An Evening with Ira Glass and the Ministry of Love: October 7, 2007
3:43 PM October 9th, 2007 by Jim Sandberg
This review of Ira Glass' Portland appearance on Sunday was offered up by Stacy Carleton, a local high school teacher and WW reader. (Psst: We’re really happy she used the term “chatterati.”)
Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007
“I wanted to go all Christopher Hitchens on this event,” Ira Glass proclaims to the overwhelmingly bespectacled, fleece-and-cable-knit-clad crowd that has gathered at the Convention Center on a rainy Sunday night. NPR-nerd-friendly, cheekily subversive humor catering to the predictably white, middle class audience further ensues (Emcee: “Now that Ira is not presenting at a church [as originally scheduled], tonight will not be all about atheism and gay sex”), along with OPB inside jokes (Ira to local host April Baer: “There’s something poetic about what you say every day: ‘It’s stop and go from the tunnel to the Banfield.’ It’s like the story of our lives. Oh, and then sometimes there’s some business with ‘the curves.’” Here I let out a whoop of appreciation, quickly realize that I’m getting a little too raucous for the backdrop of polite applause, and shut up).
For someone who, in his words, “talk[s] really quickly and [doesn’t] enunciate, and really has no particular talent for anything having to do with radio,” the This American Life host has been getting something right during his career that spans almost 30 years. TAL is currently the most popular podcast in the country, and if NPR chatterati has a reigning celebrity, it is undoubtedly Glass.
TAL’s success hinges on its unparalleled approach to the human story. With the over-saturation of irony seemingly poisoning every media well these days, TAL maintains a childlike curiosity and endangered sincerity as, week after week, it seeks to uncover profundities in the mundane. Its philosophy dictates that there is always something still worth investigating, whether it be the secret inner life of a tyrant (Glass explains Saddam Hussein’s penchant for penning trashy novels) or the fact that after thousands of years, scientists still do not understand why leaves on trees turn red (Glass: “It’s one of those things that makes you realize, ‘If we don’t know that, what do we know?’”)
This particular sensibility has prompted naysayers such as the Atlantic Monthly’s Michael Hirschorn to relegate Glass and TAL to a “quirk culture” populated by the likes of Wes Anderson, Miranda July and Napoleon Dynamite. (Hirschorn’s entire treatise is available here.) When questioned about this categorization by an audience member, Glass replies, “I hate things that are quirky. That’s taking the show to be the opposite of what it is. Ours is a Ministry of Love.”
Glass in person is reassuringly consistent with his radio persona. Like the words he uses to describe the stories on TAL, he is truly “human-sized,” and proves he deserves every ounce of his indie cred as my friend and I wait in line for 45 minutes to meet him. To pass the time, we debate an accurate description of Glass’ voice (Rule One: “hipster” is not allowed) and compromise with “East-Village-queen-meets-intellectual-but-unpretentious-Jew-meets-Valley-Girl.” As we finally get close to the front, I understand why the line has moved so slowly: Glass has genuinely talked to each and every person offering up books to sign and cameras to pose for. I’m glad he’s gone all “Ministry of Love” on this event.
[Post-script bragging rights]: Glass has been gathering contact information for an upcoming segment he is working on, and my friend and I fit the bill for the kind of stories he is scouting. After introductions, he asks for our phone numbers. But my brain is too flooded with celebrity-encounter-induced dopamine that I go all deer-in-the-headlights and forget to write it down. I do remember to include my email and an “I love the O.C. too!!” shout-out. Afterward, I’m just an insecure schoolgirl in the throes of post- “Do you like me? Check yes or no” note-passing anxiety, hoping I might somehow fit into the grand, yet human-sized, narrative.
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