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Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Come Closer Now

 Come Closer Now 

Katie Hims’s love letter to radio drama as the form celebrates its centenary.

Annie is writing a radio play about a hundred years of radio plays, and it’s also, curiously, the story of her own family. As she writes she unearths the myths, half-truths and lies that have been woven into her family’s fabric for generations. Stories that are written to cope with uncomfortable facts. Stories that warp and twist reality. Stories stowed in the studio walls. Stories that crackle with electricity. Stories that move across space and time, and end up right in your ear, right in your head. Stories a bit like this one.

From gathering around the wireless to listening on-demand on headphones, the listener, and the medium, has transformed over the century. And across this sweep of time, radio drama has remained an innovative, yet deeply intimate art form, with infinite possibilities. It’s often called the most visual medium there is.

CAST

Annie ….. Rebekah Staton

Farley ….. Joseph Kloska

Connie and Jane ….. Rhiannon Neads

Older Jane ….. Jessica Turner

Younger Jane ….. Maisie Avis

Dan ….. Don Gilet

Joe ….. Tyler Cameron

Michael ….. Josh Bryant-Jones

Nora ….. Kitty O’Sullivan

The Boy ….. Milton Dighton

Written by Katie Hims

Directed by Anne Isger

Sound by Ali Craig and Andy Garrett

Production Co-ordination by Jenny Mendez

A BBC Audio Production for BBC Radio 3

Katie Hims wrote her first play for radio in 1996, and has been writing extensively in the genre ever since, to great acclaim. Katie’s play Waterloo Station was the winner of Best Radio Drama at the 2023 Writers Guild Awards. Her other original audio work includes Black Eyed Girls (winner of the BBC Audio Drama Award for Best Original Drama), Lost Property (winner of the BBC Audio Drama Award for Best Original Drama), The Gunshot Wedding (winner of The Writer’s Guild Best Original Radio Drama). Katie was lead writer on BBC's Home Front and has written multiple leading adaptations for BBC Radio 4: Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'ubervilles, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls and The Martin Beck Killings by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.

In theatre, Katie is currently on attachment at the National Theatre. Her recent stage work includes a contemporary retelling of Kafka's The Trial which ran at The Unicorn Theatre in 2023 and received 4 and 5 star reviews.

I'm Reduced To Posting My Comment Thread Comments

A COMMENT posted on Stephanie Miller's Youtube. 

Hollywood, show biz, TV, "comedy" has normalized the basis of Republican-fascism, increasingly since the 1970s.   The glorification of gangsters, dirty Harry,  Clint Eastwood characters, etc.  The ridicule and mockery of all of the moral bases of egalitarian democracy.  They produced Trump, they produced Reagan before that.  The pseudo-journalism that followed on after the entertainment divisions of broadcasting, the editorials and reporting that followed on the entertainment features that led the ink on paper rags.   Until you address what created the basis of amorality that led to Trump,  you're wasting your time.

I won't feel better until I know Kamala Harris both won the election and will be inaugurated.  That the situation we are in right now is possible under the goddamned Constitution and the law as defined by the corrupt Supreme Court is an indictment of both of them.  A Constitution and legal system that were legitimate would have kept Trump from being a candidate,  he would have been in prison by now.   The gutting of the sections of the 14th Amendment that would have kept him from running, by not only the Republican-fascist majority but, also, non-fascists on the Court proves that the rot in our system is in no small part due to the festering, infectious rot in our judiciary and the legal profession, as well.

We Don't Have The Luxury Of Getting Lost In The Complexities Over Israel And Palestine Anymore - The United States Must Stop "Israel Right Or Wrong" Now

ONE OF THE most intelligent, moral People in their twenties who I know has told me she isn't going to vote this year, even though she knows how dangerous Trump getting another chance is.   It is a result of the Israeli genocide and the Biden administration's policy supporting it.   She, like may other People of good will has been entirely taken up by the Israeli genocide against the People of Gaza for the entire time since the Israeli military started it.  Before that she was horrified by the attack on Israel which initiated the campaign of murder, destruction and occupation that the Israeli government used that to justify.

