KPFT Notes

On Friday, February 29th, in celebration of Black History Month, Trickle Down Entertainment and the S.H.A.P.E Community Center (3903 Almeda Houston, TX 77004) will host the RBG Rhymefest, featuring world renowned hip-hop legend Brother J of X-Clan and HBO Def Poetry Jam artist Sunni Patterson. Other featured artists include Houston’s own (and host of KPFT’s SOS Radio) Zin, S.M.U.G.G.L.A.Z., 144 ELiTE, Bobbie Fine, Swatara, PKT, Truth Universal, and DJ Kool Emdee.

Doors open at 7:00 PM and the show will begin at 8:00 PM. All ages are welcome to attend. Tickets are $15 for adults, $10 for students, and $5 for children 17 and under. All attendees will also receive a free S.O.S Radio Mixtape.

Radical returns to Austin for Cornyn protest
Thorne Dreyer back after 40 years.

By Brad Buchholz
AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, February 24, 2008

Ten minutes before the demonstration, Thorne Dreyer — the guy in the chocolate-brown dog costume — ambles toward the corner of West Sixth and Lavaca streets in downtown Austin, looking every bit like a man who can’t wait to bark out in the name of democracy, in the guise of political street theater, in the company of his activist friends.

Dreyer’s dog costume covers him from neck to toe, his face open beneath a floppy-eared dog hood and bright red Houston Astros ball cap. His stride is long and tall and lopey. He pumps his arms high. Though he’s 62 years old, Dryer’s posture is youthful, expectant and a little jazzed — never mind the sudden, chilly rain that splatters the sidewalk in front of him at the start of rush hour on Feb. 15, a Friday afternoon.

“It hasn’t rained a day in, what, three months?” says Dreyer, hands on his hips as he takes inventory of a restless, dark gray sky that seems to promise nothing but more chill and harder rain. Yet Thorne Dreyer — a prominent Austin activist from the 1960s who moved back to town three years ago — isn’t about to let a little rough weather spoil this 90-minute piece of socio-political theater. The show will go on.

Dreyer’s aim on this day is to poke fun at U.S. Sen. John Cornyn — drawing specific attention to the Republican senator’s longtime advocacy of President Bush’s increasingly unpopular administrative agenda, particularly his support of the Iraq war and the Guantánamo prison. The president’s nickname for Cornyn is “Corn Dog.” But the way Dreyer sees it, the senator from Texas is more “lap dog” — the president’s eager-to-please pup.

Riffing on this dog idea, Dreyer has assembled two dozen members of Austin’s peace and social justice community in front of the Chase Tower (where Cornyn keeps an office) and invited them to express their disdain for the senator’s politics. The only ground rules: Honor the dog theme, and absolutely no speeches. Dreyer wants humor, not stridency.

David Hamilton, who demonstrated with Dreyer on the University of Texas campus as a member of Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s, and his wife Sally come dressed in Scooby-Doo costumes. Members of the Code Pink peace group arrive as pink poodles with painted noses. A man in a George W. Bush mask walks a saw-horse-sized pull-toy dog emblazoned with a John Cornyn face. As traffic lurches down Sixth Street in the premature darkness, the pretend president wags his finger at the Cornyn dog, imploring him to obey.

“Curb the Corn Dog!” shouts Dreyer, pacing the sidewalk, his droopy tail dragging behind him. And as the rain lets up a bit, his supporters join in the chant. The scene is scruffy and soggy and chaotic, in a small-scale kind of way. Several demonstrators have brought their own dogs to the protest, inciting a confusion of barking and snarling and tangled leashes. Behind them, a man stands on a crate, in a blindfold, arms outstretched — his posture suggesting Abu Ghraib, with wires dangling from his fingers. The wind gusts, suddenly, so hard that Scooby-Doo’s head blows off.

Some drivers honk their horns in approval of Dreyer’s message; a few flash the peace sign from an open window. But most look blankly at the road ahead. On the street, a middle-age man with short, gray hair glances over his shoulder and sniffs in disdain as he passes Scooby-Doo and the prisoner and a cardboard John Cornyn doghouse.

