more from the Joe anti-Anderson thing below

"Trade is the road to peace. Commerce and business know no national boundaries. They link nations together on productivity, creating jobs and peace across the world."

It sounded good at the time. Who would have thought that the people enjoying all this harmony and peace brought about through globalization would be enjoying it in a one big happy planetary work gulag?

. . .

I like the way Joe thinks and certainly concur the talking puppet syndrome we live with. plus his thought above re: nafta, world trade, etc.. 15 years ago I would have likewise said "Global economy...cant stop it!" but that was before I realized the crushing potential of job and industry exportation. before I realized the depth to which huge companies would stoop to satisfy their greed. I really had No idea they how effortlessly they would screw their employees and how completely unimportant things like moral compass and humanity were.

I truly did not know enough about ego and business "savvy" and how it would betray EVerything America is supposed to stand for in the name of wealth and winning. Scum is far too generous a category for these guys. self esteem is nothing more than a fake rolex to these turd brains. not having to pick up a check for a $1000 lunch is enlightenment. Screwing the competition while causing hellish suffering on those who work for you because every penny in the budget is more important than Any given worker down the line...it's too horrible the whole lot unthinkable.

but there it is...me me me me...fuck you you you you and you. I win. I only wish I was a super hero with a cloaking costume I could spend everyday zooming around catching these guys in the act of making their demonic calls in the boardroom or in their limos and watch them die the slowest most painful deaths I could muster till their population numbers were reduced to a manageable few. I believe it emphatically...some people do Not deserve to live.

Vengeance Against Gayness

NOT.

in fact, when it comes to reasons for living, finding someone gone yet still logged on was one of the most joyful imaginable. I already liked you a lot and targeting you in such a scam was my way of showing you affectionate attention. I wanted to include you in my little joke in pure prankish fun.

I remember that evening very well...about 7...looking into Abby's darkened office and seeing she was still on yet I'd just said good bye to her. "gotcha!" seems like I was able to sting Karen and Chris, too. the rules were clear: if you left without logging off you were fair game. there was no assumption I had a chance of not getting "busted". the final revelation of what had happened was part of the game.

anyway, I'm sorry if that episode upset you. for me it was pure office shenanigans theatre of the absurd and that incident was a glorious victory in the genre.

as far as the rest of it, I never realized how sinister the adult rites were and how infected the place was till I was fired. countless times I said, "you have to kill someone to get fired here." which spoke of my overly optimistic feeling of family and belonging. how can you fire your eccentric goofy uncle? he means you no harm.

but the commercial virus had entrenched itself to fatal levels. they had become the enemy.

as you say it would Seem the kind hearted 'family' would protect itself against the virus of the few, would itself purge the poison in public radio. but no...they're too far gone.

and as far as the remnants of the family are concerned they know the loose fabric of commercial radio ethics. they know how radio gypsies move from one job to the next like migrant workers. they know administrators make inhuman decisions based on inhuman often power politics that have nothing to do with skill and heart. so the gypsies do what theyre told and avoid the ax till there's no other choice. they submit with the understanding of their own weakness.

it used to kill me that a radio great like glenn mitchell was under the thumb of relatively worthless administrators and their arbitrary hiding skirts of ratings and executive decisions. ludicrous, insanity, the opposite of justice and logic like some super athlete confining his/her movements to what the boss's son advises cause he plays a mean Madden '06.

and it keeps me off the radio horse. I'm not going back in there knowing what I know about the relationship between idiot management and the talents they squash as a daily matter of course.

A Lesbian Fling With Abby Goldstein

When email was young..

Early 1990's, I had just come to work at KERA 90.1, in Dallas, Texas. Out under that big southern sky, one radio station out of all of them was gentle on the ears, playing the salt of the earth and the wailing winds and the African blues and Jaco Pistorius and the ringing bells of the Roches' voices and wandering esoterica late at night, while the commercial stations blasted away with their big mixes and most music and the same fifty songs that get killed over and over again on the radio today, as they did then. One station had the Kronos Quartet, quiet between the voices, unpracticed jocks without scripted liners, and even some French bluegrass. A room wall-to-wall with vinyl, rattling sliding walls of compact discs, and decades-old carpet and equipment was the source of the sound. It was part of the shack that once stood where now the impressive public broadcasting cellblock houses sleek studios with blondwood floors.

