{"id":8812,"date":"2014-02-06T06:00:40","date_gmt":"2014-02-06T12:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=8812"},"modified":"2014-02-06T06:00:40","modified_gmt":"2014-02-06T12:00:40","slug":"appreciation-welcome-night-vale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=8812","title":{"rendered":"Appreciation: Welcome to Night Vale"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Joseph<\/a>
Joseph Fink’s wonderfully odd, off-kilter creation is a piece of art that’s irresistible.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019d heard about this podcast called Welcome to Night Vale<\/i><\/a> from several friends over the last few months. As is usual for me, I came to the party later than everyone else but that\u2019s kind of the beauty of podcasts. Try one and there are more and more to download and check out.<\/p>\n

After I listened to the first one, I scratched my head and thought about what I\u2019d just heard. It was strange and beautiful and reminded of \u2014 I didn\u2019t know what. So I cued up the next one. And the one after that.<\/p>\n

Are you familiar with Welcome to Night Vale<\/i>? If not, dear readers, it\u2019s presented as a community radio broadcast with the sonorous voice of Cecil telling you what\u2019s happening in the desert town of Night Vale. There\u2019s sports reports, traffic reports and weather. We\u2019ll get to those in a bit.<\/p>\n

The first thing I thought was that Night Vale was a town a lot like David Lynch\u2019s and Mark Frost\u2019s Twin Peak<\/i>s. It\u2019s peopled with interesting, mysterious characters like Hiram McDonald, the Faceless Old Woman Who Lives In Your House, interns who mysteriously die or disappear and organizations like the Sheriff\u2019s Secret Police. It\u2019s the organizations that make Night Vale even weirder than Twin Peaks.<\/p>\n

It took me about four episodes to decide that Welcome to Night Vale<\/em> also had a distant relationship with The Twilight Zone<\/em> with jets disappearing and reappearing inside the school gymnasium, pterodactyls menacing the town via a rip in the fabric of space\/time and any number of other incidents that draw the scientist Carlos to town to investigate.<\/p>\n

Ah, Carlos. Cecil tells us how perfect he is, how melodious the man\u2019s voice is. Quickly, Cecil tells us he\u2019s in love with Carlos and the courtship is on.<\/p>\n

But that didn\u2019t tell me what the missing element was for me. And then I was struck as if by thunder: Welcome to Night Vale recalled to mind the bizarre and wonderful Mister X<\/a> comic created by Dean Motter. Almost to a \u2019T\u2019. You probably aren\u2019t familiar with Mister X<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Go ahead, look up that comic. It\u2019s absolutely worth your time to seek it out and read if you already listen to Welcome to Night Vale<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Okay. What I haven\u2019t mentioned yet is that there are places in Night Vale that are off-limits, more mysterious characters lurking in the background and lots more unusual events occurring than anywhere else in the U.S. This makes the UFO conspiracy location of Area 51 look like\u00a0 a kindergarten playground. The other comparison that needs to be put in play here is that the podcast is presented seriously and the laughs come from uncomfortable truths, ala the Mama\u2019s Family sketches from the old Carol Burnett Show. It\u2019s all tempered by the normality of all the strange things.<\/p>\n

Night Vale would be an interesting, terrifying place to live.<\/p>\n

But the weather would always be interesting. On the broadcast it\u2019s a song by an artist I\u2019ve never heard of. Usually it\u2019s more than just curious music, too.<\/p>\n

Finally, and I have to wrap up here, I want to tell you that if you like the weird, the mysterious, the off-beat, you will probably like the podcast. Best of all – it\u2019s free! Download and listen at your leisure.<\/p>\n

Listen closely though, so you can identify which surveillance helicopter is which. Your life may depend on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019d heard about this podcast called Welcome to Night Vale from several friends over the last few months. As is usual for me, I came to the party later than everyone else but that\u2019s kind of the beauty of podcasts. Try one and there are more and more to download and check out. After I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[853,897,1077,1244,1245],"class_list":["post-8812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-podcast","tag-radio","tag-strange","tag-weird","tag-welcome-to-night-vale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}