S-Town podcast is a reminder of what’s important in life
New brainchild from the minds behind This American Life is poignant audio storytelling
I was propped up in bed with headphones clamped to my skull when one of my twin daughters ambled in to ask a question. “Yes?” I said, after hitting pause and liberating my left eardrum. “What’s up?”
“What are you listening to?” she asked, a situational and spur-of-the-moment query that suggested her end game was merely to delay bedtime. “You look so sad!” She laughed after making this observation.
“I’m just listening to a podcast,” I said. “I’m not sad. Don’t forget to brush your teeth.”
“I won’t,” she replied, jumping and clapping for no apparent reason. “Goodnight! Love you! See you in the morning time!” This bundle of kinetic energy hugged me and left for Aquafresh duty.
If I looked sad — and there’s no doubt I did — the podcast was to blame. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever been so moved by audio storytelling.
If you have some time this weekend and haven’t yet listened to S-Town, the newest brainchild from the minds behind This American Life and Serial, I encourage you to do so.
The project, more than three years in the making, started when an Alabama man emailed This American Life producer Brian Reed to see if the radio show might consider investigating an alleged murder and coverup in his hometown of Woodstock, Ala.
The man, John B. McLemore, used a different name — “Shit-town,” hence the sanitized S-Town — and soon the self-described redneck and New York journalist were unlikely pen pals, phone pals and then just pals.
During Reed’s first visit to Alabama, where he needs latitude and longitude co-ordinates to find McLemore’s sprawling 128-acre property in the woods, the two get to know one another while discussing the killing of a young man, allegedly by the scion of a wealthy family in the lumber industry. The mood early on is “murder mystery,” underpinned by the original Serial and reframed with Southern Gothic flourishes. (In addition to Shirley Jackson’s The Renegade and Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace, the “bedtime reading” McLemore gives Reed to help him understand Shit-town includes William Faulkner’s A Rose For Emily.)
The unifying theme in these works, as Reed notes, is a creeping sense of foreboding, an undercurrent of depravity.
But without spoiling anything, the first sentence Reed narrates in the podcast suggests there is more here than meets the ear: “When an antique clock breaks, a clock that’s been telling time for 200 or 300 years, fixing it can be a real puzzle.”
Equally puzzling: what makes the clockmaker tick? What makes anyone tick? At the risk of sounding punchdrunk, that four-word question is what makes S-Town so transcendental.
It’s a mesmerizing journey that starts in one direction, takes a U-turn and then gets lost in a hedge maze of what it means to be human at a time when too much of the world can seem utterly inhumane.
When the story begins, McLemore, one of the most colourful and profane characters to ever leap out of my headphones, is a 48-year-old antiquarian horologist who laments his circumstances while revealing details of the alleged murder: “I should have got out of this goddamn f-----g shit-town in my 20s. I should have done something useful with my life.”
If we embraced this idea that geography can override destiny, that where you grow up shapes who you are sentenced to become, I suspect there would be a worldwide surge in compassion, empathy and understanding. As McLemore notes, there’s probably a guy in Fallujah or Darfur at this very moment who is wondering why he is stuck in his own S-Town, why he can’t outmuscle fate.
Reed’s brilliance comes from venturing into a small town that feels like it’s trapped in another time and mining universal truths that are relevant in a world now riven with conflicts — physical, cultural and, sometimes, deep inside individual hearts and minds. Along with the strange story and compelling characters, there are insights that could be grafted atop countless other strange stories and compelling characters.
When I listened to all seven chapters of S-Town a second time this week, the news was blistering with the horrors of terrorist attacks and chemical weapons getting dropped on already ravaged civilians; of parents burying their small children, parents who will never again hear “Love you!” and “See you in the morning time!”
In a flash, everything can change. And when it does, people get hurt. People get left behind. People wonder why this happened.
Tragedy has a way of opening the door to chaos. Looking back becomes the only way to look forward.
S-Town is a reminder that life is short and pain does not discriminate.
It’s a reminder to appreciate as many people as you can even if, ultimately, it’s impossible to really know anyone at all. vmenon@thestar.ca
The unifying theme in these works, as Reed notes, is a creeping sense of foreboding, an undercurrent of depravity