Back in the days of the shack was when I came to work for One of A Kind,
KERA, 90.1; And it really was one of a kind. Everyone dutifully repeated those words, but they weren't really needed. KERA needed no slogans.

I found KERA because the "creatives" at the ad agency would blast it at full volume in the back room when Sam Phillips or Lyle Lovett played. It was the little radio station that commanded wide respect in the boring wilds of cosmo Dallas. When it was on, you had the feeling that while you were listening, others in the city were listening too, others you might want to meet or hang out with one day. The lame attempt at branding did not harm the coolness, and the station reminded any and all lonely artists that other artists were out there, creating; and they were creating outside of the primary colors and primary-school ideas that saturated other media.

That such a station existed was the end of the line for me. There was no more job search.

I ended up fired from the ad agency. I only had one friend there anyway, a guy named Jim Branstedder who had a cool loft downtown where we one night sat on the roof and looked at the city. He had the craggiest, most impossible face ever on a guy, and for that I liked him. His teeth were crooked, but he had a cute smile. He was the nicest one of all of them.

I worked on a letter to KERA's PD, Craig Allen. I drew a pencil rendering of my own hand in light, fine lines, and filled the edges with a soft bright yellow from an old colored pencil. Upon this I laid down black words with my electric typewriter explaining why I had to come work with ya'll. I know you had your issues with Allen (but I can barely remember why, except that it had to do with pointy-headed middle managementism) but he liked my letter and it hung up on his wall for some time.

He didn't mind that I also worked on Saturday nights deejaying at a commercial classic rock station. It was besides the point. Or maybe it wasn't.

Because I learned later that there was a push to sound more "commercial," which was actually what I was escaping from, when I came to KERA. I vaguely remember something about wanting to sound smooth and incorporate little slogans and stuff into the announcing. Whatever. I was a trained robot and took all that for granted. What was interesting to me was the music. KERA had no formal playlist.

It was one of the last stations in the country without one. Radio programmers had jumped into computer-generated song machines as if they were the absolute only possible way to pick music. Most people never knew their radios were being taken over by computers. Visions of disc jockeys a la' WKRP happily filled the heads of those whose listening was invisibly invaded by the grind of payola and perks and market research jerks. If at some point people began to realize that they were hearing the same songs over and over and over again, they never mentioned it. And who would they tell, anyway? Maybe they changed the channel to where a slightly different tightly-wound playlist circulated according to a different clock, wearing out the almost-invisible hairs on the inside of the inner ear that, when triggered, catch on something in the heart and cause an explosion of awareness and awe.

The unexpected was no longer to be found on our airwaves. The sensibilities were silently flattened and if life seemed a little more pedestrian and forlorn, who could blame a program director at a radio station? His boss said it wasn't about the music, it was about the money. And his boss was The boss. And so forth. And so the day the music died was more than just one day. It was decades of death to music, without a goodbye, without a drop of sentimentality.

The computer decided what songs went where. It was all done for you. The disc jockey didn't even man the turntables. He or she plugged in carts, like 8-tracks, and then pulled them out. They re-cued themselves...save us the trouble..isn't that nice? Let the machines do what we once did. An artificial arm, a little less trouble, and they were set to fire off automatically, too.

So being a dj in the early 90's meant, first and foremost, you followed rules. Make your arm go back and forth. Make your arm go back and forth. All day long.

I came to KERA to get away from that.

But you guys didn't know that, either. So you were pretty surly to me for a while. I remember you even called me "conservative" once. I think it was because I had gone to Baylor and didn't wear birkenstocks. And we had that new computer installed in master control and we could type emails to each other on the in-house system. Remember MS DOS? That was my very first email account--the in-house account at KERA. And I'll never forget the email I got from Abby.

I hadn't been at the station all that long and had met everyone, thought everyone was cool, and was just discovering that though there was a computer-generated playlist, nobody used it. It was there to make the suits happy, but in actual fact each and every song got crossed off from where the computer put it, and the actually chosen song was hand-written and squeezed into the spaces that were left. The playlists were filed at the end of the day, dense with scribbles and doodles, and that was it. The software churned out dismal bloopers like the same artist and song every evening at 8pm several times a week. I was just discovering (from you, probably) that it didn't matter. As long as I played four of the new records an hour, the rest was up to me. My gig was to engineer Karen Dennard's talk show at 7 and put callers on the air, and then I had four great hours to play music for Dallas/Fort Worth/Denton.

