🪄 Fairy godmothers 🎶 singing in cursive 🌊 sea daddies 🧜♂️ display cake 🎂 true crime astrology ♈️
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Bonjour.
Today is Monday, August 7. In case this newsletter is too long…meet your new heroes: absented minded, babbling older women here, a double kidnapping here, where sea daddies had sex here.
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xoxo lp
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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
James St. James
James St. James is a television personality, author, and former member of the New York City club scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He is one of the co-hosts of Night Fever. Follow him on Twitter here.
Why are you, Fenton, and Randy the perfect hosts for this show?
Well, we've all been around since the dawn of creation, so we're familiar with the club eras we talk about. We also know the clubland legends we're interviewing. Ninety-five percent of them are in one of our phone contacts, so there's a level of trust and familiarity that makes the conversation pop and flow. I put together the back stories and major plot points – but both Fenton and Randy are from a documentary background, so they keep me on track if I'm veering off-topic. They also jump in with absolute perfect follow-up questions that I would never think to ask.
If people haven’t listened to Night Fever yet, where should they start?
It depends on your interests. For LGBTQ history, the Jayne County interview from season two is a MUST. Jayne is a trans icon who was a Warhol superstar, an early punk rock pioneer, and was there the night of the Stonewall Riots. It's an amaaaaazing episode, you'll be on the edge of your seat. If you're interested in the iconic clubs of the era (Limelight, Area, Danceteria), club owners Peter Gatien, Rudolf, and Eric Goode provide great behind-the-scenes stories. Moby and Martha Wash are featured in great episodes about club music history. If you want clubland outrageous gossip, the Joey Arias and Man Parrish episodes will have you howling. But essentially, I think you start at the beginning. The first handful of episodes set up my journey and how I came to know most of these people. But every episode is interesting in its own way, they're all my babies. Just dive in.
Are you still out there being a NYC party monster?
No, no, no. This podcast is how I keep in touch with my monstrous roots. I still go out occasionally, but I've learned some hard lessons about myself. I allow myself two cocktails. I do a lap around the party, say hello to everyone there, then it's time to go. If I have more than two cocktails, the clubkid in me comes out and all bets are off. I'll be granny at the rave when the sun comes up... then dragging everyone to the after hours party. And that's SO NOT A GOOD LOOK at my age! It's best to stay home and connect with everyone on Zoom.
Is there anyone you’d love to interview who isn’t around anymore?
Warhol, of course. Studio 54 owner Steve Rubell. Paradise Garage DJ Larry Levan. So many people in the "dead legend" category! Most of our interview subjects are "of a certain age" – which is why we seek them out. There are people on our master list of potential guests who have passed away since the show has started. People we talk about who are gone by the time the season airs. That's why it's so important to get them on camera to preserve their stories for history. Otherwise it's all lost.
Which clubs do you miss the most?
The clubs that I went to when I first hit the scene, when I first got to New York: Area, Danceteria, Palladium, Pyramid. Those hold the most nostalgia for me. I associate them with my lost youth. I think whatever clubs you went to in your late teens, early twenties, they always seem like they were the best. Like nothing can ever top them. It's the joy of discovering new worlds that stays with you – whether it was the '70s, '80s, '90s or last year.
Being a club kid sounds exhausting. How did you take care of yourself when it came to sleep, fueling yourself, and keeping up with the energy of NYC night life?
Being young helped, lol. I had energy to spare in my 20s. Also, the times were different, rents were cheaper, it was possible to do a handful of club gigs and make rent/pay bills/buy yourself a fun little outfit. I didn't need a day job to support myself. I don't know that you could do that now. But getting your beauty sleep is still paramount. Pacing yourself. And if you absolutely must wear sky-high platform stilettos, bring a change of shoes for the after party.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
So many of our fantastical worlds involve mentors of some kind—Gandalfs, Dumbledores, Yodas. Women are mentors in fiction, too, but they’re usually absented minded older women using babbling language. (Think Cinderella’s, who…yeah she doesn’t have a name.) Imaginary Worlds jumps into the world of these invisible caretakers and guardians, who mirror the invisible women caretakers and guardians in real life. Eric talks about those feminist icons who helped protagonists think through creative problems and find their voices and women get out of abusive relationships or patriarchal heteronormative household structures, and how it’s all gotten lost in translation in many of the stories we tell. I’ve often been called a “fairy podmother” and it tracks—older, absent-minded, and babbling. But maybe also a shero?
hell yeah
✨ Read my Lifehacker piece 10 Celebrity Gossip Podcasts That Spill the Tea.
