I can’t believe it IS butter! (sexy npr part 2)

Today’s Morning Edition featured DVD recommendations by “Eve’s Bayou” director Kasi Lemmons.

The sexy part is that she recommends “Last Tango in Paris” as a film she can watch over and over again.

The really sexy part is that she and Steve Inskeep don’t talk about that piece of cinema history in ways that indicate exactly how controversial it is. This could lead to some extremely humorous moments if naive NPR listeners (are there any?) bring that movie home knowing nothing more than what is said in the segment, such as Lemmons’ heartwarming travelogue description “It’s the music and the mood and Paris…Marlon Brando talking to his dead wife.”

Now, Dear Reader(s), I don’t know if you’ve experienced this film, but, if you have, I’ll bet the scene that’s stuck to the roof of your mind has a lot more to do with Marlon Brando talking to his very, very alive lover about, shall we say, pork products, while he, uhhhm, busies himself with a dairy product.

Or maybe Kasi and Steve just assume that all NPR listeners, upper-middlebrow(c)(tm)Airbag Moments as we are, must be familiar enough with Last Tango to not need any warning. And perhaps they are correct.

But what about the people listening to Morning Edition for the first time because they themselves are featured in the story about “a new kind of Sunday school, where families from a range of religions gather to learn about helpfulness, obedience, service and friendliness?”

What if those folks stuck around to hear the movie tips?!?!

Enjoy the film, families of many faiths! Use it as a teachable moment to instruct your kids about what helpfulness, obedience, service and friendliness meant in the seventies.

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Today’s sexy moment runner-up (for sophomores only):

Steve Kuhn’s helpfully “Now I’m awake!” opening to his story about North Korea:

“In his February 25th inauguration speech Lee Myung-bak dangled a big, fat carrot in front of North Korea.”

There’s a kind of sense

…all over the world, tonight! (sing it)

A funny sub-genre of sense getting is the adjectival modification of the question. You’ll hear public radio hosts straining to get various kinds of senses. Sometimes they want a “strong sense” or an “overwhelming sense,” but my favorite is the commonly heard “general sense,” such as the one Renee Montagne attempted to elicit from an interview subject on Morning Edition today.

Did she want something even more vague than a regular old sense? Really? I guess the subject should have made sound effects with their mouth instead of answering in language.

Sometimes I really miss Bob Edwards.

Sense of well saying

The second big tic indulged in by too many Public Radio hosts is the word “well” or the phrase “well and…” This throw-away word is often employed to “segue” (transition) from one topic to another during an interview or discussion. Such an almost subverbal conversational signal comes in handy during the kind of fast moving discussion live radio demands, and I have no problem with its appropriate use. But in some cases the word has become almost a medium of its own in which the conversation takes place. Some hosts use this word to begin virtually every declarative statement they make on air. Curiously this is often combined with “getting a sense”. Where you find one you usually find the other.

Robin Young, dulcet-voiced host of WBUR’s nationally syndicated “Here and Now,” is one of the champion well and sense-sayers, but she is dwarfed by the true Michael Jordan of the technique, New Hampshire Public Radio’s Laura Knoy. Ms. Knoy begins virtually every episode of her often terrific 5 day a week show “The Exchange” by trying to get a sense from each of her subjects. I once heard her carefully ask “just give us a sense” four times in a row to her four guests, strongly implying she actually chooses to do this. (Robin Young owned up to the practice via email and indicated she considered it a bad habit.) Laura also manages to leave Robin in the dust well-wise. Just today she began her interview with a combination of the two, “Well and Jamie I’ll start with you. Give us a sense of…”, for triple bonus points.

Airbag deployed!