Mmm yes hello I am Garrison Keillor.

I am old enough to be nostalgic about radio, having grown up when it was a stately medium and we listened to Journeys in Musicland with Professor E.B. "Pop" Gordon teaching us the musical scale, and the guest on The Poetry Corner was Anna Hempstead Branch, who read her sonnet cycle, "Ere the Golden Bowl Is Broken," and the gospel station brought us Gleanings From the Word, with the whispery Rev. Riley trudging patiently through the second chapter of Leviticus, and at night there were Fibber and Molly and Amos and Andy and the Sunset Valley Barn Dance with Pop Wiggins ("Says here that radio's gonna take the place of newspapers. I doubt it. Y'can't swat a fly with a radio."), but I don't feel a hankering to hear any of it ever again. I am rather fond of radio as it is today, full of oddities and exceptions. It is an unmanageable medium. Management is at work trying to format things, but reality keeps breaking through the bars. You twiddle the dial, and in the midst of the clamor and blare and rackety commercials you find a human being speaking to you in a way that intrigues you and lifts your spirits, such as a few weeks ago when a man spoke about his mother, in Houston, who as she was dying of lung cancer made a video for her severely retarded daughter to watch in years to come, which the daughter does not watch, being too retarded to comprehend death, which in itself is a mercy. It was very graceful, a fellow American telling a story unlike all the other stories. Pretty amazing. And all the more so for showing up on a dial full of blathering idiots and jackhammer music.

My taste is catholic; I don't go looking for people like me (earnest liberal English majors). I am a fan of the preachers on little AM stations in early morning and late at night who sit in a tiny studio in Alabama or Tennessee and patiently explain the imminence of the Second Coming--I grew up with good preaching, and it is an art that, unlike anything I find in theaters, has the power to shake me to my toes. And gospel music is glorious beyond words. I love the mavericks and freethinkers and obsessives who inhabit the low-power FM stations--the feminist bluegrass show, the all-Sinatra show, the Yiddish vaudeville show. Once, on the Merritt Parkway heading for New York, I came upon The American Atheist Hour, the sheer tedium of which was wildly entertaining--there's nobody so humorless as a devout atheist.

I love the great artists of public radio who simulate spontaneity so beautifully they almost fool me--Terry Gross, Ira Glass, the Car Talk brothers--all carefully edited and shaped, but big as life on the radio, smarter than hell, cooler than cucumbers. I love the good-neighbor small-town radio of bake sales and Rotary meetings and Krazy Daze and livestock reports and Barb calling in to report that Pookie was found and thanks to everybody who was on the lookout for her. Good-neighbor radio used to be everywhere and was especially big in big cities--WGN in Chicago, WCCO in Minneapolis-St. Paul, WOR in New York, KOA in Denver, KMOX in St. Louis, KSL in Salt Lake City--where avuncular men chatted about fishing and home repair and other everyday things and Library Week was observed and there was live coverage of a tornado or a plane crash and on summer nights you heard the ball game. Meanwhile lawn mowers were sold and skin cream and dairy goods and flights to Acapulco.

The deregulation of radio was tough on good-neighbor radio because Clear Channel and other conglomerates were anxious to vacuum up every station in sight for fabulous sums of cash and turn them into robot repeaters. I dropped in to a broadcasting school last fall and saw kids being trained for radio careers as if radio were a branch of computer processing. They had no conception of the possibility of talking into a microphone to an audience that wants to hear what you have to say. I tried to suggest what a cheat this was, but the instructor was standing next to me. Clear Channel's brand of robotics is not the future of broadcasting. With a whole generation turning to iPod and another generation discovering satellite radio and internet radio, the robotic formatted-music station looks like a very marginal operation indeed. Training kids to do that is like teaching typewriter repair.

After the iPod takes half the radio audience and satellite radio subtracts half of the remainder and internet radio gets a third of the rest and Clear Channel has to start cutting its losses and selling off frequencies, good-neighbor radio will come back. People do enjoy being spoken to by other people who are alive and who live within a few miles of you.

