Radio pioneer Norman Corwin died at 101 this past October. A peer of radio journalist Edward R. Murrow, Corwin's broadcasting career spanned most of the 20th Century as well as a variety of genres. Known for his creativity and diverse writing talents, he helped compose "We Hold These Truths" a post-Pearl Harbor attack radio docudrama that featured Orson Welles, Jimmy Stewart, Edward G. Robinson, Lionel Barrymore and Walter Huston, and concluded with a live speech by FDR.
During the brief documentary "A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin" he reminded us of the specific value of the medium of radio:
“In radio there was never a term equivalent to boob tube or
couch potato. The eye is so literal, whereas the ear makes a participant of the
listener. The listener becomes the set designer, the wardrobe mistress, the
casting director. You can listen to ‘Carmen’ on radio. Carmen in person may
weigh 350 pounds, but to the listener she’s a beautiful, steamy lady with a
rose in her teeth.”
Obviously I haven't been regular with this blog, but dammit, if that good old false prophet Harold Camping of Family Radio Ministry didn't goad me into an overdue entry when he revised his May prediction for the END OF THE WORLD to be October 21, 2011. But maybe we shouldn't be surprised - his middle name is Egbert for godsake!
His delusional shenanigans would be amusing if not for the fact that there are plenty of other prophet-able end-times hucksters out there working overtime to connect current events with obscure bible passages. Are these folks much different than the 2012 Mayan calendar folk? Perhaps not, but at least the Mayan prophecy isn't a destructive judgement but rather a positive shift in human consciousness. In any case, it seems wise to be suspicious of all apocalyptic predictions - right Egbert?
A competition between dates for the end of the world?
In case you hadn't heard, the most recent prediction of the end of the world comes from Harold Camping, founder of Family Radio Worldwide, and it's going to be this Saturday May 21, 2011. So then, does that mean the apocalypse of 2012 is off?
Early Christians, and certain sects throughout history believed the end of the world to be imminent, but since the first century there have been dozens of failed predictions - maybe it's a Pavlovian thing. Eschatology certainly catches my attention. Camping's prediction has also been profitable for sign makers judging by the worldwide distribution of warning messages on billboards, posters and vehicles.
Though the internet has undoubtedly helped Harold Camping disseminate his message, he has used radio to reach a worldwide audience for decades. According to Rory O'Connor in Shock Jocks, religious and other conservative radio programs have a 10-1 dominance of the airwaves over progressive or liberal radio programs and Camping was a pioneer in this growth.
So, be sure to tune in this Sunday night to see if I'm still here - or to tell your own tale of disappearing Christians!
click the center of the pupil & adjust volume on right
In spite of our rhetorical litanies claiming to value free exchange, often our reality falls far short of this lofty and necessary democratic goal.
"Be creative," "think out of the box," "we encourage free expression," "freedom of speech is important," in America we have a "free marketplace of ideas, "transparency of leadership," blah, blah, Blah, Blah, BLAH, BLAH!
Too often we are subtly (and not so subtly) discouraged from thinking outside the confines of commercial programming, unregulated greed, plutocratic reverence, competition, prohibition, corporate personhood, academic values, departments, rubrics, outlines, plans, hierarchies, trying to always control....but why?
"Control is controlled by the need to control."
Are a free exchange of ideas, promotion of creativity and leadership transparency really our daily experience? Sure, we don't (always) get clubbed, tear-gassed or shot with rubber bullets and hauled away to jail like people do in those "other" countries - but is that really the standard we want to measure ourselves by?
Why smugly trumpet the values of creative free expression only to abandon them when we are bullied to do so? Sure, for survival, it can pay in the short run, but what about the bigger picture? Does history celebrate or even remember the timid and the tame?
The heroes of history tend to be the heretics and the rebels, those who stand up to bullies, whose narrative challenges the status-quo and who have the courage and support to relate that narrative freely (and who, we must admit, often get burned in some way in the process).
...and if you think about it, human evolution happens because of mutation,deviance,difference, divergence- not just endless repetition of successful traits or formulas, no matter how tasty or fashionable!
