Late-bearing golden raspberry enjoying the sunshine before the recent cold wet weather.

The problem with monocultures is that you eventually forget that alternatives exist. They begin by taking something well-adapted and useful, proceed to apply it to all situations as the only solution, and end by erasing the possibility of competition. Finally the monoculture becomes so all-encompassing that no small pocket of resistance can easily take hold — until the forces holding the monoculture in place shift or weaken. Sometimes counterforces make it possible to hold open a small space for alternatives to exist, often at the very edge of survival.

All of this is on my mind this week as our community radio station CJMP FM undergoes another period of crisis and once again teeters on the brink of dissolution. Last time, back in the spring of 2009, the non-profit which had been hosting and supporting the radio station decided to get out of the community radio game. After much back and forth, a new not-for-profit society formed, applied for another radio license, and spent over a year waiting for the CRTC to approve their license application.

On October 1, 2010 this society (the Powell River Community Radio Society or PRCRS) held their first Annual General Meeting, at which those of us who attended learned that most of the original board intend to step down and not seek re-election. Since the society had not signed up any members except for the board, if the board went so would go the society. And with it would go our community radio license, which is a precious asset that would be hard to replace. Since there were members of the community who did not want to lose our chance at having a viable community radio station, the Annual General Meeting was adjourned to a day and time two weeks later.

As I write this, several people in the community are considering whether they want to sign up as members and stand for election to the board. This will entail a considerable commitment of time and energy, since many of the problems that a community radio station faces are difficult and ongoing: the need for funding and volunteers, the purchase and maintenance of equipment, rent for the studio space and offices, utilities, and so on.

In a sense, though, the highest hurdle that community radio faces relates to the monoculture problem: commercial radio and commercial media in general are so widespread and popular that it is difficult, even impossible, for most people to imagine what the alternative would sound like. There is an almost irresistible pressure to make the alternative like a down-home and underfunded approximation of the commercial variety. CJMP FM has always taken this approach, and in my opinion it’s a mistake to try to make community radio compete head-to-head against commercial radio. Until the community is genuinely involved, though, we can’t easily know what community radio should sound like — in this community.

In its 2000 Community Radio Policy document, the CRTC defines community radio as follows:

The Commission’s primary objective for the community radio sector is that it provide a local programming service that differs in style and substance from that provided by commercial stations and the CBC. The programming should be relevant to the communities served, including official language minorities. The Commission considers that community stations should add diversity to the broadcasting system by increasing program choice in both music and spoken word. They should contribute to diversity at three levels:

• Community stations should offer programming that is different from and complements the programming of other stations in their market. Their not-for-profit nature and community access policies should assist them in contributing to the achievement of this objective.
• Community stations should be different from other elements of the broadcasting system, including commercial stations and stations operated by the CBC.
• The programming broadcast by individual community stations should be varied and provide a wide diversity of music and spoken word.

What would happen if we kept the community radio license and involved the community as much as possible? What would that sound like?

For one thing, it would sound diverse; as diverse as the community. In the standard model of community radio, the type of programming often changes, sometimes drastically, from one hour to the next, encompassing music, spoken word programming, news, public affairs, and so on. With proper advertising, the reach of such a station is huge, since it can appeal to almost everyone within broadcast range, if only for a few hours per week. People who tune in regularly to hear a specific show are very passionate about that show and about the station that produces that show. Listeners like these will be very happy to find an alternative, to find a station that is playing something that they love, as opposed to the same old middle-of-the-road rock music that is available everywhere else up and down the radio dial.

For another thing, it would sound local. The one thing that no commercial radio station can produce, nor can our beloved CBC, is the sound of the community, its concerns, the things that people are talking about, what’s really going on out there. There is simply no public venue for an ongoing conversation about us. We have one weekly newspaper, a couple of monthly magazines, a cable TV station, numerous blogs, and other bits and pieces of local media; but we do not have any media which readily supports a high level of public participation in real time and at relatively low cost. The technology is simple. The rest is logistics.

In the region of the 50-Mile Eat-Local Challenge, it seems like a no-brainer to have 50-Mile Radio.

