The Rag Blog: Bob Simmons

Showing posts with label Bob Simmons. Show all posts

21 March 2013

RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Legendary Music Producer Chris Strachwitz and Filmmakers Maureen Gosling & Chris Simon

From left: Chris Simon, Chris Strachwitz, and Maureen Gosling at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, March 15, 2013. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz,
filmmakers Maureen Gosling & Chris Simon

This Ain't no Mouse Music! paints a "vivid portrait of an obsessive sonic sleuth" as the film takes "a hip-shaking stroll from New Orleans to Appalachia and right into the very DNA of rock’n’roll.”

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / March 21, 2013

See Bob Simmons' YouTube videos from the show, Below.

Legendary blues and roots music producer Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records, and filmmakers Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon, whose This Ain't no Mouse Music! about Arhoolie premiered at SXSW in Austin, were our guests on Rag Radio, Friday, March 15, 2013. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Chris Strachwitz, Maureen Gosling, and Chris Simon here:

Born to an aristocratic family in a section of Germany that is now part of Poland, Chris Strachwitz came to the United States after World War II. He developed a love for roots and blues music and in 1960 established the extremely influentual indie record label, Arhoolie.

As the producers of This Ain't no Mouse Music! put it, Strachwitz "traveled to plantations and prisons, roadhouses and whorehouses, churches and bayou juke joints, and returned with recordings that would revolutionize the sound of popular music."

Chris Strachwitz brought performers like Texas bluesmen Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins, Tejano musicians Flaco Jiménez and Lydia Mendoza, Cajun greats Michael Doucet and the Savoy Family, and Zydeco king Clifton Chenier -- and many more -- into world prominence. And, in collaboration with filmmaker Les Blank, he made the classic film Chulas Fronteras about Norteño music.

Bonnie Raitt said, "It’s impossible to look at the history of blues, Cajun and Zydeco music without looking at Chris Strachwitz’ role. He’s a monumental figure.”

Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon produced and directed This Ain’t No Mouse Music! which tells the amazing story of Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records. The film premiered with several screenings at this year’s SXSW Film Festival in Austin.

Jeffrey St. Clair called Mouse Music a “vivid portrait of an obsessive sonic sleuth” in which the filmmakers “take a hip-shaking stroll from New Orleans to Appalachia and right into the very DNA of rock’n’roll. In this beautifully shot film, we come face to face with the creators of indigenous music...”

“I guess I’m just a rootin’ groundhog,” Strachwitz told the Rag Radio audience. “If I can’t find musicians, I just hunt records wherever I go. I should have probably opened a detective agency.”

"I fell in love with all these different regional musics," he said, "not just with blues. New Orleans jazz was one of my first loves... and hillbilly music. There was this amazing array of extraordinarily powerful and emotional music."

Noted Musicologist Mack McCormick -- who “knew Texas, the vernacular Texas, better than any other human being” -- suggested the name “Arhoolie" for the new record company. Strachwitz' response? "Ar-what?" "Arhoolie" was a variation on a term meaning a “field holler,” sung by workers in the cotton fields. "I figured... it’s a catchy name. What the heck."

In This Ain't no Mouse Music!, Chris explains his approach to the business like this:

Most record companies, they record everything that they think is commercial. I didn’t want to record stuff I don’t like... My stuff isn’t produced. I just catch it as it is... I knew the music I liked was all over the place. Especially in Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi and god knows where... I don’t know why I like it so much. It’s just got some guts to it. It ain’t wimpy, that’s for sure. It ain’t no mouse music...

About making the film with Strachwitz, Maureen Gosling said on Rag Radio, “We had the amazing experience of hanging around with him and going on the road with him and being able to be with all these people.”

Chris Simon added, “We saw a whole other side of Chris, and the passion that he brings to his work is extraordinary. Going around, knocking on strangers' doors, saying, do you know where this person lives? It’s inspiring. And I hope that that’s one of the things that young people get out of the film. If you have a vision, just do it.”

The film, which includes narration from Bonnie Raitt, Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal, Richard Thompson, and folklorist Archie Green, features a wide range of musical performance including valuable archival footage of Lightin' Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Big Mama Thornton, and others.

Maureen says, "We filmed a lot of things live, like the Treme Brass Band in New Orleans, Michael and David Doucet performing together, No Speed Limit, a bluegrass band in Virginia... and Santiago Jiménez, Jr. here in Texas, as well as Flaco Jiménez, and many, many others..."

And, she added, "We filmed at the Savoy family annual boucherie -- and that’s just a perfect setting for the movie because it’s just people jamming and eating and having a good time and it’s a beautiful way to see music in the context of the culture. And not just set up on a stage..."

Maureen Gosling, who graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in social anthropology and who lived in Austin in the '70s, has been a documentary filmmaker for more than 30 years. Her work has often focused on themes of people and their cultural values, music as cultural expression, and the changing gender roles of men and women.

Chris Simon, who is also a folklorist, has been an award-winning filmmaker for more than 25 years, producing independent documentaries through her Sageland Media. Gosling and Simon met while working with acclaimed documentary filmmaker Les Blank, with whom they collaborated on classic films such as Gap-Toothed Women and Burden of Dreams.

This Ain't No Mouse Music! on Rag Radio
Video by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, March 22: Progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin, Sports Editor at The Nation and author of Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.
Friday, March 29: "Bronx Butch" poet, performance artist, and memoirist Annie Rachele Lanzillotto.
Friday, April 5: Anti-violence activists John Woods and Claire Wilson James about the issue of guns in schools and on college campuses.
Friday, April 12: Sixties activists and Yippie founders Judy Gumbo Albert and Nancy Kurshan.

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02 February 2012

Rag Radio : The American Radio Revolution with Kim Simpson, Jan Reid, and Bob Simmons

From left, Rag Radio's Thorne Dreyer and guests Bob Simmons, Kim Simpson, and Jan Reid. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio / The Rag Blog.
The formatting revolution in
'60s-'70s American Radio

By Thorne Webb Dreyer / The Rag Blog / February 2, 2012

Kim Simpson, Jan Reid, and Bob Simmons discussed the history of American radio and the formatting revolution of the '60s and '70s on Rag Radio, Friday, January 27.

