off the leash

Once Every Couple of Years at the Whitney

Posted on June 27, 2017 by Ken Dowell

The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes, Samara Golden

Cauleen Smith

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

The 78^th Whitney Biennial was held this year at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The Biennial is a kind of state of the art exhibit of contemporary work. The emphasis is on young and emerging artists. All the pieces shown here were done between 2015 and 2017. The Biennial dates back to 1932 when it was established as an annual event. It went biennial in 1973. Art critics look to the Biennial to identify new trends in contemporary art. Not sure I could identify any of those trends. But I can show you some brilliant works that were part of the exhibit.

Veterans Day,Celeste Dupuy-Spencer

Jessi Reaves

La Talaverita, Sunday Morning New York Times, Aliza Nisenbaum

November Edit, Jack Riepenhofff with Peter Barrickman

Painting

Split Ends, Shara Hughe

Black Sun, Tala Madani

In the Land of the Giants (Spirals and Stairs), Jo Baer

Belle Isle, Carrie Moyer

It’s a Sports Bar That Used to Be a Gay Bar

Photography

November 10, Workers, Venice, Louisiana, An-My Le

Part of the Silent General project, photos by An-My Le

Sculpture

Heart Atrium, Kaari Upson

Local police find fruit with spells, GCC

One Thousand Museum, Zaha Hadid Architects

Man’s best friends Raul de Nieves

Posted in Art | Tagged art, contemporary art, museums, New York, painting, phtotgraphy, sculpture, Whitney Museum of American Art | 5 Comments

Future of Radio: Will We Still Call It Radio?

Posted on June 20, 2017 by Ken Dowell

Back in 2009, when the Pew Research Center released its annual state of the media report, it had this to say about radio: “Radio is well on its way to becoming something altogether new – a medium called audio.” It added: “Audio’s future, unlike print or television’s, seems less a crisis and more an intriguing fragmentation.”

(Image by Averie Woodard)

Radio as audio means it is not just the AM and FM stations on your traditional radio dials. It’s streaming services like Spotify, Pandora or iHeart Radio. It’s Internet only radio stations, its satellite radio and it’s the music channels on your cable TV system It’s podcasts, in fact you might even add Audible. Another word to describe it is listening.

Defined like this, radio will surely never die. Pew’s 2009 projection was spot on. Almost all of the alternative forms of radio/audio mentioned above have grown since that time and terrestrial radio itself, however destined it seems to be replaced by a digital only version, has hung on smartly. In an earlier post I described it as the last stand of the analog world.

Here are a few stats that back this up:

eMarketer.com estimated the number of internet radio listeners in the U.S. in 2016 at 176 million, almost double the number from 2010.
In 2009 Pandora had 7 million active users. In 2016, it has 81 million.
While the shine may be off SiriusXM, it is in fact still growing with 30 million subscribers in 2016, an 8 percent increase over prior year.
All this however, does not seem to be taking away from traditional radio’s audience as a 2015 Nielsen survey showed that within a one-week period, 92% of Americans age 12 and over listened to AM or FM radio

I don’t see any future time in which we are not listening to radio as a set or type of audio programming. What we might not listen to, however, is the radio device. At a recent conference Roger LaMay, the GM of WXPN, a public radio station in Philadelphia, provided some statistics that show the different device preferences of different aged listeners. The numbers pretty clearly show the listeners to radio in its traditional forms are older and the new options are first embraced by younger listeners.

“Across NPR member stations, the average age of over-the-air listeners is 58… On tablets, it’s 53. On smartphones via the NPR News app, it’s 49. On Facebook, it’s 42. For NPR Music and NPR Twitter, it’s 39. On NPR’s website, it’s 38. For NPR podcasts, it’s 33. And for NPR on social media, it’s below 30.”

One of radio’s greatest assets as a medium in the number of places where it has been embedded. Most stereo systems and several generations of music players included a radio, your bedside alarm clock may well have included a radio and even some TV’s. Perhaps most importantly, pretty much every car has a radio.

Now there is a whole new set of devices to access a whole new set of audio options, including classic radio. There’s the desktop, the tablet, likely some wearables. But above all else there’s the smartphone. How many other devices has this palm of hand computer replaced? Firstly the telephone, but then the camera and the alarm clock. For me it has meant retiring my watches, a whole drawer full of maps and a vehicle installed GPS system. No more rolodex, no more calendars or personal diaries, no more phone books and no more printed newspaper.

