It’s probably the booze.
I mean, this is funnier than it has any right to be. —Assuming, of course, you know who Galactus is in the first place. Or Norrin Rad. Or Uatu—no, wait—this one. (They do not pay me enough to explain this stuff. They don’t pay anyone enough, really. —Original link thanks to Andrew Ducker.)
IMHO ;-}
It’s struck me, the following dictum, over the years of desultory Usenet posting and the occasional spot of blog-comment punditry, and while I’m not prepared to go to the barricades for it (nor am I prepared to state definitively that no one else has ever made the same observation), I do think it offers a pithy, pleasingly counterintuitive insight into the finer points of starving trolls and by far the best way to maintain one’s blood pressure (to say nothing of sanity, or dignity) in the hair-trigger world of internet flamethrowing debate. If taken to heart, I could see its ruthless herd-instinct logic inspiring a decorous wave of prudent moderation throughout the blogosphere and—dare I say it?—beyond:
Whoever gets in the last word loses.
(What you have to do is take the long view for just a moment: think of coming across a heated do-or-die comments thread a week or so after everyone’s stopped their thunderous two-fisted Fiskings and brontologic perorations extempore to see the last post hanging there at the tail end of it all, alone, unanswered, a call with no response, much less a breathtaking put-down stunning all and sundry onlookers into awed silence than it is the hollowed-out rhetoric of a soapbox speechifier who winds it all up to the applause of crickets; everyone else having long since wandered off to gawk and squabble over the next new thing. Whoever gets in the last word loses.)
The case for Appalachia.
So Mr. President, you have all the elements you need: weapons of mass destruction, a nearly third world enemy, potential terrorists, someone to call evil, and an easy path to victory. Now all you have to do is attack. And please, do it soon. We need the reparations, better schools, better infrastructure, universal healthcare, and a fair share in the wealth of our own resources.
You also promised Iraq democracy. We could use that here as well.
—from “Mr. President, Please Attack Appalachia,” posted over at Common Dreams last week, via largehearted boy (who also led me to—well, hear for yourself).
O, eldritch Godwin!
It’s come up twice in separate conversations over the past few days, which means it goes up here, darn it. (“What I tell you two times gets blogged.”) So: that alternate history where H.P. Lovecraft gets elected president and invades Canada, among other things.
(Written by John J. Reilly, whose crankery I’m finding quite endearing this fine, damp evening, despite the inevitable cocked eyebrow or three.)
Eat the economic interests.
Mulling over what it is I’ve come away from Ucluelet with, and how best to trot it forth and show its paces (a pre-emptive shorter Long Story on this one: “Victoria, eh; Ucluelet, wow; Vancouver Island, big”); in the meanwhile, go check out Pedantry, who’s been bloggered; today’s (28 April) entry has links to a Naomi Klein article on workers in Argentina getting fed up with capital saying they can’t work and doing it for themselves, and a timeline from Workers Power Global which indicates this has been going on for over a year.
“Life and physical integrity have no supremacy over economic interests,” wrote the judge who evicted the Brukman clothing factory Klein focusses on. How’s that for a rallying cry? —Me, I’m going to go dig up my copy of the bootleg Tintin Breaking Free, and remind myself to think utopian every now and again.
Talk amongst yourselves.
I’ll be back Sunday. Or maybe Monday. —If you need me, I’ll be in Ucluelet.
They say, everything could be replaced.
Nina Simone is dead, alas.
Alabama’s got me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam!
I think this awkward, broken translation of Pravda’s obituary says it best, in a 7.30-in-the-morning first-cup-of-coffee sort of way:
Why are cigars lit at a match? They are lit with a strong and natural flame of a match which unwillingly slips from under professional hands; the flame sputters, resists, envelops rolled tobacco leaves; it gives the leaves the passion and the flame. The head of a match falls off in a second. It is only in hands of a professional that a match lights straight away.
Mostly because she isn’t here to say it herself anymore.
Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong there
I’ve even stopped believing in prayer
Don’t tell me
I tell you
Me and my people just about due
I’ve been there so I know
They keep on saying “Go slow!”
This is what a material witness looks like.
The Portland Bill of Rights Defense Committee links to a letter from Mike Hawash. (Citigroup as yet walks free, having paid a miniscule fine.)
Twisty. Little. Different.
At End Of Road
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
>which end of the road is it?
I don’t understand the question.
>I mean, if this is where the road ends, did I walk down the road to get here? How else would I get to the end of the road? Or is it the other end of the road?
Why does it matter?
>I don’t know if I should walk up the road, which might be repeating myself, or walk past the end of the road and see if it goes somewhere.
It doesn’t matter which end of the road it is, and you didn’t come from anywhere—you’re just here.
>how is that possible?
Possible isn’t important in this game.
>Oh.
Which reminds me of a bunch of other stuff I mean to catch up on when I’ve got the time.
Ground zero.
Boing Boing showed me this amazing interview that Paul Schmelzer conducted with Siva Vaidhyanathan (just added to the linchinography to the right there). It’s about 10,000 things that are really one awful and all-important thing: the swirling morass of copyright and security and techonology law and regulation, recomplicating daily, that is inexorably enclosing the cultural commons, wiretapping the Zeitgeist, selling the collective unconscious by the pound. But enough shrill turgidity—it was reading this—
Schmelzer: The title of your book, then, takes on a new tenor when you think about how independent booksellers and librarians are shredding records to protect the privacy of readers and municipalities are voting not to enforce the Patriot Act. The Anarchist in the Library takes on a whole new cast.
Vaidhyanathan: For some reason, libraries have become the site of conflict. Libraries are perceived now as a den of terrorists and pornographers. And this is not only a misdescription of how libraries work in our lives, but I think ultimately also a very dangerous assumption. What we’re doing though is making librarians choose among their values. Librarians believe very strongly in recordkeeping and in maintaining archives. It’s part of the historical record; that’s half of what they do. But the other half of what they do is serve and protect their patrons. The federal government has made librarians choose between retaining records that might be useful, for instance in budgetary discussions not to mention historical research, and protecting their patrons, so their patrons don’t feel intimidated by the books they choose to read or by the potential of oversight of the books they choose to read. There are a lot of librarians around the country right now who are taking a very noble and strong stand against this situation, and I think we need to celebrate them and support them in this effort.
