[Kzyxtalk] Forget it, Jake, it's KZYX.

[Marco McClean]

Forget it, Jake, it's KZYX.
(On being dismissed as a "hater" for speaking up at all.)

--by Marco McClean, Albion (2015-03-26)

By any measure my show has been both a short-term and long-term benefit 
to radio stations that carry it. When I was at KMFB, which was a 
countywide commercial station, my long-time advertisers, who I'd brought 
over from my print publications, were very happy to let me promote them 
as I pleased, placing their mentions on-the-fly next to material that 
suited their products and services and general flavor, and all together 
they were paying the station about $30 per hour of my show. That doesn't 
seem like much, and it's not, but look: $30 times 24 hours times 365 
days equals $263,000, which is greater than what KMFB was pulling in per 
year at the time. My show was only on once a week, in the dead of night, 
and I was doing at least as well for the station as shows in the 
traditionally better attended radio hours could do. And most of what 
KMFB paid out to me was for electronics and other maintenance that 
needed to be done anyway, at $10/hour, and if I hadn't done those things 
a $150/hour engineer might have had to be called in, so I was good for 
the station in that way too. At noncommercial KNYO, where I've been 
since late 2012, the underwriters of just my Friday night show are 
paying for a sixth of the station's entire budget --in a month that 
sixth will be coming back up to a fourth; KNYO's tiny transmitter covers 
only Fort Bragg; there's no reason to assume that level of support 
wouldn't scale up if I could get countywide on a general-coverage 
station again, and the only thing that's been blocking the door to that 
for the last three full years, since the latest time I tried to make my 
show available to KZYX, is a single person with both a mean 
pursed-lipped attitude and a puzzling large deal of undeserved power: 
Mary Aigner.

I keep reading where people chirp "what a great job the managers and 
board of KZYX are doing especially with the tremendous /pressure/ 
they're under," and I can tell you that when owners and managers of an 
entirely elective creative endeavor feel /under a great deal of 
pressure/ it's not because they're doing a superlative job; it's because 
they're doing a heckuva-job-Brownie, it's because they're the very wrong 
people for the job; they've risen to their level of uncomfortable 
incompetence and barricaded themselves there. I edited and typeset and 
laid out sheets by hand with wax and a light table I built myself; I 
sold and designed advertisement and dealt with hundreds of writers and 
then did most of the printing and distribution runs of the resulting 
newspapers for years, and that wasn't even my day job, and I didn't 
think of that as a great deal of pressure. Compared to any retail 
clerk's job, radio is easy. And cheap? A 2,000-watt transmitter costs 
about $10/day to electrify and maintain. That's coffee-and-doughnut 
money. Compared to any real work, steering a radio station to keep it 
out of the shrubs is as easy as falling asleep in a warm bath. When it's 
done the hard way, as witness KZYX, I can see how it would be hard, in 
the sense of crazy. Everything about the operation of KZYX has always 
been done in the most complicated, pompous pretzel of an expensive, 
vexing manner possible, where overcontrolling, uptight managers meddle 
in the airpeople's shows in a way that might as well have been designed 
to drive away clever, creative radio people and to retain mainly timid, 
genially-stoned-sounding people who will self-censor to the point of 
producing only bland mush, when they produce anything at all beyond 
merely pressing a button to play commercially recorded music and 
back-announcing the name of what just played. And I can't help but 
think: How can the board and managers and their close friends 
congratulate themselves on the great job they're doing when if it 
weren't for its annual six-figure government bailout grant KZYX would 
have failed and gone into receivership every year of its existence? The 
literally millions of dollars of grants that you, readers, paid to KZYX 
through your taxes over the years whether you were aware of that or not 
have always been more than enough to reasonably maintain and operate the 
station! There has never been a need for a single miserable unlistenable 
pledge drive. KZYX' ridiculously inflated annual budget is /more than 
twenty times/ the budgets of stations like Fort Bragg's KNYO or Ukiah's 
KMEC. At KZYX about twice all the yearly membership money (counting 2000 
members at $50 each) goes not to maintain or improve the station at all 
but is entirely diverted to pay people like Mary Aigner and John Coate 
and David Steffen to endlessly fail in excruciating slow motion like the 
flailing, falling rocket scene in /Koyaanisqatsi/. Through the action of 
a hand continuously slowing, ever slowing the projector control, the 
ship apparently can never entirely crash, but you can't call that flying.

As regards the constant threat of KZYX managers' punishing airpeople by 
banishment who might reveal problems management causes and who might 
call attention to management's behavior-- think of it this way: Is it 
okay here in the Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free to snarkily 
criticize people in the highest circles of government and business and 
to point out where they're bad for us and where they're actively going 
wrong? Yes. Yes it is. Perfectly okay and to be encouraged as a 
patriotic act of civic duty. So why is it /not/ okay to do the same when 
the people being exposed are the petty-official managers running a 
supposedly public radio station like KZYX entirely for their own 
benefit? And if the people under the thumb of those managers, the people 
actually doing radio, preparing and airing their own shows, 
accomplishing as best they can, under the circumstances, what the radio 
station is there to do, are willing to volunteer /their/ own time and 
energy and talent, such as it is, to do radio, why are the managers 
never willing to similarly volunteer or even to take a pay cut in order 
to free up the little money necessary, out of the huge amount available, 
to properly maintain the on-air equipment so it doesn't frizz out and 
make farting noises and switch on and off like a crazy monkey? I'll tell 
you why I think it is: it's because they feel they're of a better class 
of being than the airpeople are, so why /should/ they volunteer, they 
who are meant to ride in the rickshaws being pulled by the sort of 
people who volunteer, and who thank the volunteers for pulling by 
granting them the opportunity to keep pulling and to pull some more later.

