Nutshellery.
A number of folks are linking to today’s Daily Howler because it rips rather entertainingly into Janet Maslin’s rip-job on Sidney Blumenthal’s ripping Clinton-era tell-all. Since I haven’t read Blumenthal’s book (and probably won’t), I’m not about to get into a knock-down dragout on who’s zoomin’ who here, but I do have my suspicions—Maslin, after all, ends her piece thusly:
Speaking of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The Clinton Wars begins with a visit by President Clinton’s entourage to the Roosevelt home in Hyde Park, NY. While Mr. Clinton looks at his predecessor’s desk, Mr. Blumenthal sounds a wistful note. Those were the days when the press was too respectful to mention the president’s wheelchair.
Now, of course, the press is a diligent, wheelchair kickin’ watchdog. Why, just look at how they handled the recent dustup in Iraq.
—But the reason I want to link to Somerby today is because of the bit at the very end, where he tags yesterday’s Molly Ivins piece as a must-read. Which it is. But it’s part of a bigger picture we need to get a grip on, and Somerby is leading the way:
In essence, Blumenthal’s book describes the interaction between two distinct classes—Ivins’ group of “Shiite Republicans” and Maslin’s simpering insider press corps. Maslin’s class gains from Bush’s tax cuts, and doesn’t much care about anything else. They aren’t Shiite Republicans themselves, but if you want to get to the Hamptons by noon, it’s better to humor Molly Ivins’ gang of crazies. So Maslin pretends that Coulter has done Big Research, and pretends that Blumenthal is making weird statements. Then she’s out the door for the weekend.
“More next week,” is how Somerby closes. I’ll be there for it. As usual.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Why, yes. There were that many vases, and more besides.
Fire up the email and lick those stamps: Elisabeth Riba points us to Zoe Selengut’s copy of a letter drafted by Bernard Frischer of UCLA which you can cut’n’paste and use to snowdrift your congressfolks’ offices regarding the shameful, shameless, wanton destruction of thousands of years of irreplaceable human culture and history as we instead raced to protect the Ministry of Oil and destroy the insulting mosaic of George Bush’s face.
Smiling because what else is there to do.
“A broken heart won’t get you much further than a cold heart” is what John Cale’s singing, and Brian Eno’s chanting “Been there, done that; been there don’t wanna go back,” which is pretty much the best thing I can think of for a Tuesday that feels like a Monday. “A bad plan is better than no plan,” is what Gary Kasparov said, and I guess the shock and awe worked in the end if not quite in the manner advertised; I’m still shocked and awestruck at how we have no plan, no plan at all. (We’re going to Syria next! No, we aren’t! And I’m terrified it’s both, or maybe neither, and no one, not a single person on this earth, will know until it actually, you know, happens. Or doesn’t.) —So I turn from thinking globally to locally and discover that, of two of the tax proposals being considered by our legislature to stanch the hemmorrhaging of our laughable budget (a sidenote: is it hemmorrhaging when the blood’s pooled around your ankles and rising?), one of them would set Mark Hemstreet up as a tinpot dictator, and the other would obliterate one of the few thriving local industries left, one uniquely suited to the current Zeitgeist (links courtesy The Oregon Blog, whose own links are bloggered at the moment; scroll to entries for 11 April and 14 April).
So.
Hey, had you heard we’re hiring cut-rate rapists and militant missionaries to go in and rebuild Iraq from the dust up on the cheap?
You had?
Well.
Kevin’s strip this week made me smile and in a good way, too. Small triumphs, I guess. So there’s that.
—Also, Wes Anderson’s going to start filming a new movie in September. Starring Bill Murray. As a French oceanographer.
So there’s that, too. And Holly Cole’s doing her honkytonkish cover of “The Heart of Saturday Night,” now, which, well.
I think I need more coffee.
And then Ray Davis made three.
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.
It’s one of those images that stick with you: Hypatia, pagan philosopher, dragged from her lofty chariot through the streets of Alexandria, her flesh cut from her body with oyster shells, burned to death as the last vestige of idolatry. She was accounted by some as not merely a librarian at the great Library of Alexandria, but its head librarian; the last head librarian; her death is therefore accounted by some as the end of that great era.
By some. We’re pretty sure she was murdered, but the oyster shells while a nice touch are not so certain, and as to whether she was the head librarian, well. It makes for a nice story. And the burning of the Library itself? We’re not even too sure about who did that, or when, or how. It went, we know that—it was there, unquestionably, and now it isn’t, and people got upset about it. But not enough of the record survives to tell us for sure what happened to it.
The same problem threatens to inconvenience future generations: video tape degrades, after all, and links rot; digitial media is upgraded willy nill without taking the time to bring everything from the past with us—what will you do with that 8-inch floppy disk, grampaw? And, paradoxically, there is too much information: too many stories flying around, written and told too many different ways. Who knows how what is happening here and now will end up being told in a thousand years?
