September 17, 2025 • 49 mins
Margaret talks with Bridget Todd about Jagadish Chandra Bose, the inventor of radio, and Kenneth Rexroth, the poet involved in the creation of public radio.
Sources
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kenneth-rexroth
https://libcom.org/article/rexroth-kenneth-1905-1982
https://www.montecitojournal.net/2023/05/16/kenneth-rexroth-a-poet-of-montecito/
https://www.britannica.com/technology/telegraph
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rescue-development-radio/
https://gizmodo.com/a-magician-used-the-first-pirate-radio-station-to-troll-1681527405
https://www.wshu.org/vintage-radio/2015-12-14/so-what-did-marconi-hear
https://www.orarc.org/?p=2297
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n01/george-woodcock/elegy-for-an-anarchist
https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2022/8/28/kenneth-rexroth/
https://crimethinc.com/2020/12/22/a-poem-by-kenneth-rexroth-painted-across-the-rooftops-of-the-world-on-the-occasion-of-his-birthday
https://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/young/revkyoung.htm
https://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/sf/1961.htm
https://www.literatureandarts.com/kenneth-rexroth/project-four-2h97g
https://www.pgurus.com/multi-faceted-single-minded-nationalist/
https://www.theheritagelab.in/jagadish-bose-home-interior-design-architecture/
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/jagadish-chandra-bose-father-modern-wi-fi
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-thinking-plants-man/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did
Cool Stuff. You're twice a week reminder that when bad
things happened, good things can happen too. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest this week is bridget Ton Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hi, Margaret, thank you so much for having me so
excited to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, on this day, that's totally a different day than
the previous day, as we all, Yeah, what are you
talking about? As we all pretend like nothing and terrible
is happening in the world that it makes it really
hard to do any job. I'm sure whatever job you
have listening to this, I'm sure it's hard for you
to do your job this week, last week, next week.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Any week.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Yeah. But bridget Todd is the host of There Are
No Girls on the Internet and is also cool And
you can go back and listen to a bunch of
episodes that she's been on this show if you want,
you should, you should. Yeah. Our producer this week, actually
always our producer, just not the one who's often on
Mike is Ian. Hi. How are you.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I'm good, glad to be back, Excited to hear more
about public radio and see where this journey takes us
because the first episode was very interesting and so I'm
sure this one will have some surprises as well. So
I'm excited to be back.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
This one is like, well, I'll get to it, okay.
The first we have to thank our audio engineer, Eva.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Hi Eva hi Eva hi Eva.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
And unwomen did our theme music, and this one okay,
But the confession I have to make. I promise you
are going to talk about the development of public radio,
and I will, but I'm not as much focusing on
the history of public radio as much as this one
guy who was part of it in the same way
that last episode was like, well I found this guy
and he does all this stuff and very little of
(01:50):
it is about radio, but he also invented radio. I'm
going to talk about a poet this week.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
There should be big overlap between the poets of the
world and the public radio enthusiast slash officionados of the world.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
There absolutely are. I remember once I was in art
school and my drawing teacher was this cool guy, and
the other students were like, what kind of music do
you listen to? You? And everyone's making guesses, and I
was like, jazz, he listens to jazz. Why is this
a question? And he was like, that's true, that's what
I listened to.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Of course, what else would it be?
Speaker 1 (02:23):
And I'm like, yeah, and that man listens to public radio,
you know, and like probably poetry, which is like I'm
describing a positive arc type of a person, you know,
And we'll kind of be talking about where a lot
of that archetype comes from, not all of it, because
actually only parts of it. Whatever I fell do on
such a deep rabbit hole this week, that this is
(02:45):
where I ended up at the bottom of the rabbit hole.
And that is what this show is is Margaret picks
a topic, falls down rabbit holes, and then stitches together
what is hopefully entertaining and educational. You a big poetry reader,
and bridget I have been.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
I went to grad school for literature, and part of
that was studying a lot of poetry. Oh shit, I've
fallen off of it a bit lately, but there was
a time in my life where poetry was very, very
important to me.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
That's awesome.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Much like any kind of nerdy high school kid who
thought they were super smart.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, I'm going to be talking about one of those
people that nerdy high school kids who are super smart either. Yeah,
my people. Yeah, I really liked poetry in high school,
and then I pretended I didn't like poetry for at
least ten years because I didn't want to read my
friend's poetry.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Oh was it bad? Were you worried it was going
to be bad?
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah, Because like anytime a friend is like, hey, look
at this piece of art I made, You're now stuck
in a situation where you have to lie, tell the truth,
or get lucky and like it.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Those are you only like do you want to be
a good friend or do you want to be honest?
And it's a conundrum, right, I love that.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Liking it is like you might hit the jackpod and
get lucky on a gamble and think it's not bad.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, totally. And that's what poetry is like for me,
is that I think most poetry is not exciting to me,
but then it's funny because like recently, I've just been
more and more like, now that is really good poetry.
It's been meaning a lot to me.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Again, do you have a favorite poet?
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Oh, lord, do I have a favorite poet? Like right now,
literally I just read a bunch of poems by the
subject of today's episode, and so I'm going to say
him right now, but that's not true in a broader sense.
I just can't ever remember. It's like when I'm on
tour with books and people are like, what other books
do you like? And I'm like, I've never heard of
a book.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
I've never read a book in my life. Yeah, you
turn into Sarah Palin being asked what newspapers she reads
all of them? Everyone, Yeah, I can't think of a
single one right now.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yeah. I like the poetry that's poetic. I don't know.
Do you have a favorite poet?
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Ooh. I will say a poet that was very important
and meaningful to me when I was in high school
with E. Cummings, And so if you would have asked
me in high school, I probably would have said Cummings.
Today I would say Nikki Giovanni. She was a poet.
My parents were very into. She passed away recently. I
am obsessed with her. She has a thug life tattoo
on her arm despite being a little old lady.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Oh fuck yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
And fun fact, she tried to prevent the Virginia Tech
massacre from happening, but she was ignored because she's a
black woman. And if they had listened to her, it
might not have happened. Fun fact, a poet who tried
to prevent a school shooting.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Oh my god, I'm like, do I need to deep
dive this person for an episode?
Speaker 2 (05:26):
She's just an interesting poet.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Yeah, fair enough, Okay. Andrea Gibson is a poet who
died recently who I really liked the poetry of. And
in high school my English teacher got me to read
Langston Hughes and it like changed the way I perceive
a lot of things and that was really useful to me.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Hughes is one of my favorite poets as well. I've
often said that any feeling that I have ever had
and tried to convey in words, Hughes has already had
that and done a better job of conveying it in
words than I ever would be able to do.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Yeah, you have you ever heard of Kenneth Rexroth?
Speaker 2 (06:04):
I have not.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
You read The Beats much, so.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
It's funny that you say this. I just had an
argument about the Beats after watching the movie Inherent Vice,
which is a movie version of a beat novel. I
have a hot take about the Beats. I think that
other than so, the poetry this is only for the fiction,
and I guess some of the nonfiction. I think that
people who say that they like long works of the
(06:29):
beat writers are lying, Like because I was talking to
somebody and I was like, you've never read Inherent Vice.
Come on, genuinely go back to some of that beat
writing and try to read it and tell me that
it's something that you're enjoying, understanding, resonating with you. I
challenge you. I challenge you.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
When I was like a young hitchhiking, train hopping anarchist
or whatever, people kept being like, oh, wow, your life
is just like on the Road. And I never read
On the Road. And I had this like oppositional like
no way, that guy's fucking like, fuck that guy. And
then I was in this tree set for a couple
of days and literally the only book was On the Road,
(07:11):
and I tried to read it, and then I stared
at the sky for three days instead.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Margaret, I have also tried to read it because I
wanted to be when I was in high school. Of course,
I wanted to be able to say it's my favorite book, right,
I will own could not make it through it. Yeah,
people who say that, they're like, oh, I read this
and I really found a lot of profoundness in it.
I challenge you, because I feel like they got the gist,
but they have not actually set down and done a
real deep read.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah, well you know who else? This isn't an ad break?
Do you know? Holts did not like the Beats? Who
the godfather of the Beats, Kenneth Rexroth, the guy I'm
going to talk about today.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Like the inventor of the movement, was like, I'm good.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Yeah, Like he's the guy who like set up the
literary salons that they came and spoke at and like
put his own cred on the line to like get
them promoted. And then he was like, honestly, these are
all a bunch of posers.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Him and me both feel that way. Another one Naked Lunch.
Find me somebody who has actually read Naked Lunch, and
I won't show you a liar.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
I'm trying to read Naked Lunch so many times because yeah,
this is who I wanted to be. I wanted to
be like Burrows. Yeah all right, I keep running across
this thing in history where the radical literary figures are
the main inspiration for the figures who come after them.
