Today I aired a special “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune”—a radio time capsule. On September 21, 1939, the CBS station in Washington, DC, WJSV, recorded its entire day of programming and gave the tapes to the National Archive. It’s the earliest surviving example of this national mass medium in its swaggering stride, and of the flow …
I still derive a lot of pleasure from artifacts of U.S. popular culture dating from the period between the two world wars. The jazz age, the Harlem Renaissance period, the pre-code years of the first talking pictures, and the so-called great American songbook of show tunes and popular standards all represent what I view as …
The April 2024 issue of The Syncopated Times, independent monthly newspaper out of Utica, New York, has on its front page my interview with jazz musician, actor, and author Steve Provizer. Our topic was the legacy of mixed-race jazz recordings, as described in his book, As Long As They Can Blow: Interracial Jazz Recordings and …
“Feeling For Life” is the title I gave my most recent radio special–a two-hour exploration of Indonesian music and musicology. My special guest, Cornell Emeritus Professor of Music and Asian Studies Marty Hatch, founded the Cornell Gamelan Ensemble in 1972. He gave a vivid picture of the role of Javanese music, as understood by Western …
[TL;DR – See my radio portfolio on this website!] My motivation for launching this website was to help with marketing and attracting clients for my freelance writing and editing work. From that narrow perspective, I would have to say the site has not delivered success to this point. Such a view, however, suffers from a …
My weekly radio broadcast, “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune,” is an endless source of pleasure for me (and my handful of fans!). This past week I did one of my best-ever specials–a timely piece from nine decades ago, if you know what I mean, about the banking crisis of early 1933. The Great Depression truly “hit …
Back in the bygone days of 2018-2019 I had the chance to smith some words, in the “social studies” genre, for one of the ultimate prestige vendors: the National Geographic Society. Their editorial standards were the most exacting under which I’ve ever worked, but it was quite clear the final product would in all cases …
On the video podcast I co-host, When Humanists Attack!!, I recently had the pleasure of interviewing one of the greatest performance artists working today, Bill Talen, AKA Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping. Billy’s message has been resounding in my head ever since—it was echoing when I learned about the latest pronouncement from …
Jan. 20, 2021 – Stirred by today’s inauguration of the second Catholic POTUS and first female VPOTUS, I suddenly remembered this unpublished op-ed I wrote in the middle of 2018. I thought I’d take the opportunity to place it on the record today, just as a testament to what we may, if we’re lucky, be …
What insights can we gain by looking at philosophy from a comic point of view, or at comedy from a philosophical point of view? Few are better equipped to tackle such portentous questions than my lifelong friend Eric Kaplan, Ph.D., the Emmy-winning TV comedy writer, executive producer on The Big Bang Theory, and author of …