<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif;font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif;font-size:small">Could there be anything more revolting than the thought of Alicia Bales and John McCowen entwined?</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif;font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif;font-size:small">...</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Jul 18, 2020 at 10:10 PM John Sakowicz <<a href="mailto:sako4@comcast.net">sako4@comcast.net</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Hi Marco,<br>
<br>
Do not spin your wheels. In the past year or two, the MEC and KMEC went from dysfunctional to moribund. Now they're dead.<br>
<br>
The rent hasn't been paid at the MEC and KMEC for more than a year. Mendocino County 2nd District Supervisor (and political hack) John McCowen carries the property as a tax write-off. <br>
<br>
Currently, the MEC has no Board. No volunteers. No money. No utilities. No website. No webstream. Nothing. Zip. Nada.<br>
<br>
There is no there, there.<br>
<br>
A year or two ago, Alicia Bales, arrived in Ukiah from Berkeley. It was a nightmare, although I didn't know it at the time. I'm naïve. Bales saw a vacuum at the MEC and filled it. She got Lara Anderson, her predecessor as Board President of the MEC, to appoint Bales as the next Board President. Then Bales proceeded to fire the old Board, install a new Board stacked with Bales's cronies, and execute a coup d’état of the MEC that makes Hitler's arson of the Reichstag building look like child's play.<br>
<br>
Bales then shamelessly used the MEC and KMEC as her platform for a job. She wanted the $96,000 program managers job at the Mendocino County Climate Action Committee. But the Board of Supervisors voted it down as an obvious and illegal attempt at patronage job that McCowen was trying to create for Bales. <br>
<br>
Bales was McCowen's tenant at the MEC. And the two seemed intimate -- too intimate. It's almost too creepy to describe the relationship. But I have photos of Bales and McCowen swooning in each other's arms during a break at a Board of Supervisors meeting. <br>
<br>
Remember, Bales needed the job. Desperately. Although college-educated, she had never had a professional job in her life. Being a Antifa-styled activist is not a job. Bales says she's a voice coach and an actress, but that didn't pay the rent. <br>
<br>
Bales had worked at Orr Hot Springs and the Ukiah Brewery in menial jobs -- but never anything professional. <br>
<br>
In a stroke of dumb luck, KZYX Program Manager Alice Woelfle left the KZYX to begin a news internship at KALW in San Francisco, and Alice Bales fell right into Woelfle's old job at KZYX.<br>
<br>
KZYX's Board being as weak as it, and largely kept uninformed by KZYX management, never questioned either Bales's lack of journalism credentials or her ruthless, take-no-prisoners style.<br>
<br>
No doubt Bales will try bending others to her will at KZYX, too. Do not underestimate Bales's Machiavellianism. If past is prologue, she'll be the next GM at KZYX.<br>
<br>
God knows Bales needs the job. No place besides KZYX would hire her.<br>
<br>
Meanwhile, good luck getting answers at the MEC and KMEC. You have a great show, Marco. By rights, you should be "featured" on KZYX. But it won't happen, of course. KZYX has a blacklist that the insiders at the station guard with their lives. Any programmer or person who questions or challenges station management is banned from the airwaves for life. Some, like you, are shipped off to the Siberian gulag that the KMEC has now become.<br>
<br>
You should have a show on the KZYX schedule, Marco, along with Doug McKenty, Norman de Vall, Beth Bosk, Mitch Clogg, Bruce Anderson, Mark Scaramella, and K.C. Meadows. That would be my dream team.<br>
<br>
Good luck, brother. <br>
<br>
-- John<br>
<br>
<br>
Meanwhile, the MEC and KMEC is a sad memory.<br>
> On 07/18/2020 7:26 PM Marco McClean <<a href="mailto:memo@mcn.org" target="_blank">memo@mcn.org</a>> wrote:<br>
> <br>
> <br>
> Subject: Gojira, don't you weep, don't you moan.<br>
> <br>
> /"Well, one of these nights 'round twev [twelve] o’clock, this old <br>
> town's gonna really rock. Didn't Pharaoh’s army get drownded [sic]? <br>
> Gojira [Godzilla], don't you weep." -Trad./<br>
> <br>
> The recording of last night's (2020-07-17) Memo of the Air: Good Night <br>
> Radio show on KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KMEC-LP Ukiah* is right here:<br>
> <a href="https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0393" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0393</a><br>
> <br>
> *Sorry, but not KMEC tonight, again. Just only on KNYO, the 87-watt <br>
> Little Lion in Fort Bragg. Available info: KMEC's website's been down <br>
> for three weeks, their web stream is off, their phone line is dead, and <br>
> the only people who've replied to my scattershot texts, phone calls and <br>
> emails are people who have no idea what's going on or have an idea and <br>
> are clamming up about it because they know what side their bread is <br>
> buttered on. If you know the story, or know somebody who does, let me <br>
> know so I can blab it and get everyone on the same page through the <br>
> magic of communication. What I know so far: zip. Except for: the <br>
> Mendocino Environmental Center's current with rent to County Supervisor <br>
> McCowen, but approximately $500 in arrears on payment to Pacific <br>
> Internet. KMEC fits in a closet in the back of the MEC and costs about <br>
> as much as a cup of coffee at Schat’s per day to operate, but /somebody <br>
> in the hierarchy of the Environmental Center has to make sure that <br>
> piffling amount gets paid./ Who is that person? Speak up; don’t be shy. <br>
> I just wanta help. I'm not going to hurt you. I will not touch you in <br>
> any wrong way or at all. If you stutter I will not make fun of you. Once <br>
> upon a time I myself had a speech impediment. I had a lisp so thick it <br>
> sounded like tearing sections out of a phone book. I know what it feels <br>
> like. Even if it's hard –especially if it's hard– spill the dang beans.<br>
