[Kzyxtalk] Tim Gregory, ladies and gentlemen.

[Marco McClean]

Tim Gregory wrote:
 >Self-destructive souls are the hardest to understand...they go down to 
the crossroads again and again, and wonder why they keep getting run 
over. Without any real base on the board, or within the organization for 
that matter, js will mewl outside the door forever, as does 
Marco...civility? No, thanks...team play? As long as they can be 
captain... We are bigger and better than this. The board did well to 
isolate the bull in the China shop so far--perhaps now we need help from 
Humane Society?


     Marco here. Tim, you remind me: I hardly ever listen to KZYX 
anymore; so much of it is so dumb, and when I'm not working at my 
various day and night jobs I'm watching a film or helping at the theater 
company or reading and writing and working on my own show (KNYO and 
KMEC); even so, whenever I flip through the dial lately and stop on KZYX 
I hear show-ejection-level pottymouth swearing. On Women's Voices, for 
example, the week after Xmas: a recorded airheaded Gaia-worshiping 
feminine-mysteries-of-the-universe speech with incidental ejaculations 
of /shit/. And on your show, Tim, a few /fuck/s, for good measure. And 
Saturday night Jan. 23rd, on somebody's actually pretty good show: the 
Fish Cheer (F-U-C-K! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!) (300,000 people yelling 
FUUUUCK!), and immediately after that a Richard Thomson sound-alike 
calling, in song, his official enemies /motherfuckers/. And my attitude 
about all that is a philosophical, /So what? Where's the harm?/ Because 
the FCC has never, I repeat never, pulled the license of any FM radio 
station for a few swears here and there, commercial or noncommercial, 
small market or large market, even outside of the Safe Harbor hours, so 
it's a trick that your self-important masters use to remove from their 
presence anyone who will not kowtow properly to their authority and 
please them. The bosses are not following the law because it's right or 
because it's the law --really there are a lot of ways in which they 
don't follow the letter or spirit of the law; they're just using a 
scarecrow of the law to enforce their own arbitrary rule in what they 
think of as their clubhouse. And you know it.


     This was my experience in 1989 at KZYX. Sean Donovan didn't like 
Mitch Clogg, because Mitch wouldn't kowtow properly to him. He kicked 
Mitch off the Environment Show. I brought Mitch onto my show to talk 
about it. Next week Sean phoned on the night of my show and told me I 
was off the air and out of the station for good, don't bother driving 
there. Much later I was told: the official reason I'd been banned was 
that weeks before the Mitch offense I'd said the word /bullshit/ at 2am, 
and Sean had saved that up against a time of greater need. That's how 
they do it. That's how Sean's appointment Mary Aigner got rid of 
Facilitator 1, the best deejay KZYX ever had. Mary just didn't like her, 
so she kicked her out and said it was for playing a sweary song in the 
middle of the night. This maneuver is what's called in the musical world 
a repeating motif.


     But, Tim, /you/ know you'll never be kicked off your show or out of 
the station, because you're a true sycophant. The proof: your show is 
consistently objectively lousy. You put zero preparation and zero effort 
into it, and even your two listener/callers will agree to that. You show 
up with nothing, no educational content, nothing of an intellectually 
stimulating or even poetic nature, you play some CD sides and mumble the 
telephone number, and you ID the station. That's your show, over and 
over, for decades. Every time I tune to your show and let it run for 
awhile, there's little to keep a listener there, least of which your 
stoned-sounding breathy mumbling. Rick has an excuse-- he has a 
disability-- but he's clever and he prepares from a base of knowing a 
great deal about the music his engineer helps him play. Shining through 
his speech impediment: he's a musician and a scholar and a talented 
radioman. You're not. John Sakowicz is abrasive and mercurial and 
sometimes shocking, but his show is doing the work of radio and yours 
isn't. And Mary kicked him out because she goaded him into swearing 
quietly to himself in the background, not even on a mic, while she was 
at the mixing board sabotaging his interview show. And all these years 
she's been paid for that kind of sabotage, by the way, almost half the 
station's entire yearly membership money, a fact never brought up during 
the interminable unlistenable poor-sad-twinkly-us pledge drives. And, 
while all the office people who don't know jack squat about how to do 
radio were and are being paid like little barons and princesses, on a 
Mendocino scale, the airpeople are not paid at all, because the bosses 
have been lying all along that there is no money to pay people like Rick 
and Jamie and Verge and so on. And Verge bailed.


     Tim, when you stir yourself to try a little harder and do much 
better radio than I've ever heard you do, and you speak up about 
injustice in terms that are a little less mushmouthed and are even 
slightly focused, and /then/ they kick you off the air and out of the 
station and they claim it's because you played a song with a swear word 
in it, we'll all be interested to see how righteously and civilly you 
defend your abusers against all the others who spoke up and were kicked 
out and locked out.


     Speaking of which... Norman, when you go to the station tomorrow to 
inspect the records, bring your phone so you can photograph paper 
documents, in case they refuse to let you use the copier or 
sheet-scanner. And bring a thumb drive, so you can take big files away 
with you to examine later. I'm interested in finding out who holds the 
lease on the studio building, and to know the details of the lease. And 
I'd like a breakdown on how much the different office positions have 
been paid year by year --so-called manager and superfluous program 
director and beyond-superfluous business underwriting coordinator and so 
on, because the pretend reports are not detailed enough. I mean, I'd 
really like a clearer idea of where that half a million dollars comes 
from and goes every year.


     We're all members as well as taxpayers, and so part owners of KZYX, 
and we have a right to know all these things and more.


     Remember, KMFB was an operation easily as big and busy as KZYX and 
ran quite well on about a fourth of that much, and had no government 
grant and no noncommercial charity organizational benefits, and everyone 
at KMFB was paid, including all the airpeople and, at least in its last 
twenty years, no-one was fired for playing a song with a swear in it, 
and the phone was always live and available, and there was no 
seven-second delay nor panic button, and everyone was comfortable 
talking about station business on the air if the matter came up in 
conversation.


p.s. I finally got to see the stop-motion animated film /The Boxtrolls/. 
I think it illustrates the situation at KZYX eerily well. And stay 
through the end credits; there's a wonderful dialogue between the two 
street sweepers, where the filmmakers leave the animator in the frame 
while the puppets talk about free will and destiny and all that.


---

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