Year: 2009/Archives

Sex and Broadcasting

Lorenzo Milam is “the Johnny Appleseed of community radio,” sez Broadcasting magazine. He helped establish KRAB-FM in Seattle in 1962, which grew into the KRAB nebula, a loosely affiliated group of freefrom stations (KTAO, KBOO, KDNA and KCHU — “the wet spot on your dial”).

Here’s an excerpt from Milam’s seed-planting guide Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station for the Community (available at: Prometheus Radio Project | Amazon):

But listen: the fears of the community radio people, I am loath to tell you, come as strongly from within as without. It works like this: people like you and me who are involved with strange and honest broadcast operations have a looseness in the brain-pan. We (you and I, love) operate best through tension, insane schemes, and bizarre fears. We seem to create nests of slander, inwit, neurotic outrage, and mental dyspepsia.

I tell you all this not to cover you and me and the existing community stations with calumny. But rather, to suggest that as you move towards getting your operation on the air, you should also set about defusing the madness inherent in the people who will come to be volunteers or staff for you.

See: commercial radio stations have a built-in defusing process which is make-money. You don’t have that. What you have is a group of dedicated sincere people who want to Do Good and Right. And they are all crackers. Aren’t we?

Choose your fellow workers carefully and well. Get people who are stable and loving and involved, but get people who have a life outside the station. Because they can drive you (and it) balmy.

Listen: the reason KRAB was such a benign operation through its first five years was not just because Seattle is such a benign city where the outrage of free speech has been tolerated up through the ages. Nor is it because for the first Ave years we were convinced that no one ever listened to us: what with our two hour concerts of Korean Temple Bells and weekend extravaganzas of the music of Dahomey. No — it was because Nancy and Gary and Jeremy and James and I were careful to people the station with richly self-contained individuals. Good people, who loved listener-supported community radio, and what it could do for our minds; but, individuals who valued life outside the station.

It was not just that we took a couple of gallons of Mountain Red to the board meetings; it wasn’t that we practiced an anarchistically politically detached wryness in our daily lives: it was, most of all, that we had a loud early warning system which went off whenever ‘political’ types came in the door. And I ain’t talking about communists or John Birch Society members.

You will have hundreds of volunteers. They, and your board and staff, should be apolitical. Apolitical in the most inner sense. Apolitical in that you can only survive through openness, warmth, and a militant avoidance of rumor. You must be a lightning-rod.

—Lorenzo Milam, Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station for the Community (available: Prometheus Radio Project | Amazon)

More Milam: Letter to Marketplace | Pacifica Radio book revu |
Whole Earth intervu | KRAB history | KRAB Archive | Salon crit of NPR

Pubradio Past

“A radio station should not just be a hole in the universe for making money, or feeding an ego, or running the worldhellip; A radio station should be a live place for live people to sing and dance and talk: talk their talk and walk their walk and know that they (and the rest of us) are not finally and irrevocably dead.”
—Lorenzo Milam

Public Radio is in transition. CPB and other tri-letteral commissions believe radio must march into a new world order of MyFaceSpace YouTwits.

I’ve never put faith in people’s predictive powers — we humans are remarkably bad at it. But I do think a journey into an unknown future benefits greatly from a grasp of the past. So I spent a sleepless night chasing tidbits of pubradio history, especially from community radio pioneers like Lorenzo Milam and Lewis Hill.

HV kicks off April by posting some excerpts from these early essays and books in our Writs- Pubradio category. We’ll start with the seminal Sex and Broadcasting.

Radio is Dead. Love Live Radio.

“But the spectrum is as big as all outdoors — and there is a niche here, a crack there, for those who care to squeeze some of the art back into radio.” —Lorenzo Milam

HV055- Wordshakers

Hearing Voices from NPR®:
055 WordshakerS: For Poetry Month
Host: Andrei Codrescu of NPR / Exquisite Corpse
Airs week of: 2012-04-04 (Originally: 2009-04-01)

Wordshakers (52:00 mp3):

Poetry Grits Glory Verve:

POETRY is a discourse
and we its discouragees.

