Radio -- NPR, Radio C, and the whole world at your fingertips

I love radio.

When I was younger I never really understood the point. I was irritated by most radio announcers who seemed to have little to add to any conversation. And why just listen, when you can watch, I thought? TV seemed infinitely superior to radio, which seemed like its ugly cousin. And why would you want to listen to the music someone else had selected, anyway, when you could choose it yourself with tapes and records and then, wonder of wonders, CDs? (Yes, kiddies, I'm that old.)

Well, I've come around completely, and for many years now radio has been rather an obsession. I think I "discovered" (American) National Public Radio when I was on a road trip -- maybe when I was driving up to northern Minnesota with Mom and all we were able to find was the worst top-of-the-charts country, some evangelical Christian talk radio, and NPR news.

I became a real junkie around the time I started commuting by car between San Francisco and Emeryville to a job at Avalon Travel Publishing years ago. And I've never looked back. When I was in Hungary, and the streaming technologies were just getting going, and I had an incredibly crappy ISDN line for internet, I used to lie on the parquet floor underneath my desk where my laptop slowly and laboriously downloaded a program in fits and starts and I would tingle with emotion, a strange mix of homesickness and relief.

KQED was my most beloved station for a very long time, and even when I spent two years listening to KUT in Austin, I longed for its programming and schedule, which had come to feel natural as a heartbeat to me. When afternoon rolled around and I didn't hear All Things Considered, I felt irritated, slighted. Didn't they understand it was the time for that unique blend of quirky, funny, heartfelt, and off-the-beaten-track you find there?

Lately, though, I think I've been won over completely by Michigan radio, which has some wonderful programs I had never heard back in California. Through it I've discovered the joys of Lynne Rosetto Kasper's Splendid Table, Dick Gordon's The Story, which often leaves me open-mouthed with wonder, and the ever-incisive Diane Rehm, who has an amazing knack for keeping her finger on the pulse of the American zeitgeist.

Since radio broadcasts have started becoming available over the web, it adds a whole new level of possibilities. Downloading podcasts for long drives, or walking commutes. . . it's a wonderful world. But I also really appreciate the streaming capabilities, particularly with non-US-based radio stations. One day, just for the hell of it, I decided it would be quite interesting to listen to a radio station in a place I know next to nothing about. So, I settled on Namibia. And then Besim, who was sitting on the couch wondering what was going on, directed us to Trinidad and Tobago. You can go most anywhere to listen to both majority and minority stations at RadioStationWorld. You might be surprised what you find.

One station you won't find there, though, as of yet, is one that is very near and dear to my heart for a variety of reasons, one I sometimes tune in to, thanks to streaming technology, and turn on at full blast on my favored PC in the doctoral lab when it's late at night and I'm there by myself trying to finish a paper. Rádió C, short for cigány, or the Hungarian word for "Gypsy," is a station that started several years ago in Budapest. It's been plagued with financial troubles, accusations of corruption, and loads of other troubles, but for now it's still in business. Sometimes I think I need to write at least a bit about it in my dissertation.

Why is it great to listen to? Well, think about Romani musical talent, for a moment, whether or not you buy into the "it's in the blood" ideology that even Roma themselves often promote. And then think, don't musicians always listen to the coolest music of all? Well, I sure think so. There's lots of Hungarian Romani music, for sure, but they also play unexpected jazz, plenty of pop from all over the world. You even hear Hindi filmi music sometimes. And sure, yes, they announce in Hungarian, and have some talk-radio shows. But most of the time it's music, and a mix you won't hear anywhere else. Check it out. (Just choose your preferred media player and format under the heading "Élő adás!")

They say about themselves: "Budapesten és környékén körülbelül 200,000 cigány ember él (ebből csak Budapesten több mint 100,000!). 2001. október 8-a óta létezik egy rádió, amely közvetlenül nekik szól, az ő nyelvükön, az ő problémáiknak hangot adva. Ez a Rádió ©."

"In Budapest and its environs, about 200,000 Gypsy people live (out of which, in just Budapest, there are more than 100,000). Since October 8, 2001, there has been a radio station that speaks directly to them, in their language, giving voice to their problems. That is Radio C." (translation by yours truly.)

If you find yourself wanting a Hungarian-English dictionary while looking at the site, I recommend the SZTAKI dictionary. However, given the intricacies of Hungarian grammar, with its prefixes and suffixes, and all, it probably won't get you very far. So, I'd encourage you instead to ask your favorite Hungarian-speaker to help you navigate, if you get as far as their website! :)

You may think that this is what those Romani musicians look like.

Well, maybe they do when they dress up in costumes to perform in a square for a Hungarian public. (I took this photo in Budapest at the Spring Festival in Erzsébet tér in 2003.)

But when they're just hanging out, playing music, they're more likely to look like this.

These are my friends Orhan (on accordion) and Dragan (on guitar), at the Amala School of Gypsy Language and Culture in Valjevo, Serbia, in August of 2003.

Orhan is (or was, back then) a director in a Romani theater in Skopje, Macedonia. (I've lost track of him and would love to know what happened to him if you know him!)

