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| Photo and t-shirt by Sidney Smith |
A caller thought he heard Davis say something wise, but she couldn't recall what she said just minutes before, attributing that to a forgettable "stream of consciousness."
Beached and unable to catch that stream again, she attempted to wiggle out of this moment of truth. Here's the call Kathy couldn't deal with.
Well there were times towards the end my my tenure at a certain radio station when I had similar problems. I so often would go on deranged digressions,...still do on the the Pod-shows. Anyway I tried to be honest about it. I used to ask the audience "...what the hell was I just talking about?" Fortunately the were paying closer attention that I was, and they'd tell me.
ReplyDelete...at least she's wearing my t-shirt.
ReplyDeleteLast night, after Michio Kaku's program,a bunch of guys who said "nowutimsayin" six times a minute were doing a program on "makin it real" or some such thing. They made more sense than either Kathy or the caller.
ReplyDeleteKathy's coherence took a big dip back in the day when she and Tony Bates shared a tumbler of the old Double Helix.
DeleteI disagree with Kathy Davis. There WAS always hope, as long as we had Monroe. Now, all is indeed lost.
ReplyDeleteKGT
Like "Cake" Davis even knows what WBAI was. She's a fucking psycho devoid of any touch with reality. Her hocus pocus nonsense is obviously a defense against having to deal with the realities of everyday life. Ultimately, she's a sleazebag and has proven so many times. She should go to a fat farm with her elephant sized ass and leave the WBAI alone already. To allow someone so mentally ill into a radio studio is totally irresponsible behavior on the part of management.
ReplyDeleteThat caller is hysterical. It's good to know that he thinks politics may have some place on WBAI. Yeah, another person who wants to tell us "what WBAI was." I guess he remembers the good old days of downing the cure-all double helix water and misses it.
Since they got their new semi-working phone lines, I can see the quality of the listeners is as low, if not lower, than the quality of the on-air dummies. That's pretty sad. However, it does show us that WBAI's lunatic asylum is only preaching to a few fellow lunatics and having no effect on society in general. That is a positive note.
SDL
Off topic, really, but I thought I'd mention this, since destroying stations is a topic here. Tonight France, Germany and Luxembourg officially closed down their last remaining MW (AM for you Americans) stations. As of shortly after Midnight, European time, these three countries no longer have any presence on MW. I was listening to the final moments of them on the Twente sdr. The most historical loss is RTL (Luxembourg) because they were the pioneers in playing rock, soul, etc. music that the national broadcasters wouldn't play back in the 1960s, even pre-dating the offshore pirate radio ships that would go on to expose Europeans to new music their government broadcasters dared not play.
ReplyDeleteWell, needless to say, some pirates popped on to fill the gap on 1287khz and 1440khz. This could get interesting...
SDL
Sad but probably an inevitable step. As a teenager in Copenhagen, I used to listen to Radio Luxembourg, but the were the pre-rock jazz days. My favorite station, however, was AFN Frankfurt.
DeleteAre the pirates taking up where Lux and the Ams left off, or do they bring a whole new thing to the table?
Hard to answer yet, since it's New Years. There are a fair number of pirates that only pop up once or twice a year for the holidays. I'll be monitoring the now abandoned frequencies a bit to see if something interesting happens. You never know if someone has a new idea about broadcasting.
DeleteWhat I can say is that the old French frequency of 1287 had a European oldies/top 40 format station, but no talk, IDs/jingles, so it's a "unid" (unidentified) at this point. RTL's 1440 frequency was pretty weak on the Twente sdr, but one Belgian I know said it was the Belgian station Radio Paradis with a rock format. All I really heard on it at one point was early Jethro Tull before it faded back out for me. My buddy said they were using a directional antenna, which is why some people said it was a strong signal and some couldn't hear it.
Another thing is that there are other stations from farther off countries on these frequencies, so who knows if they will secretly crank up their power.
Anyway. There are now like 8 or 10 frequencies in Western Europe without their former powerhouse signals.
One thing about pirating on the official MW band in Western Europe is that it's more risky, as the local equivalents of the FCC (A.T. in The Netherlands, etc.) are more aggressive about enforcement. That's why the MW pirates stay just above the official MW band and operate roughly between 1611 - 1680 khz. In fact a couple of Dutch pirates I personally know recently received cease & desist warning letters from the A.T.
Just a footnote that France still has a LW frequency or two they are using, but I know few listen to LW outside of specialized long distance travel oriented industries, like truckers, ships at sea, etc.
The sad thing is how during the recent Paris attacks, many people, in France and outside, where tuning to the French MW frequencies for first hand news.
The problem with all this moving to the WWW and other forms of digitizing communications is how easy they are to block or just monitor peoples' listening. With a traditional transmitter, you can try and jam it, but you can't really tell what a person is listening to. Ask North Koreans.
SDL
Thanks, SDL—you're obviously more than a casual ether surfer. When do you go on the air?
DeleteHappy New Year!
And a Happy New Year to you, Chris, and all the blog contributors!
DeleteI expect to be on later in January. It's taking me a while to finalize the first episode right now as I am learning the software, playlists take thinking, etc. My broadcasts will have a certain vibe and method to the madness. One element will flow into another related element and so on. Example: George Carlin's People Who Should Be Killed bit will flow into the Bootleg Bill song I'm Gonna Kill Someone. I have a pattern/link/building block way of thinking like that.
SDL
Look forward to hearing it—what will I need in the way of equipment?
DeleteVia "radio" from the USA, a computer because the station doesn't reach here. You'll just need to go to the Twente sdr at the time of broadcast, click the "AM" button (for some strange reason Twente is defaulted to ssb), and put the frequency in the "frequency" box.
DeleteHowever, to make it easy, I will also have a download url for the show, so people can download the audio file. I know a lot of people don't want to play DXer.
SDL
Was she part of the crew selling that double helix water? They should be put in jail for that. So sad to see people swindled out of their money. I'm done with wbai.
ReplyDeleteYes, Kathy and Tony Bates were the double helix pushers. Bates was later accused of sexual harassment and forced to leave when over 100 signatories petitioned for his dismissal.
DeleteNow Reimers has brought him back.
That's unfortunate. I'm "only" 35 years old and I listened to WBAI as a child, the radio next to my head at night because Armand felt like a surrogate father to me and I found Gary's nutritional info interesting. Now I'm in nursing school, I have a biology degree and looking back I can remember the times Gary Null suggested taking extremely high doses of Vitamin C as a cure all, which was irresponsible (I've been told he has "apologized" for that). I remember the station for all the the difficult times in my life it brought me through, I don't know all the politics, but I stopped listening a while back because they were begging me for money all day (which I barely have) and the claims made on those medical shows were embarrassing. I knew I had to stop listening when I became embarrassed to tell people. I stumbled onto this blog looking for info about what's been going on and it's really sad.
Delete