With a huge backlog of playlists accumulated while the posting mechanism was broken (several months now), it may be a while before we’re current. We may go ahead and install a completely new site in the hope of preventing a recurrence (or, as 99% of the populace now apparently believe is the word, “reoccurrence”). Don’t let it throw you! For now, though, we’re in catch-up mode.

Eric Felten has a splendid piece on the abhorrent farce of an “all-star quartet” going through the motions at the inauguration last month. I find it pretty dang hard to maintain any respect for these eminent folks, but my distress isn’t going to make a dent in the cash that just keeps rolling in.

Classics without walls has joined the estimable roster of programs archived at the estimable kusf-archives.com. Whether the show itself is estimable is known only to you. Check out the variety of KUSF New Music programming as well as a sampling of cultural shows, all characterized by a high degree of nift.

Sorry about the backed-up playlists and podcasts, folks. We’re working on clearing the backlog and hope to be back up to date soon. They don’t call me the Phineas Gage of Bay Area classical radio for nothing.

Meanwhile, for those keeping score at home, it’s the third Monday of the month, meaning it’s Renée’s solo show tonight. Tune in for what is usually the most coherent broadcast of the month . . . .

the Q review is now available as an RSS feed to which you can subscribe. If you’re already familiar with RSS, you know that a feed subscription – in your browser, your mail program, or a program created specifically for RSS – will keep an eye out for Ken’s reviews and fetch them for you whenever a new one appears. And if you weren’t already familiar with RSS, well, now you are – and Google Reader is one easy way to get started.

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You also have options to subscribe to our playlists, to the podcasts, or to the whole classics without walls site over there in the “subscribe” section on the right.

. . . for being the first reporter in the entire Chronicle organization actually to report on the Bonneville/Entercom trade. Three and a half weeks late, and in a special-interest section of the entertainment throwaway, but at least it’s actual reportage. Apart, that is, from its merely repeating what the gossip column already “broke” with a couple of added facts and quotes thrown in.

Garchik noted that “Entercom’s top guy plays violin and is said to be classically minded” (emphasis mine), while Fong-Torres quotes Bill Lueth thus: “I hear that the founder of Entercom is an arts lover” (ditto). I guess hearsay is as good as news. I suppose we could wait around for someone at the Chron to pick up the phone and do some actual reporting about this mysterious fiddler, but methinks it will be a long wait.

My, but this is wearisome. Thank God I’m not a reporter; I wouldn’t know what to do with all that spare time.

By the way, I hear that KDFC has begun to acknowledge the station’s sale on the air. Thank God I’m not a reporter, or I’d have to ascertain this by way of some extended listening. <shudder>

Oh, and News Flash: Bill Lueth also sez “This could mean the end [sic] of classical music radio [sic] in San Francisco.” One can only hope.

Three weeks of non-coverage and counting . . .

Well, well. Twelve days after the fact the Chron has finally reported – after a fashion – on the Bonneville/Entercom story, the absence of which from Bay Area reportage has so perplexed us. The splendid Leah Garchik has a small item about KDFC today (01-31, p. E8 in the print edition, on line here, down toward the bottom – God forbid the Chron should have to go to the effort of tagging individual items). Curiously, it lacks any reference to the seller, or to the other two stations being traded away. Still, Ms Garchik gets the Tin Star with Choking-Doberman Cluster for being the first to break the Chron’s silence on this story.

Kinda reminds one (one of a certain age, at least) of the days when the real news would show up as an aside in Caen’s column. Ms Garchik’s column is the closest the Chron can muster to a regular Caen-style “gossip” – a highly inadequate term for what the brilliant but astonishingly nasty Caen actually practiced, by the way – feature; its preoccupation with those most boring of creatures, local politicos and the class of hangers-on who have replaced “socialites,” is no fault of Ms Garchik’s, but of the town she has to cover. And it features the brilliant “Public eavesdropping” item, which resurrects the premise of Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies (”Guarantee: All Dialogue Is Reported Verbatim”) with the additional virtues of concision and community participation.

At any rate, I prefer to assume that she found the story herself; I’d hate to think the editors (finally tipped off by a certain letter, perhaps?) are using her as cover for their own lousy performance on this one. So congratulations, Leah Garchik – coverage at last!

Well, at first it seemed like fun just waiting around to see how long it would take for our clue-crippled local rag to lift its slumbering head and groggily mention a major radio deal affecting (a) the #2 station in its “market” and (b) the #9 station, which also happens to be the top-rated “classical” station in the country. But as the days wear on, it becomes drearily apparent that this is simply going to become a tale not told by an idiot – or any idiot in town, it would seem – and it’s less & less fun, and ever more an exercise in open-mouthed astonishment.

Yes indeed, as of this writing, fully six days after it was announced, you may search the on-line presence of not only the Chron, but the Examiner, the Oakland Trib, and the local tabloids as well, for any hint of the swap that sends the unspeakable KDFC from the Mormons into the hands of Entercom – in the very same week that the latter was all over the news as owners of a not-quite-as-inadvertently-homicidal-as-they-might-wish Sacramento station. Is there any satisfaction in what amounts to scooping the entire local “news” apparatus? Hardly, unless one counts vertigo, nausea, and brain freeze as forms of satisfaction.

So for those who haven’t been paying attention because they assume the crack reporting teams at their local papers can be trusted to do it for them, note that Bonneville is trading two San Francisco giants of aural anaesthesia, #2 KOIT and #9 KDFC, and a minor-leaguer, #20-or-thereabouts KMAX, for three big Seattle stations and four in Cincinnati.

I guess it shows that KDFC has been more effective than anyone suspected, since it seems to have succeeded in rendering the entire San Francisco media establishment comatose. Oh well – I guess death by a steady diet of numbingly third-rate sewing-machine music and smarmy condescension is less painful than death by water.

UPDATE Saturday 01-27: Nine days and counting.

I rarely comment on stuff like this, but if you thought the brazen exploitation in Chevy’s “our country” truck ads was shameless, brace yourself for the polyphonic-Amen “IE7 is here” radio ads from Microsoft. Don’t bother asking “how do these people sleep at night?” – or “look at themselves in the mirror,” or any of the other figures traditionally spoken by those who retain the ability to be astonished at the depths to which human beings can sink. Quite easily they sleep, you can be sure. These are The Hollow Men, the whisper of whose dried voices are indeed as

rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar