Posts Tagged ‘NPR’

Random acts of radio

February 18, 2020

The mighty Zenith K725.

Back in the Day® it seemed some oversensitive jagoff was always shrieking at us to “Turn that noise down!” Or even off.

How little things have changed.

Impeachy the Clown and Porky Pompeo have it in for NPR because a couple of its reporters had the temerity to, like, y’know, report, an’ shit.

And they’ve started cranking up that tired old double-chin music about defunding NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, because these fatboys can only punch down.

Naturally, this triggered me, because I’m as oversensitive as the next jagoff. Throw in the confluence of Presidents Day and Random Acts of Kindness Day, and boom: Before anyone could tell me to shut my yap I was opening wide to deliver another painful sound bite with the yellowing fangs of Radio Free Dogpatch.

P L A Y    R A D I O    F R E E    D O G P A T C H

• Technical notes: This episode was recorded with a Audio-Technica AT2035 microphone and a Zoom H5 Handy Recorder, then edited in Apple’s GarageBand on the 13-inch 2014 MacBook Pro. Post-production voodoo by Auphonic. The background music was cobbled together by Your Humble Narrator using Apple’s GarageBand and the iMovie effects bin. KRCC operations manager Mike Procell appears through the miracle of Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack.

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Posted in Agitprop, Arts & letters, Audio, Radio, Radio Free Dogpatch | 20 Comments »

New coat of paint

November 23, 2019

“Come On Up To The House: Women Sing Waits,”
is available at Dualtone Music Group.

Tom Waits is an acquired taste (just ask Pat O’B), but Allison Moorer finds him delicious.

Moorer and several other female artists, working with producer Warren Zanes, have released an album of Waits covers titled “Come On Up To The House: Women Sing Waits.”

They lay a sweet, smooth coat of Sherwin-Williams over that weatherbeaten Waits structure, which Zanes describes with all due respect as a “trash-can aesthetic,” and it works beautifully in the cuts I’ve heard.

Roseanne Cash performs a gently reimagined “Time,” one of the Waits songs I like to play badly on guitar. Iris Dement, a frequent John Prine collaborator, takes a deep, Dolly Parton country dive into “The House Where Nobody Lives.” And Patty Griffin’s take on “Ruby’s Arms” strips the original of its instrumental fat and gets right down to the bone.

In an interview on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday,” Scott Simon quotes Moorer describing Waits as “a fully integrated artist who seemingly sees the whole picture at once and knows how to present it so that we do too.”

“He does seem to draw up marginal characters a lot — people who are either stuck in life or we don’t consider them people that we see,” Moorer said. “He exposes the everyday.”

Zanes hopes the album will unearth the lyrical voice that for some may be inextricable from the “grit and the growl” that characterizes Waits’s delivery.

“I think over the years he went deeper into the back of the cave, and sometimes I think people fail to see the very classic nature of the songs because of that ‘trash can’ aesthetic,” he told Simon.

“We viewed it as, ‘His 70th birthday is coming, and it’s a feast day, and we’re gonna take these songs and we’re gonna give them all the sweetness that we can.’ There’s something about the female voice that’s associated with a kind of vulnerability and a kind of emotion that we really wanted to breathe in these songs.”

Meanwhile, here’s the original “Ruby’s Arms,” the closer to 1980’s “Heartattack and Vine.” I was alone and miserable in Tucson when I trudged down Orange Grove Road to some anonymous Oracle Road music shop to buy this one. Still have it, too.

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Posted in Arts & letters, Music that doesn't suck | 11 Comments »

Wake-up call

May 11, 2019

Hey! Who shit on my radio?

Ho, ho. Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic examines NPR’s new “Morning Edition” theme and finds it wanting.

He’s not the only one. Composer Timo Andres and jazz singer Theo Bleckmann had thoughts as well.

“For me, it was so reminiscent of childhood, of car rides to school,” Andres told me later of the old theme. “Even though, objectively, it sounds like an artifact from a universe where Steely Dan was co-opted into writing state-propaganda music.”

The new theme, meanwhile, was summarized more pithily by Bleckmann. “Yeah, it sucks,” he said.

Ouch.

But what do you expect when you commission a committee to compose your theme song?

Robert A. Heinlein was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right on target when he noted that a committee was “a life form with six or more legs and no brain.”

And yeah, the new theme: It sucks.

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Posted in Arts & letters, Audio, Feckin' eejits, Music that sucks, Radio | 16 Comments »

San Luis

October 17, 2018

Apropos of nothing in particular we have this lovely Andy Mann video in which the country around the Great Sand Dunes National Park & Preserve serves as the stage for “San Luis,” by Gregory Alan Isakov.

