[Kzyxtalk] Throw your voice.

[Marco McClean]

The recording of last night's (2017-06-02) KNYO and KMEC Memo of the 
Air: Good Night Radio show is available to download and enjoy via 
http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com


That was my 1000th Memo of the Air show. They gave a party and filled 
the place up with people. There was pizza and chopped fruit and popcorn 
and almonds and soda pop and a pretty good cake. I didn’t have to do a 
thing but run the board and read the show. I don't do well in a crowd, 
and Jerry and Bob took care of the whole thing -and my mother bought the 
cake and chopped the fruit- and the whole thing was surprisingly 
painless and I'm grateful, because they told me they were going to do it 
and I was anxious. Also it was neat the way about a dozen people over 
the course of the night filtered into the booth at random and sat at the 
guest mic... At one point Mitch was talking about Trump and the general 
helpless weltschmerz of the political situation, and two women and their 
little children wandered in off the street and were standing in the 
doorway; one of the women got in a discussion with Mitch, and made a 
number of good points. I was looking at my watch and thinking about how 
I should be reading this or that thing by now, that I'd brought, but 
then I grasped that /this/ is what radio is supposed to do. People 
should feel comfortable walking into a real radio station, right into 
the broadcast booth, and doing exactly this, and where else is it 
possible? Not at any of the commercial stations, that's for sure. Not at 
KZYX, which is having its pledge drive now with a goal of, I think, 
$60,000 to raise, where not coincidentally the manager pays himself 
exactly $60,000 and pays the local airpeople exactly nothing, so 
whatever they tell you on the air about how Mendocino County Public 
Broadcasting Corporation /needs/ your money to do this or that important 
thing is a fricking lie, because every dollar raised in the pledge drive 
goes straight up the manager's personal nose. They say only 20 percent 
of their budget is covered by their federal grant, but their federal 
grant is $160,000 a year; five times that is $800,000, and that’s a 
/crazy/ amount of money, /enough to build a dozen radio stations from 
scratch and run them all for a year./ Radio does not cost that much. An 
entire radio station is less complicated than the phone in your pocket. 
Something is fishy there. It's a money-laundering scheme or it's 
/something/ but it’s just not right. And on up the chain: just Ira Glass 
and his two producers of a one-hour NPR show are paid $500,000 a year. 
And a local treasure like Jamie Roberts is paid zip. And a crackerjack 
reporter like Sheila Dawn Tracy can’t even get on the air at KZYX, nor 
can I. Does that seem right to you?


If you're hearing pledge drive pitches on the radio and feeling 
influenced by Pavlovian conditioning to pay them so they can put on more 
and longer pledge drives, it's little KNYO that needs your money. In 
other words, go to http://knyo.org instead. Click on the big red heart. 
Every penny you give to KNYO pays immediately for something necessary, 
visible, audible and/or tangible, and there’s no hocus pocus. Or, 
whatever, do what you want. Maybe you like hocus pocus. It’s a poetic 
phrase; it’s fun to say. Say it when you click on the heart.


Anyway, also at http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find directions 
to many not necessarily radio-useful though worthwhile goods that I 
found while putting radio shows together. Items such as:


/Her Master’s Voice/, by and about Nina Conti. "Easily the most 
heartbreaking, romantic, and profound film about ventriloquism ever made."
http://www.avclub.com/article/iher-masters-voicei-is-the-most-profound-movie-abo-95915


Mad Marx: the class warrior.
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/186


Accents. Cockney on top, but try the others nearby, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhW0Lr7ERLA


The story of Cream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UgiJPnwtQU


And hoseplay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUGEtZTCk7g


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