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Termination Gang
Back to its normal brilliance after a few weeks of "on the road" sound that was painful to endure, Termination Gang ends with a distressing revelation. That is, the suggestion that Steve Gillmor's seemingly bottomless wellspring of contrariness may not be paired with what maybe a requisite ability to absorb flak. That is a problem, because, for me, there can be no Gang without Steve Gillmor.
I'm here because of a blog post I stumbled upon by Phil Windley. That and my discovery that the Microsoft Windows Media Play can playback audio at increased speed without changing the pitch of the sound. At somewhere between 1.4 and 2x Gilmor Gang transforms from an offbeat tech-business podcast into something ineffable. If the podcast has a central theme it is attention, and at increased speeds one must hang on every word or be lost.
I have no interest in business, yet I'm besotted with this podcast. Art is where you find it, I guess. But the artist here is Steve Gillmor, no matter how learned and scintillating the wit of his guests. That is the message I took from Harpo Gang. Without Gillmor the show had lost its soul.
I'm as irritated as anyone that each show is hacked into 15 minute segments prefixed with 4 minutes of abysmal ads. But I can't tell you that division of the show doesn't fix my attention in some way. That is not the only irritation. How about the decision to place the show in the podshow network? Could there be a more loathsome venue? Could the web site be any more hideous without being completely unusable?
But it all still works. A mystery.
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