One of the thematic contrasts that recur in my show and in my thinking is that of the organic and the mechanical. The material wonders of industrial technology and mass production are ubiquitous and obvious, as is the praise for these pervasive systems but - our species seems to be losing touch with the natural and the organic and "nature deficit disorder" is on the rise. Outdoors, in the green woods we are confronted with the "chaos" of unsystematic Nature and must rely upon our own creativity and spontaneous action - there is no script.
We regularly use machine metaphors to refer to the ideal in human performance and the digital world lures us into disdain for our bodies because they are never as "perfect" as our avatar - our bodies age and smell and this reminds us uncomfortably of our animality. Like D-503 in Zamyatin's We, our lives are increasingly lived within the comfortable confines of a "Green Wall" that keeps us safe from the chaos of Nature and encourages increasing reliance on the regimens of modern life. Though written in 1920, Zamyatin seems to capture our modern mania for hyper-scheduling and mechanical action.
"But our Table of Hours! Why, it transforms each one of us into a figure of steel, a six-wheeled hero of a mighty epic poem. Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the same hour and the same moment, we—millions of us—get up as one. At the same hour, in millionheaded unison, we start work; and in million-headed unison we end it And, fused into a single million-handed body, at the same second, designated by the Table, we lift our spoons to our mouths. At the same second, we come out for our walk, go to the auditorium, go to the hall for Taylor exercises, fall asleep...."
We may not move as one for every task, but as humorously represented in the intro credits for Weeds, Americans do have recognizable robotic patterns. As Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes" suggests, in some circles, the path of life is singular and prescribed - if they choose to follow the recipe given them.
Considerations of the impact of industrial technologies are easy to find, but most of these are laudatory and generally focus on decreases in cost and increases in quantity, often overlooking the human impact and the significant problems that arise from uncritical overproduction - one of the specific critiques made in 1888 by Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward.
Early films like Fritz Lang's 1927 silent classic Metropolis demonstrate an early concern for the mechanizing impact of technology on human bodies as well as the efforts of owners to control workers via technological means. The contemporary relevance of Metropolis is suggested by its 2010 digital restoration.
Chaplin's semi-silent 1936 film Modern Times provides a more amusing reflection on the simultaneous mechanization of industry and man, as directed by owners and managers. Thought the film dialog could have been completely featured in sound, Chaplin choses to give only certain characters a voice - note who and reflect on the significance of this.
We've all enjoyed the bountiful (if often excessive) benefits of industrial production, but it's significant drawbacks have become normalized and its toll on us, invisible. As French philosopher Jacques Ellul notes in The Technological Society, the goal of technology is the precise, efficient result and the unpredictable embodied human must be subdued for this: "To the degree that technique must attain its result with mathematical precision, it has for its object the elimination of all human variability and elasticity."
The connection to radio may be obvious, celebrating the variable and elastic nature of freeform radio, but a larger insight might be gained from brief reflection, at a greater distance, upon the history of our species. Technology has made our lives easier and more comfortable while simultaneously making us softer and less adaptable - and more rigid.
While forms, frameworks and systems are convenient technologies for organization and specific applications like mass production, they can become stifling bonds limiting creative exploration and problem-solving - like Blake's "mind-forged manacles" in his poem "Jerusalem."
While technologies have helped us to evolve, there may be a point at which our interaction with them is devolutionary, making us soft & unadaptable. Contemporary technological society requires increasing standardization and conformity on a variety of levels, but randomness, chance and mutation have been the drivers of human evolution - not predictable uniformity.
