Podcasting and Intimacy
I feel awful for posting about this a week late, but I still feel like I need to say something, so here goes…
Last weekend, Richard Bluestein, the man behind Madge Weinstein, the queen of queer podcasting, lost his partner Juan Montealegre to cancer. Until last week, Juan was known only to Yeast Radio listeners as Gussie Iskowicz, Madge’s lesbian lover with Alzheimer’s. Richard/Madge is very protective of his on-air persona, but all sorts of walls came tumbling down last week in the wake of this terrible news.
I’ve been listening to Yeast Radio for over a year because I think Madge delivers some of the smartest, funniest, most interesting commentary out there. She epitomizes the type of content you’d never hear on commercial radio (her slot on Sirius not withstanding). And last week it became really clear that the difference between radio and podcasting transcends what we would identify as the content of the shows. Because everything on Yeast Radio is produced by Richard as Madge, his own life seeped in at the corners, making both Richard and even Madge more real than any entertainment personality. I would argue that I have a closer kinship with Madge Weinstein than any radio host or news anchor. They’re both fictional characters; the difference is that Madge is allowed to be Richard magnified, while even Oprah has had a lot of her personality scrubbed off the air.
I don’t know quite how to put it, but I feel as if this moment underscores why big media is doomed - it can never compete with honest humanity, and it cannot accept true emotion. When I watched Princess Diana’s funeral on television, it was like watching the movie of her life that will be made a decade from now. When I listened to Juan Montealegre’s memorial, and Madge talk about Gussie, in a podcast, I knew him without knowing him. It was like arriving late to a party, just after he’d gone - I could feel the quiet emptiness where he’d stood, and his glow reflected on the people who were left.
My thoughts are with Richard and Madge, and have been all week.
Link to Madge’s podcast eulogy of Gussie.
Link to a recording of Juan Montealegre’s Memorial Service Officiated by Ragan Fox and Rachel Kann.
Link to Democracy Now, where donations may be made in Juan’s memory.
Feb 24th 2006
I think radio is simply a better fit with eulogies. Funerals are pretty austere, generic, and non-visual in our culture. The eulogy and the obituary are where individualism and connection comes out. I think that is why TV doesn’t handle death well, they look for the visual and don’t find something specific, they look for what celebrities have to say and find more grey. I always love how NPR deals with luminaries by finding someone connected to them, family or someone in that industry that was inspired by them or something. and sometimes that means that the piececomes out a few days later. i think its weird that media treats deaths like breaking news we need to know about 5 minutes ago.
Feb 27th 2006
Interesting point - unless we were connected with the person closely, it probably doesn’t matter that we know the same day that they’ve died. The aural nature of death goes way back to primitive storytelling, I think - before we had photos of the dead, all there were were stories (and paintings if you were rich), so that became how we remembered those who had died. I’m not sure, but I’d bet that in many cultures, the prevailing story/myth that came to represent a person was first minted at their funeral.