A Slight Delay

Seven hundred billion for Wall Street? Check. Another twenty to thirty billion for the Big Three automakers? Well, maybe. A few billion for struggling newspaper and magazine publishers? Don’t hold your breath.

Running a newspaper used to be practically a license to print money; circulation and advertising dollars made it relatively easy for a newspaper or magazine, if well-managed, to stay in the black. These days, though, things are a bit different. The litany of troubled papers and magazines reads like a Who’s Who, or a series of items from a journalism geek’s version of the gossip page: The Miami Herald, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune Company, and others have all suffered, some forced to cut back, and others being put on the auction block. Granted, the failure of a paper—even The Gray Lady—wouldn’t have the same impact on the economy that the demise of the banking industry, or the automotive industry, would. But there’s still reason to pay attention, and to care. (more…)

Confused yet? Anyway, the folks over at Ask And Ye Shall Receive, a blog where a team of reviewers analyze/vivisect other blogs, have reviewed A Slight Delay. It doesn’t appear as though we were exactly up their alley… which isn’t to say it wasn’t a good review–you kinda have to give props to someone who can make you laugh while they’re telling you they found your blog about as interesting as uncooked tofu. Read the original here.

Sometimes you just need a good laugh. Jeff Vrabel’s blog delivers pretty reliably, though it also contains some solid music writing. The columnist’s writing is a regular fixture, apparently, at the Island Packet/McClatchy-Tribune, and crops up with groundhog-like irregularity in Billboard and elsewhere. I hesitate to link to his recent post on Barack Obama because I’m nearly afraid some bozo will take it seriously, but I’m going to hope that anyone who reads this on a regular basis (all three of you) has their sense of humor intact.

The first thing I ever read on Jeff Vrabel’s blog was a post titled, “How my Uncle Jim was at the forefront of the green revolution.” I made the mistake of reading said post while drinking at my computer (seltzer; I don’t advocate writing while intoxicated) and nearly sprayed both my keyboard and monitor with it. We’ve all got families, and they’ve all got at least one character like Uncle Jim, but our familes don’t all have Jeff Vrabel to tell their stories. 

You know the little warning stickers on pill bottles about taking the medication only on a full stomach? That goes double for Man Eat Food. Entry after entry will leave you either salivating, or listening to your growling stomach (or both). What I like about the blog is its catholic quality. This is clearly someone who loves to eat–no arguments from these quarters, certainly–and who, though he loves good food, isn’t a snob about it. It’s a nice antidote to some blogs I’ve seen written by self-proclaimed “foodies,” where the simple pleasure of a good meal gets lost amid the stuff calculated to impress the other foodies. Hold onto your napkins…

Maybe it’s just a byproduct of being in the New York media market, but it seems like radio is a fickle place. Radio stations don’t last, and the few that have seem to have mutated beyond all recognition. At any given point from the late ‘70’s to the early ‘90’s, you could spin the dial and hear anything from Nektar, The Clash, Elvis Costello, PiL, the Smiths, the Cure, Joy Division, and the Style Council rubbing elbows with the likes of PWEI, Killing Joke, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, King Crimson, Big Youth, Pat Metheny, The Wonderstuff, and others, sometimes side-by-side.

Times have changed. WQCD is off the air (thankfully), while WNEW and WHTG have changed call signs and formats multiple times. These days over at WBLS (which Ross Davis once described as a “crack house with turntables”—does anyone else remember Paco?), if anyone tried to play a Clash dub plate back to back with the Sugarhill Gang, someone’d throw a Molotov Cocktail in the lobby. (more…)