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Yesterday I went up to Pleasantville for the NYRSF work weekend. There weren't a lot of manuscripts left to read, and the turnout was small, so I was making corrections by late afternoon.
In the room with the main computer (there's a laptop elsewhere), someone had turned the radio on to WFUV. When I wandered in, Pete Fornatelle (sp?) was complaining that the Malaysian tapirs at the Bronx Zoo ignored him. I started talking back to the radio, pointing out that the tapirs don't talk to anybody. Then he explained that it was the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, so he was going to be playing animal-related music. The theme was very loose: the first song was about unicorns and Noah's ark, and others included "I Am the Walrus" and some random Monkees. He finished with Danny Glover reading "How the Leopard Got His Spots", backed by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. I need to listen to him more often.
Pete Fornatelle was followed by Vin Scelsa doing "Idiot's Delight", which is free-form radio taken to an extreme. He didn't just dig out his old Robert Palmer LPs--he talked about what it had been like doing radio when everything was on vinyl, and the crackling noise (which I hadn't noticed until he pointed it out, because that's what music on the radio sounded like when I was growing up), and even played a bit of the end-of-LP sound you'd get if the DJ stepped out during a long song and didn't come back in time. He talked about the Universal Life Church and their Web site (where you can put religious credentials in an online shopping cart). He read us Ferdinand and the Bull. I wound up making corrections to one review while singing along to the Clash's "Lost in the Supermarket".
Vin described the LP bit as nostalgia, but for me the whole thing was pleasant nostalgia: the DJs I listened to in high school (on WNEW-FM, back then), doing what they do well and playing a musical mix that included stuff from that era. I'm going to be listening more often, and probably seeing what else WFUV has to offer me: they've promised lots of John Lennon for Thursday, which would have been his birthday.
In the room with the main computer (there's a laptop elsewhere), someone had turned the radio on to WFUV. When I wandered in, Pete Fornatelle (sp?) was complaining that the Malaysian tapirs at the Bronx Zoo ignored him. I started talking back to the radio, pointing out that the tapirs don't talk to anybody. Then he explained that it was the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, so he was going to be playing animal-related music. The theme was very loose: the first song was about unicorns and Noah's ark, and others included "I Am the Walrus" and some random Monkees. He finished with Danny Glover reading "How the Leopard Got His Spots", backed by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. I need to listen to him more often.
Pete Fornatelle was followed by Vin Scelsa doing "Idiot's Delight", which is free-form radio taken to an extreme. He didn't just dig out his old Robert Palmer LPs--he talked about what it had been like doing radio when everything was on vinyl, and the crackling noise (which I hadn't noticed until he pointed it out, because that's what music on the radio sounded like when I was growing up), and even played a bit of the end-of-LP sound you'd get if the DJ stepped out during a long song and didn't come back in time. He talked about the Universal Life Church and their Web site (where you can put religious credentials in an online shopping cart). He read us Ferdinand and the Bull. I wound up making corrections to one review while singing along to the Clash's "Lost in the Supermarket".
Vin described the LP bit as nostalgia, but for me the whole thing was pleasant nostalgia: the DJs I listened to in high school (on WNEW-FM, back then), doing what they do well and playing a musical mix that included stuff from that era. I'm going to be listening more often, and probably seeing what else WFUV has to offer me: they've promised lots of John Lennon for Thursday, which would have been his birthday.
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