Kurt Andersen Replies

Studio 360, the weekly public radio show hosted by Kurt Andersen, turns two years old this month. An on-air arts and culture "magazine" in format, the hour-long show runs locally on WNYC FM (93.9) Saturdays at 10 a.m. and again Sundays at the terrible hour of 7 a.m. on WNYC AM (820). (Thankfully, shows are also archived on the website studio360.org.) With a combination of in-studio interviews and field reporting, each program addresses a topic, which can be concrete (drugs, outer space, modern design) or more ethereal, as in an upcoming show on the theme of "longing." The show has become as identified with Andersen as Hardball is with Chris Matthews or Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He opens each program with commentary that sets the tone?very much the kind of casually urbane essays he's written for The New Yorker, Time and The New York Times Magazine, effortlessly bridging the high-culture and philosophical with the pop-culture and quotidian.

On a Thursday evening a couple weeks ago, Studio 360's producers celebrated its birthday with a live taping before 200-odd invited guests in an auditorium at the Museum of Television & Radio. Joining Andersen on the stage were writers Frank McCourt and Cintra Wilson, Iranian singer Sussan Deyhim, and the band Luna. The experience was like watching, rather than just listening to, NPR: good-naturedly intellectual, talky, sometimes witty and engaging, occasionally rambling; even the band was eggheady and low-key. Wilson, who carries herself like the Cyndi Lauper of journalism, proved to be the evening's surprise hit.

And Andersen, meanwhile, proved that he has developed into a polished talk show host. Which might seem an odd career move for the former bad boy who cofounded Spy, later edited New York and wrote a regular column for The New Yorker. But it's not the only quirk in Andersen's resume. Inside.com, the media website he helped found in 2000, soon proved, despite excellent reporting, to be an expensive failure as a business. Andersen had turned to the Web after the publication of his dense and clever novel Turn of the Century, which appeared to much hoopla in the spring of 1999, and was brazenly set in the extremely near future: early 2000. When the novel, a richly detailed compendium of fin-de-siecle media culture, failed to hit the Times bestseller list, there was some snickering in the peanut gallery of that very media culture. Andersen got the last snicker: he wrote the screenplay from the book, which is now with director Curtis Hanson (8 Mile, L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys).

More recently, Andersen was the victim of a bizarre hoax, when a bogus article with his byline appeared in the August Details. It was allegedly written by a Details editor, Bob Ickes, a man with a checkered (and, one suspects, now curtailed) career in the magazine world, who's no longer with the magazine. Also this summer there was a bit of gossip-column flap when it was revealed that Andersen, whose Spy used to mercilessly lampoon the pompous fatheads who own and run American media, has been serving for a year as a paid consultant to USA Interactive mogul Barry Diller.

Andersen and I talked about all this last week.

How was the leap from print to radio for you?

The fact that they are both media is like the fact that equestrian and pole-vaulting are both Olympic sports?it's entirely different, except both require a certain curiosity. I was never much of an actual journalist. I did some interviews in my time, but not all that many, so it's not like I had a deep skill set of print interviewing. I had to figure out how to do that on the radio. There are things one must learn about voice and about not interrupting, but otherwise, it's not insurmountable.

Was it your lack of journalistic skills that made Inside.com go down?

Inside.com is still in business. We sold it [to Brill Media]... The thing we made?Inside.com?was a good thing, I made a few really good friends, and almost everybody who worked there has gone on to bigger and better things. Our business model was no stupider than anybody else's business model. [laughter]

So your lack of journalistic skills...?

I mean I know how to write and I can manage people to make a magazine. But this kind of hands-on journalistic tradecraft is really not something I ever thought about.

Are you liking the interview process? It seemed like you were the other night, especially with McCourt?but he's so easy.

He is easy. Doing it live is a special gas, because you can play rock star and be live and play off the audience reaction. So that, in a way?although the stakes were higher and scarier because it's in front of a big audience?is easier.

Be honest?is anybody outside of the Upper West Side and Madison, WI, listening to NPR?

Let's get the NPR thing straight. All public radio stations are affiliated with NPR, but my program is PRI?Public Radio International?with which all of the same stations are also affiliated.

