"I've thought a lot about what will happen to Tyler. It seems inevitable that less scrupulous people than the 'This American Life' team will find him..."

"... and want to use him for purposes that he may not competently evaluate. He's a young man and — you won't learn this listening to the podcast — unusually good looking. I can't believe there won't be offers to participate in filming a reality show. Wouldn't people love to see that house he's built out of scraps and wisteria vines and a horse trough? Wouldn't people love to hear him talk with Uncle Jimmy shouting 'Goddam right!' and 'Yes suh!' in the background? What is 'This American Life' doing to protect him? What can they do? What should they do?"

I wrote on April 1, 2017, in a post about the brilliant podcast "S-Town" ("Shit-town").

I'm reading that this afternoon because I see the NYT headline "Tyler Goodson of ‘S-Town’ Podcast Is Shot Dead in Police Standoff/Mr. Goodson, who had been featured in the investigative podcast set in the town of Woodstock, Ala., 'brandished a gun at officers' before he was fatally shot, the authorities said."

"Goodson listened to the podcast alone in his bed. Every few hours, his wife would crack open the door to make sure he was OK."

"'I was just clusterfucked,' Goodson recalled. The hardest part to hear wasn't the sections about him—it was hearing his late friend's voice. 'Oh Lord. I probably bawled my eyes out through the whole thing,' Goodson said. 'Up until it got up to that fruity stuff. I don’t have nothing against homosexuals, but it was too much for me. I felt like they took that a little far.' Listening to the podcast was the first time he learned McLemore had intimate relationships with men. 'I had my thoughts, but it wasn’t none of my business on his sexuality and all that,' he said... Not much has changed in Woodstock, Alabama in the last year. 'It's still the same old shit town,' Goodson said. There have been visitors. Fans of the podcast will drop by the property he shares with his wife, four daughters, five-month-old son, grandmother and uncle to take a photo, which annoys the hell out of Goodson. 'It still gets aggravating when you got people coming up in your yard and wanting to take pictures all the time and that kind of crap,' he said."

From "'It’s the Same Old Sh*t Town': Tyler Goodson Explains How S-Town Changed His Life/One year and nearly 80 million downloads later, Tyler Goodson discusses life after a podcast" (Esquire).

I'm a big fan of the podcast "S-Town" (i.e., "Shit-town). A year ago, I wrote, "I've thought a lot about what will happen to Tyler. It seems inevitable that less scrupulous people than the 'This American Life' team will find him and want to use him for purposes that he may not competently evaluate. He's a young man and — you won't learn this listening to the podcast — unusually good looking. I can't believe there won't be offers to participate in filming a reality show. Wouldn't people love to see that house he's built out of scraps and wisteria vines and a horse trough? Wouldn't people love to hear him talk with Uncle Jimmy shouting 'Goddam right!' and 'Yes suh!' in the background? What is 'This American Life' doing to protect him? What can they do? What should they do?"

Speaking of "shithole countries" —— remember "Shit Town"?

Last year, we went wild over a podcast — "S-Town" — about a place in Alabama that the central character took cynical delight in calling "Shit Town":

John B. McLemore lives in Shittown, Alabama.... “I live in a crummy little Shit-town in Alabama called Woodstock.”

Here's the ultimate rant about the shittiness of Alabama:



I don't remember the bien pensants getting outraged.

Have you listened to the "Dirty John" podcast?

I listened to the entire 6-part series over the weekend (and listened to parts of it twice). It's very good, not as good as "S-Town," but definitely worthwhile, especially if you want to expose yourself to the thought processes of a woman — a successful businesswoman — who becomes inexplicably stupid while in love (and a second woman whose religion takes her to a mindboggling level of forgiveness).

Subscribe to the podcast in the normal way or start here at the L.A. Times where you can play the audio (highly recommended) or have a reading experience (with photographs).

In "'Dirty John': Journalism as Noir Entertainment" (New Yorker)("mild spoilers"), Sarah Larson questions the mixing of journalism with entertainment — the "pulp-like tone":

John is shown to be thoroughly evil—a descriptor used by several interviewees—and the story freely presents him as a monster. It does this journalistically, through legal documentation, jail records, first-person accounts, archival recordings, text messages, restraining orders, and so on. But it also does so narratively, with the kind of language we might hear in [the old radio melodrama] “Leiningen Versus the Ants.” [Veteran newspaper journalist Christopher] Goffard seems to encourage an almost mythical impression of his subject’s evil. At one point, Goffard tells a lawyer that the lawyer’s description of John sounds “almost like the opposite of a religious experience, you know, where you meet someone holy and it changes your life? This is sort of the inverse of that. Like you looked into a void.” “That is so true,” the lawyer says, with emotion. “Because we all—we don’t want to believe the really bad things about people. We just don’t. We want to think that people are good. And when you meet somebody like this, and you realize, ‘I am sitting here in the presence of evil incarnate,’ you know that people like him really do exist.”...