You will notice I haven't used the euphemisms "The Israeli Defense Forces" and "The Netanyahu government" because what the Israeli military has done isn't defensive, no more than the Israeli government ignoring the warnings it was given that an attack from Gaza was imminent before the initiating attack.  Nor can Israel as a nation be let off the hook by blaming what not only has happened this year but has repeatedly happened in Gaza, in Lebanon over the decades the Israeli fascists of Likud and their political allies have governed Israel WITH THE CONSENT OF A MAJORITY OF ISRAELI VOTERS.   Unlike the People of Gaza who got the all too typical first and last free election which brought Hamas to power, the People of Israel have had innumerable occasions over the past fifty years to reject the fascist face of Zionism and they chose, in the majority, in favor of fascism, of apartheid, of genocide.   The extent to which that is understandable due to the fact that Israel has been under more or less continuous attack by the Palestinians who were displaced and expelled from the lands Israel claimed for itself is undeniable.   The predictions of such a situation arising from the Zionist project go back to almost the origins of Zionist ideology,  many of those most opposed to the idea were the very People who Zionists claimed to speak on behalf of, Jews.  

I prefer to take my information about situations in other places among other peoples from the People who are most involved with the risks and consequences instead of those who have nothing to do with it.  Perhaps that is related to the rejection of abstractions that the excerpt I posted from Gabriel Marcel mentioned but it is mostly from the fact that those who are most involved.   I listen to Israelis in opposition to fascism and genocide - I know the Israeli fascists, like all fascists are flagrant liars so I don't bother with what they say - and Gazans and other Palestinians who are victims of Hamas and other terrorist fascists though far less so than they are of Israeli fascists.  

One of the things I've been doing that is related to and only supplemental to reading those directly in danger from both Israeli and Palestinian fascism is reading is the Jewish anti-Zionists because more than seventy years after its self-declaration of existence as a nation,  I have no faith that the Israeli state will ever be more than an increasingly apartheid state both attacking and murdering Palestinians but also being under attack and in danger of murder from a non-ending opposition to its existence.   I have mentioned a number of times that my belief that that is the case was sparked by the Argentinian journalist and victim of the Argentinian fascists dirty war, Jacobo Timmerman who relocated temporarily to Israel under the "right of return" and, revolted by the 1982 Lebanon war (I wonder how many Americans even remember there was one) in which the Israeli military and government acted in concert with Lebanon's "Christian" fascists, wrote a book and became an Israeli critic of the government and a live-long Zionist who seemed to become skeptical of the claimed goals of Zionism.   He noted that much of the antisemitism in the post-WWII period was a direct result of the existence of the Israeli state and, admitted what was obvious, that the modern state of Israel had certainly not made Jews there or around the world safer.  

One of the things that any outsider dipping into the extremely complex and long and infinitely detailed and drastically varied thinking and history around Zionism and the establishment and history of the Israeli government has to contend with is that extreme complexity and the extremely strongly held devotion to nuances in even seemingly related, sometimes only apparently similar positions held.  Jacobo Timerman retained his Israeli citizenship even after he moved back to Argentina, making any resumption of his Argentinian citizenship contingent on him retaining the citizenship of Israel, a country he had been far more critical of than almost any American has been, even as he seems to have become critical of the Zionist ideology he'd once held with.  I have to say that Timerman is someone who I respected because he was the kind of journalist who tried to truthfully tell the bad about any place he lived in honestly, even after he'd been kidnapped, tortured and had to face the fact that he might have been murdered as a consequence of his truth telling.   There aren't many if any American "journalists" who have that history of journalism and they aren't really worthy of being wearing the same label.

I have no idea how Rabbi Yakkov Shapiro thinks or would think of Jacobo Timerman but I have to say that from what I can check of what he says about the ideology of Zionism, both in claims and in practice, seems to me to be honest and make sense.  I say that even as I can say that after listening to many hours of his talks and interviews the past two weeks, I have no idea of the extent to which we would agree on much of anything in politics.   I am, of course not a Jew so I am considering what he says about the antisemitism that is intrinsic to Zionism from the view of an outsider, though I was aware of the atheism and hostility to both the Jewish religion and Jewish identity that was rampant among the founders of Zionism and, especially, the "Reformed Zionism" of Jabotinsky which formed the basis of the fascist gangsters who Jewish intellectuals warned against in 1948 and who have, either personally or in their next generation, have ruled Israel for much of its history, now.  I'm including the offshoots of Likud in that. 

