A couple of weeks ago I was listening to Fresh Air broadcast Maureen Corrigan’s decidedly negative review of Kyung-sook Shin’s hot new novel Please Look After Mom. The commentary finished by recommending that readers check out Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids instead. “Smith will get your book club on its feet and pumping its collective […]
Archive | Op-Ed
Opinions, editorials and fun stuff.
Radio Free Record Store Day at Numero Group’s WTNG
This past Saturday I celebrated Record Store Day by dropping in to the Numero Group’s pop-up store in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. Numero is a record label specializing on archival re-releases of forgotten treasures, especially regional records from small labels from Cleveland to Belize. They hosted a one-day record store inside Stop Smiling press’ storefront […]
Would conservatives lose the most if NPR was defunded?
The latest round of the ongoing battle over public broadcasting has concluded, and lo and behold, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting lives. The new budget preserves funding for the CPB at $445 million for 2013, albeit with drastic cuts to smaller public media funds, and the complete elimination of the Department of Commerce’s Public Telecommunications […]
Chicago’s Numero Group label to broadcast pop-up radio station on Record Store Day
Record Store Day, now in its fifth year, is an annual celebration of the independent record store. This year it goes down next Saturday, April 16. Participating stores hold special events, like in-store concerts, while selling limited-edition singles and albums. I’ve been attending since 2008 and enjoy the recognition of the threatened species of the […]
Ottawa pirate teen convicted for harassment and unlicensed broadcasting
So that kid I posted about on Monday, who was running a pirate station in Ottawa, Ontario and accused of threatening to kill another local radio personality? He was convicted Thursday of criminal harassment of both the DJ and the officer from Industry Canada who was investigating the station. He was also convicted of violating […]
Pirate Radio Roundup: Albuquerque memories, Ottawa teen tantrum
A couple of interesting pirate radio stories passed through the transom this week that I need to share. First, a writer calling himself “Captain America” wrote a short piece for the Albuquerque, NM Alibi fondly recalling an unlicensed micropower station called Rebel Radio that broadcast from that city’s “student ghetto” during the mid-90s, a period […]
Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan, and the Woman Question: The Virtues of Thinking Twice
Susie Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s lover in the early sixties, died last month, and NPR recently played an excerpt from a 2008 interview with her. I was very moved by the interview, and felt that it gave me a startling and fresh perspective on an important part of Dylan’s early work—his love (and hate) songs, and […]
NPR will more closely manage website comments (hooray!)
NPR has announced the use of a new comment filtration process in an article innocently dubbed “The Right Chord With Less Discord.” Comments left by new website users will temporarily undergo review from a “community manager,” a process that NPR predicts will take less than 15 minutes: The vast, vast majority of our community members […]
Rush Limbaugh erases then restores FDR to economic history
One of the nation’s most prominent self-appointed Presidential scholars gave his audience a history lesson today, minus a fairly important detail. Radio rantmeister Rush Limbaugh was musing on the latest economic statistics, which are disappointing. The unemployment rate has dropped to the still high rate of nine percent, indicating that the tepid recovery will continue […]
Cassette aircheck from pirate radio station inside Pearl Jam box set
The long-surviving Seattle band Pearl Jam has just announced a new box set re-release of their second and third albums, Vs. and Vitalogy. In addition to five LPs and four CDs, the box set will include a cassette recording of a January 8th, 1995 broadcast from Pearl Jam’s Monkeywrench/Self-Pollution radio series. During the 1995 and […]