Dragan Ristić is the head of the band Kal, which he founded with his brother Dušan. It has an album out that has become immensely popular in Europe, according to my friend Sani Rifati, founder of Voice of Roma. Yup, and they've even made it onto Wikipedia. I should be up on these things, but I've been hiding out in my little world in Detroit & Ann Arbor. But lucky for us, Sani is helping to organize a tour for them in the United States in fall of 2008.

Okay, now, um, back to the task of grading undergraduate papers, which I'm doing a very good job of avoiding here, clearly.

The Band - The Weight from The Last Waltz (1978)

This beautiful rendering of The Weight by the Band got my attention thanks to a friend thrice removed.

Oh, and I want further to investigate Danish folk-metal. Don't let me forget that.

Boo hoo, I want to be sleeping, but my tummy is hurting. I forgot to take my medicine this morning so I didn't get it until evening and am wondering if that could be the culprit -- or if it's something I ate. Hopefully the bicarbonate of soda & ginger/chamomile/mint tea will kick in soon and allow me to return to bed.

I still owe you an email, dear Marcell . . .

It's so silly! I absolutely LOVE to write! So why does it take me such an amazingly bloody fucking long time to get down to the business of actually doing it?

It was absolute torture getting started on my first Qualitative Methods paper. Absolute torture!! I was hiding under the desk, getting ready to scream, going around the house dusting while calling all my friends. But then, finally, finally, I picked up Ben Highmore's Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, a book I've had sitting on my shelf for-fucking-ever, and I read a bit, and it started the rusty wheels of thought. There was an interesting confluence in Highmore's using Sherlock Holmes as an example, since I'd just heard the editor of the recently published volume of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's correspondence talking on Diane Rehm a few days ago. And then Highmore led me to Weber, with some interesting thoughts about Marx and Kafka along the way, and Weber got me all excited about the stahlhartes Gehäuse and the subtleties of the new translation. And then she's off!

(from my Qual Methods paper)

In a particularly famous moment of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber asserts that capitalism has fundamentally transformed the nature and degree of human autonomy. Eschewing previous translations referring to our 'iron cages', Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells render his words thus:

Today's capitalist economic order is a monstrous cosmos, into which the individual is born and which in practice is for him, at least as an individual, simply a given, an immutable shell, in which he is obliged to live. It forces on the individual, to the extent that he is caught up in the relationships of the 'market,' the norms of its economic activity. The manufacturer who consistently defies these norms will just as surely be forced out of business as the worker who cannot or will not conform will be thrown out of work" (Weber 2002 [1905]: 13).

Weber continues, . . .

"Puritans wanted to be men of the calling—we, on the other hand, must be. For when asceticism moved out of the monastic cells into working life, and began to dominate innerworldly morality, it helped to build that mighty cosmos of the modern economic order (which is bound to the technical and economic conditions of mechanical and machine production). Today this mighty cosmos determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly involved in business but of every individual who is born into this mechanism, and may well continue to do so until the day that the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed.

"In Baxter's view, concern for outward possessions should sit lightly on the shoulders of his saints 'like a thin cloak which can be thrown off at any time' [312]. But fate decreed that the cloak should become a shell as hard as steel [stahlhartes Gehäuse]. As asceticism began to change the world and endeavored to exercise its influence over it, the outward goods of this world gained increasing and finally inescapable power over men, as never before in history. Today its spirit has fled from this shell—whether for all time, who knows?" (Weber 2002 [1905]:120-121) In a dystopic vision of a possible future, Weber suggests that, in the absence of "new prophets" or "powerful old ideas and ideals. . . reborn at the end of this monstrous development," we might become "specialists without spirit, hedonists without heart, . . . nonentities [who] imagine they have attained a stage of humankind [Menschentum] never before reached" (121).

I lapse into this lengthy quotation from the new translation of Weber because I find his metaphor to be highly relevant and useful for understanding many of the issues Ms. Grad Student Colleague raises about her experience as a graduate student being socialized into one or more professions. Weber suggests that the social structure of capitalism has created the expectation that we must embody our calling to the extent that it transforms our way of being. As the translators note on the change in language in this edition, "a shell has an organic quality and symbolizes something that has not just been externally imposed but that has become integral to human existence. Whereas a cage confines human agents but leaves their powers otherwise intact, a shell suggests that modern capitalism has created a new kind of being" (lxxi).

. . . And then, on to Crotty, and Giordano & Boscoboinik (who not only edited a volume on anthropological understandings of risk, but also coauthored a paper on Romani identity in Bulgaria, weirdly and coincidentally enough), and from there to Tom Wengraf to talk about BNIM. A few more linkages, a conclusion, and the integration of the material I have that I want to use from my interview and my colleagues' written memos, and maybe a word or two about Nagarjuna, and I'll be done. From start to finish is so easy. It's just getting to the starting line that could possibly kill me . . . .

Well, anyway, for now it's time for a bath and bed. What'll it be tonight, hmm? Lavender and orange again? Maybe some chamomile? Oh, I love aromatherapy. Liles, I can never thank you enough for introducing me to the practice.