A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

radio ezra

Welcome to Bound and Gagged for Glory broadcast to you live from the boiler room of Anabel Taylor Hall on the Cornell campus. I’m your host Ezra Kidder and I’ll be with you for the rest of life in some form or other - call it Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, call it a bad trip. Call it what ever you want, you’ll going to having flashbacks – I guarantee it. How many hours of hammer dulcimer music can the average human being listen to before they go off the deep end. I’ve had listeners call in and tell me that, after a couple of hours of hammer dulcimer music, they’ve signed up to serve in Iraq. I mean, these guys were long haired hippies, carrying signs right out there on the front lines of the peace movement. Suddenly they turned overnight into cold blooded killers for Uncle Sam, M16, jackboots, the whole works. Something snapped. Did you know that the CIA used to broadcast hammer dulcimer music behind the Iron Curtain? You think Ronald Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall and ended the Cold War single-handedly? Think again, it was some guy playing the hammer dulcimer. It’s a good thing nobody in the Arab world knows how to play the hammer dulcimer. Imagine if Al-Quaeda ever got hold of it?

Students are returning from spring break so that means we’ve had to retreat back to the basement level here at Anabel Taylor. That’s alright, we’re used to it - it’s just like the Ithaca weather, you either get used to nine months of winter or you go insane. That’s when it’s time to tune to 135.6 FM on your radio dial and listen to the comforting sounds of the hammer dulcimer.

Tonight we have a very special guest. Well, we had a very special guest until he tried some of the rat food they put out in little trays around the boilers. You know we tried to break into the dumpster up there behind the End of the Rope Café. When you get the munchies……. well, you understand what that’s all about. So our special guest can’t be with us tonight but we still have 75 hours of taped hammer dulcimer music. While I strip the body, let me put on this little number from Bill Smokehouse and the Down-trodden Country Boys.

--this guy doesn’t have a credit card. I figured as much. Here’s a union card, a lottery ticket – now what’s this. Looks like a photograph of Joni Mitchell – wow – it must have been taken at one of those nude beaches. I’ll keep that. At least I make a few bucks off the stuff he’s wearing. They love those 60’s clothes down at Trader K. Yeah – and there’s this hammer dulcimer…..

We’re back live at Anabel Taylor Hall. Our special guest has gone on to glory. But we have a taped interview that he did in 1962 during the salad days of folk music. Those were the days. Everyone wanted to run away Greenwich Village in those days and be a folk singer – live in some flea-bitten hotel with a hundred other folksinger wannabes, have sex with these wispy looking brunettes from Sarah Lawrence -- you know the kind of girls I mean - heck, they’re your grandmothers now and they probably haven’t changed much. They still wear those long dresses and granny glasses and get that far away dreamy look in their eyes whenever they hear a hammer dulcimer. Boy, if you could play the hammer dulcimer back in those days, you had it made. Now if you play the hammer dulcimer, you’re a candidate for the psych unit.

Ok – we’re get to that interview in the second half of our show. Now it’s time for a word from our sponsor, the Fourth Dimension Head Shop right on the corner of Seneca and Tioga. Oh….they moved? That’s where they’re putting up that new hotel? Shit, why doesn’t anyone tell me these things? We have no sponsors? (Pause)

Let’s go to another musical look back at the glory days of Folk when everybody knew who Woody Gutherie was and nobody knew who Bob Dylan was. Here’s a hammer dulcimer standard from Richard Purina and Mimi Buzzsaw….. Sad Eyed Lady of Cleveland.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 12:13 PM

 
state of the blog address

Good morning, lunatics and amnesiacs --- or is that insomniacs? It’s five am in the morning in our fair gulag. Ezra is here this morning to deliver the state of the blog report. That’s right. The prez gets a chance to gloss over all the fucking mistakes he made in the past year. Governors, mayors, salad bar attendants -- right down the line repeat the process. Yes, we lowered taxes this year but spent $40 billion to remodel the White Ranch to make it impervious to terrorist attack. We reformed social security by kicking everyone who made less than $1.7 million a year out of the program.

