Page 12 - the NOISE January 2014

Ira glaSS: INto the lIfe
INtervIew by aaroN levy
as a regular Saturday devotee, I was overjoyed to sit down with Ira Glass, producer of National Public Radio’s This American Life to discuss his thoughts on America — past, present and going into 2014. I hope you enjoy our conversa- tion and take the opportunity to see him live at Ardrey Audi- torium later this month.
What was the genesis for This American Life and what do you believe is its impact on the American aesthetic?
The genesis of the radio show was I wanted to do a show that would do the idealistic things public broadcasting does but also at the same time be really fun to listen to. At the time we put the first few shows on the air in the 90s. What was different about it was although it was designed as a piece of journalism, it was unashamedly entertaining. And what’s most different about how it compared to other things on public radio and other kinds of reporting is it broadcasts stories in a very traditional sense — there are characters and scenes and hopefully you’ll get caught up in it and wonder what’s going to happen next ... Stories that are really fun to listen to.
I don’t think the show has had any impact on America. The culture is chugging along very nicely. What we are is a very pleasant one hour a week for people who like this kind of thing. We’ve made many very enjoyable hours for a person to listen to should they chose to do that. But I think our impact on the culture has been minimal or none. I think football, net- work television and porn still hold their place at the top of the hierarchy in our culture and we, in public broadcasting, are beloved by those who like us and that is where our influence ends and rightly so.
Radio is a super intimate medium and when radio is work- ing, it feels like one person is talking to you. I think any suc- cessful radio show has that kind of intimacy and we play to it as aggressively as we can.
What do you believe is the essence of what makes something or someone American?
That is a really good question, and because we’re such a di- verse country I don’t have a good answer to that. I mean, I feel like what’s great about this country is we’re such a mish-mash. But I think there are certain things that tend to come up in the stories we find ourselves documenting on the radio show. We tend to find a lot of stories of people who decide, at some point, that they’re going to totally remake their life — remake themselves as somebody completely different. That happens quite a bit and seems to be something particularly American.
But beyond that I don’t have anything good and smart to say. I think every good and bad impulse you can find in some-
one in this country. You would think that someone, like me, who has done this kind of show for so many years would have come to some kind of thought about what it means to be an America after documenting so many lives. But I think I’m not that kind of person. I haven’t put together a big picture or some kind of taxonomy. I wish I were more that kind of per- son but I’m not.
I think that this honesty is what makes the show work. The show is twenty-five years old now and the driving force behind it, still, is its honesty. You piece together what is American as op- posed to the show being “Ira coming on and telling us what is American.”
I like that there are certain things that we do stories about that are hard to imagine happening exactly the same way in other countries. Like when we went to a high school on the Southside of Chicago where, I can’t remember, 27 or 29 kids had been shot the year before and how the school was react- ing and how they handled it. That felt particularly American. It’s hard to imagine that in another country.
Or this last week, we did a show about a car salesman in Long Island. We just hung out at a car dealership as salesmen tried to sell 129 cars to make the dealership’s quota. Just the ways those guys dealt with that seemed particularly not just American — but particularly Long Island.
Another episode is the one about global warming. It is very hard to do a show about this because people just tend to roll their eyes and say, “I already kinda know.” We basically tried to look at why are we so stuck, why is this conversation so stuck between whether you believe it exists or doesn’t. How come we stay stuck with this issue. Then we tried to find places in this country where the conversation had become unstuck. That turned out to be such an interesting thing to try to find.
I like that. There is no particular thing you can put your fin- ger on what is American.
What are your personal feelings about this country and our culture as this year comes to its close?
I think we have enormous problems we don’t seem to be on any path towards fixing. When it comes to our politics, for years, it’s just been stuck in these dead end arguments be- tween people on the Right and people on the Left. We did an entire episode where we documented friendships and fami- lies that just fell apart because of people disagreeing on the size of government, the budget, and President Obama, and things like that.
But, at the same time, if you leave what is happening in our politics and when it comes to movies, and music, and television, and radio and books — when it comes to mak-
Photo by Stuart mulleNberg
Stuphoto.net
ing culture, it’s an incredibly wonderful time in our country. I think there’s a certain person who always feels like things are getting worse and worse — all the time — and I am definitely not one of those people.
I think there are incredibly wonderful work being done in this country in all kinds of art, in all kinds of writing, and all kinds of films, and all kinds journalism. I think that despite the problems that newspapers are having and network news in general, there is still really exciting journalism happening. So when it comes to making culture, I feel like things are going great. It just our politics just seems very, very stuck.
Are you pessimistic about how we’re going to handle our poli- tics in 2014 considering it’s an election year?
Yeah, yeah, we seem very, very stuck. I mean global warm- ing is a perfect example of this, if you’re someone who be- lieves in the science and that we’re not doing anything about this. There’s this cultural side to this argument that makes it so difficult. You’re getting into people’s deep held personal beliefs about the world and it isn’t just about their beliefs on studies about what is happening in Antarctica that leads them to their conclusions regarding global warming.
You’re not going to argue someone out of those beliefs and you want to be respectful of people who feel differently on an issue. But it leaves us very stuck. I tend to be very optimistic, in general, but when it comes to any push to resolve these issues like global warming, health care, a woman’s right to chose, we’re not going to be able to do so.
What do you hope we can accomplish as a country for the coming year?
I don’t know. I hope we get better grades, and that we get better sleep. We’re not getting enough sleep. And I hope we accomplish a decent meal — not just junk — not that I have anything against eating junk — but just a decent meal; noth- ing to heavy, not too light, but perfect.
And that we speak to each other respectfully.
Thanks, Ira. I hope you have a Happy New Year.
Same to you, Aaron.
| Aaron Levy is an ol’ time contributor to this magazine who has since been relegated to the near-arctic tundra of Minnesota and
came out of retirement for this interview.
aaron.francis.levy@gmail.com
12 • january 2014 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us
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