Your Most Disturbing Realizations

[LizzieMaine]

I *agreed* with most of what MASH had to say, but I found the technique terribly cloying. It was an excellent show up until when Radar left, but it just got tiresome after that. Classic case of "the funnyman wants to do Hamlet."

I missed the finale -- I was living in California at the time, and didn't even own a bed, let alone a television set -- but when I finally saw it years later I thought it was way overblown. They handled the departure of Henry Blake much better -- he leaves, his plane is shot down, he dies, people have to face it and move on. That was a good example of how the show could make powerful points without getting sappy and tedious.

Some critic wrote about the history of military shows on TV around that time, noting in so many words that "at most, these programs made the point that War is Heck. MASH is the first TV show to come right out and say what war really is."

 

[tonyb]

When I started in radio in 1982, nearly all stations were locally-owned and operated, and programmed with live local announcers, local news, and locally-produced features. That first station used equipment dating mostly to the 1940s and 1950s. ...

This was still the case when I left radio in 1997. But in the years since the entire structure of the business has changed. Deregulation in the '90s decimated local broadcasting -- nearly all stations are now owned by a few corporations, and programmed remotely, using "voice tracked" announcers and automated music programmed via satellite, all of this run via a sophisticated computer program. ...

Has me wondering about the future of "terrestrial" radio itself. And that my friend Phil Harper (the voice of Harry Nile, Private Eye, among many other items on his curriculum vitae) checked out at the right time. He found himself doing voice tracking during the tail end of his career, which ended with his death, several years ago now.

We get a fair amount of local news on one of the local NPR affiliates, but even that is waaaay too limited. The same item might run every couple of hours, for a couple of days, such that a person can almost recite it verbatim.

 

[tonyb]

"Mash" the TV show was huge when I was in high school yet I couldn't stand it as I couldn't stand Alan Alda's preaching. While, I'm sure, I didn't understand political context of his comments then, I knew when I was being preached to by a moralizing snob and I didn't like it. ...

That's pretty much how I see it, too. I find such preachiness most annoying when it is in service of a viewpoint I tend to share.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We get a fair amount of local news on one of the local NPR affiliates, but even that is waaaay too limited. The same item might run every couple of hours, for a couple of days, such that a person can almost recite it verbatim.

That's really a sign of how things have changed. I was expected to write multiple versions of stories that would run several times over the course of a day, using different actualities and different phrasing. I'd no more have been allowed to read the same story in two successive newscasts, let alone two consecutive days, than I'd have been allowed to sing The Internationale at high noon just before Paul Harvey.

 

[tonyb]

And the converse of that is that there were constant campaigns among women, especially during the twenties, thirities, and early forties, for greater awareness of such things. There were also strong criticisms from women of the double sexual standard and calls for women to be more aware of their own physical needs and the workings of their own bodies. These weren't under-the-counter books, either -- this was mainstream thought for most thinking women of the time, and you'd find frank, open discussion of these issues in best-selling books and many of the popular women's magazines of the day.

The idea that women of the Era were perfectly satisfied to remain "barefoot and pregnant" in a "man's world" until those awful bra-burning feminists came along in the sixties is the most pernicious myth come out of the Happy Fifties-revisionism of the seventies and eighties. There isn't a single thing that Betty Friedan or Robin Morgan wrote about in the sixties that Elizabeth Hawes hadn't already written about twenty years earlier.

You mean that not every woman wanted nothing more than a happy husband? And a new Hoover under the Christmas tree? Pinko.

Sexual repression didn't serve the boys so well, either. Adolescent males spring erections at the slightest provocation. In a world where sex is shameful and dirty, it's little wonder that the poor little zit-faced buzzards might get to thinking they are demon possessed. And that if any expression of sexuality is shameful, the healthy ones get tossed in with the others.

Me, I enjoy euphemism as much as the next person (much of our "literal" use of language is a good deal more metaphorical than we generally consider), but some matters are best addressed head-on. Those young fellows ought to know that if they are so lucky as to live to a certain age, they will long for the time when their little captains so instantly sprang into action.

 

[Fading Fast]

That's really a sign of how things have changed. I was expected to write multiple versions of stories that would run several times over the course of a day, using different actualities and different phrasing. I'd no more have been allowed to read the same story in two successive newscasts, let alone two consecutive days, than I'd have been allowed to sing The Internationale at high noon just before Paul Harvey.

I love radio - news, sports, entertainment - but I can't listen to "local" news on the two "local" NYC stations (both owned by the same company - pretty sure that's right) as it is basically a 20-minute loop that periodically gets updated. It is painful to even take in one hour as by the third 20-minute segment your mind is completing the sentences for the announcer.

Growing up in NYC region, I used to listen to NYC local news all the time - they were real local news stations with real local reporters for news, sports, entertainment and special features segments that regularly changed. Even though I had never gone to a "nice" NYC restaurant as a kid, I experience eating them from the reviews of Anthony Dias Blue (gotta love that name) - I even knew when his segment was updated.

What is on now is homogenized pablum that can't be listened to. And I still can't believe that NYC (8 million people) plus how many more in the surrounding region can only support one classical music station and that is a "B" station which means it broadcasts on a smaller signal strength than the 10 pop or current music stations that all play the same stuff. How can that be - one, B-station for classical music for all of NYC?

 

[tonyb]

Sounds like radio is complicit in its own demise, eh? Not only is it facing competition from all the other distractions this digital age has wrought, it seems to have forgotten why people tuned in.