—that made this—
When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning flames 100 feet high were bursting from the windows I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines’ Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that “this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire”. I gave the map location, the precise name in Arabic and English. I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn’t an American at the scene and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.
There was a time when the Arabs said that their books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now they burn libraries in Baghdad. In the National Archives were not just the Ottoman records of the Caliphate, but even the dark years of the country’s modern history, handwritten accounts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, with personal photographs and military diaries,and microfiche copies of Arabic newspapers going back to the early 1900s.
But the older files and archives were on the upper floors of the library where petrol must have been used to set fire so expertly to the building. The heat was such that the marble flooring had buckled upwards and the concrete stairs that I climbedhad been cracked.
The papers on the floor were almost too hot to touch, bore no print or writing, and crumbled into ash the moment I picked them up. Again, standing in this shroud of blue smoke and embers, I asked the same question: why?
—take on a whole new awful context. The floor dropped out from under my feet again. “Libraries have become the site of conflict.” Oh, I see. Oh, I get it.
(No. Stop being overly literal. I am not proposing a direct, causal relationship. I do not think Bush took out a hit on the Iraq National Library and Archives to send a message to recalcitrant anarchist librarians who refuse to cooperate with the Attorney General and mp3-trading college students. But there is a connection. This—these ten thousand things that are one thing, really; these ill-written laws, this repugnant greed, this ignorance and contempt, this violence and the tolerance of that violence—this is what happens when you do not care about the commons. When you treat culture as merely a product. When you think of a book as just a unit to be moved. —Burn all you like; we’ll make more.)
Vaidhyanathan: Libraries are considered to be dangerous places and librarians are our heroes. This is something that we really have to emphasize. The library is also not just functionally important to communities all over the world, but a library itself is the embodiment of enlightenment values in all the best sense of that. A library is a temple to the notion that knowledge is not just for the elite and that access should be low cost if not free, that doors should be open. Investing in libraries monetarily, spritually, intellectually, legally is one of the best things we can do for our immediate state and for the life we hope we can build for the rest of the century.
Radio Free Portland.
I was a DJ for a while there. Street-legal and everything: Barry and “Jake Squid” and I, plus assorted various and sundry others, were in the mood back in 1992 or ’93 to do a spoof of a radio-soap-corporate-sponsor-variety-hour show: The Granny Applethorpe’s Fluid Hour of Power, said fluid being a snake-oil nostrum that could do anything, derived from some mysterious seepage from grandmothers everywhere. —Granny Applethorpe’s sponsored “The Cravingtons,” a weekly soap opera about a bunch of UMass Amherst inside jokes, as well as musical interludes and other stuff, the details of which escape me. There was some good or at least fun writing in it all, looking back on what doesn’t escape me with the benefit of rose-colored hindsight: Scott DiBerardino’s snappily brilliant commercial for Product (“It makes life adjective!”), say (and I would be remiss if I did not tag the sine qua nonpareil talents of Pete Fernandez, who wrote all the jingles and performed them single-handedly; I’ll be further remiss if I didn’t get his name right, geeze), or the outrageously tongue-twisting battle of inverted doubly and triply looped regressively ingressive super-duper Pig Latin battle that Barry and I mapped out (and then wrote out phonetically, so our cast wouldn’t kill us), and I still regret that we never got around to recording “Jake Squid’s” hilarious political commentary, Count Pointer-Point, which would have run something like this:
STENTORIOUS ANNOUNCER: And now, Count Pointer-Point, on the Bush Administration’s will-we or won’t-we stance towards Syria.
[Pause.]
COUNT POINTER-POINT: There! It’s right there! Jesus, what’s wrong with you! It’s right in front of you! Are you blind or something? Look! There it is!
Ah, youth. —We broadcast four episodes and got a fifth in the can (am I remembering this right, folks?) before the unremunerated strain killed it, but before we broadcast it, we had to get FCC licenses as DJs, which was easy enough to do through the UMass Amherst community radio station. We logged our hours running fill-in shows throughout the summer before Granny Applethorpe’s was set to premiere, which was a lot of fun: rummaging through the station’s collection of CDs and vinyl for stuff to play on a whim or cueing up stuff lugged in from our respective private stashes, replicating our favorite cuts and juxtapositions from mix tapes of yore. “Jake Squid” masterminded a race between the Donovan and Butthole Surfers versions of “Hurdy-Gurdy Man,” sliding the volume in and out between two different turntables, which was about the height of our avant garde experimentation (at least, while I was in the booth). (I seem to recall that the Surfers won, but I’m not sure what.)
The reason we did this, of course, was that radio sucked. —It was gratifying to get phone calls telling us that we were playing great music, that Granny Applethorpe’s was the weirdest goddamn thing they’d ever heard on the radio, or the one time I was in the booth alone at three in the morning reading “The Last of the Winnebagos” over a randomly ambient soundtrack and then at maybe half past four I got a phone call from a guy who’d pulled over in the parking lot of the diner outside of Greenfield and stayed there, listening, so he wouldn’t risk outrunning the signal till I was done, and I’d like to think it was because we were doing something special or cool or good but for God’s sake we were just fucking around, we were grabbing stuff at random off the shelves and slapping it on the turntables because it looked cool. The only reason any of us community-based small-town DJs got any traction at all with those shows is because everything else sucked worse.
—That, and Connie Willis is a great writer. “Winnebagos” will break your heart.
Radio still sucked in 1996, of course; even out here in Portland, where everything is better except the fall foliage. I was writing for the nascent Anodyne at the time, which had offices in a certain building downtown with a politically conscious landlord; we shared space with such rabble-rousing troublemakers as the Cascadia Forest Alliance and a pirate radio station.
