Former CBS Radio newsguy John Bohannon -- a man with the kind of remarkably urbane delivery that can make a report about meth-crazed rival pizza-delivery guys duking it out to the death with screaming-hot four-cheese 16-inchers sound sophisticated -- has got a blog. On this blog, he posts items about his current gig (hosting a jazz show on an FM station), the usual bloggy stuff and strikingly surreal snippets hammered together from leftover bits of popular culture.
His politics, I dunno from and don't you go pick fights; he's a radio dude of a certain age, a group that generally gets to overhear too much and therefore becomes cynical about anything that slinks into public office or the popular press. His writing, that speaks for itself-- At CBS, he worked with a crowd that knew how to put words together. I had the good fortune to work for a CBS radio affiliate when I was way young and they were giving airtime to people who could actually work a typewriter, end up with coherent sentences afterward and deliver them on the air with all punctuation intact and no abuse of the definite article. (Mind you, a few of them did dreadful things to the clock. Win Elliot's weekend sports reports tended to split at the seams and screech into the last seconds of his allotted time at a terrifying pace, his final words dodging the second hand like an Olympic fencer on a slip'n'slide.)
The elders of that generation are gone now and in their place, subliterate savages crowd the inside of your TV and computer, gasping and leering. (Your radio's probably full of dust by now, or possibly bubbling with gleeful vitriol: not my cuppa'.) Finding a survivor still putting messages in bottles (or into Teh Innernet's series of tubes, anyway) is a happy surprise.
Subliterate is probably too kind.
ReplyDeleteAnti-literate is more in line with my experience. Most of that lot's politics, manners, and mores are the flip side of those of Woody Wilson's buddy Tommy Dixon. All they lack is a trip to Bed, Bath, and Beyond for the makings of an outfit.
Of course, I have known avowed bedsheets you could talk to and reason with without triggering a hissy fit.
But I have yet to find one of the media's self described "liberals" who believed the facts to be of any importance compared to their doctrine. I have not found a "liberal" who did not react with rage when doctrine was challenged with fact.
Stranger
Yep, he's good! and +1 on Stranger... :-(
ReplyDeleteMy vote for the best commercial radio show around.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.johnbatchelorshow.com/podcasts
Four hours 9pm-1am, seven days a week.
Concur on Batchelor
ReplyDelete