I don't mind not being paid to do my weekly twenty-plus hours of 
preparation and then stay up all night doing my show on KNYO. The reason 
I don't mind it, even when I give up paying work for it, and when things 
have gone wrong in my life, which they do for everyone, is that the 
people who do the few but important official tasks to keep KNYO on the 
air are doing what they do because they also love radio /and they also 
are not being paid/. That's fair. I'm grateful the resource exists and 
I'm happy to do my part. But when the owners and managers of a 
half-million-dollar racket that's propped up by tax money are being paid 
quite well to have nice lives and even save a little for retirement, and 
all the people actually doing all the work of that enterprise are 
"volunteering", there are lots of historical terms for that kind of 
business or governmental system. Let a few of those terms bubble up to 
the surface of your own mind for a moment.

Dozens of even larger out-in-the-real-world organizations, charity 
groups and prosperity churches and for-profit colleges and disaster 
relief groups and Make-A-Wish groups and so on, are supported and by 
volunteers and even-below-minimum-wage workers, where the people in the 
corner-view offices maintain lives of stratospheric splendor by sucking 
most of the money out of the system for themselves. That's bad. KZYX is 
every bit as bad as that.

There's no reason to just accept as normal that the people sitting on 
county-spanning allocated radio frequencies --that belong to the public, 
by the way, not to any corporation, not even Mendocino County Public 
Broadcasting-- get away with what they get away with year after year. 
 From my admittedly selfish point of view, any radio station that 
refuses to schedule my show is a crappy radio station. That's my simple 
rule for how to tell whether a radio station is worthwhile or not. And 
if they won't schedule my show because the people in charge are afraid 
I'll say things like this on the air, and they're afraid I'll let others 
say what others feel the need to say on the air, whatever that might be, 
on whatever subject, then how is it rude when I point it out in print 
and describe them and their failings and their greed and their 
hypocrisy? KZYX has been kicking me and people like me in the teeth for 
over twenty-five years. /That's/ hating. And I'm only very recently 
speaking up about it. And their and their unfortunate toadies' response 
is to whine amongst themselves in their private listserv --thanks, Tim 
Gregory, for exposing that-- that /I'm/ the rude one, that I'm a 
"hater", that I'm "disingenuous" (in this case that means lying).

That very last part doesn't bug me too much. I remember a quote from an 
R.A. MacAvoy book: "No one is so offended at being called a liar as the 
habitual liar who has for once told the truth." I'm a story reader and 
writer and a story teller. And I'm not always --but in this case I am-- 
telling a true story. And I'm telling it in public here and as just a 
small part of my show on tiny KNYO. /No one/ can truly be who he or she 
is unfettered on the air at KZYX until something profound changes there, 
until the giant toads squatting on the station are removed from their 
position. Maybe it'll take moving the main office to Ukiah, or Fort 
Bragg, or Willits-- to a downtown place where people can just walk by 
and look in and even walk in and poke around and see what's what, a 
place that isn't so isolated and haunted and bunker-like as where it is 
now. Someplace with high ceilings, to draw the spirit up. There are lots 
of nice empty storefronts going for a song in downtown Fort Bragg. 
Certainly the entire existing management bloc at KZYX must be removed 
and replaced by people who will be happy and easy there and will share 
airtime and money and power more evenly, meaning an equal pay rate and a 
level playing field in every way for everyone from five-minute 
newsladies to automation-switch-flippers to fillers-out and mailers of 
official forms to musical scholars and aficionados to readers and 
babblers in the night.

I wonder what will be the result of having three of eight members on the 
MCPB board, after the election is called on Tuesday, who at least will 
consider making some real, needed changes and not just, you know, 
rearrange the deck chairs again and vanish incommunicado until the next 
meeting and call that "engaging with the members".


(In other news, I'll be reading my 9pm to approximately 3 or 4am Friday 
night show this week (2015-03-27) by live remote and not from the KNYO 
storefront, 325 N. Franklin Street, so if you were planning to come by 
and read your own work on the air or bring a musical instrument and show 
off or just talk about your project, you can do that next week 
(2015-04-03). If you do, please let me get set up and start the show 
before you arrive. I don't consider you an interruption. It's just 
better for me to get everything rolling first. And just walk in; you 
don't have to call and let me know you're coming.)

(And if you want your own show on KNYO, there are time slots free and 
ready for you to do whatever kind of show you have an idea to do. 
Contact Bob Young via http://knyo.org and he'll help you get started.)

Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com