Mayor Carolyn Peterson informs Ithacans about the great strides she’s made in bringing a Playboy Club to town. Yep, right there in the new Ithaca Hilton that’s going up across from Mugger’s alley. (More muggings take place in the Seneca street parking garage than anywhere else in Ithaca.) Yep, Ithaca needs more porn, soft core or otherwise. In the next five years we will have a 58% increase in adult bookstores, massage parlors, strip joints and pick up bars. Sex is the ultimate revenue enhancer for cities facing severe budget crunches. Oh, by the way, we’re getting a new army base.

So, Ezra wants to talk about the state of ithacasucks. You guessed it-- Ithaca sucks 120% more than it did last year, 280% more than it did in 2003 and 765% more than it sucked in 2002. We’re having a banner year for suckdom and Ez has pie charts and graphs to prove it. The only problem is that Ez has been denied access by dint of sheer stupidity to that part of his computer that spits out those graphics. So, just imagine, fuckers! It sucks!

Ez has cranked out over 120 blogs since Ithaca Sucks was launched two years ago. That comes out to something like 165 wasted hours, hunched over a keyboard with cigarette ashes piling up in the cracks between the keys, to produce a blog that no one reads. Well, actually Ezra did get emails from three people in the course of two years of blogging. One was from a guy who demanded more attacks on the VFW. The other was a guy who felt the blog was too violent. Finally, Ezra received an email from a girl named Amanda who had googled the word Permaculture and came up with Ez’s piece on nouveau- hippie culture in Trumansburg. You remember that blog, don’t you? Ez talked about how latte was the biggest cash crop over in Rongo-land. Remember?

Anyway, Ezra replied diplomatically to Amanda that, by the time she was Ez’s age, she’d be living in a gated community somewhere, growing organic butternut squash that cost $459 a seed, with robodogs and child soldiers from the Congo patrolling the compound to keep out the riffraff. So much for permaculture. Serves Amanda right for surfing sites with the word ‘sucks’ in the address. Lousy elitists.

Two years ago Ezra launched Ithacasucks with the idea of attracting a large, hip, college educated audience. He dreamed of a website with enough bells and bangles, links and pop-ups, cookies and drop downs to rival anything MSN could throw at him. Ez also fantasized about shipping ithacasucks merchandise everywhere in the world. Ithacasucks mugs, ithacasucks microwave magnets, ithacasucks banana peelers, ithacasucks cat sweaters. – you name it. All made by sweatshop labor somewhere in Freeville. Ez imagined driving to his office in the ithacasucks building in a Mercedes, having a 75 ft yacht in the marina christened the Ithaca Sucks, flying out of Ithaca airport in a Lear jet with large red letters on the side, Sucker. Just like that guy Branson who cheekily named his company Virgin. Ez wanted to be a blog billionaire.

Well, all of Ezra’s dreams came to naught. Ithaca Sucks is a dot.com bust, a cyber-flop, a media minnow. Sure, you can google ithacasucks and find Ezra’s blogs. But you can also google ‘cat shit’ and come up with a lot more entries. Nobody came to Ez’s rescue and spruced up his website – the guy who designed it in the first place never even finished it! The thousands of projected orders for ithacasucks litter scoops never materialized. Now Ez has to cough up the dough to renew his site. It hardly seems worth it. Martha Stewart spent time in jail and came out a bigger success than when she went in – Ez has spent two years in Ithaca and look where it’s gotten him. Sucking air, charley.

It sucks. It sucks. It sucks.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:05 AM

 
raging bull

The raging bull elephant of Ithaca television is on another rampage. It’s Thursday night again and the Pegasys studios echo with the soulless trumpeting of a shock jock with nothing to say but an hour to say it in. Mike Angley, the self-avowed Pirate of Channel 13, ex-CIA operative, Ladies’ Man and White Negro dons his dark glasses, adjusts some dials and launches into a rambling, hour long diatribe against an area businessman who stiffed him in a deal.