> <br>
> But that’s not what last night's show's about. It's pretty fancy, as <br>
> usual. Frightening amounts of both useful and frivolous information. <br>
> Musical thrills; I mean literal thrills. Half an hour into this there's <br>
> Lorrie LePaule’s Mendocino Theater Company radio adaptation of the play <br>
> /Trifles/ by Susan Glaspell, an early feminist drama from 1909 about <br>
> small town murder, oblivious official men and a sewing kit with a dead <br>
> bird in it. There's this week's installment of Jay Frankston's <br>
> historical, romantic and numinous novel El Sereno about sixty tumultuous <br>
> years of 20th-century Spain from the point of view of the man with all <br>
> the keys. John Sakowicz' poem /Vespers/. David Herstle Jones' meditation <br>
> on a lusciously predatory bar prostitute. Jerry Philbrick's latest <br>
> festival of gun-totin' elderly racist right-wing belligerent ignorance. <br>
> There’s disease, pestilence, innovation in sport, vehicles, taxonomy, <br>
> creeping fascism, an unusual take on cancel culture, a commemoration of <br>
> the 75th anniversary of the first of hundreds of times the U.S. <br>
> deliberately punched itself in the nose (in the desert, actually) with a <br>
> sloppy atom bomb, and the advent of a new weekly feature of MOTA that <br>
> will be variously titled: Looks at Fox, Focus on Fox, What the Fox, Fox <br>
> in Sox, etc. I'm trying to keep the kvetching about President Ass-clown <br>
> to a minimum, but when it starts taking more effort to avoid looking <br>
> there than to look there, I look there for a minute or two again, and so <br>
> what. Also there’s a long bit exploring Charlie Engel's trials and <br>
> tribulations regarding Sherwood Oaks that really is very fair, I think, <br>
> to all sides in the tragedy that we’re all heading for if we live long <br>
> enough. And that's just some of it. I'm knocking myself out for you, <br>
> here, every time, everything on the table, as disgraced genius Louis <br>
> C.K. and the sainted Alex Bosworth, from whom I seem to be estranged, <br>
> each once said, and if you like it and can use it, great. If something <br>
> pisses you off so you write to complain or to show off how you can do <br>
> better, that's even more perfect. I repeat, spill the beans.<br>
> <br>
> Furthermore, at <a href="https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com</a> you'll find a fresh <br>
> batch of dozens of links to not necessarily radio-useful but nonetheless <br>
> worthwhile educational items I set aside for you while gathering the <br>
> show together. Such as:<br>
> <br>
> What is intelligence?<br>
> <a href="https://theawesomer.com/what-is-intelligence/580299/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://theawesomer.com/what-is-intelligence/580299/</a><br>
> <br>
> The closer you look, the busier it gets. Look intently enough and you <br>
> can see Kenneth Patchen's butterflies bigger than the Earth, not to <br>
> mention leopards made of golden wire not merely circling the sun but <br>
> right down there wading around in it up to their eyeballs.<br>
> <a href="https://newatlas.com/space/images-sun-campfires-nasa-esa" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://newatlas.com/space/images-sun-campfires-nasa-esa</a><br>
> <br>
> And "Damage has been set at half-a-million dollars." That's all? Money <br>
> was different in those days. People didn't sue you because they were <br>
> painting their fingernails and tripped on the doorjamb. If a train <br>
> crashed, a train crashed. Trains crash. Also, you could buy a whole <br>
> block of houses in San Francisco for what it costs to get your Prius <br>
> fender fixed today, and screwdrivers and toothbrushes and shotglasses <br>
> (and car headlights) didn't have supercomputers in them. They just <br>
> screwed things in or out and cleaned graham crackers out of your teeth <br>
> and briefly held flammable toxic liquid and showed the road ahead. And <br>
> when you graduated from high school you knew calculus or at least <br>
> trigonometry, Spanish, German and/or French, the major dates and locales <br>
> of history, animal husbandry (you could spay your own cat and assist in <br>
> the birth of a calf). You could paint a portrait of someone and they'd <br>
> be pleased with how it came out. Everyone could plumb and wire and roof <br>
> and cook and sew and type and survey and make change at a register and <br>
> do any job that needed doing in a new town. They could make tenses agree <br>
> in casual speech and knew where to put the apostrophe in a sign, knew <br>
> how to dance gracefully, who to hold the door for, to take a slap and <br>
> like it and learn from it and not get fresh with that one again. You <br>
> knew the names of at least a hundred colors and a hundred nuanced <br>
> emotions. You could play the piano and recite from memory at least one <br>
> epic poem and possibly even a whole Shakespeare play. It was rare if a <br>
> person couldn't sing or tell a joke. Also, every spigot everywhere could <br>
> be fixed in a minute with a washer that was so cheap they gave them away <br>
> from a bowl next to the free rulers and paint stirring sticks and free <br>
> golf pencils, and if you were white you could enter any diner, sit at <br>
> the counter, spread out the newspaper (morning edition or evening <br>
> edition of any of a dozen different newspapers just for your city), <br>
> relight your pocket-cigar and settle in for a lunch hour that lasted an <br>
> hour. And the coffee was terrible everywhere, so bad that it’s a wonder <br>
> people drank it at all. So it wasn’t just money that was different.<br>
> <a href="http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_wreck_of_the_city_of_san_francisco" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_wreck_of_the_city_of_san_francisco</a><br>
> <br>
> -- <br>
> Marco McClean, <a href="mailto:memo@mcn.org" target="_blank">memo@mcn.org</a>,<br>
> <a href="https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com</a><br>
> <br>
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</blockquote></div>