Spin Magazine 1989

"If video killed the radio star, why is Joe Frank alive?"

By David Carpenter

Say you're driving down the road one existential night, or even better, you're lying on your back, alone in a big dark room around midnight, listening to the radio. There's the sound of water in a tub, and a man and woman talking. Water splashes as she begins to wash his back, and the man quietly asks, "What makes you sad?"

Or you're in an auditorium packed with young scenesters from the literary, music and performance worlds. The lights go down and a middle-aged man with penetrating eyes walks out onstage wearing a sweatsuit and holding a microphone. "I'm an insomniac," he begins. The audience chuckles. He then describes how one night he phoned an escort service to request "a slim graduate student, her hair in a bun, wearing glasses, and smoldering sexuality overlaid by a deep knowledge of Heidegger. Her left buttock should have tattooed on it a verse from the Koran - failing that, an obscure poem by Joyce Kilmar..."

Joe Frank makes his living as a purveyor of angst-ridden introspection. "Work In Progress," his weekly one-hour broadcast produced Santa Monica, California's KCRW and aired nationally on National Public Radio, is a journey through a surreal landscape of words, sounds and ideas. Combining spoken text with music, audio effects and improvisations of a group of New York actors with whom Frank has long been associated, an episode might take the form of a dramatic monologue, diatribe, talk show, audio documentary, or hallucinatory travelogue. It might be an impassioned and clumsy ode to "woman" that that detours into an unnerving portrait of misogyny, a discussion of domestic terrorism, or a simple story of friends who come to the rescue, lovers who drift apart, and family members who die.

This summer Frank took his "Work In Progress" into a new medium, performing live to packed houses (the run was extended twice) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. Drawing from his radio programs, Frank stalked the stage holding his microphone like a talisman, delivering deadpan truisms as he stared the audience down, laid back on an analyst's couch and told stories about the rain, his childhood, and the nature of desire. A collection of his stories will be published this winter by William Morrow and Co.

"Humor is a way of deflecting terror," Frank has said. If so, then Joe Frank is an invaluable warrior who stands in defense of our fears, our vanities, and our forever-eroding sense of ourselves. He transforms the everyday banality of the human comedy into an inspired weirdness that feeds on pathos and irony, and feels a lot like revelation. Sartre would have called it nausea; Frank makes it art.