Like you have someone who's super radical and they'll be
really important to a bunch of people who are less
(08:40):
radical who get way more famous. And Kenneth Rexroth might
be the ultimate example of this because he is much
more interesting to me. And actually I won't even want
to say all of the Beats, because there's people associated
with that movement who actually think are really interesting. I
think people call Dan the Prima a beat, but I
can't remember. Anyway. Whatever this makes it sound like I
(09:02):
knew everything about poetry, I do not. Kenneth Rexroth was
born in Indiana in nineteen oh five to a radical
family in the US tradition, which is to say, his
family going back a couple generations used labels like feminist, abolitionist, freethinker, socialist,
and anarchist. But he was orphaned at age twelve, and
(09:24):
he grew up in Chicago, surrounded by all the cool
bohemian artsy types in Chicago at the time. He didn't
really bother to do the school thing, but he instead
taught himself a whole bunch of languages and then if
you want to check off some cool people, bingo, if
you have your Bingo card out. He joined the industrial
workers of the world. The IWW, the union that ends
(09:45):
up interwoven into like half of the history if it's
about nineteen oh six to nineteen thirty.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
I've heard you mention it many times.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yeah, totally, rex Rof. He was a wobbly, which is
the word for someone who's in this to the end
of his days. Rex Roth often opened his letters with
the sort of cliche IWW salutation dear fellow worker. Later,
he talked about maybe one of his earliest experiences of
class based on his youth, in a poem from nineteen
(10:17):
fifty six called Portrait of the Author as a young Anarchist.
I'm going to read a little bit of this poem.
There were two classes of kids, and they had nothing
in common. The rich kids who worked as caddies and
the poor kids who snitched golf balls. I belonged to
the saving group of exceptionalists who after dark and on
rainy days stole out and shat in the golf holes.
(10:45):
Pretty good. Yeah, So that's the kind of kid he was.
He's like those two kinds of kids. There's the rich
ones and the poor ones, and then there's us. So
this orphan who teaches himself a bunch of languages, becomes
a hobo for a while. He works all sorts of
odd labor jobs including cowboy cook, cowboy farmer Forrester, toothbrush maker,
(11:06):
diet pamphlet seller, and deckhand.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Wow, that's quite the range.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah, fortunately, and again it's not an ad break. I
think we have diet pills banned from our shows, so
I can't say I have that one in common with him.
I actually have, uh, none of these in common with him.
But he deckhanded his way over to France pretty early
on in his life, and there he met a political exile,
(11:33):
a recurring character on the show, Alexander Berkman, who is
an anarchist, mostly famous these days for being the sometimes
spurned lover of Emma Goldman, a more famous like birth
control pioneer anarchist, but he was more famous at the time.
And I think part of why he was living in
France is because he spent a bunch of years in
prison because he absolutely shot and stabbed a strike breaking
(11:56):
industrialist named Henry Clayfrick. Betah, I know. Unfortunately Frick survived
both being tabbed and shot.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Unfortunate.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Yeah, little Johnny live a lot over here.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
I know, anyway, So rex Roth meets this would be assassin.
He's probably one of his heroes AND's you know, written
a lot of books about anarchism and stuff, and Berkman
is like, don't just become another fucking expatriot in Paris.
What the fuck? And so he's like, all right. So
(12:30):
he goes home to Chicago, and I feel like that
was like good lesson moment. And so he gets married
when he's back in Chicago. And as always, when I
talk about famous men who dated women, the women are
left out of the story and I have to dig
incredibly hard to find who they interacted with and how
they treated those people. Rex Roth is tricky to understand
(12:53):
his relationship to women. Best as I can tell, he
is bisexual and promiscuous. One friend said about him, he'd
fuck a snake if it would hold still.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
I love that his friends were like, oh, very promiscuous, Yeah,
like that being a notable thing is I like that?
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Yeah? And it's like one of those things where like
that can go okay, and that can go really badly
in terms of a quality of person right, And I
can't tell. Rex Roth himself once complained that he might
have permanently damaged his own mouth and throat by fucking,
which I think means this guy sucked a prodigious amount
of dick. Sounds like it, Yeah, yeah, just a prodigious amount.
(13:38):
He got married four times in his life, always to women.
One of his wives would leave him and claim gross
abuse in the divorce papers. She left him for the
married marriage counselor that the pair of them were seen,
so him and his wife went to go to marriage counseling,
and then his wife left him, and the marriage counselor
(14:01):
left his wife and they got married.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Messy, messy, messy.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Right, Which doesn't mean that she's lying about how rex
Roth treated her, but it sure is messy. I think
he saw his partners as his partners. He seemed to
be genuinely kinder and more supportive of women in general,
not just women he wanted to fuck, than he was
of men. Like there was this thing when people would
talk about him and they were like, he was like
(14:28):
Caddie and he would always talk shit on men, and
he would like, you know, if a man wasn't in
the room, he'd be like, oh fuck that guy, blah
blah blah, And he like never talks shit about women, and.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Notably, it sounds like not just the women that he
was sexually asstreacted to, just women generally.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah, that's the best I can figure out. There is
a biography of him that was written that is very
negative about the way he treats women, but then a
bunch of people who knew him wrote like long, piece
by piece responses. I spent way more time this week
about how this man treated women, and I'm left with
(15:04):
I don't know. I suspect he's one of those people
who's like, I love sex, I love women, I don't
always treat them right, but I also like care. He
was an active part of the feminist movement in the
forties and fifties.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
I feel like anybody who is in a leftist or
socially social justice inclined space in their life knows that
kind of guy. Yeah, I definitely I know that guy.
I've been mixed up with that guy before.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
I know. I think he's not the really bad version
of that guy, but he's the other version of that guy. Yeah,
that's my guess.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
They're always charming, that guy.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Yeah, he might have sucked a date. He spent his
entire life translating women poets that was like his main
thing he did was translate women into English. I don't know.
That's my big takeaway is I don't know. But do
you know what I do know that I have very
little control over the advertisers who hypotize on this show.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Except for diet stuff. If you hear one of those,
that's true.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
There's a couple categories that you shouldn't hear, and if
you do, it's a problem. But here's the ads and
we're back. So young Kenneth Rexroth and his wife moved
to San Francisco in nineteen twenty seven, when Kenneth is
twenty two years old. When he gets there, he starts
(16:26):
working to help organize the dock workers. And then the
New Deal came around and it hired out of work
writers to write travel guides, and so this young anarchist
is hired to write the official travel guide to San
Francisco in California for the US government. And I actually
think this might be one of these strange little moments
(16:48):
in history with a huge outsized effect because Kenneth Rexroth,
the pacifist, anarchist, feminist who is really into spirituality in
class war becomes one of the most important cultural figures
in San Francisco history. He is literally writing the book
about it in the thirties, and so it helps set
(17:09):
up the culture, the like cool literary artsy queer, et
cetera culture of the Bay. This hobo kid is part
of the reason that that happens, as far as I
can tell.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
And if they had gotten someone different to write that,
I mean, right, would our entire understanding of that time
and place be completely different?
Speaker 1 (17:31):
I know. But then it's really funny, right because this
like really liberal, cool little town also gives us Silicon Valley, right,
and so like maybe the world would be better, but
it's just been another like normal ass town with normal
ass politics.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
That's like, that is so funny of that one decision.
What were the reverberations throughout history? Like like what did
it get us today? That's so funny, and you.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Know, and there's all these other things that were like
causing San Francisco to have that culture for him to
write about it, but he's emphasizing this part of it,
and he's also going to later do a lot of
the organizing that is going to make the literary renaissance
of San Francisco happen. And he was not subtle about
his politics. He was not just a like, I'm kind
of progressive. He once wrote, quote, the socialist and trade
(18:19):
union movements in the West have functioned, in reality, not
just as governors to ensure that steam is let off
when the pressure gets too high, not just as what
are now called fail safe devices, though they are certainly that,
but as essential parts of the motive organization of capitalism.
More in other words, like the carburetors that ensure they'll
be just the right mixture of fuel and air for
(18:40):
each new demand of the engine. Wow. So he's like, Ah,
these like socialists and trade unions aren't radical enough. Fuck them,
like not.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
To you find a point on it.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yeah, But during World War Two, the stuff he does
here is actually the reason I was like, Oh, this
guy's going to be the person talk about and the
first part of it, it's like, fine, whatever. He's like,
I'm not into the whole war thing. I'm a pacifist,
and this is ideologically consistent. He refuses to join. He's
a conscientious objector. I have no problem with the US
entry in World War two and killing the Nazis. This
(19:13):
seems like one of the few things that it's like
this in the Civil War, the two things that I
can point at the US government and being like, well
they were on the right side of that one, got
that one right, Yeah, But he registers as a conscientious objector.