The email was sort of shy, sly and sweet at the same time. It was a couple of paragraphs long and chatted about how nice it was to have met me and how she liked my show so far. I didn't know Abby well and thought she was funny. She was sitting in master control one day with her feet up on the console, sitting across from whoever was on the air. She had sneakers on with no socks. "I like those socks," someone said. "They're the same color as my underwear," she replied without a blink.

She said she liked the songs I was picking and thought the station sounded good with my show and would I like to get together and maybe have coffee sometime? I thought that was a nice, neighborly offer. Let's welcome the new kid in town. Maybe we could go for spinach enchiladas with sour-cream sauce down at the mex joint, near the ad agency over by the Crescent building. Or we could catch a show together sometime. She hoped it was OK to let me know that she really liked the way I dressed. However I picked out my clothes it somehow seemed to work.

OK, maybe she should just come right out and say it, and please don't be mad at her or feel awkward or whatever. It's just that she really thought I was cool and liked me so much and hoped it was OK if she took the direct approach: she was really attracted to me. Please don't get upset! This might not be the right thing to do, but she just had to let me know she had thought about kissing me already, and if I wasn't interested, pleaassse just tell her to shut up and she would go away. Could she get in trouble for writing this? Maybe, so please keep it to myself, she just felt I was a really special person and had to take a chance to tell me.

I printed out the email on the dot matrix printer, folded it, and tucked it into my purse, where it burned a hole all night. The letter came on a Friday evening and on Saturday I pulled it out again at home and examined it. She had included her phone number. She wanted me to call so we could have a conversation so things were less awkward, because I might feel weird after getting her email, so please, please call her so she could be sure I wasn't all freaked out, because it was NO big deal, she just liked me and thought we could be friends, or more.

My hand hovered over the phone. I picked it up, I put it down. I put the letter back in my purse. Later that afternoon, with the shadows growing longer and my boyfriend over at his parent's house watching golf, I took it out again. I put it on the table. I poured a glass of wine. I thought about joining my boyfriend and his parents and rejected it out of hand. I called Abby.

She seemed delighted to hear from me. I asked her how she was doing, what she was up to. Everything she said sounded like blah, blah, blah, to me. I was nervous. I cared more about how I sounded than what she was actually saying. Through layers of self-consciousness I realized she had asked me a question. "What email?"

"You know, the email," I said. "The one you wrote me."

"Did I send you an email?" she pondered.

Then she said, "Shit!"

And she said, "Read me the email!!"

And you, Kim Corbet, were busted.

"I left myself logged in at my desk the other night!!!" She told me. "I didn't write that love note. Kim Corbet wrote that love note, during the overnight, when he was wandering around and found my computer still logged in. That's how it looked like it came from me, son of a bitch. But look, it's all true. I still think you're really cool and all, but I'm not a lesbian."

"That's good, because I'm not either," I said. "But it's one of the nicest letters I ever got."

It's Anderson Cooper's Fault (Joe Bageant)

I love Joe Bageant. He doesn't mince words. Here he lets it fly at Ol Coop, who richly deserves it.

Here he explains why the Media Complex sucks.

_______________________________

And for that I blame Anderson Cooper. That's right, CNN's boyishly good looking, sincere faced, Emmy Award winning Anderson Cooper. Let me explain.

Between the corporate and financial elites and the slobbering masses stands the American Information Class -- the reporters, talking heads, news anchors and pundits. In short, the entire gaggle of meat puppets and journalism hacks who have been cultivated and bred to be clueless by the university industry and others serving our corporate empire. In other words, serving global capitalism, and the national fictions it maintains, including that sizable piece of corporate feudal turf known as America. And that fiction is maintained through la danse des marionnettes de viande.

Not that these meat puppets are to be pitied for their cluelessness. Lordy no! When your employer is throwing celebrity and money at you faster than you can suck up the adulation or blow the bucks, why would anybody pause long enough to get a clue. I sure as hell wouldn't. I'd pull a Bill Clinton, buy me some Cuban cigars and tell the secretary, "Under the desk, baby! And crack open a bottle of of Jack Daniels for me on your way down."