I would recommend listening to Rabbi Shapiro though there are others who share his opposition to Zionism as being opposed to Judaism. Before listening to him I was ignorant of the nature of the irreligious character of Modern Hebrew, which, I he is correct, would seem to have intentionally baked in ridicule and disdain for the Jewish religion.  

I have no great hope that if Kamala Harris wins the election that she will change American policy in a way that would force the Israeli fascist government* to end its genocidal policies or its whipping up wars to both steal land and manipulate domestic politics to keep itself in power.  But I know if Trump rules,  his son-in-law and, probably, he will be bidding on land seized by Israel on which to build luxury properties over the blood and bones of Palestinians.  I've tried to reason with young woman I mentioned above but I really don't have any arguments that will talk her into choosing the far, far, far, lesser of "evils."    I agree with her that AIPAC has to have its influence broken because it and other, similar agents of the Israeli government have far too much influence in American politics.  It's far from the only one but it's one of the most dangerous.  

I have warned her that a lot of the supposedly pro-Gazan and anti-Israeli stuff she gets sent to her on her phone is probably as dishonest as the pro-Israeli-pro-genocide stuff is, quoting Howard Zinn's vitally important point that every government and side lies.  Though I can't fault her for what she says about the genocidal war that the Israeli government is waging against the People of Gaza,  Muslim, Christian (some of what I read says they're obviously targeting Palestinian Christians, though how you can make that distinction in the general Lebensraum that is happening is hardly an important question).   I wouldn't be surprised if there are many more opponents of Hamas who have been murdered as supporters of Hamas in the Israeli genocide.   A lot of the problem of trying to distinguish lies from the truth is in the attacks on reporters, journalists, aid-workers, medical practitioners, etc. who seem to, as well, be the object of targeting, though, again, in the general murder it's hard to tell if that's the case.  It's clear they haven't been following international law against the killing of such People. 

One of the things that needs to change is the rote accusation of "antisemitism" made against those who insist that a nation, such as Israel, can't be allowed to escape either criticism or opposition in the way that every single other country is held to be liable to by any rational, moral Person in the world.   Rabbi Shapiro has made a conclusive case that that is based in the insistence of Zionists that they represent all Jews and that Zionism is the same thing as Jewishness.   I've criticized the recent campaign to legally define "antisemitism"  in such a way as to legally exempt Israel and its governments, even the fascist governments that have ruled it for most of the past fifty years from having the truth told about it.   I think Rabbi Shapiro has made the best case against that I've yet heard. .

*  A fascist government that can count on the majority of voters supporting it has no need to suppress elections, especially when they can manipulate things to foment violence and military actions that will enhance that support among voters.  I don't hold that such elections are a reliable distinction between fascism and real democracy because real democracy as any modern person of any morality should use the term is based on equality.   Elections, by themselves, are a necessary part of democracy but in a country such as Israel, they certainly don't guarantee either democracy nor are they a means of exempting fascist rule from being honestly identified as fascism.  Especially in a situation of apartheid practiced by a majority over a minority. 

Bela Bartok - Piano Concerto no. 3

 
 

Zoltan Kocsis playing Bartok's PC 3 with the NHK under Hans Drewanz, live on 12 June 1985.

Free Press Absolutism Is A Guarantee Of Media That Kneecaps and Sandbags Democracy Not For Profit Media Sold Us Out First And Fastest

READING YET ANOTHER journalist complaining that Kamala Harris's "closing message" has "fallen short" which, if you think about it in the context of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance means absolutely nothing,  I remembered the very first blog post I wrote on a Saturday, May 13, 2006 and the thing that finally got me to write something like that and post it,  listening to NPR's Saturday Edition hack Scott Simon holding up liberals to a standard that required the highest standards of accuracy, veracity, and adherence to some absurd standard of imaginary purity that he, the rest of the hacks at NPR and, in fact, just about the entirety of the media never, once held a conservative or a Republican-fascist to once in the history of American mass media or narrow media.  

So here almost twenty years later if anything that's gotten worse.  I'll repost that very first blog piece I wrote only for "liberal" you should understand it to mean Democrat, Democrats and Democratic in the context of late October 2024.

