The Progressive Voice of the Mountains

In this historic election year, MAIN and WPVM are working on two critical and related issues:

*Solving the rural broadband problem and preserving Internet freedom

*Fixing the WPVM signal problem and expanding local voices on the public airwaves.

We need your help! Both of these battles to “Free the Airwaves” are happening NOW in Washington.

We need your tax-deductible donations to ensure that our voices are heard in Congress and at the FCC.

Please give today and help MAIN and WPVM continue our record of media reform achievements!

Current MAIN/WPVM efforts your dollars will support:

*MAIN is working with the Media & Democracy Coalition and the Wireless Innovation Coalition to get FCC approval in October for use of the vacant TV channels, which come available next February when TV goes digital. This spectrum is critical for solving the rural broadband problem and providing a high-speed alternative to the cable and telco duopoly.

*MAIN is working to pass the Community Radio Act in Congress, which would free the airwaves and allow WPVM to fix its signal problem - and allow more communities to launch low-power FM radio stations.

*MAIN is working to make Asheville a “Wi-Fi City” to boost economic development, small business incubation, digital job training - and to reach low-wealth, underserved neighborhoods.
*MAIN is perfecting one of the nation’s first alternative media business models based on a simple principle: Give citizens the option of spending their Internet dollars to support local, independent media.

More on MAIN

The Mountain Area Information Network (MAIN) is a non-profit, community-based provider of wireless Internet services. Since 1996, MAIN’s public-service achievements include:

*the first local Internet access in 14 counties of Western North Carolina
*the first public Internet access in libraries and community centers in 12 counties of WNC
*recycled computers and free or reduced-fee Internet access for more than 400 citizens with disabilities
*helped create the local nonprofit fiber network, ERC Broadband
*boosted disaster-recovery efforts via a pioneering partnership with local ham radio operators
*is leading the fight in Congress and at the FCC for high-speed Internet access in rural North Carolina - and the nation
*a national leader in preserving Internet freedom and online privacy
*led the decade-long effort to create URTV, the first and only public access TV station in WNC
*returned local voices to the airwaves via radio station WPVM 103.5 FM -”the Progressive Voice of the Mountains”
*unique business model: allow citizens to spend their Internet dollars to support local voices, privacy, and community self-help.

Tune in tonight (Wednesday) live @ 11pm or check out the Archive @ www.nighttimeswerve.org

Listen for Adam’s exclusive interview with Elliot Bergman, sax player for NOMO (Ubiquity Records). Elliot took a quick break from their American tour to stop by our WPVM studios last month. Learn about the formation of this explosive band and their exciting US tour promoting their new album Ghost Rock.

Attorneys representing the Pack family heirs, Buncombe County, and developer Stewart Coleman made their arguments today in Superior Court regarding the sale of park land for luxury condos. We’ll tell you what happened and hear from the Pack attorney, Joe Ferikes.

We’ll also talk about last weekend’s Southern Energy and Environment Expo.

This local news and public affairs show focuses on underreported information and encourages civic activism. Tune in live 7-8 pm Monday, catch the 1 pm Tuesday rebroadcast, or stream or podcast.

This week on Veterans’ Voices we talk with “Jim Stroupe, a local resident who is a veteran of World War II, the Korean Conflict & the Vietnam Clusterf*ck.” As per Ronald Harayda. Additionally we hope to check in with Jason Hurd and find out how the IVAW State of the Union Tour is going.

News this week:

How to Crack the Pentagon Pundits’ Code

The ‘Veterans’ Vote’ is far from locked up

US Army Deserter to be Deported from Canada

America’s Homeless Vets, a Causality of Epidemic Proportions

This last article is one we will be following up on in the near future. Stay tuned for our upcoming series on the homeless Veteran crisis.

Tune in to Veterans’ Voices at 5 pm every Wednesday or stream/podcast here.

Greensboro’s Ken Rumble, one of the founders of the Lucifer Poetics Group, trekked across rivers and mountains to Asheville this past Sunday and visited Wordplay. He provided some keys to Key Bridge (that’s a .pdf file, so give it a few seconds to download), his well-received book from Carolina Wren Press, discussed some his favorite poets, working on typewriters, and read some new work as well. One new piece was a two-voiced collaboration, so I got to fill in as the other voice. It was a hoot.

Ken’s work is always adventurous in its exploration of the dimensions of poetic form - and like, in that respect, the work of one of his favorite contemporaries, Lisa Jarnot. Both seem to draw on the work of Robert Duncan and George Oppen, who drew in turn on the practice of William Carlos Williams, Gertude Stein, and others among the great twentieth century modernists; both go a far piece, of course, beyond the maps defined by Duncan and Oppen into their own territories. But that’s the company, as it seems to me, and it’s a fine company to be in.

Music this week all came from Geoffrey Keezer’s Falling Up; we opened with the title track (long the virtual theme for Wordplay), and also heard “Palm Reader” and “Gollum’s Song.”

Do check it out over on the Archive page (just scroll down to “Wordplay”).

(For the impatient, here’s the direct link to the .mp3.)

The show will be available as an on-demand stream and podcast through next Sunday, August 10th.
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The photo can be found over at Ken’s blog, in his Blogger profile. The closed eyes perhaps testify to its candid occasion …

Cross-posted at Natures.

