Smart Guy Radio

I remember hiding under the covers at 11PM, looking for rock and roll radio stations transmitting from up north to my one-transistor radio that was clogged with local, twangy country quartets and holy roller music. That radio was special to me because it let me imagine wonderful, far-away Buffalo NY where Dick Biondi played Danny and the Juniors, sending them all the way down into the highlands of North Carolina.

Radio got more interesting when I came back from the Army in Vietnam Days. I remember when the FM DJ’s played “The wicked witch is dead” all day long when J. Edgar Hoover finally died. They gave drug reports for white heart-shaped tabs and pink and blue caps every afternoon at 5. They told us where to go when when we had a rash or something was happening in the city. And there was that guy, Rumpled Foreskin, who was the night DJ and played the Fugs from NY and Quicksilver. We turned it up loud in the incense packing room where I worked making watermelon and mango flavors using Bombay charcoal sticks and Dow Chemical artificial flavors our weird boss hid in the back room.

FM then was like the internet a couple years ago. We owned it. And the money people did not. But the money people finally figured out how to make FM bland as Wonder Bread and weenies with their focus groups and teeny-bop wonders.

It got worse. Yelling old men preached waco politics and got hold of everything on the air. I turned off the radio and never listened again.

Now I´m back, almost. But I’m a geeky downloader type. I looked for interesting stuff on the web and finally found some. I listen in now as smart folks explain the world to me. They tried it once before, when I was in school listening to rock and roll, but this time a lot of it makes more sense.

Here are some of the shows I get now:
Shooting an Elephant: Why Europe Went to War in 1914
Mapping the Brain
Ezra Pound and Basil Bunting
Special Relativity
The Design of Future Things: Cautious Cars and Cantankerous Kitchens

I put them on my IPod and go for a walk about an hour everyday, listening and trying not to bump into stuff when it gets real interesting. OK, I don’t take notes and I forget a lot, but it is sure is better than Geraldo or, even worse, Regis and Kelly. Nice that there are still some smart guys left in the world--broadcasting free on my webcast radio.