Hot List: British Spies on Cinemax, Meeting Strangers, Oil Can Ukeleles

Strangers

I’ve been listening to Strangers produced by the KCRW Independent Producer’s Project. It’s hosted and produced by Lea Thau,  who was also the Executive & Creative Director of The Moth. It’s a podcast all about strangers: interactions with strangers, people who become strangers, or strangers who change us. Each episode follows one particular person. They narrate the story by themselves. My favorite so far has to be about a woman who works in day-time court television and is responsible for finding the quirky clients for the show. -Sayre Quevado

Hunted

Do you know how hard it is to find a good spy show on TV these days? It got so hard for a while that I had to go all the way across the pond to watch MI-5 (one of the greatest spy shows in the history of spy shows). Well, thankfully, the brilliant minds at the BBC have come back with another one: Hunted. And while it originated across the pond, Cinemax has picked it up here in the great U.S. of A. The premise is simple: an operative gets attacked. Once she discovers the attack was orchestrated by one of her own, she goes undercover within her own organization to figure out who did it.  Watch it. - Kurt Collins

Bohemian Guitars

Among the music industry movers and shakers trying to evaluate Big Music at SF Music Tech, I found a guy with a more rarified product to peddle: acoustic guitars made from oil cans and lunchboxes. The brothers who founded the company are from South Africa, where they township musicians making these ingenious instruments. They took the idea to market and placed some of the instruments into the hands of musicians like Jonti, who’s playing on Goyte’s U.S. and European tours. -Nishat Kurwa