An unvarnished blog that dips into the past and comments on the present of WBAI-FM, a once significant, intelligent New York radio station that for years has suffered chronic abuse from within and now nears extinction. Your comments are welcomed and will not be censored.
Kaffy Davis--aka”The Blob”, Michael G. Haskins--aka Lenny (from Of Mice and Men), Bertholt Reimers, Esther Armah--spoiled brat of Ghanian aristocrats, the doddering Earl Caldwell, the inebriated Robert Knight, the bimbo Ifé, announcers that can’t pronounce words with more than one syllable, and engineers that couldn’t run a Lionel Railroad. Programming that seems to have emerged from Zora Neale Hurston’s The Sanctified Church starring Null as Uncle Monday and Kaffy, aka Kaffrin Davis, as Aunt Judy Bickerstaff. An audience of idiots that purchases DVDs, CDs, and books about obscurantist nonsense and bogus cures for cancer at inflated prices and worries more about MOVE than about GMOs, nuclear power, or the destruction of public schools.
ReplyDeleteAs Edward Albee’s character, Jerry, muses in Zoo Story, “It’s odd, and I wonder if it’s sad.”
WBAI is no longer the WBAI I knew. It’s something different and quite hideous. Once again, I must quote Fred: not the fricking fracking Fred, but the philosopher Fred:
...the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; ...whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, and adaptation through which any previous “meaning” and “purpose” are necessarily obscured or even obliterated.
(Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals)
Oh, the horror, the horror.
Adieu.
TPM
The "fricking, fracking Fred, after years of hogging Bob Fass' phone, has now taken the second step. Last week, he took advantage of the old host's absence and—for the second time that I know of—showed up in the studio. This time, he pushed co-host Barish aside and commandeered the show. Boring barely describes what a handful of regular listeners heard.
DeleteFade to black....curtain down.
As this point BAI is a Rico fraud enterprise, the money donated goes to pay those axing for it, BAI is finished, fin, that's it folks, there's only the green slime stink of the rotting carcass
ReplyDeleteWas Kathy Davis a station staffer, who got her own show, or did she have a show first, and then became a member of BAI management?
ReplyDeleteI don't have the answer to that one handy.
DeleteIt could have been a double whammy!