ATTENTION SLOW READERS-- STAR WARS CONTENT INCLUDED!
After a long hiatus (a word that always makes me think of hernias), Hot Plate! The 120 Minute Radio Hour is back with its best episode yet.
The Sweeps Week Episode is packed with blue ribbon content, which will lay waste to the previously high standard we’ve established while previously high.
The centerpiece of the episode, functioning in the manner of a giant ice sculpture at a gathering of poobahs and muck-a-mucks, is my special guest Yael Ksander. Yael is known for her years as a host and interviewer on above ground radio, where her combination of erudition and effervescence (I think those are the words she insisted I use) has been a feather in the cap of one of the few states whose name begins with the letter I.
A little-known curriculum vitum of hers (I suspect she doesn’t even put it on her resume) is that she and I were classmates when we were young. We talked about many disparate things in our rambling discussion, but the excerpts of that talk the Hot Plate team culled for Sweeps Week mostly deal with our recollections of high school during the Reagan era. Our tete-a-tete covering many touchstones of a quainter far-off time turned into an impressionistic meditation on the mystery of human memory. (I say that to distinguish it from canine memory, fish memory, and so forth.)
Travel with us back through the mists to a world of overhead projectors and ditto machines, a world where students were distracted by handwritten notes rather than consumer electronics, and presidential prevarication was genteel and involved complete sentences.
Though this episode is light on music, it does feature a new Straubinical number called “If Half of It Was True.” This song about suburban chicanery is chock full of fuzz guitar from Karl and his Down Under colleague Jeff Lang. Normally a recording with those two guitarists on it wouldn’t require some third guy gumming up the works, but we found the Johnny Marr-inspired playing of Jarrett Nicolay to be the glue that kept the whole thing together.
The maiden installment of Damon Hildebrandt’s Tinseltown Breakdown Report is another item to look out for. Damon sets up a clip from the new Wes Anderson-helmed Star Wars film, the latest example of the quirky auteur’s ongoing effort to shine a cinematic light on the odd behavior of humans on the periphery of the human condition. The clip has dialogue and music from a scene taking place in the Death Star Daycare Center.
Things kick off with the usual contribution from Dagny Coleman, News Reader. Dagny reads an ad for the Tot Spot, an artisanal eatery specializing in tater tots, and a news story about TontoCon, the annual convention of sidekicks and second bananas. This year, there was moderate drama involving Grand Marshall John Oates.
All this, plus the typical genre-busting incidental music. This episode uses snippets from Bryan Ferry’s cover of Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away,” the MC5’s “High School,” Ben Webster’s tenor sax on Big Sid Catlett’s version of “Memories of You,” the original Leiber and Stoller-produced version of “Go Now” by Bessie Banks, “Time” by Richard Hell and the Voidoids (with a few seconds of late master Robert Quine’s guitar break), and Dolly Parton’s early single “Dumb Blonde.” (If any of my country-music-fanatic friends can identify the steel player on that track, they know where to find me.)
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