[Kzyxtalk] MCPB Corporation (KZYX) board meeting, 6pm Monday night, Fort Bragg Senior Center.

[Marco McClean]

On 5/15/2018 7:07 PM, Mark Slafkes wrote:

 > I think your ageism is .... well .... I don't want to get into a 
pissing match with you.  But I find it offensive.
 >
 > Clearly you have a different philosophy about how to run a 
non-profit, one which I leaned towards many ages ago.  But my experience 
is that it is the volunteers that give non-profits important energy and 
fill spaces that there is just not enough money to fill.  As for how 
much directors of these agencies get paid, I was just talking with a 
friend today about another non-profit which had a membership of 1200 and 
which paid the director $200,000 a year.  I was on the board when that 
was decided and I was the only one who protested.  I had been introduced 
by other members of the board as "our Socialist."  Nice?
 >
 > But your rage and nasty behavior towards others at KZYX is certainly 
a reason why if I were on the board or part of management, I would 
refuse to "give" you a slot as a volunteer.  I just don't think you play 
nice and when working in a large volunteer-based organization, playing 
nice needs to be part of the social ecology of the organization.
 >
 > So, I'm done trying to communicate with you.  I've tried to 
communicate without behaving like an ___hole.  And, believe me, I'm more 
than capable of that.
 >
 > So, if you want to keep demonstrating why the decisions to not give 
you a slot were good ones, so be it.  I get it.  I'm 72 and my 
participation in volunteer organizations started when I was 17 and 
included important ones like the Civil Rights Movement (marching with 
some well-known people and spending time in prison in Alabama) and the 
Poverty Program (being threatened with death in Eastern Kentucky because 
of the work I was doing) and membership in a Socialist Collective in 
Orange County, CA (oh the memory of meeting at the VVAW in Oceanside, CA 
in a house riddled with bullet holes and sitting on the floor behind a 
mound of sand bags) and many, many other organizations including the 
Mendocino County Grand Jury and the board of the, according to you, 
awful Senior Center.
 >
 > Do you want to be effective or do you want to continue to attack 
people?  And interesting choice, don't you think?
 >
 > Mark


Hi, Mark. Marco here. To start out, listen: I love the Senior Center; 
it's creepy that you think I don't, from what I wrote. I like the people 
who run it and patronize it and help there and are helped. I like 
everything about it; what's not to like? I was writing about the KZYX 
board meeting that was set there.

And I get along great with the people who run KNYO and KMEC, 
volunteering my time and work. I got along great at and with KMFB, when 
there was a KMFB, and everyone was freer there to create and experiment 
and enjoy doing radio than anyone has ever been at KZYX; nobody was 
breathing down our necks, the Safe Harbor rule was observed, and KMFB 
reached the same county that KZYX reaches, but KMFB properly paid all 
the airpeople and did it all on half the budget of KZYX.

I repeat: /on half the budget of KZYX,/ and no $160,000 CPB grant, 
either. Manager Bob Woelfel made sure to pay all the airpeople at KMFB 
before he paid himself. A real manager does that. That's the main part 
of a manager's job: pay the workers. Bob paid us by the hour and by a 
cut of the underwriting we brought in. The bookkeeper kept everything 
straight with a computer program; it's not hard. KZYX and its sycophants 
and cheerleaders repeat and repeat that /there's no money to pay 
airpeople/. But that's a lie. KZYX bosses simply mismanage the $600,000 
(!) they burn through every year, and a large part of that mismanagement 
is paying the management bloc, the people in the office, $300,000 a year 
to do everything the manager of KNYO, say, does by himself and takes no 
money at all for.

On my own I may not be effective at changing the hearts and minds of the 
closed club that the management and board of KZYX are, but I am pretty 
effective in the real world. I edited and/or edit/published countywide 
truly public-access newspapers for years. That takes way harder work and 
longer hours than managing a radio station does, and I paid myself 
nothing. Whenever there was money left over after paying for the print 
run it went to whoever needed it most. Sometimes to a typist. Sometimes 
to the volunteer women who did part of the delivery run. I have always 
maintained several part-time jobs to support myself. Helping maintain 
KMFB and doing my show there was one of those /jobs/. Doing a radio show 
is work that deserves compensation. And the poobahs at KZYX know that, 
otherwise they wouldn't spend tax-derived grant money from the CPB on 
contributing to paying for canned shows like, say, the one Ira Glass 
does. Which is a fine show, but did you know that just Ira Glass and the 
two producers of his one-hour-per-week /nonprofit public radio/ show get 
$500,000 a year for that? The bosses of KZYX know it, and yet to them 
it's /absurd/ to even consider paying a /local/ airperson $1,000 a year. 
That's just $20 a show. Do you see the cognitive disconnect there? And 
it's not as though there's no money to pay local radio workers. KZYX' 
high-power broadcast license is a license to coin money. There's always 
been a firehose of money pouring into KZYX; it's just very badly 
mismanaged so they have to keep begging for more, and most of the ones 
doing the begging and manning the phones during the begging drive, like 
the one starting this week, are not being paid. Or, I dunno, maybe they 
give them a doughnut, or a kiss on the cheek or a nice card. Perhaps all 
three.

