Somepody to love
It's been a long time since I've done any sort of music post.
There's several good reasons for that
a) I've not been on the hype machine half as much to get new music
b) I've mainly been listening to film scores
c) I've mainly been listening to an assortment of podcasts
d) My iPod died in the middle of the year, taking with it my best of 2010 playlist, such as it was
e) I'm lazy
I'll do a thing with c) first of all and give you a run through what I've been listening to.
BBC Witness Podcast is never more than 10 minutes long and comes out 5 times a week. Each episode focuses on one event of the 20th century and takes archive recordings made at the time and interviews from primary sources recorded later to give a personal account of them. It's got a broad range in time and geography and is fantastically well done. I've heard from the first black girl to attend an integrated school talk about the time that G-Men turned up on her doorstep to tell her that the president had sent them to take her to school. I've stood in the kitchen and cried when listening to one of the children saved on the kinderstansport out of Germany in 1938. She told the story of the train leaving the station, with mums and dads running alongside the carriage, when the door was flung open and a baby basket was thrown into the middle of the train. And don't even ask me how I felt when she said that in Britain her school celebrated the end of the war by taking the children to the cinema. To see Bambi.
I would pay my licence fee twice over for programmes like Witness.
The History of Rome podcast (which acronyms as THOR) is one that I'm just getting in to. It's more like a lecture, with one man, Mike Duncan, talking you through, well, The History of Rome. It starts with Rome's founding by the mythical Romulus, recounts the popular narrative and dismisses some stories as fanciful and useful myth. It does take more concentration than most podcasts that I listen to since it's not conversational and it does depend on you understanding it a lot more than something like IGN or House to Astonish. The latter is a comic book podcast by two Scottish guys (one of whom at least is a lawyer). They do the fairly standard industry news and reviews stories but with the added twist that they're usually really behind with the news by virtue of being released fortnightly. They're relatively amusing and witty types and it's also quite nice to hear some more Scottish voices that (I don't listen to local radio since it's appalling. I do miss the Fred MacAulay show though, which I would listen to when I was on study leave. A decade ago.) They also have the unique feature of the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, where they find obscure and failed characters from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and rehabilitate them for modern books. Almost every character is one that I've not heard of, so I don't really get to appreciate the redesign, but there are a lot of good ideas flying about the podcast. They also focus more on the publishing and business side of the industry than other podcasts do, which can be genuinely interesting.
There's several good reasons for that
a) I've not been on the hype machine half as much to get new music
b) I've mainly been listening to film scores
c) I've mainly been listening to an assortment of podcasts
d) My iPod died in the middle of the year, taking with it my best of 2010 playlist, such as it was
e) I'm lazy
I'll do a thing with c) first of all and give you a run through what I've been listening to.
BBC Witness Podcast is never more than 10 minutes long and comes out 5 times a week. Each episode focuses on one event of the 20th century and takes archive recordings made at the time and interviews from primary sources recorded later to give a personal account of them. It's got a broad range in time and geography and is fantastically well done. I've heard from the first black girl to attend an integrated school talk about the time that G-Men turned up on her doorstep to tell her that the president had sent them to take her to school. I've stood in the kitchen and cried when listening to one of the children saved on the kinderstansport out of Germany in 1938. She told the story of the train leaving the station, with mums and dads running alongside the carriage, when the door was flung open and a baby basket was thrown into the middle of the train. And don't even ask me how I felt when she said that in Britain her school celebrated the end of the war by taking the children to the cinema. To see Bambi.
I would pay my licence fee twice over for programmes like Witness.
The History of Rome podcast (which acronyms as THOR) is one that I'm just getting in to. It's more like a lecture, with one man, Mike Duncan, talking you through, well, The History of Rome. It starts with Rome's founding by the mythical Romulus, recounts the popular narrative and dismisses some stories as fanciful and useful myth. It does take more concentration than most podcasts that I listen to since it's not conversational and it does depend on you understanding it a lot more than something like IGN or House to Astonish. The latter is a comic book podcast by two Scottish guys (one of whom at least is a lawyer). They do the fairly standard industry news and reviews stories but with the added twist that they're usually really behind with the news by virtue of being released fortnightly. They're relatively amusing and witty types and it's also quite nice to hear some more Scottish voices that (I don't listen to local radio since it's appalling. I do miss the Fred MacAulay show though, which I would listen to when I was on study leave. A decade ago.) They also have the unique feature of the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, where they find obscure and failed characters from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and rehabilitate them for modern books. Almost every character is one that I've not heard of, so I don't really get to appreciate the redesign, but there are a lot of good ideas flying about the podcast. They also focus more on the publishing and business side of the industry than other podcasts do, which can be genuinely interesting.