The show can be heard here:

Kim Simpson, Jan Reid, and Bob Simmons
on Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer, Jan. 27, 2012:

Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. It is hosted by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer.

Kim Simpson is the author of Early '70s Radio: The American Format Revolution, published by Contiuum Books in 2011. Jan Reid is the editor of Bill Young's Dead Air: The rise and demise of music radio. It was published by CreateSpace, also in 2011. Bob Simmons reviewed both books at The Rag Blog.

As Simmons wrote,

Both books cover roughly the same era of American radio broadcasting: the turbulent late 60's and the decade of the 1970's. Early '70s Radio is more of a weighty cultural criticism full of well-researched information from those decades. Dead Air, on the other hand, is a personal memoir and first-hand tale from someone who fought in the trenches of the media war and lived.

Kim Simpson, PhD, is a cultural historian, musician, writer, and radio show host. He hosts Sunday Folkways on Austin's KUT and The International Folk Bazaar on KOOP. His CDs include Mystery Lights: Solo Guitar (2009), The Mad Dukes Sing and Play for You (2006), and Midnight Apparitions (1996).

Jan Reid is an author and music historian and a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly, and his writing has also appeared in Esquire, GQ, Slate, and The New York Times -- and The Rag Blog. Reid's books include Texas Tornado: The Life and Times of Doug Sahm, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock (considered the definitive tale of Austin music in the 1970's), the novel Comanche Sundown, and books about Tom DeLay and Karl Rove.

Bob Simmons was a pioneer in the "underground" format in FM radio, and has been a producer and personality at a number of legendary radio stations in places like San Francisco, Austin, and Portland, including KUT, KPFA, KSAN, KKSN, and KFAT. He has also been an oil biz entrepreneur, video maker, voice talent, construction worker, newspaper publisher, writer, and sports editor.

Simmons wrote in The Rag Blog that

Dead Air is... is the story of Bill Young's relationship with hit radio in Texas at Houston's KILT, Dallas' KLIF, Waco's WACO, etc., and the myriad of people with whom he came in contact... Young gives us a taste of what that long-gone world was like, a whiff from the inside of the glass-windowed rooms where the mics were live and the air had better not be “dead.”

In Early '70s Radio, on the other hand, Kim Simpson

was fascinated by the genesis of the idea of “formatting"... that was in its complete infancy in the early 70's, and Simpson thought that he could follow its development and demonstrate that a study of “hit radio formats” could provide a unique and useful means for examining and understanding the period and the culture as a whole...

On Rag Radio, the three discussed the two books -- and the rich and tumultous era they covered -- and placed that era in the context of the storied history of radio broadcasting.

Rag Radio -- hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer -- is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

[Thorne Dreyer,a prominent Sixties activist and underground journalist, was a founding editor of The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston, was on the editorial collective of Liberation News Service (LNS) in New York, and was manager of Pacifica Radio's KPFT-FM in Houston. He now edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. Read more articles by and about Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog.]

Please read "Two Books on the American Radio Revolution" by Bob Simmons at The Rag Blog -- and listen to Thorne Dreyer's July 7, 2011, Rag Radio interview with underground radio pioneer Bob Simmons, and his October 12, 2010, interview with author and Texas music historian Jan Reid.

Coming up on Rag Radio:

Friday, Feb. 3, 2012: Historian and political economist Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism.

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25 January 2012

BOOKS / Bob Simmons : Two on the American Radio Revolution

Dead Air and Early '70s Radio:
The formatting revolution
in American radio

By Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog / January 26, 2012

Kim Simpson, author of Early '70s Radio, and Jan Reid, editor of Bill Young's Dead Air, will be Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio, Friday, January 27, 2012, 2-3 p.m. (CST), on KOOP 91-7-FM in Austin and streamed live to the world. They will discuss the American radio revolution of the '60s and '70s. Rag Radio is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA, Sunday at 10 a.m. (EST).

Dead Air: The rise and demise of music radio, by Bill Young, edited by Jan Reid. (CreateSpace, 2011); Paperback, 302 pp., $19.95.

Early '70s Radio: The American Format Revolution, by Kim Simpson (New York: Continuum, 2011); Paperback, 288 pp., $32.95.

Two books about media, radio in particular, have recently been released for the public's consideration: Kim Simpson's Early 70's Radio The American Format Revolution and Bill Young's Dead Air: The rise and demise of music radio, edited by Jan Reid.

Both books cover roughly the same era of American radio broadcasting: the turbulent late 60's and the decade of the 1970's. Early 70's Radio is more of a weighty cultural criticism full of well-researched information from those decades. Dead Air, on the other hand, is a personal memoir and first-hand tale from someone who fought in the trenches of the media war and lived.

If you're a student of American media or cultural analysis of the period, then these books may be worth your time to explore.

For those too young to remember, or who need to be reminded, the 60's and 70's were times of tectonic shifts in American culture and society. You know, assassinations, Vietnam, black power, feminism, energy crises, impeachments, etc. It was a rockin' time for sure. In the middle of it all, jockeying for position, or just to stay alive like Eliza on the Ice, was the medium of radio, trying to lead, hoping to follow, and to continue to be or become a key part of its listener's lives.

In those days radio wanted to be, and perhaps was, a “social network” -- before there was any concept of such a thing. Radio sought to be more than just a medium, radio wished to mediate the culture around it.

In the 60's and 70's, radio went wherever we went -- in our cars, in our homes, at our work. Our little buddy was there, talking to us, playing the tunes that defined our hearts, blabbing about the navel lint of our lives, shocking us, informing us, and cajoling us to buy some product that likely as not we were better off without. Waterbeds! Hot tubs! A Mercury Montego!

That box was more than just another media choice. We didn't have 500 channels of TV, we didn't have the Internet. We didn't have PDA's and cell phones. We only had... that little radio and some guy sitting on top of an Astrodome or flagpole telling us what it was like. We could take it with us, in our car, to the beach, to the mountains, in our bedrooms at our most intimate moments. Radio could be there, defining us, refining us, and perhaps keeping us from the loneliness of just being alive in our skins.