Radio must’ve been on my mind, because for our press pack I’d written up a “review” of KNRK’s one-year anniversary concert at popular nightspot La Luna; a review that had turned into a jeremiad against the encroaching corporatization of radio and its concommitant increase in sucking. —NRK (“Anarchy,” get it?) was one of Entercom’s stable of “alternative” radio stations, though at the time the term (which had doubled me over in paroxysms of laughter the first time I saw it as a category in a Sam Goody’s) was being phased out to make room for “modern rock,” They were most famous for a giant mural ad painted on a building downtown of a tattooed back: tattoos, yeah, hip, cutting-edge, pierced, black leather, ’90s, yo.
Anyway: that piece never saw the light of day, really, except to prove to potential advertisers that we had street cred or something, so when I learned there was a real live pirate DJ in our building that I could interview, I was amped to do something with all the notes I’d amassed about corporate schlock radio. It took a little doing, and I don’t think I ever learned his real name, but I managed to spend a day with DJ Schmeejay and tour the facilities of Subterradio, 88.7 on your FM dial (those facilities consisting of a 100-disc CD changer hidden in an unused janitor’s closet in said certain building downtown; he told me the transmitter itself was “in the West Hills,” but he knew I knew he was lying), followed by a week-long research binge on pirate radio thanks to the Multnomah County Library (which had an amazing small-press history of pirate radio that doesn’t seem to be there, now—maybe it was an early edition of this?). I interviewed Paul Griffin of the Association for Micropower Broadcasters over the phone, and learned all about Stephen Dunifer and his tussle with the FCC over Free Radio Berkeley, which had won its first battle in court (but would go on to lose the war; the peace itself is as ever muddled and undecided).
I ended up being more happy than not with the article. It was only my second piece of actual reportage, and it shows (as do the reasons why I’m now a second-string blogger and freelance cultural critic, rather than a journalist; that shit is hard). It got a brief mention in another local rag, which was nice. —About a month later I got a note from Larry, our ad salesperson extraordinaire, to call the FCC. Which was weird. Weirder still was that the phone number left turned out to be disconnected. At the time, I thought maybe it was something similar to an incident from a few years before, when a select group of friends was using that phone card number which charged back to some asshole lawyer creep who’d fired one of those friends, and another one of those friends thought it’d be really funny to prank call everybody else as “the phone police”—but Subterradio then went dark. Turns out the FCC spotted his antenna on the roof of that certain building. —He came back, skipped up the dial, moved his transmitter to a couple of different places, inspired the Pander Bros. to do a comic and then a compilation album, and then, well.
KNRK’s still around though. Hip? Cutting edge? It appears to be Cuervo and Bud Light and Maxim, yo. Ah, well; plus ça change and all that.
Subterradio’s gone; Dunifer lost; Clear Channel won the Oklahoma land rush Clinton sparked when he signed the 1996 Telecommunications Act into law. Decades of law and regulation designed to keep broadcasters mindful of their responsibilities to local communities were undone, and stations could suddenly be traded like million-dollar baseball cards, and radio now sucks worse than ever. The micropower struggle I wrote about in 1996 had one notable victory, of sorts: the FCC grudgingly set up a low-powered FM broadcasting license that was compromised enough to make no one at all happy. (In a shocking display of indecorous hardball, NPR fought strenuously against it.) —You might also remember a flap over internet radio, which is still trying to make some noise.
Pirate radio still flies its Jolly Rogers, and LPFM community stations are doing some good, but the fight has moved on: to television, now. FCC Chairman Michael Powell wants to do to television what the 1996 Telecommunications Act did to radio. And it might seem like there’s nothing to save on television—after all, the news is all winnowed down to a couple of points of view, the right and the far right, and whole chunks of the upper channels are blasted wastelands, some Big Content corp leveraging its back catalog of panned and scanned movies and clipped TV reruns down its own boutique cable pipeline into your house—but keep in mind: things can always get worse. And they will.
What’s disheartening to note is the shift in the battleground: with radio, it was a fight for the chance to say what we want, over who had a hold on the transmitters, and whose voices got a chance to be heard. With television, for God’s sake, it’s a fight for the chance to watch what we want. We’ve given up on the means of production. It’s out of our league and out of our hands. We’re struggling to record what we want when we want, to find shows that aren’t numbingly dumb or bowdlerized not for content but to make room for new ads, to dredge up some news that looks like it came from the planet we’re currently living on. We’re being lectured by network execs about minimizing our bathroom breaks when commercials are on.
Things can always get worse.
The one line from this piece I wrote back in 1996 that stays with me has nothing to do with radio or piracy or corporate hegemony, whatever that might be. It’s something Schmeejay tossed out with a studiedly off-handed lilt when the subject of politics came up. He was all about the music, but he didn’t mind running commentary, live or taped; he just had one dictum: “We just want to make sure that whatever we do, it’s educational, that it isn’t just about the wrong that’s going on, but about what we can do about it.”
The wrong that’s going on. —Sometimes, of course, the very act of talking about the wrong that’s going on is doing something about it. That is in a sense what this sinistral end of the Islets of Bloggerhans is all about, Atrios and Digby and Skimble and their ilk; the incomparable Bob Somerby; David Neiwert and his astonishing survey of “Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism,” which has everything to do with radio and 1996 and Clinton and monopoly and fighting for the right to be heard. (I don’t pretend to know what the dextral end is all about. Puffery and amateur McCarthyism, I imagine, but that’s my own shortcoming. Isn’t it.) But sometimes, of course, that isn’t enough; sometimes, all that is required for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing but bitch and moan.
Radio sucks; this is a given. There is no local content. There is nothing exciting or new. The talk is nothing but dextrously nasty ditto-chamber bloviating. There’s 20 minutes of bad commercials for every hour, and there’s few enough advertisers that you’re hearing the same commercials every goddamn hour. (Or more.) Record sales are down, way down, for the major labels who play the payola-lite games that are the only way to get on the radio these days, and you can’t just blame P2P and CD burning; sales are up for indie labels who rely on word of mouth, on small-venue concerts and giveaways, on internet distribution. Arbitron ratings show that overall Americans are listening to radio 10% less than they were in 1996.
