I’ve got a Content Blues Podcast about halfway recorded, and then there’s a Shallow & Pedantic planned to be recorded this weekend. Of the two, the CBP is easier, because I can add to that whenever I want. The work is getting enough recorded to fill out about 30 minutes or so of material. Any more than that is probably too much to listen to one person talking. Also, I find myself running out of things to say at about that time.

Shallow & Pedantic has the opposite dynamic. The last two I’ve had to edit things out so as to not get past an Hour and a half. Which has been about standard since we added the third man to the podcast. Prior to that, episodes were about an hour. So it seems that each person adds 30 minutes of talking. That doesn’t exactly match all podcasts I’ve listened to, but I have noticed that the more people you add, the longer it goes on. That must be why carrying a conversation at parties feels like such a chore.

Doing a podcast can feel like playing in a jazz quartet: you’ve got to keep some kind of a rythm, you’ve got to trade the flow properly, and you never know when you’re going to begin what it’s going to sound like. Some podcasts are free jazz or avant-garde, everyone just shouts, and the strongest voice will be heard. We’re not going for that vibe. It’s a serious podcast about unimportant things. A lot of them are unserious podcasts about important things. Which is better, I guess than unserious about unimportant. But I can’t imagine doing it that way. Why talk about the maelstrom of pop culture, most of which is derivative and unoriginal, unless you’re trying to form some kind of understanding of the world and why we respond to it in this way.

Art is the relationship between man and nature. If it’s bad, something’s going on to make it bad. You can call this “structural” if you want to, but that’s a word clunky and overused by communists. I prefer to call it “the thing unspoken”. Why are sitcoms the way they are? Something unspoken in their conception, production, and marketing, known to those inside the biz but not to the audience. That’s the kind of things that interests me.

Anyway, podcasts imminent. Watch this space.