It’s baffling to me that community radio seems to be such a hard sell here. In many other places throughout Canada, the community radio station is the place to hear what’s going on in the region, to find out what your friends and neighbours are thinking and doing, and to connect with the place you live in with all its idiosyncrasies and special character. I find it hard to believe that people really want to hear the same old music, the same old stories, the same voices (all sounding so professional and manicured) that you can hear in any place. It’s another aspect of the monocultural approach to creating the world that drops the same damn chain stores and crappy food in every town: many people find that comforting, but many do not. For those who do not, we need to keep the alternatives alive and thriving. Constant resistance to homogeneity and repetition is necessary.

The Canadian government in its finite wisdom has made resistance possible by creating and maintaining the category of community radio licenses which exist to let a community hear its own voice. As long as we have this tool for resisting monocultural media, we have the responsibility to use it. As we begin to enter the era of relocalization during which decisions made at the regional and neighbourhood level will take on increasing importance, we need as many media channels as we can possibly create and support.

If you are interested in helping keep our community radio license, please attend the continuation of the Annual General Meeting of the Powell River Radio Community Society on Friday October 15, 2010, 4:00 PM at the Life Cycle Common Room, 4949 Ontario Ave. in Powell River (at the dead end north of Alberni St.). I will attend, and I hope to bring back good news about the future of local media in this region.

It's just "Claire's film Lily" because we all know this particular film-maker quite well -- she's one of us!

Last Saturday we attended the Gillies Bay premiere of a special film, one made on location on Texada Island last August. Lily is a 15-minute short film written and directed by Claire Sanford, who is about 22 years old and just graduated from university last week. Claire grew up on Texada, and though her film isn’t specifically about our island, she told the 100 or so people at the premiere that this community, and the beauty of Texada Island, have inspired her for years.

I won’t give away the story. But the film convincingly portrays an unresolved conflict in a small island community, especially a prominent local citizen’s tormented conscience. The ending is startling, if not happy, and includes one of Texada’s icons, the North Island Princess (our ferry). Claire intends to put her film on DVD for a wider audience, and I’ll let you know when it becomes available.

Claire also showed us five other short student films, most of which featured her distinctive and captivating camera work. It turns out that one of Texada’s own has grown into quite a skilled cinematographer. For Lily, her first effort as a writer-director, Claire could barely stand to let someone else operate the camera. Now she’s off to Montreal to learn French and find work in the independent film industry there, where she hopes to direct more films.

We arrived on Texada when Claire was 13, and I still vividly remember her performance that year (in the same Texada Community Hall where we just viewed her film) playing back-up trumpet for Gary Fjellgaard and Valdy. Through the years I’ve seen this young woman volunteering at community events, playing piano and singing at the Texada School and singing with a group of her peers at the first Jazz on the Rocks concert in 2004.

So it’s only natural that the Texada community went crazy supporting Claire Sanford last year when she asked us to help her make Lily on location far from the urban film centres of Canada. The list of people and organizations who contributed – and literally took part – in the making of this film would take up more space than I normally devote to a Journal entry.  I’ll just proudly say that this film, and the young woman who wrote, directed, and yes, produced it, truly belong to us, too.

Clothes on a line, clouds forming overhead. Brought to you by the verb "be" and the adverbs "here" and "now".

Everything was a lie, everything stank, everything stank of lies, everything feigned meaning and happiness and beauty, and yet everything was decaying while nobody acknowledged the fact.
(Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha)

… what is real is you and your friends, your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, and your fears. And we are told no. We’re unimportant, we’re peripheral, get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that, and then you’re a player. You don’t even want to play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. Where is that at?
(Terrence McKenna, Q&A session of “What Science Forgot”)

Last Tuesday evening, about twenty people met at the Unitarian Hall in Powell River to have a conversation about starting a local media collective. As I’ve discussed in a couple of recent posts, much of this conversation was inspired by the current fragile condition of our local community radio station, CJMP FM.

The people who showed up for this conversation brought a lot of positive energy and creativity with them. Some wanted to talk about keeping CJMP FM on the air. Others, myself among them, were particularly interested in exploring other options made possible by newer technology: blogging, podcasts, vodcasts, mixed media on the internet, etc. The exciting outcome of the evening is that we decided to form a media collective, to continue meeting and working together, and to focus for now on two areas of work:

1. Continue to explore ways of keeping community radio alive and well in our region;
2. Learn some new skills, starting with podcasting.

