knight rant

THE BRASS RING

In the media circus, radio is the carny tent-with stages for freaks and jokesters and women showing the parts of themselves that will thrill men. To the people in the industry radio is the Big Tent, and there's no better place to be. They leave behind sleep, financial health and tribe. When you're under the Big Tent it all seems worth it.

I loved dancing in the Big Tent. I was living a recognized life. I was on stage. I was making money. My success was indesputable.

Then I was kicked out of the tent and I wandered for a year, weeping over my abandonment. Nobody wanted to see my act. I was hollow and hungry and angry. I no longer held the brass ring, so many people in the business avoided me. Now I was a painful reminder that everybody, sooner or later, gets left behind. Smaller carnivals offered to pay me a tiny fraction of what I'd made to dance on a smaller stage.

Then the circus came back around and I was ready. I'd stayed limber, I knew my steps. I jumped on the carousel to show them my costume and to reclaim the respect and value I felt I'd lost.

They finally threw me the brass ring-and I saw it.

I saw it, in the shadows beneath the glittering lights. I looked closely. Suddenly it wasn't the trophy of my career-junkie dreams, but a cheap trinket that every music fan vaugely wishes they'd caught, a trinket that oxydizes and gives you a rash, and is tarnished and dull in real daylight.

I didn't see myself holding it high so other people could approve of my success. I didn't see myself ascending.

I saw myself being jerked off the wooden horse and dangling by the thread of company approval; I saw myself being dragged along the coarse ground of a never-ending cycle of exhaustion, with no time to work out or see friends or travel or clean my house or learn something new. I saw myself going around and around in the dizzying, nauseating cycle of forgettable daily information, Arbitron print-outs, and the hysterical whims of paranoid PDs.

So I said no, thank you.

This was met with a barter: How much, then? It's the game; I'm supposed to auction myself. What am I worth to you guys? What am I worth to myself? What's my price?

I looked down into the gaping, rank mouth that bellowed, "Yeah! Make her bend over! How much?" and I simply jumped off the carousel and walked away. I changed my mind.

When I first started in radio the PDs told me, "Be yourself". My answer was, "I'm an actress. Which self do you want?" They did not find this amusing. Jocks are the clowns and strippers in the media circus, and you aren't supposed to show up with method acting skills. You're supposed to show up with your makeup on, ready to dance. The boss does not know how to do your job or even really understand you or what you do. He only knows what brings the money in.

So, dancers become strippers. Actors become clowns. Writers shovel elephant shit. We all do it to be under the Big Tent and when you're under it, nothing is better.

Once you're out wandering alone for a while and you get used to fresh air and making your own creative decisions, the smell of funnelcakes is sickening rather than enticing.

Once you're out you can't claim the glory of working under the Big Tent anymore, but most people don't remember what they see at the circus anyway. And people who would be awed by the carnival life are not your friends. Your friends have always secretly believed that it was beneath you.

So-I'm out, leaving my costume behind. No more bad compromises and exhaustion, and no more fame.

But, I've discovered, I can still dance. And I really like dancing. Barefoot. On the ground.

For myself.

The Want-Ad Translator

Canvassing: A humiliating activity in which you get a lot of doors slammed in your face for 10 hours at a stretch. Canvassers sometimes have the comfort of knowing that they are doing "something good" for rape victims or the environment. Rest assured they are doing something even better for the organizations themselves, which are only paying them about $5 an hour.

Commission Only: You don't get any money unless you've been there for a while and have established contacts and have chased the carrot shamelessly for at least a few weeks. What you live on until then is not their problem. See: Potential.

Dancer: Bump and grind for men who call you a whore. If you have no aversion to second hand smoke and verbal abuse from hideous men (the ones who can't find a woman) and you are between the ages of 18 and 25 with no body fat and implants, you can make a nice living.

Easy Money!: The activity you are asked to do is essentially easy, like stuffing envilopes. Stuffing one envilope IS easy. Stuffing 10,000 envilopes is much more time consuming than anyone will tell you, and results in vicious paper cuts, desperate calls to family and friends at 3:00 in the morning, deterioration of relationships with said friends and family, and hand cramps.

Expirience Required: "We don't have time to train you. Sink or swim,"

Great Opportunity!: If you already have a lot of money and aren't terribly intelligent, please call!