“I hope you point out that these are serious people, among the brightest minds in Austin,” says Steve Speir, a Democratic precinct chair who has stood in the rain in his dress shirt and slacks — no coat or hat or umbrella — to lend his support to this day’s demonstration. “A lot of the people here have been committed to making this a better world for a long, long time.”

For all his experience in the movement, Thorne Dreyer is just now realizing how hard it is to pass out his Cornyn “barking points” leaflets on the street while wearing a dog suit. “Man, these mitts make it really hard,” he says, looking down at his damp, chunky dog paw-hands after dropping a clutch of papers onto the street. But he laughs it off and continues to hand out more leaflets.

This man in the dog suit — the only son of Houston journalist Martin Dreyer and his wife, the painter Margaret Webb Dreyer — was one of the leaders of the Texas student protest movement as a young man. He joined the SDS as a UT freshman in 1963 and embraced its socialist-tinged manifesto of participatory democracy, world peace, economic justice and environmentalism, even though the UT Board of Regents sometimes labeled its members “subversives and revolutionaries” and tried to revoke the group’s status as an official university organization. With several SDS friends, Dreyer co-founded The Rag — Austin’s influential underground newspaper — and worked as its first editor in the mid-1960s.

Dreyer moved to Houston in the late 1960s and helped launch a second underground paper, the Space City News. During the course of the next 30 years, Dryer worked as a freelance journalist, hosted a talk show on the Pacifica radio station, did public relations work for artists and politicians, managed a Houston jazz club, dabbled in the theater and at last, in the 1990s, suffered through a divorce, depression and two prison sentences for cocaine possession.

After three decades away, Dreyer returned to Austin after attending a reunion of The Rag staff in 2005. It was an event, says Austin activist and former staffer Alice Embree, “that reaffirmed people had not lost their sense of outrage … or outrageousness.” Last year, Dreyer helped start the local chapter of Movement for a Democratic Society — a national offshoot of the old SDS.

“This is such a weird time, an outrageous time,” says Dreyer, who has been contributing to the Next Left News, the Texas Observer and The Rag Web site since moving back. “Everything Bush has done is such an abomination, I think there should be hundreds — thousands — of people in the streets every day. And while the consciousness seemed very high in Austin when I came back here, there didn’t seem to be much happening.”

Much like SDS, MDS “believes in solutions to the problems of the world without war,” says Dreyer. “We believe in universal health care. We believe in a world without racism, sexism or class-ism. And we believe all things are interconnected, at the core, by our economic system and who controls the economic system. So long as we let corporate powers control the decisions of how we live, we’re not going to live very well.”

At last light on Sixth Street, Thorne Dreyer knows his “Curb the Corn Dog” rally hasn’t changed the world. His demonstration drew four dozen people and a lot of raindrops. Yet Dreyer’s spirit is bright around 7 o’clock, when he slips off his dog suit and joins a handful of friends for post-rally Mexican food at Maria’s Taco XPress.

“Hey, Thorne Dawg,” someone shouts out when Dreyer arrives at Maria’s. “Sit down and chill out.”

Dreyer orders a mango margarita, then tugs on a pale blue T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Dogs for Peace.” The picture on the front: a half-dozen dogs seated at a table, flashing peace signs with their paws.

“During that Vietnam time in the 1960s, we believed — sincerely believed — that what we were involved in was unique to history. You felt something on a gut level,” Dreyer says later, reflecting on movements old and new. “You felt that something momentous was happening. And there was such an incredible sense of community that evolved from that, that helped shape that, that you really don’t see as much of today.

“But this is really important: We don’t want to sound like we’re just into nostalgia. We don’t want to get up and talk about the glories of the ’60s. This is not the 1960s. There has been a loss of innocence. It is a different time. But like Alice Embree likes to say, ‘I’m more interested in what we’re going to do tomorrow than what we did in the past.’ “

Unlike a lot of SDS alumni, Dreyer believes in the possibility of electoral politics, inspired in part by his interactions with Houston politicians such as Kathy Whitmire, Fred Hofheinz and the late Congressman Mickey Leland. Dreyer was an enthusiastic supporter of Sen. John Edwards’ run for president — “he was more concrete, and class conscious” — yet he’s intrigued by Barack Obama’s ability to inspire. “For the first time in a long time, people believe in something and have some hope.”