It's somewhat akin to the big metropolitan dailies responding to new challenges by cutting back on what they had to offer that the competition didn't. You know, news, and lots of it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Indeed. The deregulation of radio in the 1990s let the bean-counters and the corporate raiders ake over, and there was nowhere to go but down. When you own a chain of stations and fill the air with round the clock syndicated talk shows, all of which offer the same stuff honked out by different honkers -- and that makes money -- why bother to do anything different? Stations were formerly required, by law, to serve the interests, convenience and necessity of the public, and to demonstrate regularly that they were doing so on pain of revocation of their license to broadcast. Now it's just the bucks.

I've listened to a lot of New York radio in my lifetime -- the 50kw stations come in here like locals after dark, and I regularly listened to WCBS for news, WNEW for music, and WOR for Jean Shepherd and, God bless his memory, Joe Franklin. You would never mistake any one of those stations for any other, but nowadays WCBS is, as you say, bland and repetitive, WOR is just another bunch of idiot talkers, and WNEW is long dead. And I've also listened to a lot of New York radio from the Era -- more local programming from NYC has survived than from any other city, and it's absolutely breathtaking how diverse it was. You had the big network stations, but you also had a whole raft of little stations, 100 watt neighborhood deals that shared time and covered very specific communities within the city.

I have several hours worth of recordings from a station in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which couldn't have had a listening area that extended more than a few blocks along Graham Avenue, but it had programming in English, Yiddish, Polish, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, and German -- all reflecting the interests and issues of the community. There's a local "kiddie amateur hour" where all these little children of immigrants come on and sing songs, and then listen to a lecture on traffic safety from a cop from the neighborhood precinct, there's political speeches from the Women's Republican Club of Williamsburg and the Young Communist League, there's an African-American woman and her teenage daughter who do beautiful gospel duets, there's Anthony Witkowsky and His Polish Serenaders, there's a disc-jockey playing Bumblebee Slim blues records and there's, honest to God, a live cowboy band singing old-time western tunes. In Brooklyn, in 1936.

That's what radio used to be, and that's what radio will never, ever, be again.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Yes, I can say, that I'm a radio-fan:

Radio itself stands out of competition, technically. TV was overrunned by internet, newspapers were overrunned by internet, books seem to be slower overrunning by internet. Every visual media, or not?

German private radiostations are for the garbage-can, too. Just international chart-mainstream, annoying talk, mini-rotation, Same bullshit, like usual TV-entertainment.

Our public-service-broadcasters are "mixed", means "ok" to "better". Info-radio, (mixed) culture-radio, classic music-radio, youth-radio (chart-racket), younger-adult-radio (same dump chart-racket), partly state-applied-radio.
Badly, the mainstream-chart-radios directly compete with the private strations.

http://www.ard.de/home/radio/ARD_Radios_im_Ueberblick/109996/index.html


Lizzie, that might interest you:

Inside MDR Figaro (alternative/culture radio):
https://meinfigaro.de/inhalte/61fcf8572e847fa5/anhang/72788
https://meinfigaro.de/inhalte/e16e97e9c48d783b/anhang/70203

https://meinfigaro.de/inhalte/1041254bcd387276/anhang/73591

BUT:
I tell you, the very best is still "Deutschlandfunk"!!
They are more neutral AND critical, what you can't expect from the "regionals". Best mixture of information/critical journalism/music).

Deutschlandradio-Kultur is "ok". To much pop-mainsrteam, sadly. Reformed in 2014.

I like "NDR Kultur", very much. Until today it's an enjoyable high-culture-format! Probably the last good of it's kind.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

I consider that a very sad analyalization of recent history and am disappointed that you see it that way...FWIW

Analyalization ? ......George double ya is that you ?

 

[GHT]

Analyalization ? ......George double ya is that you ?

Come on Lean'n'mean, forget the mean part of your name. Balero meant analysis of course, but the English language is flexible enough to understand a mistake. One day you might make a howler that would leave you with egg on your face.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

Come on Lean'n'mean, forget the mean part of your name. Balero meant analysis of course, but the English language is flexible enough to understand a mistake. One day you might make a howler that would leave you with egg on your face.

Bolero meant !..............mistake !.................made a howler !................egg on his face !

No need to be so hard on the chap, it was only an Americanization.

 

[Bolero]

What does analyzation mean? - Definitions.net

So I got a couple extra letters in there with my version, got carried away in the fever of it all...happens occassionaly ooops did it again....

Life is way too short...Relax

 

[Bolero]

"I say old chaps...all this talk with reference to eggs...is rather making me bloody-well hungry!"

(Imagine Cary Grant saying this)

(Or Sir Laurence Olivier for those in Good Old England)

Sir Laurence in "Marathon Man" and that Dentist Drill.......Whoa....

 

[MisterCairo]

I saw the film "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"* with my parents on its release.

At a drive-in....

*Almost forgotten now, with the tv version "Alice" being much more well-known.

 

[Trenchfriend]

I saw the film "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"* with my parents on its release.

At a drive-in....

*Almost forgotten now, with the tv version "Alice" being much more well-known.

Interesting. Never heard of this early Scorsese, strangely! But I like road-movies!

 

[MisterCairo]

^^^

I've not seen it since that day in, what was it, 1976 or so? I'd have been about 9 years old! Funny what your parents will take you to see, though I imagine there was a more family oriented first feature.

 

[Trenchfriend]

^^^

I've not seen it since that day in, what was it, 1976 or so?

Seems to be 1974. And I was born in 1984, went to 4th class of primary-school in 1994 and became 20 years old in 2004.

 

[MisterCairo]

My parents took me to see that when I was SEVEN?!

And I REMEMBER it?!

Funny what sticks in your mind!

 

[Trenchfriend]

Scorsese-stuff, always good on children!