A stupid disk jockey might irk us, please us, or maybe clue us in about an event that simply should not be missed. We could dial up our tastes -- country, rock ‘n roll, hit music, the marischino strings, music and news from dusk till dawn -- helping to release endorphins in our brain.

Mood elevators? Who needed Miltown or Prozac? We had K-Lite or K-Life or K-Whatthehell to keep us in the corral. Let it snow, let it snow I've got my radio to keep me warm. Radio made us feel like we belonged to something. It wasn't a country club, it wasn't a sorority or fraternity, but dammit, we belonged to... something. Good morning, sunshine... we're here to getcha' goin'. Looks like it's gonna be breezy so wear a slip, OK?

Talk about pressure! As they used to say in Creem magazine: Boy Howdy!

Imagine what it must have been like to be the guy in charge of remaining relevant to an audience of some 20,000 people at any given moment, to do something to maintain your "cume" (your listening audience's total numbers) of one or two hundred thousand people a week. Do you think you might feel a little, um, squeezed, a little apprehensive?

Pity the poor PD (Program Director) of a major city radio station. His DJ's hate him, his manager beats him like a rented mule, the sales department thinks he is a tyrant and a stubborn jerk for not allowing some manufacturer of specialty latex products to be advertised on the air.

The league of decency is on the phone, the record promo men are in the hall with the latest directive and LP from Columbia’s Clive Davis. Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun says play this, or we break your legs. What is your weakness pal? You like girls? You like drugs? Money? As PD, you are the key to all their locks, and they are going to find a way to pick you.

Out there in the street are listeners who depend on you. They don't know it, but they do. You're the gatekeeper, you are the chef, you are the culture cop protecting them from inferior or bogus goods. You are the juggler trying to keep six things in the air: a chocolate cake, a running chainsaw, a medicine ball, your kid's birthday, your wife's anniversary.

David Bowie once sang, “It ain't easy to go ahead when you're goin' down.” On top of all that was the fact that your audience was shifting and changing more than a woman looking at her closet before church.

Gordon McLendon on the air at KLIF in Dallas, 1948 / History of KLIF.

Top 40 or “All hit Radio” was the invention of a couple of guys, mainly one Todd Storz, who had noticed back in Omaha in 1955 or so, that people would put quarters in jukeboxes and play the same song over and over. People didn't get tired of the song and move on. Listeners were getting some kind of rush from the repetition.

Storz had the revelation that most people don't listen for more than an hour or two at a time. A radio station could repeat itself as much as it wanted. In fact, repetition was good, not bad, as had been thought before. People liked knowing what they were going to hear.

Hit radio was born and prospered like an army base hooker. This of course led to competition. But for years Storz and his buddy, Gordon McClendon, made millions on that simple idea.

Dead Air: The rise and demise of music radio is about Bill Young's experience from inside that radio circus -- from its rosy innocence in 1955 to the days of deepening cynical market research in the late 70's and beyond. Young worked the wheelhouse of a couple of Gordon McClendon's flagship stations in Dallas and Houston, leading them to top ratings and helping to maintain McClendon's fortunes, until the day the music, or more accurately, the music machine, began to cough, sputter, and spit parts out on the highway.

Call it a challenge? I think so.

Once the format was discovered in 1955, radio operators had it pretty easy until the late 60's and early 70's when Americans began to evolve into walled off cells of opinion, class, and age. Marketers who kept their fingers on the pulse of the tastes and desires of the public noted with great interest the erosion of our “one nation indivisible under God” into increasingly distinct demographic and psychographic profiles. Market consultants and psychiatrists started testing “consumers” from behind one-way glass to try to figure it out.

The teenagers were coming of age. That wise guy Bugs Bunny was growing a beard, smoking pot, and singing, “I ain't marching any more.” The kids that had liked Mickey were now on a C-131 headed for Nam. Black guys who had watched the news from Birmingham in the 60's were wearing berets and saying things like, “By any means necessary.”

Pity the poor radio stations trying to figure out where their audiences were going. Again, “Boy howdy.”

By the late 70's it was estimated that over 100 different radio “formats” had evolved. It had Bill Young scratching his head along with several hundred other radio programmers and tipsters around the country. What the hell should I play? To whom am I playing it? Teens, young adults, housewives?

Dead Air is a self-published work edited by historian, novelist, journalist Jan Reid, and is the story of Bill Young's relationship with hit radio in Texas at Houston's KILT, Dallas' KLIF, Waco's WACO, etc., and the myriad of people with whom he came in contact. Personal saga time.

You know the plot line. Youthful yearning hick shows up on doorstep of local East Texas radio station, and uses wits and pluck to work his way up to... Waco. And from then on folks, it's all history. Bright lights, big city. Houston, Dallas, um, Tyler.

This is not to denigrate those accomplishments, given that succeeding in popular radio, whether in Mid-America or on the more sophisticated East or West Coasts, was akin to scaling icy mountains or driving in a Grand Prix race where all the cars were driven by psychotics who would just as soon run into you as win the race. Becoming a success in Top 40 was not easy for the men at the top, middle, or bottom.

Bill Young gives us a taste of what that long-gone world was like, a whiff from the inside of the glass-windowed rooms where the mics were live and the air had better not be “dead.” Young was behind the mic in Dallas the day they killed the President, he was on stage when the Rolling Stones wondered if they should flip their cigarette butts at the audience before they started playing. He crawled atop the Astrodome as his deejay pal finished his 400th hour living up there.

It might be said that Dead Air's virtues are also its limitations. As a personal memoir it is a success; as an inside history of the game, it works too; but as a book for the reader who is trying to understand media and its relationship to the broader culture, well, don't look for much of that here, folks.

A lot of Dead Air is a list of names who are only familiar to people from within "the industry" whose careers were important to trade publications like Billboard, Cashbox, and Advertising Age. Sure, some were hometown hero DJ's to teenaged listeners. But the other names like Bill Drake, Buzz Bennett, Bill Stewart, Don Keyes, Claude Hall? Who they?

