibben on interesting doings in public radio.

McKibben begins:

Radio receives little critical attention. Of the various methods for communicating ideas and emotions—books, newspapers, visual art, music, film, television, the Web—radio may be the least discussed, debated, understood. This is likely because it serves largely as a transmission device, a way to take other art forms (songs, sermons) and spread them out into the world. Its other uses can be fairly pedestrian too: ball games and repetitive, if remarkably effective, right-wing commercial talk radio. Rush Limbaugh is the radio ratings champ; according to the industry’s trade journal he reaches 14.25 million listeners in an average week. Sean Hannity, working the same turf, trails him slightly.

But then he confounds me at least with some surprising numbers about public radio listenership:

[A]n equally large audience turns to the part of the dial where public radio in its various forms can be found. Public radio claims at least 5 percent of the radio market. National Public Radio’s flagship news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, featuring news and commentary alongside in-depth reports and stories that can stretch over twenty minutes -- are the second- and third-most-popular radio programs in the country, each drawing about 13 million unique listeners in the course of the week. These NPR shows have far larger audiences than the news on cable television; indeed, all four television broadcast networks combined only draw twice as large an audience for their evening newscasts. Morning Edition and All Things Considered are supplemented by well-regarded programs like The World, a BBC coproduction with Boston’s WGBH, and the business broadcast Marketplace -- programming produced outside of NPR itself but within the larger world of public radio. In polls, public radio is rated as the most trusted source of news in the nation. The audience for most of its programs dwarfs the number of subscribers to the The New York Times or The New Yorker, or the number of people who read even the biggest best sellers.

About one in ten Americans tune in to public radio each week; if you landed in a spaceship someplace in America searching for thoughtful and nonpartisan culture, your first stop would be the public radio stations that usually show up below 92 on the FM dial. You'd find not just the big news shows but also a variety of call-in shows: national ones, like On Point, The Diane Rehm Show, or Talk of the Nation, with its much-loved Science Friday edition, but also a number of superb local talk programs, with hosts like Leonard Lopate and Brian Lehrer in New York, Michael Krasny in San Francisco, Steve Scher in Seattle, Larry Mantle in L.A. -- the list is very long.

These differ from the commercial right-wing shows in that they daily feature guests from a wide spectrum of American political and cultural life: on the morning I'm writing this, for instance, Tom Ashbrook of On Point in Boston spent an hour discussing the rise of social gaming on Facebook, Krasny covered "the troubled construction industry," and The Leonard Lopate Show examined the current state of the company Google. The sine qua non of these efforts is Terry Gross's relentlessly intelligent interview show Fresh Air, which is based in Philadelphia, has been running for thirty-five years, is syndicated to more than 450 stations, and claims nearly 4.5 million listeners.

"And yet," McKibben notes, "very little gets written about public radio." Nor is there any "well-known radio equivalent of the Emmys or the Grammys or the Oscars (or even the Tonys)," which he suggests "reflects public radio's smooth professionalism -- it's gotten so good at its basic task that it's taken for granted, a kind of information utility."

I've mentioned before that I'm a rather reluctant daily Morning Edition listener. Since the loss of Rachel Maddow's Air America morning show (and before that the amazing Morning Sedition) I haven't found anything better on TV or radio to help me get out of the house in the morning. I find ME kind of stodgy and limited in its purview. Still, the information it does present isn't hopeless and is somewhat useful.

As a matter of fact, McKibben isn't here to defend what he describes as the public radio "flagship" broadcasts like Morning Edition and All Things Considered, which he suggests have undergone something of the ossifying process observable in much more complete form in the standard infotainment newsmedia. He quotes All Things Considered veteran Brooke Gladstone:

As they become the primary news source for more and more Americans, public radio newsmagazines are restricting their own ability to move listeners. Like physicians in medieval times they seek to balance the four humors (so as not be too choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, or melancholy) by blood-letting. Public radio newsmagazines are looking a little pallid these days, because the passion has been drained off.

