May 9th, 2008
94.7 KNRK has a little bit they play sometimes about how they’ve been around for over 25 years. 25 years of alternative music.
Except that’s not…possible, unless I have a really messed up recollection of things.
As I remember it, we had 970 AM The Beat until the early- or mid-90’s. This is how I remember high school, or what passed for high school for me (mostly moping around Lincoln High, where I did not even attend).
I remember 970 The Beat as a lot of “Mexican Radio” and “99 Luftballoons” and the more alternative side of Duran Duran. Natalie Merchant. Siouxsie and the Banshees. Blessedly non-grunge.
As I recall it, 970 AM didn’t have a real DJ, and definitely did not have commercials. Or is that just a weird quasi-memory-fantasy of mine? Why is all this so watery when I listened to that station pretty much exclusively at the time?
Then sometime in the mid-90s, it magically migrated to the FM dial. I can’t remember the exact order of things. I think they may have moved it first to somewhere high on the dial, like 107.5, before moving it to 94.7.
Does anyone remember this with more clarity than I do? What heritage gives 94.7 the “right” to claim 25 years? Do the 970 years count? Help me out here.
Tags: portland, radio
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May 8th, 2008
I’m going to see DJ Armin Van Buuren at the Roseland on Sunday evening, the 11th. Wouldn’t it be nice if you were there, too? If this is your sort of thing?
Tags: dance, dj, Music, trance
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May 7th, 2008
Last night I went printing with my friend Chris Chen at the IPRC (and Brett was there, too). Chris was printing wedding invites for friends from plates–and boy howdy is he a fast and efficient printer. It was inspiring.
I realized that I had never posted about making the invitations for Aileen’s baby shower. At the time I didn’t want to ruin the surprise for her. So. Here they are.
They’re set in 12-pt. Century Gothic Bold, with Aileen’s name in Park Avenue 18-pt. I almost ended up printing the stork icon in the blind (that is, without ink at all, as the impression looked pretty) but ended up using a transparent white with just a touch of black for a very pale grey.
My goal was an homage to anachronistic formality, avoiding typicality of pink and ribbons and such, and using a clean main typeface to emphasize a bit of modernity.
I had a bit of trouble with all of the lower-case “o”s (they were all smashed), but I think it worked out OK in the end. There was no @ sign; hence my peculiar email address. No, it wasn’t to prevent spam!
Tags: art, iprc, letterpress, printing
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May 6th, 2008
So I call my mobile device a cell phone, a lot of the time. I’m kind of in the biz (mobile and Web development), so maybe it matters, my jargon.
Cameron Moll, in his book “Mobile Web Design” decries this habit as podunk and indicative of a culture ignorant of the impact (or potential impact) of mobile devices. Stop, he urges us, calling them “cell phones.” It marks you as techtards. This is very much my paraphrasing. The rest of the book is fairly valuable. I read it last September, in the sun, in the Okanagan Valley in Canada, but the cell phone terminology argument sticks in my craw.
I guess what I think is that it’s not terribly relevant. Do we insist on knocking down the doors of our British friends and demanding that they stop calling it the “telly?” Or that pluralizing the Internet is the end of the world? Perhaps more than other words, technical ones tend to be consistent across geographies. But I still think there’s a bit of room for regionalism. People still know what I’m talking about.
Or maybe it’s just that Moll has called me out, and my contrary nature now makes me extra recalcitrant to change my ways. What do you think?
Tags: mobile, phone
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May 6th, 2008
It’s finally, tentatively spring in Portland. Here’s my home. With dog.
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May 9th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
i have also found this claim to “25 years” questionable. i assume they are counting those 970 days but as far as i can tell the only continuity was the fact they were sending their call letters from Banks.
May 9th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Hmm. I always thought they were simply referring to 25 years of the existence of alternative music in general, not on their station in particular. But then, I was unaware of this 970AM fellow.