Thinking of turning the shower talk recordings into a trimmed down playlist. I actually say interesting things once in a while, and a cursory search for anyone else doing it suggests the format of speaking with water tinkling in the background is probably unique. I find plenty of podcasts which, at about 15 minutes in length, are intended to be listened to in the shower, not that you couldn’t listen to them anywhere else. But I don’t see anyone recording from the tub. That’s maybe a little surprising considering the reputation showers have for good acoustics. I should ask around but I suspect that being naked might be a turnoff for the right people and a turnon for the wrong ones.
There are plenty of what I guess you’d call a genre of X-rated or at least sexually provocative podcasts. Some have a feel of the Nuyorican, others feel more labored. But it sounds like most of what I hear comes from people trying to be cool and popular. I don’t care about being either.
I don’t know if simply being in the shower while telling stories would be considered provocative. It would be something like that if I, you know, masturbated or audibly spanked my junk around. No need for that… Listening back to some of it now I sound (depending what I’m talking about) somber and alone, and the nakedness contributes to that atmosphere. But what would the neighbors think if they knew I was doing this? Would they think anything? It’s not illegal to be naked in the shower, or to document my time in that space. It’s a way to make that time productive, dammit.
Now that I think of this I remember that this is not the first time I considered doing this. I remember thinking that the so-called fabulous acoustics of the shower, which I think are something of a myth, might make the idea of broadcasting from there a gimmick with which normal people would connect. Or it might make them nervous.
Of the podcasts I’ve heard lately I find that either they do not feel very real or they feel too real. By not real I mean they sound like well-produced auditions for traditional broadcast radio. By too real I think of something like the Men We’ve Fucked show, which was just too much nitty-gritty about the mechanics of sexual acts. I have not found any middle ground of just real-life storytelling and anecdotes from regular people, in the spirit of the personal website confessional-type genre.
You can be erotic without being overtly sexual, and in fact I think definitions of “erotic” should be extended to include non-sexual connotations. The sound of a radio program wafting in from a distant window, or the music I hear forming in the combination of noises made by a box fan and an air filter. I find these sounds to be erotic in their ephemeral ways.
2017 was supposed to have been the year of the podcast. Looking around, though, I don’t see too much content with which I connect. It goes without saying there is no Joe Frank lurking on iTunes, that gluttonous and system-changing software which I do not have installed and which I do not intend to install. My show, such as it is, is freeform, to use a cliché term. I think that’s a word we used to describe the college station I worked at when we were not using the term “Alternative”, a format descriptor that I think belied the fact that most programming there was pretty predictable. It’s like there was a standard alternative format, which sounds paradoxical but I found it to be true.
Well, I am rambling along here. Gotta get out of here for a bit. Going out to see if it is possible to post to this site from a kiosk. I gave up on the notion of using the free website services, since I don’t think any of those resource-hungry interfaces will work on the puny web browser the kiosks use. Time to think of what other subversive stuff I can do with these kiosks.