There is now a group of people meeting and working on [1]. For [2], I undertook to learn what I could about podcasting, and to offer that information back to the community in the form of a free ‘teach-in’, by which I mean a workshop of sorts, but one that is more about colleagues exploring a subject cooperatively than it is about an ‘expert’ delivering information to a receptive audience of ‘novices’. If anyone out there is interested in participating in this teach-in, it will be at 7:00 PM on Wednesday May 13 at the Community Resource Centre (4752 Joyce Ave. Powell River), after the monthly Kale Force potluck and conversation. All are welcome.

I’m very excited by the possibility of getting more local people actively creating media of all kinds, especially media which focus on our particular concerns or on the lives of the people who live here. If we can get a functioning community radio station going again, that’ll be great — community radio is designed specifically to give a voice to the people and ideas excluded from commercial radio.

But what excites me most about podcasting and other new internet-based ways of communicating is that there are very low barriers and low costs to getting started and keeping going. This means that it can be done very much in the do-it-yourself spirit of other insurgent media like broadsheet printing, chapbooks, zines, graffiti, and indie film and music. And when something can be done cheaply and easily, it can have, as Frank Zappa used to proudly boast, “no commercial potential”.

In my opinion, the most valuable things in this world have no commercial potential, even though we live in a society which is hellbent on attaching monetary value to everything possible and ignoring what cannot be so valued. A grove of trees at the water’s edge, sheltering birds and other wildlife, adding beauty to the landscape, providing living proof of the miracle of all life… or raw timber to be trucked off to build something flimsy and ugly? A clear and pure stream, home to fish, insects and amphibians which provide food for other creatures, nourishing plants and trees, irrigating farmland and giving drinking water to humans… or something to shove into plastic bottles for a quick buck? Media and human communication for the purpose of giving expression to to their creators and bringing joy to those who experience it… or as a carrier of advertisements and frivolous nonsense?

In each case, there is a way of looking at something and seeing it as an end in itself — or as a means to the fulfillment of the highest human values — and another way of seeing it as a means to some lesser end, as something to be produced or consumed in the interests of making a living. Obviously I am not saying that no one should make a living or that there is no place for commerce; but we live in a time when we are forgetting that there is anything but commerce. Every piece of our world with the least amount of commercial potential has been claimed, colonized, strip-mined, drawn down, and left desolate. The common areas of the natural world have been fenced in, sold off, and converted to money. Forests, lakes, streams, watersheds, air, salmon stocks, soil… all have been commoditized and control over them has been taken away from the people and given over to special interests.

More and more we accept that this is the way things are and should be. More and more we acquiesce in the destruction of meaningful and important parts of our world. We need to hone our skills in pushing back against this. We must train ourselves to see a swindle when one goes down in front of us, and to have the language with which to call it what it is. We need to claim our right to engage in frivolous action leading to no financial gain. We need to commit gratuitous acts of humanity all over the place, and stop listening to the voices in our heads and elsewhere which urge us to play it safe, think of potential corporate sponsors, don’t rock the boat, say what they expect to hear.

Every time we pull a punch we run the risk of forgetting what we really meant to say in the first place. And even to demand the right to create media which are free from extraneous influences sounds somehow subversive. Remember that ‘subversive’ is defined only in contrast to a surrounding mindset or worldview which gathers much of its strength from being able to resist questioning and the harsh glare of attention and critical thinking. Much of what passes for the mindset and worldview of this culture does not bear much scrutiny. That’s precisely why it needs scrutiny. We need to be consumers less, and start becoming producers. Less the victims of pointless and destructive consumerism, and more the creators of a new producerism.

