The June 6 premiere of Blind Spot, a radio show on WLUW, was a live, abstract “restaging” of the Allied landing at Omaha Beach on D-day, exactly 60 years earlier. Rather, it was mostly live.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A few days earlier he’d stuck microphones in the two-by-two-foot vessels, made from scrap wood and plastic two-liter bottles, then floated them on Lake Michigan and taped the sounds they picked up. This was a practice run–his goal was to repeat the stunt on broadcast day, feeding the sound live to WLUW’s studios on the Loyola campus. “The boats took a good beating on the Friday of the test,” he says. “When constructing them I forgot to factor in how violent two-foot waves can be on a small boat.”
“When I got home from my initial test run I was frustrated and chain-smoking,” he says. “During the [D-day] practice run there was a point when the whole structure of the liberation of Europe may have been rethought because of all the casualties. Because of all my problems I had the same feeling: Do I need to rethink these boats? And then I guess like Eisenhower I thought: No. This is the way things have to go.”
A year ago Wanzel and von Zweck began assembling a team of artists interested in collaborating on a new show. They bounced ideas around, including options for a name. “For the first couple months we referred to it as ‘the New Radio Show,’ or ‘Chimera,’ or a number of other names,” Wanzel says. “But after a long session around my kitchen table we decided that Blind Spot had the most support, the idea being that a blind spot is something you have to consciously look for–radio that you have to look for, radio that you have to turn your head to listen to.”