Radio cognoscenti know them; most people though, didn't then, and still don't. Fame is so fickle, especially in the world of pop music and radio. Who remembers Jobriath, David Blue, Frankie Ford, Nervous Norvus? One of these days no one will know who Howard Stern was. Praise Jesus!

KILT disc jockeys. Bill Young is second from left.

It was said by someone somewhen, that radio was/is the bottom rung of the show business ladder, and one wishes in a way that Dead Air covered a bit more of the “up-close-and-personal” of what it was like to be a deejay at the time. You know, the “cleaning up after the elephants” stuff.

Maybe Bill Young should have included some vignettes of what it was like to “work in the window,” with the DJ on display as listeners drove past the studios, where DJ's might be threatened with a stick of dynamite, or had to worry about someone taking a pot shot at them?

A portrait here and there of the radio guy who lived with a U-haul trailer on reserve for the day when he would be transferred to another city or be fired and forced to move from Oklahoma City to Detroit inside of two weeks. DJ's? Born to be fired. (Radio bums!)

Or maybe a story about the vicious RKO Radio program director who installed sun lamps in the studio so that when an announcer wasn't up to snuff he could turn the lamps on remotely to make him sweat. At the end of the week, the DJ with the best tan was on the shitlist.

Or saddest of all, maybe something about all the losers who forewent college to be in the “entertainment business” and found themselves burned out and tossed out of media at the ripe old age of 40 with a taste for the fast life and no skills to back it up? Being a deejay might have offered brief fame, but for many it was a one way ticket to Palookaville. Mama told you not to join the circus.

Young talks a bit about the development of innovations like hot clocks, stop sets, day-parting of music, limited rotation, “jingle packages,” etc., which may be of some interest to media junkies, but in the long run were only about how thick or thin to slice the baloney and still make people think they were getting a sandwich. Just how many ways could one devise to play the same 30 records anyway?

Flagpole sitting DJs might promote the call letters of the station so their station would be remembered in the listener surveys and make a strong showing in Pulse or the Arbitron ratings, but they made the real rubber meet the road by simply playing the artists who were the rage of the moment.

Picking hits with a tip sheet and sales charts? Could Donald Duck have done it as well? Who knows? But when it came to self-promotion and log rolling, the guys mentioned in Young's world were tops. And that programmer who came up with a new innovation about how to arrange a limited play list of 30 hits and a hundred oldies in some new manner? He was the “genius” of the month… Ok, ok, of the year?

Big bucks would be dangled by one of several radio group owners. Gordon McClendon, Todd Storz, Don Burden, and the others would hire this “programmer of the year” or subscribe to the tip sheet that seemed to offer insight into which way the ever-skittish crowd would respond to certain sounds.

Advertising fortunes rode on being right. Pimple cream merchants and Ford dealers waited for the ratings to offer the big payoff to the stations that could pick the ponies. “I want men, 18-34 goddammit. I want housewives who like those Saturday sales. We've rented balloons and searchlights, some people better show up or it's your ass.”

But Young does make a good argument that the showcase for the music counted for something. The frame around the picture made the music more important, and since this was his world, one should not expect that he would not emphasize that.

And a wild bunch some of those handmaids to the music were. What a gang of cut-ups! Setting each other's news copy on fire while on the air! Ha ha. And consorting with record promo men who wanted to (gasp!) give them money to play records! Never mind that Nixon was being impeached, or that Jimmy Smith from down the street just got his ass shot off in Veetnam.

One can't help but notice from the blurbs on the back of the book that the same cast of mutual backslappers is still at it. Kent Burkhart, Chuck Blore, Ron Alexenburg, Sonny Melendrez all have comments about this book “written by a radio legend.” These guys could promote a dust bunny from under your bed. Of course it would have to be a “good” dust bunny. In fact a dust bunny with legs! “This dust bunny is breaking wide at 18 with a bullet. Got your finger on my trigger, now pull it.” Those guys are going to be promoting each other's coffins.

Always lurking in the background of Young's story is the doppelganger image of Herb Tarlek -- with his plaid jacket and white tasseled shoes -- from WKRP in Cincinnati, anxious to promote turkey giveaways dropped from helicopters like bombs in a parking lot at the A and Poo Feed Store. But admit it, if you liked WKRP, you liked Herb Tarlek (played by Frank Bonner.) “I swear, I thought turkeys could fly!”

Herb Tarlek of WKRP in Cincinnati, played by Frank Bonner.

While reading Young, the older reader's mind wanders back to the time of the dreaded teenagers to whom the radio dial had been abandoned while mom and dad watched the glowing tube in the main rooms of the house. Junior and Missy retired to their rooms to listen to Danny and the Juniors, Earth Angel, and Connie Francis, germinating their own world that would eventually lead to the fragmenting of both the culture and the audiences into worlds that not even the most statistically minded sociologists could predict. (Think Married With Children.)

England? The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan? What would those voices mean to someone who was playing the music of Leslie Gore, “It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to?”

But Bill Young was there, caught in the middle of it, “too cool for the room, too square to be rare,” helming one of Gordon McClendon's ships-of-the-line through the stormy media waters. “You may fire when ready, Gridley. Damn the torpedos.” Don't worry about that FM program director Tom Donahue declaring in Rolling Stone that, “Top 40 is dead and its rotting corpse is stinking up the airways.”

And it did take another five years to die and for the culture to morph into Disco, Contemporary Hit Radio, Middle of the Road, AOR, Urban, Country, and News/Talkers, and all their subgenres. It also took an assassination of a president, his brother, and a civil rights giant, a horrible and unjust war, the popularization and mass use of drugs (both legal and illegal), the rise of FM radio, LP records, and cable television to split the listenerships into microsegments that became an advertiser's nightmare of demographics, psychographics, and statistical weighting.

Bill Young was there and lived to tell the tale for students of mid-America, mid-century, and media-as-a-message. If that stuff interests you, then dig right in.

Working the same fields, but plowing much more refined furrows, is the book by Kim Simpson, Early 70's Radio The American Format Revolution.