(The thing about things getting worse is it’s not just us that get the short end of the stick.)
Radio sucks. That’s one of the wrongs that’s going on. —And this, then, is one of the things that can be done about it.
Anyway. This was supposed to just be an introduction for the article I wrote back in November of 1996 about Subterradio and micropower and the FCC, and it’s ended up almost as long as the thing it’s introducing.
Sorry.
If you want more, keep reading.
DJ Schmeejay:
- is of middling height, and neither his hair nor his eyes are of a startling or unusual color, nor is there anything distinctive about his voice;
- came up with his moniker because he was tired of—but no, he doesn’t want me to mention that;
- was once kicked off the air for saying “erection” into a live mike;
- loves music, and has big plans for Portland;
- once bought a 15-watt transmitter from Steve Dunifer, of Free Radio Berkeley, which he is using to broadcast 24 hours a day at 88.7 on your FM dial. Without the benefit of a license from the FCC.
DJ Schmeejay doesn’t want you to know who he is. He doesn’t want you to know what he looks like. He doesn’t want your adulation or recognition.
He just wants you to listen to his radio station.
“Well, look,” he says to me at the end of our interview. “Thanks for the publicity. I think.”
His ambivalence is understandable. This is what most folks call pirate radio, outlaw radio, clandestine radio. Its practitioners tend to prefer the term “micropower,” these days, claiming that what they do is legal under the First Amendment, but the FCC does not as yet agree. Steve Dunifer has been handed a $20,000 fine for operating Free Radio Berkeley; Richard Edmundson has been fined $10,000 for broadcasting San Francisco Liberation Radio. Napoleon Williams, who runs Liberation Radio in Decatur, Illinois, woke up one night to find cops battering down his doors and guns waved in his family’s face; local papers reported the next day that he had plotted the murder of a couple of vice cops, though no formal charges were ever filed. Perhaps more to the point: Paul Griffin, who runs the Association of Micropower Broadcasters, tells a story about a Spanish-language micropower station who thought a little publicity on the cable station Telemundo might be a good idea; they let TV cameras film them at work in their broadcast space, then watched as “a little publicity” turned into a three-night-long sensationalistic exposé on “radio illegál” and a visit from the FCC.
So Schmeejay was only half-joking when he took me to see the home of Subterradio and said with a half grin, before unlocking the first door, “You’re really just this FCC guy who went undercover with this magazine so you can pose as a reporter and get me to let you in here and then bust me, right?”
Maybe three-quarters joking. But still.
My editors want me to talk photo op with him: “No way,” he says. “Not if I can be recognized.”
“Maybe from the back?” I suggest. “Working with your equipment?” This is before I hear Griffin’s story.
“No,” he says firmly. “Not in the space. Besides, from the back…people would know. Some people would know.”
“Maybe with a bag over your head?” I say, and we both laugh at the image of the Unknown Broadcaster.
“No,” he says. “No pictures.”
The FCC doesn’t want you to hear Subterradio, or anything like it. “The law is very precise: no one can broadcast without a license.” Or so says David Silberman, an attorney for the Federal Communications Commission. The only problem is that such a license can cost around $10,000 once you’ve paid all the application fees; it’s been estimated that start-up costs for a radio station to meet bare-minimum FCC specs are in the neighborhood of $250,000.
Kinda out of the reach of folks like you and me.
There is a rationale, of course; you don’t want the airwaves too crowded, and there are over 6,900 licensed conventional FM stations in America already. Besides, there’s big money in radio, what with advertising and all. The airwaves are a national resource, given into the stewardship of the FCC—why not sell them as dearly as possible?
Of course, the people who’ve bought a slice of the airwaves want their investment protected from upstarts who might step on their signal, or compete with them for an audience “unfairly,” without the benefit of a license. “The operation of unlicensed radio stations is in direct violation of FCC Rules and Regulations,” says an FCC “notice of apparent liability,” the letter they send to warn unlicensed radio stations to cease and desist. “Their operation may endanger life and property by causing harmful interference to licensed radio operations.”
Obviously, Schmeejay and Subterradio are not endangering anyone’s life by pumping out fifteen watts of music 24 hours a day on 88.7. It’s that second word, property, that’s the key. Broadcasters pay big money for their licensed slots on the dial, and that chunk of the national resource now belongs to them. And they don’t want anybody messing with their property.
What are they so scared of?
“There’s nothing good on the radio,” says Schmeejay. “It’s all the same. You listen to NRK here, and then you go to San Francisco, and you hear about Live 105, their alternative station, and you think it must be cool, and you tune in, and it’s the same shite. The same old shite.”
It doesn’t hurt, of course, that NRK and Live 105 are owned by the same company. More on which later.
“Ever since I was a kid—I used to have a kit, from Radio Shack or something, and I would broadcast a show in my house. I’d wait by the radio, you know, to record just the right song off it. It’s always been my boyhood dream to share music with people.”
So when he heard about Steve Dunifer and Free Radio Berkeley a year or so ago, he began pestering Dunifer to sell him one of the micropower transmitter kits which Dunifer manufactures and sells. “I had to bug him for about a year. He only sells to certain people, who understand what he’s trying to get at with micropower broadcasting. I finally had to meet him in person, travel down to Berkeley and talk to him, face-to-face, before he decided I was the right kind of person to have one of these.”
That was a few months ago. With some help from a couple of somewhat more technically savvy friends, Schmeejay installed the transmitter, got it up and running, and Subterradio, the Space Station, was on the air. Schmeejay estimates about $3,000 of his own money has gone into getting the station on the air. “I’d bought a real state-of-the-art amp, but for some reason that made everything sound awful. Way to bass-y. So we switched to this piece-of-shit thing that was kicking around, and it sounds much better.” He shrugs. “Maybe it’s because we broadcast in mono.”
