Agitator Podcast

I like podcasting. I’ve been doing it since 2015. In that time, I recorded 137 episodes of my interview show, 53 episodes of No Country with Kris Saknussemm, and now 6 episodes of Agitator. I like to think of podcasts as projects that have beginnings and ends. For now, I think The JDO Show will pause. But it could come back! I’ll still interview people randomly.

See, people are still discovering episodes of the show that I recorded years ago. Some of them have racked up several hundred downloads. We’re almost at 40,000 downloads for the show! So I’ll keep those old episodes up.

But I decided to do a little redecorating, with the assistance of my co-host Kelby, who did the logo. It’s badass.

When I was a kid, I would order DVDs from Tartan Asia Extreme. Sometimes I’d even get them from overseas. I was completely obsessed with gory Japanese movies. Eventually that expanded to Korean and HK action movies.

I’ve always looked to Takashi Miike as an artistic inspiration. He approaches his projects with humility and honesty. With a focus on the characters, and on making every scene pop with some kind of weirdness. And he’s prolific. While the jobs of a writer and a director are completely different, I began wondering how I could adapt his work ethic onto what I do. A director takes pre-made material (a script), and fleshes it out, gives it life. After a bit of soul-searching, I realized that I’m not great at making up plots. Why not take some pre-existing ones and “reskin” them, adding my own twists and style? That’s how I adopted the techniques of a “director” to my writing.

I can see the eye-rolls from here. “Books are different. They’re different than movies, and they’re supposed to be different.” And I agree with you. I’ve written on this blog about how annoying it can be to edit a book where you can tell the writer doesn’t read, and is simply dictating a “movie in their head.” And all of that is true. However, I think there’s a middle ground, and plenty of untread ground to cover when it comes to using films influence in books.

I won’t write more about that until I have examples, but I have to be honest with myself: my major influences are not books. Or maybe they are, but a few very specific books. And a few very specific movies.

Enjoy the podcast! And please holler at me with ideas if you think of a good place to promote it. I’d like to do a little legwork and get this thing listened to. It’s an interesting experiment, with lots of ambient sound, passing cars, cicadas, corruption. I think it sounds cool. The logo fits the vibe.