In case you’re thinking that I am advocating art or media with an overt political content, I should be more clear. I don’t really care much about the content of the media we intend to create under the aegis of this media collective. Some people might be drawn to produce works of a more journalistic nature, confronting the myths of our society or taking on the powerful interests. Others might want to record the rushing streams and the wind in the trees. Others might want to talk with the elders of our community to capture and preserve their knowledge, experience, and wisdom. To me, it’s all great. It’s all important. And it’s all vitally needed. More important than the content of our media will be its nature and the conditions under which it is produced:

• complete artistic freedom;
• no deference to interests other than those which the artist/reporter/producer brings to the project;
• as an offering, a gift to our community;
• a commitment to capturing what it is like to be human and alive in this place at this time.

To produce art and document our world under these conditions is already subversive. It will create the aura of genuine authenticity which commercial media and false art lack. Authenticity cannot be manufactured, and people are starting to crave it as a reaction against the artificiality and dead-endedness of our world.

**** * *—* * / * —* —** * — **** / — **** * / *** * *—* —— ——— —*

If you’re interested in being on the contact list for our new (as yet unnamed) media collective, drop me a line.

Stark branches of a mulberry tree at the demonstration garden in Powell River stand against the blue sky of early spring

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
(Attributed to Buckminster Fuller.)

In last week’s column (“The decline and fall of community radio”), I discussed some of the challenges behind the struggle to keep our local community radio station (CJMP FM) on the air. This effort continues up to the time of writing. As long as there is a signal at 90.1 FM, we can continue to hope. Once we lose that signal, it will take a great deal of will and work to bring community radio back.

But whether or not we manage to save our local community radio station, I am becoming much more hopeful lately about the possibilities of genuine grassroots media. Here’s why.

1. We have the stories

I was recently listening to the radio program This American Life, which was covering the impact of the current economic downturn on regular Americans. It was incredible radio: slow-moving enough to contain the details that tell the story; compassionate, intelligent, funny, and sad. And it occurred to me that here we are, in the midst of some very important changes in this region and worldwide: the mill is in decline, the forestry industry is in crisis, and the fate of the local economy is uncertain. Like other regions, we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to continue functioning in the face of a global economic recession. Where are the documents of this time? Why are we not recording the thoughts and impressions of the people who live in this region? What are people experiencing as we move into times of such great uncertainty?

And even if we weren’t living through exciting times, shouldn’t we be creating an archive of the stories and memories of the people — especially the elders — in the region, who have so much to say about where we have been, how we got here, and where we are going? This sort of oral history project is exactly the sort of thing that is perfectly suited to radio as a medium. Print is not quite right, because you need a lot of time to let the stories unfold and many people do not have the time or patience to read so much. Video and film are not quite right either, because story-telling is mainly an auditory thing: you can sit in the dark if you want, and the sound of the voices and the stories they are telling are enough to hold your attention. You don’t need the distraction of visuals to get the message.

I’m convinced that everyone has a story worth telling and hearing. But the commercial media, with their need to attract advertisers and hold a paying audience, cannot often afford to stretch out and report those stories. We are surrounded by people who have no voice in the commercial media. They are neither glamorous nor important nor accomplished in the ways which we consider worth reporting on. And yet these are our friends, neighbours, and fellow citizens. How can we let ourselves believe that their stories are not worth telling, not worth hearing?

2. We have the technology

Traditionally, the capital and operating costs needed to get up and running for print publication or broadcasting were so high that only those with plenty of money could get started. And even though it is now easier to get started in publishing with relatively little capital, the ongoing operating costs are such that it is a constant task to get money from purchasers, subscribers, and advertisers. Printing paper copies costs a lot of money. Radio and television broadcasting require considerable costs in equipment and maintenance. Reporters and DJs cost plenty.

The commercial media are classic examples of economies of scarcity. A newspaper can only carry so many articles. A radio or TV station has only so much time set aside for the views of the community. There is a layer of expertise and editorial control between the potential contributor and the audience. Don’t believe me? Submit an article to the local newspaper. Send a song you recorded to the local commercial radio station. Try to get your video on TV. Because you are just a member of the public, no one will feel obliged to give you an audience.