He does his service as an aid in a psychiatric
ward instead of the military. And then during the war,
he and his wife, I believe his second wife, a
(19:35):
nurse named Marie, did about the most base thing that
the two white people in San Francisco can do, which
is that they worked tirelessly and endlessly to help Japanese
Americans in the wake of the incredible racism and the
whole concentration camp thing. He didn't just write about it
as a problem, though, that would have been leaps and
(19:55):
bounds better than most white people at the time, who
were like, ah, this is great. You know. They noticed
that racism was on the rise before the concentration camps opened,
and they befriended Japanese Americans to ask them how to help,
and were like, what do you all need? Once the
camps opened, the two of them coordinated with imprisoned Japanese
(20:16):
librarians to open libraries in the camps. They collected Japanese
language books to get them into the camps for the
first generation immigrants. And this was like a huge uphill
fight because like every single time they get Japanese books
into the camps, the guards would be like, oh, it's
written in Japanese, it has to get thrown out. We're
shitty racists, you know, and they would keep doing it.
(20:38):
They would also show up with supplies again and again.
At the local camp. Marie volunteered as a nurse because
the medical clinics were run by the Japanese internees with
fucking prisoners, and so she would show up and help them.
And when he wrote about the place, he called them
concentration camps, which was like no one was doing at
the time. And then the two of them just helped
(21:01):
people just not go to the concentration camps. Most of
this was legal work. The Army was overwhelmed. So the
rex Ross went up and were like, Hey, you're kind
of overwhelmed anyway, what if we get your internees educational
passes to go out of the camp and go to
art school in Chicago. The Army was like, yeah, whatever,
(21:22):
just kind of wild, and so they helped dozens of
people get into the Midwest Art Academy of Chicago, and
they would drive them to the train station and shit,
and they would hold onto their belongings while they were gone.
And like their house was just I think it just
was basically a storage unit for people who were fucking
imprisoned or like escaping imprisonment. Another one of their friends
(21:46):
they just straight up helped evade capture, like there was
like a guy they were trying to catch, or a
person they were trying to catch. It actually their gender
wasn't noted and the piece that I read, and so
they gave their friend contacts out east with people to
lay low with and then held onto all their stuff,
which is what you should do if, for some weird
reason you live in a version of the United States
that has concentration camps where people are interned because of
(22:08):
their country of origin. You help people.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, I mean I can't imagine that being something we
would have to deal with or think about today, but
if it were, that would be good advice.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Right, totally, exactly like history is so wild. People had
such different things to deal with me too, God damn it.
And yeah, this is what the rex Roths do during
World War two. And this is where Kenneth rex Roth.
I know some negative stuff about Nneth Rexroth.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
I mean he founds like the kind of person who
might not text you back.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Yeah totally. So, first of all, he's like, I found
a snake. Sorry you're out of the picture.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
I got snake plans tonight, Like, don't call me.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
He just texts back the emoji of.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
A snake, and you already know that's all he needs
to say.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Yeah, totally. So he's also one one of the proto
white people getting proto hippies into like Eastern spirituality and culture,
and he comes at it I think earnestly. He is
a like lifelong Buddhist, and he is like one of
(23:15):
the main translators of women poets from China and Japan
into English, and he's like friends with folks and helping
them evade capture and all of these things. By my
read as a white person, it seems like he has
kind of done the work where he's like, I am
genuinely interested in this stuff. But he is one of
the people who introduces the like thing that becomes like
(23:39):
pop Buddhism, you know. And then possibly the most fucked
up thing I know about him doing is that At
one point he wrote a forgery pretending to be an
Asian woman of like poetry, where he was like, look
at this new book of poetry I translated and he
just had written it himself.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Oh no, yeah, that's no good.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Uh well all right, yeah, I know, I know.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Nobody bats a thousand.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Yeah, totally. After the war, you have all of these exiles,
like the surrealists, especially the more radical surrealists have like
fled Europe because of the war, and so all of
these like anarchist surrealists are in the Bay and he
helps run a magazine with them, and then he sets
up what later becomes the San Francisco Libertarian Circle. And
(24:24):
this is in the older use of that word of libertarian.
This is not what we would call libertarian. That it's
a word that the capitalists stole from anarchists. They like literally,
there's a quote I can't remember which guy it is,
one of the founders of libertarianism, probably Rothbard, has a
quote where he is like, we got one of their words.
It's ours now.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Ugh, of course totally fine to just say that.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Explicitly, yeah, exactly. And so the San Francisco Libertarian Circle,
it helps escape to Italian and Spanish anarchists, as well
as the conscientious objectors who are finally being released from
prison at the end of the war. This kind of
becomes more of a literary salon type thing. And at
these meetings he always cooked for them. He was, by
(25:07):
all accounts a fantastic cook, so he's willing to do,
you know, reproductive labor. He wrote about these salons and
his autobiography quote the place was always crowded, and when
the topic of the conversation of the evening was sex
and anarchy, you couldn't get in the doors. People were
standing on one another's shoulders, and we had to have
(25:27):
two meetings. The overflow in the downstairs meeting hall.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Tell me that doesn't sound like a good time. I know,
you know, a bunch of freaking promiscuous weirdos getting together
and talking about anarchy.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
I met a time with had Yeah, it's certain. And
this is kind of what led to the beat movement.
The younger artists in that circle spun off into the beats,
and Kenneth Rexroth gets called the godfather of the beats,
and he was like ran the literary salon where how
was read by Ginsburg for the first time, and he
(26:04):
resented being called the godfather of the Beats, because he
was pretty soon accurately calling them hipsters who were adopting
the pose of being counterculture without committing to actually confronting
the system and building a better world.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
I agree with him. I don't think he's wrong. I
think that I agree with that take.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Yeah, And it's interesting because most versions of this that
I've read have been like, oh, he's just jealous, And
he probably was jealous. But the historian George Woodcock was
friends with him and wrote about him quote more than
any other individual, he was responsible for the San Francisco
literary renaissance of the forties and fifties, though lesser men
(26:43):
like Lawrence Ferlingetti and Gregory Corso reaped most of the
credit for his endeavors. Most versions of the story say
that Rexroth was basically just jealous, but Woodcock goes on
at length to say that rex Roth was not the
jealous sort about other writers, and that he always offered
his full throated support of younger writers, including ones that
(27:03):
were more successful than him, as long as he actually
approved of them. But he fucking hated at least half
the Beats, so he was like, Nah, fuck these people.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah, I mean, it just goes to show how even
back then, just saying somebody was jealous is such a
easy thing to say. And it sounds like he genuinely
was like, Oh, I support writers who I think are good,
but if I don't think they're good, I'm not going
to support them. And I don't think a lot of
y'all are good.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Yeah, totally. And he's like known for being kind of
especially as he gets older, he's like known for being
that kind of grouch who's like says it like it
is or whatever the fuck. You know, it can go
any which way, whether that that's a good personality trade
or not. I genuinely don't know whether I would have
loved this man or hated him. I can't.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
I already know I would have. I would have gotten
mixed up with him, for sure. I already know this
is you. You're basically describing my type. I know, I
already know. I'm glad you have some ambiguity, but I'm not.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Yeah, I think when I was like a twenty year old, like,
I think I would have hated him. And I think
five years earlier and ten years later, I would have
liked him, but I don't know, and despite okay, but
then it's funny. Despite being part of this counterculture, he's
no beatnik himself. He's not subcultural himself, and he at
(28:15):
one point demanded that his daughter only date a man
whose shirtcuffs could button and who could cook a good
meal while wearing formal wear.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Oh, I feel like that's sort of good advice. But
it's interesting how he's like, Oh, I'm around all of
these like dirty hippie beatnick types. I don't want that
for my kid. You got to marry a dude with
a job.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Yeah, totally, absolutely, And also like even being like he
can cook a good meal wearing formal wear is like
kind of like he knows how to dress up for you,
and he like, also, isn't gonna make you doing all
the cooking. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how
his daughter felt about this advice. I like, I don't know.
And when you asked me earlier who some of my
(28:54):
favorite poets are. I read a bunch of his poetry
for this, and I haven't read all of this poetry yet,
and I'm gonna read more of it and maybe i'll
like do a follow up episode where I'm like, Rex
Rothel was a terrible man. I don't know, but like
I read a lot of his poetry for this, and
some of it is some of my favorite poetry about.
There's this thing that I've talked about a lot on
the show where you had this moment in the early
twentieth century of this huge movement for leftism and for
(29:16):
anarchism and for all of these these things that are happening,
and then it started to die away, and by the
end of World War II a lot of it was
dead for a while, right, And so you have this
generation of people feeling this incredible loss that they like
had given their lives to something and it didn't stick.
