Short Circuits:


nine modest and extravagant proposals


in search of new features




Gregory Whitehead




Feature dreams, radio realities.




The tension --- or schism --- or chasm --- between the two has been an ominous constant throughout my entire career, throbbing away unpleasantly, like an untended dental cavity.




At occasions such as this, intended to celebrate the creative possibilities of the medium, the standard script introduces a couple of suspects from the creative side who procede to elaborate the aesthetic, literary and acoustic DNA for a teeming bestiary of Future Feature Creatures, living proof of radio’s most vibrant aspirations.




Then, while the air still hangs heavy with the heat of fresh possibility, benevolent but pragmatic representatives from the corporate side enter the stage to present their sober analysis of market share, focus groups, listener profiles and demographics, during which the air is slowly sucked from the room, reducing the gang of radiomakers, who just a few moments before, had been rubbed up into a hormonal tizzy, back to the mild depression they had long believed, in their bones, to be their fate. It’s like the Master of Ceremonies telling everyone to get up and do the macarena, only for the band to launch into a lengthy funeral march.




Happily, that is not the agenda for this occasion, here in this venerable building , full of so many spooky and remarkable echoes. Instead, there is the far more productive structure, based on the alternative premiss, that at a deep level, the interests of feature-makers and the interests of management are identical: to conceive programs that fulfill radio dreams by creating real audiences, programs that will reclaim the qualities of illumination, excitement, provocation, seduction, my favorite "e word", entertainment --- and sheer unadulterated good fun, all of which should be our natural domain.




Of course, each of these qualities is open to discussion, and a premature consensus will producer the worst possible outcome --- the formula feature, something for everybody, but moving, and changing, noone.




When I asked Simon and Richard what kind of beverage I should bring to the party, they said: something to get the juices flowing.


So here goes…. Nine past castaways in search of future features.




Number One: L’INDOMPTABLE




That was the prologue to an essay for Radio France, about the dark side of dolls, titled, "L’indomptable", or the Unconquerable, in which the great doll artist Michel Nedjar answers the question "What is a doll" with no fewer than twenty two qualities, each of which might just as well be used to answer the question "what is a feature"?





I start with it not just because French is a nice language to hear before the coffee kicks in, but because the medium of radio,


like the medium of the doll, is a medium of multiple tones, pitched


under and over the finely tuned dominant signal.




Radio is a slip stream,


always fading out and away, at a speed faster than fingers can twitch or ears can adjust:




who is speaking,


who is listening?




Like Nedjar’s DOLLS, Mother radio was born with a severe case of multiple personality disorder --- and the problem is, every voice is always on, in the air, all the time, from vegetative drone tones to the voice of God.




The radio listener, in all her protean moods, is equally as slippery, equally as unstable: in the bath, or in the dentist chair, in the car, on the move, somewhere else, probably thinking about something --- else, some other place, some other voice. Not us.




So on both sides of the call and response, the listening situation is viscous, fluid, indefinite, only the potential for a crossing--- no promises.




The key to making good radio lies in understanding the creative possibilities of communicative uncertainty, NOT in trying to erase it, or pretend that all is perpetually in order, whether through compulsive handholding or the urge to spoon feed and infantilize.


Too much of that, and the relationship dries out, withers and dies.


It’s easy, but it won’t last --- like a marriage drained of every last drop of romance. Mediocrity only feels "cozy" for so long.




Radio thrives on the illusion of co-presence, the illusion that every call will find a response. Yes, I know that to speak of the magic of radio is fairly old hat --- but feature makers rarely follow the implications of the metaphor, the most important being that …




To conjure a story is not the same as to explain it.




The pleasure of the Nedjar doll, and the magic trick, and the radio feature, vibrates in the suspension of the immediate connection between event and explanation, relying more on the play of curious associations and on the mysterious resonance, later, much later, lying in bed, and you think --- oh, my goodness, that’s what is it, that’s how it’s done, that’s what it means! The pleasure resides in the pure play of style, wit, voice, clarity coupled with strategic disinformation, and a abundance of personality – all with the aim of engaging the audience, who wants, beyond all else, to wonder.






Number Two: MARINADE A LA TETE




As some of you know, I never miss an opportunity to sing silly songs. That little cooking show aired first over here on Radio 4, and when a slightly different version played in the USA, I was flooded by emails requesting the recipe, and realised that I had tapped into a sub-tradition of the conjuror’s art, the banter of the snake oil salesman.




I play it to make another simple point about the nature of a compelling illusion --- the audience loves to believe, even as a fiction, in the organic unity of the scene --- that is, the deep desire to see the magician become the victim of her own illusion, or the chef baked into his own pudding.




