Information, Please.

I just realized that I highly recommended an upcoming album without mentioning its name or any particulars about it. It’s called We Are the Pipettes, is to be released in the UK on July 20th, and the label is Memphis Industries. No US release date that I can find.

I guess I unconsciously write for an audience already deeply entrenched in the pop-music scene, who are willing to do the legwork to find things their curiosity is piqued by, and who perhaps, like me, are sick of reading reviews that repeat the same information over and over again. In my endeavor to say something unusual, I often end up saying nothing useful.

Oh, and Information, Please was a remarkable, long-running radio show starring educator and critic Clifton Fadiman as the host, with a weekly panel of well-informed and amusing people like newspaper columnist and poet Franklin P. Adams, sportswriter and naturalist John Kieran, and composer and enfant terrible Oscar Levant, plus a couple of spots that would change out every week; guests I’ve heard include directors, actors, musicians, politicians, poets, novelists, artists, newspapermen, historians, explorers, scientists and, memorably, a Chinese general. The sensibility of the show was quiet and unruffled (although Levant stirred things up in a minor way), an urbane and intellectual chat among people who respected one another and were not ashamed to admit they didn’t know things. The object of the show, of course, was for the panel to answer questions sent in by listeners: typical questions would be to name three unusual bathing customs in the ancient world, to name Shakespearean plays suggested by short pieces of music, or to name three people who became rulers of a land they were not born in. Answers were included; if the panelists got one or two answers wrong — depending on the difficulty of the question — the listener who had sent the question in would get a cash prize plus a set of encyclopedias. That such a show could run today, on a commercial network, and be so successful as to last twenty years, is of course not within the range of thinkable thoughts. More’s the pity.