(29:37):
And he writes about that better than anyone I've ever read.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
I need to read that.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Well, I'm going to read you part of it. This
particular poem is full of gendered language. I love it anyway.
It's from a poem called for Eli Jacobson. I assume
that's someone he was friends with who died. I'm cutting
little bits of it to make it slightly shorter. We
believed we would see with our o own eyes the
new world where man was no longer wolf to man.
(30:04):
But men and women were all brothers and lovers together.
We will not see it, none of us. It is
farther off than we thought. It does not matter. We
were comrades together. Life was good for us. It is
good to be brave. Nothing is better, food tastes better,
wine is more brilliant, girls are more beautiful. The sky
(30:27):
is bluer. If the good days never come, we will
not know. We will not care. Our lives were the best.
We were the happiest men alive in our day.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
That's so beautiful. Something about hearing that now especially is
really pointing here, Margaret, you have such a beautiful I
can tell that you spend time reading. You bring such
a gravitass to those words. That's very moving.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Thank you. This one fucked me up, Like there's one more.
I'm going to read another excerpt, but like reading is
like it. It was like yeah, like it's so hard
sometimes looking at how bad shit is getting, especially when
shit starts looking really bad right after we start seeing
things look really good, you know, and starting to be like, oh, us,
(31:18):
fighting to make things really good is worth it, no
matter what it is worth it, whether or not the
good days come, like just the whole, like it is
good to be brave. Nothing is better. It's just like
it fucks me up. I love it.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
I mean I think, I mean not to get off
on like everything, but I fight this urge of giving
into the idea that all of the good times we're
gonna have are behind us and nothing will ever be
done again. Absolutely, that poem speaks to that instinct that
you know why in a kind of way, it's so
(31:53):
important to fight that urge, Yeah, and focus on like
what we do have right now, yeah, which is being brave.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
No, it's true. And because the other thing that I
think about a lot is that like we can't present
like we've lost. We haven't, Like it's an ongoing fight.
We kind of can't lose permanently, right, We also kind
of can't win permanently, But we can't lose permanently. There
will always be people fighting for a better world. Like
they literally can't kill us all because if they did that,
(32:22):
their own kids would turn into us, you know, well
in some context and not other context. But like, I've
been thinking about this a lot, right because there's a
lot of with the news happening this week, which again
you could be listening at any point in the future,
and you'll be like, ah, yes, the news this week.
It's like really easy to get caught up. I see
people posting a lot of like this is it. It's bad.
(32:43):
Everyone should just be scared, and you're like, well, we
should probably be scared, because you have to be scared
to be brave. But like, we do have each other.
We can try and do something about this, and bravery
is a choice we can make, you know, and it
I don't know whatever. Anyway, I don't want to totally
soapbox this. I just I it's been on my mind
a lot.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Thank you for reading that. That really speaks to me.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Thank you. I'm gonna read one more excerpt, and this
one I'm partly reading it because the title of this
poem is like two of the episodes of this show
crammed into one title, which is from the Paris Commune
to the Kronstat Rebellion. Ooh really, yeah, they shall rise up, heroes.
(33:30):
There will be many, none will prevail against them. At last,
they will go saying each I am one of many.
Their hands empty save for history. They die at bridges,
bridge gates and drawbridges. Remember now, there were others. Before
the sepulchers are full at Ford and Bridgehead, there will
be children with flowers there, and lambs and golden eyed
(33:52):
lions there, and people remembering in the future.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
That last line, people remembering in the future. I mean,
isn't that what we're fighting for. Isn't that what this
is all about? You know?
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah? And that like their hands empty save for history.
Like the thing that we are bringing to this fight
is that we come from something and are part of something,
you know.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
And that we we were talking in the previous episode
about how these things are so tenuous and worth fighting for.
But like the importance of telling those stories accurately. Even
if they don't have them in the history books, people
aren't learning about them in school. We can always do
what we can to make sure folks know that this
is our history, our shared, messy, complicated, beautiful history together.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Yeah, totally. And it even helps to remember that they're
also all fuck ups, right, Yeah, because you don't have
to be like, oh, I once did something that wasn't great,
like fucking.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
All out here fucking snakes just like the rest of us.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Totally just the snake fucker's a history making the world
a better place for most people. Yea, and yeah, so
the this guy he sets up the literary salon with
other people. In his sixties, he moves to Santa Barbara
and tries his hand at teaching. He's kind of avoided
academia until then, but by his seventies he's like, now
(35:10):
fuck this, and he goes back to doing what he loved.
He's actually he's one of the originators as far as
I can tell. Oh, this is one of those things
where I'm like, I sort of assume black people did
this first, but I could be wrong. He traveled around
and read poetry accompanied by jazz musicians, and he's seen
as like one of the people who sort of brought
that idea around. But I don't know it specifically said
he's the guy who did this, and I just always
(35:31):
have a skepticism. But now he's connecting in his seventies
with something he did fifty years earlier when he was
like twenty in Chicago. That's kind of cool. That's a
kind of a nice way to end your life.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
You know.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
He'd been a Buddhist for a very long time, and
then on the Easter before he died, he converted to
Catholicism without abandoning Buddhism or anarchism. As far as I
can tell.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
It just was like Buddhist, anarchist Catholic.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Sure, yeah, why not? And I think it's interesting last
week when I talked about her a couple weeks ago,
at some point I talked about the socialist photographer. Oh
you remember, you were talking about air, the weird air
people who go around hot air balloons and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
So I ended up talking about this photographer who invented
a ton of new types of photography called Na Dare,
(36:20):
whose socialism is completely forgotten about, who helped Paris during
the siege of Paris and the invented air mail by
taking balloons out of the city with letters in them.
And he is the person who was like an important
photographer artist. He was literally one of the first Bohemians,
(36:41):
well besides people from Bohemia, which is an actual place,
So being a Bohemian is one of the first examples
of cultural appropriation of a name by Western people, even
though the Bohemia is a white place, but it's an
Eastern European place. Anyway, I did not know this. Yeah,
it's part of I think the Czech Republic now and
at least I have been to Bohemia, and it was
in the Czech Republic. I don't know if it continues elsewhere. Anyway,
(37:01):
In the eighteen forties, thirties and forties there were the
first Bohemians and they were like hobo radical traveling around,
sleeping under bridges, making art, being weird hippies, right, And
he was one of the very first original Bohemians. And
he then and I can use him to connect the
revolutions of eighteen forty eight to the Impressionists, because he's
(37:24):
the one who his salon or his gallery maybe a studio,
was the first place to have an Impressionist exhibit. And
I think it's cool that I can now then do
the same thing one hundred years later, where I can
connect to Chicago wobbly hobo, who witnessed the end of
the classical era of socialism and anarchism, organized the first
(37:45):
exhibition of the Beat poets.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
That is so cool.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Yeah. As for what that has to do with radio,
I'll tell you. After these ads, I.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Forgot that that was what we were talking about er back.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
So there is more to tell about the history of
public radio that I want to learn, and I just
have so much time in my life and I want
to try and get things right instead of doing a
really glossing over stuff. But rex Roth and the people
around him, especially the other Pacifists who he was part
of the same social circles as, were essential to the
(38:28):
birth of public radio because they founded a radio station
that is still around today that some of my friends
have work on. It's KPFA ninety four point one on
your FM dial in the San Francisco Bay area. It's
part of the slightly broader PACIFICA Radio network. Have you
heard of PACIFICA Radio?
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Oh? I know PACIFICA very well. Shout out to PACIFICA.
I used to give them lots of money.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Fuck yeah. Whenever I hear the first, I'm always like,
is at the first in America? Is at the first
in the world? I don't know right, but either in
nineteen forty eight or nineteen forty nine I have read both,
they start at PACIFICA Radio. Theodore Rojak wrote in an
Anarchy magazine in the nineties, I think says quote the
(39:12):
first PACIFICA station, KPFA, which broadcasts like BBC local radio
on a UHF signal, was founded in nineteen forty eight
in Berkeley, California, by a group of local citizens, mainly
pacifists and anarchists. Its first station manager was a guy
named Lou Hill, who was a pacifist and if you
want to check off another mark on your cool zone,
(39:33):
bingo a quaker. They formed Pacifica Radio to finance the
whole thing, and it's also still around today. And the
idea that they had was a magazine of the airwaves,
supported by subscribers. And it's funny because like reading that,
I was like, oh, that makes sense, it's a radio magazine.
(39:53):
But all clicked together when I finally read that. I
don't know how much it is these days. It started
at twelve dollars a year with discounts for students, and
then soon those fifteen dollars a year. But you also
clearly don't have to subscribe, right, Like it's on the airwaves.