Too often, when feature makers place themselves in their programs, the result is a sort of sticky, goopy, sentimental mess, and I want to know why?




I believe it is simply a matter of training:


The most productive workshops I have ever given for radiomakers have been essentially acting workshops, with an emphasis on voice and gesture, and with an aim towards creating programs that know how to play, looser, more at ease with themselves, and therefore more at ease with the listener, above all when the story is difficult.




The average feature maker learns far too much about what makes a good story in the abstract, and far too little about how to actually tell it, or even more than telling the story, "doing" the story, speaking from right inside.




The upscale broadcast journalist clings to notions that descend,


for the most part, from the newspaper of record: authenticity, objectivity, balance: who, what, when and where.




But the feature making illusionist plays, or ought to play, by different rules. Our goal is not to set the record straight, but rather to entertain in the root sense of --- entretenir --- to hold or keep among, ears held through our hypnotic conjuring of associations, memories, inspirations and ideas. Ears held through motivated style, style at the service of the illusion, and by the living, breathing presence of personality, in the figure of the illusionist, who may well become the victim of the scene.




Number Three: BEWITCHED BOTHERED BEWILDERED




Those were the closing minutes from another essay, Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered, four very different conversations arranged into rotating quatrains, floating buoys for the audience, who is invited to voyage downcoast, by dead reckoning, to enter the biggest media story of them all: how to navigate the riptides of the present.




The subjects are maritime historian Nathaniel Philbrick, on death and the ocean; London performance artist Michelle Griffifths, on why she submerged herself in a water tank for two weeks; Argentinian filmmaker Leandro Katz on the iconography of Che Guevara; and French literary historian Chantal Thomas, on the memoirs and life philosophy of Casanova.




Like many of my programs, the essay also became, inevitably, a meditation on the nature of making radio, for radio journeys often end in shipwreck, airwaves offering an electronic mirror for the submerged graveyard of the Atlantic.




and radio, like a body floating in a vat, is nebulous, which is the very opposite of opaque, for the longer you look at the nebula, the more you see, it is all a matter of letting light work on cognition, a process that does not happen in a single sound bite.




And radio is a medium where I believe the possibilities of one individual CAN still make a difference; And radio, like Casanova, seduces in a way that entangles the erotic with the dangerous, like a headlong jump into a carnival.




When dense clouds burst, they create streams ---


And while the idea of an information "stream" has been a buzzword for so long that it almost starts to sound like ancient history,


it strikes me as very odd that radio, most suited to streaming media, has actually been the medium to hold out for box cars.




I could well imagine a feature stream, or a feature channel,


that would stream series of brief self-contained ideas, memories, audio poems, anecdotes, analysis, speculation, rants, soundscapes, songs and stories in a kind of endless shuffle mode,




fresh associations produced from each shuffling, all flowing in long repeating cycles, with new materials fed into the stream each day, entirely without narration.




Inexpensive to produce and curate, but very challenging to fill the clouds with the rain that would feed the stream, I believe such a program would be readily accepted by all kinds of listeners, particularly younger listeners, for whom "dip" media are the normal model.






Number Four: LOVELY WAYS TO BURN (notch volume down)




A couple of minutes from Lovely Ways to Burn.




A sort of antic reworking of the song FEVER, giving me yet another chance to sing a silly song, but a good one, followed by the ruminations of a young woman who had spent most of her childhood setting fire to herself, her hands noe covered with scars, in what I wanted to be a delicate duet with herself, one hand speaking to the other, fniger puppets.




I play it today to raise the thorny question of ars acustica.




Since I come from a culture that has no sanctioned cultural space for Feature, nor for Radio Drama, or for Ars Acustica, so as a consequence, I have never paid much attention to the boundaries among them, boundaries that are, as boundaries always are, more about politics and money than communication.




The radio feature is, or ought to be, the omnivorous octopus of the airwaves, grabbing anything that plays, including fairly sense passages of sound art, but only if they can be integrated, or creatively dis-integrated, into the stream in a way that is not overly fetishised or muscular, and that is treated as one strategy or mode among others, rather than an end entirely unto itself.




Programs that consciously set out to be "experimental" too often do nothing but give more ammunition to the border patrols, and reduce the audience to the lone self of the radio maker, a result that is the very definition of solipsism, and ism best performed in the privacy of one’s own home. On the other hand, there is nothing more pretentious than an artificial clarity imposed upon a reality that is mysterious, paradoxical and often convoluted.