“In the old days, we thought electoral politics was just a trick — a trick bag, we used to call it,” Dreyer says with a smile. “I didn’t vote. I didn’t believe in voting. I never did it back then. Because either way, the problem was societal. What either party created was just the illusion of change. But as I matured — and I don’t think I ever sold out — I began seeing things slightly less in black and white. There are things you can do (in electoral politics), so long as you keep your perspective.”

Thorne Dreyer’s belief system for a new millennium is anchored in community and participation and a sense of humor. As a younger man, he led a charge to change the world, thinking it his generation’s calling. Today, Dreyer has the gentle feeling at times that the movement has repaid the favor — and saved him. For the first time in a long time, he feels at home.

“Hey, my friend, this is for you,” activist Carlos Lowry calls out to Dreyer as he presents him with a plate of exotic ice cream. All around, there are claps of appreciation. Dreyer is hesitant to accept the gift, but the demonstrators urge him to grab a spoon and dig in. “Every dog has his day, you know. … “

Editors of the KPFT Voice want to highlight recent programmer milestones for the upcoming issue.

Are there any program anniversaries? Awards? Remarkable interviews, shows, etc. that you want mentioned? Please ask them to send milestones, awards, program description changes to voice@kpft.org.

Also, please review your program description in the most recent Voice and on the web to make sure they are what you want.

KPFT’s Program Council, which is composed of listeners, programmers and board members, collaborates with the Program Director on matters of programming. KPFT’s Program Council is composed of four listener members, four programmers and four board members. The LSB chooses its four members and two listeners, while management chooses four programmers and the two remaining listener members.

If you are a programmer or listener and wish to be considered for the Program Council, please send me an email indicating your interest. I’m reachable at pd [at] kpft.org. Your email to me should arrive no later than Feb. 29. Thank you.

KPFT’s Local Station Board met last night to vote on members of the 2008-2009 Program Council. KPFT’s Program Council is composed of four listener members, four programmers and four board members. The LSB chooses its four members and two listeners, while management chooses four programmers and the two remaining listener members.

Members selected by the LSB last night are:

Staci Davis [LSB]
Eric Johnson [Listener]
Bob Randall [Listener]
Alfonso Rivera [LSB]
Sandy Weinmann [LSB]
Susan Young [LSB]

KPFT management is expected to choose programmer and two listener members in March.

SWAN folks sent this. Check it out!

You Are Cordially Invited To
Put Yourself on the SWAN Day Map!

Are you planning an event for Support Women Artists Now Day?
If so, you can now post that event on the official SWAN Day website at www.SwanDay.org.

You can click on the link to Host an Event or find a place to celebrate by clicking on Search for events.

Once you have posted your event, you can use the tools in Manage Your Event to send your friends the link, track their RSVPs, and post announcements and pictures on your page.

After your event, you will be able to post reports with pictures and videos. The reports will be a great way to share your celebration with women around the world.

Here are a few tips and guidelines for posting your event:

1) WHAT TYPE OF EVENT CAN I POST? You can post a party, performance, parade, exhibit, or any event that celebrates women artists. You can choose to make the event public or private. You do not need to know any programming, and your email address will not be visible unless you type it in the box describing your event.

2) HOW CAN I FIND OTHERS TO WORK WITH? If you are looking for collaborators to help you create a SWAN Day event, please use the word “Seeking” and indicate your location in your heading. For instance, if you wanted to organize a theatre event in San Francisco, you would put “Seeking Theatre Artists in San Francisco” as the title of your event. Also, don’t forget to look on the WomenArts Network at www.WomenArts.org/network when you need to find women artists. There are over 1,000 artist profiles on the WomenArts Network, and you can search by art form, region, theme and more. You can email any artist on the network from her profile page.

3) CAN I USE THE OFFICIAL SWAN DAY LOGO? Yes, you can download the official SWAN Day logo in the Publicity Tools section of our website at: www.SwanDay.org/publicity. The Fund for Women Artists retains the copyrights to the image, but there is no charge to use it to publicize or fundraise for SWAN Day events. We have also published a page of Publicity Basics which includes SWAN Day Feature Story Ideas to pitch to reporters.