You can just pick it up.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
If anybody lives in the DMV area. WPFW is a
Pacifica station. They've got them all. You can just like
listen to it even today.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Yeah, it's such a cool model, and I see why
it's like it's hard. It's a hard model. For them
to get to do, but also like any media organization
that started in nineteen forty eight that's still around is succeeding.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
Yeah, they clearly are doing something right.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Yeah. By the early sixties, they set up sister stations,
and I think the first ones are in LA and
New York. And because they were responsible only to their listeners,
to their subscribers, they were able to play things over
the airwaves that other stations would bulk at. And not
just like edgy politics, although obviously they're more capable of
doing that, but they can do longer form stuff. They
(41:00):
can be like, you know, we don't have to just
do like the three minute version of something. We can
do the sixty minute version. We can do the sixty
three and a half minute version of something, and we
can have more diverse points of view. When they first launched,
they were able to pay their workers through the subscription model,
but tenuously so, and I think they invented this, but
(41:22):
I could be wrong. Marathon broadcast fundraisers.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
I associate that with like PBS, but they were doing
it first.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Right because PBS didn't exist yet shame of course, So
they would do marathon broadcast fundraisers that I think they
invented to cover the gap between the subscription costs and
their operating expenses, and then by doing that, they also
realized that they had some of their most creative content
(41:50):
was the subscription like fundraisers, and volunteerism was an essential
part of it, with most people chipping in unpaid. And
this was seen it's kind of one of these things
that like, our attitude around this is like shifted a lot,
you know. It's like the like amateurism of the Olympics
was seen as this important part of the Olympics, whereas
eventually people were like, yeah, but what about people who
(42:11):
weren't born rich, who like need to get paid to.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Do it if I want to do it, but I
can't do it for free because I have the need
to eat and pay rent.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
Yeah, totally. Now, if we all teamed up with some
amateur landlords and some amateur restaurants and some amateur like
get a.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Whole amateur society.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Thing going, I think it's called communism, and you do that,
but you know whatever, And so volunteerism, like rex Roth
talks very positively about the volunteerism that made pacifica radio happen,
and I like don't know one way or the other,
but I'm personally glad that a lot of our culture
has moved to like the kind of fuck you pay me,
like in order for people to create radical content or
(42:50):
do things like that. But of course I say that,
and you know it's complicated. And rex Roth contributed content
to Pacifica every week, and his circle was a huge
part of its founding. Early PACIFICA Radio included Paul Goodman,
who's the philosopher of the New West. And there's Alan Watts,
who was the anarchist who introduced Buddhism to the hippies.
(43:12):
And I'm sorry. And Kennis Rexroth wrote about Pacifica nineteen
sixty one, quote it is a non commercial, educational FM
station owned and operated by Pacifica Foundation, a democratically run,
more or less cooperative board of local leaders of every variety,
united largely by their sense of community responsibility. He also wrote, quote,
(43:36):
more than any other factor, it is KPFA that has
set the character of San Francisco culture in the post
war period. And so again that influence, like I read
a bunch about like they were hugely important during the
sixties movements like the anti war movements. They were kind
of one of the only places you could get real
(43:57):
news about what was happening in Vietnam and the United States.
In nineteen ninety six, they gave us democracy.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Now, I don't know if you're gonna get into this,
but like, I'm a big Carlin fan. They had the
whole I think in the seventies, like they aired a
and fact check this, but they aired an uncensored Carlin
special and it was like meant to be like indecent,
and they took it all the way up to the
Supreme Court, and it was this like foundational thing of
(44:28):
free speech and like what you could say over the radio.
I find this to be so fascinating. And like you,
if you didn't have Pacifica Radio setting up shop, you
would not have any kind of situation where it's like
leftist folks trying to set up their own conglamorates. So
like Air America Radio probably wouldn't exist. That's why we
have Mark Marin. Like so many things down the line
(44:49):
of history exist because of PACIFICA Radio really setting this
standard very early. It genuinely is such a cool history.
Speaker 1 (44:57):
Yeah, no, that's amazing. I honestly, like I basically was like, oh,
I ran time to go any further with this. At
this point, there's so much more I want to know
about public radio, and like, yeah, it seems obvious in
retrospect that it came from radicals, right and PACIFICA radio.
I just assumed it was from low West coast, so
it is the Pacific Ocean. But like, in retrospect, I'm like,
(45:18):
it's probably because of Pacifism, you know.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
I feel like on this show, it's always like, oh,
the Pacifists, we're doing something and it's cool.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
I know, I know, And every now and then you're like, okay, Pacifists.
Sometimes people need to shoot the Nazis in World War Two,
I'm discussing Europe. But god, yeah, anyway, that's what I got.
It's some of the history of public radio. You know.
I think I probably could have done this with a
bunch of the founders. Is tie them into these things
(45:47):
where it's like it's not coming out of nowhere, it's
coming out of this like you know, it's like through
him being part of the IWW, I can tie him
to Lucy Parsons, who was born enslaved and is like
one of the founders of the labor movement in the
United States, you know, and it's like, we can make
these direct through lines to now to the things that
(46:10):
are happening now, and that pacifica radio still exists, and
we come from somewhere and that just means so much
to me.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
We come from somewhere. That's such a beautiful way to
put it. Yeah, folks should support media like this, like
I think. I mean, it sounds so silly to say
now more than ever, but these things are tenuous and
it's just so cool that what you've just described, like
WPFW is the preset radio station in my car. Oh cool,
next time I get in my car, it'll be playing.
(46:38):
It's like, the reason why that is the case is
because of all of this history that came before. I
just find it so so beautiful.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
Yeah, well, you got anything you want to plug.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
You can listen to my podcast. There are no girls
on the internet. Yeah. Also, I should have said this
last time. You should support statehood for DC, and you
should check out Free DC and Harriet's Waldest Dreams and
any other folks who are doing cool work to fight
for the self determination of the residents of the District
of Columbia, of which there are more than half a million.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Of us speaking of a now more than ever, like
it must be such a like, you know, statehood for
DC is like always made sense because there's people who
live there, right and the whole taxation with that representation thing,
but like, yeah, now more than ever, you know, like, oh,
a loophole that was left in the government that everyone's like, ah, no,
(47:28):
one's going to take advantage of that.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
Don't even get me started, Mark Lord.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Well, you have a recent episode of it could happen here. Well,
I guess it's actually a couple weeks older. I do.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
We're actually Garrison and I are going to do another
sort of thirty years of our thirty years Scott thirty days.
That was a slip. It feels like thirty years. About
thirty days since Trump announced the takeover of DC's police force,
et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, so I don't know when
a layer, but it depending on when you're listening. You
(48:00):
could listen to that.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Cool, what do I want to plug? I have a substack.
I write almost every week, and I actually wrote a
longer piece, not longer, it's actually shorter than the script,
but I wrote more about some of this poetry and
kind of my feelings about reading Rexroth and all of
that stuff. And you can check that out for free
on my substack, which is Marto Kildoid at substock dot com.
(48:24):
Ian you got anything you want to.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
Plug, Yeah, just check out all the feeds for all
of our sub series within it could happen here, including
cool Zone Media book Club. You can now find dedicated
feeds for all those subshows. And yeah, just you know,
keep fighting the good fight.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
Hell yeah, all right, see y'all next week.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
Bye bye bye.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
Mm hmm
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did
Cool Stuff. You're twice a week reminder that when bad
things happened, good things can happen too. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest this week is bridget Ton Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hi, Margaret, thank you so much for having me so
excited to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, on this day, that's totally a different day than
the previous day, as we all, Yeah, what are you
talking about? As we all pretend like nothing and terrible
is happening in the world that it makes it really
hard to do any job. I'm sure whatever job you
have listening to this, I'm sure it's hard for you
to do your job this week, last week, next week.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Any week.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Yeah. But bridget Todd is the host of There Are
No Girls on the Internet and is also cool And
you can go back and listen to a bunch of
episodes that she's been on this show if you want,
you should, you should. Yeah. Our producer this week, actually
always our producer, just not the one who's often on
Mike is Ian. Hi. How are you.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I'm good, glad to be back, Excited to hear more
about public radio and see where this journey takes us
because the first episode was very interesting and so I'm
sure this one will have some surprises as well. So
I'm excited to be back.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
This one is like, well, I'll get to it, okay.
The first we have to thank our audio engineer, Eva.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Hi Eva hi Eva hi Eva.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
And unwomen did our theme music, and this one okay,
But the confession I have to make. I promise you
are going to talk about the development of public radio,
and I will, but I'm not as much focusing on
the history of public radio as much as this one
guy who was part of it in the same way
that last episode was like, well I found this guy
and he does all this stuff and very little of
(01:50):
it is about radio, but he also invented radio. I'm
going to talk about a poet this week.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
There should be big overlap between the poets of the
world and the public radio enthusiast slash officionados of the world.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
There absolutely are. I remember once I was in art
school and my drawing teacher was this cool guy, and
the other students were like, what kind of music do
you listen to? You? And everyone's making guesses, and I
was like, jazz, he listens to jazz. Why is this
a question? And he was like, that's true, that's what
I listened to.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Of course, what else would it be?