People like Tommy Mischke, a nighttime guy on a right-wing station in St. Paul and a free spirit who gets into wonderful stream-of-consciousness harangues and meditations that are a joy to listen to compared with the teeth-grinding that goes on around him. Not that teeth-grinders are to be disparaged: I enjoy, in small doses, the over-the-top right-wingers who have leaked into AM radio on all sides in the past 20 years. They are evil, lying, cynical bastards who are out to destroy the country I love and turn it into a banana republic, but hey, nobody's perfect. And now that their man is re-elected and they have nice majorities in the House and Senate, they are hunters in search of diminishing prey. There just aren't many of us liberals worth banging away at, but God bless them, they keep on coming. Just the other day, I heard one foaming and raging about the right to life and about liberals preying on the helpless--I realized he was talking about Terri Schiavo--and then he launched into the judiciary and how they had stood by and done nothing. He held their feet to the fire for a while and then he tore into George McGovern for about five minutes. George McGovern is a kindly, grandfatherly man who lives in Mitchell, S.D., and winters in Florida and every year attends his World War II bomber squadron reunion. He ran for president in 1972. His connection to the Florida case is tenuous at best. When you go ballistic over 1972, you are truly desperate to fill time.

The reason you find an army of right-wingers ratcheting on the radio and so few liberals is simple: Republicans are in need of affirmation, they don't feel comfortable in America and they crave listening to people who think like them. Liberals actually enjoy living in a free society; tuning in to hear an echo is not our idea of a good time. I go to church on Sunday morning to be among the like-minded, and we all say the Nicene Creed together and assume nobody has his fingers crossed, but when it comes to radio, I prefer oddity and crankiness. I don't need someone to tell me that George W. Bush is a deceitful, corrupt, clever and destructive man--that's pretty clear on the face of it. What I want is to be surprised and delighted and moved. Here at the low end of the FM dial is a show in which three college boys are sitting in a studio, whooping and laughing, sneering at singer-songwriters they despise, playing Eminem and a bunch of bands I've never heard of, and they're having so much fun they achieve weightlessness--utter unself-consciousness--and then one of them tosses out the f-word and suddenly they get scared, wondering if anybody heard. Wonderful. Or you find three women in a studio yakking rapid-fire about the Pitt-Aniston divorce and the Michael Jackson trial and the botoxing of various stars and who wore what to the Oscars. It's not my world, and I like peering into it. The sports talk station gives you a succession of men whose absorption in a fantasy world is, to me, borderline insane. You're grateful not to be related to any of them, and yet ten minutes of their ranting and wheezing is a real tonic that somehow makes this world, the world of trees and children and books and travel, positively tremble with vitality. And then you succumb to weakness and tune in to the geezer station and there's Roy Orbison singing "Dream Baby" and you join Roy on the chorus, one of the Roylettes.

I don't worry about the right-wingers on AM radio. They are talking to an audience that is stuck in rush-hour traffic, in whom road rage is mounting, and the talk shows divert their rage from the road to the liberal conspiracy against America. Instead of ramming your rear bumper, they get mad at Harry Reid. Yes, the wingers do harm, but the worst damage is done to their own followers, who are cheated of the sort of genuine experience that enables people to grow up. The best of what you find on public radio is authentic experience. It has little to do with politics. The U.S. Marine just returned from Sudan with lots of firsthand impressions of the crisis there; the journalist just back from Fallujah, where he spent three months; a firsthand documentary about life aboard the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis in the Middle East--that's what Edward R. Murrow did from London in 1940, and it's still golden today. It's the glorious past and it's the beautiful future. (Thanks to the internet, the stuff doesn't vanish into thin air. You can go to thislife.org and get the story of the Houston woman or the aircraft carrier documentary. You can find the Sudan and Fallujah interviews at whyy.org/freshair. More and more people are doing this. Nobody cares what Rush Limbaugh said two days ago; it's gone and forgotten, but the internet has become an enormous extension of radio.) That's why public radio is growing by leaps and bounds. It is hospitable to scholars of all stripes and to travelers who have returned from the vast, unimaginable world with stories to tell. Out here in the heartland, we live for visitors like those. We will make the demented uncle shut up so we can listen to somebody who actually knows something.