✨ Read about using user-generated ideas to create content in Podcast Marketing Magic. (Featuring a new series we could use your help with!)
✨ I was on Sound Off talking about promo swaps and whether or not you should have a microphone on your show art. (No.)
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Hotter Than Ever in her newsletter and podcast.
💎BTW💎
🎙️After I read that piece in The New York Times about Lyme Disease, I was reminded 1) to be terrified 2) how Lyme Disease-sufferer Lizzy Cooperman never told me to go outside wearing white or uncovered and 3) a damn good podcast, Patient Zero, that I think everyone needs to hear. It dropped in 2019 but is still relevant. It is about Lyme Disease—what exactly is is, what’s happening when the tick latches on (episode 3, ew) and the first patient (the index case, better known as patient zero) to raise the flag. The flag-raiser was a woman, and in the least surprising part of this story, nobody listened to her. But Patient Zero is also about uncertainty—why this disease puzzled people for so long. Seven years. A mom started this investigation and scientists finished it. Sort of. It’s not over. Listen here.
🎙️Stuff the British Stole is often about stuff, stuff. Things stuff. In the final episode of this season, Marc Fennell provides the true story of Matoaka, the young Powhatan girl who you probably know as Pocahontas. She wasn’t just stolen (she was—she was being used as a propaganda tool to show people in England that colonization was going great!) her story was stolen. We don’t really know how she died on a ship coming back to the Americas, but she was likely murdered because the British didn’t want her to come home. The false narratives about Pocahontas were established hundreds of years ago by John Smith and then embellished and perpetuated ever since, especially in Disney’s Pocahontas. On this episode, Marc talked to Lauren DeLeary and Derek Blais, who spearheaded Missing Mataoaka, a project created by a team of Indigenous creators that presents an alternative audio track to a film made about Pocahontas, correcting the stereotypes and historical inaccuracies that perpetuate a romance between an “Indian Princess” and a dashing European explorer. It’s the real, much darker story. Listen here.
🎙️Switched on Pop had a great episode on singing in cursive, (think Halsey, Shawn Mendes, street urchins from Newsies) a style that features elongated vowels, extraaaa vowels, vocal fry, “dipthongization,” and lack of diction. It’s not a new phenomenon but the name came from TRACKDROPPA’s who tweeted in 2009, “Voice so smooth it’s like i’m singing in cursive.” There’s been enormous backlash to this new vocal style—some people think it’s just too much and make lyrics impossible to understand. Cursive writing is a lot art. Maybe we’ll look back at cursive singing and think of it as a wild and strange language we need a translator to understand. This episode was full of history, specific examples from the past few decades, and a step-by-step guide to understanding exactly what makes singing cursive and why some people hate it so much. Listen here.
🎙️Whether you’ve seen Star Wars or not, I think The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks will be one of your favorite listens of the year. Dylan Marron is talking to Ahmed Best, the man who played Jar Jar in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, and the traumatizing events that followed when Jar Jar was released into the world from fans who felt so much hate for him that it spilled over onto hate for Ahmed. This is the story of what it was like to be on the end of all this hate from the very early internet, the dark places it took Ahmed (things get extremely dark in episode 4,) and the thinking behind anyone who would create something called The Jar Jar Hate Page. (In episode 5, we get to hear from him.) This isn’t a Star Wars podcast, it’s a culture podcast that’s incredibly human, one that touches upon so many issues that are relevant today, yet it gives a perfect snapshot of the early 2000s. Listen here.
🎙️If you recognize the title of this podcast from the lyrics of Blink 182’s “All the Small Things,” you’ll immediately appreciate the vibes of this funny, conversational show about people and their jobs. Comedian (and butcher) Michael Timlin’s Work Sucks I Know is a play on Studs Terkel's 1974 bestseller, "Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.” He talks to comedians and writers about the ins and outs of their jobs, what keeps them sane, what they do for money know and what they hope to do for money in the future. Go immediately to the Ashley Ray (of TV I Say, with Ashley Ray) episode to hear about how Ashley does the bare minimum at her Google job so she can get a paycheck and health insurance while pursuing her artistic dreams. It’ll inspire you to make a boundary in your own job, give yourself a break if you’re not at your dream job just yet, and save space for your creative pursuits. Listen here.
