December 10, 2018

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THE LIST

Wandering through the lens of his history as a film criticism, Jonathan Goldstein riffs on an old Russian art flick and a nagging feeling he can't shake. Broadly speaking, what is the nature of regret? And what does it look like to encounter someone who should objectively long for a re-do...but just doesn't? While the movie is integral to the parsing out of these large existential quandaries, the episode's approach does not rely on any prior knowledge. It is classic Heavyweight: Goldstein's idiosyncrasies politely pound away at a perplexing question in a whimsical journey of investigative reporting. 

Of the many topics covered by the excellent Decoder Ring through eight episodes, none seems more blithely obvious than that of the tabloid news cycle. I mean, isn't it obvious that people are suckers for salacious details of lives that appear out of reach, end of story? But "Sad Jennifer Aniston" is more than a basic tear-down of humanity's proclivity for sensation. It humanizes the journalistic engine that churns out those endless cycles of melodramatic half-truths that plaster check-out lines across the country, all without pulling punches. Plus, it considers the potential positive effects of having speculation about one's personal life shoveled into newsstands for decades on end.
Obsession can fester and morph into something really dark. But it can also be nurtured healthily and grow into a magnificent love affair. Luckily the show at hand is This Is Love and not Criminal, meaning listeners are treated to a poetic rendering of a color's evolution up to and through it's fanciful intersection with an artist. It's really impressive that the inherently non-visual media form of this story was able to sketch such a vivid picture of a color, but at this point expecting disappointment from Phoebe Judge would be pretty foolish. 

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