-- INSANE CLOWN FOSSE (adelangsto...), June 2nd, 2006.

lol otm!

paul harvey is the REAL rural folk bullshit that tombot was complainin' about on the other thred. and that's why he totally fucking slayz gk any diddy damn day of the week.

The novel is in a pretty bad state. A future historian surveying the novel at the turn of the century will see a world populated with grisly serial killers, overly-imaginative sexual perverts, legions of oppressed and/or repressed people of certain socio-political constructs, dire pain and sorrow emanating from all directions; the sole exception being lonely, 30-something, city-women who drink cosmopolitans and have a staggering number of sexual partners. What he won't have is any insight into the souls of the vast majority. The people who populate the day-to-day world will be a blank slate to him. Or worse, he will come away believing we are mindless slaves to some combination of our neuroses and advertising.

That's a shame, because I believe there are great stories in normalcy. The sales rep who is thousands of miles away from home trying to close a deal on two hours sleep with a broken laptop. The divorced mom who gets hauled out of work to meet with her daughter's teacher who thinks the kid should be on Ritalin. The 22-year-old who, upon graduation from state college, realizes she will make a better living as a waitress than an entry-level web designer. The hypertense father of four who can't stop eating baby back ribs and hopes Viagra will save his marriage. The families who haul themselves out of bed at 5 AM because that's the only time the hockey league can get ice time for the kids. The 38-year-old woman away on her first ever solo vacation. The middle aged bachelor who realizes that all he has to show for his life is an encyclopedic knowledge of '80s movies.

There are great stories in the common, with stark and revealing conflicts, an awful lot of humor, and an endless supply of humanity. The stories may get told, but it's increasingly unlikely novelists will do it. Why bother with the trouble of creating interest and depth from commonality? It's much easier to go to the headlines and pile on the bombast. The further and further novels get from the mainstream of life the more the novel loses it's stature as an art form. It becomes just another thing to pass the time, another form of entertainment. And since reading a novel is much more troublesome than most other ways to pass the time, the novel moves further and further to the sidelines of art, taking up a spot right next to poetry and painting (if it hasn't already), with only a handful of devotees talking amongst themselves.

This is, I suppose, natural. Another form of writing will rise to take its place as a vital form of humanistic expression. It could be 'blogs for all I know. But as a novelist, I can't help but be saddened. Especially since it almost certainly means I'll be keeping my day job. Forever.

One author who still occasionally writes of normalcy is Garrison Keillor. His well-received Wobegon Boy is a classic example of fiction as contemporary documentation, with characters and plotlines of the sort that happen to everyone, everyday. No murders, no wanton sex, no magic realism or impressionistic symbolism; just funny, well paced and smartly observed storytelling. Keillor's currently remaindered novel Lake Wobegon: 1956, is dissimilar in plot but very similar in concept.

We follow a 14-year-old boy, Gary, who describes himself as having the face of a frog, across a single summer in Lake Wobegon. Those expecting the gentle folksy stories of Keillor's radio shows may be shocked by the frank nature of this book. Keillor stays true to reality in expressing the inner thoughts of a 14-year-old boy; that is to say there is an overreaching obsession with sex and toilet humor. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of this book is that it honestly portrays the mind of a 14-year-old boy — including the ignorance, awkwardness, and outright painfulness of it all — without ever being prurient or lurid. Frank and explicit yes, but American Pie this ain't.

Clearly autobiographical to a large extent, Gary lives a stifling life amidst a devoutly religious family. Gary is wracked with guilt. He knows Jesus and his late grandfather are always watching from above, even when he has a friend's copy of High School Orgies hidden inside Life magazine. He knows it would kill his mother to find-out that he has been kissing his 17-year-old cousin Kate. And God forbid anyone ever see the insulting stories he's written about his teacher. To him, it seems the world is a perfectly orderly place and he only exists as a freak within it.

And yet, much more comes to light. He's discovers a strain of (very mild) mental illness in his family — no raving lunatics, no axe murders; just a small problem that has been right under his nose, but he didn't have a clue because no one ever talked about it. He is stunned when his mother talks about a time when she went away to New York to visit his father in the service. Just the idea of his mother wandering around New York at all hours of the night blows his mind. But most tellingly, when Gary's clever stories and poetry are criticized and dismissed by the authority figures in his life, he receives a bit of advice on artistic integrity from a hard-drinking, debt-besotted, rock singer who few in his circle have had anything good to say about. Gary steps beyond the confines of his rigid faith and family.