Enter the internet. Nowadays, it is possible to start a blog like this one for free or very close to it. No printing press, relatively little technical expertise, no paper costs, and no shipping. No workshop, no studio, no typewriters or mixing board, no transmission tower. No rent, no insurance, no lawyers. If I hadn’t paid for the domain name, this blog would have had a startup cost of precisely $0.00 (excluding my labour, which I contributed freely and gladly). Likewise, to begin an audio or video podcasting project would cost very little: mainly some gear and the time it takes to film or record, edit, and upload the finished product to the internet. You can buy a decent digital sound recorder now for a hundred dollars; sound quality approaching professional levels is yours for under $500.

There are free platforms for blogging. (WordPress, which we use, is one of them. There are many more.) There is software freely available for sound and video editing. Archiving sound and video files is free or very close to it. Once on the internet, these files can be accessed by anyone in the world who has access to the internet. If need be, they can be transferred to media such as compact disc or DVD so that they can be heard or watched in any context.

And we can do all of this with no restrictions on content except the ones which regulate freedom of speech and common decency. We do not need to defer to the gatekeepers of the commercial media, the ones who determine whether their readers, listeners, viewers, or (most importantly) advertisers will want to see what we have to say. We can bypass them altogether. Liberation!

3. We can build our audience

This is what I have been thinking while we wait to find out whether CJMP FM is going to survive — and if so in what form. I’ve been thinking that I need to find means of expression which are as independent as they can possibly be. The older I get, the more I chafe under arbitrary control.

I believe that there are people out there who are as dissatisfied as I am with the state of the commercial media. I don’t blame the media; they are doing the best they can under conditions which are not conducive to free and open expression. They are trapped in an economy of scarcity, and their operating costs are continually rising. When I look at TV, which is very rarely now, I can scarcely believe that what I’m looking at is happening on this planet. Likewise commercial radio and much of the print media. It says nothing to me about my life.

And to be very clear: I’m not complaining about the lack of counterbalancing political opinion from the left end of the political spectrum (which is anyway a ridiculous oversimplification, but that’s a story for another time). I’m talking about the fact that the commercial media very often remove the humanity from the stories they tell simply because of the constraints they operate under. Stories need to fit space and time limits, need to have some kind of narrative arc or moral, and need to conform to the opinions and mindset of the largest possible section of the population. In other words, these stories have to behave like nothing in real life.

We need to create an audience for stories which are like real stories: too long, too short, rambling, open-ended, pointless, contrary, upsetting, or just plain weird. Because that is what life is really like. And for too long we have had to put up with media which try to convince us that life is neat and tidy and by the way please buy this box of cereal. Life is about so much more. I demand more. You should too.

4. A call to action

So, let’s recap. Free (or inexpensive) software and gear (computers, cameras, audio recorders) means that we can create media products of high quality with relatively little technical expertise. We can publish these works to a global audience thanks to the internet. We are not hampered by arbitrary or absurd restrictions on format or content. We can follow our passion to find the stories we care about. We can use these tools to tell the real stories which are going on around us all the time, and we can share those stories easily, freely, with anyone who wants to read, hear, or see them. We can do this fast and cheap.

And here’s the kicker: by doing this — by engaging in guerrilla story-telling outside the confines of the commercial media — we can connect together a group of local artists, reporters, documentarians, and musicians who want to use the new media tools to tell the story of a community. And by telling these stories, we will strengthen the community. People will be able to hear and see themselves in the stories of the region. They will be caught up in stories told by people they know, stories they never heard because they weren’t ‘fit to print’ or ‘ready for prime time’. We can be part of creating a culture of honouring all of the stories and all of the people who make our region what it is.

So if any of this interests you, please come out for a public meeting on Tuesday April 21 at 7:00 PM at the Unitarian Hall in The People’s Republic of Cranberry (Powell River). We’ll be talking about how to kick-start a collective of like-minded media guerrillas and start telling the stories we want to tell by whatever means available. See you there.

"Fields of people; there's no such thing as a weed."

In a previous post, I tried to capture some of my thoughts about community development and how we are all in that business (whether we like it or not). And recent events are making me think more and more about the importance of local media in building a truly workable and democratic community.

