The Well-Read Red on the Old Mole Variety Hour 6/4/07 Earlier this year, the mainstream press discovered that there are problems with veteran’s health care. The scandal of dilapidated buildings and untreated soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center led to a series of firings and resignations. But, as even the commercial press is aware, being a veteran is still no guarantee of access to health care. Stories reflecting on this fact imply that veterans have an extra claim to medical attention. Perhaps they do, but we should be wary of suggesting that there is anyone who doesn’t have a right to health care.

I was honored to attend a presentation with Oregon Community Foundation last week at which received an unrestricted grant of $25,000. With this gift, OCF will single-handedly make up our membership drive shortfall. This is part of the PGE Multnomah County Charitable Fund of The Oregon Community Foundation which was created as part of a settlement in which PGE also refunded its customers who paid the Multnomah County Business Income Tax. We are thrilled that OCF supports sister organizations like KBOO radio in support of positive change in our communities.

Also thank you to the Corporation For Public Broadcasting.  We just received the final $15,000 reimbursement for our digital transmitter upgrade.  Over the last two years, CPB reimbursed a total of $75,000 in expenses for our digital portion of our transmitter upgrade.  If you upgrade to a digital receiver for your home or car, the station sounds better.

 

This morning I was getting more and more frustrated hearing bits and pieces of the Monica Goodling "testimony" filtering thru the corporate media haze while filling up my tank with $40 worth of gas on the way to do the Dharma Wheel .  All during the 15 minute drive a nagging voice kept asking....isnt it totally frivolous to go spend an hour and a half playing music (even music that is a commentary on our times)?  Shouldnt i be working for REAL change instead?

 And then halfway thru the show the phone rings and a listener lets me know he is really in tune with what I am playing and thanks me and I smile and realize that every revolution needs its art and whats that old saying--:if i cant dance, i dont wanna be a part of your revolution?

 So thanks to the artists who keep putting out the music that I am privledged each week to share with all of you and thank all of you for contributing your energy to this community of people who are helping to make change and and a positive future  together while sharing the transformative power of music and community.

One totally fun moment during our Spring Membership Drive was when my friend Julie Wolffe offered homemade “Amy Goodman Shrinky-Dink refrigerator magnets” as pledge thank-you gifts. When she made the offer, I had to pause for a moment: “Do people even know what Shrinky Dinks are? Would anyone pledge for Amy Goodman refrigerator magnets? What would Amy think of such an offer?”

Like so much here at KBOO, it was an offer from the heart: Julie was making Amy Goodman and James Baldwin magnets at home (as gifts, not for sale) because, as she explained, “They’re my current heroes.”

THIS SHOW INCLUDES WEB-ONLY EXCLUSIVES!!! click here to download.
Dive into classes on medicinal herbs and bicycle maintenance. Hear interviews with Michael Newman, who curates the "Live Journalism and Experts" series at the Waypost and Teri Thomas Peterson of SCRAP (the School and Community Reuse Action Project). Thanks to Brian Kramer for production assistance. Thanks to Levi Cecil for recording help and original music.

The May 16, 2007 show is about Iran. We interveiwed Dr. Catherine Thomasson, President of Physicians for Social Responsibility about the history of US involvement in Iran, and about her recent trip there,  sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation.We also talk to Sorab, editor and founder of Tehran Avenue,  the on-line magazine focusing on issues that official or established media seldom do.

Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility
http://oregonpsr.org

 The Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran  
campaign iran.org/ casmii

The Fellowship of Reconciliation website

http://forusa.org/

American Iranian friendship council

http://www.aifcpdx.org/

Middle East Study Center of Portland state university
www.mesc.pdx.edu

Tehran Avenue
http://tehranavenue.com/

The Well-Read Red on the Old Mole Variety Hour Someone in Washington must have finally taken to heart the bumper sticker that says, “Ok, joke’s over. Bring back the constitution” because there’s now a bill in both houses called the “Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007.”

George Washington inaugurated as 1st president of US

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

--George Washington

 
     
 

Kiss Me Deadly will be playing this coming weekend (April 28th & 29th) as part of the Northwest Film Center’s Film Noir series, “Killer Ladies.” In the 1940s and 50s, Film Noir combined the grim vision of the American hard-boiled detective novel with the dramatic camera angles and lighting of German expressionist cinema, and Kiss Me Deadly is considered a late masterpiece of the genre. Directed in 1955 by Robert Aldrich, the film draws its title, though little else, from a Mickey Spillane book. It opens with a barefoot woman in a trenchcoat stopping a car on a dark road. The hitchhiker, Christina Bailey, played by Cloris Leachman, and the driver, private detective Mike Hammer, played by Ralph Meeker, are themselves stopped by mysterious thugs who torture them and leave them for dead. Mike survives, and his subsequent interrogation by interstate police convinces him that he’s on to something big, and potentially profitable. With the help of his secretary Velda, played by Maxine Cooper, he pursues the secret that Christina was hiding, and along the way encounters her supposed former roommate, Lily Carver, played by Gaby Rogers, as well as an opera singer, an art dealer, a number of boxers, and assorted cops, thugs, and other sadists wielding knives, guns, and hypodermic needles.

Upcoming on Life During Wartime:

April 25th
The Vicious, from Sweden.

May 9th
Pisschrist, from Australia.

May 16th
Sleepwalkers, RIP, from good ol' Portland (ex-Triggers).

August 1st
The Bayonettes, from Toronto.