Speaker 1 (02:23):
And I'm like, yeah, and that man listens to public radio,
you know, and like probably poetry, which is like I'm
describing a positive arc type of a person, you know,
And we'll kind of be talking about where a lot
of that archetype comes from, not all of it, because
actually only parts of it. Whatever I fell do on
such a deep rabbit hole this week, that this is
(02:45):
where I ended up at the bottom of the rabbit hole.
And that is what this show is is Margaret picks
a topic, falls down rabbit holes, and then stitches together
what is hopefully entertaining and educational. You a big poetry reader,
and bridget I have been.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
I went to grad school for literature, and part of
that was studying a lot of poetry. Oh shit, I've
fallen off of it a bit lately, but there was
a time in my life where poetry was very, very
important to me.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
That's awesome.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Much like any kind of nerdy high school kid who
thought they were super smart.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, I'm going to be talking about one of those
people that nerdy high school kids who are super smart either. Yeah,
my people. Yeah, I really liked poetry in high school,
and then I pretended I didn't like poetry for at
least ten years because I didn't want to read my
friend's poetry.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Oh was it bad? Were you worried it was going
to be bad?
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah, Because like anytime a friend is like, hey, look
at this piece of art I made, You're now stuck
in a situation where you have to lie, tell the truth,
or get lucky and like it.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Those are you only like do you want to be
a good friend or do you want to be honest?
And it's a conundrum, right, I love that.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Liking it is like you might hit the jackpod and
get lucky on a gamble and think it's not bad.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, totally. And that's what poetry is like for me,
is that I think most poetry is not exciting to me,
but then it's funny because like recently, I've just been
more and more like, now that is really good poetry.
It's been meaning a lot to me.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Again, do you have a favorite poet?
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Oh, lord, do I have a favorite poet? Like right now,
literally I just read a bunch of poems by the
subject of today's episode, and so I'm going to say
him right now, but that's not true in a broader sense.
I just can't ever remember. It's like when I'm on
tour with books and people are like, what other books
do you like? And I'm like, I've never heard of
a book.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
I've never read a book in my life. Yeah, you
turn into Sarah Palin being asked what newspapers she reads
all of them? Everyone, Yeah, I can't think of a
single one right now.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yeah. I like the poetry that's poetic. I don't know.
Do you have a favorite poet?
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Ooh. I will say a poet that was very important
and meaningful to me when I was in high school
with E. Cummings, And so if you would have asked
me in high school, I probably would have said Cummings.
Today I would say Nikki Giovanni. She was a poet.
My parents were very into. She passed away recently. I
am obsessed with her. She has a thug life tattoo
on her arm despite being a little old lady.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Oh fuck yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
And fun fact, she tried to prevent the Virginia Tech
massacre from happening, but she was ignored because she's a
black woman. And if they had listened to her, it
might not have happened. Fun fact, a poet who tried
to prevent a school shooting.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Oh my god, I'm like, do I need to deep
dive this person for an episode?
Speaker 2 (05:26):
She's just an interesting poet.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Yeah, fair enough, Okay. Andrea Gibson is a poet who
died recently who I really liked the poetry of. And
in high school my English teacher got me to read
Langston Hughes and it like changed the way I perceive
a lot of things and that was really useful to me.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Hughes is one of my favorite poets as well. I've
often said that any feeling that I have ever had
and tried to convey in words, Hughes has already had
that and done a better job of conveying it in
words than I ever would be able to do.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Yeah, you have you ever heard of Kenneth Rexroth?
Speaker 2 (06:04):
I have not.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
You read The Beats much, so.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
It's funny that you say this. I just had an
argument about the Beats after watching the movie Inherent Vice,
which is a movie version of a beat novel. I
have a hot take about the Beats. I think that
other than so, the poetry this is only for the fiction,
and I guess some of the nonfiction. I think that
people who say that they like long works of the
(06:29):
beat writers are lying, Like because I was talking to
somebody and I was like, you've never read Inherent Vice.
Come on, genuinely go back to some of that beat
writing and try to read it and tell me that
it's something that you're enjoying, understanding, resonating with you. I
challenge you. I challenge you.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
When I was like a young hitchhiking, train hopping anarchist
or whatever, people kept being like, oh, wow, your life
is just like on the Road. And I never read
On the Road. And I had this like oppositional like
no way, that guy's fucking like, fuck that guy. And
then I was in this tree set for a couple
of days and literally the only book was On the Road,
(07:11):
and I tried to read it, and then I stared
at the sky for three days instead.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Margaret, I have also tried to read it because I
wanted to be when I was in high school. Of course,
I wanted to be able to say it's my favorite book, right,
I will own could not make it through it. Yeah,
people who say that, they're like, oh, I read this
and I really found a lot of profoundness in it.
I challenge you, because I feel like they got the gist,
but they have not actually set down and done a
real deep read.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah, well you know who else? This isn't an ad break?
Do you know? Holts did not like the Beats? Who
the godfather of the Beats, Kenneth Rexroth, the guy I'm
going to talk about today.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Like the inventor of the movement, was like, I'm good.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Yeah, Like he's the guy who like set up the
literary salons that they came and spoke at and like
put his own cred on the line to like get
them promoted. And then he was like, honestly, these are
all a bunch of posers.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Him and me both feel that way. Another one Naked Lunch.
Find me somebody who has actually read Naked Lunch, and
I won't show you a liar.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
I'm trying to read Naked Lunch so many times because yeah,
this is who I wanted to be. I wanted to
be like Burrows. Yeah all right, I keep running across
this thing in history where the radical literary figures are
the main inspiration for the figures who come after them.
Like you have someone who's super radical and they'll be
really important to a bunch of people who are less
(08:40):
radical who get way more famous. And Kenneth Rexroth might
be the ultimate example of this because he is much
more interesting to me. And actually I won't even want
to say all of the Beats, because there's people associated
with that movement who actually think are really interesting. I
think people call Dan the Prima a beat, but I
can't remember. Anyway. Whatever this makes it sound like I
(09:02):
knew everything about poetry, I do not. Kenneth Rexroth was
born in Indiana in nineteen oh five to a radical
family in the US tradition, which is to say, his
family going back a couple generations used labels like feminist, abolitionist, freethinker, socialist,
and anarchist. But he was orphaned at age twelve, and
(09:24):
he grew up in Chicago, surrounded by all the cool
bohemian artsy types in Chicago at the time. He didn't
really bother to do the school thing, but he instead
taught himself a whole bunch of languages and then if
you want to check off some cool people, bingo, if
you have your Bingo card out. He joined the industrial
workers of the world. The IWW, the union that ends
(09:45):
up interwoven into like half of the history if it's
about nineteen oh six to nineteen thirty.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
I've heard you mention it many times.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yeah, totally, rex Rof. He was a wobbly, which is
the word for someone who's in this to the end
of his days. Rex Roth often opened his letters with
the sort of cliche IWW salutation dear fellow worker. Later,
he talked about maybe one of his earliest experiences of
class based on his youth, in a poem from nineteen
(10:17):
fifty six called Portrait of the Author as a young Anarchist.
I'm going to read a little bit of this poem.
There were two classes of kids, and they had nothing
in common. The rich kids who worked as caddies and
the poor kids who snitched golf balls. I belonged to
the saving group of exceptionalists who after dark and on
rainy days stole out and shat in the golf holes.
(10:45):
Pretty good. Yeah, So that's the kind of kid he was.
He's like those two kinds of kids. There's the rich
ones and the poor ones, and then there's us. So
this orphan who teaches himself a bunch of languages, becomes
a hobo for a while. He works all sorts of
odd labor jobs including cowboy cook, cowboy farmer Forrester, toothbrush maker,
(11:06):
diet pamphlet seller, and deckhand.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Wow, that's quite the range.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah, fortunately, and again it's not an ad break. I
think we have diet pills banned from our shows, so
I can't say I have that one in common with him.
I actually have, uh, none of these in common with him.
But he deckhanded his way over to France pretty early
on in his life, and there he met a political exile,
(11:33):
a recurring character on the show, Alexander Berkman, who is
an anarchist, mostly famous these days for being the sometimes
spurned lover of Emma Goldman, a more famous like birth
control pioneer anarchist, but he was more famous at the time.