To start with, there are two things about the Code of Liberal Ethics that bother me. One, that we are supposed to be entirely fair to everyone and especially in instances when that would put us at a disadvantage, will be dealt with later. The one I will deal with first is the assumption that liberals must get it right every time, not only right but correct. That liberals and leftists, such as myself, must be purer than pure or relegated to the tip, is something I'd better address right now in this first post.

I have no intention of getting it right every time. I begin with no expectation of getting it entirely right a plurality of the time. No guarantee of such is given or offered. I will not allow considerations of the possibility of failure from keeping me from action. On occasion I'll plow straight ahead if conditions seem to warrant it. I, friends, am the thoroughly bad sort and claim as mine, as the sacred possession of every liberal and leftist, the absolute right enjoyed by the rest of humanity to get it wrong. And not only this but I claim as the birthright of leftists to present our side of things to the advantage of our side. I have absolutely no intention to be fair to fascists either, but that's for another day and I hope that Nat Hentoff doesn't die before I get to it.

The Code of Liberal Ethics is a standard operating setting required in every organ of the media. It is applied without consideration, without thought, as a matter of habit. It is a solid state component of the minds of far too many liberals. It is a weapon used exclusively against liberals and leftists and is applied to no other segment of the political spectrum. Everyone, from mushy moderate to rabid fascist is allowed their failings and their biases. But not liberals. Certainly not leftists.

No more. Here, today, I issue our own manumission, my fellow leftists. We have shaken off the chains of perfection, we are free of the lash of faultlessness. We claim our right to consider our own opinions superior and worthy of dominance. Never again will we present the arguments of conservatives as if they merit equal treatment. We will scorn their folly and expose their lies and their entertaining hypocrisies without apology. We will get off our knees and kick every fascist where it counts. In all seriousness, our lives, the lives of our loved ones, the life of the biosphere absolutely depend on it. We must crush out of ourselves and our kind the remains of these mind forged manacles and wipe their residue from every voice and their assumed existence from every ban. Friends, we have nothing to fear. We are free.

Disclaimer: I make no pretense of being a journalist. At best, if someone wanted to insult me, they might claim me as a columnist, an unskilled occupation of which I do not claim to be a part. I would never want anyone to assume that I pretend to be a real journalist, a reporter.

If Kamala Harris and Tim  Walz win the election, especially if they win big I hope one of the results is that it vindicates a decision to bypass the legacy,  hack, Republican-literally-fascist enabling corporate media, which I hope will be the beginning of the end of it.  We need a media but it is not that media, what we need is real journalism which you can hardly find in the legacy media, starting with that Sulzberger run house of presstitution,  the New York Times but including virtually all of the big media.  I think I mentioned a month or so back listening to a journalist from a small Latino newspaper who said the NYT today was a gaming company that had something that passed as a news operation still going.  For example, there's today's third worst person in the world, according to Keith Olbermann,  the NYTwit Jeremy Peters as aided by MSNBC's Katy Tur.  

There is a massive study waiting to happen on the topic of the complicity of America's freest press in the history of the "free press" in the age of impunity for lying, rejecting community service, rejecting any kind of even the pathetic excuse for "fairness" that was the Fairness Doctrine.  Not only its complicity of such a media in the age of free speech absolutism but what I think is a near certainty that such a media serve the enemies of everything from electoral government to even abolishing the identity of the truth as opposed to lies of the most transparent kind.  Such a media, such a "press" is the opposite to what the dolts who drafted the dangerously inspecific First Amendment imagined would be such a media left entirely to its own devices, as exempted from even the libel and slander penalties that kept such media from doing its worst even in its entirely inglorious past and into its infamous present. 

I fucking hate NPR.   I wish I'd never sent it a penny back when I still stupidly supported it.   I have learned not to trust alleged "not for profit" media because they were among the first and worst sell outs, bought out by Koch money, the fascist Heritage Association and which pushed shit like Politico and The Hill even before I'd read them and realized they were even worse in full than before.   Just like I used to watch Brian Lamb on C-Span pushing the worst of the worst,  helping make Matt Druge's career,  pushing Judicial Watch and countless other sewage.