Simpson, also a musician and a host of folk music shows on Austin's KUT and KOOP, is from a different generation than Bill Young, and approaches the period as a historian and studious cultural critic. Born in 1969, Simpson experiences the 70's mainly as research first begun in his dad's stashed archives of old Billboards, Cash Boxes, and Record Worlds. Curiosity led him further.

He was fascinated by the genesis of the idea of “formatting” -- that is, the process of trying to design a medium to fit the perceived preferences of a preselected “target audience.” It was an idea that was in its complete infancy in the early 70's, and Simpson thought that he could follow its development and demonstrate that a study of “hit radio formats” could provide a unique and useful means for examining and understanding the period and the culture as a whole.

In Simpson's words:

Radio historians, having recognized the early 70's as a watershed in the medium's history, refer to the era as the "format explosion," the "crossover explosion" or the “FM revolution,” among similar descriptions. These all fit the bill -- if commercial radio's format offerings numbered in the single digits at the beginning of the decade, they had multiplied, according to a Broadcasting magazine tally, to an industry-wide cornucopia of 133 formats by the end of the decade, all but six of which could be classified as “Popular music" in one sense or another.

[….] the radio business's formatting efforts were a cultural phenomenon that mirrored the identity issues with which the nation as a whole, had been grappling. It was no mere coincidence that this change in the radio landscape toward audience segmentation occurred in a period rife with heated politics, identity anxiety, and social fragmentation amid a steady stream of large scale disappointments and chronically insoluble social problems (Vietnam, OPEC, Inflation, and Watergate to name just a few).

In this light, commercial music radio formats, however industry driven, served two cultural functions, both of which appear as recurring themes throughout this book: (1) they provided a means whereby radio listeners could reimagine and renegotiate identity be it their own or another's; and (2) the formats acted as coping mechanisms. For example, they could serve as escape hatches through which radio listeners might opt out of the social turmoil and anxieties of the day, while functioning for others as well-defined identity headquarters that offered meaning and resolve in equal measures to their corresponding demographics.

“Boy Howdy!” Once again, you just said a mouthful.

Well, is/was it true? Is that what music radio formatting was/is all about? Bubblegum, heavy metal, folk-rock, singer-songwriters, jazz, country, light-country, mellow, elevator music, classical, AOR, AAOR, MOR, Urban, Quiet Storms, Indie/College, Bluegrass, and so on through the spectrum of bins at your local music store? What the hell does all that mean? What do those tea leaves mean, Gypsy woman?

Well bless Mr. Simpson, he tries to make heads or tails of this ball of confusion of cultural demarcation. Genre's, sub-genre's, incongruent glops of cross-referential music emerging from the variety of eras and socioeconomic partitions, divided by race, culture, age, background, geography, and whatever other cultural identifiers offered for a lost people to grasp to find a sense of themselves.

Once, in Bill Young's day -- what Simpson (and others) call the days of “Unformatted Innocence” -- radio and other media were broadcast out over the broad waters of the American landscape as though there was one body with one set of ears.

In the early 70's, right about the same time people started recognizing the significance of Marshall McCluhan's Understanding Media, the advertising world and the broadcasting world, moving in lockstep, recognized that the stuff they used to do was hopelessly naive and ineffective in reaching the people they wanted to motivate to do the things they wanted them to do. And what they wanted was for people to buy products, not to mention to buy the products that were luring them to buy more products.

(One of the great ironies of music radio was that probably the most salient merchandise that they were selling was not the “products” they were advertising with the “commercial spots,” but was the very program material they were playing on the air. The recordings from the major and minor labels were ads for themselves! This hasn't changed a bit and continues to this day unabated.)

No wonder the major record companies vied so heavily for airplay. Their “product” was being used to advertise itself. The promo men from Atlantic, CBS, Warner Brothers, and from Hi, and Sarg, London, and from the local one-stop distributor lined up at the radio programmer’s door. “Pleeeze, play my record.”

And if the product was good, and was played in the right way, to the right audience, then listeners would tune in, and the station could sell more actual advertising to local merchants and manufacturers of goods and services. Maybe it was as the Marquis de Sade who once said, “All of them engaged in happy mutual robbery.”

Pity the poor programmer who had to negotiate among all these competing interests. (Wait, is that a spot or a song? Are they selling “Lady Came from Baltimore” or Lady Schick Razors? How do you know? Is the DJ talking to me, or selling me something?)

And pity the poor cultural critic who has to parse this into its constituent pieces. Boy howdy!

Progressive radio pioneer Tom Donahue. Image from Bay Area Radio.

So there goes Kim Simpson with his fine book, to make his contribution to the understanding of media and of pop culture. Watching Scotty Grow, Soul Crisis and Crossover, MOR and Soft Rock, Casey Kasem, Robert Plant, Country Music, oh hell, it's all here.

I am here to warn you, this book is not light reading. It is deeply researched, it is thoughtful, it is rich with facts and insights of both Simpson's and of the ideas from the source material.

Since he is doing his work from archives, from studies, and from interviews with the personalities of the times, he occasionally makes an error. He talks about the original FM revolution which ostensibly started in San Francisco, where he gives credit to Tom Donahue for “owning” the first “underground” FM station, KMPX. Simpson missed the fact that Donahue owned nothing and went on strike with his staff against the station owner who refused to share in the new gold mine that Tom and his rag-tag staff were creating.

But Simpson bravely wades into the fray. He covers every aspect of the culture -- feminism, religious broadcasting, news, racism in media -- from Olivia Newton-John to Frank Zappa, Black Sabbath to Merle Haggard. He studies all of the musical genres that are covered by bellwether artists and tries to give context and meaning about how they fit into the wider culture. It is a staggeringly difficult thing to do, but somehow he seems to pull it off.

And what does he predict from all this? More of the same of course. (Satellite radio, mood oriented. Terrestial radio, demographic oriented -- but radio still needed, ostensibly for its “communal listening experience.”) But in further fragments and segments, maybe even a segment that goes back to the unformatted innocence of music that is incongruously served up as a bunch of this and that. Only in a highly segmented spectrum could an unsegmented format be included. It's full circle time.