Actually, that's a formula for disaster. Misunderstood child, repressed by religious family in a rural community, sees the evil that has been holding him back and breaks away. Except Keillor isn't anywhere close to that trite. Though he clearly, sympathizes with Gary, but he never descends into judgementalism.

In contrast Keillor has also written such novels as Me: by Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente, a clever satire of, or a shameless attack upon (depending on where your political sensibilities lie), Jesse Ventura, featuring what a jacket copy editor might call personalities pulled from the headlines of the day. Or his latest, Love, Me, a slightly confused story of a writer which who goes off into the world only to end up in cahoots of the mob at the request of John Updike.

Keillor is, justifiably and necessarily, trying to push into new places with his novels. Criticizing the far-fetched in comparison to the normal is akin to a fan of A Hard Day's Night dissing the White Album. But here's hoping Keillor doesn't completely lose sight of the normal.

yellowcard on the way.

the on the media people regularly annoy me...most of the other shows just make me embarrassed for the people on them..though wwdtm, has its moments sometimes

I assumed you were talking about Whad'Ya Know, hosted by Michael Feldman. Both can be pretty funny in a cornball way.

I do a good Garrison Keillor impression: the trick is to start out kind of high and loud and then progressively get slower and quieter, as if you're being rocked to sleep, and it's shhhh... -- AND THEN suddenly roused again.

I once took a check from a woman at the Minneapolis liquor store I worked. Her last name was Keillor, so I asks, "ha, any relation to Garrison?" And she coldly, coldly replied "Why yes. He is my cousin."

...but doesn't he look almost like Laura Palmer?

Prairie Home Companion represents the limit of my ability to understand whiteness*. my dad is an NPR junkie and sometimes he'd try to listen to it when I was in the car. when it got to the "punchlines" and people softly laughed we would look at each other like "wtf could possibly be going on right now?"

*for comparison, Car Talk seems to involve a kind of whiteness, but it's much more accessible. that's my favorite NPR program (my dad's, too; as far as I know it's the only thing that makes him laugh.)

For fucks sake. Car Talk feels like a calculated attempt to tack a blue collar on the NPR rundown... everyone who calls in seems to be the same insufferable grad school douche with an '82 Volvo that he keeps around cuz it makes him feel all Nantuckety, VOMIT

Keillorgeist vs. Nantuckety

http://letsturnthisfuckingwebsiteyellow.com/yellowcounter.php

I once took a check from a woman at the Minneapolis liquor store I worked. Her last name was Keillor, so I asks, "ha, any relation to Garrison?" And she coldly, coldly replied "Why yes. He is my cousin."

-- Pleasant Plains, Monday, September 17, 2007 12:50 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Link

haha my friend in college used to date his niece (i think that was the relation, either way her last name was keillor)...she had kind of the same reaction, she was like "oh yeah i know GARY"...she always made a big point of calling him "Gary" cuz I guess that's actually his name and he just made up the "Garrison" deal and his family thinks he's a douche cuz of it and maybe other reasons.

i like this show okay. it reminds me of being a kid, grandma loves it.

http://fivepointsofattack.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/flat-face.jpg

otm

hahahahahaha

JOINING US TODAY WILL BE TEXAS TERRY AND HIS FIDDLE-DE-DEE FIDDLERS FOUR AND ANNE MCCARTHY, GOSPEL SINGER, 98 YEARS YOUNG.
::SINGS LIMERICKS ABOUT TOWN HE IS IN::

― INSANE CLOWN FOSSE (Adrian Langston), Friday, June 2, 2006 10:59 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
he sounds like he is perpetually massaging his own balls

― INSANE CLOWN FOSSE (Adrian Langston), Friday, June 2, 2006 11:00 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark

vintage aidsy

he sounds like he is perpetually massaging his own balls

― INSANE CLOWN FOSSE (Adrian Langston), Friday, June 2, 2006 11:00 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark

actually, he is perpetually massaging your balls

the 95 Theses 95 in the Lake Wobegon Days book is completely and utterly classic

http://baptism.co.nz/95theses95.html

http://i34.tinypic.com/4l4jut.jpg

i don't think i've ever seen a gk pic before but now i'm immensely creeped out by him