And likely no more free-standing radios. The smartphone not only has apps that deliver streaming music services but it also gives you access to online apps of radio stations, breaking the geographic access barriers of terrestrial radio. And while it doesn’t seem to be widely known, most phones include FM chips that allow you to listen to over-the-air radio.

As with other forms of entertainment and information, the future of radio, or if you prefer, audio, is likely to be device agnostic. And the type of delivery, streaming, over-the-air, archived or on-demand is also likely to be of far less significance than the content itself. We will choose among them in the same way we have traditionally chosen from among different radio stations, maybe the touch of an icon instead of the push of a button or turn of the dial. And we might have to go to a museum to see a free-standing radio.

Posted in Radio | Tagged audio, broadcasting, devices, future, media, Radio, smartphone | 3 Comments

Family Life

Posted on June 17, 2017 by Ken Dowell

Taking the twins for a swim

Mom and dad’s watchful eye

Snacks!

Baby portrait

Edgemont Memorial Park, Montclair, N.J.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged animals, baby geese, goose, gosling | 3 Comments

The Future of Radio: Is It the End for Big Corporate Radio?

Posted on June 13, 2017 by Ken Dowell

In the 1990’s the FCC relaxed its restrictions of radio station ownership and set the stage for large corporate consolidation of radio stations. Before long, two or three giant operators gobbled up a majority of the nation’s radio stations in most of the major markets.

Chief among those consolidators was Clear Channel Communications, which was later sold in a private equity transaction to Bain Capital and Thomas Lee Partners. It was renamed iHeart Media. iHeart owns 858 radio stations in more than 150 markets.

The ClearChannel/iHeart stations are the epitome of big corporate radio. They are divided into narrowly defined formats. Their playlists are computer generated based on ratings. They are intentionally and unashamedly predictable and repetitive. I don’t think that puts them in a very competitive position.If that’s what you want to hear, there are plenty of places to find it without having to listen to all the ads on commercial radio.

So how’s it working out for them.? Well, according to a financial statement by iHeart earlier this year, ““We incurred net losses and had negative cash flows from operations for the years ended December 31, 2016, and 2015, as well as for the quarter ended March 31, 2017.”

The leveraged buyout of ClearChannel in 2008 saddled the new entity with $20 billion in debt And they can’t pay it off. In a recent SEC filing iHeart acknowledged that they might not in fact make it through the year.

Then there’s the number two player, Cumulus Media. They own 454 stations in 90 markets. Seems as though they aren’t doing much better. In a filing at the end of last year they warned, “we may be required to seek protection from our creditors through a bankruptcy filing.” Their stock, which was worth about $30 a share a couple years ago, is now worth about 50 cents per. And in the first quarter they lost $7 million.

The financial troubles of these behemoths has meant there are even fewer local DJs, less local staff, less local programming, less local news. Instead we’re subjected to packages of data driven and computer generated programming that comes out of headquarters and is broadcast nationally. Robo-radio.

So if you want to consider what is a threat to the existence of radio, it may not be about Pandora or YouTube or Spotfiy. Instead the biggest threat is radio stripped of its local interest and built for the ad sales department rather than the audience.

Viewed in this light, the pending collapse of these large corporate consolidators can hardly be considered bad news. There’s the potential for more than 1,000 FM and AM stations to be put in play as these corporate entities collapse. Will one corporate owner replace another, accumulating the same sort of suffocating debt and delivering the same non-descript programming.

I’d like to think this could be the opportunity for a renaissance for radio. Maybe dozens, if not hundreds, of these stations could fall into the hands of independent local owners. In that case, radio can go back to its roots with local talent building communities of listeners with local programming tailored to their interests.

Posted in Radio | Tagged broadcasting, ClearChannel, Cumulous Media, future, iHeart, media, Radio | 1 Comment

Future of Radio: Is It the End for Terrestrial Radio?

Posted on June 6, 2017 by Ken Dowell

In my series of posts on the history of radio, one was titled “Video Didn’t Kill the Radio Star After All.” It was about the time when television became popular, the late 40’s and early 50’s, and the networks, NBC, ABC and CBS, virtually abandoned radio. Many, including the guys who ran those networks which supplied the most popular of radio programming, were ready to write the medium off.

But instead of fading away, radio had a revival. Transistors, car radios, teenagers, DJ’s, rhythm and blues and rock and roll all combined to make radio more popular than ever with both more listeners and more influence on a few successive generations of Americans.

