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