We’ve written here in several previous pieces about our project to develop a freeform radio archive. Hopefully, we already answered why we want to do it. Suffice it to say it was a critically important aspect of radio history that is in danger of becoming if not forgotten then perhaps not much more than an Read More
Category Archives: smARTy
Ephemeral Things
Life as an artist. A career in the arts. It’s a passionate need for self-expression and a challenging way to make a living. Like most areas of enterprise in a capitalist system, a few people make a lot of money and most everyone else barely gets by. Employment for artists is an ephemeral thing, a Read More
Turn Your Radio On
There was a new generation of music coming on and a new generation of people who wanted to hear it. There was a new generation of radio personalities, too, who wanted to play it for them. They had different ideas about how it should be done and what the purpose was. Traditional radio was about Read More
Radical Radio
Radical what? Radio. Yeah, that’s what we said. There was a time, you know. And it mattered! Here’s why. It was called underground radio. Freeform was a better name for it. Radio without walls. No separation between different genres or types of music. No restriction on what you could play if you were at the Read More
Artistry
Art and artistry. Thank the gods and goddesses for blessing us so. Can’t imagine life without it. So many problems in this world of ours. Nothing but bad news. Gloom and doom. A global pandemic. Government everywhere in crisis. One American political party in the grip of a madman. The other in a maelstrom of Read More
It’s a Mystery
One day when I was a young man working at The Denver Post, a reporter I admired dropped by my desk to give me some surprising news. His name was John Dunning, he was a few years older than I, and struck me as equal parts 1930s movie character and Jack Kerouac protagonist. John Read More
Serial Literature
Streaming literature has a very rich history and a plausibly bright future, each for it’s own reason. The former because the price was right; the latter because it fits the contemporary attention span. The great novelists of the 19th century, Dumas, Flaubert, Thackeray, Eliot, and especially the “father” of the form, Charles Dickens, produced their Read More
Free Form
“Whoever controls the media controls the mind,” said the poet Jim Morrison, lead singer for the Doors in the late 1960s. “Who are the Brain Police?” asked Frank Zappa of the Mothers of Invention is his 1966 album Freak Out. Those quotes and so many more like them were just part of that drug-addled Read More
Sociometry
YES! There really is an Institute of Sociometry and, yes, it is helmed by two artists, partners Heather Link-Bergman and Peter Miles Bergman, who claim a collective of over 700 special authorized agents in 23 countries join them in their efforts at culture jamming and guerrilla communications. As artists, they take a more adventurous approach Read More
Translocal Arts Activism
An interesting discussion with Complex Movements, an artist-activist collective in Detroit, about the intersection of art, technology, and commodification in trying to build “translocal” alliances for change here.