And all of it exists and continues to morph because of the wild multiplication of technical media delivery systems. Cable, Internet, over-the-air FM and AM, TV carriers and sub-carriers, satellite radio like Sirius, ad infinitum. Anyone need an all-Dolly Parton station? Technical change allows, nay, demands cultural change. Napster becomes Pandora, Pandora becomes Spotify. Next please! Everybody into the ditch!

So, Dead Air, and Early 70's Radio. Both recommended for people who like this kind of stuff. But as they said about the Magic Theatre in Steppenwolf: “Not for Everybody.”

[Bob Simmons has been a radio producer and personality, oil biz entrepreneur, video maker, voice talent, construction worker, newspaper publisher, writer, and sports editor. Simmons has a storied career in radio, where he was a pioneer in the underground format, and has been a producer and personality at legendary stations -- including KUT, KPFA, KSAN, KKSN, and KFAT -- in places like San Francisco, Austin, and Portland. Read more articles by Bob Simmons on The Rag Blog.]

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20 June 2011

FILM / Bob Simmons : The Cave of Forgotten Austin

And it's all in 3-D!
Werner Herzog, Second Street,
and the Cave of Forgotten Austin

By Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog / June 20, 2011

Bob Simmons will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, July 1, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP-91.7 FM in Austin, and streamed live on the internet.

I went to see Cave of Forgotten Dreams last night, the movie by Werner Herzog about the cave that was discovered in the Ardeche Gorge of France a few years ago. It's the cave that features unmarred Neolithic wall paintings done in the Pleistocene Age. The movie is a 3-D jewel of sensitive movie making, but more important, it is also a thoughtful reflection on the state of humankind, now, 33 thousand years later.

The cave has reposed in silence for more than three millenia, sealed away with its secret cave bear bones, its dripping stalactites, its delicate crystal calcite depositions, and incredible renderings of horses, rhinoceroses, and mammoths.

The hypnotic voice of Herzog with his northern European accent set the tone for what is revealed as we are lured into the timeless void and the deep past through a tiny opening in the cliff face. The charcoaled figures are illuminated on the undulating surfaces of the limestone in ways that demonstrate the artists' deep connection with the world they inhabited. The skill of the human hand or hands that applied the shapes to the wall rivals that of any modern day painter, but more important, the shapes capture a breathing essence of the creatures and moments in their lives. Below the drawings, on the cave floor, we see petrified animal bones sealed in pure crystalline calcite. They gleam and reflect in the flashlit darkness.

There are no human remains in the cave, nor representation of human forms, though the Sistine Chapel, the sculpture of Pythias, the terra cotta warriors of Xi'An all come to mind when looking at these walls as the shadows of camera lights play over them. Herzog comes in close, then takes us outside for some speculation and facts by the French caretakers, one of whom includes a very Gallic perfumier who appears outside the cave sniffing the rocks.

Just as the movie approached the point of being repetitious or too long, it was over. The credits rolled. I rose unsteadily to my feet and trudged out to the clanging modernity and angularity of Austin's 2nd Street.

The span of human history isn't something we think about very often, and indeed, as I emerged from the cave of the Violet Crown Cinema with its soft, first class airline seats, and mixed drinks into another of Austin's latest "entertainment districts," the contrast was so violent as to make it a jarring, psychologically-disturbing, experience.

I was suddenly mentally and visually assaulted by fashion, design, surfaces, human hubris and objects of commercial desire. I felt like the theater must have held me inside while all kinds of things had transformed around us. I had wandered out into a different era.

Somehow I found it hard to even say the word "we" when I looked at the crowds of young homo sapiens strolling past the sidewalk cafes and milling in front of the Mary Moody Theater (where the band “Widespread Panic” was playing for a second night).

The hard-edged architecture seemed to fit the sharply age-segregated crowd. Ninety-nine percent of the several thousand who were gathered in the street and leaning over the third floor balconies were between the ages of twenty and thirty with more males than females. But the ratio was close. Girls in sexy outfits and perfect hair, guys in shorts and flip flops, some in jackets and tee shirts. All stylized, looking like they were prepped for a photo shoot by a SoHo photographer's assistant.

Backslapping, air kissing, high-fiving and a few hanging on the wall posing sullen and distant. None seemed drunk or overly bellicose. Mindless good spirits, youth mixing with itself. Not an old person in sight, except for me. I wondered how all those kids would be behaving if someone had dosed their drinks with LSD? It was just a random thought.

I plowed through this throng with my "age force field." The youth detected me and magically parted to make way for the older gentleman, except now and again where some callow fat kid didn't notice my distinguished bearing and mistook me for one of his own. (“Oh, excuse me sir.”) And then he shrunk back with a smirk at his own unfathomable wit.

Big truck rigs and two-band busses idled their diesel engines behind the theater. Shiny as firetrucks they were.

I was mixed in this bunch, and I marveled at the street where I used to walk in Austin, my home since the fifties. There, under that glittering boutique's facade was the ground where Liberty Lunch once stood, where I saw a young John Hiatt, a cowboy attired k.d. lang, Doug Sahm in a long duster playing with Augie and Freddie, the Superior Dairy with its huge milk carton, railroad tracks in the street, a boxcar on a siding. The only reminder of the past was the brick building where Lambert's BBQ now stands, the Schneider Building that housed the old Calcasieu Lumber company. I am old enough to have driven trucks into the lumber yard that stood behind and alongside this building.

Violet Crown Cinema and Austin's Second Street District. Image from A.V. Club, Austin.
People stepped without a thought over the dust of those days that lie under this smooth clean pavement. There was a smell of pasta and BBQ in the air. A new Lexus hummed down the street. And I thought of the Cave of Forgotten Dreams and its whiff of the Pliestocene. A long sharp needle point stuck out of the roof and over the street of Austin's City Hall and Municipal Building looking like a dagger or maybe a stalactite gone horizontal? Architecture with a point, literally.

I walked further, down to West Fourth Street where there were more happy crowds, but I also saw what was left of the warehouses where I used to come to pick up sheetrock and plumbing parts, and later where little theaters presented local plays and one could park at a meter for a nickle. I went further and turned onto Congress where I stopped in front of 316, the W.B. Smith building. It was once also known as the Vulcan Gas Company [a legendary Austin music venue].

