Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

I've always listened to audio late at night. As a kid, I would flip the dial of my tiny boombox  and listen to whatever weird audio oddities I could find. I was never content with listening to the average music that saturated the FM bands, so I often would switch over to the AM dial to find suitable alternatives. I have written before about playing pool and listening to the radio while always searching for something interesting. Other times I would record myself talking or intersperse my dialogue with snippets from the radio and television and listen to them over and over again. I particularly loved recording dialogue from old television shows on Nick At Nite. Sometimes I even recorded full episodes and listened to them. It's sad that I never found that many old time radio shows. My great aunt Alice had a ham radio, and I remember loving when she would go on and find people from other countries and places talking. I knew nothing about numbers stations at that time, but I re...

“The reality of what we really are is often times found in the small snips, way down at the bottom of things.” - Jean Shepherd I watched Bob Clark's  Christmas Story (1983)   for the first time on TBS, years before TNT started broadcasting the film twenty-four hours a day in 1997. I soon became an obsessive fan of the film, watching it over and over again every Christmas. Now I probably watch it once a year, but its lessons and humor have affected my life significantly, and I quote the film more than I should. I started reading Jean Shepherd's short stories and listening to his old WOR radio show. Many of these have been archived on the internet spanning a period from the early 50s to the late 70s.  According to lore, Shep usually told his stories without a script, ad-libbing about certain characters and scenarios, and commentating on culture and society.  I particularly identify with his stories of the Midwest because I grew up there fifty years later, b...