Fifty years later, many are again questioning the future of radio. With streaming services, Spotify and Pandora, with satellite radio, podcasts and internet radio, with smartphones that allow you to carry your whole music collection in your pocket, what happens to all the those AM and FM radio stations?

Maybe nothing.

The Pew Research Center’s 2016 State of the News Media annual report didn’t have a lot of good news when it came to traditional media. That is, except for radio. “The American public’s consumption of audio content, which includes radio news and talk shows in addition to music, sports and other programming, continues to increase. Advances in consumer technologies allow increasing numbers of Americans to choose to listen to radio on a variety of newer platforms, while at the same time, terrestrial radio continues to reach the overwhelming majority of the public.”

The Pew report continues: “Traditional AM/FM terrestrial radio still retains its undiminished appeal for listeners – 91% of Americans ages 12 and older had listened to this form of radio in the week before they were surveyed in 2015, according to Nielsen Media Research.”

The radio industry trade publication Radio Ink concurs. “Still as strong as ever, radio continues to confound competitive naysayers by expanding its connection to analog listeners despite the proliferation of pureplay alternatives like Pandora and commercial-free experiences like satellite radio. In fact, radio was the only analog medium to show growth year-over-year in Nielsen’s analysis (+1% in time spent listening) and it is the only medium to command a consistent share of daily media activity (17%), no matter the demographic.”

So why is radio the medium with nine lives? Turns out that simple old AM/FM radio has a lot of things going for it.

Radio is free. There’s no monthly subscription required. It’s not bundled into some expensive package by your cable operator or broadband provider. It’s in the air. Turn it on and you’re good to go.
Radio has a business plan. It has nearly a century of history being supported by advertising. While traditional on-air spot advertising has shown a small but steady decrease in recent years, it is still by far the largest stream of radio revenue (75% according to Pew). Wil Pandora ever make money? (For the first quarter of this year Pandora reported more revenue, more subscribers, more advertising. And a loss of $132 million. Even higher than the loss of $115 million in last year’s Q1.) Why is there only one satellite radio provider? And who’s making money on podcasts?
Media advertising itself is in a state of flux. You can block ads on your phone or computer. You can record and fast forward past them on TV. But radio ads are pretty much unstoppable. And while display ads have been widely discredited in terms of effectiveness, radio has been practicing the newly-popular “native advertising” approach since the 1920’s. Just have your favorite DJ describe the great dinner he or she had last night at a local restaurant and you’ve got the kind of meaningful endorsement advertisers struggle to replicate on other mediums.
Some newer cars today come equipped with satellite radio. Some have wifi. Some have wireless connections to your smartphone. But ALL of them, old or new, cheap or expensive, have radio. And you don’t have to set it up or figure out how to work it. Here’s the numbers from Pew: “…traditional AM/FM radio is – and by a large margin – the most common form of in-car listening. Just 8% of listeners in the car named online radio as the source they used most often and 12% named satellite radio, compared with 63% who named AM/FM radio as the audio source they turned to most often. That is up only slightly from 60% in 2015.” That’s right it went up!
The whole world doesn’t have broadband. The whole country doesn’t have broadband. Last year the FCC said there were 34 million Americans without broadband. There are still rural areas with little or no good internet options. There are people who don’t have smartphones and there are people who can’t afford the only available broadband. Some folks are unaware of how to find and listen to podcasts and some others don’t know how to connect their phone to their car speakers. But they can get radio and everybody knows how it works.
Radio scales at no cost. Station operators’ expenses are the same no matter how many listeners they have. There are no additional data costs if your online audience grows. Nor do your listeners need a bigger data plan to listen. And royalties are not calculated based on the size of the audience.
And finally, here’s one I hadn’t thought of (courtesy of Slate): “When the zombie apocalypse arrives, radio will save your hide. Anyone with a generator and an antenna can broadcast radio, and everyone listening hears the same key information in real time.”

Is it the end for terrestrial radio? No. At least not for now. Radio is looking like the last holdout of the analog world. But will radio have another revival? I’ll discuss that in next week’s post when I raise the question “Is It the End for Big Corporate Radio?”

Posted in Radio | Tagged AM/FM, broadcasting, car radio, future, media, Radio | 12 Comments

Made by Immigrants

Posted on May 30, 2017 by Ken Dowell

In Ybor City, they still roll cigars by hand.

