And we're back. A good two months have passed, but Shadercast lives on. We have a fascist elected to be our next president, but stories still need to be told. Do they have to be my stories? Well, dear listeners, that's all the stories I have. We open with your podcaster sharing Eagles small talk as scripted by a student to use on Thanksgiving. The other voice you hear is my uncle's brother, Patrick, who seems to know what he's hearing. After that, I vent spleen about the Orange-haired, numb-nutted president-elect and how working class voters have been taken into an eminence front. Next, we have a dramatic reading of "I'll Lead a Live in Some Small Dive: A Christmas Eve Eve Story," which ran in Philadelphia Weekly, formerly The Welcomat, in 2009. Listen for the Rod Stewart cameo and an outro from Johnny Hartman.

Daniel Nester's Shadercast

Shadercast Episode 17 Lush Life

It's a mixed bag this time out, with a cold open featuring none other than Eric, the UrbanSurfer himself, interviewed out in the wild (i.e., a basement studio in North Jersey). I ask him a question about keytar ownership that just popped into my head. Great interviews work that way sometimes. After that, we feature a 25-year-old field recording of speeches made at a union holiday party in midtown Manhattan. Then our centerpiece: a dramatic reading of "20 Things Not to Do at an Open Poetry Reading," which originally ran on the Best American Poetry Blog back in November 2015 and was shared widely throughout the Poetryland universe. And, before you know it, the Shadercast episode is over, and you'll have to go back to your regular, workaday lives, trying to forget how the American left couldn't get it together to hold back a totalitarian fake-billionaire from being elected president. We'll be back sooner, rather than later, to help you keep up your diligence to preserve our fragile republic.

Shadercast Episode 18 Keytars and Open Mic No-No's

The journey begins with our 100 entries on the NME and EW lists: The Ramones’ debut (1976) and The Smiths’ collection Hatful of Hollow (1984). Dan presents his Mid-Year Kicker Pick from 1980.

About Album Oriented: 

Two guys who grew up during the albums era. Two lists of the top 100 albums of all time.

This is Album Oriented.

For the purposes of dramatic conflict and also based in reality, we are hosted by Erich Hertz, the apologetic indie snit Anglophile who never stopped paying attention to mainstream music, and Daniel Nester, the unapologetic mainstream champion who watched every episode of 120 minutes and accumulated pockets of obscuro factoids along the way.

Each episode, we present two albums: one from America’s Entertainment Weekly top 100 albums of all time  and the top 100 from the UK’s New Musical Express (NME) list of the top 500.

We supplement each episode’s discussion with a pick of our own, taking turns with an album from our personal top 100 list. To confine ourselves, we select albums released at the midpoint of the albums we discuss in the episode. For example, if we discuss an album released in 1970 and another in 1980, one of us has to pick an album from 1975. That’s the Mid-Year Kicker Pick®.

So let’s do this is. Welcome to Album Oriented.

Check us out online at http://www.albumorientedpodcast.com.

Album Oriented

Album Oriented 100: Ramones and The Smiths

Maja reads Walt Whitman's "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" as part of Daniel Nester's Poetry in Performance class at The College of Saint Rose, Spring 2017.

Maja reads Walt Whitman's "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing"

Home of the Shadercast and various field recordings related to my writing projects and teaching. 

Daniel Nester

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