Self Help Radio 091914: One Way

I had a radio show yesterday (sorry, I went out of town & couldn't post this immediately afterwards) with the theme "one way."  I still don't know how or why that became the theme.  But I think it turned out pretty well.  I talked to a self-help guru who believes he's discovered the one way to happiness, & I talked to a doctor who believes he's found the one way to men's health, & I talked to two civil engineers who believe that Lexington would benefit from the city having only one way streets.  All this, plus music, including a new song Tania & Juan wrote for the show, plus a report from our man in Hollywood, Mark Miller.  I guess the show went one way, & I'm glad it did.

Listen to it now!  Self Help Radio Dot Net!  The songs I played are listed below!  I think I'm going the wrong way!  Oh no!

Thanks for listening!

(part one)

"One Way" Tania & Juan _One Way_
"One Way Love" Allison Weiss _Say What You Mean_
"One Way Or Another" Blondie _Eat To The Beat_

"(I'm Walking Down) A One Way Street" Guy Mitchell _The Very Best Of Guy Mitchell_
"One Way Street" Miki Smith _Trouble Doll_
"Walking Up A One Way Street" Willie Tee _Teasin' You_
"One Way Street" Sharon Tandy _You Gotta Believe It's... Sharon Tandy_
"One Way Street" The Dirty Burds _Hellbound Honeys, Vol. 1_

"One Way Ticket Home" Phil Ochs _Greatest Hits_
"One Way Ticket" Bobby Crown & The Kapers _Rockabilly Rarities, Vol. 1_
"One Way Ticket" The Nerves _One Way Ticket_
"One Way Trigger" The Strokes _Comedown Machine_

"Love Can't Be A One Way Deal" The Rev-Lons _Boy Trouble: Garpax Girls_
"One Way Love" The Innocents _One Way Love 7"_

(part two)

"One Way Love" The Damned _Don't Cry Wolf 7"_
"One Way Love" The Undertones _The Undertones_
"One Way Love" The James Hunter Six _Minute By Minute_

"One Way Out" Elmore James _The Sky Is Crying: The History Of Elmore James_
"One Way Out" Martha & The Vandellas _Watchout!_
"One Way Bus" New Birth _New Birth_
"One Way" Mighty Mighty _A Band From Birmingham_

"One Way Mind" John Cunningham _Becket House_
"One Way Or The Other" Chumbawamba _Readymades_
"One Way Track" Bill Nelson _Noise Candy, Vol. 1: Old Man Future Blows The Blues_
"One Way Spit" Debris _Soul Jazz Records Presents PUNK 45: Sick On You! One Way Spit! After The Love & Before The Revolution, Vol. 3: Proto-Punk 1969-77_

"One Way Kisses" The 4 Knights _Jivin' & Smoothin'_
"One Way Rider" Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash _Rockabilly Blues_

Whither One Way?

Who knows?  The show is happening tomorrow morning from 7 to 9am on 88.1 fm WRFL, & you can listen online at werful dot fm.  I'll also live tweet like I do nowadays on my the SHR Twitter account.

But I might not be able to put the show up on the Self Help Radio website because I'm going up to Cincinnati for Oktoberfest Zinzinnati.  Specifically, the wife wants to see the Running Of The Wieners.  Because they're hounds & they're cute.

I have to ask, though - why do they hold Oktoberfest in September?  Is that just common here?  I guess I never paid attention to Oktoberfest when in Texas.  But just checking, it turns out that Fredericksburg has its Oktoberfest in October.

So maybe it has something to do with climate.  Anyway, I apologize for not getting the show up in time.  If only they had Oktoberfest in October…

Preface To One Way: No, I'm NOT Running Out Of Themes!

Why would you think that?  Is it because of that Bob Dylan show?  He would never do a show with a theme like "one way"!  He picked general themes like "cars" or "homes" or "family" or "Bob Dylan"!  Why can't Self Help Radio be like that?  Why not do a show about something that's tangible, that's a thing, that makes some kind of sense, that there are songs that we will know about & you will have to play?

Seriously, dude.  "One Way"?  All I can think about is that Blondie song.  That's it.

What just happened?  I started out with one voice & ended up with another.  I think I liked the complainer's voice better than my own explainer voice.  Anyway, it doesn't matter - no one really cares what theme I pick & very rarely is anyone excited by a theme.  Which is cool - I don't mind the anonymity.