For the past three months or so (dates, like so many other details, are vague), the station has been in a sort of test mode, automated for most of the time, with only occasionally live turns. “It’s hard to categorize the music we play,” he says. “For me, there’s really only two kinds of music: good and bad. I hate labelling and categorization.”
When pressed, he will admit that a lot of what they play would fall into the “rhythm culture”: acid jazz, techno, trip-hop, ambient. We’re listening to the station as we talk; a Luscious Jackson remix comes on. “But we also play stuff like this,” he says, “or Ani DiFranco, or Beck, or the Beastie Boys—but we play what doesn’t get played on other stations. Different mixes. Or ’50s stuff. Charlie Parker, Stan Getz. Esquivel.” He looks a little uncomfortable after this spate of labeling and categorization. “We play music that needs to be heard,” he says, simply.
Response has been, well, “horrific” is the word he uses to describe it. He estimates, from the volume of calls they’ve been getting, that Subterradio may have as many as 500 to a thousand listeners on any given day. “We gave away tickets to the Meat Beat Manifesto show, a 10th caller kind of deal—we got a hundred some-odd phone calls for that. Horrific. I feel this tremendous responsibility to return all of them.”
He grins. “Crazy people call us. We’ve got this guy, Marty, he’s adopted us, he’s our ‘roving listener,’ he’ll call in every day and let us know where and when he’s picking us up. ‘Hey, guys, I’m up on Mt. Tabor, you’re coming in loud and clear.’ Or this other person, who calls in to say they are moving downtown, they’ve heard us, but they can’t pick us up where they’re living in Beaverton. I’m not kidding.
“We do get some complaints. We have this show we do from 10ish to 2ish evenings called ‘Joy in Repetition,’ and sometimes people will call and say that we play too much of that techno stuff. And there was the time we were on autopilot, and Marty called in to let us know a song was skipping. But even the people who complain say that it’s better than everything else out there.”
When Subterradio is on “autopilot” (like so many of us, Schmeejay has to contend with a day job; even with his associates, there can’t be somebody there, live, 24-7—at this point), it is left in the care of a multi-CD changer hidden behind a wall in an unspecified location “somewhere in the west hills.”
Think about it: this CD player, loaded with somebody’s favorite CDs and set on random shuffle, has been delivering what some folks think is the best radio Portland has to offer.
“We even got praise from a DJ at NRK, who shall remain nameless, a self-described ‘corporate radio whore’ who’d love to come do a show on our station, and play the kind of music he wants to play, instead of what they tell him.”
It didn’t used to be like this, of course. An easy thing to forget, but. Alternative music—excuse me, modern rock—didn’t exist until about seven years ago. As late as 1969, FM radio was considered a passing fad, something that would never topple the mighty AM Top 40 stations. Epic battles over the ethics of the very idea of supporting a mass medium with advertising dollars and product sponsorships were still being waged in the ’30s—losing battles, to be sure, but. And in the ’20s…
In the early ’20s, the magic of radio was still something visceral; its power to obliterate distance and bring people together had folks huddled over contraptions made from cheap crystals and wires and oatmeal cans and gutted telephony, tuning in programs from far-off Kalamazoo or Parsippany. A real sense of community was felt; magazines like Radio Broadcast sponsored contests in which listeners competed to see who could pull in the furthest signal. And radio stations participated in what were called “silent nights”: for one night a week, radio stations would go off the air, to allow people who lived close to their antennas to pick up distant signals that were otherwise overwhelmed. These silent nights weren’t legislation, or regulation—they were a suggestion from the Department of Commerce, which had jurisdiction over radio broadcasts at the time.
Things changed, as they are wont: mostly in 1934, with the passage of the Communications Act and the creation of the Federal Communications Commission. By this time, money was talking, and radio stations had long since stopped the silent nights. Give up airtime to a competitor? How quaint. The task facing Congress and FDR’s New Deal was to create and regulate a national radio while avoiding the looming spectre of monopoly—and without nationalizing radio, as every European country had done. Giant broadcasting companies had already invested a great deal in radio, and those investments had to be protected. There was an attempt to preserve something of the community of ’20s radio: the Wagner-Hatfield Amendment to the Act, which would have set aside 25% of the airwaves for nonprofit community stations, and allowed them to sell airtime to defray expenses—but the path of least resistance was taken. The Federal Radio Commission was renamed the Federal Communication Commission, and given unrestricted powers in the granting of broadcast licenses.
In 1978, in the interest of regulating the sudden boom of FM radio, the FCC banned all FM broadcasts of less than 100 watts. In the deregulatory frenzy of the ’80s, the three-year rule was stripped away (used to be that someone purchasing a radio station had to hold onto it for three years before selling it, to ensure that broadcasters would take a long-term interest in the community they served; no more). And early this year, Clinton threw out the restrictions on the number of radio stations any one corporation can own, launching a station-buying frenzy which culminated in the highest price yet paid for a single radio station: 90 million dollars for WAXQ in New York City, by Entercom—which promptly traded it to Viacom for three stations in the Seattle area: KBSG FM, KBSG AM, and KNDD, which joined the Entercom family of KMTT FM and AM, in the Seattle area, and KGON and KFXX and KNRK here in Portland, and Live 105 in San Francisco, and more, in Houston, Pittsburgh, Tampa…
How many newspapers in Portland aren’t owned by Newhouse? How much of the television you watch isn’t owned by MTV and HBO? How many companies are ultimately responsible for the movies Act III chooses to carry?
“It’s based on the First Amendment,” says Paul Griffin, describing the defense strategy in United States v. Stephen Dunifer. “There are so many radio stations being bought up by media conglomerates that minority opinions, anything that might offend the advertisers, are being shut out entirely. There’s a real lack of diversity, a real danger to our right to free speech.”
Dunifer is the man behind Free Radio Berkeley, which began broadcasting in 1993. He wanted to start a populist movement of low-power community radio stations, while challenging the FCC’s ban on low-wattage FM transmissions, and so he began building kits for 5- to 15-watt transmitters which he sold to interested groups throughout the US, as well as Mexico, El Salvador, and Haiti. Thus was “micropower” born.