Later, McKibben writes:

It seems churlish to criticize even mildly the flagship public radio news shows -- their reliable excellence deserves lavish praise. In recent years, though, it's started becoming clearer that, for all their polish, the big shows like All Things Considered suffer from some of the same constraints that plague other parts of elite American journalism. They aim for a careful political balance -- one academic study found their list of guests slightly to the right of The Washington Post and "approximately equal to those of Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report." That's not a particularly interesting place to be, and it may explain why, especially in the Bush years, many left-of-center listeners defected to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, a highly professional but ideologically engaged daily hour on the Pacifica network. Others -- particularly young listeners -- are listening to The Takeaway, a morning news show that pairs veteran public radio voice John Hockenberry with Celeste Headlee. It takes stories one after another, and gives each a few serious but fast-paced minutes. It feels electric, alive -- Web-paced journalism, purposely not as polished as Morning Edition but every bit as intelligent. "There ought to be something in the public radio idiom that delivers information live," says Hockenberry.

Now throughout the piece I'm not confident that I'm hearing the same thing as McKibben. I should probably listen to more of the shows he recommends, but the ones I've sampled haven't done much for me. Notably, in a few weeks of listening to The Takeaway, I didn't get it at all. I couldn't even figure out what the show thought it was doing which represented an upgrade over Morning Edition. Of course, it may just be that I'm too old and/or hidebound to represent the "particularly young" audience thirsting for the kind of innovation he's so excited about.

For McKibben the fountainhead for the new wave of information-based radio programming is Ira Glass's This American Life, from Chicago Public Radio. (I can't say I've given the show a fair chance, but it's never held my attention. Again, though, that may just be me.)

Those who restrict their listening to Morning Edition and All Things Considered are well informed -- there's no better news operation in English-language broadcasting. But they are missing a quite different world, one that's never been richer or, thanks to the Internet, easier to access.

The most important name in that other world is Ira Glass, the inventor of the show This American Life. He learned his craft at the big NPR news shows and slowly developed a powerful style that centered on storytelling. There was a group of others -- like Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva (known as the Kitchen Sisters), David Isay, and Jay Allison -- who had long been producing remarkable programs, including segments for the flagship news shows, extended features, ranging from quirky accounts of family kitchen rituals to politically minded portraits of juvenile prisoners. The best ones came to be called "driveway moments," because listeners were so hooked that they would linger in their cars to hear the end of a piece even once they'd gotten home. In fact, NPR now packages CD collections of these beloved pieces.

But Glass figured out that he could make a weekly hour entirely of this kind of radio, dispensing with traditional news and talk; and since 1995, under the wing of Chicago station WBEZ, that's what he's done in This American Life.

Glass and the people who have come to work with him, and the people who have been inspired by his example, have in common "a commitment to covering the 330 degrees of life that didn't show up on the newscasts," to covering "life the way most of us experience it, where heartbreak or lunch is as important as stock prices or distant revolutions."

"A FEW OF THE BROADCASTS WORTH LISTENING TO"

In the print version of his article, Bill McKibben promises a list in the on-line version of radio shows he considers worth listening to. As he points out in the article, via streaming and free-download podcast, virtually every show he mentions can be heard by anyone who owns a computer "free of charge and without the slightest hassle." Here's the list. Note that in the on-line version each listing is a live link.