Which is why it is incumbent upon all of us to engrave these words somewhere and kept them in that peculiar taboo state, untouchable and safe, where the sacred meets the profane:
The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, “My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?”
So that when our children, and our children’s children, and their children besides, ask, “Who destroyed the treasures of the Fertile Crescent? Who let the golden harp of Sumer slip through his fingers? The cuneiform tablets and the copper shoes? Who pledged to do his best not to war on the earliest history of humanity, and failed to keep his pledge? Who destroyed the history and the heritage of the people he tried to save, thus fueling the very hate from which he hoped to save them?” we can smile sorrowfully at them and say, “Donald Rumsfeld,” and then, demurely, spit, to rinse the foul taste of his name from our mouths.
Is it possible there were that many vases in the whole country?
—Some will frame this as a moral dilemma and yes, if you were to ask me, point blank, would I save the person or the Picasso from a burning building, I’d rather see RAWA live and thrive than save a hundred ancient statues of the Buddha, any day. But RAWA’s not exactly thriving these days, either, and anyway, the dilemma’s a false one. It’s more like this: if you plan to set fire to a museum to smoke out a madman, are you morally obligated to arrange to save as many paintings as possible? When you saw the bough off the tree, should you not try your best to catch the cradle?
Well?
The Jews ambushed the Christians, and the Christians slaughtered the pagans with oyster shells and fire. Cæsar didn’t give a fuck how he got his outnumbered force out of Dodge and torched the city to cover his escape. ’Amr bin Aas, who conquered Egypt to prove that he was a better general than Khalid ibn Walid, is supposed to have been asked what he would do to secure the scrolls and codices of the great Library; he is supposed to have said:
If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious, and ought to be destroyed.
But that’s apocryphal. Especially the bit about him burning the scrolls and codices to heat his bathwater for six months. —The irreparable destruction of the irreplaceable cradle of civilization is not apocryphal, for all that it is not burning up our television screens. The blood and the oil and the hypocrisy are not apocryphal. The seven billion dollars for capping nonexistent oil fires is very real, and the monumental stupidity and colossal ignorance preen openly before the press.
Is it possible there were that many vases in the whole country?
No means no.
Separation means separation.
Uniter means not dividing.
This means war.
I don’t want to listen to fundamentalist preachers anymore.
Mission creep.
I need a new word. If it’s war that’s hell, what on earth can we call this that will do it justice?
UMM QASR, Iraq – The US military came up with a solution yesterday for the penniless people of this port town begging for water: Sell it.
Despite general mayhem at distribution points—including knife fights—the Army has struck a hasty agreement with local Iraqis to expedite distribution of water to the roughly 40,000 living here.
Under the deal, the military will provide water free to locals with access to tanker trucks, who then will be allowed to sell the water for a “reasonable” fee.
“We’re permitting them to charge a small fee for water,” said Army Col. David Bassert.
“This provides them with an incentive to hustle and to work,” said Bassert, an assistant commander with the 354th Civil Affairs Brigade.
He said he could not suggest what constitutes a reasonable fee and did not know what the truckers were charging. He said the tradition here of haggling at markets would help the system work.
“People know when they’re being gouged—we’ll deal with it,” Bassert said.
Especially when the largest potential employer is hanging signs like this:
Tucked in the classifieds of national Indian dailies on Wednesday was an advertisement that could further alienate the Muslim community from the United States.
The advertisement calls for applications from “non-Muslims only” for sundry jobs at the US base in northern Kuwait.
The US base “urgently requires” lift operators, store keepers, clerks, typists, security guards and drivers. The advertisement insists that the applicants, besides being non-Muslims, should speak English and be below 35.
Luckily, retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner is listening to the British and not the Americans.
Garner sought to gloss over what had become an increasingly angry US-British dispute on the direction and goals of the relief effort. The Americans wanted to jump-start a free-market economy by letting Iraqi contractors sell water at a modest profit to encourage private business in general.
But British officers were exasperated at what they viewed as a heavy-handed and unrealistic American attempt to impose supply-side economic theory on what is essentially a barter economy in the aftermath of dictatorship and war.
“We’re going to build on what the British have done,” Garner said, putting an end to the initial US approach that was enthusiastically outlined Monday by Army Col. David Bassert of the 354th Civil Affairs Brigade.
But I still need that new word. Greedracious? Backstabistick? A thick brown taste in the back of your throat, an acrid tang of decay, like you’re rotting from the inside? Jesus Mary Mother of God, what in the hell are you jumped-up morons thinking?
(Via Nathan Newman, with an assist from Steve Colbert.)
Has been constitutive of.