One thing that does happen from time-to-time is that a person will call & say, "I hear you're looking for songs about [today's theme]."  I am happy when someone makes suggestions or requests a song, but it's weird to think that they'd be listening to a radio show & think, "That deejay is doing a show about [whatever subject], but of course they wouldn't have brought enough music about [whatever subject] to fill their allotted two hours, but, luckily, hey!  Me to the rescue!"

I'm never insulted or anything, but I wonder if that's happened enough to the average RFL listener that they've heard a deejay say, "I wanted to do a show about [something], but I don't have enough songs!"

It's possible.  It's just not something I'd ever do!

I didn't get a chance to do this two posts ago...

One of my favorite boring bookkeeping events passed & I barely noted it: the 1900th post on this blog!

You're not paying attention anyway, but I like to do this:

I started this blog on September 12, 2006.  Holy fuck, that's eight years ago!

I reached 100 posts on Match 7, 2007.
I reached 200 posts on August 13, 2007.
I reached 300 posts on January 11, 2008.
I reached 400 posts on May 29, 2008.
I reached 500 posts on October 19, 2008.
I reached 600 posts on April 2, 2009.
I reached 700 posts on October 4. 2009.
I reached 800 posts on May 2, 2010.
I reached 900 posts on July 30, 2010.
I reached 1000 posts on January 4, 2011.
I reached 1100 posts on May 30, 2011.
I reached 1200 posts on October 23, 2011.
I reached 1300 posts on Mach 3, 2012.
I reached 1400 posts on July 30, 2012.
I reached 1500 posts on December 23, 2012.
I reached 1600 posts on April 23, 2013.
I reached 1700 posts on November 22, 2013.
I reached 1800 posts on April 21, 2014.
I reached 1900 posts on September 12, 2014.

If you stumble through this blog - & please don't, it's embarrassing for me - you'll find that I do a celebratory "anniversary post" most of the time.  But you'll notice it's usually wrong - the blog entry entitled "The Legendary 1000th Post," for example, happened on December 14, 2010 (when it was a not-very-legendary 994th post), instead of six posts later.  There's a reason for that: I'm dumb.

Blogger very handily tells you the number of posts you've published.  It also notes when you start a post (a "draft") & then saves it if you don't finish or if you forget about it.

I'm not a "draft" writing kind of guy.  I wish I were - boy, I'd love to be able to rewrite some of my crap to make it better - but if I write something, & don't finish it, & close the window on the computer, I'll probably not return to it.  I'll almost certainly open another window & write something new.

I obviously have done this several times on this blog.  For a long time, I had six or so drafts in my draft folder, which Blogger counted toward my total.  I deleted them.  Most of them were blank pages anyway.  Now I can just go look at every hundredth post from the beginning, but back then - well, I'm dumb.  I trusted the number & I counted backwards.

Let me repeat that: I counted backwards.

I am fascinated about the time periods represented here.  From October 2002 to May 2008, Self Help Radio was on KOOP in Austin.  From May 2008 till June 2009, it existed as a podcast.  From July 2009 to June 2010, it was on WMUL in Huntington.  From August 2010 till present (excepting Spring of this year) it has been on WRFL in Lexington.  So that total is:

KOOP: five years, eight months
WMUL: eleven months
WRFL: three years, eleven months
Podcast: one year, seven months (at different times)

Does that add up to eleven years, eleven months?  Because that's hold long I've been doing Self Help Radio!

(Actually, it adds up to 12 years, one month, because I counted a couple of months, like May of 2008 & January of this year, when I have half in one place, half another.)

(I'm still celebrating my twelve anniversary next month.)

High School Daze

A friend with whom went to high school had a birthday today & we texted back & forth all up & down memory lane.  I made a joke about high school, which led us to reminiscing about those awful days.  We went to a school called South Garland High in Garland, Texas.  Our school team was the colonels, we had a modified Confederate flag as our flag (as seen above), & our slogan was "the South shall rise again!"  After my graduation, a friend attended but didn't go to South Garland asked me, "Does your school know the South lost the war?"

For both my birthday friend & myself, this seemed normal (as normal as anything in high school), but my friend didn't remember something specific I recalled: there was a giant mural in the cafeteria of a Southern plantation.  Since he couldn't bring it to mind, I looked around for evidence online.

I found, archived at the University of North Texas, a book called "School Spirit or School Hate: The
Confederate Battle Flag, Texas High Schools, and Memory, 1953-2002" by
Perry Dirickson, which, you may notice, kind of rhymes with my name.  You can see the pages I'm about to quote here.