I stumbled upon this at NPR’s “World Cafe” while clambering down various rabbit holes, hoping to escape the wind.

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Posted in Arts & letters, Music that doesn't suck, Radio | 7 Comments »

Souvenir

March 12, 2018

John Prine backed by Jason Wilber, David Jacques and Kenneth Blevins.

Thanks to Pat for passing this along: John Prine performing an NPR Tiny Desk concert for us.

The 15-minute set includes a couple new tunes from “The Tree of Forgiveness,” which is due out next month, and a couple oldies, one of them from those long-gone days when I still had hair on my head and not much on my mind.

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Posted in Music that doesn't suck | 6 Comments »

The news just repeats itself

August 19, 2016

Now and then I miss working in a newsroom. This is not one of those times.

Most days, daily journalism is like any other gig, only more so. Hours of tedium interrupted by moments of pandemonium.

But news in the era of what Charlie Pierce calls He, Trump, is a whole other ballgame. It’s like trying to sip delicately from a fire hose hooked to a septic tank. It can’t be done, and nobody should have to try, not even for money.

And certainly not for free.

Instead I’ve been trying — and mostly succeeding — in paying attention to the bicycle, may God save her and all who sail in her.

There’s Bicycle Retailer‘s big 25th-anniversary celebration, for example. I need to dash off a column and cartoon on that topic, which shouldn’t be too much of a stretch, seeing as I’ve had 25 years of practice.

And I’ve ridden four different bikes in four days — Sam Hillborne, Steelman Eurocross, Soma Saga, Jones Steel Diamond — and loved every minute of it. Well, not every minute — the Steelman’s low end of 36×26 is a tad tall on steep, sandy single-track for an auld fella — but still, it beats perching in front of the Mac, letting the shit monsoon wash over me.

This morning I got up, grabbed some coffee, and when Herself went out to walk The Boo, I shut off NPR’s “Morning Edition” and started playing some John Prine instead. Sometimes a fella needs a little country to restore his faith in a bigger one.

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Posted in Arts & letters, Journalism, Music that doesn't suck | 27 Comments »

Chaos theory

August 14, 2013

“Out of order, chaos.”

That phrase rumbling through my skull woke me up way too early this morning. Naturally, I thought it a bit of profundity, the Universe addressing me while I slept.

“Remember this,” I instructed myself, and went back to sleep.

I remembered. And this morning the first thing I did (after getting coffee, of course) was to give a good hard twist on Mr. Google’s decoder ring, hoping to find out what the hell the Universe was talking about.

Well, it appears that the Universe was having me on, as usual. Seems my snoozing cerebrum had managed to flip a quote from an NPR story I heard yesterday about one of two female Type 1 incident wildfire commanders, the first to attain that lofty rank.

“Think of us as 911,” Jeanne Pincha-Tulley said. “We’re really good at taking chaos and making order out of it. We’re used to taking complicated and making it work.”

Leave it to a so-called journalist to (a) get the quote wrong, and (2) come down squarely on the side of chaos over order.

• Editor’s note: This is my 1,200th post on this free WordPress blog, which in a dreamscape ruled by chaos means absolutely nothing.

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Posted in Fire, I knew only confusion, Journalism, Stupidity | 29 Comments »

Keep it simple, stupid

August 6, 2010
Spice is nice.

Spice is nice.

It’s gonna be a long, fat winter if I’m already searching out new recipes in the first week of August. Step away from the skillet, lard-ass, drop the spatula, and keep your hands where I can see ’em.

Yesterday I test-drove a Kung Pao chicken recipe from NPR and it turned out pretty damn’ good for a first attempt, though stir-frying on a glass-top electric stove is far from ideal. Plus it gave me a chance to go shopping for stuff I don’t ordinarily have on hand, like Sichuan chiles, Sichuan peppercorns, rice wine, Chinkiang vinegar and what have you.

You might think a guy would have a tough time finding anything other than wafers and wine in Bibleburg. But we have a bunch of military types here, many of them wed to Asians, and thus there is no shortage of Asian grocery stores — among them the excellent Asian Pacific Market, housed in what once was the old Ampex headquarters off Highway 24. The chiles and peppercorns I got downtown at Savory Spice Shop, which is a place I’d like to run through someday with a wheelbarrow and someone else’s credit card.

Like many stir-fries, Kung Pao chicken is a simple dish, and I appreciate simplicity. It’s not always fun to spend hours in the kitchen for 15 minutes of eating. So here’s another easy one, from Martha Rose Shulman at The New York Times — a spinach omelet with Parmesan that she calls “the perfect one-dish meal.”

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Posted in Cookery | 14 Comments »