broadcastellan
broadcastellan
“Hello, Big Boy,” Goodbye: Thoughts Occasioned by Sherwood Anderson’s Independence Day “Inquiry into America’s Progress” (1926)
“Nations are like people,” the US American novelist, short fiction writer and poet Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) remarked in 1926. “It takes a long, long time for one of them to grow up.” That year—that month—the United States was commemorating its one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary, which prompted Anderson to add: As a nation we are still young.…
When in Rome (1970): With Ngaio Marsh at the Villa Giulia
I had never been to Rome, that teeming aggregation of antiquities to which all roads ostensibly, and, as it appears, inevitably lead. Eventually, that is. Years of German high school Latin, drummed into me at a school not far from the Roman outpost of Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (Cologne), did little to raise my curiosity…
Some Mike It Hot: Tuning in Marilyn Monroe on the Eve of Her One-Hundredth Birthday
Monroe’s voice rendered a hot mike redundant. At once torrid and tender, it smolders rather than blazes. Carrying promises of pleasure and warmth, it has the charm of a lullaby sung on what could not be anything but a sleepless night of reverie. Many such a night I spent as a teenage boy, alone in my…
“The Present Fad of Self Confession” (1926): Aldous Huxley and the Paper “monster of spiritual impudicity”
I readily admit to having a thing about anniversaries, however obscure. They are an invitation to catch up with whatever I missed first time round, especially if I was not around at the time. The century marker in particular offers an opportunity—or a pretext, if ever I needed one—to dwell on bygone media events and the popular…
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…
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