Angley takes no prisoners but mentions no names. His attack, while nasty, personal and relentless, falls just below the event horizon for the legal department. This hit man of the microwaves knows his broadcast law –he’s been through it all before with a previous arrest on obscenity charges back in the 90’s. Time Warner, host for Channel 13’s Cable Access studio, came to his rescue then by way of defending their own right to air soft core on the Playboy Network. Angley became a local cult hero and attracted a small viewing audience which he quickly proceeded to shed by boring the hell of anyone who expected lively, titillating monologues every Thursday night.

The five viewers who, by all reports, watch Angley regularly must be the guys on the graveyard shift up at Cornell’s Safety Department. Those poor dudes have to stay up past ten – someone might break in and steal some nanotechnology and shrink Ithaca – who knows? Back in his college days, Ez used to head over to the neighborhood White Castle and lug back to the dorm a bag of those tiny, individually wrapped rat burgers. Stack up your books and notes in the john, eat a dozen of those things and you’d be up most of the night, glued to the ceramic. That’s the trick to get in a good night of cramming for exams. Only folks who have nothing better to do with their time will last through the first five minutes of Angley’s rant. The ensuing mix of personal fantasy, status reports on his diet, attacks on anyone and everybody from the Pope right on down to people with Save the Whale bumper stickers just fails to engage viewers who are jaded on Jerry Springer. This is just a local yokel with a beef, not Dick Cavett qua axe murderer.

On this particular Thursday Angley is getting really worked up. He grabs his bullhorn and yells BULLSHIT a couple of times. How appropriate for a guy who’s having a bad attack of verbal diarrhea right there on the telly . We’re wading in it –like a brown tide swooshing against the inside of cathode tube –it’s going to short circuit our set for christsake!! Angley is really stomping on this dude’s head –accusing of him of cheating on his partners, cheating on his taxes, cheating on his wife and, last but not least, cheating on his 8th grade homework. Have some mercy!

Interspersed between repeated blows to his victim’s dignity and personal reputation are Angley’s reminisces of working undercover for the CIA in China when the tanks rolled into the Square, fantasies about being the Babe Magnet of all times, exhortations about Virtue and Integrity. Angley is off the hook, he’s on a roll but the ship might very well capsize from the dead weight of this guy's empty patter. Suddenly, if you’ve lasted through all this, you sit up bolt upright and wonder if this might not be a guy who’d blow his own brains out in front of a camera. Could this be the night he picked -- the finale of Angley Live, prequel to Angley Dead? Will the janitors be mopping up Angley’s own blood off the studio floor for a change?

Think again. Angley comes back the following week, a lime green t-shirt shrouding his beefy shoulders, to celebrate St Patrick’s Day and kick off another night of bloodletting, maudlin self-promotion and psychopathic babbling. This time the novelty factor has worn off. Anybody, absolutely anybody with half a brain could do this talk show thing better, you say – and make it more lively and interesting. You could show footage of Chihuahuas fornicating and make television more appealing. Why doesn’t someone do just that – take the orientation, learn how to push the buttons and adjust a few dials and produce a show with a little more, ah – we’re reaching now – ah --intelligence? Ezra still believes in a classless society so he couldn’t very well say ‘class’ to describe the opposite of what Angley is doing on the air.

Why was Angley voted Ithaca’s best talking head? Why have intelligent Ithacans abandoned Cable Access to lunatics like Angley, bible thumpers, holy rollers of every ilk, right wing Republican savants, Catholic Workers with Ego? Public access television is a wonderful way to build community, encourage dialogue, promote freedom of ideas. Why, in Ithaca, has it become the roost for madmen and self-promoters who bring a limited range of ideas and interests to the table? What happened anyway to the Left? Are radicals in Ithaca camera shy? Or is this the age of the Patriot Act? When free speech is stifled or repressed, nasty speech fills the void. Is that it?