We’ll talk to Jason Hurd of WPVM’s “Veterans Voices”. Jason and other Iraq Veterans Against the War are on the State of the Union Base Tour, currently heading for Fort Bragg. We’ll talk about what he and the other veterans are doing to try to raise awareness among military families.

David will talk about what George Bush and the Republicans (and some Democrats) don’t want to acknowledge: Socialism is alive and well in America - socialism for the wealthy, that is.

We’ll talk to some of the treesitters from the Magnolia slated for destruction if Stewart Coleman is allowed to build his Parkside condominiums.

This local news and public affairs show focuses on underreported information and encourages civic activism. Tune in live 7-8 pm Monday, catch the 1 pm Tuesday rebroadcast, or stream or podcast.

•  BELE CHERE  - A moment I will always remember from Bele Chere,  is   one with the crowd silently massed around  picketers on Place de La Concorde, pardon me, Place Vance.  Imagine the scene.  One man is holding the usual  ” Homosexuality is  Sin ” banner.  Next to him, shoulder to shoulder,  another man  holds another one ” Proud of my Homosexuality”.   Bele Chere was a place of intense solitude …
• CICADA - Some of those alien insects have not returned to  their spaceships, and like ET, they are still vibrating around.  I  invite you to hear the special report I did for WPVM/Paris of the South radio hour  in June when the first neighbors discovered the site of the landing.
• The European Philosophy Festival : The French economy may be gloomy but you can still have fun with philosophy.  A special festival in Saint- Emilion near  Bordeaux where the theme is… happiness. 

 ALSO meet the PLEASERS , Philippe Katerine, oldelaf , Mrs Sarkozy singing and CACTUS …. Click here to listen to the show  

Hillsborough poet Jeffery Beam was in town last weekend for Loco Logodaedalist, the celebration of Jonathan Williams’ work hosted Saturday night by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, so I talked him into coming into the micro-studio at WPVM to talk about his work. He read a few poems from his Visions of Dame Kind (Jargon, 1995), a book whose vision I’ve long admired, but we spent much of the program reading and discussing poems from his new (as in brand new) The Beautiful Tendons, Uncollected Queer Poems 1969-2007 (White Crane Books, 2008). It’s a fine, emotionally searching and honest, collection of love poems - when we’re in the kingdom of love, it doesn’t matter whom we see as the other, the same rules pertain, and this book limns them with a forthright grace.

Several of Jeffery’s poems have found musical settings, so we discussed the relation of music and poem, and Jeffery, in honor of his lifetime love of the old songs he grew up in Kannapolis singing, and which he feels still inform his work, closed the show with a remarkable rendition of the old Methodist hymn “In the Garden”.

If you don’t yet know his work, here are three poems from Beautiful Tendons that he read on the show, just to give you a glimpse:

TWO LOVES

This is my lesson in humility.
My lesson in grief.
My lesson in the cruelty of the human heart, my own.
Trudging through deep southern snow:
finding both of your faces frozen in the white.
Sparrows still singing in the shrubbery.

I could not say it then.
I cannot say it now.
My heart split in two.
A tree limb weighted by ice.
A white        quiet and protective.
A white        dangerously warm.
My hands spiritless in the drifts.

Why do birds continue to sing?

LOVE COMES

not silent,
   but noisy and indiscreet,
           rowdy and persistent.
He comes in leaf fall.
   musty earth in his palms.

           Held out to me
I can do nothing but take it,
   and take it gladly,
           earth being the one coolness
other than water
   to be enjoyed.

           The fact of the matter is this:
tomorrow he may come silent.
   Tomorrow may be love quiet as mist,
           but today,
his cheeks rough with new hairs,
   I smell furrows of new fields.
           I turn over fertile soil.
I hear burrowing insects, happy worms.

   I taste the gentle, crude, excavating damp.
           The stain of love upon the earth!
Stain of love!
   His sleep rattling me.
           His sunrise and breath awakening me.

THAT NIGHT

That body        tree on a misty hill
That face        fawn with dark eyes
That full moon       surrounded by evening skies
That hour        pavement ending in dust
That grass        green with summer's black-green
That night        coming over us with its breath
That sound        crickets singing at eye level
That body        me on the ground with their song
That body        another touching me with fire
That fire              round as the moon burning as the sun
That face        fawn with dark eyes
That you        speaking in tongues unknown and green
That sound        crickets singing in my ear
That body        tree on a misty hill

There were many more, so give the show a listen. Given that Asheville will be in the throes of Bele chere this weekend, it’ll be available through Sunday, August 3rd, at WPVM’s Archive page (just scroll down to Wordplay) as on-demand stream and download.

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The show opened with McCoy Tyner playing “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” from the 2007 release McCoy Tyner Quartet. We also heard three of Billy Holiday’s classic performances, “Easy to Love,” “Life Begins When You’re in Love,” and “Summertime,” all from Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles. Keith Jarrett’s “Paint My heart Red,” from the 2006 The Carnegie Hall Concert: Selections for Radio, took the show out.

Enjoy,

Jeff

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The photo of Jeffery is by M. J. Sharp.

Cross-posted at Natures.