Lord Alfred Tennyson bangs the podium in “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (from the book/CD set Poetry Speaks).

Thomas Edison waxes Walt Whitman’s “America” (Poetry Speaks).

Cheerleaders Chant” a found-poem (CD: The United States Of Poetry, part of the USOP project).

If it’s a worldwide depression, everyone is depressed.
Ah, but try to run a gypsy through the ruins of time.

Host Andrei Codrescu decontructs his “Poetry.” Codrescu assembles The Exquisite Corpse (a Journal of Life and Letters), and is an NPR commentator.

Denise Levertov knows “The Secret” (Poetry Speaks).

Carl Sandburg wonders “What is Poetry?” (produced by Barrett Golding).

Scott Carrier presents the categorical conundrum of “Alex Caldiero- Poet?”

Ed Sanders (fmr Fug) poses “A Question of Fame,” off his CD Thirsting for Peace.

My publisher says “At some people’s readings
the crowd goes out and buys their books.
At yours they run out and steal them.”

More…

I Seem to Be a Verb

We at HV are now twits, but with a twist. Most tweets are rapid and vapid. We’re experimenting with another approach: slow and substantive: twitticisms. Every morn we add enter another line from R. Buckminster Fuller’s I Seem to Be a Verb, delivering discrete daily doses of philosophically  dense data.

Running along the footer of that book’s pages is a continuing line of text. The book’s out-of-print so we’re resurrecting these Bucky bits in 140-character chucks. Follow us @hearvox or read the whole below.

I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.
–R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem to Be a Verb (1970)

New Yorker: “Dymaxion Man” | “Weird Science” (slides)
“Starting with the Universe:” Whitney (NYC) | MCA (Chicago)
Whole Earth: “God is a Verb” | “2025, If…” | “Thoughts”
Films: “Thinking Out Loud” | Everything I Know
Bucky Fuller: Institute | Wikiquotes | Dome | Challenge
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

This text is the footer of Bucky Fuller’s I Seem to Be a Verb:

Society neither hears nor sees the great changes going on.

Either man is obsolete or war is. War is the ultimate tool of politics. Political leaders look out only for their own side.

Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.

Half-century of subconsciously developing world revolution is crossing threshold into human consciousness and ultimate popular support.

Today’s students, reared by television, “the third parent,” think world.

They think and demand justice for all humanity with no exceptions.

Theirs will be the most powerful constructive revolution in history. Earth is a very small spaceship. We are all astronauts.

Each human is a whole universe. We have 28,000 pounds of explosives for each human being on earth.

Weaponry has always been accorded priority over livingry. Only two alternatives — Utopia or Oblivion.

All the fundamental problems are world problems. Man knows so much does so little.

Greatest fact of century: We can make life on earth general success for all people.

World’s prime vital problem: How to triple swiftly safely satisfyingly overall performance realizations per pounds kilowatts manhours of world’s comprehensive resources, rendering those resources capable of supporting one hundred per cent of humanity’s increasing population at ever higher standards of living than any human minority single individual has known or dreamed of.

War over population hunger disease would cease to exist if “haves” devoted larger share of their industrial budget to world livingry.

Malthus is wrong. There is enough to go around.

Basic you-or-me-not-enough-for-both-ergo-someone-must-die tenets of class warfaring are extinct.

Real wealth — indestructible, without practical limits — is combination of physical energy and human intellect.

Every time we use real wealth it increases. Intellect must increase wealth to eliminate poverty.

Design science, invention revolution could elevate poverty to haveness.

(If you can produce it, you can afford it. If you can’t produce it, you can’t afford it.)

Intelligence should be recognized as a global resource. Brain stores retrieves special case experiences.

Mind discovery generalized patterns apparently governing all special case experiences.

Thinking is the consciously disciplined separation of relevant feedback from irrelevant feedback.

Greatest single revolution in human affairs has been ascendancy of intellect’s intuitive mastery over the physical but all the important critical events realizing that revolution just happens.

