All posts by jmp

credit: burchfieldpenny.org Who was the first rock ‘n’ roll disc jockey? There are a few contenders and all but one of them are black. That one isn’t Alan Freed, who’s said to be the source of the phrase rock ‘n’ roll. He’s often cited too as the first white deejay to capture the sounds of Read More

Jewel Changi Airport, Singapore – credit: Matteo Morando/Wikipedia A few issues past in this newsletter, we mentioned Solarpunk (HERE), an imagining of how we free ourselves from technology’s relentless grip not by rejecting these many modern wonders and not by surrendering to them; rather, by tying digital curiosity to the love of life rather than Read More

The Jim Irsay Collection – credit: Valerie Macon / AFP Jerry Garcia’s guitar, a Doug Irwin model he played at the final Grateful Dead concert before his death, sold at auction for $11.55 million recently, which might seem like a lot of money. But then, just to keep things in perspective, David Gilmour’s famed black Read More

Sun Studio, Memphis, TN – credit: en.wikipedia.org Broadcasting Underground is a new class we’ve created that looks at the arc of radio broadcasting from the Golden Age through Top 40 and on to the time of the FM Radio Revolution when the Classic Era of Rock was born. The medium was a revolutionary new technology Read More

Photo by Umberto on Unsplash If we think at all these days, rather than just reacting, we must periodically at least wonder what it is that makes so many people so angry. Including ourselves, of course. It seems like everyone’s pissed off about something all the time. Pissed about lots of things, more often than Read More

credit: amraandelma.com Do you have difficulty concentrating in the current daily onslaught of mayhem and mendacities? Do you ever wonder if that’s as it’s intended? Persistent distraction as a sort of soporific, an opiate of the masses whose nerves by now are so frazzled by all the contrived versions of reality that any notion of Read More

Fountain by Marcel Duchamp 1917 – photo credit: Dr. Steven Zucker More than 100 years ago, DaDaists gave us insight into the future of politics as it is being manifest today. When Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal for an exhibition, he was questioning what art really is, by what process art is made, and did Read More

Grizzly Bear – Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash I met a neighbor the other day while walking through the new part of town where we now live. A retired Forest ranger who has lived and worked all over the country during his career, the subject eventually turned to grizzly bears, which we had encountered at fairly Read More

Here we are once again at the holiday season and an anniversary, maybe the fourth or fifth now, I can’t remember for certain, since we began the Freeform Radio project at radicalradio (HERE). We’ve had the pleasure of converting a tremendous amount of material from reel to reel tapes into state of the art digital Read More

Early in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan began enunciating his dictum: The Medium is the Message. His meaning was that the venue itself was more impactful than the material it conveyed. There is no clearer evidence currently than the cell phone, a device that influences society to a far greater degree than the information it delivers. Read More