Garrison Keillor Turns Out the Lights on Lake Wobegon
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I just hope Lake Wobegon is doing alright without us.
I'm 33, I've been listening to PHC since I was 10 or so, its something I've spent a majority of my Saturday afternoons doing - I look forward to the new host and the new format, but its clear to me that it will never be quite the same.
I do the same thing in my house, though I have to say, I don't think my wife and kids appreciate it as much.
I'll miss Lake Wobegon, always a wonderful place to visit on the weekends.
I always thought the show stood as sort of the perfect archetype for what you'd call "white" American culture. Which I'm pretty sure is what David Simon was trying to say in this classic clip from The Wire:
I think the day I started changing my view was when they were reading birthday greetings passed up as notes from the audience. Keillor read one that said "Happy birthday to Grandma so-and-so in X-ville, upstate NY. 96 years old and still chopping her own wood." The audience dutifully went "awwww" and clapped. Keillor paused and said: "Why doesn't anybody up there help that old lady out?"
A quote from Garrison Keillor reprinted in the article alludes to this: "You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories."
American law schools use the Socratic method for teaching. A good law school professor will never answer a question even when directly posed, but merely respond with another question, often times using classic Socratic irony. With the really good professors, no matter how heavily laden with innuendo their questions, in three years you'll never figure out their actual opinions or beliefs about a subject without resort to their published material outside of class.
(And, FWIW, the biggest mistake you could ever make reading Plato, for example, is to believe that it's obvious what kind of point his protagonists (e.g. Socrates) are trying to make. The Laws is an excellent example.)
That's the type of character Garrison Keillor seems to be, particularly when it comes to questions of culture and sentimentality. If you think he's gaming his audience, then that's sad.
I think streams where you don't pick the song that comes up next can also be licensed more similarly to radio broadcasts.
The law itself isn't really the question here; it's more the economic entities and standard agreements built to sustain broadcast use of music can't be adapted to podcast use in a cost-effective way.
This is also why we don't have the Massive Attack song as the intro to "House, M.D." on streaming services any more.
Has anyone found an online source for full archived shows?
Surely someone somewhere has them saved...
The APM player is open source.
https://github.com/APMG/APMPlayer
But no need to deep dive the source.
When you open a player page's source, you see a line like this:
var playables = [{"identifier":"apm_audio:\/phc\/2016\/07\/02\/phc_20160702_128.mp3"}];
Looks like the end of a URL, but what is the beginning? It isn't prairiehome.publicradio.org where the page is served from.
Opening the apmplayer-all.min.js, there is:
function(){var d={"apm-audio":{flash_server_url:"rtmp://ondemand-rtmp.stream.publicradio.org/music",flash_file_prefix:"mp3:ondemand",http_file_prefix:"http://ondemand-http.stream.publicradio.org",buffer_time:3,t...},"apm-live-audio"
You get the beginning of the URL for the file. Put two and two together, you get:
http://ondemand-http.stream.publicradio.org/phc/2016/07/02/p...
Now that we have the format and know that PHC is a weekly show, you could directly grab or make a bulk download script.
http://ondemand-http.stream.publicradio.org/phc/YYYY/MM/DD/p...
Note: the archive only has Sept 2012 onward - http://prairiehome.org/shows/2012/09/ Before that, episodes are Realplayer RAM files on the old archive page.
The thing is sometimes there's not much distance between an homage and a satire. Fred Armisen's Portlandia is a good example of a show that wobbles between gently poking fun and outright mean-spirited mockery.
Once I learned all the Prarie Home Companion episodes were written from New York City it became much easier to see some of those skits as GK laughing at Lake Woebegone residents rather than with them.
I don't think you understand his work. You don't have to like it, but that doesn't mean you know what he's trying to say.
I understand he's trying to depict a bucolic lifestyle and portray himself as a resident and narrator of this fictional little town. But in my opinion if you're sitting at a remove from the area that inspires these stories it's possible for another perspective to color your view. Culturally NYC and St. Paul much less Lake Woebegone are vastly different.
Nobody's saying you have to agree with me, but I do get what he's trying to do. I just find it harder to believe it's anything but entirely fiction as opposed to a tapestry woven from an underlying truth with the names changed to protect the innocent, and for me that makes all the difference.
It'd be one thing if he was born and raised in NY, but he grew up and spent most of his life in Minnesota. Surely as a writer he is able to invoke his past memories with sincerity in creating this fictional narrative. Or do you believe that as soon as he crossed the Minnesota border, all that was lost, and as he stepped into a NYC Starbucks he became a jaded cynical New Yorker.
Dear Friends,
I come from serious taciturn people and grew up in a separatist religious sect that believed that every word and deed should be to the glory of God and here I am winding up forty-two years of talking my head off, much of it silliness, and portraying a private eye and a cowboy. This was not supposed to happen. As Robert Frost did not write:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And, sorry I could not travel both,
I chose the one with the galloping hooves and the barking spiders
And now I’m trying to figure out why.
I’m 73, in good shape for a writer, working on a memoir and a Lake Wobegon screenplay, writing a weekly column for The Washington Post, planning to take brisk walks and start reading books again and rediscover the pleasures of the Weekend. Meanwhile, I am grateful beyond grateful for the people I’ve met along the way, Richard Dworsky, Tim and Sue and Fred, the ladies I’m singing with, Sara and Sarah and Aoife and Heather, and Suzanne Weil who was the first person to ever put me on a stage. She is here tonight and it is all her fault, every bit of it. Had it not been for Suzanne, I would be preaching every night at the Union Gospel Mission on Skid Row and all my friends would be old drunks. Millions of people would never know about Lake Wobegon or Powdermilk Biscuits or the power of rhubarb to ease shame and humiliation. But in the course of fifty years of preaching, I would’ve brought three, possibly four, men to eternal salvation. I will have to make peace with this myself. Meanwhile, thank you for listening to the show.
–Garrison Keillor
Was overall a quite entertaining experience, but my local NPR station dropped the show a long time ago so I haven't kept up.
Might see something out of left field from a member station, it's hard to say. Podcasts are doing alright though, probably providing more variety than NPR could ever support.
There's something about the usability or delivery of a radio station though. Low budget college stations and shock jock conglomerates are equally accessible to any user. For a niche podcast to take off, it needs exposure. People need to learn what a podcast is and how to download it.
For NPR shows, well, they were already beamed into everyone's homes. If users just dialed through the static, something they already knew how to do, they'd hear it.
Second affiliated stations are still producing great national programs. Stalwarts like "this american life" and "on the media" or newer shows like "the moth radio hour" seem to directly contradict your statement.
EDIT: Spelling
Doing a show about a weird little slice of Americana will never grow old. It's just that the slice needs to keep changing every 5-10 years.