And I think part of why he was living in
France is because he spent a bunch of years in
prison because he absolutely shot and stabbed a strike breaking
(11:56):
industrialist named Henry Clayfrick. Betah, I know. Unfortunately Frick survived
both being tabbed and shot.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Unfortunate.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Yeah, little Johnny live a lot over here.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
I know, anyway, So rex Roth meets this would be assassin.
He's probably one of his heroes AND's you know, written
a lot of books about anarchism and stuff, and Berkman
is like, don't just become another fucking expatriot in Paris.
What the fuck? And so he's like, all right. So
(12:30):
he goes home to Chicago, and I feel like that
was like good lesson moment. And so he gets married
when he's back in Chicago. And as always, when I
talk about famous men who dated women, the women are
left out of the story and I have to dig
incredibly hard to find who they interacted with and how
they treated those people. Rex Roth is tricky to understand
(12:53):
his relationship to women. Best as I can tell, he
is bisexual and promiscuous. One friend said about him, he'd
fuck a snake if it would hold still.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
I love that his friends were like, oh, very promiscuous, Yeah,
like that being a notable thing is I like that?
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Yeah? And it's like one of those things where like
that can go okay, and that can go really badly
in terms of a quality of person right, And I
can't tell. Rex Roth himself once complained that he might
have permanently damaged his own mouth and throat by fucking,
which I think means this guy sucked a prodigious amount
of dick. Sounds like it, Yeah, yeah, just a prodigious amount.
(13:38):
He got married four times in his life, always to women.
One of his wives would leave him and claim gross
abuse in the divorce papers. She left him for the
married marriage counselor that the pair of them were seen,
so him and his wife went to go to marriage counseling,
and then his wife left him, and the marriage counselor
(14:01):
left his wife and they got married.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Messy, messy, messy.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Right, Which doesn't mean that she's lying about how rex
Roth treated her, but it sure is messy. I think
he saw his partners as his partners. He seemed to
be genuinely kinder and more supportive of women in general,
not just women he wanted to fuck, than he was
of men. Like there was this thing when people would
talk about him and they were like, he was like
(14:28):
Caddie and he would always talk shit on men, and
he would like, you know, if a man wasn't in
the room, he'd be like, oh fuck that guy, blah
blah blah, And he like never talks shit about women, and.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Notably, it sounds like not just the women that he
was sexually asstreacted to, just women generally.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah, that's the best I can figure out. There is
a biography of him that was written that is very
negative about the way he treats women, but then a
bunch of people who knew him wrote like long, piece
by piece responses. I spent way more time this week
about how this man treated women, and I'm left with
(15:04):
I don't know. I suspect he's one of those people
who's like, I love sex, I love women, I don't
always treat them right, but I also like care. He
was an active part of the feminist movement in the
forties and fifties.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
I feel like anybody who is in a leftist or
socially social justice inclined space in their life knows that
kind of guy. Yeah, I definitely I know that guy.
I've been mixed up with that guy before.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
I know. I think he's not the really bad version
of that guy, but he's the other version of that guy. Yeah,
that's my guess.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
They're always charming, that guy.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Yeah, he might have sucked a date. He spent his
entire life translating women poets that was like his main
thing he did was translate women into English. I don't know.
That's my big takeaway is I don't know. But do
you know what I do know that I have very
little control over the advertisers who hypotize on this show.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Except for diet stuff. If you hear one of those,
that's true.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
There's a couple categories that you shouldn't hear, and if
you do, it's a problem. But here's the ads and
we're back. So young Kenneth Rexroth and his wife moved
to San Francisco in nineteen twenty seven, when Kenneth is
twenty two years old. When he gets there, he starts
(16:26):
working to help organize the dock workers. And then the
New Deal came around and it hired out of work
writers to write travel guides, and so this young anarchist
is hired to write the official travel guide to San
Francisco in California for the US government. And I actually
think this might be one of these strange little moments
(16:48):
in history with a huge outsized effect because Kenneth Rexroth,
the pacifist, anarchist, feminist who is really into spirituality in
class war becomes one of the most important cultural figures
in San Francisco history. He is literally writing the book
about it in the thirties, and so it helps set
(17:09):
up the culture, the like cool literary artsy queer, et
cetera culture of the Bay. This hobo kid is part
of the reason that that happens, as far as I
can tell.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
And if they had gotten someone different to write that,
I mean, right, would our entire understanding of that time
and place be completely different?
Speaker 1 (17:31):
I know. But then it's really funny, right because this
like really liberal, cool little town also gives us Silicon Valley, right,
and so like maybe the world would be better, but
it's just been another like normal ass town with normal
ass politics.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
That's like, that is so funny of that one decision.
What were the reverberations throughout history? Like like what did
it get us today? That's so funny, and you.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Know, and there's all these other things that were like
causing San Francisco to have that culture for him to
write about it, but he's emphasizing this part of it,
and he's also going to later do a lot of
the organizing that is going to make the literary renaissance
of San Francisco happen. And he was not subtle about
his politics. He was not just a like, I'm kind
of progressive. He once wrote, quote, the socialist and trade
(18:19):
union movements in the West have functioned, in reality, not
just as governors to ensure that steam is let off
when the pressure gets too high, not just as what
are now called fail safe devices, though they are certainly that,
but as essential parts of the motive organization of capitalism.
More in other words, like the carburetors that ensure they'll
be just the right mixture of fuel and air for
(18:40):
each new demand of the engine. Wow. So he's like, Ah,
these like socialists and trade unions aren't radical enough. Fuck them,
like not.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
To you find a point on it.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yeah, But during World War Two, the stuff he does
here is actually the reason I was like, Oh, this
guy's going to be the person talk about and the
first part of it, it's like, fine, whatever. He's like,
I'm not into the whole war thing. I'm a pacifist,
and this is ideologically consistent. He refuses to join. He's
a conscientious objector. I have no problem with the US
entry in World War two and killing the Nazis. This
(19:13):
seems like one of the few things that it's like
this in the Civil War, the two things that I
can point at the US government and being like, well
they were on the right side of that one, got
that one right, Yeah, But he registers as a conscientious objector.
He does his service as an aid in a psychiatric
ward instead of the military. And then during the war,
he and his wife, I believe his second wife, a
(19:35):
nurse named Marie, did about the most base thing that
the two white people in San Francisco can do, which
is that they worked tirelessly and endlessly to help Japanese
Americans in the wake of the incredible racism and the
whole concentration camp thing. He didn't just write about it
as a problem, though, that would have been leaps and
(19:55):
bounds better than most white people at the time, who
were like, ah, this is great. You know. They noticed
that racism was on the rise before the concentration camps opened,
and they befriended Japanese Americans to ask them how to help,
and were like, what do you all need? Once the
camps opened, the two of them coordinated with imprisoned Japanese
(20:16):
librarians to open libraries in the camps. They collected Japanese
language books to get them into the camps for the
first generation immigrants. And this was like a huge uphill
fight because like every single time they get Japanese books
into the camps, the guards would be like, oh, it's
written in Japanese, it has to get thrown out. We're
shitty racists, you know, and they would keep doing it.
(20:38):
They would also show up with supplies again and again.
At the local camp. Marie volunteered as a nurse because
the medical clinics were run by the Japanese internees with
fucking prisoners, and so she would show up and help them.
And when he wrote about the place, he called them
concentration camps, which was like no one was doing at
the time. And then the two of them just helped
(21:01):
people just not go to the concentration camps. Most of
this was legal work. The Army was overwhelmed. So the
rex Ross went up and were like, Hey, you're kind
of overwhelmed anyway, what if we get your internees educational
passes to go out of the camp and go to
art school in Chicago. The Army was like, yeah, whatever,
(21:22):
just kind of wild, and so they helped dozens of
people get into the Midwest Art Academy of Chicago, and
they would drive them to the train station and shit,
and they would hold onto their belongings while they were gone.
And like their house was just I think it just
was basically a storage unit for people who were fucking
imprisoned or like escaping imprisonment. Another one of their friends
(21:46):
they just straight up helped evade capture, like there was
like a guy they were trying to catch, or a
person they were trying to catch. It actually their gender
wasn't noted and the piece that I read, and so
they gave their friend contacts out east with people to
lay low with and then held onto all their stuff,
which is what you should do if, for some weird
reason you live in a version of the United States
that has concentration camps where people are interned because of
(22:08):
their country of origin. You help people.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, I mean I can't imagine that being something we
would have to deal with or think about today, but
if it were, that would be good advice.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Right, totally, exactly like history is so wild. People had
such different things to deal with me too, God damn it.
And yeah, this is what the rex Roths do during
World War two. And this is where Kenneth rex Roth.