Effective, though, here: On my own I put up posters and made 
public-access teevee shows for years with whoever showed up to do their 
act, and fed them dinner, too. I've built whole radio stations where I 
made every part of the radio station from circuit diagrams and junk and 
parts pulled from broken household electronics. In the middle 1980s I 
put a complete, working quarter-watt radio station in the Albion Whale 
School for the kids to play with, and I put a fully automatic radio 
station --the transmitter fit in a coffee can with a car antenna on 
top-- in the bell tower of Corners of the Mouth with a phone line and an 
answering machine hooked to it, that /anyone/ could play with, and lots 
of people did.

Now I do my /eight-hour weekly/ show and read everything on the air that 
anyone sends me to read, and anything else interesting that I find in 
reading during the week. I start the show with half an hour of community 
announcements. I put callers directly on the air without a swear delay 
and let them talk until they're finished, just like it used to be at 
KMFB. And KMEC, when the connection works (which maybe is fixed this 
time; let's cross our fingers) also runs my show. People wander in off 
the street --both KMEC and KNYO are smack in the middle of a real town; 
not out in the middle of fricking nowhere-- and I stop what I'm doing 
and put visitors on the air no matter what they smell like and we deal 
with whatever they need to deal with. Nobody is doing anything like Memo 
of the Air on KZYX.

The people who run KZYX have no place for a show like mine. It's too out 
of their control and too /community/ for them, even though they claim to 
be a community station. They are not, and they are becoming less so all 
the time.

Right, and also, Mark, you mentioned Bob Bushansky. I was told after my 
last letter that I was right about his being behind the noisy 
destructive ATV park, you know, the 600 acres of forest up Highway 20 
that the Rec District needs to turn some money up on quickly to make up 
for /their/ lousy decisions; they bought it to flatten it and poison it 
into a golf course, and that didn't work out, so they're putting up a 
chainsaw-motor Autopia ride instead. /Bob Bushansky is president of the 
board of the Rec District./ Is that a vicious attack, to point that out, 
Mark? because it looks like just news to me, as does the news that, in a 
unanimous blink-of-an-eye vote the new board of KZYX, without any 
visible deliberation, handed Bushansky the keys to their treasure room, 
just like that, because he's a well-off old white guy who wants to stay 
that way, and how do you do that without a tentacle in every available 
cashbox? Well-off old white guys have an understanding between them. 
They like the cut of each other's jib, and they recognize the threat 
represented by letting the peasants get a little too free and 
disrespectful. You see it all the way from the national stage down to 
every benighted little burg. And you also get people like Stuart 
Campbell, the Grima Wormtongue of KZYX.

And Bob Bushansky's wife Meg Courtney? Before Bob smiled in to replace 
her on the board of KZYX, for a little while there, when some people on 
the board would actually respond to the public, I wrote that there 
should be a link on the station's website to an open forum where deejays 
and management and boardmembers and listeners could write their ideas 
and concerns and share them amongst one another where everyone could 
see, something way better than the yearly community advisory committee 
whitewash, and Meg wrote back, "Absolutely not! It would turn into a 
free for all!" Oh, well. Can't have that, can we. Free? For all? Humph.

Current manager Jeffrey Parker and the board clearly are aiming to make 
KZYX the KQED of Mendocino County. I don't know if you've ever listened 
to KQED; I turn it on in the car sometimes on the way to or from 
Juanita's place; you can get it on 128 when you're almost to Cloverdale, 
and then all the way down 101. It's all syndicated canned shows from 
thousands of miles away. Some of them are cute and funny, like the 
word-game show and the still-somewhat-appealing pale shadow of Prairie 
Home Companion, and there are even a few shows with black-sounding 
people in them, and that's nice, but there are no local people of any 
color or stripe just doing radio on KQED. There's even less community 
and less freedom about KQED than about KZYX. Of course that's what 
Jeffrey and the KZYX board want, because that's where the money is. The 
old, well-off boomers are hot for safe, comfortable NPR, and they fall 
for it and pay for it and the hell with everything and everybody else. 
They have theirs, and they didn't get it by fairly paying the people 
whose work put them there.


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