It looks as though we are going to lose our community radio station, CJMP FM (also known as JUMP FM). The organization which holds the broadcasting license and which has housed the station since it went on the air in early 2003 has decided that it can no longer support the expense of running a radio station. So far this year there have been a few meetings and discussions aimed at finding a way to transfer the license to some new non-profit group, but unfortunately we have recently learned that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) does not allow a community radio license to be transferred. The closest thing to transferring the license would be for the current license-holder to apply to have their license revoked while at the same time endorsing the license application put forward by some new non-profit group. It’s not clear to me that there is enough energy in the community to put together a new license application. So we might lose one possible outlet for the voice of the community. It’s a little bit like losing a species from the web of life.

I was involved in this radio station for a few months after I came to Powell River. I stopped being involved because I felt that the management of the radio station did not accommodate diversity of opinion and did not encourage direct community involvement. As far as I can tell, this radio station has struggled for a long time to find and keep volunteers, although there have been a few stalwart programmers producing some very good shows. It failed to bring in enough money from advertisers, partly because the signal does not reach the whole region and partly because no one knew who was listening and when.

The station is still broadcasting as I write this, although the programming is entirely automated. There are no more human voices coming across the local airwaves. For all we know, this is the end: one day soon, there will be nothing but static at 90.1 FM.

I’ve thought a lot about why this happened. Last week I attended a workshop in Vancouver about making community-development projects more sustainable. Kylie Hutchinson, who led this workshop, gave us a list of 34 factors promoting the sustainability of community initiatives. I won’t run through them all, but some of the ones which really stuck out for me were:

• Program idea originates from the community: I don’t know enough about the prehistory of CJMP to be sure about this, but it’s my understanding that the application for a radio license did not come from a broad-based grassroots organizing effort. And if a project does not come from the community, then the sponsoring organization needs to work extra-hard to enlist and keep the support of the community once the project is up and running.
• Strong and diverse forms of community participation and support: I am not aware of any focused effort to recruit more volunteers to the radio station in the two-and-a-half years since I have been in Powell River. Likewise, I don’t know of any funding drive or other effort to raise public awareness (except for a few ads and the publication of the broadcast schedule a few times). I believe that much more could have been done to give people in the community a feeling of commitment to the station.
• Strong base of committed volunteers: There were some very committed volunteers. There could have been many more. But the organization hosting the radio station did not appear to have the capacity for recruiting, training, and supporting many volunteers. And so volunteers came and went, and in the end more went than came.
• Diverse sources of funding: To the best of my knowledge, most of the funding came from advertisers and corporate sponsorships. There were relatively few listener members. Usually, listener members and their membership dollars are one of the main sources of funding for a community radio station.
• Program mission aligns with host agency: I feel as though this is the foundation on which the success of an initiative rests. And in this case, the non-profit organization holding the broadcasting license and hosting the radio station has a mandate which is not about community radio. So there was always some tension between the central goals of the organization and the community’s desire to participate in community radio. And when push comes to shove, when there are only enough hours in the day and many projects to manage, it’s the ones which lie outside the primary mandate that will fall by the wayside.

It’s sad to lose an outlet for the creativity of the community. Maybe we’ll get some kind of eleventh-hour reprieve. But at the very least, we should be trying to learn from this situation and finding ways to create community projects with as high a chance of success as possible.

I believe that there can never be too many venues for the expression of different points of view. Here in Powell River we have one weekly newspaper, a few monthly arts, culture, or business publications, some newsletters of specialized interest, and that’s about it. There is not much local content on the radio and television stations we can pick up here. I felt that there were many things not being said in the existing local media, things which are important to me and maybe to other people. And so rather than complain about the shortcomings of the existing media, the logical thing to do is create more sources of information. It’s like complaining that your potato bed is producing only potatoes. Well, go plant some spinach or carrots or something! Don’t blame the potatoes; they’re just doing what they know, which is how to be potatoes.

Bottom line: we need more local media, and not just in written form. There are so many interesting things to hear, to hear about, and to see. We need videos and audio recordings, opportunities for storytelling and just talking. We need more people telling more stories, reporting on the world around them, saying what they need to say without fear of treading on toes. There is too much creativity being bottled up, and we need to let it go.

So, in the continuation of this article (next week, insha’allah), I’ll expand on this and lay out some of my thoughts about creating a more diverse and resilient local media scene. Until we meet again…