Griffin read about Free Radio Berkeley, and Dunifer’s fight with the FCC, and began volunteering wherever Dunifer needed help; this help ended up becoming the Association for Micropower Broadcasters, a loose affiliation of about 20 or so micropower stations throughout the country, which publishes a newsletter and a taped radio show, both called the AMPB Report, tracks records currently played on micropower stations, and offers updates on Dunifer’s court case and other news of interest. It also helps coordinate record company promo discs and materials. (Yes, in a classic case of the right hand not caring what it does to the left, record companies love having pirate radio stations play their music as much as any other. Air time is air time, whether legal, il-, or quasi-, right?)
Dunifer isn’t interested in (utter) anarchy on the airwaves; remember, he’s very particular about who gets his kits. What he wants is for the FCC to create a micropower FM registration service. If you found a clear spot on the dial, you’d mail fifty bucks and a registration form and boom! Radio Free You. (Canada already has something similar in place.)
The FCC doesn’t agree, and in 1993, shortly after Free Radio Berkeley began broadcasting, they served Dunifer with a notice of apparent liability. Unlike legions of unlicensed radio broadcasters before him, Dunifer didn’t shut down, he didn’t shift to a new frequency, he didn’t move his transmitter to a new location, or put it in a van, or stick it on a boat and sail out into international waters. He introduced them to his lawyer, Luke Hiken, of the National Lawyers’ Guild. And whether you reduce it to free speech, or the voice of the community, or the image of Hiken holding up one of Dunifer’s transmitters in court and proclaiming that people have a right to use these things, or to the fact that there’s just nothing good on the radio, dammit, the defense worked. So far. In a hearing in January of 1995, Judge Claudia Wilkin handed the FCC a significant defeat when she denied their preliminary injunction to prohibit Free Radio Berkeley from broadcasting.
Both sides currently await her decision on the overall case.
DJ Schmeejay fills me in on the Subterradio plan for world domination:
“Reggae and dub in the mornings. Because that’s the way we like our mornings to be. Afternoons: a little bit of conversation, editorial, discussion. We do a bit of this already, but we want to do more.”
“Yeah,” says one of his associates, passing behind us on some mysterious errand.
“He wants more conversation,” says Schmeejay. “We already play something called Truth Serum, we just want to make sure that whatever we do, it’s educational, that it isn’t just about the wrong that’s going on, but about what we can do about it.
“Then evenings would be trip-hop, acid jazz, drum and bass—like a really good party, we’ll build it up, and build it up, to maximum bpm, and then bring it down again. And then from 2 am to 6 am it’s ambient, to sort of cool down.”
This is, of course, a rough approximation. “We’ll play anything that’s not too booty, local bands, local DJs that aren’t getting airplay, the more the merrier. Send us your tapes. We’ll also be doing weekly shows, like Courtney Taylor and Pete Holmstrom will be doing a space rock show on Sundays called The Space Station.”
And further ahead? “More power, or relays to additional sites, for more coverage, definitely. I want this to be for everybody. Everybody who wants to be involved.” Another grin—”The more the community writes in, the more the community supports us, the more leverage we have.”
I might have exaggerated the danger to Schmeejay just a tad. Make no mistake, free speech over the airwaves is powerful stuff: the Menomonee Warriors’ Station provided a center for Indian rights in Wisconsin in 1975; Napoleon Williams’ Liberation Radio has spoken out against police brutality in his predominately black neighborhood, and helped lower the number of police abuse cases there; Radio Zapata broadcast news of the Chiapas rebellion gleaned from the internet to sympathetic farm-workers in the Salinas Valley. Even when it’s just the music, the impact can be dramatic: Radio Caroline, an English offshore pirate station, splintered the BBC’s hold on radio when it became the first source to play the Beatles, the Who and the Rolling Stones to an English audience, back in 1964. Radio One, Two, and Three have been playing catch-up ever since.
But the FCC is lying low these days, waiting to see which way the wind will blow on the whole issue of micropower, and as long as nobody raises a stink they can’t ignore, Schmeejay and Subterradio should be safe from threatening letters, multi-digit fines, and trumped-up police raids (please imagine your faithful correspondent crossing fingers and knocking wood simultaneously as he types this; he hopes you do the same as you read).
It’s just the romance of it all; the undeniably satisfying “Fuck you!” to the powers-that-be which comes along with the secrecy, the paranoia, the code names and the transmitters hidden behind secret walls. That, and something else:
“It’s about the music,” Schmeejay tells me, shortly before he’s called away. “I don’t want to be recognized for this. I’d like to just overhear some people talking about the station, and about what they thought about it, and for them not to realize it was me. That’d be great.”
And that’s all it ever really took for most pirate radio stations throughout history: stations like Radio Free Radio, the Voice of Laryngitis, the Crooked Man, the Crystal Ship, WGHP (With God’s Help, Peace) or the Voice of the Purple Pumpkin, Secret Mountain Laboratory, the Voice of Voyager, Radio Ganymede, the Voice of FUBAR (Federation of Unlicensed Broadcasters on AM Radio), or WUMS (We’re Unknown Mysterious Station, perhaps the longest-lived pirate ever, who broadcast from 1925 – 1948, and whose equipment, upon retiring, was requested by both the Ohio Historical Society and the Smithsonian); and now Free Radio Berkeley and Subterradio—
The realization that nothing good was on the radio, and the drive to get up off their collective ass and do something about it.
Never attribute to malice.
Kevin has an oddly—touching?—postscript to his cartoon from earlier this week. Turns out the shock jocks thought it was “totally awesome,” and offered this defense:
it wasn’t nessesarily just a tirade about her, just us acting like three year olds saying fat bitch on the radio.
Aww. Isn’t that sweet?
Rolling back the years.