The useful "Best College Radio Stations" map in my previous posting is the work of a 26 year old radio activist and web developer named Sujay whose interest in the promise of non-commercial free-form radio was inspired by a move to the San Francisco Bay area where there are many creative, local stations ranging from KPFA's listener supported "free speech" radio at Berkeley to the more staid NPR clone KQED. When I asked Sujay what motivated his build of the site, he wrote "I've always sought out untainted sources of art and culture, and when I discovered college radio, I knew I found something great. I wanted an accessible map and playlist of the "best" stations and since I couldn't find them, I built them." When I asked whether the site included local community radio stations or if its focus was solely college radio. Sujay explained his rationale:"After initial research, it seemed like most 'community' stations relied on NPR broadcasts or were run by professional DJs. I decided to limit the list to stations run by student volunteers. There are a lot of great stations that are not run by students, though, and that's why I'm working on a spin-off project right now that focuses on outstanding commercial-free radio shows from any station in the world." This promising project may be part of the RADIOcollective grassroots work. From my brief email exchanges with Sujay, it seems that the value of promoting freeform radio is in its freedom for experimentation which is only possible with a freedom from regimentation. "To me, true freeform programming means that there are no rules. The DJ could broadcast static noise, satanic verses, or Top 40 hits. Obviously there are FCC guidelines, intellectual property restrictions, and hate speech regulations, but to me these are all forms of censorship."
Amen to that! In these days of homogenizing global consumer culture it is more crucial than ever to start creating our own. And when it comes to important issues, can't we find more serious moral considerations than whether or not someone has a potty-mouth?
Marlon Brando supplies a succinct analysis of our potty-mouth paranoia in his Colonel Kurtz monologue from Apocalypse Now: “We train young men to drop fire on people but their commanders won’t allow them to write fuck on their airplanes because it’s obscene.” Is the broadcast of words like "fuck" and "shit"reallya serious crime worthy of the significant legislative and enforcement costs involved? I wonder what the total annual cost would be?
Maybe the FCC's trivial obsession with taboo words is really just an effective distraction from their consistent promotion of media monopoly - just one more reason that grassroots radio is an increasingly important medium to use and support.
The image above is a map of The Best College Radio Stations courtesy of DJ Sujay of Radio Collective whose mission statement is well targeted for the promotion of genuine cultural creations rather than the mechanically produced programming that is the law in commercial radio.
"We believe that independent radio is an unparalleled source of music and cultural exchange. Our goal is to discover and share the most interesting radio shows in the world, with the world."
In the homogenized wasteland of commercial radio, there is some small degree of "programming diversity" but the spectrum is surprisingly narrow considering how much lip-service we give in America to creativity and freedom of expression.
"There are many systems of control that shape our lives in this great nation we call America. They govern our daily lives on most fronts, our political and spiritual views, but it is undeniably more personal when they attack a people's access to art by filtering and bottlenecking anything that does not fit perfectly into the mold."
There are almost 20 "morning zoo" radio shows still being aired even though this trite format has been regurgitated since the 1980's when it was considered a fresh approach being promoted by broadcasters like Glenn Beck. If you listen closely to their script, you are sure to recognize the zoo litany.
How many dithering duos start our days with their inane banter and canned station slogans like "the 50-minute music hour?" or "the workforce block?" The subtext suggested by such standardized professional programming rhetoric seems designed for distracting or mollifying legions of cubicle-bound workers.
More about DJ Sujay, the Radio Collective and the crucial need for truly independent "freeform" programming in my next post.
Tonight is my radio debut as StryderLee hosting "Strange Cucumber" an eclectic, engaging, varied and unexpected radio show that combines music, audio collage, sound effects, commentary, spoken word, interviews, local soundscapes, interesting audio history and more. My first time slot is Monday mornings 1AM-3AM, a time when most folks are asleep but many college students are catching up on the studying they should have done over the weekend, so I hope I can engage them.
The origin of the title is in a remark one of my fellow students made to me one afternoon at the Eastern School of Farriery: "Stryder....you sure are a strange cucumber." An old friend gave me the name Stryder because I walk so fast, so I used it at horseshoeing school. The other guys taking the 6-week summer training course didn't know what to make of a guy who read books and didn't join in conversations about "niggers, faggots and bitches." When I tired of being kept up until 2AM (when we woke at 6 to work on horses!) I packed up and moved my gear from the men's bunkhouse (population 15) to the women's side (population 3) and these guys didn't know what to think - hence, "strange cucumber."
So, I hope the title doesn't scare anyone off and that for my two short hours I will be able to entertain, inform, provoke thought and surprise my listeners.