It's certainly an easy gig. Move your lips like a reporter, wear a black shirt and a $600 bush jacket in disaster and war porn spots as Anderson Cooper does, and make at least 4 million a year base salary (plus a few hundred thousand more a year in speakers fees for canned talks. Cooper's agency will provide the list). Anderson's basic message is that the world is a horrific place filled with miserable inferior lives, ridden by want, African machete amputations and the like. The guy in front of the flat screen in Cedar Rapids, Iowa doesn't even have to stop and think to draw the corpo-state approved conclusion Anderson delivers. It's instantaneous into his deep reptilian brain: "Hatians fucked. Iraqis fucked. Greeks fucked. Me live in best place of all."

Attractive, serious and sincere looking, and presented as calm and rational against the backdrop of world terror and misery, Anderson is the perfect robotic mouthpiece, easy on the eyes, poised in the "Anderson Cooper suit," (actually, it's Ralph Lauren, the gay aesthetic goes a long way in his business). And most importantly, despite what he's seen first hand, he remains clueless about the world. Bullet proof to reality. Robot. Then again, that's a job qualification in the entertainment business. American news is first and foremost entertainment. If you happen to stumble onto some accidental truth, be assured there will be a correction in the name of Republican sponsored "fairness and balance in media."

Now this may be a stretch for some more open minded readers, but to my mind, anyone such as Cooper, who actually believes he is worth 4 million, and can put it in the bank without dying of shame, has no idea what's going on in this world -- no matter how much he or she is paid to look like they do. In fact, anyone doing so for over $50,000 is in the same category. Which includes everyone you see on your television screen. It's all just self-absorbed celebrity preening. At the local level the rubes watch you on Keokuk Cable. At the national level, an indoctrinated people read Vanity Fair's writers going down on you, telling you what a brave and saintly journalist you are. And the internet dedicating hundreds of thousands of word to your choice in suits.

There is no way out of our culture manufacturing machinery. We're not in charge. It would be bigger than any one of us because it consists of all of us. It tells us all we are individuals supremely worthy of our silliest notions and desires, thereby making us soft and lazy, infantilized an incapable of truly effective solidarity as a people. Instead, we are fed Tea Party drivel. Even if CNN decided to send Coop to Guiyu to cover the blood poisoned worker women with the deformed children, the result would be the same. The guy in Cedar Rapids would see further proof that "Me live in best place in world. Got Cheetos." Or perhaps a nice Cotes du Rhône if you are a member of the commodity drugged educated faux middle class.

And I wanna say to them: "Not for much longer, buddy. Not much longer. And you can thank Anderson Cooper and a helluva lot of other people like him who do not have a clue, but nevertheless inhabit your very mind, for that."


source

no go for explorer

I installed the latest explorer for mac, downloaded the page which included the 13.7 Mg soundfile and it crashed both times I tried. something aint liking my little mackie.

Joe My God: Gays In The Military

Joe My God

Great article. Read it not so much for its content as for the hilarious entertainment of the comments section below the story.

The Tragedy Of John McCain

Sorry if you can't hear this. If you open the window in explorer it has a chance of working. It might be a plug-in issue. But I haven't had time to figure it out yet.

article linked here


Here's another good link found today.


Some things help me understand, some sound like nothing but sound and fury. God help me but I don't get those teabaggers, I really don't. How do they give a pass to everything the right has done to fuck things up? They seem basically insane.

The Voices In The Machines

It's the machines calling me up that have pushed my mind to this place. The sales calls were at least from people---though in recent years they are from people assisted by machines. You pick up the phone, you hear nothing. Maybe some chatter in the background. You know to hang up if you say "hello" and there is a pause before you get a response. If you stay on the line, someone will mispronounce your name, and try to sell you something.

If you don't want it, they will insist, and keep talking loudly.

So you just hang up the phone during that moment of silence.

But, one more time, it's a reminder that your phone line is not your own. People can call you out of the blue. The phone ringing may not be a signal that someone you care about is trying to reach you. Instead, it means someone has your number, and wants something that you probably don't have--money.

