Escaped Notice

DJ Rynk's Best Albums of 2025

2025-12-08T09:25:00.001-06:00

The indie musicians of 2025 hear everything and will play anything. Their art helped make sense of a crazy year. Every weekend I was running through Humboldt Park to the soundtrack of another new release—prep work for my morning DJ shift and CHIRP's featured album rotation. Thank you, CHIRP Radio sustainers, for keeping me steeped in music. These albums I kept on replay. Big Ugly by Fust

Legendary producer Boyd's book traces rhythm's global roots

2025-09-05T23:47:00.020-05:00

Joe Boyd is not a complete unknown. At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Bob Dylan went electric, Boyd was behind the sound board. The next year, with the British Invasion still raging, he was in London as an A&R assistant for Elektra Records and running a club where Pink Floyd gigged. Boyd went on to produce albums for Chris Blackwell's Island and his own Hannibal label, moving from Nick

Painting a picture of Mom

2025-01-31T02:39:00.027-06:00

Catherine Rynkiewicz, 1931-2025 Catie Rynkiewicz in her art studio is surrounded by her work, including a portrait of her husband, Walter. Every so often, Mom asked when I would start painting again. I had studied art through my freshman year in college, which convinced me that writing was an easier mess to clean up than drafting or painting. But Catie Rynkiewicz adopted art late in life like

Gonna be a long walk home

2024-11-08T05:22:00.008-06:00

Arenas are not made for rock bands or rock fans. I followed a 16-hour work day with a trip to Toronto for my last arena show, and two and three rows ahead of me were eight people, all standing. The one directly in my line of sight for the stage was a full head taller, singing and pumping his fist at the stage. Good for him! I just leaned into the people in front of me, who were doing more

College radio with more asssignments

2024-10-12T00:37:00.014-05:00

Is it a second childhood if it starts in college? The community station CHIRP Radio has a robust playlist, analyzed and reported to the North American College & Community Top 200 chart, and a robust DJ database of programming notes. While reviving my student radio experience as an unpaid DJ, I contribute album reviews to the studio database the Wisconsin campus station never had. Aspiring media

Caution: CHIRP Radio DJ in training

2024-08-15T19:50:00.040-05:00

I'm a disc jockey in training at CHIRP Radio, an independent music station streaming at chirpradio.org and broadcasting on Chicago's North Side at 107.1 FM. So music is taking up more space in my brain. On Your Sunday Sonic Sundowner Aug. 11 and 18, I am grasshopper to Craig Reptile's kung fu master. Time is carving me, and I must shape my playlists according to my true nature. What would you

Long live Lisagor

2024-06-02T21:00:00.074-05:00

Presidential aide Tom Johnson (from left), Peter Lisagor and Lyndon Johnson. Peter Lisaor's breezy Chicago Daiily News writing helped establish Chicago’s mid-century reputation for muscular, no-nonsense journalism. Peter Lisagor died in 1976, just before I graduated from j-school at Wisconsin. As the Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Daily News, his political reporting was syndicated

Conversational AI in Marketing: A Calculated Guess at PR’s Future

2023-04-07T22:45:00.036-05:00

Joost Crop / Unsplash photoAI chatbots like ChatGPT won’t replace content strategists but will make marketers’ work more efficient and distinctive. A few of us recall when calculators were not allowed in school and we had to learn how to use a slide rule. Keeping track of decimal points in our head wasn’t as simple as reading from a Radio Shack dot-matrix display, which made chemistry class a

'Ink Master' Draws Life Lessons

2022-03-03T22:18:00.007-06:00

Mentors and apprentices make their mark in the 'Ink Master' tattoo contest when they put their clients and each other first. Which is more manipulative, reality TV or cable news? I've made my choice. I'm binge-watching a decade of "Ink Master." Don't judge. "Ink Master" is a tattoo competition. A dozen or so tattoo artists are thrown into a Brooklyn loft (or more likely a New Jersey film studio

Sugary sweet success

2022-02-01T21:15:00.007-06:00

Nerds candy boosts Itasca plant's fortunes Reporters once might have been drawn to newspaper work by the printing machinery rumbling a few floors beneath their desks. For sure, I couldn't resist touring a factory. As a Chicago Sun-Times business reporter in 1984, I wrote about not only healthcare innovations like MRI scanners and PPOs, but also candy breakthroughs like the Everlasting Gobstopper

What does a Google E-A-T?

2021-11-01T00:00:00.551-05:00

How editors can feed the beast Who is your most important reader? Business editors imagine it's a company's chief executive, or the people desperately trying to understand what the CEO is doing. Investors, business partners and especially potential business partners hang on the CEO's every word. Crain's Chicago Business used to advertise itself as "Where the Who's Who read what's what," till

Vacation in the time of COVID

2021-10-01T00:00:00.127-05:00

It’s a tough time to travel.Once upon a time, humans actually traveled to meet people and see things for themselves. Now tourists want to get back in circulation, but the covid virus had the idea first. We’re ready to bust of the house, but wherever we go the residents aren’t quite ready to bust out of the house to greet them. That leaves Michigan, with its scenic roadside attractions and high

Just another crime non-statistic

2021-09-02T00:00:00.091-05:00

Most crime goes unreported. The reasons remain unexamined. No one wants to be another statistic, but that's how the police police. Chicago keeps a tally of where crimes are called in, and stations more cops there. Only 2 out of every 5 violent crimes are told to police. But any attempt to prevent crime has to start somewhere. Cops follow where the data leads. We know most crime is hidden from

A subscription there always is

2021-08-01T00:01:00.004-05:00

We pay a bundle for entertainment, but not for news. And we get what we pay for.How many entertainment subscriptions do you have? My cable TV package is just big enough to get the White Sox, plus more than enough reminders of the channels I can't watch. But wait, there's more: Netflix, even though I can't really chill Amazon Prime, because shipping is free MLB TV, filling the

Tribune slow jams the news

2021-07-01T00:00:00.003-05:00

Tribune Tower is converting to condos, and the Tribune is converting to hedge fund control.The Big Buyout: Everything Must Go! Reading the Chicago Tribune is hard these days because all the columnists are writing the same thing. No, not that Trump really won the election. They're posting farewell columns. Dahleen Glanton, John Kass, Steve Johnson, Phil Rosenthal, Mary Schmich, Heidi Stevens, Eric

A year for the books

2020-12-30T09:00:00.013-06:00

The novel survived the coronavirus. Reading habits mutated. Have you caught the bug? Mom called to ask for audiobook recommendations; her reading habit has not dimmed despite lost sight. What have I read lately? If I recall sunlight on the page from a bus window, it was not this year. Books were important in my commute, timed so I could take a seat and turn pages. The pandemic lockdown seemed

A Blatz from the past

2020-04-17T06:53:00.010-05:00

I'm from Milwaukee, and I ought to know. Some thoughts on negotiation need writing down, because that's how agreements work. Agreements end not with a handshake but a signature. I learned

The journal and the journalist

2019-11-02T07:41:00.004-05:00

President Wilson looks on from my grandfather's 1915 journal. Taking note of my note-taking helped improve my outlook. A lifetime of writing and I might yet get it right.