4) WHAT IF MY EVENT IS NOT ON MARCH 29? You are welcome to post any SWAN Day event happening in March or early April on our website. We would like as many events as possible on the weekend of March 29, but your desire to celebrate women artists is more important than the exact date of your event.

5) DOES IT COST ANYTHING? There is no charge for posting your event. This is a free service provided by The Fund for Women Artists.

6) CAN I GET A GRANT TO DO MY EVENT? The Fund for Women Artists is not offering SWAN Day grants, but we encourage you to use your event to raise funds for yourself or other women artists in your community. In the Fundraising Tools section of our website at www.SwanDay.org/fundraising, we have posted a Sample Fundraising Letter that you can use to approach potential donors. We have also posted a page of Fundraising Basics with advice about approaching individual donors.
WHAT IF I LIVE OUTSIDE THE U.S.? We welcome artists from outside the U.S. to post SWAN Day events on our site. If you select a country other than the U.S. on the sign-up page, you will be able to post your event without filling in the state and zip code fields. Please let us know if you have any difficulties with the software or if you need help creating your listing in English.

About 20 SWAN Day events have already been posted, and you can look at what others are doing to get ideas for your event.

Be brave! Have fun! Tell your friends! Support Women Artists Now Day is a holiday for us!!

The International Documentary Film Festival of Mexico City (DOCS DF) is gladly announcing that the call for entries for its third annual festival (taking place from September 25th to October 4 2008) is open! You can visit docsdf.com to get more information. The last day to register your materials is May 15th, 2008.

KXCI Community Radio is looking for an Underwriting Sales Director to oversee the sponsorship of programs and events on 91.3 FM. Excellent benefits, flexible hours, and competitive salary plus commission.

This position requires someone who is a leader, self-motivated, results-oriented, and professional with a minimum of 3-5 years previous broadcast sales or related sales experience. Superior communications skills, both oral and written, are a must. Comprehensive knowledge of the media industry, especially in the Tucson area, a plus. Women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply.

The Underwriting Sales Director will be responsible for all department operations including efficient business relationship management, marketing and development of underwriting sales, supervision of a department budget, and recruitment of support staff. The position also requires extensive organizational management and record keeping, plus basic record keeping skills in a digital environment (knowledge of VT traffic system also a plus).

KXCI is a community radio station celebrating its 25th year of broadcasting. We operate out of a old boarding house that was built in 1903 for the railroad workers in the heart of downtown Tucson. We broadcast music, news, and public affairs programming to the greater part of southern Arizona. We operate with a small staff and committed volunteer base. We are also in the process of an inclusive strategic planning process to be completed by the end of the year. We have an active membership department (2800+ members) and stable base of underwriting support. The weather is perfect most of the year and the cost of living is reasonable for a metropolitan area of over 1 million people.

Additional information about the position and the radio station is available on kxci.org. Please scroll to the bottom and select “job opportunities.”

Raul Salinas, a regional poet and sometime KPFT guest, has died. Raul was an inspiration to many people in the Latino community and beyond. Bold, thoughtful and always kind, Raul was involved in many social justice and cultural efforts. His obit is below.

Raul Roy Tapona Salinas was born in San Antonio, Texas on March 17, 1934. He was raised in Austin, Texas from 1936 to 1956, when he moved to Los Angeles. In 1957 he was sentenced to prison in Soleded State Prison in California. Over the span of the next 15 years, Salinas spent 11 years behind the walls of state and federal penitentiaries. It was during his incarceration in some of the nation’s most most brutal prison systems, that Salinas social and political consciousness were intensified, and so it is with keen insight into the subhuman conditions of prisons and an inhuman world that the pinto aesthetics that inform his poetry were formulated.

His prison years were prolific ones, including creative, political, and legal writings, as well as an abundance of correspondence. In 1963, while in Huntsville, he began writing a jazz column entitled THE QUARTER NOTE which ran consistently for 1-1/2 years. In Leavenworth he played a key role in founding and producing two important prison journals, Aztlán de Leavenworth and New Era Prison Magazine, through which his poetry first circulated and gained recognition within and outside of the walls. As a spokesperson, ideologue, educator, and jailhouse lawyer of the Prisoner Rights Movement, Salinas also became an internationalist who saw the necessity of making alliances with others. This vision continues to inform his political and poetic practice. Initially published in the inaugural issue of Aztlán de Leavernworth, a Trip through a Mind Jail (1970) became the title piece for a book of poetry published by Editorial Pocho-Che in 1980.

