So, I’ve got a new project that’s been brewing for a little while, and the first episode just went live.
It is called THE KONCAST.
TL;DR: thekoncast.com
It is a podcast. Yes, everyone has a podcast now. It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time. Back when I used to commute into Silicon Valley every day, I would spend 2, 3, 4 hours a day in my car, and Audible books would put me to sleep. (This one is good, though.) I got started with podcasts back when they actually involved an iPod, when cell phones were still clam-shell things that involved pressing a key four times to get one letter in a text message. I spent a lot of time listening to Adam Carolla, then Joe Rogan, finally getting hooked on Marc Maron. I liked the comedy and the people interviewed, but most of all I liked the conversation. I liked hearing people talk for an hour, liked hearing something unfold in long format, in an interview that wasn’t just morning zoo three-jokes-plug-product-done.
That’s also the reason I liked blogging, and really got into reading personal blogs ten or fifteen years ago. You got a certain insight into people by hearing their stories. I would spend hours back in the day reading a person’s LiveJournal, their long posts about their drama, or old journal-style blogs about a person’s band or home town or whatever. That stuff was awesome. But now it’s gone. People post a meme or an emoji or a selfie and move on. Nothing wrong with memes, but the life isn’t there anymore.
So I don’t read any blogs anymore, because they are all dead. Hell, I barely talk to people anymore on the phone. Other than work and parental check-ins, I think I’ve had two or three conversations on the phone this year. I used to spend entire days talking to people long distance, burning through a new MCI card, catching up with people across the country. I don’t get to do that anymore, and I wish I could.
So, a few things clicked together recently. First, I was on Hangin’ With Old Lew, which is a podcast that an old writing buddy Joshua Citrak does. Even though we both live in the bay area, we’ve only been hanging out virtually, clicking ‘like’ on various posts or whatever, but his podcast pulled me into the studio so we could spend some time talking shit. And that was a lot of fun, something I wanted to do more.
Second, I saw the movie Uncle Howard. It’s by Aaron Brookner, about his uncle Howard Brookner, who shot a movie about William S. Burroughs back in the late 70s/early 80s. Howard Brookner died of AIDS in 1989, and Aaron barely knew him or his background, since he was just a kid then. So he went back a few years ago to restore this film (I did the Kickstarter for this, which was great) and in the course of this work, he found a treasure trove of old artifacts in the Burroughs bunker in New York: VHS tapes, audio recordings, pictures, reels of old film, notes. It contained tons of shots of the Lower East Side in the Seventies, video of Zappa and Warhol and everyone from the Beat movement, audio tapes of Ginsberg rambling on in restaurants, tons and tons of documentation.
And that is something I wish I had more of. I think about how I could have been taping ideas onto cassettes, how I have almost no pictures of the Nineties, how I owned a camcorder and never recorded my first reading in Boston. And I save emails, but nobody emails anymore. When it is 2027 and I’m thinking back to the then-to-be-dead Facebook era and the people I knew, how will I remember them? What will be left?
Also, I had a bunch of Amazon credits from my rewards Visa card burning a hole in my pocket, and really want to buy some expensive gear.
So, podcast. I will be talking to other writers, bloggers, musicians, whoever has a story or wants to ramble on with me about the past or about writing or anything else. I’ve got the gear to record two people in person, but I’ve also got a setup to record people remotely over the computer. Me and John Sheppard are going to belt out a bunch of these, and I’ve also recorded one with Jessica Anshutz, with more planned. A few people are in the pipeline. The plan is to go biweekly, the first and the fifteenth of the month. I don’t know how long I’ll do this or how much of a time sink it will become, but it has been fun so far.
THE DETAILS:
Go to thekoncast.com (also known as http://koncast.libsyn.com)
The first episode is with John Sheppard, where we talk about zines, the early history of Paragraph Line Books, how we met, and the birth of self-publishing: http://koncast.libsyn.com/episode-1-zines-paragraph-line-and-why-we-write
You can listen to them in a player on those web pages, or click the download link to get an MP3 and then play it at your leisure with whatever program.
The easiest way to handle that automatically is to subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. You can do that here.
If you’re on an Android phone, I’m told you can use Google Play to do this. (I don’t have one so I don’t know how it works.) It’s located in Google Play here.
There is also the Stitcher app, which has it available here.
Goes without saying that you should also rate and review on those respective stores and whatnot, and tell all your friends.
Also, go add us on facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/koncast/
In the future, I’ll be auto-posting links to new shows here, so stay tuned for those. Let me know what you think. And yes, I’m looking for more people to interview, so drop a line.