So the ring of the phone brings an uhnappy reaction. I don't want any--I think. I can't take it right now--telling someone no thanks. I just can't go there.

Email was great at first. I remember the first email I got was spam. When I fired up sendme@earthlink.net in the 90's, the first thing in my box had a header consisting of mysterious symbols. "I got an email!" I announced to the helpful person at earthlink, who was setting up the account. "Oh, nevermind," I said. "It's not from anyone."

The spam filters help, but they don't keep out all the noise. And you still have to look in your spam box just to make sure you're not missing something important. So you see all the spams anyway. And that's not including the flood of email you get from anyone you've given your address to in a foolish or consumer-oriented moment.

The machines are calling me now. They're just machines. The first time one called, I hung up on it in a panic. The message said, "This message is for (my name, garbled by the computer). If you are not (my name, garbled), please hang up now."

I hung up even though it sounded enough like my name. I don't know what I'm signing up for, by listening to this message, I thought. I thought of a registered letter coming to my best friend, from an unknown sender, which informed him he had to pay a traffic ticket issued by a private corporation, for rolling through a stop sign in a deserted state park area. He had to sign for the letter, and did so even though he felt apprehensive. What happens if I listen to this message? Does it legally obligate me to something I don't want to do?

So I hung up.

The machine called again soon after. This time, it left a message on my machine. Since it was a recorded message, I didn't hang up this time. The computerized voice told me to call CMRE Financial Services to talk about a bill they wanted to collect on behalf of UCLA Medical Center.

It gave a number. At no time did a live voice come on the line.

So they couldn't even be bothered to have a live person call me to work out what they said I owed. Their machine just called me, instructing me to make the call myself and navigate through their phone tree.

The machines are on their side, and they are everywhere. They are not people--they are companies. And the people at the companies don't care. They have a script. They are programmed, as surely as if they were bots. They don't respond when you ask logical questions, they don't laugh when you throw up your hands in frustration, they won't ever see you, ever know you, or ever have to talk to you again. "No, we can't lower your APR from thirty per cent." "Our records say you still owe this amount." "I'm sorry, but there is no supervisor you can speak to."

The worst ones are the ones who lecture you for your bookkeeping errors or carelessness. I admit I have become careless. I am traumatized by numbers and machines. I need the machine to talk to anyone. And the talk comes in text on a screen, not in human inflections. My bosses don't even want to call me anymore to tell me things. They would just as soon not be bothered. Why shouldn't I keep my machine on waiting for emails? That's what everyone does these days. I should do it too.

And why should I be weirded out by all the people walking around talking to their pockets these days? People on the street, or in the waiting room at the doctors, or at the supermarket, don't look at you anymore. They are looking at hand-held mechanical devices used for communication. They are always communicating with someone who is not there. Their presence is diluted by their absence of attention--they are halfway there, or hardly there at all. On the road, they smash into each other because communicating with someone who is not there is more important than carefully tracking one's trajectory in the physical space occupied by the vehicle. A train engineer was the first of 25 people to die last year, texting a friend as he blew through a signal light burning bright red for him to stop.

Our stream through life is handled by machines every step of the way. We have to find each other through the machines, and just when we think we have made human contact, we discover that the machines have taken away yet more of our ability to connect on a human level. We can get any question answered by typing into a box, but what to do with the answers? And what about all the different answers out there? The people alone on the other ends of the machines (because each of us is alone with our keyboard, that's how it's set up) disagree on what's real. And without seeing each other face to face to explain it, we marinate in our fury at our ineffectualness. We drink and type, we mutter with our friends about how the world is going to hell, and we are so conditioned by the machines, so constrained by them and by our need to satisfy all the entities that want a piece of our earnings, that fighting seems distasteful. It's unchoreographed. It's unpredictable. The machines are unpredictable, too, just when we think we've figured them out.

For one thing, the machines that brought us music changed, and kept changing and changing. CDs were so much better than records (even though you now have to squint to see the art on the covers). And then there were the hours and hours spent transferring all those CD's to Mp3 format. What next? Every camera, every device for capturing that which is human----it all becomes obsolete in the blink of an eye. Browsers are phased out, and the new ones have bugs. Computers download and install things you don't know about or want. The machines do things to us that we don't even know about. Do cell phones cause cancer? There's a significant body of research saying they just might. But you won't hear about it on the machines that dictate popular opinion, the television and radio machines, because those machines are owned by companies that have an interest in you not knowing anything that might threaten the revenue streams of the powers that be. And they all own each other now. They are very powerful in dictating opinion. Even intelligent people often believe that if a news story were potentially very important, television news will cover it, and cover it with some degree of accuracy. They have faith in television which is far too trusting.