In 1886 Don Vicente Martinez-Ybor established a cigar factory in what is now known as Ybor City, a section of Tampa, Fla. Martinez-Ybor was a Spaniard who moved to Cuba at the age of 14. His career is cigar manufacturing started there. He later established a factory in Key West and then moved it to Ybor. Other manufacturers followed and Ybor City became Florida’s first industrial town. Those factories and the jobs that they offered attracted a work force made up almost exclusively of immigrants from Cuba, Spain and Italy. Romanian merchants followed, establishing stores in the city, and German lithographers came along and are credited with inventing a new art form, the cigar label.

A central feature of life in late 19^th century and early 20^th century Ybor was the social clubs for Cuban, Spanish and Italian immigrants. El Club Nacional Cubano was founded in 1899. Two years later another cigar manufacturer Igancio Haya started the Centro Espanol. L’Unione Italiana came along in 1894 with the initial membership of 116 Italians and eight Spaniards. These clubs not only served as the hub of social life for their membership, but fulfilled a variety of functions that included a type of trade union and a healthcare provider.

The heyday of Ybor City as a cigar manufacturing hub was between 1890 and 1930. At one time it had tens of thousands of residents and it was almost entirely owned and occupied by immigrants. 500 million cigars were made in Ybor in 1929, but that also proved to be the beginning of the end for the industry. During the 30’s the demand for premium cigars waned and in future years manufacturers would turn to automated processes rather than hand-rolling. A decline set in that lasted through the 50’s and 60’s until the city was almost completely abandoned by the 1970’s.

Ybor began to make its comeback in the 1980’s as artists moved into the district. Gentrification followed and by the 1990’s Ybor was being reinvented as an entertainment hub, the “Latin Quarter” of Florida. It continues to be a thriving nightlife center with bars, clubs, restaurants and retail. The Ybor Chamber of Commerce describes it as “a cultural and intellectual hub for new-age immigrants.” It is a National Historic Landmark District and 7^th Avenue, the main retail drag, was named by the American Planning Association as one of the “Ten Great Streets in America.”

7th Avenue, one of the ‘Ten Great Streets of America’

Posted in History, Travel | Tagged cigars, Florida, history, immigrants, Tampa, Ybor | 4 Comments

A Mayakoba Boat Tour

Posted on May 23, 2017 by Ken Dowell

Setting off from the docks of the Fairmont Mayakoba.

Mayakoba is a one square mile resort area in the Riviera Maya section of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. It is home to four luxury hotels. But it is also surrounded by undeveloped lands that include beach, sand dunes, mangrove and jungle. It is home to some 300 species and that number is growing as surrounding areas become developed and birds and wildlife find a refuge here. There are canals running throughout Mayakoba. These images are from a boat tour on those canals.

common moorhens

Green heron

Blackbird

Tilapia

Posted in Travel, Uncategorized | Tagged Birds, canals, jungle, Mayakoba, Mexico, travel, Yucatan | 9 Comments

Quintana Roo

Posted on May 16, 2017 by Ken Dowell

Quintana Roo is one of 31 Mexican states. It is on the eastern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. These images start in Cancun and proceed south along the coast through the Riviera Maya region to Playa del Carman and end in Tulum, an overall distance about 80 miles.

Park Las Palapas, Cancun

Fairmont Mayakoba

Nest of Abeja Melipona, stingless bees

Maguby

Spider monkey

Fifth Avenue, Playa del Carmen

5th Avenue

Tulum

Posted in Travel | Tagged beaches, Cancun, Mayakoba, Mexico, Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo, travel, Tulum, Yucatan | 6 Comments

A Mayan Seaport and Trading Hub

Posted on May 9, 2017 by Ken Dowell

Tulum is a Mayan city believed to date back to 564 AD. It is built on the cliffs overlooking the Caribbean Sea on the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. It is one of the few Mayan cities that had a wall. Tulum peaked as a city between the 13^th and 15^th centuries when estimates suggest between 1,000 and 1,600 people lived here. It is during that period that most of the buildings were erected. As a seaport it served as a trading post and artifacts found at the site suggest it was a trade hub for other parts of Mexico and Central America. The city was abandoned after the population was decimated by European diseases brought to the New World by the Spanish.

In the middle of this building are the remains of a cistern.

Temple of the Frescoes

The Castle

Watchtower

The view from the top of Tulum. Today there is a bathing beach at the bottom of the cliff.

