A beautiful symmetry

When the interests of large record companies and the owners of commercial radio networks combine, the result is millions of listeners hearing the same handful of tunes over and over, and a handful of listeners hearing the other millions of tunes once, if they're lucky. When cash incentives and coercive programming practices are added in, it is called payola--a crime. When governments prosecute payola, the result can be an out-of-court settlement for big American dollars. And the government may establish something like the New York State Music Fund to channel that settlement back into the arts.

When NCPR got wind of the fund, we asked ourselves (as we often do) "What would Robin Hood do?" Well--he might reach out to all the composers, songwriters and performers in the region and pay a bunch of them to come into the studio and record. He might buy publishing rights for performers and produce CDs and podcasts and pay royalties to all the artists. He might put everybody's music together in one place and get it out to the public and on the air. He might organize a paid concert tour and send the best performers all around the region. He might have a blast. So we sent in the Robin Hood proposal. It seems we were not the only ones to see a beautiful symmetry in using payola money to promote and support the independent legions of the seldom broadcast--we received one of the largest awards made from the fund in order to do just that. Look for a whole lot more over the next two years.

The case for headlines

What with war, famine, AIDS and global warming, few of us have the time or inclination to worry about capitalization rules. But we're a hardy and stubborn few, as the news crew discovered when I opened a local front in the great headline format debate. Until a few days ago, NCPR Online had followed the headline capitalization conventions used by NPR Online--A Variation of "Title Case" Promulgated by the AP Style Manual. Most newspaper sites and some other online news sites use title case--and it does make everything sound Very Important--but the rules change from stylebook to stylebook. Some capitalize all verbs, some capitalize all verbs except forms of "to be." Some use lower case for all prepositions, some capitalize longer prepositions, such as "beneath." And further picayunities proceed from there. Trying to convey the nuances of title case to radio reporters who, if they really got off on this stuff would probably be print reporters instead, was-uh-problematical. There was some enthusiasm for the suggestion that we just capitalize everything, like text messaging, except upside-down.

Fortunately, there is a perfectly respectable alternative, "sentence case," that is used by many news organizations in the English-speaking world including CBC, BBC and CNN, and that is also used by the foreign-language press and by most bloggers. In sentence case you capitalize as you would in a sentence: first word, proper nouns and acronyms, period. (Well--actually you omit the period in headlines.) So that will be the new NCPR headline standard--Except If We Forget. I rest my case.

Reinventing July

On the Mohawk calendar, I am told, the name of one midwinter month translates succinctly as "Cold." A name like July just doesn't do justice to the feel of the season. All this delicious frenzy packed into a too-short space: festivals, barbecues, weddings, sports, block dances, beach weeks, boat rides, field days, parades, skinny-dipping, dock-lounging, nature-walking, berry-picking, rock-diving and bass fishing. And such music--Richie Havens at the Wild Center Opening, Bonnie Raitt, Keb' Mo' and Kelly Joe Phelps at Ottawa Bluesfest, Johnny & the Triumphs rockin' in the middle of Potsdam's Market Street. We should call the month Kickit, or Wahoonival or something. And we should apply for an extension. As long as we don't run our calendar from moon to moon anymore, what's stopping us from giving July 51 days. Just take ten from January and ten from February. They seem way too long already.

If you build it, there's no telling what they will do with it

This is the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the US interstate highway system, a constuction endeavor that outstrips in scope the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China combined, and that has transformed the physical, social and commercial landscape of the nation for good and for ill. It's difficult now to recall that what President Eisenhower had most in mind was a means to provide for rapid deployment of military personnel and supplies in times of crisis, and a way to quickly evacuate American cities in case of nuclear attack. Our ongoing love affair with long-distance driving and the sprawling homogenization of suburbia "just happened." Drive-thru donuts beside the on-ramps were not in the plan.

Another cold war invention was ARPANET, a decentralized network of computer nodes that would continue to function even after large areas of its infrastructure were destroyed by nuclear attack. Its direct descendant is the modern Internet. I doubt the bunkered pioneering cyberwonks of the Defense Department foresaw poetry podcasts, UTube, spam, and bangkokvirginsluvuplenty.com. One might well wish to devastate large areas of its infrastructure, but the geeks of yore built too well. And going farther back, Marconi, the wireless pioneer, thought the best use for radio was to keep in touch with ships at sea. He may have been right--increasingly, we are all a little at sea.