Earlier this month, Britain’s Channel 4 aired The Root of All Evil?, a two-part exploration of religious faith hosted and narrated by Richard Dawkins, the eminent Oxford ethologist and author who is one of the world’s most outspoken proponents of the theory of evolution. He’s also an aggressive critic of religion. The Root of All Evil? follows Dawkins as he travels to some of the world’s religious centers—among them Jerusalem, Lourdes, and Colorado Springs—to observe services and to interview leaders and followers of various faiths.

Tipped off by a thread on Echo, I bittorrented both episodes a few days ago. From the vantage point of the United States, the program is remarkable: You simply would never encounter such a brazen denunciation of religious faith on this country’s airwaves, because the outcry from the religious right would be deafening. Dawkins’s narration drips with contempt; as he goes about his rounds, it’s as if he can hardly restrain himself from shouting, “I’m surrounded by IDIOTS!” The smoke coming out of his ears leaves a trail behind him wherever he goes.

In the seven-and-a-half minute clip linked through the image below, Dawkins visits Colorado Springs to attend a sermon by an influential but proudly ignorant pastor. In a conversation with Dawkins after the sermon, the pastor likens the event to a rock concert. Dawkins suggests that it was more akin to a Nuremberg rally—a comparison that the pastor appears to be too uneducated and ignorant to be offended by.

[I found the two torrent files on a members-only site. You can download the torrent for the second of the two parts here; the first episode is surely available on other torrent sites, too. For information about bittorrenting files, see this item I posted in July.]

The great Los Angeles-based radio artist Joe Frank has been struggling with health problems over the last few months.

If you’ve never heard of him, Joe is a completely original American storyteller whose shows have pioneered new forms of radio narrative over the last two decades. I’m most obsessed with his monologues, which are usually accompanied by eerie looped music, but his shows often incorporate other formats, including taped phone conversations, found sound, and improvised radio plays that Joe records with actors and then imposes a structure on in the editing room.

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. He’s spent his career grappling with all the grand topics: sex, love, morality, lust, greed, sin, fear, hatred, the search for meaning. Much of his best work is both utterly profound and completely hilarious. He often blurs the lines between real life and fiction, and his shows are sometimes explicitly about the creative process. At his core, he’s a tortured man who attempts to make sense of the world by telling stories about it. There is simply no one else like him. Can you tell that I’m completely obsessed?

And I have yet to even mention his voice, which is incredibly rich and expressive and spellbinding.

Much more about Joe after the jump, including details about his health, links to some of his work, and other info.

[Continue reading "Joe Frank, Radio’s Brilliant Purveyor of Postmodern Noir, Has Been in the Hospital"...]