~a column by Colleen O’Brien
We Americans have been home alone for longer than we thought we would have to be, or at least more often than we had planned. Once we get our work done or the house cleaned, the supper cooked, we who can no longer bear to turn on the news look for one of the great TV series available, or we flip through a Netflix or Hulu subscription and rent a movie. We become TV babies again, like when we were little.
Another way to go is radio. Not wanting to sit still to catch the compelling images of a television drawing my eyes to the screen, I slip my radio into a holder on a leash and wear it around my neck so I can do stuff. Because the radio requires only my ears, I draw or paint. Sometimes I bake. Once I scrubbed the kitchen floor. I can clean the bathroom, and it’s over before I know it.
I do not play it all the time, because quiet is good when I do some things, like writing or reading, but merely listening to music is a soother for too much home aloneness. A free app called Simple Radio gives me “Radio Swiss Jazz! I have been listening to this station for six months now, and I have yet to hear a repeat selection of jazz. Some of it has a decided Latin sound, some of it is pure rhythm and blues and some verges on early rock and roll, a little of it is avant-garde, offbeat stuff, and all of it I love.
The Simple Radio app offers stations all over the world. As well as my favorite Swiss station, I have listened to broadcasts from Portugal, Honduras, Korea and most of the states in the Union – and all their variety of country western, Broadway, oldies but goodies, hard rock and classic rock, plain classical, sports, news, NPR. It is truly a way to be the armchair traveler, to feel cosmopolitan listening to music from Paris, Rome, Cape Town, Rio, Sydney…. When I was in Italy in January, I listened every night to my Florida-area National Public Radio.
IHeartRadio is another free broadcast and podcast and streaming radio platform. It carries 850 radio stations across the United States, as well as hundreds of other stations from various media. The service includes more than 250,000 podcasts. IHeart offers a music recommendation system and an on-demand subscription. It can be heard on smart speakers, digital auto dashes, tablets, smart phones and wearables – I think this means smart wristwatches.
Right now, I am stuck on WNYC, the NPR station in New York City. It carries the regular public radio shows – Morning Edition, All Things Considered, This American Life, Fresh Air with Terry Gross. On the Media is a favorite of mine – it covers the media and its effect on American culture. This morning I listened to a show called All of It, which was an hour of interview by Allison Stewart – and I heard about what sounds like a good read: The Overground Railroad by Candacy Taylor. It is about the Green Book, a directory of the South assembled by Victor Green and his wife Alma in the 1930s. It was a guide to restaurants, gas stations and motels where black people were welcome.
Late at night I choose a podcast from my growing library of the 750,000 in the world – 30 million episodes to pick from – such a wealth of information that includes interesting lectures, talks, discussions and interviews – which I access on my smart phone. So far, I subscribe to 1A, which is an NPR show that I kept missing until I learned I could call it up on my phone at any time; Longform, usually about politics; No Lie, another political show, which host Brian Tyler Cohen says has no bad faith talking points, no disinformation, no lies; The Book Review, which is not just book reviews but discussions about writing, comparison of famous dead writers and interviews of new authors; The New Yorker: Fiction invites authors to read to us from old favorites – Shirley Jackson, Eudora Welty, Isaac Bashevis Singer.
I put my chosen podcasts in a queue, and some nights I just never get to sleep.