At the end of the day, this is maybe the worst crime I’m willing to charge junior professor and middleweight bloviator Nicholas De Genova with: a tendencious mangling of the written word out of unexamined habit that results in such no-duh sentences as:
In my brief presentation, I outlined a long history of US invasions, wars of conquest, military occupations, and colonization in order to establish that imperialism and white supremacy have been constitutive of US nation-state formation and US nationalism.
The remarks in question (“I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus”) led the New York Post to idly speculate on how cool it would be for the National Guard to take up once again the practice of opening fire on peacefully protesting fellow citizens. De Genova has since expounded on his “million Mogadishus” soundbite in the Columbia Daily Spectator (link gacked from Electrolite’s comments, though the Invisible Adjunct has more to say on the subject), and it’s pretty much what I thought; these sorts of clarion calls for clear moral lines—with little thought as to the very real effects on those (of racially subordinated and working class backgrounds, as he takes pains to point out) who must necessarily toe those clear moral lines; who are rarely, if ever, anyone remotely like the clarion caller him- or herself—this sort of stirring speechifying has always been and will ever be constitutive of rabble-rousing and moral thuggery on every side of any conceivable political divide. It’s as shocking to find in academia—red state or blue state—as gamblers in Casablanca. —Yes, sheltered narcissist De Genova is far too quick to urge others (from racially subordinated and working-class backgrounds, to boot) to step up to his plate, but when it comes to the difference between urging and actually being in a position to enforce a glitteringly beautiful, inhuman moral clarity, I reserve my ire and my disdain first and foremost for the enforcers, button-men and condottieri—and there’s a long line of zipless cakewalk neocons ahead of De Genova, let me tell you.
(And such powerful weapons my ire and disdain are, too. Each hair on my head stands upright, like spines, and each one is tipped with a fire-spark. One eye squeezes tighter than the eye of a needle; the other opens as wide as a goblet. My mouth opens and stretches to my ears, my lips peel back until all my teeth show and you can see straight down my gullet. All around my head the hero-halo spins and flashes like a falling star. —Just ask the Spouse.)
Anyway, best quote on the whole sordid mess comes from Scott Lynch, in those ever-lively comments at Electrolite:
The thing that hits me hardest in the gut about this stupid De Genova/Kent State “thought experiment” is that there are folks out there who seem to think (or are willing to suggest in “jest”) that Kent State was only a tragedy for the left. It’s a bit like suggesting that Pearl Harbor was a tragedy solely for Hawaiians.
Now: Geraldo Rivera. Shameless flack or traitorous hack?
The dot-com war.
Tracking a meme from my own rather limited point of view: Jon Meltzer was the first I saw to say it, this morning, over in the comments to this post at Making Light. —Five minutes of browsing later, and here’s Sullywatch making a more detailed case. (Although—thinking about it—George Soros wrote an op-ed a week or so ago about the Bush Hubris Bubble…) —The dot-com war. —This one has legs, I think.
Sweating the small stuff.
It’s hardly surprising that nothing’s going according to plan (or is it?) when we can’t even get the uniforms right.
Military leaders insist that the shortage of desert BDUs will not affect the safety of American soldiers. They point out that Iraq’s terrain is not entirely Sahara-like, and that green camouflage may actually work better near the banks of the Euphrates River, where vegetation and mud are present.
Oh. Never mind, then.
Keeping it simple.
There’s a stark beauty to this:
To: president@whitehouse.gov (President George W. Bush)
From: k@metameat.net (Paul Kerschen)
Subject: The cost of the Iraq war
Dear Mr. President:
Yesterday the media reported that you have made a supplemental budget request to Congress of $74.7 billion to pay for the current war in Iraq. Your budget for fiscal year 2003 assumes total federal receipts of $2,048.1 billion. My personal income tax accounts for .000000040% of that figure. Applying this percentage to the amount of funding you have requested from Congress, I find that I personally have been asked to pay $29.94 for the Iraq war.
The Mercy Corps, a charitable organization with which you may be familiar, has established an Iraq Emergency Fund to help alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe that the war has already caused, and which will only worsen in coming weeks. Lack of food, clean water, power, and medical supplies will place millions of people at risk of hunger and disease, and a refugee crisis of massive proportions is assured. I have made a charitable donation to this fund in the amount of $199.62. As I am in the fifteen-percent tax bracket, this will reduce my federal tax liability for the next year by the precise amount which you have charged me for your war.
I oppose this invasion in the strongest possible terms. Neither my belief that America must be protected from unconventional threats, nor my immense respect for the American men and women who are currently risking their lives on your orders, alter my conviction that you and your advisers have conceived this war recklessly, in bad faith, with insufficient thought given to possible consequences, insufficient support given to diplomatic alternatives, and appallingly little regard for the sanctity of human life. You will not wage it in my name, and you will not wage it with my financial support.
Sincerely yours,
Paul Kerschen
I needed to run the numbers on our taxes anyway. (Thanks, Juliet.)
