Twee Magazine

The Belt Buckle.

Starlee Kine is a former producer on "This American Life," and she has a classic "This American Life" voice: It's unpolished and unforced, featuring an occasional lisp and frequently dipping into vocal fry. The latter seems to be chronic on "This American Life," perhaps because host Ira Glass does it do often.

Apparently people write in to "This American Life" quite often to complain about the voices on the show, especially the vocal fry, and I think they're mad. There are a lot of radio shows and podcasts out there in which the hosts affect a radio voice, and it just sounds cheesy and forced. "This American Life" always presented itself as an alternative, and presented itself as offering an authentic look into the American experience, and put-on radio voices would have sounded odd and inauthentic.

I don't know how authentic Kine actually is, though, and don't really care. There is a quality of role-playing to some of her work -- in her newest podcast, she sometimes seems to be playacting at being less competent than she really is. In her radio work, she seemed to highlight her eccentricity, such as her childhood obsession with child stars, especially those who played orphans. She's emotional and obsessed with fringe self-help projects, and she seems permanently balanced on the precipice between adult experiences and childlike reactions. But maybe that's actually who she is; maybe she's just twee.

It works for her. She's just three episodes into her new podcast on the newish Gimlet Media network, "Mystery Show," and she's already produced one masterpiece. The show has a perfectly twee premise: Friends ask Kine to solve little mysteries for her, and they must be the sorts of mysteries that cannot be solved just by digging around on the Internet for a while (an increasingly rare thing.) So she solves them by wandering around with a tape recorder, talking to people who might help her and, when they seem especially interesting, following them as they veer off into unexpected tangents. The first two episodes were delightful: Kine returned a videotape to the owner of a New York video store that seemingly just disappeared years ago, and Kine tracked down Britney Spears to ask her what she thought about a friend's book.

But the masterpiece is the most recent episode, "Belt Buckle," which sent Kine in search of the owner of a customized buckle that had been found in the streets decades earlier. It is a marvelous buckle, emblazoned with images of a chef's world, including a toaster that could be made to pop up tiny metal pieces of toast. As Kine dug into the mystery, the likely owner of the buckle grew in mythic status, while the person who gave the buckle grew more mysterious. The climax of the episode has Kine returning the buckle to its original owner, who weeps on seeing it, and there is an extraordinary reveal about who gave it to him. "I am not in the business of sustaining whimsy and wonder," Kine says in the episode, or words to that effect, but it turns out that this is precisely what she does.

And of course she does. After all, she was discovered by "This American Life," and discovered the show, when she was featured on it. She was in college then, and one of the show's producers learned that Kine was enmeshed in a long feud with an older neighbor. The neighbor had started a smear campaign against Kine, hanging signs all over claiming that Kine was the drug kingpin of the East Village and was selling drugs out of her apartment. "This American Life" covered the feud, but left out the very thing that had brought it to their attention: Kine had responded by making a short documentary about the feud, and then invited friends over to see the documentary, and then led them past the neighbor, who would open the door and scowl out at them, flashlight in hand, like a live-action version of a costumed monster at a haunted house. Kine had taken a somewhat ridiculous conflict with a neighbor and infused it with whimsy.

She was famous for doing so on "This American Life." Perhaps her best-known episode had her tell of a post-breakup obsession with the music of Phil Collins, and her decision to respond to her heartbreak by writing a break-up song -- which she does by enlisting the help of the actual Phil Collins.

One of the hallmarks of twee is a particular sort of elaborate aestheticization of the human experience. All art does this, to some extent -- Charles Bukowski aestheticized his alcoholism into a series of brusque, rowdy poems, as an example. But the twee ascetic often focuses on mystery, marvels, and wonder, and the way these experiences resonate with our memories of childhood, and the ways in which we are still influenced by the children we once were. Kine has brought this worldview to podcasting, and it's a perfect venue for it.