• This American Life
• Sound Opinions
• Planet Money
• Re:sound
• Too Much Information
• Radiolab
• Studio 360
• Fresh Air
• 360documentaries, with the best from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
• Wiretap, from the CBC
• Transom podcast
• On the Media
• BBC Radio 4
• The Sound of Young America
• Q podcast
• Vocalo
• The Takeaway
• To the Best of Our Knowledge

McKibben has a lot to say about Glass's approach, and about shows like Studio 360 and Hearing Voices and Radio Diaries and To the Best of Our Knowledge and especially Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad's Radiolab. "In one sense," he writes, "this is the perfect moment to be a young radiohead. It's like 1960s and 1970s cinema, with auteurs rewriting the rules." However,

there's one problem, and that's the economics of this new world. Radio is now cheap to make, true, but the people who make it still need to live. And it's very hard to get paid anything at all; in the early weeks of the fiscal downturn two years ago, NPR canceled two of the shows -- Weekend America and Day to Day -- that were consistently airing the work of new independent producers. Up-and-coming broadcasters are increasingly left to make their own way. Consider, say, Benjamen Walker, whose show Too Much Information airs weekly on New York's independent radio station WFMU. It absolutely crackles -- an hour-long mix of "interviews with real people, stories about fake people, monologue, radio drama." It's good enough that 240,000 people have downloaded some of the twenty episodes he's made so far. That's a lot of people, but it's zero money, since podcasts, like most websites, are by custom given away for free. Walker's previous show, a similar effort called Theory of Everything, was widely promoted on the Public Radio Exchange, and six public radio stations across the country actually paid for and ran it. "I think I made $80," he says. "If I thought about it too hard, I would just quit. It's much better not to think about it."

McKibben lays a good share of the problem at the doorstep of public radio station program directors. In the following excerpt he's quoting Greg Kot, cohost of the pop-music discussion show Sound Opinions, which he thinks is the bee's knees.

They are the gatekeepers for what gets on the air -- and their default mode is clearly to say no. "I'm not a radio veteran," says Kot, "but in my experience, program directors are conservative, afraid to rock the boat." They depend on their listeners to ante up about half a station's budget at pledge time, and local underwriters such as restaurants and bookstores to provide most of the rest, so they don't want to do anything that might offend them.

But the result is all too often flaccid radio, and listeners who have no idea what else is out there that they might enjoy. There are public radio stations so hidebound that they run the not-that-hilarious Car Talk twice each week.

Well, um, actually I think Car Talk is that hilarious -- and a lot else besides. I get a much better sense of the way people are living life in the America of today from a single broadcast of Car Talk than I got from all those weeks of trying to figure out what the Takeaway people thought they were up to, besides being "innovative," of course.

Nevertheless, as McKibben points out, we have hardly any serious discussion of what's happening on the radio, and I think anyone who cares should check out what he has to say.

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That's right, it's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson!

THIS IS THE CORRECT CLIP, I HOPE (thanks, WaPo!): Gene Robinson spoke yesterday in the Washington Post newsroom after the announcement of his Pulitzer Prize for commentary. You can hear him talk about the moment, at 10:45 on Election Night 2008, when he got to call his parents from the MSNBC set and inform them that they had lived to see the election of a black president. I realize this is technically a "spoiler," what I've just written, but I don't think it will spoil the moment for you.

by Ken

First off, not to worry, nothing has happened to Howie -- he just had an overnight business trip, and should be back in his blogging chair momentarily.

Second, I really don't think we can let the day pass without taking note of Gene Robinson's Pulitzer triumph yesterday. It was a happy moment last night when Rachel Maddow almost exploded with pleasure at being able to introduce as her guest "Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson." It's probably more thanks to his incorporation in the Countdown and Rachel Maddow Show family than to his newspaper writing that Gene has come to seem like family -- like, for that matter, one of the newspaper columnists he beat out, a fellow named Krugman.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT: KRUGMAN HAS NEVER WON A PULITZER

This is, I believe, the fifth time he has been passed over -- and by "passed over" I mean in the sense that he was nominated but didn't win. Since he began writing his NYT column, in 1999, has there been a year in which he didn't deserve the prize?

It's easy to joke that Krugman will just have to console himself with the Nobel Prize he just snagged, even if it is for work he did eons ago. However, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that he occupied a position of such special loathing in the eyes of the Bush regimistas that the politics of the Pulitzers made a prize impossible while the regime was in power.