🎙️You have no idea how much sex sailers were having in the 18th and 19th centuries. Or maybe you do, but I doubt you know all the details—where exactly on the ships they went to “find some sly corner to have sex in,” the duties of a “sea daddies,” the punishment men received for any erotic contact or solicitation, what trial records tell us about the men who were prosecuted, and why some men weren’t. This is Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, so the conversation is energizing and hilarious, and with guest Dr. Seth LeJacq, it’s a plunge into a sly corner of history you haven’t explored. It’s not just history you didn’t know, it’s a look into the way men expressed emotion for each other hundreds of years ago and how that was viewed by society and the powerful cultural connection sailers have had with queerness. Nobody does history quite like Jonathan. This was like a learn-a-second journey on the high fucking seas. Listen here.
🎙️Blum is an audio drama that tells the story of Clara Torres, an art history student who disappears while working on her thesis about Ursula Blum, a famous Swiss avant-garde painter from the 20th century. Five years later, journalist Emma Clark decides to travel to Switzerland to continue Clara's investigation and narrate in a podcast what she discovers about the mystery surrounding both women. The sound production includes original music and archival tape, and is top notch. I felt like I was dropped into the middle of a foggy, mysterious documentary, an active participant in the investigation. The only thing that kept reminding me that it wasn’t real was that it felt absolutely cinematic. Listen here.
🎙️John O’Hegarty is an interesting person. With a masters in psycho-analytic studies from Trinity College, Dublin, you wouldn’t think he’d be the most likely person to become a bank robber, (not to mention Dublin’s “most polite bank robber,”) and I’m Not Here to Hurt You is helping us grasp with how he got there. It all started with a bike accident. John ran into someone and killed them. It was a breaking point that led to a drug addiction that sparked his need to fuel a very expensive drug habit. John, who is free from his twelve year prison sentence (he could have left earlier but morally wanted to fulfill the entire sentence) has been approached by journalists before. Lots of people have wanted to teach his story. But John wanted to work with an Irish reporter and found his way to Kevin Doyle, the host of I’m Not Here to Hurt You. It’s a story about going to the bottom fast, something that could happen to anyone. But it’s not just about him, his participation in the project makes it an intimate reflection on one person going to a terrible place that feels complicated and alive. Listen here.
🎙️So I’m listening to one of my favorite storytelling podcasts, RISK!, and I know that Kevin is trying to raise money, and mentions that he will do anything on the podcast if people donate. Then I hear that a listener has already done this. She was listening to RISK! herself, when somehow accidentally, her phone switched over to Spotify and started playing “If I Loved You” from Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel and she thought for a moment that Kevin was singing to her. Her ask was that Kevin sing “If I Loved You” to her for $250, and he does, terrrrribly, and I was surprised to discover that the caller was Cookie Passell, my mom. I played it for my husband and he was like, “Is this real life?” I told you I’d adopt a listener. I think I’ve adapted a Call-in-Girl (this makes three—me, her, and Arielle.) I think I’ve created a monster. Listen here at the 45:30 mark.
🎙️Seth Meyers and his brother Josh are the hosts of Family Trips with the Meyers Brothers, a show that ask guests to relive their family vacations. Talking about trips is an excuse for them to have funny conversations with John Oliver, Amy Schumer, Amy Poehler, and other funny people (who I’m not seeing on other podcasts at a high-saturation level.) It’s a peek into these people’s families and childhoods. I completely enjoyed the Pete Davidson interview—he talked about his dad (who was killed in 9/11) and his very tall sister. The Colin Jost episode was about Colin loving Disney World but all of the funny tangents were appreciated. The brotherly banter between Seth and Josh is really nice. There’s always a custom-written parody song at the end. Listen here.
🎙️In Undiscarded’s Season 1 finale, Tania has a conversation about a display cake at La Villita bakery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that was adorned with a scantily clad doll named Xoxa. It’s a cake that reflects the neighborhood's transformation from a predominantly Puerto Rican community to what it is now, a land of rich white people. I run through this neighborhood on the weekends and see huge buildings that used to be factories—I had no idea they were put there to drive rich people away. New York neighborhoods change basically every time I run through them. This is an episode about the evolving cultural landscape of Williamsburg, served with a piece of cake. Listen here.
🎙️Pro-Trump, self-described “freedom fighter” and “artist” Scott LoBaido was recently seen tossing pizza slices over NYC City Hall gates in protest over new law that will require pizzerias using wood-fired ovens to curb emissions. (“Give us pizza or give us death!” It’s not just you…this doesn’t make any sense.) It’s so stupid you could cry, but Where There’s Woke has a great episode explaining why exactly it doesn’t make sense and the logic Scott and other republicans are trying to follow. This is one of those screamy shows that makes fun of dumb people in an effort to make sane people feel better, but it’s also an attempt to understand the thinking of the right. If it was fake it’d just be hilarious, but since it’s real, it’s fascinating. Listen here.
