Some Pockets will not be Pocked

A few days ago I got a new partner: Marcy Fleming. We talked about some new ideas for the program, such as exploring the intentional communities around, commune-type homes where young Okies are trying to shape alternative life-styles. Also, Marcy mentioned a friend of hers that lives by the river, camping on the river bank; yes, that would be an interesting program. However, how far do we go into revealing the best kept Norman secrets? Marcy and I--like a few other Normanites--love the outdoors. I have two Colombian dogs and a ten year old daughter, and I'm always looking for new places to go hiking. Between the two of us, Marcy and I have found the best places to go hiking around Norman, a place not known for its great outdoors. We know several hidden passages into to the Canadian River shores, beautiful, secluded sites where I can go walking with my dogs, never seeing another human around. We have discovered miles-long corridors great for hiking in the city's ditches; walking inside these hidden passages, bordering people's backyards, small forested areas, finding dark tunnels where Antonia tests her courage, that's some of the best hidden pleasures around here. Are we going to broadcast these hidden pockets on the radio? No way!

  

First Episode of Poking at the Pockets

The first episode of Poking at the Pockets was supposed to be an elections special. The program was supposed to be finished by Monday, November 3rd. Today is November 27, Thanksgiving day, Obama won the elections and is already making all kinds of decisions about the future of this country, and still the program is not finished. By now I think it'll have to float in the eternal limbo of unfinished projects. All kinds of unanticipated problems kept us from finishing the elections special:

* my partner and I could never coordinate times to do our like-around-wine dialogue about the election;

* a segment I recorded on my computer where my ten year old daughter Antonia and her friend Freya are having an interesting conversation about McCain and Obama is useless because the recording volume was set too high. The girls were great, Freya said she did not like McCain because he was known to have tamper tantrums; Antonia said that she didn't like McCain because he was into sending so many people to fight wars, that soon we were going to run out of grown-ups and would have to start sending babies to the battle front;

* the only segment usable is a fragment Ben and I did at a new Bar-b-q restaurant called Roy's Smokehouse BBQ; this segment is really good, filled with sounds of the restaurant, someone chopping meat, the cash register, cutlery, and the warm sounds that always emerge from a group of humans enjoying each other and the scent of dishes they love; one of the themes of Poking at the Pockets is Food and Fusion, about interesting eateries or food stores around here; we'll probably use this segment in a future program;

* Ben and Brad taught me Audacity, but it's taking me much longer to become a fast editor; I begin to realize that producing Poking at the Pockets will require much more time than I thought. 

Poking at the Pockets

I've been transcribing interviews with Colombian community radio pioneers. From what they say, I learned that someone wanting to start a new community radio program needs to think about: 1) the program's goal; 2) the program's audience; 3) how the program will facilitate participation so that it's a dialogue and not just a monologue; 4) how often will the show air? 5) how long is your commitment to producing your program?

Our program will be called Poking at the Pockets. The motto will be something like: "a program that explores those sometimes invisible pockets of non-while, non-Christian, non-heteronormal cultures in Norman, Oklahoma. A program for those of us suffocating under the weight of white, middle-class, heterosexual Christian hegemony in the heart-land." As I write this, we haven't finished our first program--and it's already November! so I really don't know what the final version will be. The general idea is to stir into visibility, to serve as a loudspeaker for those pockets of cultural expression that stray away from the heavy Oklahoma norm.

The audience is those of us who need and want to know that, despite the loud weight of mainstream hegemony, small pockets of difference survive around us. Small audience, perhaps, but if one of my Colombian friends maintains a program about poetry in Puerto Inírida, a small town in the Colombian rain forest, as he says, a frontier town where they only want to listen to vallenatos, why can't we have a program about difference at the heart of sameness? 

Although we don't have a radio station yet, we thought about asking friendly places like The Earth Café (the best baking in town), Guestroom Records, and others to play our program on CDs. Someone said we could drive around town and play the programs on a loudspeaker mounted on the car's roof, the way they advertise merchandise and the arrival of the circus in Latin America. In typical mid-western USA politically correct style, someone else responded that that would be sound pollution.

It's hard to think about participation; maybe inviting people to propose themes? How often will we be on the air? Originally I thought Poking at the Pockets would be a weekly program. I've had to re-think this. With full-time professional jobs, kids, pets, and other stuff, maybe every three weeks max? In terms of commitment, I think we should commit to at least a year. But who knows? My co-producer could move away from Norman, or we could burn out in a couple of months ... I can see now how vulnerable a community radio station is, there's nothing really holding the volunteer producers. 

Easier said than done

At a meeting around Colombian coffee at my house, some of us decided that we really wanted to get our hands wet; we wanted to start experimenting with radio production. There's three of us and each one wants to produce our own show. Ben is into obscure historical radio personalities and sharp self-reflexivity. Brad wants to do music. I have in mind an eclectic program about culture and politics.

I recruited a friend and colleague as my co-producer. I believed that producing with her would be super easy 'cause we are always having intense conversations full of sarcasm and cynicism; if only we could do in front of a microphone what we already do around red wine ... Well, easier said than done. When it became a task and not just getting together to socialize we were never able to coordinate our schedules and could not make it work. So now I have a different partner.

How it all started

For more than 20 years I have researched community/alternative/citizens' media in my own country (Colombia) and in many other corners of the world (Nicaragua, Cataluña, Chile, among others). Since 2000 I live in Norman, a small town in Oklahoma, the heart-land of the USA (long story how I got here and a scary heart! Apart from Alaska, Oklahoma is the ONLY state where Obama did not win in any county. As my friend Lisa says, this is what hegemony looks like!) 

A few months ago a former student recruited me to moderate a panel at a sustainability conference. Bored with my panel on intentional communities, I left the speakers to their questions about by-laws and rules in three-ring binders and wandered into a nearby panel on community radio.

To my surprise I found a woman speaking about how she had single-handedly applied for a community radio license to the FCC. Mary Francis is her name. At the end of the session I approached her and introduced myself. So now I am part of a group working with Mary, as we wait to see if the FCC actually approves our license to have our own Norman community radio station.

So, from being a community media researcher, I am journeying now into DOING community radio. And I am finding it much more challenging that I anticipated. With this blog, I want to document my experiences as I enter this new world of actually doing (and not just studying) community media.