At long last: The brilliant Los Angeles-based radio artist Joe Frank finally has a podcast. A year ago today, I wrote a long post about Joe in which I talked about his amazing body of work and shared the news that he’d been sidelined by some major health problem whose details have not been disclosed. As I wrote last year, “Joe’s work might best be described as a cross between Kafka, Nietzsche, Raymond Chandler, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and David Sedaris. He’s a short-story writer, a philosopher, a comedian, a raconteur, and one of the greatest-ever purveyors of the postmodern-noir sensibility.” Read my June 2005 post for a lot more details. I think Joe Frank is simply one of the greatest American artists of the last two or three decades—in any medium.

According to reports on joefrank.com, Joe is still ill, but he’s recovering slowly and beginning to work on new shows. In the meantime, he finally has a podcast. As announced on his site last week, “Joe Frank podcasts have arrived! Twice a month, we’ll serve up either a one-hour show, or a couple of signature stories, or a half-hour show, and every now and then, some absurd extras.”

The first offering is an excellent hourlong show from 1997 called “The Other Side.” It’s a typically diverse Joe Frank episode: It opens with an actor (or is it an actor?) mangling a short passage from the Bible, then moves into an improvised phone dialogue between two actors. Later on are excerpts from a phone interview Joe conducted with an unidentified woman who is apparently a friend of his; she tells Joe about her doubts regarding her current relationship. (As he often does with his phone interviews, Joe cut out most of his side of the conversation, which gives the interviewee’s answers the flavor of a monologue.)

The rest of the episode consists of two classic Joe Frank monologues. The first is a paranoid, Raymond Chandler-ish tale of an office worker who is visited by a strange woman who forces him to accept a mysterious box. The second is a first-person story of a man who realizes, out of the blue, that he must leave his wife: He tells her calmly that he’s leaving her, then packs up his things, walks out the door, and checks into a hotel to begin a new life.

If you don’t want to listen to the entire show, you should at least listen to Joe’s two monologues—they begin at the 17:22 mark and the 46:52 mark. They’re fantastic. Otherwise, load the show onto your iPod, slip your earbuds into your ears, turn out the lights, and enjoy.