🎙️I am not a gamer, but I was really interested in this conversation on Games and Feelings about how to create non-ethnocentric villains in TTRPG and video games. Claire Aubin, a PhD graduate of the University of Edinburgh (her research was in “the comparative individual agency of Holocaust perpetrators in the post-war United States immigration process”) joined Eric Silver to talk about roleplaying hate-speech, whether or not we should include Nazi-adjacent things or try to do a genocide in our table top and role play games and how not feel weird and bad in these fantastical worlds. Listen here.
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
[From February 28, 2020] Slow Radio doesn’t tell a story in a traditional sense, but it brings you to another place, allowing you to imagine a story of your own. The 15-minute episodes are a celebration of sound of places all over the world, allowing you to take in the way an environment ebbs and flows via noise. From Dadar to the Stars takes you to Mumbai, beginning with a quiet, cricket-speckled morning, to the swelling sound of a bustling city. I love listening to these at night, before I go to sleep, or while I’m walking around the city in darkness.
From the Desk of Tink
Today we’re talking to Kevin Henderson, writer and actor of In the Cards from Next Chapter Podcasts.
Describe In the Cards in ten words or less:
An existential comic romance about a loser who fights his destiny.
Who is it for?
In the Cards is tailor made for anyone who loves a good story! Readers, Audible book devotees, Movie junkies, adults and young adults (if you don’t mind the occasional swear word)… It’s about a guy who finds out that fate is the driving force of the universe and he is destined to lose at absolutely everything. He always misses the bus, burns his toast, cracks his phone screen, never gets promoted, never has a second date, on and on and on… But he’s lived his whole life this way so to him it’s normal. He’s basically accepted all his misfortunes, persevered and lived carefree… until now, when he visits a tarot card reader who reveals the truth to him: The Universe really is out to get him. Funny? Yes! But it also asks big questions about our place in the scheme of things and about the agency we have (or don’t have) in controlling our destiny.
What was your favorite thing about working on In The Cards?
Well, writing is a long, lonely and sometimes painful process because even when you finish the scripts they really aren’t complete until they are performed. So, easily, my favorite part of this process was directing the actors in the studio and hearing this story come to life. Performance-wise, when things are cooking, the actors make your words even better than you ever imagined which was definitely the case with IN THE CARDS. Our cast is culled from the top tiers of Broadway, film, podcasts and TV so the performances are full and nuanced; comic and impactful. During recording I wanted to experience the story the way the audience would experience it so I would close my eyes and just listen. It was funny where it is supposed to be and truly moving to an even greater depth than I had imagined in the serious moments. It was a fantastic part of the process.
What do you hope listeners take away from it?
The sound design and scoring by Shane Rettig add so much to the already inspired acting performances. Shane’s work is wonderfully meticulous and comprehensive. The performances and sound design really put you right there in every moment. When people listen, I want them to feel like they are watching a movie with their ears. Ultimately, I want people to know they’re not alone in the world when they feel like the Universe is out to get them. I want people to be able to laugh at themselves a little and come away feeling a little lighter. I mean, the universe isn’t ever really out to get you! And if Gil Garson can keep his chin up through all his misfortunes, anybody can.
If you could force one person in the world to listen to your show it'd be…
My younger self as a struggling actor / writer trying to get a foothold in the business when I first got started. I’d say: “This is what all your strikeouts are going to lead to some day”. I’d maybe not have punched as many walls (which would have saved me a lot of money on damage fees for apartments I rented!).
What do your parents/kids/family think you do?
They think I am grappling with major mental health issues because I’m always locked in a room talking to people who aren’t really there. (I say all the lines out loud when I write!).
Anything else you’d like to share?
There are so many production companies chasing the same rabbits in the narrative podcast space. IN THE CARDS is unique: An existential comic romance?! When I first started pitching this I kept getting turned down by producers because they don’t do comedy or anything that doesn’t “check the box”. Next Chapter Podcasts totally got the project from our first meeting. They loved the writing and tone, and saw the lane on the comic side of narrative podcasts was wide open. So, I am grateful for the partnership I found with NCP. They have been nothing but supportive and engaged partners both on the business side of things and also on the artistic side.