Posted in History, Travel | Tagged history, Mayan, Mexico, Quintana Roo, ruins, travel, Tulum, Yucatan | 6 Comments

More Montclair Film Festival — Lost in Paris, Found in Tultepec

Posted on May 7, 2017 by Ken Dowell

The last days of the Montclair Film Festival took me from Denmark and Belgium to Mexico, by way of England. Actually I was just sitting in one of Montclair’s three theaters, but that’s where the films were from. Here are some short reviews from the second half of the sixth annual festival.

Lost in Paris

Fiona is an awkward young Canadian woman from some desolate hamlet in the frozen north. She heads to Paris at the behest of her 88-year old aunt Martha who is being stalked by a woman in a nurse’s uniform who wants to move her to a nursing home. Once in Paris, Fiona falls into the Seine, gets her nose caught in an elevator and is presented the ashes of a different old woman named Martha. The title Lost in Paris might make you think you’re in for some existential study of ennui. Nope. This is screwball comedy. There’s a third character, a homeless guy who lives in a tent on the river bank, who separately ends up having a relationship with both women. The title is to be taken literally as all three are more or less lost. This is a Belgian movie, set in Paris and mostly in English. Light and fun. I left the theater wondering if there really is such a thing as a biodegradable urn so you can toss your loved one’s ashes into the river without doing any damage to the environment. If so, throw me into the Great Falls.

For Grace

This is a fictional narrative movie that was made to look like a documentary. In fact, had I not listened to the comments of screenwriter Andrew Keatley, who was at the screening, I might well still think I had seen a documentary. Keatley also plays Ben, the main character in the movie. And the guy who plays the director in the ‘documentary’ is in fact the director of the movie. Have I lost you yet? The movie is about a man who sets out to find his biological parents. The search takes him to Dungeness, which honestly looks like the end of the earth. The movie drags us into the suspense of finding Ben’s real family. In the end what he finds is a different definition of what a real family is. I hesitate to say much else because spoilers will truly spoil this one. The title “For Grace” refers to Ben’s baby. The baby is played by a baby whose real name is Grace and the actress who plays the baby’s mother is really the baby’s mother. One member of the audience said after watching the film she felt “emotionally manipulated.” The rest of us just felt we’d watched a really good movie.

The Commune

Nobody killed anybody and nobody committed suicide. But when a middle-aged Danish couple with a teenage daughter decided, after inheriting a house that was too big for just them, to start a commune, no one really lived happily ever after. It’s Europe and I think it’s the 60’s based on what was on the TV newscasts, so everybody smoked. I think the commune turned them all into chain smokers. People started sleeping with people they shouldn’t have been sleeping with, someone lost their job because they couldn’t deal with the drama in the house, and not everybody marked off the beers that they consumed the way they were supposed to. It especially sucked for the teenage girl. About the best adjusted commune member was the guy who picked everything up that his housemates left on the floor and burned it all. No room for clutter in a commune. This is a movie that makes you just agonize over the life choices that the main characters make. Will someone come to their senses? No, not really. This one was far from my favorite of all the films I watched this week.

Brimstone & Glory

Think the running of the bulls is insane? You should see the burning of the bulls. The place is Tultepec, Mexico, a place where just about everybody with a job is busy making fireworks. A place where the candle on a kid’s confirmation cake turns out to be a sparkler that shoots up to the ceiling. It is on the day of the festival of San Juan de Dios, the patron saint of fireworks makers, that the bulls are rolled out They appear to be made of some sort of plaster or paper mache attached to a wooden frame. They’re the size of garbage trucks, brightly and intricately painted and stuffed with fireworks. The guys at the controls, and they appear to be all guys, light the fireworks and push and pull the bull through the main street with the rockets’ red glare shooting out in every direction. Did I mention that the streets are packed with people, seemingly with someone standing on every square foot of space? It apparently is some sort of badge of honor to come home with a scar or two. The combat scenes from most Hollywood war movies don’t look as scary as this. The filmmakers even show the army of EMTs getting they’re last minute instructions. “Drunks and shouters go last.” And there is an uncomfortable sight or two at the first aid tent. My guess is that as a short documentary feature (67 minutes) it will be hard to catch this one on a big screen except at a film festival. But a big screen is a must because the glory is in the sights and sounds.

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See more reviews of Monclair Film Festival screening here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged documentary, film, film reviews, For Grace, Lost in Paris, Montclair, Montclair Film Festival, movies, The Commune, Tultepec | 7 Comments