This week on A Prairie Home Companion, the staff is on its annual ice fishing retreat to the mighty Lake of the Woods, and so we're revisiting two shows that we did last January from The Fitzgerald Theater. Roy Blount Jr. and Chuck Mead of BR-549 will give a talk on the philosophy of honky-tonk music, and Dusty and Lefty make an appearance at St. Paul's Winter Carnival. Plus, Nellie McKay's debut performance, Becky Schlegel, Suzy Bogguss and an episode of The Lives of English Majors.
"Prairie Home Companion" epitomizes everything wrong with:
NPR
Garrison Keillor, and
Midwestern America in general.
When this flavorless, humorless comedy, featuring bland, slow-paced, hokey, corn-fed themes, doesn't actually lull the listener into a lobotomized glaze characteristic of the entire region south of International Falls between the Mississippi and the Rockies, it manages to infuriate for its sheer maddening unfunniness. Keillor and his crew of edgeless, hee-yuking goobers are the flat beer, Muzak, and unsalted chips of an outmoded radio world best left to nostalgic misremembrance or (better yet) glass-eyed senility.
Dear Mr. Keillor,
As a long time admiring fan of PHC and your writing, I was dismayed to read your suggestion to President-Elect Obama that he "might pardon his predecessor and his vice."
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney need to be held accountable for their actions. If the powerful are not subject to the consequences of our laws, then our laws are of no consequence and the American experiment with democracy has failed.
Say it ain't so Mr. K!
John H.
Pittsboro, NC
--
The economy is staggering under trillions in debt, we need to rebuild this country after eight years of blind willful indifference and destructive politics — and we are going to start out by conducting a prosecution of the outgoing administration for war crimes? I have no doubt that a determined prosecution could make a case against the Current Occupant and his Vice, but pursuing it would be sheer insanity and would plunge us into yet another ugly hopeless chapter such as the impeachment of Bill Clinton. The verdict on Mr. Bush was rendered in November and now is the time to go forward and do the essential things. Shore up the economy, fix the tax system, end the bloody war, and save the planet from our own excesses. Retribution is not what we need.
And here it is, 2009, about to drop from the sky. Unbelievable in a way, but there it is, 365 days gone since the last time we sang "Auld Lang Syne" and each of us got exactly the same number, nobody got a bonus. Hard times for many people. Friends whose 401k got socked hard by the crash and who don't talk about it but their retirement plans have now changed. Friends whose jobs seem shaky. A good radio show, "Weekend America," is biting the dust, dang it. And of course there is a lot of mortality going around.
We have a new president coming in and I'm delighted about that and also pleased that he's a man of great discipline and decorum and isn't full of himself or vindictive and righteous and he invited that evangelical guy to give the invocation at the inauguration. Bravo, Barack. Enormous progressive changes have been wrought by mannerly people in ordinary clothing. Anyway, I'll be there at the ceremony January 20, sitting in the bleachers (thanks, Senator Klobuchar!), hoping for a good speech, hoping the inaugural poet proves worthy.
Our old radio show plows forward, after a two-week break, with a winter run at the Fitzgerald and tour stops in Louisville, Duluth, Appleton, Nashville, Durham, Watertown, the April run in New York, and the spring route to Washington D.C., Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago, and Tanglewood.
My New Year's resolution is: Do it better. The enemy, as always, is passivity, inattention, self-indulgence, cynicism — the list goes on and on — when you get to my age, you know your faults all too well — and the reward is to give you some shining radio moments. Those moments are more intense for the fact that it is a live show and even if you listen to it as a podcast or hear the Sunday rerun, it still is live, sort of. It's produced by an extraordinary team of individuals — backstage, there is the wizardly Tom Scheuzger, the orderly Ella Schovanec mistress of scriptage, our writer Laura Buchholz who does Mom and Duane and Jim and Barb and Rhubarb and many other things, our music producer Kathryn Slusher who can find anything in three minutes or less, our stage manager Albert Webster who makes sure that nothing bad happens in the theater at any time, our house sound guy Tony Axtell who is a musician and knows how things should sound, our tour wrangler Caroline Hontz and our truckdriver Russ Ringsak, our various ranchhands Janis Kaiser and Ken Evans and Tom Campbell and Jim and Alan and Hey You, and our technical director/producer Sam Hudson who makes the broadcast happen and has a say about everything that goes into it. And then there are the people onstage, but you know them already. And the mysterious people back in the office in St. Paul. And the even more mysterious people at American Public Media. And the people at the stations who put the show on the air.
And so onward we go and you too, God willing. Courage. May we all find some beauty and humor and kindness in the new year, and maybe even some inspiration. We will try to do our best and hope to be forgiven for the rest. Take care.
All about the January 3rd compilation show, with highlights from 2008, including songs from Emmylou Harris, Brad Paisley, Yo-Yo Ma, Kristin Andreassen, and much more.
This independent feature-length documentary film by Peter Rosen goes behind the scenes at A Prairie Home Companion, and inside the imagination of the man who created it.
A national holiday in Lake Wobegon is always gaudy and joyful. But what is going on between Clint Bunsen and Miss Liberty?
Everyone is here—Pastor Ingqvist, the Sons of Knute, Sister Arvonne of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility and her ocarina band, the Norwegian bachelor farmers, Dorothy and the Chatterbox Café, Wally in the Sidetrack Tap—as crowds converge on the little town to celebrate American independence, even as the chairman of the event broods on the great question of the day: Shall we struggle on valiantly here or shall we burst the bonds and find beautiful life in the golden west?
A couple of highlights worth mention from the Mudcats Montana tour this last summer: We played in Butte where my brother Mick lives, at the Silver Dollar Saloon — he lives in the city but not at the saloon — on a Monday night...
Our friends at Minnesota Public Radio started a new Web and HD radio audio service called Radio Heartland. It's filled with an eclectic mix of acoustic, Americana, and roots music.
On January 17, we're in Louisville, Kentucky, before moving on to Duluth, Minnesota, on January 24. Then it's back to home base — the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul — on January 30 and 31.
Scripts and bits from A Prairie Home Companion celebrate the secret society of men and women who possess excellent spelling and punctuation skills. (You know who you are.)
Selections include "The Six-Minute Hamlet," a tribute to Emily Dickinson, a Guy Noir adventure that exposes an MFA scam, a riveting "Professional Organization of English Majors" drama, and guests Billy Collins, Robert Bly, Roy Blount Jr., and Calvin Trillin.
(01/04) Garrison Kellor, Thank you for cheering me & making me laugh Sat afternoons w... >>
