The Los Angeles fires, blazing with apocalyptic fury, prompted me to do something I hadn’t done in years: dust off one of my radios and tune into live local news. The live broadcast brought with it not just updates but an epiphany. Two things, in fact. First, I realized that deep down, I despise my streaming devices—their algorithm-driven content is like an endless conveyor belt of lukewarm leftovers, a numbing backdrop of music and chatter that feels canned, impersonal, and incurably distant. Worst of all, these devices have pushed me into a solipsistic bubble, a navel-gazing universe where I am the sole inhabitant. Streaming has turned my listening into an isolating, insidious form of solitary confinement, and I haven’t even noticed.
When I flipped on the radio in my kitchen, the warmth of its live immediacy hit me like a long-lost friend. My heart ached as memories of radio’s golden touch from my youth came flooding back. As a nine-year-old, after watching Diahann Carroll in Julia and Sally Field in The Flying Nun, I’d crawl into bed, armed with my trusty transistor radio and earbuds, ready for the night to truly begin. Tuned to KFRC 610 AM, I’d be transported into the shimmering world of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” and The Friends of Distinction’s “Grazing in the Grass.” The knowledge that thousands of others in my community were swaying to the same beats made the experience electric, communal, alive—so unlike the deadening isolation of my curated streaming playlists.
And then there was talk radio. Live conversations on KGO 810 AM with Jim Eason and Ronn Owens held a spellbinding charm. In the 70s, my mother and I would sit in the kitchen, enraptured, as they dissected controversies and gossip with the vigor of philosophers at a cocktail party. It was conversation as an art form, communal and vital, like cavemen telling stories around the fire. Contrast that with my podcasts: cherry-picked for my biases, carefully calibrated to affirm my tastes, locking me in an echo chamber so snug it could double as a straightjacket.
The fires aren’t just devastating to the city—they’ve exposed the cracks in my own longing for connection. The nostalgic ache sent me down a rabbit hole of online research, hunting for a high-performance radio, convinced that it might resurrect the magic of my youth. But even as I clicked through reviews of antennas and AM clarity, a voice nagged at me: was this really about finding a better radio, or was it just another futile errand from a man in his sixties trying to outrun time? Could a supercharged radio transport me back to those transistor nights and kitchen conversations, or was I just tuning into the static of my own melancholia?
Cinemorphosis 
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