Revolving Radio

Over two years ago NPH lamented the death of a quality radio station where he lives. 97.3 The Planet had its format switched, due to low ratings, from an indie rock type to an all-out rocker type, even though they left The Planet up online. They changed the stations name from "The Planet" to "Max FM" and took the tagline, "Everything That Rocks."

More like sucks rocks.

Well, now its changing again. Parent company Union Broadcasting is switching it to an FM sports talk station, enlisting ESPN Radio as its purveyor. This will make the third sports station that Union owns in the Kansas City market, as they also run Hot Talk 1510 (another ESPN affiliate) and 810 WHB on the am dial, a station that has a great local following and has even started its own restaurant.

NPH likes this. Union is a locally owned media company that has been very successful, and if their fm station isn't going to work as a music station, then we'd rather it broadcast something that it knows how to do well.

Interestingly, the station's Wikipedia entry already has this as written history, even though it just happened two days ago. I wonder if a Union Broadcasting employee wrote that . . .

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Another NPH First

This spring NPH will vote in his first mayoral election. Ever. We've never cast a ballot for mayor in any of the cities we've lived in, simply because we've never actually lived someplace when that place was electing a mayor. NPH will keep his readers thoroughly apprised of the campaign events, signs, phone calls, and fliers as we encounter them.

Walking down Main street in midtown this morning, we walked past Joe Joe's Italian Eatery, where a huddled group of people were gathered, and where a KCTV 5 news crew was standing around outside. As we walked past the building, we looked back over our shoulder to see a massive sign reading, "Do you shop at Costco? Thank Jim Glover. Glover for Mayor." So there you go. Kansas City Councilman Jim Glover is running for Mayor, and he's launching his campaign on the compelling premise that the he's the man who brought us Costco. What NPH had stumbled upon was the ribbon cutting ceremony for his new campaign headquarters.

Pardon NPH for not being riveted.

There's a Home Depot on the same lot as the Costco. Is Glover not taking credit for it? Surely the urban retail complex that Glover advocated and helped to realize has helped the city (it's on a plot that NPH used to walk past all the time back in the day, when it was just an abandoned lot). But putting the retail chain Costco in your campaign slogo? That's just lame. And the picture on his website looks like an ad for the store, not a picture of a compelling candidate.

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Ads on Cell Phones

NPH got a new phone over the summer, and when we did so we sought out a phone that was a phone and nothing else. No camera, no web browser, no video: just a phone. And we found it (pictured there on the left).

Part of the reason we wanted such a simple phone was that we just don't use all that other stuff. We wouldn't surf the web from a mobile device, we already had an mp3 player, and limited video clips streamed over your phone screen just seems like a dumb way to waste time. But another reason to avoid those bells and whistles is that with content-delivery streams comes advertising. NPH didn't figure that it would take long for those mobile video clips to subject us to ad content (the same way that networks' online versions of their shows do).

Well, Mark Glacer over at MediaShift has a post about this very thing, the prospect of your cell phone being used to assail you with advertising. His post is an innocently posed question: "What do you think . . ."; but consumer reports are already saying what people think. "No thanks." Make no mistake: any time a device can be used for any kind of communication, be it audio, text, video, or anything else, that device is going to be used for advertising purposes. The text message function on the new NPH phone has already been hit up by ads from the its service provider. If we start getting all kinds of ads on the thing, we may just have to get a phone without text capability. If that's even possible.

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HDTV is Hot

Douglas Rushkoff has a column up over at Discover Magazine about High Definition television. It's the first thing NPH has read about HDTV that 1) isn't enamored with the technology and 2) doesn't assume it to be a simple progression of television as a medium.

In fact, Rushkoff argues, because of the ridiculously-high pixel levels featured by high definition plasma screens, what we're dealing with is a whole new medium, an entirely new content delivery system, and not just an improvement on an old one. Because whereas television, with its vertical lines and internal bulb, projected an image outward that a view more-or-less passively received, an HD receiver highly intensifies the resolution, amps up the color palette, and provides an aspect ratio that, in Rushkoff's words, "can cover my whole field of vision instead of just a little square." All this, he says, "turns the TV set from a flickering box into razor-sharp hyperreality."

Which may not be entirely good. Rushkoff draws upon Marshall McLuhan's categories of "hot" and "cool" media to raise some concerns (a "cool" medium invites active interpretation from a subject who is aware of themselves as a recipient of the medium, while a "hot" medium stokes the emotions and diminishes both interpretation of the medium and self-awareness in the recipient). Ultimately, the hotter the medium the weaker the active interpretation of it. And HDTV is hotter than anything we've ever had.

It's a good article, and thought provoking. NPH doesn't have an HDTV, so we can't validate from experience Rushkoff's contention. But y'all should read the article, if only for its description of what watching "The Sopranos" is like in HD.

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Good Stuff, I Mean Good Local Stuff

While NPH's wife is out the country, some good friends are keeping him company and allowing him to spend exorbitant amounts of time on their couch, eating their food, watching their bigscreen, and playing with their baby.

On Tuesday night, as dinner cooked, we took a jaunt to the local hardware store to copy some keys. We couldn't resist the temptation to duck inside the bookstore next to the hardware store, one that we'd both driven past several times but never, as yet, patronized. Why'd we wait so long?

At the Half Price book store in Westport NPH picked up a cheap used copy of a cd that another local blogger had recommended and a $10 Random House edition of W.H. Auden's Longer Poems (including "For The Time Being"). But the real event was finding a copy of Douglas Rushkoff's Coercion and, well, coercing our friend to buy it. We were looking for Get Back in The Box, but couldn't find it, so NPH was tickled to find Coercion. It's the first Rushkoff book we ever read, and it remains required media literacy reading to his mind.

That a copy of it is now in the hands of our brilliant friend can only mean good things for the world.

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Churchy Reversals

NPH is immersed in H. Richard Niebuhr these days. We're reading large sections of The Social Sources of Denominationalism during the commercial breaks of bowl games. It's a truly fantastic book and should be required reading for anyone even considering a vocation within the church.

Of the many observations contained in the 1929 book, this one strikes NPH as particularly ironic for a 2007 world. Speaking of the difference between the "church" (that is, the institutional church hailing from the Reformation--Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican) and the "sect" (the free church deriving from the Anabaptist tradition(s), Niebuhr says this:

They [the Reformation "churches"] are not prone to seek reforms; they are most often the bulwark of political conservatism.

NPH notes that, now, exactly the opposite of this assertion is true. Niebuhr wrote not quite 20 years before the German confessing church movement and the Barmen declaration, and so Social Sources . . . is without the benefit of such a historical case. And as a result of Barmen, along with the fundamentalist/modernist controversy (well underway in Niebuhr's day), the contemporary manifestations of these "churches" are now most soundly maligned as "liberal" by their mostly free-church antagonists.

In 21st century North America, it is those churches deriving from non-denominational, anti-state church traditions that are now the bulwarks of political conservatism, and not only its bulwark but, more accurately, its devoted activist. While those church voices which criticize the political order and the actions of the nation are increasingly those with the most comfy church/state legacy.

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Blogging The End

NPH and a colleague are collaborating on a preaching series for the next seven weeks and a-blogging as we go. Check if out at A-blog-alypto.

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