It’s Friday folks! And what a week it has been. We started off with a 14-hour car ride with an Australian GPS named Jill who yelled at us about shaaap turns from New York to North Carolina, spent mid-week in Urgent Care with a case of strep throat that took at shot of penicillin in the ass to resolve, and now we’re so loaded up on ibuprofen that it’d take a horse tranq and a Big Gulp of rectified spirits to cure these cramps! TMI? Our apologies! We’ll make it up to you with this vintage picture of APM’s Kai Rysdall, who is single-handedly responsible for making the Dow sound like sexy talk. Did you know that before joining Marketplace, Mr. Rysdall was a Navy pilot and worked in the foreign service in Ottawa? There’s only one thing hotter than spying on Mounties, and that’s this: when you donate to Marketplace’s sister show, The Dinner Party, you get a page from Kai Rysdall’s on-air script! No word on how much it takes for in-person delivery, but that would be worth all the Nina Totenbags in the world. HOT!
Portlandia’s Carrie Brownstein:
There was a question at the beginning: Will this show appeal to people outside of Portland? Once the episodes starting airing, Portland turned out to be a city that was watching it a lot less than others, mostly because people here can’t afford cable.
From The Dinner Party, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim reveal a secret behind the unpracticed look of their TV show and new movie:
It takes a lot of work to make it look like it’s not a lot of work. A lot of it’s in the editing — cutting to the right reaction shots. A trick we use is we shoot a lot of reactions from people and extras when they don’t know the camera’s rolling. That’s when you get a really weird pose, like eyes closed.
Listen:
—
GZA, aka “The Genius,” the rapper and wordsmith at the core of the Wu Tang Clan, has a new title: lecturer. This week, he spoke at Harvard about (predictably) music and creativity but also (less predictably) science.
