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Behind the Scenes with radio maverick Gregory Whitehead
Interview conducted by Julie Shapiro
When we first started talking with Gregory about featuring his work on the
Third Coast website, he requested that instead of conducting a standard
interview, could we possibly engage in a dialogue that would unravel over a
short period of time, and extract parts of it for the Producer Extra on the
site. We were more than happy to break from tradition for a couple weeks and
indulge him (and ourselves) in a conversation about his work. What follows are
some of the highlights:
> So, I’ve been asked to describe your work a few times, and have never
been exactly sure where to start. How would/do you describe your approach to
your work?
I begin with the idea of radio as an adventure, and part of the idea of an
adventure is that you don't always know precisely where you are. To my ears, a
good radio program invites the listener to navigate. Sometimes the waters get
choppy, or the fog rolls in. I always remind myself that the first community of
radio artists was a community of maritime distress and rescue, the community of
S-O-S.
In fact, the first trans-Atlantic radio broadcast was the single letter "S" in
Morse code, dot-dot-dot. It's a twitching finger, a nervous finger, and radio
is a nervous medium, we never really know who is really speaking, or why, or
from where, it is a medium of permanently suspended disbelief. Rather than
pretend the fog doesn't exist, I've always tried to embrace it, listen for the
buoys, and hopefully float a few of my own. There's nothing more pretentious
than imposing an artificial clarity on a nebulous, and even convoluted, world.
I believe it was the poet Leopardi who said that the smallest confused idea was
superior to the most lucid grand idea. Not to say that we should aim to create
confusion, but good programs, to my mind, are an invitation into a field of
associations, where the conclusion may not be entirely clear. The open
adventure of thought, not the delivery of predetermined conclusions.
> What strikes me about your work is that you’re constantly inviting
listeners to suspend their beliefs in what they think they comprehend as Truth,
and what they suspect is fiction. You coax a certain flexibility from them...
Producers spend far too much time policing boundaries -- on this side, we will
put all the facts, and over there, we will isolate the imagination -- but of
course that's not the way of the world, in which the fabulous becomes all too
real in a heartbeat, and in which "hard facts" are transformed into the most
perverse fictions, whether through political motivations, or through the drive
to sell stuff. Good programs invite the listener to ask questions about the
nature of contemporary reality, and the blurring of fact and fiction is very
much a part of reality. That's not to say there is no "truth" -- of course
there is, but it does not come with a sign hanging around its neck, or with a
blinking neon arrow. I would always choose the truthful fiction over the
duplicitous fact.
I've produced documentary features where listeners have asked me where I found
such excellent actors, and plays where I've been quizzed about where I found
such crazy people. That's not because they weren't listening closely enough,
but because the very nature of identity has become extremely slippery.
> It seems you’ve mastered the art of crafting such convincing, yet
benevolent narrative deceptions. Are listeners ever upset by your talent for so
convincingly blurring the lines between literalism and imagination?
It's a question of style. My role is to open up a space of play between fact
and fiction, certainly not to fool anybody. Not deception -- but play. For
example, take Ice Music, in which a sextet of trumpets are frozen into an ice
tray, then dropped into a glass of selzer to create a brass choir. Well, the
dream of freezing sound is an old one, and it pops up in Rabelais and
elsewhere, but it does not carry much water as science. The humor is in taking
the illusion seriously enough to inhabit the conventions of a "real" discovery.
Deadpan style has a long tradition in American humor. Twain and Bierce come
immediately to mind, but most television comedy goes the other way, into a kind
of manic cartoon, pumped up by a hysterical laugh track. Meanwhile a President
of the United States can stare into a camera and say "I did not have sex with
that woman" in a deadpan so perfect it jumps straight through comedy to become
tragic farce.
> I'm also struck by how you implicate yourself as a
character/role/voice in your programs. Does this then heighten the sense of
play?
Oh, absolutely, hey I don't want to miss out on the fun. I spend a good deal of
time studying the technique of master clowns and also magicians, who often make
fabulous humorists. Key to so many routines and tricks is allowing oneself to
become the victim of the scene. Like a chef baked into her own pudding. So for
example in Marinade a la Tête, I am the first head to get juiced by the
marinade, and loved every squirt. Radio is also the perfect medium for this
technique, the ear is so much more forgiving than the hyper-analytical Eye,
radio is the medium of creative ambiguity.
> [How much] do you want/need the listener's trust? Maybe this hearkens
back too much to the deception idea, which you countered with the notion of
play. In that case, [how much] do you want/need a listener's participation in
the game?
I want listeners to trust in the spirit of the game, certainly, and also in the
process of an active navigation. In many of my longer pieces, the cross
currents of association can at first seem to create a sense of chaos, like
Poe's famous Maelstrom, but I work very hard to make sure there is always a way
through, the associations make sense, the metaphors resonate, the stories build
meaning. Not a passive delivery of a story that is prescribed, like a daily
dose of received wisdom, but an active navigation, which we will do together.