Here’s a guy like Angley who, at least on the air, passes himself off as a down and dirty, no holds barred, street fighting dude. He looks mean, talks mean, But he never manages to go for the head. His clumsy, barroom style of verbal kickboxing, if you can even call it that, depends on the ankle shot. In one sense, Angley is Everyman, filled with displaced anger and spewing resentment against a society that is corrupt, petty, cruel, unsympathetic to the plight of the little guy. But Angley’s ‘rage against the machine’ act is transparent and gets him no points because he comes across like some narcissistic jerk with an axe to grind, especially against the people around town who have shut him out, ignored and failed to recognize his ‘genius.’ Angley passes up his chance to speak for all the little guys in Ithaca and fails to tap into that uneasy fault line where the classes and races meet. It’s obvious he’s only on the air to blow his own trumpet.

The camera is his mirror. Angley likes what he sees because the mirror is filled with his own image. What other viewers see is a portrait of Dorian Gray after a hard night at the Chanticleer, a handful of diet pills and a Gimme chaser.

Ezra should go down and get on the air. Haha! Never happen. You all know he’s camera shy, has a tattoo of Mikhail Bakunin on his forehead and smokes too much to last an hour in the studio, fiddling with the dials.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 8:24 AM

 
anti-tourism

Some retired couple in Iowa is at this very moment looking over a glossy brochure flaunting the scenic highpoints of Ithaca, New York – intent on coming here for their summer vacation. Or maybe it’s the proud parents of a future Cornellian, visiting the campus for the very first time. Over there in Osaka, poring over the same glossy 4 ½ by 8 inch flyer in Japanese. Ithaca is gorges, state parks, a shimmering lake lined with marinas, lovely college promenades, glittering culture. Anyhow, Martha, it beat’s looking at cornfields all summer. Or the 24 hour harsh luster of neon billboards.

Suckers. Wait til they get here and discover the potholes, the empty store fronts, the snobby liberals, the last remaining withered, dead leaves of the counter culture. You can keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Ithaca.

They’re coming. The tourists in all their myriad shapes and sizes. Lugging digital cameras, camcorders, bug spray, credit cards, New York State phrase books. Soon they’re be strolling down the Commons past the bottle pickers, the hippie drum circles, the teenagers bumming smokes, the trendy boutiques that are so pricey that native Ithacans can’t shop there.

We need to head them off at the gorge. Adopt stern anti-tourist measures. Declare war on tourism. We want to keep Ithaca poor, wasted, sucking for air, decaying in its own natural juices. Who wants more hotels rising from the debris of our dead metropolis? More boutiques and bistros advertising blackened salmon specials?Who wants to be constantly telling people where Cayuga St. or how to get up to Cornell? Its Ka-u-ga, ok, buddy?

Got any ideas how we can ward off this summer’s tourist invasion? Ezra does. First, we send out a news story to the wire services that every single Ithacan has come down with mad cow disease. Or that there’s been a rash of legionnaire’s disease reported in Tompkins County. That there are crazed VFW guys, frothing at the mouth, pulling army surplus howitzers down Rt 13 to kill every fucking last tourist that ventures down the road from Syracuse in an SUV. Maybe we can take pictures of Cayuga Lake showing that it glows green in the dark. How about putting out the word that Cayuga Lake has disappeared? That it got sucked up to Cornell in a giant straw and never came back? Throw in for good measure a story about how some whacked out grad student in Chemical Engineering up at Cornell sprayed Agent Orange over a good part of Ithaca and environs from a crop duster.

OK. A few tourists will get through. We have to be ready to deal with them. We can get all the 4 to 8 years olds in town, dress them in rags and send them out to harass every tourist who shows up on the Commons. Got chewing gum, Mister, Salvia, Ecstasy? You want to meet my sister?

Then we put signs up along the highways – Tompkins County Leper Colony – 5 miles. Or another sign idea – Ithaca Nuclear Testing Area – Visitors Restricted.

By Ezra’s ghost, we’re on to something here. If there are no tourist dollars coming in, prices will start falling. Then we can enjoy some of that blackened salmon at fire sale prices.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 8:17 AM