I warn you: the book is badly written.  I have copied it verbatim, but did feel the need to note when there were egregious grammar mistakes.  Some of the commentary feels forced & awkward, but the historical part of it is eye-opening.

At South Garland High School, the students chose the Colonels & the Confederate flag because of the Civil War centennial.  The school opened in the fall of 1964.  The year before, students who would attend the school voted for the Colonels as mascot & adopted an Old South theme.  South Garland was located at the southern edge of Garland's residential area at the time.  There were few houses; mostly cotton fields surrounded the school.  This added to the Old South feel of the school.  South Garland High School released the first edition of the school newspaper on Friday, October 2, 1964, with the name "Plantation News."  In the paper, the cartoon "Colonel's Plantation" ran, displaying the paternalism implied by the school's mascot.  The cartoon presented three characters: the Colonel, Rastus, & Liza.  Liza & Rastus were portrayed as poor whites in tattered clothing whom [sic] used broken English.  The Colonel dressed in an all-white suit with a black tie & spoke impeccable English.  This reinforced the romantic view of the Old South & the class superiority implied by the mascot name of Colonels.

Other traditions reinforced the Old South theme.  The students named the drill team, Southern Belles.  The cheering section, underclassmen drill team members, named itself the Dixie Darlings, & the fight song played to the tune of "Dixie."  Another tradition that the students tried to initiate, although it did not last, was a fundraiser to earn money for student activities.  The fundraiser was a slave auction. The slaves were members of the drill team who sold themselves to male students for a day for whatever the buy [sic] wanted, such as washing his car.  The girls dressed in sackcloth, wore their hair in dog-ears, donned a beanie or cowboy hat, & wore no make-up with mismatched shoes.  The Clothes [sic] worn by the "slaves" were eerily similar to the clothes of actual slaves.  To add to the Old South theme, the school painted a plantation mural in the cafeteria with a generic white-columned mansion surrounded by fields of cotton devoid of any black slaves working the fields.  The omission of workers in the mural portrayed an understanding the workers in the field were black slaves. By leaving them out, the administration was saying in a nice way that black slaves were not important & as an extension, blacks were not important as well.

South Garland students not only developed traditions based on the Old South, they also adopted the Confederate flag as their school's symbol & school flag.  Before 1967, the school used a Confederate battle flag as its school flag.  In the fall of 1967, the 1966 seniors presented the school a gift, the South Garland flag, which was the official Colonel flag.  The flag's design included the school's crest in the flag's center as well as "S" & "G" for South Garland on the outer part of the flag.  The school called its crest the "libertas," liberty in Latin, the Garland family motto,  The "libertas" had the colonel's head on top of a shield with crossed sabers.  On the shield, the Garland family crest appeared in the upper left quadrant.  The Confederate flag was in the upper right corner.  In the lower left quadrant, the golden bugle symbolized class "spirit [sic] de corps" & aggressiveness in the future.  The torch of knowledge centered by live oak & olive branches borrowed from the Great Seal of the State of Texas.  The "S" for South was to the left of the "lbertas" & the "G" to the right.  This would remain the South Garland flag until 1991. The South Garland students viewed the flag as their flag.  The design of the flag incorporated the Confederate battle flag, but the students saw the banner as their flag & claimed pointed [sic] out that this standard was not the Confederate battle flag.  The flag's inclusion of the South Garland High's crest & the "S" & "G" separated it from the association with the Confederate battle flag in the minds of students.

I remember in the 1990s my family members griping about how the NAACP was going to sue the school & replace the flag.  ("It's not racist, it's tradition!")  It turns out the school district did it themselves (although doubtless there were some who may well have filed a lawsuit).  According to Wikipedia, "the Garland Independent School Board voted 6 to 1 at its August 1, 1991, meeting, to discontinue use of the altered Confederate flag as the school flag & to also change the color of the mascot's uniform from gray to blue & red."  The mural, presumably, is still there.  The Wikipedia adds, "Today many students still use the Confederate flag to symbolize the school's 'southern culture' with little to no backlash from students or parents. However, South Garland High School & the GISD refuse to recognize the flag. The school still uses the song 'Dixie' as the school's fight song to this day."

My friend, who I hope doesn't mind me sharing this, texted something about those years that may explain why we weren't as horrified when we were students as I imagine you are reading this.  He said, "I just recall high school as being sort of frightening & overwhelming at times & mind-numbingly tedious at other times.  I had no cultural reference points or socialization to prepare me for it."

Me neither.