Like Emerson wrote, "The ship that sails the truest course does not necessarily
sail a straight line." My intent is not to float out false signals, but rather
to offer a few reference points for individual mapping, listeners taking what
they want, or need, and building their own journeys, come what may.
> You’ve talked about how good radio programs invite listeners to ask
questions ... now how about answers? Do good programs also offer an answer, or
a variety of answers ... or the encouragement to figure it out ourselves?
For answers, all you have to do is tune in the prevailing gang of pundits. The
audience, above all, the American audience, is saturated with answers. In a
confusing world, program makers have a key choice: do we try to simplify,
filter, streamline and move towards the delusion of the One Answer? Or do we
create programs that exercise the more fundamental skills of multi-dimensional
thought, the ability to hold two competing thoughts in the mind at once, which
may be the very definition of intelligence. Americans are relentlessly
infantilized, and mass infantilization of the sort we have here eventually
produces a weak democracy, and the evidence for that is everywhere. More
complex structures encourage more complex thought, leading to more open,
vigorous discussion, which in turn prepares all of us for a future where one
person's Big Answer inevitably turns out to be another person's coffin.
> You also manage to tackle an assemblage of abstract notions
(revolution, evolution, inspiration, art ...) via more conventional or standard
communicative methods, such as interviews, or dialogue/monologue ...
Yes, well, it's hard to ignore the most ubiquitous pop formats, and the Talk
Show dialogue, or shared monologue, is right up near the top. So I proposed a
series of interviews, in celebrity talk mode, in which I would be the host, the
guest, and the band. Mind, Body Soul presents an unnamed performance artist,
who has become a sensation in the art world for eating three books: The Oxford
Universal Dictionary, Gray's Anatomy and the King James Bible. One for the
mind, one for the body and one for the soul. Within the simple Q & A
format, with a down-tempo backbeat, I'm able to raise all kinds of questions
about the art world, ambition, the market, the body. The simplicity of the form
gives a tremendous amount of freedom, and at the same time, the format is so
familiar, and readily accepted by an audience, gives the most difficult notions
a relaxed feel.
> The composed music in your work comes across as a voice as loudly as
the speech does. Which came first – music or radio? What does the music
accomplish that language can not?
Radio is at root a PULSE medium, it's the very nature of soundwaves. My own
roots are in music and writing, so radio seemed like a lovely place to dance. I
use music to set tone, certainly, but also to heighten the humor, create
counterpoint or cross-reference. Listeners are trained to hear radio as a
combination of Words and Music, so once again, why fight it? In a piece like
Brain Mash, it's crucial to communicate the essential ingredient of TIME, if
you aim to transform mashed Idaho tubers into living human brains.
> So what motivates you toward making this kind of work? What’s inspired
you to develop as the radiomaker/artist you’ve become?
Well, when I give workshops to students, I always warn them that creative radio
is not the endeavor to satisfy one's hunger for fame or fortune! I've always
believed deeply in the utopian side of radio, the wonderful power to create
these temporary communities, among listeners you can never entirely anticipate
or predict, very democratic and even random. The other side of radio
flourishes, I call it radio Thanatos -- radio death. Radio was born as call for
help (S.O.S), yet swiftly became a tool for destruction, whether in the rants
of tyrants or, quite literally, as a weapon. But we should never underestimate
or abandon the radio that is close to the beat of life, the rhythm of
community, what I call Radio Eros.
If you think of the radio "feature" as the form of radio broadcast that tries
to work with the root materials and possibilities of radio itself, then there
is the challenge: the task of coaxing, seducing, luring, seizing, out of the
dark, a moment of thought. A charge, a scream, a laugh, an objection, or a
fragile connection. Putting things back together again, where a moment before
there had been only solitude, silence and rupture. And featuremakers and radio
playwrights don't have to look hard for themes, because they are all right
here, inside the old mother herself: radio, born from maritime distress,
riddled by catastrophe and salvation, instrument of conquest and illumination,
source of immense profit, propaganda, and pleasure medium of polyphony and
crushing monotones. The Third Coast Festival has a lot of ground to cover, and
very much to celebrate!
Gregory Whitehead also writes for the live stage, and for film/video, including
the mockumentary The Bone Trade, and its sister website, www.bonetrade.com. His
feature, Dead Letters, was one of only a handful of radio works to float
through the Whitney Museum's American Century show, and he also contributed a
radio work to the Whitney's more recent Bitstreams review of contemporary
digitalia. As a voice performer, he was recently featured in the New York
premiere of Valere Novarina's Theatre of the Ears. His writings about radio,
voice and media culture have been widely anthologized, and he is the co-editor
of Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, from MIT Press.
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