Item: 1 box set of News from Lake Wobegon cassette tapes
I used to listen to A Prairie Home Companion on Saturday nights on KUNI during the first few months I lived in Iowa, before I knew anyone. In a way, it was part of my initiation into the Midwest: the vocal intonations, the references to small-town taps, lakes frozen over, guys who went hunting, before I had actually experienced any of those things. There were the stories, and then there was a part where Garrison Keillor would read messages: "Happy 45th Anniversary to Elbert and Nancy from your children" or "To Brian, congratulations on your graduation from medical school. Now will you clean your stuff out of the garage?". These were also instructive in telling me what sort of place I had come to.
What Garrison Keillor has done with that show is tremendous. His voice is gorgeous and flexible and he has timing, and all the things that make a radio show worth listening to. He has created an entire town of people and places, one that I know and can easily slip into and inhabit.
I understand there's an A Prairie Home Companion movie coming out this year. Interesting, since the focus on music and storytelling will change to the concentration on the visual that goes along with putting something on a screen. The movie is supposed to include a lot of the people who are involved in the radio show. I'm not sure what the result will be.
If I were working in Hollywood, I'm sure that I, too, would jump at the chance to do projects based on classics, where the basic structure of a story is already intact, rather than pour resources into somebody's random screenplay that might or might not work.
But I'm not working in Hollywood, and so I'm allowed to believe that not everything needs to be a movie. I haven't seen the Narnia movie, mainly because I don't think it could improve in any way on the impressions I already have of Aslan the lion and the 4 schoolchildren in Narnia. Seeing the movie, I think, would make this experience less than it was before. They are planning on making movies of the Ramona Quimby books, too, I hear. And I suppose that on some level I resent the process of taking a world that for me is already full and complete, scattered with associations from childhood, and making it into something else. So they portray a different version from mine, fine, only movies have a way of becoming The Version in our culture, the one that rests in the collective consciousness.
I think Garrison Keillor has written some on the experience of stories on radio versus television. I would have looked it up, but all my books are packed.
What Garrison Keillor has done with that show is tremendous. His voice is gorgeous and flexible and he has timing, and all the things that make a radio show worth listening to. He has created an entire town of people and places, one that I know and can easily slip into and inhabit.
I understand there's an A Prairie Home Companion movie coming out this year. Interesting, since the focus on music and storytelling will change to the concentration on the visual that goes along with putting something on a screen. The movie is supposed to include a lot of the people who are involved in the radio show. I'm not sure what the result will be.
If I were working in Hollywood, I'm sure that I, too, would jump at the chance to do projects based on classics, where the basic structure of a story is already intact, rather than pour resources into somebody's random screenplay that might or might not work.
But I'm not working in Hollywood, and so I'm allowed to believe that not everything needs to be a movie. I haven't seen the Narnia movie, mainly because I don't think it could improve in any way on the impressions I already have of Aslan the lion and the 4 schoolchildren in Narnia. Seeing the movie, I think, would make this experience less than it was before. They are planning on making movies of the Ramona Quimby books, too, I hear. And I suppose that on some level I resent the process of taking a world that for me is already full and complete, scattered with associations from childhood, and making it into something else. So they portray a different version from mine, fine, only movies have a way of becoming The Version in our culture, the one that rests in the collective consciousness.
I think Garrison Keillor has written some on the experience of stories on radio versus television. I would have looked it up, but all my books are packed.
posted by Karen at 7:53 PM
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