I have just posted my last Poscast for a while. It is with Michael Schur (of course) and it is particularly long (of course). This one is long enough that my wife Margo, who has nobly served as producer since the very first Poscast, is only now starting to speak to me again. Her vision of the Poscast is for each one to last about 20 minutes. I think this last one was an hour and a half.
The Poscast is going on hiatus because, as mentioned here before, I am about to go into deep research mode for my upcoming book on Joe Paterno. I should say that I have started a Facebook Fan Page for the book, and I have a special email for the book as well. I would certainly love for you to join or to email me if you have any stories, opinions, thoughts on JoePa. I'm trying to cast a wide net here.
In any case, I intend to start doing the Poscast again after spending the college football season concentrating on reporting this book. I guess you never know how it will work out, but that's my plan.
It's been an interesting experience. this podcasting thing. You probably know that at the beginning I did not really want to do it … I can barely tolerate hearing my own voice when I'm transcribing an interview, much less in a public setting. And I've always known I was lousy on radio*.
*That was actually going to be the name of my collection of columns -- Lousy On Radio -- until someone made the not-unreasonable point that you probably don't want the first word in your book title to be "Lousy." As you can see in these random examples …
Lousy Seabiscuit
Lousy Orchid Thief
Lousy Boys Of Summer
Lousy Infinite Jest**
Lousy Catcher In The Rye
Lousy Old Man and the Sea
**I want to proudly point out that my friend and regular co-host Michael Schur directed his first music video, which is a perfect intersection of great band (Decemberists), great song (Calamity Song) and great idea (scene from Infinite Jest). I love this song, by the way -- I was explaining to a friend that it's like someone doing old REM better than REM, but I'm not really sure what I mean by that.
I still know that I'm lousy on radio, but this Poscast thing turned out to be more fun than I expected … probably because I was so far over my head that there was no point in it being anything but fun. It has been a blast talking sports with Mike Schur, who came up with this idea of just drafting sports things.
It has been hilarious in a pathetic way dealing with my own weekly technical difficulties -- there were the early wind-tunnel days, twice I had to call good friends (Kevin Harlan and Jim Nantz) and ask them to completely re-record a podcast that had already done because I had somehow screwed up the first one, and I had to ask Peter King and Michael Rosenberg to kind of wait by the phone for a couple of hours while I did some patchwork engineering. Then there was the time I had Keith Law come to my house and I decided, for reasons unknown, that it might work best if he sat like 40 feet away from the microphone.
You may ask: Doesn't Sports Illustrated have real engineers and producers who could have prevented these sorts of disasters? Certainly. But you would hope they're concentrating on real broadcasters. Anyway, the Poscast wouldn't be nearly as much fun without the disasters.
We live in a strange new media world where there are so many ways to reach people. I never got a dime for doing the Poscast. No one ever paid a dime to listen to it. Nothing about the thing really makes any sense. I guess, in the end, that's what I like about it. People volunteered to record theme songs -- at last check, The Cinnamon Fuzz was recording one -- and someone started polls to determine whether Michael or I won the draft, and heroes of mine like Duane Kuiper and Al Michaels and Bob Costas semi-willingly came on. And I actually had some amazing guests lining up: Jeff Garlin, Seth Meyers, my wife kept trying to get Paul Rudd … well, I could say anybody, couldn't I?
My brother-in-arms, Mike Vaccaro, twice came on to talk. I specifically mention Mike because he and I once did a radio show together. I mean that literally: We did it one time. I've told the story before: The little light came on, I said: "Hi welcome to the show, I'm here with Mike Vaccaro." And he said, "Hi." And I said, "The Royals made a minor trade today." And he said: "Yep." That's all. "Yep." Mike, under normal circumstances, could talk for 27 straight hours about Mr. Met.
And, in my memory, we were silent for the next 118 minutes.
On this week's Poscast, Michael Schur breaks down Quidditch, we go over our baseball predictions, we watch on helplessly as our NFL predictions segment deteriorates into a "Well, they could be good too," parade, and we draft the best records in sports. I'm pretty sure I won this draft. But I think I've won all of them.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
