A Brief Gee-Whiz Post

As I may have mentioned before, my mp3 project has a bit of an oral history dimension to it, since may of the people involved in developing the technology are still alive and happy to talk about their part in it. I’ve done a couple of these interviews by telephone now, as I’ve been travelling so much I can’t imagine doing much more. But the technology of the telephone interview has been troubling for me. Last summer, I tried out Skype and found it glitchy (and learned that it didn’t play nicely with Airport networks). So I bought a box that allowed me to basically plug the audio out of my phone into my computer and record from that. Except that the sound was terrible — perhaps because we also use our phone line for DSL and the filter doesn’t get quite everything.

So this week, I decided to try Skype again and was very pleasantly surprised. I picked up a USB headset, downloaded Skype, turned on Audio Hijack Pro (an incredibly useful piece of software, as are some of their other titles), made a test call to Carrie and then made a 2-hour phone call to Germany for an interview. I think it cost me $2. And the recording sounds good — but kind of cringeworthy — as I appear to be speaking too loudly (to compensate for the fact that my ears are both covered by headphones, no doubt). Oops.

Anyway, this development should be useful for all sorts of stuff in the coming summer months. And yesterday’s interview was absolutely fantastic.

A Few Thoughts on the Virginia Tech Massacre

Despite my taste for violence in fiction, I have a very limited appetite for mediatic violence when it corresponds to something that actually happened. Which is to say that I’m not particularly a news junkie when it comes to disaster and monstrosity and thus have not been following the Virginia Tech Massacre beyond reading enough to get some details. So my apologies if this point has already been made.

Carrie and I were talking with a friend last night about mental illness in academic culture. In some ways, we’ve come a long way. It used to be a completely taboo subject, despite the fact that I suspect academia is a haven for people with certain kinds of mental illness. Now, we can talk about it with our students and colleagues(1). There are even offices to deal with it. And yet the response is wholly inadequate, both for students and faculty who suffer from one or another kind of mental illness, and for those of us on the other end. I hear over and over from colleagues concerns that if they are worried about a student, there is really nothing that they can do, and there’s not much more than can do if they feel threatened by a student. More than once, upon finding out that I teach large lecture courses, someone has asked me whether I’m worried about crazy students becoming violent. (I believe one can’t go through life worrying about such possibilities, and anyway, it’s statistically much more likely I’ll die in a car crash during my weekly trip for groceries, not that I’m planning on that either.) I’ve also had mentally ill students whom I believe are entitled to the same level of service and education as everyone else, despite their sometimes debilitating conditions. Universities understand physical accessibility very well. We are years behind on mental illness. How one accommodates these diverging interests is beyond me, but if nothing else, the Virginia Tech shootings show once again how crucial this issue really is.

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1. Interestingly, I’m not sure we’re even that far with illnesses like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome where the diagnosis itself is controversial. Sure, we can argue that CFS may or may not exist as an identifiable disease, but that doesn’t change the fact that the person with the diagnosis is suffering and requires accommodation.

A Dispatch From South of the Border

The following email arrived in my inbox yesterday, which I am reproducing here. If you want to skip to the chase, here’s a link to a letter you can send to the Postal Board of Governors. I’m not sure if they’ll pay attention if you’ve got a Canadian address, but then, it being the U.S., they may not notice that you’re not from there.

The news media are covering the tragic murders in Virginia this morning, and as they do an extraordinarily significant story is slipping through the cracks.

On very rare occasions I send a message to everyone in my email address book on an issue that I find of staggering importance and urgency. (My address book includes pretty much everyone who emails me in one form or another, and I apologize if you get this message more than once.) This is one of those times.

There is a major crisis in our media taking place right now; it is getting almost no attention and unless we act very soon the consequences for our society could well be disastrous. And it will only take place because it is being done without any public awareness or participation; it goes directly against the very foundations of freedom of the press in the entirety of American history.

The U.S. Post Office is in the process of implementing a radical reformulation of its rates for magazines, such that smaller periodicals will be hit with a much much larger increase than the largest magazines.

Because the Post Office is a monopoly, and because magazines must use it, the postal rates always have been skewed to make it cheaper for smaller publications to get launched and to survive. The whole idea has been to use the postal rates to keep publishing as competitive and wide open as possible. This bedrock principle was put in place by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. They considered it mandatory to create the press system, the Fourth Estate necessary for self-government.

It was postal policy that converted the free press clause in the First Amendment from an abstract principle into a living breathing reality for Americans. And it has served that role throughout our history.

What the Post Office is now proposing goes directly against 215 years of postal policy. The Post Office is in the process of implementing a radical reformulation of its mailing rates for magazines. Under the plan, smaller periodicals will be hit with a much larger increase than the big magazines, as much as 30 percent. Some of the largest circulation magazines will face hikes of less than 10 percent.

The new rates, which go into effect on July 15, were developed with no public involvement or congressional oversight, and the increased costs could damage hundreds, even thousands, of smaller publications, possibly putting many out of business. This includes nearly every political journal in the nation. These are the magazines that often provide the most original journalism and analysis. These are the magazines that provide much of the content on Common Dreams. We desperately need them.

What the Post Office is planning to do now, in the dark of night, is implement a rate structure that gives the best prices to the biggest publishers, hence letting them lock in their market position and lessen the threat of any new competition. The new rates could make it almost impossible to launch a new magazine, unless it is spawned by a huge conglomerate.

