The Department of Tangents Podcast

This is the third and final interview I recorded at NECON 2019, which I have previously described as a mashup of a horror writers conference and summer camp with adult beverages. I attended NECON for the first time in 2018, and this week's guest, Matt Moore, was my roommate. Lucky for me, he is also a fine and thoughtful writer. His debut book is It's Not the End (and Other Lies), a collection of...

This is the second interview I recorded at this year's NECON conference, which is part horror author's conference and part summer camp. It is with Scott Goudsward, a very busy fellow. I've been trying to catch up with him for months, but as you are about to find out, Scott has a lot of jobs. He has written two novels -- Fountain of the Dead and Trailer Trash -- and many short stories, co-edited a...

Pornsak Pichetshote edited other people's books for DC for years before he attempted to write his own. He didn't give himself an easy out. His first series, now collected as a graphic novel, is Infidel , a horror story that explores xenophobia. It's hard enough to do horror and politics well separately without trying to combine them in a graphic format, but Infidel is a complex and nuanced story t...

In early July, rumors started to surface that MAD Magazine was going to cease publishing new material and just reprint old stuff with new covers. MAD has been around since 1952 and has influenced multiple generations of smart asses. The eulogies came quick and heavy, and they're still coming, even though we've never gotten a terrible clearly statement about the magazine's future. Everyone seems so...

This is episode 100 of the podcast, and I thought about doing some sort of compilation of previous interviews, as I've done a couple of times in the past, to commemorate that. I decided against that for a couple of reasons. First, I haven't accomplished everything I want to with this podcast yet, so it's not time to celebrate. Hopefully, that comes later. Second, I have so many great interviews wa...

This episode was originally planned to be a minicast, but when Lucette and I started diving into her songwriting and her new album, Deluxe Hotel Room , the conversation went a bit longer than I had thought. Which is fantastic, because it means you get to hear more from Lucette about how this album reflects more of her true self as a songwriter, her approach to the arrangements and lyrics, the idea...

I had been thinking a lot about how sound - the score and incidental music - effect the mood and even the story in horror movies and looking for a way to discuss that on the podcast when I came across the book Blood On Black Wax: Horror Soundtracks On Vinyl , written by this week's guest conversationalists, Aaron Lupton and Jeff Szpirglas. It is, as the name would imply, a guide to horror movie so...

I had been thinking a lot about how sound - the score and incidental music - effect the mood and even the story in horror movies and looking for a way to discuss that on the podcast when I came across the book Blood On Black Wax: Horror Soundtracks On Vinyl , written by this week's guest conversationalists, Aaron Lupton and Jeff Szpirglas. It is, as the name would imply, a guide to horror movie so...

If things had worked out as Lucy Isabel had originally planned, she would be firmly planted in New York right now, using the theater degree she got from Yale as a working actor. Instead, shortly after graduation, the New Jersey native left theater behind and moved to Nashville to become a touring singer/songwriter. If things had worked out as Lucy Isabel had originally planned, she would be firmly...

If you want to make anything funnier, just add Lamont Price. It certainly made watching Godzilla a much more enjoyable experience, which is the point of much of this podcast. This one has been brewing for a couple of years, starting with a conversation we had after a more formal interview with Price when he organized the comedy portion of the Boston Calling festival a while back. We were going to...

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes in this job of talking to notable people, you get kind of a day off. You talk to someone with such a long history, with such a broad view of the world of entertainment, with so many stories, that your presence is barely required. That was the case with Christine Ohlman. I just needed to pitch a topic or two out there and get out of her way Since 1992, Ohlman...

Face it. Bernard Fowler has a better job than you. Not only does he release his own solo work, like his new album, Inside Out, he has also toured the world singing with the Rolling Stones for more than thirty years. He first started working with Mick Jagger on his solo album, She's the Boss, in 1985. Producer Bill Laswell had told Fowler he had a job for him in London, but didn't tell him with who...

Nathan Ballingrud has a wonderfully demented imagination. He has a way of reaching into your brain and finding all of those creepy little corners where you hide the things that make you cringe and make your skin crawl. In his first collection of stories, North American Lake Monsters, there was a bit more realism in his stories and characters. Hulu has optioned that, and will start shooting an anth...