I don't know what PRI is.

It used to be called American Public Radio, it's now called Public Radio International, and they produce shows just like NPR does.

That are carried on NPR?

There is no NPR to be carried on. Each radio station is an independent entity. Yes, they all carry, or virtually all carry, All Things Considered and stuff like that. NPR slops over into identifying with each of them even though that's not strictly accurate. It's a piece of public radio theology. I just bore myself every time I have to explain, but it requires it.

So really, how many people listen to your show?

A year ago?the last numbers they had?there were about a half-million listeners. The big shows have several million. In fact, 20-something million Americans listen to public radio during a given week. Which has made it, in this fractured media environment, a bigger deal. It's grown, and as everything else has broken down into little audiences here and there, it's that much bigger and has that much more impact, theoretically.

Do you feel that you have the same, more or less impact on air than when you write for print? You had a thing in The New York Times Magazine on Oct. 6?does that have more impact, less, different?

Totally different. I've also written for Time, which certainly has far more impact, by my lights. Everybody you know sees your pieces in The New York Times and The New Yorker. Not everybody hears this show. But on the other hand, when I write anything for print, I don't get the e-mails that I get regularly because of this radio show from people in Vermillion, SD, or Sacramento or whatever saying, "You're everything to me. This show is great, I love you." For the people on whom it has impact, some fraction of those 500,000 people, it's a bigger deal than any given piece of writing can be.

It's on a hundred and how many stations?

One hundred thirty-something.

They're all around the country?

All around the country, seven of the top 10 markets?

All on college campuses or nearby?

No. [laughter]

The commentary you write and read at the top of each show is very much like the stuff you've been writing all along anyway. Are you writing differently because you know you're going to be reading them on the air?

Yeah. You know, my first job as a kid out of college was writing radio essays for Gene Shalit. So I had this early training in writing for both. I think in fact that what's wrong with a lot of essays delivered on television and radio is that they're written by writers who don't write differently for the voice.

Are you comfortable as a talk show host?

I enjoy the show a lot. The idea that I can decide, let's do a show about drugs, then call up Eric Bogosian and spend two hours with him?that's a gas. I'm very proud of it and I enjoy it. In terms of my self-identity, if a visa officer or God were to ask what I do, I would say I'm a writer, not a radio host.

Can you see yourself moving the show to public television? Doing a Charlie Rose?

I'd rather be on radio. Not having to worry about how you look allows that much more energy to go into one's brain and ask better questions and be involved in the conversation... Anything like a daily show would take up too much of my time and identify me too much as that. I'm very happy doing this once a week and spending the rest of my time working on books and stuff.

How much time does it take?

About a dozen hours a week.

Sweet.

Really, my personal life has never been more comfortably organized. There's nothing that can suddenly grow and take over my life. I'm in control of how many hours a day I spend working on a book, and this radio thing takes a dozen hours or whatever it is, and if I have a little time here or there left to write magazine pieces, I can do that. The fact that everything is very orderly and circumscribed is very, very appealing.

Did the show exist before Kurt came to it, or did they build the show around you?

There was an idea for an arts and culture show with the name...(makes a face) Hot Ticket. Beyond that there was nothing before I arrived. It was going to be a suit, but then everything about the suit was customized for me, I guess.

You're writing your second novel. What can you tell me about it?

I can tell you a little about the novel. It begins 1848 and ends in 1850 or '51, and it happens a little bit in London and Paris, a lot in New York and a lot in California. I spent, as it turns out, almost an entire year doing nothing but research, and it was just bliss. It was the most blissful professional thing I have ever done in my life. Being somebody who didn't go to graduate school, I felt like this is what that in its ideal version would've been like. It was work, but with none of the anxiety of actually writing. Just pulling all of these little nuggets and immersing myself in a world sufficiently to believe that I could replicate a version of it. And it was great, doing that.

It sounds like it has epic sweep.

I don't know. I didn't intend it to be so big. I don't have any big plan to make it a doorstop.

And you wrote a screenplay for Turn of the Century? How was that?

It was hard, because the book was a big, dense thing. I'd written one other screenplay, so I knew going in I had to think of this as somebody else's book.

