A Star Is Born

    “Joseph, you wanna anchor the news?”

    It took me fully thirty seconds to realize that she meant tonight. Did I want to anchor the news tonight? I had volunteered to do it eventually, at some nonspecific future date, but I’d never even seen a radio newscast happen live, let alone try to anchor one.

    I am not, it turns out, a prodigy. I always sort of wondered if maybe I’d step into the studio and discover that I was just preternaturally good at being on the radio, but it turns out that there’s some technical stuff I’m not very good at. When you finish reading a news story, you’re supposed to point at your co-anchor, or at the engineer, so that they can know you’re done and it’s time to fire some tape or read the next story.

    The worst . . . no, the second-worst. The second-worst was when I got caught up trying to remember who I was supposed to point to and flubbed the hell out of a really long story about something. It was pure vertigo, like a dream in which you’re riding shotgun in a car that’s crashing, but then you realize, no, I’m not riding shotgun, I’m supposed to be driving this thing! I have no memory of what the story was about. But I did get through it. Eventually.

    I’m not sure I made it all the way through any single story without stumbling. I imagine this is the sort of thing that improves with practice, but I kept getting stuck on simple words, words I say all the time, having to say them once or twice before they made sense to me. The feeling of vertigo did disippate after a while. That was good. Eventually I kind of forgot that there might be people listening, which I imagine is both good and bad.

    The worst, though, was launching into a story that either (A) I had written, only to discover it had been substantially altered on edit; or (B) I had written, only to discover that someone had just thrown away the copy and re-written it, worse. I mean, composition class-level bad sometimes, verbs and nouns not agreeing, subjects of news stories referred to by their first names . . . I almost wish I could just brandish one of my degrees at someone and go, Yo. Don’t fuck with my story. I already wrote it better than you could ever imagine.

    My co-anchor — who am I kidding, she was really the anchor, I was just there to fill up space while she was gathering her thoughts — turned out to be a local Catholic school product who graduated a year after I did. After we did this, we eyed each other for a while, and collectively decided we might have known one another once, almost twenty years ago. Not very well. That was strange. It’s a small town, this.

I'm So Awesome and Brave

    It’s going to take me most of the weekend to write another post on The Reddit Thing, so here’s a quick-and-dirty about something I’ve been pondering:

    How important to you is it that you be ideologically heterodox? Furthermore, is being annoyed by people who agree with you, but do so in the wrong way, a part of your life? Because it is for me.

    This has come up a fair amount since I’ve started working at KBOO, the community radio station here in PDX. KBOO, as you’d expect from a decades-old community radio station, is an extremely groovy place, where people who are more committed to causes and communication than money tend to gather. Part of its mission, at least as it’s self-described, is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, which is something I admire. But sometimes sitting in the newsroom drives me a little bit nuts.

    Whycome nuts? I’m in sympathy of a great majority of the political causes that KBOO advocates. I guess part of the problem I have there some times is that I don’t think the kind of communication that it does is terribly effective at the “afflict the comfortable” part of their mission. KBOO, like a lot of very groovy places, also adheres to a very rigid orthodoxy that is pro-labor, anti-establishment, deeply suspicious of anything and everything to do with money, and ultimately not terribly complex: issues that require a lot of deep consideration, issues like Israel, or the use of US military force in humanitarian crises, have pat, proscribed answers. These answers foreshorten the need to think. Sometimes I suspect that’s kind of the point.

    Anyway, despite the fact that, after deep consideration, I land in the same place most of the time as this orthodoxy, it drives me nuts to hear people sitting around agreeing with one another on a bunch of lefty talking points. Or — or — substituting suspicion, raised eyebrows, and innuendo for journalism. A lot of people in congress hold stock in the company that owns Phllip J Morris. So the fuck what? I can see how that might be a problem, but is it? Has their behavior been materially changed by these stock holdings? I submit to you the following theses, which are neither mutually exclusive nor proof of one another:

    (a) It is entirely possible, in fact probable, that their behavior has been materially changed.

    (b) It is not good enough to assume any such thing, and loudly being like, Eh? Right? I mean, how evil ARE these fuckers? is not a form of argument and will never convince me.

    Anyway. The actual news that ends up on the air at KBOO doesn’t really consist of that kind of thing. But, in the manner of people who spend a lot of time simmering in a sauce of righteous and agreed-upon opinion everywhere, the people who work there talk about that kind of thing a lot. And that’s fine. But holy hell does it get on my nerves.