Not surprisingly, the new scheme was drafted by Time Warner, the largest magazine publisher in the nation. All evidence available suggests the bureaucrats responsible have never considered the implications of their draconian reforms for small and independent publishers, or for citizens who depend upon a free press.

The corruption and sleaziness of this process is difficult to exaggerate. As one lawyer who works for a large magazine publisher admits, „It takes a publishing company several hundred thousand dollars to even participate in these rate cases. Some large corporations spend millions to influence these rates.‰ Little guys, and the general public who depend upon these magazines, are not at the table when the deal is being made.

The genius of the postal rate structure over the past 215 years was that it did not favor a particular viewpoint; it simply made it easier for smaller magazines to be launched and to survive. That is why the publications opposing the secretive Post Office rate hikes cross the political spectrum. This is not a left-wing issue or a right-wing issue, it is a democracy issue. And it is about having competitive media markets that benefit all Americans. This reform will have disastrous effects for all small and mid-sized publications, be they on politics, music, sports or gardening.

This process was conducted with such little publicity and pitched only at the dominant players that we only learned about it a few weeks ago and it is very late in the game. But there is something you can do. Please go to www.stoppostalratehikes.com and sign the letter to the Postal Board protesting the new rate system and demanding a congressional hearing before any radical changes are made. The deadline for comments is April 23.

I know many of you are connected to publications that go through the mail, or libraries and bookstores that pay for subscriptions to magazines and periodicals. If you fall in these categories, it is imperative you get everyone connected to your magazine or operation to go to www.stoppostalratehikes.com .

We do not have a moment to lose. If everyone who reads this email responds at www.stoppostalratehikes.com , and then sends it along to their friends urging them to do the same, we can win. If there is one thing we have learned at Free Press over the past few years, it is that if enough people raise hell, we can force politicians to do the right thing. This is a time for serious hell-raising.

And to my friends from outside the United States, I apologize for cluttering your inbox. If you read this far, we can use your moral support.

From the bottom of my heart, thanks.

Bob

Robert W. McChesney
www.mediaproblem.org
www.freepress.net
Department of Communication
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Here Come the Leaping Lesbians

For each academic year since I’ve become a professor, the end of classes has been punctuated by a rock show. I have fond memories of sitting on the Carnegie-Mellon lawn in Pittsburgh, lazily watching a lukewarm set by Superchunk. Another year we drove to Cleveland to watch Shiner (one of my favorite bands at the time). And on and on. It’s true that my final isn’t for another week and a half, which means that I’m at least two and a half weeks from really being done. But the end of classes means you can taste it, and anyway, sometimes events are just special like that.

This year’s show was last night’s Lesbians on Ecstasy gig at Club Lambi. For those of you who don’t know, the Lesbians on Ecstasy concept is this: take songs written by other lesbians and cover them in a heavy, techno-rock style. The first album had Melissa Etheridge, kd lang, and other canonic figures. For the second album, launched last night, LonE went back to classic wimmin’s folksongs of the 1970s. But in covering them, the songs are totally transformed from earnest campfire empowerment to feel-good dancefloor butt shakers. The lyrics come off as positive and playful (which, granted they probably were the first time around, I just can’t take the earnestness of folksongs) and in their heavy dancefloor guise, many of the songs become positively anthemic.

As you might imagine, this kind of music is perfectly designed to be performed live in a packed club, with an audience that has a sizable queer/trans contingent. The place was absolutely on fire, the band was tight and they performed with the kind of swagger that most male indy rockers would be afraid to try and pull off these days. The lightshow was perfect, and I thought the whole building was going to collapse in on itself when the band brought out their own dancers with spray bottle shooters for “Jealous Mix” (a cover of Melissa Etheridge’s “Like the Way I Do” — it’s on their myspace page right now).

The new album is called “We Know You Know” and easily passes the Steven Rubio Test for politically progressive art.

Footnote on Club Lambi: I went in expecting the place to be a complete dump based on Midnight Poutine’s review of the Xiu Xiu show there Wednesday, but apart from the sightline problem Susan noted (I’m a tall and fat indy guy, so I’m part of the problem, not the solution), the place seemed fine for a rock club. There was some seating, the sound was actually better than some Montreal clubs I’ve been to — unlike the National and La Tulipe (for instance), the opening band had a good mix as well as the headliners — and the men’s room wasn’t totally squalid (my standards have been lowered from years of going to shows).

The point being made. . .

I just finished reading a comprehensive exam answer in which the student refers to Lewis Mumford’s notion of “biotechnics,” which he elaborates at the end of The Myth of the Machine. For Mumford, biotechnics is an attempt to subordinate technological development to the rules of life instead of the rules of math, an attempt as a reformed, sustainable model of technology. There’s much to be said about his model of technological abundance, but I cannot look past the delivery system. For as I pulled my copy of the book from the shelf — a used copy I picked up as a bargain some years ago — I could hear the crackling sound of particles of glue falling from the space between the pages and the binding. And as I opened the book, it, too cracked. In my single act of rereading a few pages in the 390s, it completely unbound itself. Thus, the book somehow demonstrates its mute author’s point.

As for me, I just ordered my replacement copy. Which is clearly an example of the kind of abundance that Mumford derides as “megatechnics” in the very same passage.