And, so, anything that might threaten the flow of money to the war machines, that, too, is silenced. The television keeps reality from our minds as effectively as any hypnosis. The people in the machines help make this happen. This is because they work for the machines, not the other way around. A popular newscaster must not say anything too controversial, because he'll lose his job--even though news is controversy by its very nature. Controversy grabs people, though: and that's why it's one of the main products of television and radio. Just as long as it's controversy that favors those in charge. If an opinion targets those in charge, it's few and far between, and often presented in the form of a weak-appearing or otherwise unsympathetic type of person, surrounded by those who argue forcefully for the other side.

pix

I've seen and of course remember about half of these. I think many appeared in the gold spiral book you sent me. I need to find that, I'm sure it's still in the packed books in the garage. I almost never pick up books any more...that's a shame, sorta.

seriously considering getting the ipad though I may wait till the 2nd generation. everyone I've heard who's looked, touched, smelled has nothing but good things to say. I've been waiting for such a device, not sure why. I Do think it's a game changer. it's all in the touch.

playing for poets tonight and I'm working really hard on a new music set up I'm debuting next saturday at the bath house. tonight I think I'm only taking my toy banjo sample player and improvise really short goofy hillbilly songs.

if I were there right now, one might be:

saw me a girl one bright day
she saw me first and done
run away...she one bright
girl, one bright girl...she
saw me first and she
done run away.

(play a banjo lick)

one bright girl,
one bright girl...

(banjo lick)

I have three slots with lots
o time in between. no prob.

might take a kitchen appliance
or two to use as a turntable device.

oh...so kristen just bought a sewing
machine that embroiders. so I've
commissioned her to make a few
Jampact shirts with Jampact on
the sleeve, a personal mascot on
the back shoulder and a band
name over the pocket. this
afternoon I became "Poppa Fly"
and my mascot is a snail named
"slugger" with a big goofy grin.

cant wait to see it for real.

Media Reform: Why We Need It

This is a good place to start reading about why the system is so fucked, if you want it without swear words.

What If AT & T Prevented You From Reading This Article?

Here's a really good article about the net neutrality fight.


To quote Tim, "to lose net neutrality would be like Rupert Murdoch owning Youtube."

We can't lose it, can't lose it can't can't can't. The net is all we got...the only place to put our heads together and no matter what anyone says, it's an information miracle. I used to feel like I could never find out the real story about anything because I didn't have the time or the patience to go to a library and research and use the dewey decimal system day in day out to find reference material. Now it's a click away. No matter how you slice it, that's a beautiful thing.

But the more I've learned, the more opinionated I've become. I admit to having become very intolerant of stupidity, maybe more so than ever before. I always liked to think I was more tolerant than anyone, just a mellow go-with-the-flow kind of gal, saving my energies for the battles that seem to deserve them.

It's just that all that niceness has gotten me exactly nowhere and so I've become, I think, less nice. Or maybe nice is not the right way to describe what it is that causes a person not to speak up and say what needs to be said. That might be called passive-aggressive. Well, mabye I've just become aggressive-aggressive. But at least people know where I stand.

I have talked to a number of people from K-Krazy over the past months and that's why I'm thinking so much about radio and all that stuff. I have a good story about you and Abby that I want to write up. Coming soon. But read that net neutrality article. It's a great snapshot of what propoganda fights look like in their blooming stages. This has been an issue for a while but is a real danger.

artwork created at kcrw

I have a large number of drawings that were created during the years I ran the board in the afternoons, before there was anything to produce (after 2000, I was news hostess with the mostess). So I am going to put some of them online. They were pen and ink drawings and I had plenty of time to listen to the broadcast and do the repetetive pen strokes that filled them in. One of the volunteers said to me once, 'hey, they have medication for that, you know." Pretty funny. I actually got some offers to buy pieces and people thought I should do a show. So here's my show.

