Anyway, she is so in love with herself. She clearly thinks she is the best interviewer out there. Her phrasing, the way she says, "Fresh Air!" ... hell everything about her drives me nuts. Do you remember that lounge singer Nora Dunn used to play on Saturday Night Live? That is kind of how Gross does it.
But the guests are just so good.
Here are some of my favorite examples of some questions from recent podcasts. I listen to these on the way to and from work so obviously these aren't exact quotes. But the inanity of it all is still 100% intact.
Tom Petty
Q: So you grew up in Gainsville. Isn't there a satellite campus of the Univ. of Florida there?
A: Um, yeah. The university is there in Gainsville.
Later --
Q: When your house was burned down in 1987 by arson, you and your family were inside when it started. Did you react by instinct? Did you run out? What was that like? Did you think before you ran out? Did you just simply run?
A: Yeah, the house was on fire so we ran out.
Cristian Mungiu: Director of the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Q: So because of the law that made both birth control and abortion illegal, it created a baby boom in Romania that began in 1966 and lasted for many years. You were born in 1968? Were you part of the Romanian baby boom?
A: Um, yeah. I was born 2 years after the baby boom started.
John Soluri: Writer of a book about the history of bananas. He spent 30 minutes talking about how mass produced bananas aren't as good as they used to be because the old bananas have mostly died because of fungi and such. For 30 minutes he was talking about this, the history of the banana, and how today's bananas might die soon as well. 30 minutes he's talking about how today's bananas don't taste that great.
She then goes on to start describing some of the problems she has when she buys bananas these days at the supermarket and lists all of the things he just focused on. She asks, "So why do my bananas not taste good these days?" He is speechless.
Blake Nelson: Writer of Paranoid Park
Q: In an earlier book, you wrote from a girl's perspective. Let me read you this part. "He was on top of her. All she could think about was she should like him more but he was just this big weight grinding into her." How, I mean, um, how, you ... um, you are a guy! How did you write this part? How did you know about that feeling?
A: Um, you know. It's just life you know, I guess.
Stay tuned for the next Terry Gross installment sometime soon!
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5 comments:
Have you heard the interview she did with Gene Simmons? It is worth dredging up if you haven't.
Is she a really bad interviewer? LOL That question was a la gross
I'm intrigued now and want to catch her on NPR.
I know the feeling about listening ot someone who really annoys you but you listen anyway because it's kind of fun to point out how moronic the person is . It makes you feel really smart. I get that with Elizabeth Hassleback (The View)who swears she knows everything about everything. my stomach hurts just listening to her but I just like how aggravated everyone around her gets and how they pretend they dont want to shut her up.
She said something the other day about tipping . Supers don't get tip because they are the supervisors. They are in charge...uh ..no . That would be the building owners genius!
rant over
if you google "terry gross sucks" (as I admit I did), you come up w/ someone else's blog entry, which is eerily similar to this one.
In that picture, she looks a lot like the guy who was sitting across from us at the pizza thing, actually.
dn
I was depressed that so few websites came up with good hits about how TERRY GROSS SUCKS. God I and EVERYONE I know who listens to NPR hates her with almost as much passion as I do. She can't speak, she speaks with a valley girl inflection, and is just a bad interviewer - which is an amazing thing for a program about interviews. What is really incredible is to listen to an interview from her first ten years - she was actually articulate and didn't start every sentence with "like"
I absolutely abhor this ignorant, fake, lamer known as Terry Gross. I recently wrote an email to Fresh Air. It reads thus:
Terry Gross, for many, many years, has been a very real black hole in my daily dose of listening pleasures. She does not understand the stellar people she interviews. She does not fully understand their backgrounds, their historical and cultural importance, nor much about the subjects that they relate to her. I constantly suffer through her misunderstandings of what her subjects say to her. If her producers give her cheat notes about her interviews, she either doesn't read them or she doesn't understand them, or worse, she doesn't care. She transparently glides across the ice of her ignorance, trying to cover it with self-effacing comments, and ass-kissing. That's not journalism. NPR, radio, and the listeners at large deserve better. Her vocal tones are tiresome, her informal slang ("umm", "...like...", etc.) is lazy, and her wit is nil. This dumbed down version of interviewing really doesn't work and is not flattering to NPR. Either stop the show or get a better interviewer and make NPR better; better yet, stop torturing the listeners. I could do a better job drunk and half asleep. Hire me.
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