The chickenhawks of the kulturkampf continue their war on truth, health, life, science, trust; the very fabric of the commonweal. —I’m running out of curses. Japanese is a geat language for getting up a righteously angry dudgeon. Maybe I should learn some Japanese.
Happier thoughts: Ampersand’s blog, which I don’t link to nearly so often as I ought, because a) I assume most of you reading this read him already, and b) I’m a lazy, disreputable bastard, is about to go group: housemates Charles and Bean (who guest-hosted while Barry I mean Amp was off telling his relatives once again why this night is different than other nights) will be joining as regular co-bloggers, fingers flying over keyboards to fight the power and whatnot. A round of applause, please, ladies and gentlemen.
And: the Polyphonic Spree is one small way I’ve just discovered for dealing somewhat with the current surfeit of Weltschmerz: “When you’re dealing with 25 Texans in white robes, it’s pretty impossible not to mention you’re dealing with 25 Texans in white robes.” —After which, you’ll be needing a bracing tonic; management humbly suggests rather than spinning Godspeed You! Black Emperor once more, you instead pluck up this poem by George Faludy, nicked from a Making Light comments thread:
Learn by Heart This Poem of Mine
Learn by heart this poem of mine;
books only last a little time
and this one will be borrowed, scarred,
burned by Hungarian border guards,
lost by the library, broken-backed,
its paper dried up, crisped and cracked,
worm-eaten, crumbling into dust,
or slowly brown and self-combust
when climbing Fahrenheit has got
to 451, for that’s how hot
your town will be when it burns down.
Learn by heart this poem of mine.
Learn by heart this poem of mine.
Soon books will vanish and you’ll find
there won’t be any poets or verse
or gas for car or bus—or hearse—
no beer to cheer you till you’re crocked,
the liquor stores torn down or locked,
cash only fit to throw away,
as you come closer to that day
when TV steadily transmits
death-rays instead of movie hits
and not a soul to lend a hand
and everything is at an end
but what you hold within your mind,
so find a space there for these lines
and learn by heart this poem of mine.
Learn by heart this poem of mine;
recite it when the putrid tides
that stink of lye break from their beds,
when industry’s rank vomit spreads
and covers every patch of ground,
when they’ve killed every lake and pond,
Destruction humped upon its crutch,
black rotting leaves on every branch;
when gargling plague chokes Springtime’s throat
and twilight’s breeze is poison, put
your rubber gasmask on and line
by line declaim this poem of mine.
Learn by heart this poem of mine
so, dead, I still will share the time
when you cannot endure a house
deprived of water, light, or gas,
and, stumbling out to find a cave,
roots, berries, nuts to stay alive,
get you a cudgel, find a well,
a bit of land, and, if it’s held,
kill the owner, eat the corpse.
I’ll trudge beside your faltering steps
between the ruins’ broken stones,
whispering “You are dead; you’re done!
Where would you go? That soul you own
froze solid when you left your town.”
Learn by heart this poem of mine.
Maybe above you, on the earth,
there’s nothing left and you, beneath,
deep in your bunker, ask how soon
before the poisoned air leaks down
through layers of lead and concrete. Can
there have been any point to Man
if this is how the thing must end?
What words of comfort can I send?
Shall I admit you’ve filled my mind
for countless years, through the blind
oppressive dark, the bitter light,
and, though long dead and gone, my hurt
and ancient eyes observe you still?
What else is there for me to tell
to you, who, facing time’s design,
will find no use for life or time?
You must forget this poem of mine.
Chin-chin.
The thing of it is, we could have been spending it on books all along.
Watched the most recent episode of Angel (which is fun these days in a way that Buffy, sadly, isn’t) through a haze of static.
We watched Angel through a haze of static because a couple of weeks ago I asked Jenn if we’d gotten a cable bill recently. —We’ve just swapped bill-paying duties from her to me, so a couple of things still needed sorting out, and while it was possible that a cable bill had slipped through the cracks, it seemed odd that two whole months’ worth would not turn up. So I called AT&T Broadband and discovered via the chirpy answering recording that it had been bought out by Comcast or somesuch.
So sue me. I don’t read my junk mail.
I asked for a new statement and got it, last week. For four months’ worth. $134 and change. Wrote them a check back. Mailed it off. Came home today, checked email, checked voice mail, twiddled with a couple of things. Got dinner ready. Turned on the television for some background yammer. Got the blue screen of death.
So I called and was on hold while the pasta water boiled and when the nice person came on the phone I asked why we didn’t have cable. And was told it was because I hadn’t paid my bill. There was no record, apparently, of my previous call, when I’d asked for a new statement, and told them I hadn’t been getting one. “We’ve sent them out every month on the 14th,” she said. I tried to explain the bit again about how we hadn’t been getting bills and I understood that maybe it was because of the changeover from AT&T to Comcast which I hadn’t even been aware of until I’d called to ask for a new statement. “We’ve had TV commercials and everything,” she said.
She never got around to explaining why I’d never gotten a notice of cancellation mailed to me, or a phone call from them wondering where my money was.
We haven’t been watching cable all that much, lately. That ’70s Show in reruns while I cook, maybe, because Jenn likes it so much; Buffy reruns on FX. First-run Buffy and Angel. Gilmore Girls now and again; if the damn thing doesn’t get turned off on a Thursday night, an episode of Scrubs. I tried that new Lucky the other night, which, eh. But Firefly is dead and Farscape is dead and anyway coming out of college when we never had money for cable; we watched videotapes every now and then and otherwise, the box was cold. TVs, we discovered, are big dead presences in rooms when they aren’t on. If you put them up high—on top of those rickety pressboard entertainment towers you buy at Circuit City, say—it’s paradoxically less noticeable; or you can cover them with a tapestry or something when not watching them. Just flip up the cloth when you want to put in Duck Soup or Metropolitan for the umpteenth time. Video wallpaper. Comfort food. —We went to Sara and Steve’s one night to watch Tom Waits on Letterman. They hauled out a tiny television from some back room and hooked it to the cable jack coming out of the wall in an unused corner. I cocked an eyebrow at the relatively large color set sitting dark on top of their VCR and under their DVD player. “Doesn’t hook up to cable,” said Steve. He pointed at the little set, where Letterman was sweeping a dud joke off-camera. “We’ve hauled that thing out twice, for New Year’s,” he said. “And September 11th,” said Sara.