I took out my camera and photographed the nameless office that now occupies the space. The photo will look like nothing to anyone but me. I wonder if it will be occupied by a CVS Pharmacy soon, or perhaps an ice cream vendor... or maybe it will become covered in calcite and a flashlight will drift over its gleaming surface and people will wonder if there are bones inside.

Where now Lightnin' Hopkins, Bubble Puppy, Big Mama Thornton, Stevie Ray and Texas Storm, The Jomo Disaster? Where are the Snows of Yesteryear?

Where is Echo, beheld of no man?

[Bob Simmons is a veteran broadcaster with over 30 years experience in most aspects of radio. He is a graduate of the University of Texas and presently lives in Austin where he has business interests and pursues his longtime avocations of photography and video production. Read more articles by Bob Simmons on The Rag Blog.]

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03 December 2009

Bob Simmons : A Medical Mission to Palestine (Documentary Video)

A Medical Mission to Palestine - Part 1 from Telebob on Vimeo.

Good works done by good people:
A Medical Mission to Palestine

By Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog / December 3, 2009

See Parts 2-4 of A Medical Mission to Palestine, Below.

The hardest part of making this documentary was trying not to come right out and say it. The main problem with health care in Palestine is Israel.

In July of 2009, I took a trip to the country of occupied Palestine, or the West Bank, or, in the words of some Israelis, the “newly acquired lands.” What I saw was not shocking if you have been paying attention. But for me, an American who has rarely been overly concerned about the heated politics of the Middle East, it was a revelation.

I was lucky to have been included as a witness on a recent Physicians for Peace mission to Ramallah on the West Bank. My role was simply to document some of the clinics and seminars that Physicians for Peace conduct while guests of the Ministry of Health of the Palestinian Authority. I had been asked to use video to communicate some of the small victories of the mission -- a child who found a new life because of a pharyngeal flap operation, a repair of a hare lip cleft palate, or maybe some other “happy ending” story that would quickly and graphically demonstrate the enormous good that PfP does on these missions to the “troubled areas” of the world.

I was up for it.

Little did I know that what I would find would change my view of the Palestine question forever.

And little did I know how hard it would be not to be “political” with my small story about a mission to make a small difference in the world.

But the truth of the matter is, there is nothing in Palestine now that is not political, from the smallest act of buying a banana, to the issue of whether the Palestinians should be allowed to have radiology machines capable of treating the population with modern techniques, whether the local drug store can carry antibiotics or not, whether they will have simple antiseptics, or whether one can go to the hospital to have a baby or be forced to have it at home with a midwife in a house with no running water. It's all political. In some places in the world the phrase “Oh, I am not political,” is a luxury that is not a real option. And this is especially true for anyone who lives on the West Bank.

With this video I wanted to tell a story of the good works done by some good people who were trying to make a difference in people's lives in the Middle East. But I discovered that if I tried to get rid of the politics, I couldn't tell the story. It's as simple as a map that shows where people now live, and who used to live where.

Map from the United Nations.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

It's a map that tells a story that no rhetoric can explain away. It's as simple as the 400 miles of walls being erected by Israel as they disenfranchise a people, and no matter how much they deny it, Israelis "ethnically cleanse" the lands where they plan to live. Not all Israelis of course, but the party in power believes that the “manifest destiny” of Israel requires that they make life as hard as possible for the population of the country that they plan someday to completely occupy.

“The Palestinians can leave, they can go anywhere in the Middle East, they are Arabs. We are Jews, we only have here, our motherland.”

Thus, no story about health care in Palestine can be free of the background of the political issues that surround every act in the West Bank.

Physicians for Peace are the good guys. They go into countries all over the world. They bring skills and relationships and the best wishes and the best impulses on the planet. They bring with them the heart and soul of America.

Some people say "support our troops"; my instincts say, if you want to support America, then do what you can to support the people who win hearts and minds through their generosity and sense of decency. As someone once said, any fool can burn down a barn, but it takes skill and care to build one.

A Medical Mission to Palestine is about building the things that matter.

[Bob Simmons is a veteran broadcaster with over 30 years experience in most aspects of radio. He is a graduate of the University of Texas and presently lives in Austin where he has business interests and pursues his longtime avocations of photography and video production.]

A Medical Mission to Palestine - Part 2 from Telebob on Vimeo.

A Medical Mission to Palestine - Part 3 from Telebob on Vimeo.

A Medical Mission to Palestine - Part 4 from Telebob on Vimeo.

Also see:

Occupied Palestine: How the West Was Lost, a Photo Essay by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog / July 24, 2009

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24 July 2009

Occupied Palestine: How the West Was Lost (Photo Essay by Bob Simmons)

Damascus Gate, Jerusalem. The West Bank or Judea has always tried to solve things with walls... but somehow they always fail. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.

Occupied Palestine:
How the West Was Lost (A photo essay)

Words and images by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog / July 24, 2009

Last week I had an opportunity to visit the West Bank (Israel), or its preferred name, Occupied Palestine. I was with a group of doctors called Physicians for Peace who had invited me along to shoot some video and photos.

I was starkly introduced to how the mainstream picture of the area is distorted in the USA media, and how the constant pressure and humiliation that Palestinians have endured for now more than sixty years is deftly avoided in the reports for American consumption.

Stateless inside their own country, the Arabic residents of the former Palestine suffer a gradual but relentless ethnic cleansing effort that keeps them in political and cultural exile. It is something in the USA we used to call “separate and unequal.” One suddenly understands the meaning and the reasons for the word “intifada” or uprising.

Nothing exemplifies this Middle East apartheid better than the West Bank wall that is being built with the assistance of U.S. funds at a rate of $3.5 million dollars a mile. It is a bigger and better, more high tech version of the wall between East and West Berlin that fell at the end of the cold war. It is the symbol and the fact of Israel’s shame. There is almost a hundred miles of it as it dissects and bisects the country as the Israelis build another settlement on an Arab hillside.