With the assistance of several professors and students at the University of Washington – Seattle, Salinas gained early release from Marion Federal Penitentiary in 1972. As a student at the University of Washington, Salinas was involved with community empowerment projects and began making alliances with Native American groups in the Northwest, a relationship that was to intensify over the next 15 years. Although Salinas writes of his experiences as a participant in the Native American Movement, it is a dimension of his life that has received scant attention. In the 22 years since his release from Marion, Salinas involvement with various political movements has earned him an international reputation as an eloquent spokesperson for justice. Along the way he has continued to refine and produce his unique blend of poetry and politics.

Salinas’ literary reputation in Austin earned him recognition as the poet laureate of the East Side and the title of *maestro* from emerging poets who seek his advice and a mentor. While his literary work is probably most widely known for his street aesthetics and sensibility, which document the interactions, hardships, and intra- and intercultural strife of barrio life and prison in vernacular, bilingual language, few people have examined the influence of Jazz in his obra that make him part of the Beat Generation of poets, musicians, and songwriters. His poetry collections included dedications, references, and responses to Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Charlie Parker, Herschel Evans, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, for example. Academics have primarily classified Salinas as an important formative poet of the Chicano Movement; yet, while he may have received initial wide-scale recognition during the era, it would be unfair to limit a reading of his style, content, and literary influence to the Movement.

There were many dimensions to Salinas* literary and political life. Though, at times, some are perplexed at the multiple foci of Salinas life, the different strands of his life perhaps best exemplify what it means to be mestizo, in a society whose official national culture suppresses difference: his life*s work is testimony to the uneasy, sometimes violent, sometimes blessed synthesis of Indigenous, Mexican, African, and Euro-American cultures. Salinas currently resides in Austin, Texas, were he is the proprietor of Resistencia Bookstore and Red Salmon Press, located in South Austin. Arte Publico Press reissued Salinas* classic poetry collection, Un Trip through the Mind Jail y otras Excursiones (1999), as part of its Pioneers of Modern U.S. Hispanic Literature Series. He is also the author of another collection of poetry, East of the Freeway: Reflections de Mi Pueblo (1994).

RadioInk reports (below) about Clear Channel’s settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, which will mean CC’s divestment from several markets, including Pacifica station signal areas Houston and San Francisco. What form this takes, and what properties get sold off, is still the matter of much speculation.

DOJ Requires Clear Channel To Divest In Four Markets To Complete Buyout

WASHINGTON — February 13, 2008: The Department of Justice says it will require Clear Channel to divest radio stations in Cincinnati, Houston, Las Vegas, and San Francisco in order for the company to proceed with a buyout led by private equity groups Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners.

Additionally, the DOJ’s Antitrust Division has filed suit in Washington, DC, to block the acquisition, and at the same time has filed a proposed settlement that, if the U.S. District Court in Washington approves it, will resolve the lawsuit and the DOJ’s competitive concerns.

The divestitures will be required, the DOJ said, because “the transaction, as originally proposed, likely would have resulted in higher prices to purchasers of radio advertising in Cincinnati, Houston, Las Vegas, and San Francisco because [buyers] Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners already have substantial ownership interests in two firms that compete with Clear Channel in those cities. Bain and THL have ownership interests in Cumulus Media Partners LLC (Cumulus), a large nationwide operator of radio stations, and THL also has an ownership interest in Univision Communications Inc. (Univision), a large nationwide operator of radio stations that broadcast primarily in Spanish.”

According to the complaint filed by the Antitrust Division, radio stations owned by Clear Channel and Cumulus compete head-to-head in Cincinnati and Houston, while Clear Channel and Univision own competing Spanish-language radio stations in Houston, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. The division must approve the buyers of the divested Clear Channel stations.

“Without the divestitures obtained by the department, advertisers that rely on radio advertising in the affected cities likely would have faced higher prices,” said Thomas O. Barnett, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division. “The divestitures will ensure that advertisers will continue to receive the benefits of competition.”