[Kzyxtalk] Joe Frank is dead.

[Marco McClean]

On 1/17/2018 12:51 PM, Zeke Krahlin wrote:
 > JOE FRANK, whose radio monologues on SANTA MONICA COLLEGE Triple 
A-News-Talk KCRW/SANTA MONICA ranged from humorous to surreal and served 
as an influence for many broadcast storytellers, died MONDAY (1/15) at 79.


God dammit. Well, he was in great physical pain for much of his life, 
and he's not in pain anymore.

We're setting up to run all of Joe Frank's recorded monologues on KNYO. 
Part of it is a participating radio station has to agree to play 
/everything on the list, on a regular schedule, without cutting out any 
problematical material and the swearing, nor editing the shows in any 
way, and play them in the exact order they were recorded/. Which KNYO 
can and will do. Joe Frank's death reminded me to email Bob and goose 
that along. I think it's just a matter of another couple of pieces of 
paper needing to get signed and go back and forth.

The thing about a Joe Frank story for me was the shape of events. He'd 
tell the story of someone's inner and outer problems in a situation, and 
it would get bad and/or complicated for him or her, darker and darker, 
until everything was as wonderfully bad as it could get, and that had to 
be the end of the story. And he'd pause for a moment, and start from 
/there/, and things would get worse and even more complicated, and reach 
another obvious place that had to be the end of any normal story. And 
there'd be a pause, and he'd start talking again, in that insistent 
basso whisper/rumble of his, and everything up to that point was just 
the back-story for everything getting even /worse/.

I have a few favorites, but all it takes to think of one as your 
favorite is to think of any one at all: 1. The one where he tells about 
cleaning his apartment and gives the feeling of how futile the activity 
is, and that's funny and sad, and you get it, and then he relates this 
to the slow dissolution of his own health and internal organs. Entropy. 
2. The one where he visits his escaped-from-Nazi-Germany mother in an 
old-folks' hospital, and on every visit he goes outside to smoke a 
cigaret, and he becomes fascinated by the drama of small creatures dying 
in the swimming pool no-one swims in. Insects-- he rescues an insect. 
And the landscape ducks begin to disappear one by one, predated upon by 
a racoon, until they're gone, and that's sad and horrible, but he can't 
rescue /everything/, it's the natural world, red in tooth and claw, and 
he's thinking about a Chinese restaurant, and how "There's nothing 
better than crisp. Duck. Skin."  3. The one where he takes fifteen 
minutes to tell about the movie /The Incredible Shrinking Man/, and then 
he does all the voices of adenoidal, fatuous people at a faculty 
cocktail party pontificating about what /The Incredible Shrinking Man/ 
really means. 4. The Eye In The Sky...


--
Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com