Saturday, April 02, 2005

Morphic resonance redux?

In a previous post, I explored some odd semantic connections in my life at the time and linked them to the idea of morphic resonance, an idea I still don't know much about. Well anyway, the connections keep happening. This, one strangely, involves dead Philadelphia broadcasters. One morning on the way to work, I was listening to the WMGK morning show, hosted by John Dibella, former king of Philly's morning zoo on WMMR. King Dibella had long ago been dethroned by shock jock Howard Stern. Somewhere along the line WMGK changed formats from soft rock to classic rock. Anyway, I'm not a fan of Dibella, never was, but there I was listening for five minutes as the car stepped its way out of West Chester from stoplight to stoplight. Dibella mentioned that his former morning zoo sidekick "Mark the Shark" had died recently. A couple days later I googled "Mark the Shark" and found a site I had been to before, when researching the literacy show "Operation Alphabet": the site is called Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia, and it offers many nostalgic treasures for those of us who grew up on local shows like Sally Starr, Chief Halftown, Captain Noah, and Wee Willie Weber. Anyway, on the front page of their site they had a tribute to the recently deceased Doctor Donald T. Rose, a popular DJ in the 60's and voiceover host of after-school cartoons on channel 48. I browsed the site a little more and discovered that Chief Halftown had passed on a few years back. The next morning, I was listening to WXPN's morning show, and they announced that Annie Haslam, diva of the classical prog rock band Renaissance, was going to be performing in the area. A little googling turned up her website: anniehaslam.com, at which I discovered she'll be performing at the Media Theater, is a breast cancer survivor, and has taken to painting abstract pictures that conjure O'Keefian tissues and tendrils, like shimmering, mythic vulvas and labial folds. Her site also mentioned a tribute to the deceased Philadelphia DJ Ed Sciacki, who used to be on WIOQ and was a keeper of classic rock and prog rock fires in our area. I hadn't known he'd passed away either. Later in the day, I was listening to Howard Eskin on the sportstalk station, and he incongrously brought up the death of Dr. Donald T. Rose, an absolute non sequitur interjected between talk of the Sixers and the Phillies. In my lit classes, we had covered Tennyson's "Tears, idle Tears", a poem about nostalgia for the "days that are no more". Its last line "O Death in Life, the days that are no more" might apply to memories of local radio and tv personalities, who were quietly dropping out of my life. Rest in Peace!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home