“So why do you have the cable jack?” asked Jenn.
They shrugged. “Comes with the condo,” said Steve. “We couldn’t get them to turn it off.”
And the thing of it is, we haven’t been watching television all that much. —It was Buffy that got us back into the habit, dammit. Jenn and Barry way back in 1997 caught the first showing of episode two on a whim and said hey! This doesn’t suck! And cajoled the rest of us one at a time into watching it. By the time of the first season finale, we were group-watching, a microcosmic echo of those massive geek outings back at Oberlin, where we’d sign out the massive projection TV in the Mudd Library AV Room for showings of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Only much more satisfying.) (And you should probably note the rather sloppy use of the first person plural throughout; at times it means me and Jenn, at times it means me and Jenn and Barry and Sarah and Charles and Matt and Brad in various subsets, and just then it meant a whole helluva lot of people I knew in college who all teased me mercilessly for looking like Wesley Crusher. Verb. sap. and all that.) —By the midpoint of second season Buffy, we were hooked, and hooked good. Tuesday nights were sacrosanct. You didn’t call any of us at 8 pm because we just wouldn’t answer the phone. It is not at all an exaggeration to state that Jenn and I first got cable ourselves so that we could watch Buffy without the static and occasional unwatchable nights we’d had with a simple antenna.
But the thing about having cable is once you’ve got it, you might as well use it. We got caught up on DS9, say, which is the best of the various Treks, yes, but I don’t think has aged all that well. We watched a lot of Friends in reruns, and Seinfelds, and Roseannes; we got hooked on Xena for a while. Tried Farscape on a whim and found it was better than not, and then somewhere in its second season we got that ohmygod rush again: this show rocked. Friday nights, out on the town? I think not. At least, not without setting up the VCR to record while we were away. Angel we started watching because, well, it’s a Joss Whedon show, and ended up enjoying it in its own right, but Tuesday nights were an utter wash when both it and Buffy were on the WB: that’s two hours of television right there, not counting the hour or so of syndicated sitcoms in the 7 – 8 cook-and-eat bloc. G vs. E we both liked a lot, but it got cancelled. Jules Verne was fun until it got weirdly obsessed with Dumas and shunted to one o’clock in the morning and then cancelled. Cupid—remember Cupid? I don’t remember why we started watching it, a whim again, I guess, maybe because we’d liked Jeremy Piven in Ellen which, you know, we’d been watching, but it was a great little show, and it got cancelled, too. We loved Sports Night, until it got cancelled, and Sports Night led us to West Wing which we loved even more. We never clicked with Smallville, despite the cheeky amusement value of a show that knows it’s nothing but an engine for slash; we checked out that Iron Chef show, which we did click with. Wow. AbFab reruns on Oxygen? Okay. Commercial break—skip up to AMC, there’s an old spaghetti Western on. Surf back down to the mid 50s, where TNT and FX and the Superstation hang out—what the fuck? Wesley Snipes, with a sword, slicing Stephen Dorff in half with lots of bad computerized blood effects? Jesus, this is so bad you have to watch. There’s a Law and Order on every hour tonight. Or we could skip back down to the Cartoon Network—Dexter’s Laboratory, Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack…
We got really excited about Firefly. The idea of Whedon and co., stretching their wings a little, the background and backstory we’d seen bits and pieces of, what we knew about a couple of the actors (Gina Torres, Ron Glass, Adam Baldwin) going into it—it had us buzzed. The first couple of episodes were a bit rocky, and then it started hitting its stride, and it got better and better. We were getting that ohmygod rush again. Friday nights were going to be shot once more. —And then it got cancelled.
Which wasn’t the straw here, no, but as I said, we hadn’t been watching television all that much. We’d been leaving it on, looking at something out of curiosity, surfing up or down to the next interesting thing. The times you actually watch television—when you sit down and know you’re not getting up for a half hour, or a full hour, or until the tape ends, when you’re committed to ride whatever story’s unfolding in front of you—we hadn’t been doing that through cable all that much. Buffy still, yes, but out of grim loyalty these days more than anything else, and anyway it’s about to go gently into that good night. Angel, but it isn’t a big deal to miss a week or two. West Wing—what happened to that one? Right, we just sort of stopped watching. Farscape? Gone. Firefly? Gone. And what else was up there on the television screen?
Right. Law and Order and Wesley Snipes sneering under some badass sunglasses. Morimoto rolling some deft sushi with asparagus in it or something. Bubbles and Buttercup and Blossom riffing on old Beatles songs. Axminster hunting MacGuyver, and Christopher Lloyd channelling Reverend Jim under inches of Klingon makeup for the umpteenth time.
For this we were paying nearly $40 a month.
So I told the nice woman on the other end of the line, who insisted they’d been sending us bills we hadn’t gotten, who seemed to think it weird that I hadn’t seen the TV commercials telling us Comcast had bought AT&T, who couldn’t explain why we’d gotten no mailed notice about cutting off our service, or a phone call ditto, I told her to cancel our account.
We can get The Sopranos on videotape from the library, you know.
Nyekultyurni.
Which is what I say when what I really want to say is “Fisk this, motherfuckers.” —I’ve been spending too much time at Making Light, but Teresa’s on a roll, and I need to know someone else gives a fuck, and thank God, they do. Quite a lot of us do.
Doc Searls has sketched out on the back of a virtual envelope some bare bones toward starting to make a gesture resembling a stab at setting right what little we can. Somebody want to get this onto Tony Blair’s desk? He, at least, seems yet capable of some small shame.
Fighting evil, take two.
Colin Upton (via his daily cartoon journal) has a humble suggestion about where next to take our God-driven fight for good against evil, light against dark, civilization against barbarism.
