A couple years ago my dorkiness reached incredible heights when I saw the Lost Buildings Tour, a live radio show by Ira Glass of This American Life with a slide show by meticulous-is-an-understatement- for-this-comic artist/genius Chris Ware. All of my favorite daydream topics (comics, architecture, antiques, preservation, storytelling) came together in a very touching story of a young man and his mentor's quest to save the original Louis Sullivan buildings of Chicago. Under the golden glow of UCLA's Royce Hall Ira Glass was a maestro in his element as he engineered each sound cue live with a flourish. I assume he does that each week on his radio show. Ware created a companion PowerPoint presentation with detailed drawings of buildings accented by sentimental cartoon characters projected onto a giant vertical screen. This achieved the scale of these buildings and payed homage to the lost art of facade decoration pioneered by architect Louis Sullivan. I became a KPCC Public Radio donor that year just to get a copy of the slide show on DVD, designed by Chris Ware.

Now on This American Life's online store you can purchase the Lost Buildings DVD as well as some of the most beloved episodes of the radio show on CD with covers designed by Ware. They're all quite lovely and a must for any Ware collector. I especially like the The Secret Decoder Program from 2000, where a group of radio serials have secret messages encoded at the end of each story. They'll bring out the dork in all of us in that lovable Ralphie Parker sort of way. If you got that movie reference you deserve a decoder ring of your very own, you geek.

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