THE CIVIL WAR
September 21, 1990

I'm proud of this because, without any inkling of how popular, influential or resonant this documentary series would become - and without knowing that Ken Burns was about to become a household word - this review nailed what was best about The Civil War. Namely, historian Shelby Foote, filmmaker Burns' graceful visual approach, the poetry of the storytelling, and one soldier's unforgettable letter home in particular. (LISTEN NOW)

TWIN PEAKS
April 30, 1990

Until I got to do my salute to Sgt. Pepper (also included in this Fresh Air favorites sampler), I considered this 1990 review my absolute personal favorite. Part of it is because it captures my unbridled passion for television at its best and most imaginative. I'd raved about Twin Peaks earlier that month on Fresh Air already, keyed to the premiere of the two-hour telemovie pilot on ABC. But after the episode in which Kyle MacLachlan's FBI agent Dale Cooper had a bizarre dream involving a velvet-covered red room and a dancing midget, I couldn't contain myself, and had to do a follow-up review.

But there's another reason I'm so proud of this review, and it's a long, behind-the-scenes story - two stories, actually. One fascinating element of the David Lynch-directed dream sequence was the odd way the "Man from Another Place," as the dancing midget was billed in the credits, spoke in Cooper's dream. The midget, like the Laura Palmer look-alike played by Sheryl Lee, seemed to be speaking a type of broken English, as jerky and unnatural as their movements. I guessed - correctly, as it turned out - that Lynch was running film backwards, and having the actors do things in reverse to make their actions look almost right, but positively dreamlike. I also guessed Lynch had pulled the same trick with the audio, for reasons that lead to behind-the-scenes story number two.

I first got fascinated with TV's technical aspects in high school in Florida, attending Fort Lauderdale's then-experimental Nova High School. Nova had a closed-circuit TV system, and students enrolled in either the technical side (running cameras, working the audio board, riding gain) or the journalistic side (writing and performing shows closed-circuited to the entire school). I was the first student to take both, which explains a lot about my passion for television. But the germane part of this story (yes, there is one) is that, on the days when I ran audio, among my jobs was the responsibility to cue up the reel-to-reel tape to the proper spot to begin the recording that announced the pledge to the flag.

"Will everyone please stand," the tape began. In cue mode, so it wouldn't be broadcast, I listened for the "Will everyone" part of the phrase, pressed stop on the reel-to-reel Ampex recorder, and rewound the tape manually with a slight turn of my wrist. The tape, still in cue mode, would rub against the playback heads in reverse - and for some reason, "Will everyone," played backward, sounds like "Milli ribbit." I have no idea why, but it's the same reason the phrase "Number nine," played backward on The Beatles' "Revolution #9," sounds uncannily like "Turn me on, dead man."

Anyway... So I run into the Fresh Air studios like a madman, and explain to the engineer, Thad Kirk, that I think I know how David Lynch made his characters talk so strangely on Twin Peaks, and that I wanted to try to do it with my voice. All we had to do, I guessed, was record me saying something, flip the tape and play it backwards, then write down those sounds phonetically and record me reading that. Then flip the tape again, and presto! "Milli ribbit" becomes "Will everyone" again, only dreamlike.

Instead of beating me senseless with a mike stand, Thad played along, and had the expertise, as well as the patience, to make it work. So when you hear the last line of this review, you'll understand it was a true labor of joy. I still thank Thad for this every time I see him - and I wonder, now that WHYY-FM in Philadelphia has gone digital, if we could do it again today without the low-tech tape reels.

Oh, and that's another long-time WHYY buddy, Marti Moss-Coane - now the host of WHYY's Radio Times - introducing the piece as Fresh Air guest host, a position Dave Davies and I share now. I still love Fresh Air, I still love Twin Peaks... and, after all these years, I still love this report. Thanks to Patty Leswing, also of Fresh Air, for rescuing it from the archives. (LISTEN NOW)

SGT. PEPPER TRIBUTE
June 1, 2007

My favorite report ever. Fresh Air executive producer Danny Miller, all-around great guy, acknowledged and indulged my passion for everything Beatles by asking me to put together a tribute keyed to the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The idea was to do a track-by-track sampling of the best cover versions of songs from that album, and all I had to do was winnow through my embarrassingly anal Beatles covers collection. It was the most fun I ever had putting together a Fresh Air piece - and also got the biggest reaction of anything I ever did for radio. Special thanks to both Danny, and Jonathan Menjivar, for assembling this report, which aired 40 years to the day after Sgt. Pepper was released. (LISTEN NOW)

THE SINGING DETECTIVE
December 28, 1987

Dennis Potter, who wrote the British miniseries The Singing Detective, called it "a drama with music." At the time, I called it the best drama ever written expressly for television - and 20 years later, that assessment still holds true. Getting a chance to steer people towards something this brilliant, then and now, is the biggest joy of being a critic. My challenge when writing this piece, when radio was quite new to me, was selecting clips which gave a sense of how unusual and ambitious The Singing Detective was, without being able to show any visuals. I'm not sure I succeeded, but Dennis Potter sure did. The Singing Detective is, by any standards, a true work of art. (LISTEN NOW)

IRON CHEF
March 19, 1998

Chris Spurgeon, who worked at WHYY in those days, was a cutting-edge collector and purveyor of all things that really popped in popular culture. One day, he lent me some VHS bootleg tapes of episodes of an imported Japanese cooking show called Iron Chef. Some were translated, others weren't, but all of them were mesmerizing. This is one of the only times on Fresh Air I've reviewed a show before it was presented by a network - but before too long, Food Network picked up Iron Chef, and the rest is history. I have Chris to thank for being so far ahead of the curve. I have to thank him again, too, for being the brains behind the computer-programming part of this website. (LISTEN NOW)

9/11 COVERAGE
September 20, 2001

There are old newspaper clips on this site, as well as these old radio reports. Sometimes, though, you can hear things in the voice that you just can't get from the printed page. This Fresh Air report, broadcast nine days after 9/11, is my best example of that. At that moment, I was emotionally raw - not only from watching nonstop coverage of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath for so long, but by personal stuff that had hit me just as hard, including the separate sudden deaths of my father and stepmother and the equally sudden death, just a few weeks before, of my 25-year marriage. All that came out, somehow, in this piece, and even though I choked up while delivering it, my producer, Phyllis Myers (another great Fresh Air friend), wouldn't allow me to record another take. In retrospect, it was the right call. (LISTEN NOW)