Annuals And Perennials
by Sean Carolan

As of today's entry, Altrok has reached the age of a single year. We've run 170 articles (counting this one) and one page or another within the site has been touched over 16,000 times. Not bad for no promotion, no budget...nothing but an interesting voice and an attitude, really.
 
If you guessed it's been an experiment, you were right. Yours truly is nothing more than a pundit, as qualified to say what I have to say as the guy they hired as a military advisor at Fox News who'd really only been to boot camp. Okay, maybe a little more so, but not much.
 
I do, however, have the ability to sense manipulation, and that's probably the thing that started me on the Altrok soapbox in the first place. Radio stations are being manipulated by conglomerates, musicians manipulated by research, consumers and artists manipulated by middlemen, and the ongoing structural twist and groan of dubious mathematics being used to shore up arguments that try to convice us that fewer choices are better, really.
 
Still, I've also rediscovered the thrill of finding and evangelizing things that have impressed me over this past year. For every old stalwart that resurfaced triumphantly (New Order, Elvis Costello and the Chamelions come to mind) there was a new voice worthy of praise (Seedling, Pete Yorn and the Dismemberment Plan, to name a few more.)
 
I must also thank everyone that has kept the fire lit over the year, even when the winds of September threatened to extinguish it, and so my hat is off (if, indeed, it was ever on) to Lorraine Doran, Stiffy Biceptz, Shaun Nelson, Jeff Raspe, Mark Wintle, Rich Robinson, Jennifer Moore Keating, Kerry Nolan, Chris Sheft, Mike Sauter, James Denning, Jason Ulanet, the One True Tami Yaches, and especially to Robin Pastorio-Newman, whose clockwork intensity shows no sign of letting up. She's spending some time devoting a corner of the web to the creative folks that have at one time or another stomped through New Brunswick, NJ, and those efforts are coming to fruition at Poor Impulse Control. You are invited.
 
As I said, it's an experiment, and there's no reason to discontinue an experiment that's going well. The domain's been re-upped for another year, and I anticipate be able to keep it running comfortably, so no need to worry about it going away.
 
(The streaming audio is another thing entirely, since it's kind of beholden to Live365's good graces, and they're fighting tooth-and-mail to make sure that goodwill doesn't run dry on May 21, which is imminent if the CARP proposals go through. Go to Live365 for details, or see the very lucid discussion at WFMU, or view the whole shootin' match at SaveInternetRadio.org. If CARP succeeds, Internet Radio will become completely divorced from the music industry at best, and it will more than likely disappear entirely.)
 
So, summarizing: Altrok just keeps rolling along. More crankiness coming tomorrow (and for the foreseeable future, actually.)
 

©2002 Sean Carolan