At Vulture,  Nicholas Quah is more critical "Dirty John Is a Stunning Story, But Why Is It a Podcast?"

The podcast is a crude construction, and its choices often come to the detriment of the actual narrative it’s trying to unfurl and ideas it’s itching to explore. Which is a damn shame, because the Dirty John story, as reported by Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard in a six-part written feature, is a stunner. If you were to give up on the podcast midway through its first episode and switch over to the feature, you’d find a deep, complex tale of domestic abuse and psychological violence that’s rigorously reported, deftly written, and smartly laid out....

I got a lot out of hearing the voices of the characters, but I wanted more psychological depth. A man was evil — some people are just evil, we're told, and there's no explanation. You might as well say his skull was full of "green worms" (somebody says, near the end). As for the woman who took him in and took him back repeatedly, she's treated with such respect as The Victim that there's no exploration of the part of the story that would make some sense of her awful choices: profound sexual desire and satisfaction.

"You can’t tear yourself away from the results — especially from the fate of Tyler Goodson, an especially open-hearted and forthcoming subject, who you come to care about deeply..."

"'S-Town' is expertly constructed, by some of the most talented people in the podcast realm. The incidental music is an intriguing combination of strings and handclaps, urging you along, suggesting wistfulness and contemplation; episodes conclude with a lovely Zombies song, 'A Rose for Emily.' In the end, we empathize with almost every character, and find commonalities between them and ourselves. 'S-Town' helps advance the art of audio storytelling, daringly, thoughtfully, and with a journalist’s love of good details and fascinating material—but it also edges us closer to a discomfiting realm of well-intentioned voyeurism on a scale we haven’t quite experienced before. In the past four days, 'S-Town' has exceeded ten million downloads. Whether the Internet and an audience of millions will share the show’s sensitivity toward its subjects remains to be seen."

Writes Sarah Larson in The New Yorker.

You can listen to the series here. I've listened through the whole series once and am an hour away from hearing it all twice. I've thought a lot about what will happen to Tyler. It seems inevitable that less scrupulous people than the "This American Life" team will find him and want to use him for purposes that he may not competently evaluate. He's a young man and — you won't learn this listening to the podcast — unusually good looking. I can't believe there won't be offers to participate in filming a reality show. Wouldn't people love to see that house he's built out of scraps and wisteria vines and a horse trough? Wouldn't people love to hear him talk with Uncle Jimmy shouting "Goddam right!" and "Yes suh!" in the background? What is "This American Life" doing to protect him? What can they do? What should they do?

ADDED: As for the incidental music of strings and handclaps... listen closely to the difference in the music at about 36 minutes into Episode IV V, right after Cousin Rita says "Cut his nipples off — he's dead." The percussion becomes a snippy-snappy sound that — to my ear — was made with some sort of metallic clippers or loppers. [Sorry I had Episode IV, but it's Episode V. And I would begin a bit before minute 36 to hear Rita. The music I'm talking about begins around minute 37.]

"Almost every journalist has met people like Mr. McLemore, sources who email you under pseudonyms with tips a little too good to be true."

"Often they seem to mostly want someone to talk to, and to have their experiences validated by a journalist, whose job, after all, is to decide what’s important and true. Most reporters would stop taking those calls when the story ideas don’t bear fruit, but not [Brian] Reed. He finds [John B.] McLemore’s life important in and of itself, and a whole world opens up to him."

Writes Amanda Hess (in the NYT) about the new podcast "S-Town." She avoids spoilers. You can listen to all 7 episodes here.

I highly recommend it. I listened to the whole thing in 3 days and immediately went back to Episode 1 to relisten (and am up to Episode 3). I consider it a work of art — perhaps a great work of art. The second go-round will tell. The first time through, you're pulled along by wanting to figure out who all these people are and what happened. There are layers of revelations. On re-listen, you see the first hints of what is to come. You see the repetitions of themes — such as time (McLemore is a restorer of clocks, sundials have sad inscriptions about time). You know as characters show up and start speaking in their own way from their own perspective what part they will play in the whole story. If it is a great work of art, it will be better the second time. That's my test.