Internet Actress: Internet Whore

Internship: A method of slavery in which you are ordered around with no regard for your basic human needs, such as rent, sleep, and dignity. Interns are given any number of orders a day with glee by their supervisors, which is why interns are often attractive, naive women in their 20's; their bosses can fantasize all day about "giving them orders..." These women are ready to work hard and complain very little, until they develop a realistic picture of the situation and self-esteem, after which they are "trouble". Less attractive women are more prone to be "trouble".

Marketing: A humiliating activity in which you chase uninterested people around in malls and parking lots, begging them to buy junk you wouldn't buy.

Motivation: A revival-like frenzy imposed on you by your new employers. The aim is to get you so hopped-up on "could-be" that you miss the facts right in front of you, such as the fact that your first box of product to sell is going to cost you more than your groceries this week. See footnote: Bait and Switch

Motivated Individual: Someone who has very little expirience with con artists and who is in a desperate financial situation.

Phone Actress: Phone Whore for 10.00 an hour, or Phony Phone Psychic dispensing uneducated guesses to people who are in desperate need of actual therapy, for 10.00 an hour.

Potential: AKA, carrot-on-a-stick. This is an ancient technique of manipulation; a donkey's bridle is fitted with a stick that protrudes over his head and a carrot is hung from the stick. The idea of the carrot keeps the donkey moving forward, but the donkey never gets the carrot.

Telemarketing: A humiliating activity in which you bother people on the phone and try to get them to buy stuff from you, or sign over some of their money in hopes of a better rate on loans, etc. You are screwing people to the wall (most of them know it) and you can make between 5 and 8 dollars an hour.

Work From Home: A scam in which you are promised a certain range of income if "you are motivated enough"; you give the company money for the privilage for hawking their wares, often in a decimated market. If you lose money, you can't blame them. They have made their money off your hopeful attitude, or "motivation". See: Motivation

* Bait and Switch: A technique used by con men, unscrupulous advertisers, and people who place want ads in the paper. It works like this: the ad says, "15 to 25 dollars an hour". When you are actually in a human being's office, they shamefacedly look out the window or stare at your forehead as they inform you that the job pays 9.00 an hour, but with expirience and hard work you might be able to make as much as 15 dollars an hour, and who knows, if you can find a way to create a time warp, you MIGHT make 25 dollars an hour.

How to Work Yourself Out Of A Job

Set a standard of desperate overwork early on, so that people get used to your lack of self-esteem. When they manipulate you, assume that you have no right to object, and capitulate with a minimum of "flack".

Work harder and harder. Take on every project as if it's your life's blood. Strive to succeed at everything. Put all else in your life second. Let work deteriorate your relationships and your health. Stop calling friends. Stop exersizing. Eat out of the snack machine a lot.

After a couple of years, when people are accustomed to this, start to object on occasion. When outrageous things are asked of you, start to protest. When pressured, deliver, but confide to a co-worker how unhappy you are. Lose sleep. Get behind on rest and rarely catch up.

Now: have a revelation with a family member, and recover self-esteem. Start to act as though you deserve the occasional Sunday off and as though eleven hour days are too long. Start to admit to yourself that not being paid for 30% of your workday is a bogus deal.

Continue to overwork, but start to question your Yankee work ethic. Decide that you want to do certain things before you die. Think about how short life really is.

When you receive the "warning", lose a lot of sleep. Beat yourself up a lot. Cry all the time at home and work very hard. Garner a lot of fatigue. Lose so much sleep and work so hard that you make a "potentially costly" mistake.

Congratulations! You have just worked yourself out of a job.

Yes, I know how bitter and self-indulgent and self-pitying this is. It is also true. There are other truths I've left out, such as the fact that events can conspire to make a lateral, money-saving move quite attractive to the company you work for. The market or competition can change. You can have enemies you are unaware of-or aware of, but completely out-powered by. And, most importantly, you can be the vehicle
(not victim) of your own subconsious need to flee a rediculous situation. As I prefer to believe that I have more control rather than less, I'd rather shoulder the responsibility for my situation than act like something aweful was "done" to me. Therefore, I worked myself out of the job.

But it still hurt worse than any breakup I've ever had.

Ick. They'd love that.

Radio is Dying, Part 1

My boss is 12 years younger than I am.

My boss is thirty years old. She is wearing glittery orange plastic butterflies in her hair. She also wears a t-shirt and overalls. She is tapping a gleaming, pointed letter opener on the tips of her fingers, which are about three inches from the tip of my nose.

