iTunes

iTunes is featuring my show "Cute with Chris" on its homepage this week. If you're not an iTunes person, you should really consider becoming one.

An "iTunes person" is a person who never goes out in public without headphones. I wear headphones everywhere I go: the gym, the line at Coffee Bean. Big silver ones that announce to people that I can't hear them. "Do not ask this man for directions." Not chatty. Chris will bite.

If you're not familiar with iTunes, it's an awesome service that allows anti-social people like me to listen to hundreds of free shows like "Cute with Chris". You simply set your subscriptions in the iTunes browser, and every day it loads new shows onto your MP3 player that you can tune in whenever you want, wherever you want, however you want. On headphones. To block out society.

Currently, I quite enjoy The Sound of Young America. This is an extraordinary independent radio show produced out of host Jesse Thorn's apartment in Los Angeles. Salon calls it "the greatest radio show you've never heard" and with guests like John Hodgman, Jonathan Goldstein, and Merrill Markoe, I'd have to agree.

Being a Canadian ex-pat, I also listen to a lot of podcasts produced by the CBC, the radio arm of Canada's Public Broadcaster. Sook-Yin Lee is the host of my fave show, Definitely Not the Opera, and I've been fascinated with her for many years. She's a good-looking, funny woman who seems to live an utterly fearless life. Beyond her life as a broadcaster, she's always been a
working artist, and recently I saw her in acting in a movie where she got gang-banged, made out with a drag queen, and masturbated herself into a frenzy on a park bench. Canadians are a self-obsessed bunch, always asking themselves how they're different than Americans. When I watched Sook-Yin in the movie, I thought, "There it is. That's the difference between Canada and America." You're not gonna see NPR's Nina Totenberg jerkin' it.

Of course, I also always listen to The Petcast, a charming show about the issues facing modern pet owners, hosted by the equally charming Emily Richmond and Steve Friess. And I was recently surprised to discover Steve has a second show dedicated to the culture of Las Vegas called The Strip. For a guy who produces  this show independently on his own dime, he manages to score some pretty incredible guests. Recently he interviewed both Sheldon Adelson, and Steve Wynn; two of Las Vegas' biggest real estate developers. After listening, I'm thinking of writing a TV Movie about their rivalry. It would star me, as a young, hungry Steve Wynn, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the irrascible yet brilliant Adelson. I'd call it "Strip Wars; A Jerry Bruckheimer Production".

(Jerry Bruckheimer wouldn't actually produce it, but it's always a good idea to put his name on things. In fact, I'm changing the title of Cute with Chris. From now on, please refer to the show as: Cute with Chris: A Jerry Bruckheimer Production.)

*click graphics for iTunes.

Comments

[ashley]

wow, thanks for the reccomendations! i will check them out! now i just need to get a video ipod!

[Jesse]

Thanks Chris :)

[Veronica]

Thanks for the recommendations. I always wondered what Sook-Yin Lee did besides play guitar and make out in John Cameron Mitchell movies(not that just doing those doesn't make you pretty awesome anyways).

[monkeyposh]

Awesome--Congrats. You are bigger than Jonathan Togo!