Number five: PRESSURES OF THE UNSPEAKABLE (volume back up)




For those lucky enough to suffer….




Talk Radio.




From the perspective of the classical Feature, most Talk Radio would be considered beneath contempt, the veritable sewars of the airwaves. And so may they be!




But a mud trench supports much more life than a glass house, and so for many years now, I have been plotting fresh ways to dig myself into the muck and see what comes out in the wash, guided by the spirit of the Trickster coyote, who understands better than anyone that even the freshy oxygenated blood that fuels the brain gets its kick from the belly, up.




The scream piece, Pressures of the Unspeakable, was first produced for The Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1992.


The concept was simple:




I presented myself, business card and official letterhead in hand,


as Dr. Gregory Whitehead, Director of the Institute for Screamscape Studies, visiting Australia to produce the definitive study of the Australian Scream.




Through talk radio appearances and newspaper interviews, Dr. Whitehead was able to generate a good deal of publicity, which in turn generated thousands of scream donations into the archive, which in turn generated a forty minute broadcast montage, a "Feature" that was really nothing more than a loose documentation of a hybrid circuitry of performance/ stories/confessions and a vast archive of screams.




Since that first project, the concept has been repeated in over twenty other cities. With varying degrees of direct involvement from me, and produced mostly, on the tiny budgets that have become my putative specialty, I consider some of these live-to-air screamscapes, unedited, to be among the best work I have done, in any medium, teaching me about the tremendous value of two more indispensable qualities of the radio feature: interference and feedback.




Another pop format for potentially fruitful inhabitation by the nomadic feature maker which might play very well on radio 4, offering a kind of civilized informational patter that becomes incredible only if you really listen: the pseudo-celebrity talk show. Real or imaginary conversations with real or possible people, celebrities of the present or the imminent future, such as this one with performance artist Michael Monihan, who endeavors to eat his way to the top of the art world by ingesting three canonic texts: the Oxford Universal Dictionary, Gray’s Anatomy and the King James Bible, or, as he puts it, one for the mind, one for the body and one for the soul.




6. MIND BODY SOUL




Merrily continuing on our little audio journey through pop radio formats, I confess to harboring a certain perverse fascination for the figure of the Shock Jock, the bottom of the Talk Radio feed chain, and therefore the most highly paid.




The very antithesis of the Feature Maker, the successful Shock Jock is a relentlessly abusive persona whose combination of manic charm and bottomless cynicism seems to strike at the very heart of contemporary America, or the conspicuous lack thereof.




Last year, the centennial for Marconi’s famously twitching letter "s", the first translatlantic transmission, coincided with the 150th birthday of Moby Dick.




The coincidence is particularly apt, as I have long thought of Captain Ahab as America’s first Shock Jock. Ahab, struck by lightning, and then never stops talking, as he seduces, cajoles and ridicules his doomed crew, s.o.s.




7. AMERICAN HEAVY




I couldn’t resist playing a little montage from American Heavy, produced last August for the Friday Play, in which the world famous Shock Jock, Jack French, finds himself in a bog named The Big Sloppy, and tries, unsuccessfully to talk himself out.




Through the unhappy laugh, or loff, The Shock Jock convenes community, and then puts it to waste, and in so doing replicates in daily, hourly episodes, in a thousand segmented markets, the fallen status of democracy in the time zone of the new millenium --- communitas, for the dead.




Making it all the more important for us not to forget about the happy loff. I am not going to make the mistake of trying to say anything intelligent about humor, except to say that we need much, much more of it, above all with respect to the juiciest target of all, at least in North America: technology. So, from my world reknowned Laboratory for Innovation and Acoustic Research, L-I-A-R or LIAR:




8. ICE MUSIC




To change channels for the last time: over the past year, we have seen the dark side of radio in all its terrifying glory, smart bombs and electromagnetic orgies of hatred and conspiracy.




Radio Thanatos, stronger than ever.


Only Radio Eros can break the lethal spell,


and Radio Eros is the home neighborhood of the Feature maker, charged with the task of coaxing, seducing, luring, seizing, out of the dark, a moment of thought, a charge, a scream, a laugh, an objection, or connection, putting things back together again,


where a moment before there had been only solitude, silence and rupture.




We don’t have to look hard for our themes,


because they are all right here,


inside the old mother herself,


radio, born from maritime distress,


riddled by catastrophe and salvation,


instrument of conquest and illumination,


source of immense profit, propoganda, and pleasure


medium of polyphony and crushing monotones ---




it is all right here, in the air,


and in this room, over the next two days


let’s try to make something new from it.