Only the impossible happens. Probability unreliable. To each of us environment is everything that isn’t “me.”

New, physically uncompromised metaphysical initiative of unbiased integrity could unify world.

It could and probably will be provided by the utterly impersonal problem solutions of man’s antibody, the computer.

Only to their computer’s superhuman range of calculative capabilities can and may all political scientific religious leaders face-savingly acquiesce.

Evolution is apparently intent that man fulfill a much greater destiny than that of being simple muscle and reflex machine, a slave automaton.

(By 1975 China may be most impressively modern nation, highly automated.)

Automation can produce wealth beyond all our needs and dreams.

(We’ve always had automation. What’s happening to your lunch?)

Automation has made man obsolete as physical production and control specialist — just in time.

Specialization is only a fancy form of slavery wherein the “expert” is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially culturally preferred, ergo, highly-secure, life-long position.

Nature always does things in simplest most efficient way. All nature is based on triangles.

Nature doesn’t have separate departments of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics.

World society is operating almost exclusively in inaudible nonvisible area of physical universe.

We are living in a world where change is normal.

Because prime evolutionary transformations are invisible, it is approximately impossible for world society to comprehend that changes in next 30 years will be far greater than in last 100 years. It is approximately impossible for world society to comprehend that.

Artists are now being recognized as extraordinarily important to human society.

Scientist are utterly irresponsible regarding pro-vs.-anti social disposition of “eggs” they lay in the laboratories.

Every child is born a genius: Ninety-nine percent are degeniused by early post-natal circumstances.

Human being has great potentiality, but many wires get disconnected.

Ages 0 to 4 are biggest “school” opportunity. Child is trim tab of the future.

Least favorable environment for study is schoolroom and closely-packed desk prisons.

Real schoolhouse is in the home and outdoors.

Within 10 years anything reasonably think-upable by science fiction will probably have been realized.

Possession is becoming progressively burdensome, wasteful, and therefore obsolete, total man may be going through a total wave of transformation into an entirely new relationship with the universe.

Man freed of special case superstition by intellect has had survival potentials multiplied millionsfold.

Humans can now whisper in one another’s ear from anywhere around the world. (Be sure to entertain all your emotions.)

Intellectual integrity will win tomorrow’s battles with accelerating inexorability.

Political commercial sham false premise institutions will vanish with startling rapidity.

Man, as designed, is obviously intended to be a success. Success: not a bad thing to have “hanging over your head.”

Experiment is always valuable. You can’t learn less. You can always get nearer to the truth.

(Language can be a block to reality.) Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and Universe is ahead for all of us.

(Man was designed with legs — not roots.) Man can do anything he wants.

—R. Buckminster Fuller

Office Yoga- vid

We present a more realistic approach to spiritual awareness: how updated yogic breathing and stretching exercises might help relieve stress for office worker bees and corporate clones… or not. Audio by author  Rebecca Flowers from an NPR story she produced. Animation by Max Darham. “Office Yoga:”

Megapolis Audio Fest

Fren o’ HV, Justin G, is co-directing The Megapolis Festival, “a weekend-long celebration of the craft of DIY audio creation. Artists, documentarians, musicians, and fans come together to share secrets on producing and presenting challenging audio works online, on-air, and on the stage.” April 24-26 2008, Boston.

Among the featured: Gregory Whitehead, a bicycle-powered 8-track player, and HV’s own AnnKara (festival schedule).

Capital Ideas

For a recent This American Life, “The Inauguration Show,” I was among several producers TAL asked “all over the country to go out and talk to people about what they’re thinking as Barack Obama gets ready to take office.” From the dozens of hours of interviews, they crafted another fine TAL hour.

I went to our state capital, Helena MT, to talk to citizens, and to the “citizen-legislators” now in session. (The Montana legislature meets only 90 days every two years, so our reps are real folk most of the time and only part-time pols.)

