Like pirate radio itself: worth tuning in to, but in the end the signal’s too weak.
A journalist looks back on her adventures in the outlaw world of low-power radio during the ’90s.
Carpenter, now an editor at the Los Angeles Times, was a receptionist at a San Francisco law firm in 1995 when her yen to explore radio and a lack of access to legitimate airtime led her to found the pirate station KPBJ in her bedroom. Her timing was just right: The Telecommunications Act of 1996 led to massive consolidation that placed the airwaves in the hands of a few powerful conglomerates such as Clear Channel. Carpenter makes a strong case for the righteousness of her cause—creating an island of “people’s radio” in a sea of mind-numbing corporate broadcasting. She later moved to LA’s bohemian Silver Lake district, where she started up another low-power in-home operation, KBLT; that station ultimately became a popular local phenomenon employing dozens of unpaid DJs before the FCC shuttered it in the late ’90s. She is adept at depicting the exhilaration of running an illicit radio operation on a sliver of appropriated bandwidth and the clandestine machinations required to remain one step ahead of the FCC. Her descriptions of her travails riding herd on an unruly pack of volunteers working out of her cramped home are especially well-observed and amusing. However, Carpenter never effectively delineates her transformation from curious radio aspirant to firebrand pirate zealot. Other than an ill-defined restlessness, her motives for plunging into the hazardous demimonde she chose for herself remain somewhat mystifying; she admits to an initial ignorance of and lack of real interest in the offbeat music that became the mainstay of her underground stations. The author also exhibits a tin ear for convincing dialogue, and a potentially colorful cast of Bay Area and LA radio misfits is rendered flatly in her hands. It’s easier to admire Carpenter’s spunk and spirit than her skill as a memoirist.
Like pirate radio itself: worth tuning in to, but in the end the signal’s too weak.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-2988-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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