http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/fashion/06POSS.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
The New York Times
January 6, 2008
Possessed
Comic Relief via Shortwave
By DAVID COLMAN
“THE great joke of our era is that this is called the information
age,” said the actor and humorist Harry Shearer. In other words, if
information is free, you get what you pay for. Since childhood, Mr.
Shearer has tried to get the genuine article, even if that has
meant spending a little time and effort to do so.
It was at the peak of radio’s popularity that Harry Shearer was
born in 1943 in Los Angeles. He tuned in quickly: not only was he a
child actor whose first gig was on Jack Benny’s radio show (“I was
passing as a child,” he said), but he had a feverish fascination
with radio itself. As a boy, he looked down on the Art Deco carved-
wood radio console in his family’s living room, preferring the more
sensitive RCA model in his room (“an early vomit-green plastic
radio”), which he fiddled with nightly like a junior Marconi.
“I would try and find the most distant station possible,” he said.
“I knew something happened when it left Hollywood and then came
bouncing back from across the country a half a second later. It
sounded weirdly magical to me. If there was stuff in the air, I
wanted to receive it.”
Today the vomit-green RCA exists only in the Smithsonian of his
memory. A dedicated hobbyist in the radio tradition, Mr. Shearer
has gone through 40 to 50 radios: a Hallicrafters table-size
shortwave, an early Sony ICF and countless others, big, small,
portable and pocket-size.
He even forsook the exploding world of television in the ’60s for
the increasingly anarchic world of radio. “I never saw ‘I Dream of
Jeannie,’ ” he said. “I think of it as an enhanced childhood.” Even
today, though he writes and acts as prolifically as he always has,
it is his voice (of a dozen or so characters on “The Simpsons”)
that is probably most familiar to us.
Although he gets romantic talking about his lifelong love of the
medium, it is always his latest radio that gets pride of place in
his heart and on his desk.
“I didn’t call any of them ‘Steve,’ or get attached to them as an
object,” he said in the anchorman deadpan for which he’s known. “If
they stopped working, I didn’t keep them.”
For some eight years now, his flame has been a Sangean, model
ATS-909, a digital shortwave radio. The 909 may not have the reach
of fancier shortwave radios, but for Mr. Shearer’s purposes, it is
nearly perfect. It is simple enough to involve little in the way of
instructions, yet allows for the obsessive tinkering and tuning
that is the hallmark of the radio hobbyist. (An optional 30-foot
shortwave antenna boosts it to another level of sensitivity.)
It’s not the most attractive radio on the market, but Mr. Shearer
does not care. “We have a Tivoli, we have a Bose, all the famous
radios,” he said, ticking off high-design brands. “This is my
companion. I’ve always been more about functionality over looks.
This has all the buttons I need and not much else. There is one
that says ‘Page,’ and I’ve never pressed that. I don’t know what
would happen.”
Though he loved searching out new music back in the ’60s, he has
settled comfortably into the armchair of the fanatical global-news
enthusiast, for which the Sangean is ideal. Though the BBC stopped
broadcasting shortwave to North America in 2001, a move that still
pains shortwave fans, he has figured out how to receive the
transmissions on his own radio via the Internet.
Getting his news from the most reliable (and often most remote)
sources, Mr. Shearer said, gives him great satisfaction. As even a
cursory overview at the Information Age will tell you, nothing is
really free: you pay the price when you don’t get the real story.
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