I’m posting a few of the more fascinating MT voices which couldn’t fit in the TAL episode. Each offers a singular vision of political history:

State Representative Brady Wiseman
(D– Bozeman MT)
“They have eaten out our essence…” (1:38 mp3):

State Senator Jonathan Windy Boy
(D– Box Elder MT)
“Natural Law” (1:20 mp3):

State Representative Janna Taylor
(R– Dayton MT)
“Not Substance, Appearance” (1:19 mp3):

Bishop David Eslick
Worship House of the Rockies, Helena MT
“Jesus Is Coming” (1:19 mp3):

(more) Rep. Brady Wiseman
“Jubiliee” (1:03 mp3):

Brady is a friend and a real big-picture person. We’ll be posting a longer vers of his interview soon, with transcript, cuz I think people should hear what this guy has to say.

Drinkin’ in LA- BV3k

A decade later, still sounds good, Bran Van 3000 “Drinkin in LA:”

BTW, is Bran Van 3000 related to André 3000?

6 Yrs in SV

The Silicon Valley correspondent for The Economist looks back on “Six years in the Valley:”

Jaron Lanier, a Valley pioneer, saw behind the Web 2.0 totem of “collective intelligence” an insidious “digital Maoism” that suppressed individuality. Linda Stone, a former Apple and Microsoft executive, observed an unhealthy trend towards “continuous partial attention”, as people spent less time focusing on a single thing or person because they were constantly scanning so many other things—from Facebook to e-mail and their phones—for fear of missing out on some social opportunity.

Perhaps most dangerously, Web 2.0 still had only one business model, advertising, and the Valley was refusing to admit that only one company (Google) with only one of its products (search advertising) had proved that the model really worked.

Add to that, from the same issue, “Internet companies: The end of the free lunch—again:”

Now reality is reasserting itself once more, with familiar results. The number of companies that can be sustained by revenues from internet advertising turns out to be much smaller than many people thought.

I, for one, hope to never hear the word “monetize” again.

via Tech360.

Sweet Home Alabama.ru

HV listener Jack R Box has been combing thru this site for us, uncovering 404s, removed YT videos, and other species of link-rot. In one of our eeem xchanges he suggested I check the following vid, and I’m glad I did.

Witness this musical incarnation of multinational glasnot, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” by the Leningrad Cowboys & Red Army Choir:

HV054- Food Fight

Hearing Voices from NPR®
054 Food Fight: The Dark Side of the Muffin
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-11-17 (Originally: 2009-03-25)
soma
“Food Fight” (52:00 mp3):

Serving a savory mix of these Ingredients (photo © Hildie Golding):

“Eat the damn cheese,” sez Carolyn Hopewell in the web series Chesty Morgan’s Forbidden Love.
antabuse online
A Chinese student, Mr. Yen Ching, shares with host Larry Massett his recipe for cooking “Carp” and escaping communism.
buy phentermine
Young Palestinian-American Rocky Tayeh, from WNYC Radio Rookies, fights food in “My Struggle with Obesity.” More…

Thoth

YouTube’s Screening Room featured this 40-min video portrait of street performer, Thoth. This Oscar winning film has an elegant story structure, steadily revealing more elements of the man, his music, and his “prayformances” (go to YT and click HQ for their high-quality vers), “Thoth” by director Sarah Kernochan:

NPR Saves the News?

Fast Co wonders: “Will NPR Save the News?”

NPR’s listenership has nearly doubled since 1999, even as newspaper circulation dropped off a cliff. Its programming now reaches 26.4 million listeners weekly — far more than USA Today’s 2.3 million daily circ or Fox News’ 2.8 million prime-time audience. When newspapers were closing bureaus, NPR was opening them, and now runs 38 around the world, better than CNN. It has 860 member stations — “boots on the ground in every town” that no newspaper or TV network can claim. It has moved boldly into new media as well: 14 million monthly podcast downloads, 8 million Web visitors, NPR Mobile, an open platform, a social network, even crowdsourcing.

Day to Day’s Last Day

[Today is the final broadcast of NPR Day to Day. The show, which has aired so much HV stuff and been a pleasure to work with, has been canceled.]