It's a pretty cinematic book. I remember that as I was reading it I could see the movie.

I actually think with the last year of business scandals and further popping of that bubble and everything?and this may be just self-serving, rationalizing bullshit?that a movie of that book right now would be an interesting kind of three-years-ago period piece.

Turn of the Century was launched into an environment with a fair amount of schadenfreude. There were people hoping it was going to fail, and when it didn't hit the Times bestseller list they said, "Ha ha, Kurt failed. Told you so." Were you disappointed?

Oh, not at all. It sold almost 50,000 copies in hardcover in America. There were three printings in hardcover, and there's the paperback. My fear of failure, and thus my bar for what would've constituted it, is so much lower. To me, it was an unbelievable success... The only concrete expectations for any book are those of the publisher, as measured by first printings and the size of the advance. Random House, as I mentioned, went back for multiple printings, and to my shock last year I got a nice fat royalty check from them, having earned out the advance and then some. Which is to say, their expectations were more than fulfilled. In addition, by the way, the book appeared on the bestseller lists of Newsday, the L.A. Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. On Amazon I think it reached number two or three and hung around in the top 10 or 20 for a long time.

So, what about this Details hoax? How do you look back on that now? Are you embarrassed?

No, I'm not embarrassed at all.

Pissed?

Not even that pissed. I was unsettled, and bewildered. At first, just for a few hours, I thought, "I'm going insane." It's some more elaborate, Gothic version of being stalked, that's both disturbing and in some perverse, sick way flattering, I guess.

Did you hear from Ickes before it ran?

I heard from him sometime last spring. I got an e-mail from him saying, "Do you want to write a piece for us?" I said, "I don't know, I doubt it. What'd you have in mind?" Then I never heard from him. And the next thing I know, the piece appeared in Details. It was fucking weird, you know? Mainly my thinking about it consists of wondering how anybody could be so nuts to try to do such a thing. What's weird is it was almost off the stands before anybody mentioned it to me. But Fairchild and Conde Nast couldn't have behaved better and more decently and correctly. They were mortified and shocked.

Ickes never apologized afterward?

No.

And what about this business of your being a consultant to Barry Diller for the last year? How and why did he approach you?

He liked Turn of the Century and asked me out to lunch. We kept having occasional meals and talking. A year ago last spring, about the time we were selling Inside to Brill Media, he proposed that I sign on as a kind of part-time creative adviser and idea generator for USA Television. So that's what I do some afternoons after I'm done working on the novel for the day.

What is it exactly you do for him? I mean, do you sit in creative meetings where someone says, "How about a series that's Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Inside the Actors Studio?" and Barry turns to you and says, "Your thoughts, Kurt?" Or do you propose ideas for shows or series? Or what?

Most of my work has involved trying to help invent new cable channels, and helping to reshape Trio, the pop culture "arts" channel. But yes, I also sit in meetings and throw in my two cents about new program ideas, existing programs, the whole lot. And by the way, John, that Buffy/Actors Studio idea of yours sounds fabulous. I'd definitely have my people call you, if I had people.

How do you respond to the charge that's been leveled in the press that for the mogul-bashing Spy guy to grow up into Barry Diller's mascot is, if not hypocritical, at least sort of a humiliation or humbling?

"The charge that's been leveled in the press" exclusively by Michael Gross in his little Daily News gossip column, you mean? Please. The idea that having helped start Spy 16 years ago morally obliges me to remain a muckraking satirist for the rest of my life is just ridiculous. Humbling? Humiliating? Not remotely. Writing for one of those free weekly underground papers?now that would probably feel humbling and humiliating. Barry Diller is a smart, acute, interesting, entertaining person, as are the other people I work with at USA. It's a delightful gig. And by the way, I bashed moguls in that essay I just wrote for the Times Magazine.

Do you see yourself doing this radio thing in perpetuity?

As I say, I enjoy it, audiences seem to enjoy, PRI enjoys it. All the constituencies seem happy with it, and it is fun. So I can't imagine a circumstance that will make me say I don't want to do this.

And it's only 12 hours a week, so why couldn't you keep doing it?

Right?unless I make the tragic and stupid error of taking a job.