― tehresa (tehresa), Saturday, June 3, 2006

i don't think i've gotten over this yet.

getting over kasell's absence will be hard but i've been prepared by edwards and stamberg

wrong thread lol

57. You taught me that, no matter what I thought, it was probably wrong. The world is fundamentally deceptive. The better something looks, the more rotten it probably is down deep. Some people were fooled but not you. You could always see the underlying truth, and the truth was ugly. Roosevelt was a drunk and that was that. New Deal? What New Deal? A sham, from beginning to end. There was no Depression, a person could get work if they really tried. There was more to everything than anyone knew. This teaching has led me, against my better judgment, to suspect people of trying to put one over. At the checkout counter, I lean forward to catch the girl if she tries to finesse an extra ten cents on the peaches. That's how Higgledy-Piggledy makes a profit. That's why cashiers ring up the goods so fast, to confuse us.

Knew I'd heard that before somewhere.

Also if you'll forgive me I think the correct way to evoke his voice is to suggest that there's always someone motorboating his nuts.

http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/130/checkob9.jpg

theres a guy around town that looks exactly like garrison keillor.

http://www.commongoodbooks.com/NASApp/store/Search?s=results&initiate=yes&ks=q&qsselect=KQ&title=&author=&qstext=9780143115274

It was beautiful, the candles, the linen and silver,
The sun shining down on our northern street,
Me with my hand on your leg. You, my lover,
In your jeans and green T-shirt and beautiful bare feet.

How simple life is. We buy a fish. We are fed.
We sit close to each other, we talk and then we go to bed

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/SHOWBIZ/09/09/garrison.keillor.stroke/art.keillor.gi.jpg

mmm yes hello i suffered a minor stroke how sumptuous and delightful ah mmm yes

http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/1019/dsc095202.jpg

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pictures-of-Garrison-Keillor-Looking-at-an-Erect-Male-Member/146289608725651

he sounds like he is perpetually massaging his own balls

― INSANE CLOWN FOSSE (Adrian Langston), Friday, June 2, 2006 12:00 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

cannot listen to garrison keillor say anything anymore without thinking of this post

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/tv/132931758.html

'Prairie Home' sound effects master Tom Keith dies

*ker-thunk!*

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pictures-of-Garrison-Keillor-Looking-at-an-Erect-Male-Member/146289608725651

― ENBB, Tuesday, November 30, 2010 8:38 PM (11 months ago) Bookmark

My dad listens to this ALL THE TIME and a couple months ago I he had it on in the car which, of course, made me think about this thread/that fb group. I literally LOLd started telling him about the facebook group when I was like wait what am I doing? I can't tell my dad about this. Then I was all, oh nm.

ah damn that sucks. i saw prairie home companion live once and i'm a total geek for foley effect stuff, cool to see how he did everything

"You and Pictures of Garrison Keillor Looking at an Erect Male Member"

he sounds like he is perpetually massaging his own balls

― INSANE CLOWN FOSSE (Adrian Langston), Friday, June 2, 2006

one of my top ten favorite ilx posts, i think.

It's so fucking true. I can't hear the guy without thinking about that post.

Man, RIP Tom Keith.

http://i.imgur.com/3xsoZ.jpg

Mmm yes hello

hate that cunt

― hstencil (hstencil), Friday, June 2, 2006 10:27 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

errm yes *labored breath* hello

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12691

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiCXqrBmdaE

http://i3.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/000/138/Picture_2.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cqieCdlhX9A#t=42

http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxo2p6JHVx1qzoxbvo1_500.png

he sounds like he is perpetually massaging his own balls

― INSANE CLOWN FOSSE (Adrian Langston), Friday, June 2, 2006 12:00 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

xp probably my favorite moment in the whole wire

http://blogs.citypages.com/gimmenoise/Toki_Garrison.jpg

http://i4.bebo.com/047/21/mediuml/2008/12/04/19/2532111077a9562383733ml.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/3xsoZ.jpg

timely