Much of our news today is like much of our food today.  Heavily processed.  Raised in cages, fed hormones and antibiotics.  It makes us sick, maybe causes cancer.  At least it doesn’t seem unreasonable that you could get cancer from the news.

But we need news, just like we need food.  In order to maintain a civil society we need to stay well informed of the issues at hand, and the news is how we do this.  So what we need is news that isn’t processed, we need more organic news.

In my opinion as a news connoisseur and critic, Day to Day was the cleanest, most ‘wild caught’ program produced by NPR.  Sometimes after listening to the program I actually felt better.  I had more energy and eagerness to go about my life.  I wondered what would be on the show tomorrow. More than anything Day to Day gave me hope of hearing something really fresh and true.  If anything suffers in processing, it’s the truth.

Faced with alleged budget shortfalls last Fall, some of NPR’s 17 vice presidents decided to cut Day to Day from it’s schedule and fire everyone who worked there.  Personally, I would have erased all vice presidents.  When was the last time you heard of a vice president in a news room?  There are people called editors and producers and engineers in a news room but nobody goes by vice president, let alone 17 people who go by vice president all making around a quarter million a year.  Not to mention their secretaries and assistants.  Maybe some country club memberships.

This class of NPR employee apparently doesn’t mind producing and consuming processed news.  They’ve done tests and conducted studies that show the news they produce is made from the best ingredients, assembled by trained professionals, all approved by the Columbia School of Journalism, and brought to you at a surprisingly inexpensive price.  They are marketers and lawyers, and I say they should be gathered together and marched out onto the downtown Washington street on a snowy day and made strip down to their underwear, and then every single one of them should be fired and forced to eat nothing but Big Macs for the rest of their lives.

What a Kroc of shit!

–Scott Carrier

HV053- Ranchers

Hearing Voices from NPR®
053 Ranchers: Life, Death, Land, and Livestock
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-02-09 (Originally: 2009-03-18)

“Ranchers” (52:00 mp3):

Cattle and sheep, wool and meat:

Our host documents a year on a Roxanne Linderman’s Montana sheep ranch, raising, lambing, herding, shearing, and selling sheep.

Click thru our audio-viz gallery of sheep-shearer Jerry Iverson’s ranch paintings.

Composer Phillip Bimstien made music with the voice of his neighbor, a Rockville, Utah cattleman, in “Garland Hirschi’s Cows,” (Starkland 1997).

Lili Olsen, 3-years-old, takes us around her New Hampshire farm, recorded by Jason Rayles.

The late Attilio Genasci, interviewed for this story at age 97, held onto his California alpine-valley cattle ranch. Produced for the Nature Conservancy’s Stories from Heart of the Land and Saving the Sierra.

Inauguration Approximation

They fixed it in the mix:

“The Obama inauguration performance was pre-recorded, as we learned a few days after the event. Here is how the live performance might have actually sounded, for all we know… This is a satirical hypothetical document, not an actual record of what happened on inauguration day. Albeit with a nod to StSanders, numerous viewers have also pointed out that the duration of this video (4’33”) makes it a sort of John Cage tribute.”

via Lucas at WFMU.

Series of Tubes Turns 20

From CNET, “It was 20 years ago today: The Web:”

Is it already 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee authored “Information Management: A proposal” and set the technology world on fire?

T B-L’s 1989 client/server model for a distributed hypertext system

A Twitter Darkly

For all you twits out there, Brian Ungar (NPR Day to Day) sez tweet this:

via Ben- Comma Q.

Sony SPS

Sony just released their long-awaited new SPS. You’ll need one Right Now (nsfw):

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work

Solitary Confinement

Nine former prisoners describe their experiences in solitary confinement. Produced for the STOPMAX project and video, working to end cruel treatment of prisoners. (Voices: Robert Dellelo, Munirah El-Bomani, Tommy Escarcega, Ray Luc Levasseur, King Arch Angel, Hakeem Shaheed, Bilal Sunni-Ali, Laura Whitehorn, Robert King Wilkerson.) Aired on NPR Day to Day; by producer Claire Schoen, “Solitary Confinement” (7:19 mp3):