"OK?" she says, "You, like, totally need to-" her head snaps to the left. A co-worker is rounding my cubicle, sucking on a Slurpee. "Oh, my God," says my boss, "Why didn't you totally get me one?"

"Dude," comes the retort, "I-like-totally never know what you're going to want,"

"Retard," says my boss, "You knew I'd totally want one," she turns back to me, again formal and sour. The shining tip of the letter opener flails even closer to my face.

If this woman did not have the power to fire me I would have simply snatched the offending object away, admonishing her to be more aware of her agressions for the good of everyone. Now, I watch the letter opener dance. I need this salary.

"You-OK?" my boss sighs, "You, like, need to make a lot more calls and not bullshit on the phone all day. You need to make, like, fifty calls a day instead of thirty,"

I meet her carefully outlined eyes and answer with my Tissue Voice. It's a voice I have perfected for use with people on the phone and with potentially violent mentally ill adults and program directors. It's soft and simple, with a hint of compliance. It's a voice that yeilds and asks for nothing. It's there to receive aggression, frustration, general bitchiness, and other forms of psychic snot.

"OK," I say.

"Dude!" the shout comes from behind my cubicle.

My boss is still frowning at me, wondering if she's been understood. "What?" she shouts, directly into my face.

"Oh, my God, it's a new picture of 50 Cent! Come look at this!"

"OK?" my boss says to me.

"Fifty calls. I can do that," I smile calmly, but every internal organ is still trembling with the proximity of the letter opener.

"OK," she turns away, then turns quickly to me again, searching for dissent. I have already begun to sift through a file. She waddles away, shouting to the cubicle behind me, "Fitty? Oh, my God, show me,"

To keep this job I call radio stations and ask them for affidavits, or proof of shows they have run. It's tedious paperwork that I'm asking them to do, and most radio people hate doing anything that isn't bright and shiny and over quickly. I am one of those people. I am asking those who are stumbling under an increasing workload, in an increasingly uncertain workplace, to do more work. Some of them won't take my calls, hoping to avoid me. Some are directly abusive. Many moan. And often, they want to talk about how tough it is. I'm someone they can confide in, because they don't know me. They do know by my instant ease with them, by the slang I use and by my vocabulary that I am FM. Most of them know right away. And when I ask them how they're doing or how many hats they are wearing these days, they spill aggrevation and dissapointment and sordid details about an industry that is dying.

I have first-name relationships on the phone with three women (one in Bakersfield, California, and two in Maine) who each run an entire cluster of radio stations, solo. Picture a lone woman, checking settings and wandering empty halls between six different control rooms which hold no air talent, no producers, no one. They are ghost stations. Studios holding several microphones and CD players and beer-stained chairs are now just large, hollow receivers, broadcasting national shows to the locals from satellite or from recorded mediums like CD or tracking programs like Prophet. I know of several husband and wife teams who run smaller radio station clusters the way some couples would run a Mom-and-Pop store, or a kennel. The wife is the traffic manager and the continuity director for all four stations, the midday talent on one of them, and the news person on local morning news cut-ins on the AM station in the cluster; the husband is the engineer, the program director, the promotions director, and the afternoon drive talent on an FM. This is quite common.

Much more widespread is the bloodbath of mass layoffs. Entire staffs are fired and the station begins under a new format, or an automated format, or under a new PD, or any number of scenarios. The result is this: radio is shrinking.

Instead of a bustling, loud, outrageous industry of misfits who have rediculous adventures and share those adventures with listeners, radio is becoming a ghost town, a lonely hallway, a dry echo. Only the great survive by the law of the jungle, and local radio is going the way of Lord Of The Flies. It's paradise until one little boy who's been rejected by Daddy too many times grabs the big spear and starts giving orders.

Ten years ago a friend of mine in the industry received an anonymous call from a lady lawyer back East, who told him, "You people in radio need a union yesterday," and informed him that she'd just been to a BIG meeting, and that the grand plan was to eliminate 90% of the air talent in the United States within the decade. They haven't succeeded. I have no numbers, but my rough, uneducated guess is that about 60% of the air talent in this country have gotten the ax so far. When I was voice tracking multiple markets I put four women out of work, and there are plenty of jocks like me voicetracking all over the country. Still, the industry isn't dead yet; its heart has stopped, but it's still flailing in the dust.

What, then, do we do? We the misfits, we the commitmentphobic, we the overly verbose and undereducated, who are deprived of our purpose, our passion, our tribe, and our community-what do we do?