broadcastellan
broadcastellan
Leaping at “Elastic”: Resourceful Play, Perpetual Replayfulness, and the Inflexibility of the Museal Dis-playground
“Not by any stretch of the imagination.” That is what a friend of mine used to say—and perhaps says it still—whenever something struck him as unreasonable or preposterous. Considering how firmly the expression remained stuck in the layers of my neocortex after all those decades, much struck him that way—and, to this day, much does strike me…
“… this Land of the Cretin and Home of the Depraved”: US Radio Naysaying Anno 1926 and the Silencing of So-called “Legacy Media” in the Age of AI Slop
I was tickled—or, rather, pricked—by the snide remarks a certain John Wallace made in the April 1926 issue of Radio Broadcast, in which he expounded on “Radio and the Taste of the Nation.” In particular, Wallace took issue with the assertion that the new medium was threatening to turn the United States into the “Land of…
“99% slush, hokum and flap-doodle”: Having Words with a Pugnacious Pundit
“Who he?” I thought. Or make that “hooey!” The “he” in question is Walter Prichard Eaton (1878–1957), a theater critic and academic of whose voice I first took note while flicking through the digitized pages of Vanity Fair’s April issue. April 1926, mind. The “hooey!” is Eaton’s, or rather, it is my response to his sweeping dismissal of motion…
“Wanted: A Radio Shakespeare”; or, Something Is Rotten in the State of Make-Believe
When it comes to second-hand knowledge, I can get a tad—permit the portmanteau—malcontentious. You know, not just dissatisfied but downright disputatious. It frustrates me not to be able to get straight to the source and having to rely instead on a privileged intermediary. Owing to that frustration, I tend to quote extensively from the primary sources that…
“… despite the distortion of the curving horn”: The Wireless, the “Radario,” and the First “Step on the Stairs” (1926)
“What is the basic force that makes the human mind function?” The question was posed not at a symposium attended by noted philosophers and physicians, but to the readers of the 27 February 1926 issue of Radio Digest, who were subsequently asked: What is telepathy? Is it not fundamentally Radio activity, a form of Radio transmission[?]…
Live from the Lincoln Bedroom: Herbert Hoover Cautions Depression-Stricken Radio Listeners Against the “opiates of government charity”
“By the magic of the radio.” Suitably charming if by then well-worn, the phrase served as the opening of a public address by the thirty-first president of the United States, Herbert Hoover. Broadcast from the White House on this day, 12 February, in 1931, and occasioned by the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the message conveyed in the…
“A piece of ice”: Greenland, a US Mission, and the Drafting of Another War Below Zero
When, at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, the forty-seventh and perhaps last elected President of the United States, in one of his characteristic falsehood-and-insult-littered tirades, referred to Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark he had long coveted, as “a piece of ice,” his imperialism, imperiousness and imperviousness to historical facts were once again…
“Trump … and Trump Again”: Pulp, Politics and the Impossibility of Getting Away from the One Who Gets Away with Murder
Over the past few months, enervated by minor illnesses and the lingering nuisance of ingrown eyelashes that make reading for pleasure less than pleasurable, I have been busying myself performing the mentally undemanding task of cataloguing my digital collection of detective and mystery magazines, most of which, for the reason aforementioned, still await my perusal.…
“It gets something off my chest, doesn’t it?”: Keeping Norman Corwin’s “Appointment” (1941) Because Liberty Won’t Keep in the Heat of Hatred
Speaking out against fascism—publicly and nationally, via the airwaves—used to be regarded in the United States of America as a moral imperative, or at least, in the terms of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as an act “in the public interest.” These days, in the era of MAGA on steroids—and, to be clear, the first…
“The First Radio Play Printed in America”: “Sue ‘Em” (1925) and the Ensuing Question of Legitimacy
Here I go again. Another broadcasting centenary, another radio “first.” This “First,” mind, is wrapped in quotation marks, as the claim is not mine. I am not going to dispute it, either, or challenge someone else to have the last word in the old “Who’s on First?” routine. I have been there before. Picture it: Early 2024. I am commemorating…
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Harry Heuser 