Undernews is the online report of the Progressive Review, edited by Sam Smith, who covered Washington during all or part of one quarter of America's presidencies and edited alternative journals since 1964. The Review, which has been on the web since 1995, is now published from Freeport, Maine. See main page for full contents
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Your editor has been a musician for many decades. He started the first band his Quaker school ever had and played drums with bands up until 1980 when he switched to stride piano. He had his own band until the mid-1990s and has played with the New Sunshine Jazz Band, Hill City Jazz Band, Not So Modern Jazz Band and the Phoenix Jazz Band.
Here are a few tracks:
SAM SMITH'S DECOLAND BAND
PHOENIX JAZZ BAND
APEX BLUES 
Sam
playing with the Phoenix Jazz Band at the Central Ohio Jazz festival
in 1990. Joining the band is George James on sax. James, then
84, had been a member of the Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller
orchestras and hadappeared on some 60 records. More
notes on James
WISER MAN Sam
piano & vocal
OH MAMA Sam piano & vocal
posted by TPR | 12:48 PM
2 Comments:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2009938638_vaccine25m.html
'12 minutes'... one can tell Rod is from another era.
My childhood memory is also confirmed by renting old TV DVDs: there were 9 minutes of non-program per hour (15%) in the late 50s / early 60s, including commercials and all cross-promotions. The big dreaded 'station break' was about 2 minutes long.
Today, the commercial rate is almost precisely double that: 30%, or 18 min. per hour. 'Whatever the market will bear, and then a bit more' seems to be the policy. 5 1/2 minute breaks are not at all uncommon, nor is a steady alternation of 7 min. programming to 4 min. commercials. Even when we pay monthly for satellite or cable (whose 'commercial-free' aspects were sold to us so heavily at the beginning.)
Hell, even so-called 'public' broadcasting has less than 51 minutes of content per hour nowadays, with all the cross-promotions, pleas for money and commercials (which they very hypocritically deny are commercials.) And that doesn't even count the 2-week-long 'has-been-singer fortnights' (pledge drives) that seem to occur bi-monthly now. Puts us former-donors in a real bind... Sorry, I just can't donate to that anymore, Nova and Moyer notwithstanding.
I certainly wonder whatever happened to the 'public' in public airwaves. And why the 9% model of the 60s should have been stealthily stolen from us and become 'economically non-viable' (meaning 'we can milk the public for more, and they'll stand for it, why ever would we not?')
TV just makes us dumber and more compliant by the day. That's a cliche, of course, but I worry very much that it's an even bigger factor in U.S. degeneration than is commonly realized. So much trash is repetitively crammed into the U.S. mind. But who of our 'representatives' are going to bat for the people on this?
Corporate wealth uber alles....
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