What follows are my notes and some photos. If you can’t get there for yourself, perhaps these will give you a tiny taste of why conflict in this area will continue until some form of justice is granted to the Palestinians who remain in the West Bank and who have not yet fled to become second-class refugee citizens all over the Middle East. Or maybe peace will only be achieved when the last suitcase is packed and the last olive grove is dozered under an Israeli tank?

It may be a cliché or a commonplace that Occupied Palestine -- or Israel's "West Bank" -- is a land of contrasts and paradoxes, but that fact is never so sharply defined as when one has the opportunity to share the lives of the residents. One won't really gather a deep understanding in a few days, but the media veil that filters the light from this part of the world can begin to lift, and we can call it a start.

My first impressions of the citizens of Ramallah are of a basically decent people who have been dealt a lousy hand by history. Worse, they haven't played that hand very well either. In a culture this generous and hospitable, it makes one doubly sad to sense the feelings of resignation and desperation that are cloaked by the smiles. But in the early morning dark when you turn on one of the radio channels and listen to the prayers you can hear the bone deep sadness in the call of the muzzeins. For some reason I kept thinking this is really the blues, and about as soulful as it gets. I wasn't ready to jump on a rug and devote my life to Allah, but I suddenly understood the urge a little better.

I went to Ramallah with Physicians for Peace, a group of doctors who do missions in a half dozen medically challenged countries. The doctors donate their time and efforts, as well as often pay their own fares and housing costs, in order to help bring modern medicine to places that have limited access to current therapies and techniques. The local populations get the benefit of the procedures and therapies, but more important, the local medical infrastructure gets new training and collegial support from the visiting team. New friends and colleagues are created, and they take another small step, changing the world a few friends at a time.

As for the West Bank and Gaza, many of you know the story of the 1948 partitioning of former Palestine for the creation of the Jewish state of Israel. I won't dwell on it. There are thousands of papers and histories of the events of that momentous year and its disastrous aftermath. A new nation may have been born, but a very old one was thrown into the dustbin of history, except that there were five or six million quite alive people who found that dustbin an unacceptable place.

Facts about the West Bank

There are approximately 640 checkpoints on roads and intersections in the West Bank. The Israeli Defense Force mans these stations with young soldiers all of whom seem to have a bit of “tude” toward their “customers.”

Palestinians, Arabs, non-Jews have differing status at each of these checkpoints. These differences are carefully delineated and marked on one’s identification documents. Arab descent is glaringly noted; whether you are Jewish, Christian, or other is also noted. Your license plate separates you. If you have a mustache, if you wear European sunglasses or have a woman in the car with you in a hijab scarf you can be sure you will get special attention, meaning that your moment at the checkpoint can stretch into an hour while some detail of your “papers” is gone over, and over, and over. This happens every day. Even a trip to the grocery store can become a hellish experience if the paperwork is outdated or not correct in every detail. It defines the meaning of a police state.

There are close to 600,000 Palestinian displaced refugees living in the West Bank, with a total population of 2.5 million overall, including (not confirmed) approximately 200,000 Israeli settlers occupying hilltops and recently built villages and settlements... this process continues unabated.

Palestinians are not allowed in Israel without a rigorous documenting procedure, and even then only on a limited basis for even the Israeli born. Many, if not the majority, of Palestinian villages and neighborhoods are now separated by the Israeli wall which has been constructed in a strategic manner to divide the Palestinian territory into isolated segments. This dividing line between the two societies almost assures that there can be no peace between the cultures. Dividing a state along race lines is universally condemned in all parts of the world, except Israel. It can be termed by no other name than race warfare and ethnic cleansing.

It is true that the number of suicide bombs in Israel has been much reduced by this policy, but at the same time army assaults on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank continue on a daily basis.

I am in a car with the director of a local hospital. He demonstrates the five pieces of ID that he must show ten to twenty times a day to one "authority" or another in order to simply navigate the streets of East and West Jerusalem and to travel to the West Bank. With his car with green Palestinian plates, there are certain roads that he may not take. No matter that he was born in Jerusalem. He is of Arab descent.

Munir was kind enough to drive us down to Jericho and the Dead Sea. Munir was born in Puerto Rico and is part of the Palestinian Diaspora. He has a U.S. Passport and has returned to live in WB with his family. Munir gave me an earful

This is a section of the Ramallah wall between East Jerusalem and the "no man's land" and Israel. The balloon graffiti is by the English artist Banksy.

This wall cost approximately $3.5 million per mile to construct. It snakes all over the country, starting and stopping in almost random fashion to the untrained observer. One can be shot, just as they were during the Berlin Wall days, if caught trying to go over it. The amount of U.S. funds that went into the building of this wall is undetermined. One thing for sure, it was not insignificant. Ask Joe Lieberman.

From my little daily journal:

The Palestinians, whether they know it or not have the air of a beaten people. Some have a resigned and philosophical attitude, some are angry with a barely suppressed edge, yet they all struggle on knowing that each day will bring its own set of challenges. These are challenges not put in place by pure chance or life itself, but as though there were an active evil alive in the world that made plans to make them suffer. It is not the indifference of the Universe, but the face of an arrogant and vindictive policy that is put in place in order to subjugate and humiliate a population that is not secretly despised.

This is the situation. The Palestinians know they have lost, at least in any real world way. Now they only want to salvage their lives and dignity and be spared further abuse. Yet each day, the powers that be conspire to divide, conquer, and confiscate land, to pass new discriminatory laws against simply existing. The Israeli settlements bloom. Each month a new hilltop sprouts a few Israeli trailers, followed by construction of houses, then fencing, then a road. Suddenly another fifty acres is added to the archipelago of Israeli islands in the Palestine sea. The pressure mounts as Israel's plan to push all Arabs out of the former Palestine takes another olive grove. The settler's attitude is, they are Arabs, they can go to any other Arab country. We are Jews, we have only here to make our stand, and the relentless pressure continues. No matter that the Palestinians have 2,000 years of tenancy, they are being cleansed, family by family, acre by acre.

Checkpoint Ramallah

This checkpoint is a constant traffic jam. It can take 20 minutes or two hours to get through. It is like a country border crossing. Cars are subject to random search. Documents are vetted. Guns are pointed in people’s faces every day.