I'm reading some other articles about "S-Town." Aja Romano has a piece in Vox with a headline that overstates the argument: "S-Town is a stunning podcast. It shouldn't have been made." The text says: "I’m not sure it should have been made." One might say that Reed invested so much of his time — speaking of time — gathering audio and got such great material that he just had to use it, and he processed it brilliantly. It may be so good because Reed, et al, were so desperate to justify using what they had. And McLemore's vivid raving is so wonderful, so fascinating, that it's hard to say it should be suppressed for the reason that you will know if you get to the end of episode 2.

Here are links to the Reddit threads discussing the show episode-by-episode. The top comment at the linked page is:

I wish I had a cousin like Tyler's uncle Jimmy to be my own personal hype man whenever I talk.

"Yeah!"

"Yes sir!"

"You goddamn right!"

Is there an ethical problem or are we free to enjoy Uncle Jimmy? Here's how Hess in the fit-to-print NYT referred to him: "Uncle Jimmy, who communicates exclusively through shouted affirmations." Jimmy is a man with a bullet lodged in his head.

Katy Waldman in Slate says that McLemore "embodies rightwing fantasies about the judgmental elitism of the left." Don't misread that. McLemore is obsessed with everything that's wrong with the world, especially global warming. He rants about it continually, enlarging talk on just about any subject into all the terrible things that are happening in the world. That is, he seems to be a lefty that popped out of rightwinger's fervid caricature. But "S-Town" isn't making a hero of him because he's into lefty issues. In fact, the show lets it become clear that his ravings on these subjects is symptomatic of his devastating personal problems.

Beyond clocks, McLemore also tended to his garden — lots of flowers and an elaborate circular hedge maze. People have found the maze on Google maps, and you can see photographs here.

Despite all the horror at the troubles of the world and the refuge in gardening, the show never mentions Voltaire's "cultivate your garden" resolution of "Candide." But the show does have literary references, notably the William Faulkner story "A Rose for Emily," which I was motivated to read yesterday. The story is mentioned early on, and every episode ends with the beautiful recording "A Rose for Emily" by The Zombies. Listen to that here. That's from the "Odessey and Oracle" album, which came out 50 years ago. Talk about time! (The Zombies are touring, playing the music from that album, and I hear they're great. They'll be in Madison on April 15th. Get your tickets here. I've got mine.)

I'm listening to the new podcast "S-Town."

All 7 episodes of "S-Town" (AKA "Shit Town") became available at once — here —  and that makes it difficult to have a discussion. It's not like "Serial," where you'd get one episode a week and could bandy about all your theories and opinions while waiting for the next episode to come out.

I'm in the middle of episode 4 right now, so I'm not sure who I can talk to. I don't want spoilers. I had a good discussion yesterday with someone who was ahead of me in the episodes but being very careful not to say anything revealing, even to react one way or another to my ideas about what I thought would happen. He stressed that I shouldn't read anything about it, and I was all I know, I won't.

But it does make me feel that I need to rush through, so the experience is not spoiled, so I get the artful roll-out of the story as it was intended. I think I'd prefer to get it week by week and to have an opportunity to discuss one episode at a time — as I mostly did with "Serial."

Now, part of what I find myself thinking about is why they chose to dump the whole thing at once, and that's coloring my experience of it. Perhaps they wanted to control the storytelling, and if they restricted the flow, key information would come out in news and social media anyway. The story would be told in any crude, blunt way that anybody who could scoop them chose.

But I'm also thinking that the whole enterprise is exploitative of real people, and episode-by-episode discussion in social media might have questioned the ethics and got some serious antagonism going against the show. Dropping the whole thing at once gets ahead of that phenomenon.

I'll have more to say about exploitation and ethics when I'm finished with the whole show. It's quite interesting and elegantly crafted. The aural art is equal to the visual art which you can see at the link. You might want to get going listening to this thing so you'll be in a position to talk about it with me when I'm ready, which will be soon. Until then, I'm not reading any articles, and I won't be reading the comments to this thread — so go ahead and say anything you like.

UPDATE: Since finishing the post, I've made it to the end, beyond spoiling. Quite an amazing work of art.