Click here to see what I've got up so far.

the two sides of hip

well, let's put it this way...if you think youre hip youre not.

same goes for slick and cool. your coolness level comes from the amount of blues you've lived through, from the storms you've survived. if you think youre cool or hip and dont have the dues credentials, sorry...come back when life has thrown you enough hardballs and you've ended up in a walking coma for a few years. only people humbled by life need apply.

the other side of hipness is eccentricity. a total lack of desire to fit in any system or accept authority or submit to bullshit. to Know most of what human beings call social norms and self-imposed pecking order hierarchies in the name of progress and productivity and the requisite wardrobe is absolute bullshit.

under those definitions we both qualify.

those who dont qualify are people who spend an inordinate amount of time becoming beautiful looking to get into beautiful clans, constantly talking about how to be chic and fashion savvy, those who judge eccentrics and unfashionables to be cluelessly inferior.

they live their lives thinking they have to look like supermodels, become socialites and obsess over achieving the perfect lifestyle (and they would gladly stab their so-called friends in the back if they could get closer to it).

integrity means nothing to them. they wouldnt know morality if it came standard on their beamer's dashboard. to them art is a bore and real people are peons.

Steveaux

steve's stage face when things got especially fertive, fertile or futile

It Might Be Just

that I don't think I could get any joy out of a life in which I wasn't insubordinate at a certain point of dignity. When someone asks me to swallow shit I just can't seem to fucking do it anymore. And I like myself better for it. I know I can shape my own destiny and no one but me decides what that is---unless it's the great God above doing the shaping of my fate.

Once you get a taste of refusing to accept tyranny, it can be damn hard to accept it beyond a certain point even though that might look weird to other people. Power trips are the worst asshole trip on the planet when it comes to "do I have power over whether you remain a part of this community." It's an awesome responsibility to have to your subordinates.

But that idea of responsibility going both ways is another controversial one. I happen to believe human beings have human and moral responsibilities toward each other. And the Nth commandment on my tablet says "THOU SHALT NOT BE AN ASSHOLE."

Because it builds a world of assholes, that's why.

Power to the People. Fuck The Assholes.

Something like that.

"I Don't Trust You Either"

It doesn't seem like an unreasonable thing for you to say. Unless, of course, she wanted to play Master and Servant.

I thought Abby was cooler than that. I really did. It seems like some bosses can keep their perspective, Luchsinger was always totally cool to me. Chris was a cool boss, at least he's older than I am and had more power when he brought me to the station, or I came and worked on his show for a year. He did give me good advice, letting me know that traditionally, everyone must volunteer at KCRW. That's just how they liked to do it. I thought that was a reasonable thing to ask, and would have done it anyway just to get to know different parts of the place. (I realize the concept of volunteerism is sort of lost on the commercial radio world. It's a form of apprenticeship that doesn't get enough credit in this day and age--volunteering for something, that is. But don't get me started on the "stand for something or be part of something" argument because some people don't hear that.

I'm trying to disgest a disagreeable conversation I had yesterday with a colleague who doesn't seem to have any knowledge of/respect for the kind of radio adventurous public radio people were trying to make, back in the day. I do think the old adventures are stale.. You can't ride on them forever. But it is an adventure to try to bring music to the world outside of the corporate stadium rock megaplex culture. Smaller venues, money not so much an issue. I dunno, seems worth it to me. So you do have people doing this, but they had to have sought it out, it had to have called to them. And some people it just didn't call to. I am amazed to find there are people who were just OK with music scheduling software taking the place of people deejays. By the time I got into commercial radio it already was like that, but there were clocks and you had freedom within the clocks. They weren't computer generated clocks is what I mean. You had to play one of the red dots, but you could play any track on the CD. Like that.

We played with clocks at my college radio station, where it all began for me, the little-hyped but incredibly cool KWBU. I don't know what's become of the station, but it had a rich history as college-run alternative station. One of the "real" alternative stations in the late 80's. Which is when I was in college and just discovering that there was more music being made than that which aired on commercial radio stations. It was a revelation that there was all this great music that had no exposure. I couldn't fricking believe it. If you guessed I had no plugged-in friends in high school, you'd be right, with the exception of one who finally rescued me from the musical wasteland of commercial radio and Phil Collins. (Who is occasionally OK.)

