Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 2, Summer 2002 | Page 7

Introduction In this second volume of our lucky 13th issue, Popular Culture Review brings its readership article topics gleaned, as usual, from a wide range of mediums — television, radio, film, the written word, and the world of cyberspace. Within these pages we meet up with Sherlock Holmes, Walt Whitman, Gen X ’ers (aka “Bridgers”), celebrated radio talk show and television news hosts, Audrey^*^ the on-line family organizer, and several memoir writers. We also re-visit that popular monster-thrashing Buffy the Vampire and the cinematic theorist Andre Bazin whose film reviews were translated in volume 13, no. 1. Interestingly, this issue seems relatively “light,” politically speaking, with the most serious articles addressing the various spins taken by policy elites on the Oklahoma City bombing; the con trast in reactions to underage drinking and violence in our high schools among “Boomers” and “Bridgers”; and differing views on the dying process from three male writers suffering from AIDS. In keeping with the overall tone of the issue, we open with Laura DeLind’s amusing warning that Americans just might be “slowly boiling ourselves alive” with an ever-quickening pace and unhealthy over dependence on the technological. Reading her terse diatribe, “Beware: Breakfast with Audrey Is Not Dinner with Andr6,” I looked fondly at the eclectic “en ergy” of my own “family news center” — the refrigerator — with its haphazardlypositioned notices, photos, amateur artwork, and cluttered calendar. Hopefully DeLind’s article will remind readers to embrace the “spirit and contradiction” that is diversely created on refrigerator doors across the country and to stop and take more than a moment to savor our wonderfully human dis-order. The included selections in the medium of radio are informative and inspiring. In “Sherlock Holmes Meets Art Bell: Masters of Knowledge at the Fin-de-Si^cle,” Steve Bailey juxtaposes two unique seekers of “truth”: the fictional detective of the 19th century, Sherlock Holmes, and am radio personality Art Bell, whose show is broadcast from here in the Southern Nevada desert. Bailey moves back and forth between Holmes’ (and consequently, Doyle’s) modernist rationality and Bell’s postmodern irrationality, ultimately turning both labels on their highfalutin’ heads. In “ T Feel Powerful’: African-American Community Radio in Dallas, Texas,” J.M. Dempsey and Meta G. Carstarphen provide a laudable portrait of another am radio personality, the Dallas-Fort Worth area morning host Willis Johnson. Johnson claims that the purpose of his show “.. .is to serve the Black community, 100% the Black community.” Dempsey and Carstarphen studied approximately 14 hours of recordings of the radio station and applied concepts from the social learning theory of behaviorist Albert Bandura to explore how positive behaviors are amplified by association with radio listening. As the authors note, while many studies have