|
| Monday, May 26, 2003 |
 |
CaffeiNation 
| | Hanging at AltCoffee with my old pal Steve, giving a class in Manila and the Radio Userland outliner. Plus heterodox Islam. Here's one of Steve's favorite shrines, in the East of Bulgaria: |
So I'll just guess the answer is yes
| | I'm checking off over half of these, but I'm too busy to finish the whole list. |
Frontiers of arcana
May Trix
| | My own thoughts about the original Matrix (that it was a metaphor for marketing, basically) are here, here and here. |
What's happening over there?
More help
I knew it!
| | I¹ve often been at a loss to explain the connection between my varied activities, but just last week, sudden clarity came in the form of a news release from the BBC informing a startled world — well, at least Iwas startled! — that American interrogators have been using music from Sesame Street to ³break the will² of uncooperative prisoners in Iraq. ("Tear my fingernails off!" I can imagine the hapless captives shouting. "Beat me or prod me with an electric baton! But PLEASE... no more Elmo!") |
| | Chris's partner at Iraq War Reader (and co-author of the book by the same name) is Micah Sifry, brother of David. |
Radio Rewind
| | I'm here, without the equipment to record it. Oh well. Hope somebody is recording this and putting it up somewhere. |
| | In its heyday WABC was the New York Yankees of Top 40 radio. Kids back then were often as loyal to radio stations as they were to baseball teams. From the late 50s through the mid-60s, when I got turned on to more progressive forms of rock, and FM radio, I was a fan of the underdog, WMCA, which had 1/10 the power of WABC (5000 watts vs. 50000), and a great rivalry with the big guy. |
| | In the daytime, you could drive from Albany to Baltimore and get the WABC the whole way on an ordinary car radio. At night, coverage extended from the Maritimes to the Great Plains. My cousins in North Carolina used to listen to everybody's Cousin Bruce Morrow. |
| | By the way, yesterday I walked for awhile around midtown, visiting those electronics & camera shops with a zillion items in the windows, hoping to find a radio walkman that records on cassette. They're no longer made. There weren't even any alternatives for recording on MiniDisk or MP3. Even if they exist, it's hard to believe it would be possible to isolate AM radio reception from noise from the microprocessors in the same unit. Though I could be wrong. |
| | I think one reason is that ordinary radio doesn't matter much any more for music. The pop stations take payola from the record companies, are mostly owned by the same conglomerates, and all have the personalities of wallpaper. |
| | Funny... listening to WABC Rewound, I find myself doing what I did thirty years ago: tuning away. Right now WFDU/89.1 has Junior Wells and Buddy Guy (working killer bottleneck slide) doing "Mojo Workin" (I think it is). WBGO/88.3 has sultry jazz (Idris Muhammad doing Power of Soul, it says here). Now WFDU is back with James Cotton doing "When it rains it pours," which is perfect for today, since it's gray and rainy outside Britt's apartment here. WKCR/89.9 is playing Bessie Smith, I think. Right off an old 78rpm, from the sound of it. |
| | I see here that WKCR, which lost its transmitter atop the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001, is still radiating temporarily from the Columbia University campus, which is why it sounds like crap down here in midtown. They're planning on returning to something like full power from the belfry of the Riverside Church. That's the former home of WRVR/106.7, now WLTW. WRVR was a great station, but its signal sucked pretty much everywhere but uptown and New Jersey, which is across the river from the church. |
| | WFUV/90.7 is playing a nice song in a swinging groove (no way to tell what it is at the moment). They've had transmitter upgrade problems, too. |
| | WFMU/91.1 has some kind of interesting ethnic music. The disc jockey just ID'd the song and the artist, and I couldn't begin to guess the spelling. Israeli, I gather. 'FMU, by the way, has a very fine 128kb signal on the Web. |
| | WNYE/91.5 has something by Marlene Dietrich, I think. Sound like it. |
| | Now WABC has Ron Lundy on the air, from 1975 aircheck. Haven't heard anything yet from the period I was most interested in: the early '60s. In '75 I was working at WDBS, the outstanding little commercial FM station at Duke University. (More links here and here.) WABC was long gone from my life by then. |
| | Sad that WABC has exactly nothing on its web site about what it's doing on the air today. |
| | Why am I writing all this stuff? Because I'm the first one up. Everybody else is still asleep. |
| | [Later...] Now Dan Ingram is on. Dan was (and I suppose still is) the smoothest pure Top-40 jock of all time. The Michael Jordan of the genre. He could smack a lyric, ad-lib and talk in and out of anything better than anybody. He never sounded false of phony, never aped the false enthusiasm that made garden-variety top-40 radio so insufferable. Up-and-coming jocks (including myself, when I was briefly possessed of the ambition) were in awe of the man. |
| | [Later...] More on WFMU from from Jason Harenski here. (BTW, I've been a WFMU listener in various ways since it was Free Form Radio back in the 60s.) |
discuss
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
