Above: the greatest living comic authority on depression: Maria Bamford
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Who: host comedian Heather Gold ("Cookie"), guests Maria Bamford (Comedy Central's Comedians of Comedy), SF favourite Will Franken (Good Luck With It), and Cynthia Levin (Comedy Central's "Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn)

What: The Heather Gold Show@SFSketchfest: Comedians on Depression at SF Sketchfest

When: Monday January 19th, 2008.  8-9:30pm,  

Where: Eureka Theatre 215 Jackson St San Francisco CA 94111 and podcats online at heathergold.com/show

Tickets: $15. Way cheaper than therapy. Available at sfsketchfest.com or 866-468-3399

I've wanted to do this show since I looked in my wife's psychology textbook under depression for information and it had a picture of Drew Carey and just said 'Comedians are depressed.' So now I'm consulting comedians. Only the best. These are the cream of the crop. It will be neurologically impossible to be depressed during this show. We may even cure a few therapists before the night is done. I hear they need help.

Who knows more about depression than comedians? Maria Bamford (Comedians of Comedy, Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, Variety's Top Ten Comics), Will Franken (Good Luck With It, Best SF Comedian), Cynthia Levin (Comedy Central's "Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn) and surprise therapy guests join comic and host Heather Gold and you. Is it possible to be a comic without first being depressed? Are there Americans who aren't depressed? These and other fine answers await your participation at Comedians on Depression. Will not cause drowsiness, bloating or leakage. Cheaper than therapy.

We did one of my favourite Heather Gold Shows on perception (listen) which featured many synesthetes. It's really one of my favourite subjects, possibly because I associate physical sensation with much of what I do creatively. Or maybe it's just because it seems the closest human being come to supernatural powers.

toque tip: A Sull.

Sex, Love and Commitment

The Heather Gold Show: Process Over Outcome, May 12, 2008 (mp3 file, 34 MB)

(Subscribe to the audio feed)

This is powerful stuff for the web and connecting people through talk shows online which is at the heart of the Heather Gold Show (tHGS) mission. She even used the Ghandi quote about "being the change you wish to see in the world" which I used for the first few shows.

If you want people to connect, the web is really much more the right medium than pure television.

Oprah's basically using the web in a fashion similar to the TV medium. It's a one-to-many show though they took questions via Skype and phone during these webcasts. These were scripted and pre-screened and structured in a standard TV fashion, but it' a process that's familiarized many with these tools. She had over half a million simultaneous streams.

Even with that kind of production, her webcasts made good use of the sense of all of us being together at the same time, doing the same thing. That feeling is a key part of communal prayer or meditation, which is really what was at the the heart of the spiritual study of these webcasts.

But that feeling is also at the heart of any collective connection. It's at the heart of live performance and concerts. It's at the heart of a live lecture or conference. It's at the heart of sports gatherings and rallies It's at the heart of a really great idea brainstorm and conversation. It's at the heart of what I'm doing in tHGS.

I spend a lot of time thinking about Oprah and studying her show these days. She does television and integrated media properties incredibly well. Some of what we're doing at tHGS is quite intentionally a subversion or inversion of what she's doing.

The key difference to the interactive performance I practice and tHGS has developed is that it consciously shifts the form away from one-to-many. 

Oprah's work grows from an era of top/down branding and one-to-many communication and *authority." But authority never really was in the one other than what came from the attention of the many. The form of one-to-many ends up emphasizing the branded "expert" as knowing more than you and mattering more that you. I don't think that's her moral intention, but its inherent in the macroeconomics of the television system and branded person as "property" we've had for a while.

There is no more audience. It's a change and it's not. As Eckhart Tolle would say, it's really a case of acknowledging what *is:* the inherent power and authority over self each person already has. It's a change in recognition or consciousness.

More on what this means in the next post. Cafe Ritual is turning off the lights now.

Listen Now (90 minutes, mp3)

My friend Cheryl Dahle (a woman with a great mind to speak) has alerted me that this is a question Salon and Lindsay Campbell and the newsvlog Moblogic have asked.

I think its the wrong question to ask if your goal is to have more women's opinions spoken in public. A more helpful question is: what helps women talk on camera?

I don't think it's so much an issue of women not wanting to speak on camera as the way in which they are approached. This is something I think about for The Heather Gold Show (tHGS) a lot. and I do believe that its more fruitful to have a goal of having more women (and people of colour, and any form of diverse viewpoint or experience you can think of) on camera sharing their thoughts with others.

I hope on tHGS itself its much easier to talk because
-there are snacks

-there is no microphone in your face

-you're sitting on a couch

-there are other people talking

-the whole show is uploaded so you don't have to worry about being taken out of context

-another chick is (vulnerably i hope–me) making her thoughts known

-I am not professionally attractive

-I'm listening (seriously..i really listen :-) and there is a whole room of people listening.

I really like moblogic. But it seems set up to grab quick clips. tHGS is 60-90 minutes. Smaller bts come out of a more nuanced conversation.
If you have a desire for a longer, more nuanced conversation, that would be tough to convey to the people you're interviewing for moblogic, unless they already know the show and find it to be nuanced.

If someone I didn't know (caveat: I do know Lindsay, and have worked with her, and would certainly talk to her) pointed a fuzzy microphone at me and asked my opinion in public I would assume:

-it was for television

-I will be made to look like an idiot by an editor or producer if it will get higher ratings

-the structure of the show depends on conflict and I will not be there to respond to an attack

-my appearance may be mocked

-my thoughts will be ignored or mocked

So, to simple ask "Are women less likely to speak their mind?" Misses the entire point. In law school I was frustrated the few of my female classmates spoke in class. Years later I can now see that it would have been more useful to wonder why law school was structured the way it was, if it's goal was inclusion. Now I ask the same goal of the media..which is why I'm making my own show. Because there are so many voices and conversations I'm craving. And I'm still learning how to help people feel comfortable on camera.

Listening is an art that takes a great deal of practice. From my experience, women can more easily than men when you're not really listening to them.

What helps you feel comfortable speaking in public / being on camera as a women?

This carousing panel featured so many great moments- Julia sitting on my lap, Shaila bursting Julia's bubble about fact checking and "respectable" main stream media, and the genuine community response to the Mark Zuckerberg / Sarah Lacy keynote disaster….it's worth watching the video as well.

Download the full podcast (60 minutes)

Click To Play

During my SXSW panel, “Gossip,” tech scene gossip-ee Julia Allison booed Chief Valleywag and gossiper Owen Thomas, then ended up joining our panel, sitting on my lap and became part of a carousing, unpredictable conversation that was twittered, liveblogged on Valleywag twice while it went on. Lane Becker called it “The best panel I’ve ever been to at SXSW.”

Until I can get it up in the nav, I'll just let you know here: If you'd like to support my work, donate via paypal nosh at subvert.com. Thanks to JoCo for the inspiration to ask.