Jimmy Tingle is one of the first people I interviewed in the Boston comedy scene years ago. He was hosting and producing a stand-up show on race relations that featured, among others, Patrice O'Neal and Sue Costello. During my twenty years covering this scene, Tingle has always been a community-minded guy, whether it's been as a theater owner for five years or his Humor for Humanity comedy benefit...

Jimmy Tingle is one of the first people I interviewed in the Boston comedy scene years ago. He was hosting and producing a stand-up show on race relations that featured, among others, Patrice O'Neal and Sue Costello. During my twenty years covering this scene, Tingle has always been a community-minded guy, whether it's been as a theater owner for five years or his Humor for Humanity comedy benefit...

Jimmy Tingle is one of the first people I interviewed in the Boston comedy scene years ago. He was hosting and producing a stand-up show on race relations that featured, among others, Patrice O'Neal and Sue Costello. During my twenty years covering this scene, Tingle has always been a community-minded guy, whether it's been as a theater owner for five years or his Humor for Humanity comedy benefit...

If you have not heard Erica Rhodes's comedy, you have the perfect excuse to dive in on June 18, when her new album, Sad Lemon , comes out. Rhodes has been performing in some fashion since she was a kid, modeling at five and playing the voice of Garrison Keillor's conscience on Prairie Home Companion at ten. She was a dancer as a child, then dedicated herself to playing cello before discovering act...

Carole Montgomery is 61, and she won't hesitate to mention her age onstage. That is somewhat unusual in an industry obsessed with youth. But Montgomery is proud of her age. She has been doing comedy for roughly forty years, slugging it out in the clubs and balancing stand-up and family. She told Forbes online she once had to leave her baby son with a bouncer while she did her set, and found the bo...

There is so much to explore in Karen Haglof's career. She started out playing with a band called The Crackers in a Minneapolis scene that included Curtiss A, The Suicide Commandos, The Suburbs, and Flamingo before bands like Soul Asylum, the Replacements, and Husker Du put that scene on the map nationally. If, like me, you're unfamiliar with that bit of history, seek out a new documentary called J...

If you follow the Department of Tangents Blog, there's a good chance you've seen some of Christina Raia's work. I featured her delightful ghost story Hello on October 23 of 2017, and another of her horror shorts, Night In , a month later. This past November, Raia debuted a different kind of film for her, a heist film called Enough with an ensemble cast. Raia says she loves to direct horror, and sh...

I have been working on this one since last fall when I saw Jim Breuer at the Comics Come Home benefit show in Boston. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, it's an annual event hosted by Denis Leary with an all-star lineup of stand-up comedians, many of whom have local ties. Lenny Clarke is there every year, and the 2018 edition featured Brian Regan, Robert Kelly, Jessica Kirson, Billy Garde...

If Nat Freedberg's voice sounds familiar, it may be because you've heard him on this podcast way back on EP32, when I interviewed his band, The Upper Crust . Of course, back then, he wasn't speaking as Nat, he was speaking as his character, Lord Bendover, the snarling 18th century aristocrat in a powdered wig and finery that wielded his Gibson SG like a rocque n' roll weapon. That band got some na...

If you are a fan of music or comedy, you should already know Geoff Edgers. He was a longtime arts writer with The Boston Globe before moving to The Washington Post , where he has written some extraordinary pieces on Roseanne Barr, Chevy Chase, Norm Macdonald, and the article that his new book, Walk This Way, is based on. He makes it clear he is a reporter, not an analyst. So what you get from his...

This is the last of the four podcasts I taped last November at the NorthEast Comic Con and Collectibles Extravaganza, which happens twice a year out in Boxborough, Massachusetts. Philo has had a long and varied career, and we get into his resume straight away in the interview and drill down from there. You've seen his animation work on Disney's The Little Mermaid , The Smurfs , Super Friends , and...

If you are used to our usual theme song, do not adjust your iPod at the beginning of this episode. This week, we open music from this week's guest conversationalist, Micropixie. It is the title track to her latest album, Dark Sight of the Moon , and yes she does realize that sounds like another album you may have heard of. Throughout this episode, you will hear a few other songs sprinkled into the...