Hey, have you ever had a time in your life that you couldn't hear music properly and it depressed the hell out of you not to be able to get from music what you had previously gotten? I mean has there ever been a time in your life where you just couldn't hear it and so the world seemed cold and dead and distant to you? I went through a period of not being able to hear music when I moved to California and there I was surrounded by some of the coolest music on the planet. At the heart of a real resource for music. And I couldn't hear it. I told my therapist this and she found it interesting. She said I was totally fucking depressed. She suggested medication. I apathetically said that I would try anything once. It happened to work. Was amazing in fact, the meds. And they helped me hear music better, too.


I'll tell ya more about that conversation I had yesterday, later. It was a real bummer.

I don't even know if I respect people who genuinely have no idea how cool public radio is, was and could be. Who don't listen to or have use for it at all. Well, that's not true. I can respect people as long as they respect me. I felt disrespected in that conversation and that's the heart of my irritation. I also felt like someone I like was being disrespected and that's my real problem. But about public radio, that some people genuinely don't feel even remotely interested in listening, that's weird to me. It's like Ross Perot saying he never had listened to "All Things Considered" and my boss at the ad agency said, doesn't that sort of show how uninformed he must be, to admit he never listened to "All Things Considered?" And I thought it was a good point.

That's a whole segment of the population and it wigs me out, man. I don't know how people can just swallow the accepted loaves of wonderbread and nothing else their whole lives long.


Oh, and I hear you about having the other stuff that you do for creative outlet. I've got my mosaics and art and my blogs and if I relied on my job for my creative outlet, I'd be screwed, man, because that just isn't where it's at in radio anymore. At the same time I can completely enjoy being on in the way I'm on..reporting traffic. There was some dude in Escondido today, just walking along northbound in southbound lanes on the 5. CHP said it was causing a "traffic disruption." California, man!

Oh, and I do have thoughts about some other stuff you bring up. Liza looms large for me on that past horizon. She was always really fun and a real talent who's been tragically underutilized at K-crazy. But she also doesn't seem to remember I exist even though I sent her a really nice greeting on myspace some time ago. I mean, it was maybe 7 months ago, a year. Unless she just doesn't look at it and has an assistant or something. There's deniability when it comes to Myspace now. But nothing really hides that fact that this computer is a communications tool and it all boils down to communicating, and when people decide not to communicate with you, it's a drag. However, talking recently to other KCRW castaways, I've discovered that I am not alone in the phenomena of being considered deceased when I have ceased to share an employer with certain persons. But there are others who have remained friends----just a few cool ones. One of the cool ones was getting dissed in this conversation that I had and that's why I'm all bunged up about it. I'll try to explain it after I find some caffeine and sugar to goose my nerve endings.

Say Thank You

to those who have made you life beautiful and who have helped you to see a world where you are loved.

On Appreciation

my new buddy

Hip Chick Thing

What, you saying I'm not hip? I thought I was pretty fricking hip. I mean I dated Steve Price. That's hip. Because he's definitely a trip. But, whatever. I always felt hip. Back in the days we hung out. Or maybe I should say, I felt like life was fun, and it didn't mean squat to me whether or not I was hip or not. But I had my sister to hang out with all the time then, because she lived with me and for a time she was not an asshole, but fun; however she got weird with me once Steve was in my life; and after that we were not friends; she would not discuss whatever was causing her to have a massive stick up her butt, and the only solution to conflict is discussion, unless one person refuses to discuss. And so that's what happened, she refused to discuss anything and it became unbearable to live with her. And around the same time Steve got that job offer from CBS, which was a really exciting idea to me---go to Los Angeles! Why not? I always dug California and I think I always would have come here, because there's nothing like it for laid back. But actually I had no idea of ending up here, I just wanted to go somewhere else and see what it was like. Moving is hard, so I stayed. And finally came to like this place after about 7 years. Anyway, we're all a village now online, or whatever. The fact remains that the people you see in person right in front of you do have an effect on how you feel. So it's really important that some people not be assholes.

Am I making any sense? I fear not, I'm tired and cranky and haven't yet written my Inland Empire headlines. And it's already 8.


What does hip mean, anyway?