SPEECHLESS

The Podcast is an interesting hybrid between yodeling down a deserted canyon and sleeping naked with the blinds up. I suppose that's precisely why it appeals so much to my good friend David Schoffman.

Every Tuesday evening Schoffman takes to the airwaves (yes I know it's not the airwaves but alas, my lycée English was formed in the sixties) and spreads what can only be described as his unholy gospel of eccentricity.

No two broadcasts are alike.

One week he interviewed the psychic Dietrich Goulwasser who apparently sat beneath an orb and predicted who would be included in the Whitney Biennial for the next 15 years.

Another time he read the menus of six of his least favorite Los Angeles restaurants and spent the duration of the broadcast suggesting recipe adjustments. In my opinion, removing the olives, anchovies and capers from a puttanesca would not only be unforgivable but might also subject a restauranteur to serious criminal charges. But then again, I'm French.

But such whimsical speculations are exactly what makes the Schoffman podcasts so entertaining.

His ratings went through the roof last week when he hosted the now infamous Czech performance artist Brichacek Breza. Breza, as most of you know, ran afoul of the authorities when she crashed a meeting of the G-7+2 and loudly read the first three points in her feminist manifesto Us Chicks Want This (My ženy chtějí tento).

In what was probably a podcast first, Breza performed a 40 minute mute pantomime of Vladimir Nabokov's classic Lolita. The ambient noise and the recording crew's muffled gasps were apparently enough to captivate David's avid listeners and the show was subsequently re-aired in fourteen different countries.

I'm far from intimate with these new technologies and I suppose that pegs me as an irrelevant old goat consigned to the past and ready for pasture.

Unless, of course, I could write an entire novel using only emojis.