I'm certainly not going to begrudge Gene Robinson his Pulitzer, which was awarded specifically for his 2008 election coverage. But one of these years Krugman is going to score his first Pulitzer, and I wonder how many people are going to be startled, then shocked, to realize that he's never won one.

It may be worth a moment's reflection to consider how the progressive presence in media has resurged under the pressure of the living catastrophe of the Bush regime. I don't think I've ever been stinting in my gratitude to people like Krugman and Frank Rich and Jon Stewart, and then the the upcomers like Marc Maron on Air America Radio's much-lamented Morning Sedition show, and Rachel Maddow on AAR, and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. And now Keith's and Rachel's MSNBC shows have given us an entire family of more or less trustworthy talking heads.

It's frustrating that such a sizable part of the country still hasn't absorbed the lesson in the horrors of Modern Republican (or Movement Conservative) government dished out in eight years of the Bush regime. But there's some comfort in the newly released AP poll showing, as Ron Fournier (yes, Ron Fournier!) and Trevor Tompson put it:

"For the first time in years, more Americans than not say the country is headed in the right direction, a sign that Barack Obama has used the first 100 days of his presidency to lift the public's mood and inspire hopes for a brighter future."

Let's not kid ourselves about the difficulty of the road ahead. But things look a lot less bleak than they did in, say, the darkest hours of 2003 or 2004. And congratulations again, Gene!

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Happy Channukah to all -- and fry up a storm! (Including my latest morning-radio rant, complete with the traditional dumping on Air America)

by Ken

I suppose I should really check it out before going into a public whine, but I'm wondering if the powers that be have really thought through the scheduling of The Takeaway, the alternative public radio morning show produced by PRI and WNYC in association with the BBC World Service, the New York Times, and WGBH Boston.

Here's the thing: As I've mentioned countless times here (well, I'm not about to try counting them), I've been adrift for media support for my morning get-out-of-the-house routine since Air America Radio cut us New Yorkers adrift. (It appears that AAR hasn't been able to figure out any way of muscling its way into the cutthroat New York radio market except by finding the 90-pound weaklings among local stations and strong-arming them -- with the gift of a few bronze coins, I assume -- into giving up their airways.

The last time they did one of these mind melds, it was with a station so puny that many of us in the metropolitan area can't even get it, and in the morning there was no reason to try, since they seem to have been unable (or uninclined?) to shove the station's old programming off the air, leaving us stuck with right-wing scumbucket Armstrong "Army" Williams. Yes, in the country's No. 1 media market, morning drive time on the progressive radio network was held down by a wingnut sleazebag who got caught taking money from the Bush regime to flog its wackadoodle No Child Left Behind racket in his newspaper columns.

Up till then, however, the morning drive had been the glory of AAR -- although it was probably no thanks to the succession of boneheads who ran the network. After they somehow allowed the creation of the gloriously irreverent, high-voltage Morning Sedition, a show that started building a fanatically loyal fan base, instead of nurturing and promoting the shit out of it as the potential franchise-builder it was, they sabotaged and finally pulled the plug on it. And even then, probably again by sheer dumb luck, they turned a couple of those hours to a host who had been exiled to the 5am time slot, where to her credit she had continued toiling, developing her on-air format and skills for the time when she would get a real chance.

You may have heard of her. Her name was Rachel Maddow. It was totally different from Morning Sedition, a smart and outrageous progressive comedy show, with genuinely talented comedy writers and performers, including a fellow named Kent Jones who landed a spot on Rachel's show. Rachel's morning show did an amazing job of informing and entertaining and, as I've said here before, providing a barely awake progressive with the basic briefing he/she needed to face the world on near-even terms, or at least get through the day.

Rachel deserved her promotion to the evening slot, but that didn't do me any good. It was a morning radio show I needed. (In fact, I wasn't able to listen to Rachel in the evening.) Even before that switch took place, we in New York lost her -- and Air America mornings -- to the station shuffle. I was barely able to get the new station, but after a week or two of Army Williams (see? I really tried to give the show a chance!), I fled in horror. Since then I think I've made one attempt to tune the new frequency in. As I recall, it failed.

