Carl Blare

By removing the ‘p’ from Part 15 you are left with the word ‘art’. And indeed radio broadcasting is a medium of several art forms.

By removing the ‘p’ from Part 15 you are left with the word ‘art’. And indeed radio broadcasting is a medium of several art forms.

Technical engineering may be a science at its core, but most engineers show their artistry by doing neat and clever engineering that presents the science in a very attractive way.

Radio programming is a dual art, in that simply choosing a string of appealing shows for the daily schedule is “the programmer’s art,” and doing a smart, talented, pleasant show for a happy audience is the art form that made radio popular from the beginning.

Yet the wording in a sentence can be short circuited, like when I called radio itself an art form, to which my father rightly said, “Radio is not an art form.” I was reduced to stuttering “Ya, but..,ah,…” attempts to explain what I really meant. I may have said, “You know what I mean.”

But I still haven’t gotten to the point of this blog, which is “the life span of art.” Take a great painting, the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, for example. The Mona Lisa is one great painting that is still one great painting every day and every year. The artist was not required to produce another great painting every week or every day. His kind of art is infinite.

By sharp contrast the radio program art is anti-infinite, it is finite. Even as the radio program airs it is coming into being and disappearing every second. It is timely. It is coming and going. You cannot hang it on the wall for permanent display nor schedule it 24-hours a day forever. That is where I rebel.

Every time I produce my programs, Blare OnAir and The Low Power Hour, I want each one to be THE ONE, which can stand for all time as the penultimate version. Almost no radio programs in history achieve the status of “THE ONE,” with the rare exception being Orson Welles WAR OF THE WORLDS, although it’s reputation is bigger than the show itself, which is not that easy to sit through anymore. Some program series are somewhat celebrated, including The Jack Benny Show, Amos ‘n Andy and…. it’s a short list.

Radio program creation funnels rapidly into a sink hole. Like sand through an hour-glass. No genius has ever been able to avoid disappearing down there.

Lesson learned: wear mining gear when tampering with radio programming. Maybe you’ll be able to climb back out of the hole you get into.