On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Doug Henwood wrote:
> In those days, you could hear Wagner's Ring, broadcast complete every
> Washington's Birthday, as well as drama and poetry. There's a schedule
> from the early 1960s up at the station, and it was even more highbrow
> then.
You know, now that you mention it, that's an interesting point. When BAI ruled the New York airwaves it took positive glee in putting on shows that spit in the eye of commercial viability. Every June 12th for example, they read James Joyce's Ulysses from cover to cover. And they had one Vermont guy in his 60s with a lovely slow voice whose show consisted entirely of reading aloud two books: Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (including the footnotes, which he liked most of all); and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. When I was young I fell in love with both shows, in large part *because* they were so willfully perverse. Even though I'd originally tuned in to find out news about the Vietnam war.
In sum, glancing at WBAI's heyday shows their success in the marketplace had nothing to do with selling out. They were as noncommercial as you could imagine; they positively flaunted their noncommercialism. But they had variety and charisma. And that's what they are missing now.
It could well be that the best path to broadening the audience and convincing more people that left ideas are good ones is not becoming more commercial but becoming less -- having more variety and more free form, so that people come to hear great shows that aren't about politics whose creativity and excitement and uniqueness they then associate with the politics. And vice versa. The problem with pacifica stations now is their utter sameness -- they are as monotonous in their own way as MOR. Creativity, variety and change -- and a programming staff with a large helping of the young, the inspired and the short term. Want to attract the young? Give them shows. They'll attract themselves.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com