I won't bore you with the litany of media alternatives I've tried to plug into this hole in my mornings. For a while USA's JAG reruns worked,but then we got back to the point where I'd come in.

Without a lot of enthusiasm I sort of settled in with NPR's Morning Edition. It's not a terrible show, and occasionally there's some really alert reporting or commentary. But so much of it is well-meant time-filling -- the sort of tedious, mealy-mouthed stuff you're always afraid of being choked with on NPR.

But now, at least in theory, we have a public radio alternative in The Takeaway, with personable hosts John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji. For a while I was setting my alarm for 6 or 6:30, and I got to hear a little of the show, and it wasn't bad. But then I pushed the alarm back to 7, when WNYC-FM switches to, yes, Morning Edition! No more Takeaway for me, unless I'm up before 7 and ambitious enough to turn the radio on manually.

I just checked the scheduling online, to make sure I wasn't making it up. Sure enough, I'm not crazy. This is the way the show is really scheduled:

New York
New York, NY 820 AM WNYC-AM 8 a.m.–10 a.m. Mon–Fri
New York, NY 93.9 FM WNYC-FM 6 a.m.–7 a.m. Mon–Fri

Do you notice anything odd about here?

Let's look at it another way. Wouldn't it be fair to say that many if not most people have to be at work at 9am? And that all of those people consequently spend some if not all of the preceding hour traveling to work? (Actually, since my company moved all the way downtown in Manhattan, it now takes me about an hour and a quarter, maybe an hour and a half. But who's counting?) So for those of us who fall into this demographic, what would you say would be the most crucial hour of the morning schedule?

(a) 6am - 7am
(b) 7am - 8am
(c) 8am - 9am

Am I crazy, or is the answer not (b)? And if you look again at that schedule for The Takeaway in New York, when between 6am and 10am is the show not on the air? It's like it was carefully planned. Has WNYC been hiring some of the AAR program scheduling talent?

I'LL BET YOU THOUGHT I FORGOT ABOUT
THE CHANNUKAH PART -- WELL, HA!

As it happens, this morning I did flip the radio on early, and they were doing a sort of Channukah show. John and Adaora's guest, I figured out gradually, was New York Times food writer Melissa Clark, and she had a take on the holiday I've never heard, or at least never heard put quite this way.

After running through the historical event being celebrated, the miracle by which the insignificant amount of oil remaining in the Temple, needed to light the Eternal Light, lasted eight days, Melissa explained that that's why we fry stuff at Channukah, like potato latkes (and she provided two crucial latke-making tips: grate the potatoes coarse, not fine, and above all be sure to squeeze the moisture out of the grated potatoes before making your pancake mixture and frying), and that in fact frying anything counts as Channukah celebration, as long as there's lots of oil and grease.

That's why they do doughnuts for Channukah in Israel, Melissa explained. (Jelly or jam doughnuts, apparently. Not my favorites, but okay.) And why in Italy they fry chicken, and in Morocco something else. Anyway, you get the idea. For these eight days, frying stuff is practically a religious obligation.

This isn't the sort of thing you would want to carry through 365 days a year. But for eight days, knowing that you can fry any damned thing you can think of and get into appropriate oil and you're commemorating a religious observance, well, isn't this the sort of thing that gets people involved with organized religion in the first place?

Melissa had some other decidedly unfamiliar takes on Channukah celebration. Like she had apparently brought in "golden gelt cookies" she'd baked (not fried, eh?), for presumptive use in that fast-paced, high-stakes dreidel play common during Channukah. Normally we would use those golden-foil-wrapped chocolate coins, the way it says in the Bible. But Melissa explained that she's always looking for alternatives to the old chocolate coins, and the way she kept talking about those golden cookies of hers, the more I thought it would be churlish not to at least try them.

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