I know some negative stuff about Nneth Rexroth.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
I mean he founds like the kind of person who
might not text you back.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Yeah totally. So, first of all, he's like, I found
a snake. Sorry you're out of the picture.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
I got snake plans tonight, Like, don't call me.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
He just texts back the emoji of.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
A snake, and you already know that's all he needs
to say.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Yeah, totally. So he's also one one of the proto
white people getting proto hippies into like Eastern spirituality and culture,
and he comes at it I think earnestly. He is
a like lifelong Buddhist, and he is like one of
(23:15):
the main translators of women poets from China and Japan
into English, and he's like friends with folks and helping
them evade capture and all of these things. By my
read as a white person, it seems like he has
kind of done the work where he's like, I am
genuinely interested in this stuff. But he is one of
the people who introduces the like thing that becomes like
(23:39):
pop Buddhism, you know. And then possibly the most fucked
up thing I know about him doing is that At
one point he wrote a forgery pretending to be an
Asian woman of like poetry, where he was like, look
at this new book of poetry I translated and he
just had written it himself.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Oh no, yeah, that's no good.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Uh well all right, yeah, I know, I know.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Nobody bats a thousand.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Yeah, totally. After the war, you have all of these exiles,
like the surrealists, especially the more radical surrealists have like
fled Europe because of the war, and so all of
these like anarchist surrealists are in the Bay and he
helps run a magazine with them, and then he sets
up what later becomes the San Francisco Libertarian Circle. And
(24:24):
this is in the older use of that word of libertarian.
This is not what we would call libertarian. That it's
a word that the capitalists stole from anarchists. They like literally,
there's a quote I can't remember which guy it is,
one of the founders of libertarianism, probably Rothbard, has a
quote where he is like, we got one of their words.
It's ours now.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Ugh, of course totally fine to just say that.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Explicitly, yeah, exactly. And so the San Francisco Libertarian Circle,
it helps escape to Italian and Spanish anarchists, as well
as the conscientious objectors who are finally being released from
prison at the end of the war. This kind of
becomes more of a literary salon type thing. And at
these meetings he always cooked for them. He was, by
(25:07):
all accounts a fantastic cook, so he's willing to do,
you know, reproductive labor. He wrote about these salons and
his autobiography quote the place was always crowded, and when
the topic of the conversation of the evening was sex
and anarchy, you couldn't get in the doors. People were
standing on one another's shoulders, and we had to have
(25:27):
two meetings. The overflow in the downstairs meeting hall.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Tell me that doesn't sound like a good time. I know,
you know, a bunch of freaking promiscuous weirdos getting together
and talking about anarchy.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
I met a time with had Yeah, it's certain. And
this is kind of what led to the beat movement.
The younger artists in that circle spun off into the beats,
and Kenneth Rexroth gets called the godfather of the beats,
and he was like ran the literary salon where how
was read by Ginsburg for the first time, and he
(26:04):
resented being called the godfather of the Beats, because he
was pretty soon accurately calling them hipsters who were adopting
the pose of being counterculture without committing to actually confronting
the system and building a better world.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
I agree with him. I don't think he's wrong. I
think that I agree with that take.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Yeah, And it's interesting because most versions of this that
I've read have been like, oh, he's just jealous, And
he probably was jealous. But the historian George Woodcock was
friends with him and wrote about him quote more than
any other individual, he was responsible for the San Francisco
literary renaissance of the forties and fifties, though lesser men
(26:43):
like Lawrence Ferlingetti and Gregory Corso reaped most of the
credit for his endeavors. Most versions of the story say
that Rexroth was basically just jealous, but Woodcock goes on
at length to say that rex Roth was not the
jealous sort about other writers, and that he always offered
his full throated support of younger writers, including ones that
(27:03):
were more successful than him, as long as he actually
approved of them. But he fucking hated at least half
the Beats, so he was like, Nah, fuck these people.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah, I mean, it just goes to show how even
back then, just saying somebody was jealous is such a
easy thing to say. And it sounds like he genuinely
was like, Oh, I support writers who I think are good,
but if I don't think they're good, I'm not going
to support them. And I don't think a lot of
y'all are good.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Yeah, totally. And he's like known for being kind of
especially as he gets older, he's like known for being
that kind of grouch who's like says it like it
is or whatever the fuck. You know, it can go
any which way, whether that that's a good personality trade
or not. I genuinely don't know whether I would have
loved this man or hated him. I can't.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
I already know I would have. I would have gotten
mixed up with him, for sure. I already know this
is you. You're basically describing my type. I know, I
already know. I'm glad you have some ambiguity, but I'm not.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Yeah, I think when I was like a twenty year old, like,
I think I would have hated him. And I think
five years earlier and ten years later, I would have
liked him, but I don't know, and despite okay, but
then it's funny. Despite being part of this counterculture, he's
no beatnik himself. He's not subcultural himself, and he at
(28:15):
one point demanded that his daughter only date a man
whose shirtcuffs could button and who could cook a good
meal while wearing formal wear.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Oh, I feel like that's sort of good advice. But
it's interesting how he's like, Oh, I'm around all of
these like dirty hippie beatnick types. I don't want that
for my kid. You got to marry a dude with
a job.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Yeah, totally, absolutely, And also like even being like he
can cook a good meal wearing formal wear is like
kind of like he knows how to dress up for you,
and he like, also, isn't gonna make you doing all
the cooking. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how
his daughter felt about this advice. I like, I don't know.
And when you asked me earlier who some of my
(28:54):
favorite poets are. I read a bunch of his poetry
for this, and I haven't read all of this poetry yet,
and I'm gonna read more of it and maybe i'll
like do a follow up episode where I'm like, Rex
Rothel was a terrible man. I don't know, but like
I read a lot of his poetry for this, and
some of it is some of my favorite poetry about.
There's this thing that I've talked about a lot on
the show where you had this moment in the early
twentieth century of this huge movement for leftism and for
(29:16):
anarchism and for all of these these things that are happening,
and then it started to die away, and by the
end of World War II a lot of it was
dead for a while, right, And so you have this
generation of people feeling this incredible loss that they like
had given their lives to something and it didn't stick.
(29:37):
And he writes about that better than anyone I've ever read.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
I need to read that.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Well, I'm going to read you part of it. This
particular poem is full of gendered language. I love it anyway.
It's from a poem called for Eli Jacobson. I assume
that's someone he was friends with who died. I'm cutting
little bits of it to make it slightly shorter. We
believed we would see with our o own eyes the
new world where man was no longer wolf to man.
(30:04):
But men and women were all brothers and lovers together.
We will not see it, none of us. It is
farther off than we thought. It does not matter. We
were comrades together. Life was good for us. It is
good to be brave. Nothing is better, food tastes better,
wine is more brilliant, girls are more beautiful. The sky
(30:27):
is bluer. If the good days never come, we will
not know. We will not care. Our lives were the best.
We were the happiest men alive in our day.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
That's so beautiful. Something about hearing that now especially is
really pointing here, Margaret, you have such a beautiful I
can tell that you spend time reading. You bring such
a gravitass to those words. That's very moving.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Thank you. This one fucked me up, Like there's one more.
I'm going to read another excerpt, but like reading is
like it. It was like yeah, like it's so hard
sometimes looking at how bad shit is getting, especially when
shit starts looking really bad right after we start seeing
things look really good, you know, and starting to be like, oh, us,
(31:18):
fighting to make things really good is worth it, no
matter what it is worth it, whether or not the
good days come, like just the whole, like it is
good to be brave. Nothing is better. It's just like
it fucks me up. I love it.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
I mean I think, I mean not to get off
on like everything, but I fight this urge of giving
into the idea that all of the good times we're
gonna have are behind us and nothing will ever be
done again. Absolutely, that poem speaks to that instinct that
you know why in a kind of way, it's so
(31:53):
important to fight that urge, Yeah, and focus on like
what we do have right now, yeah, which is being brave.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
No, it's true. And because the other thing that I
think about a lot is that like we can't present
like we've lost. We haven't, Like it's an ongoing fight.
We kind of can't lose permanently, right, We also kind
of can't win permanently, But we can't lose permanently. There
will always be people fighting for a better world. Like
they literally can't kill us all because if they did that,
(32:22):
their own kids would turn into us, you know, well
in some context and not other context. But like, I've
been thinking about this a lot, right because there's a
lot of with the news happening this week, which again
you could be listening at any point in the future,
and you'll be like, ah, yes, the news this week.
It's like really easy to get caught up. I see
people posting a lot of like this is it. It's bad.
(32:43):
Everyone should just be scared, and you're like, well, we
should probably be scared, because you have to be scared
to be brave. But like, we do have each other.
We can try and do something about this, and bravery
is a choice we can make, you know, and it
I don't know whatever. Anyway, I don't want to totally
soapbox this. I just I it's been on my mind
a lot.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Thank you for reading that. That really speaks to me.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Thank you. I'm gonna read one more excerpt, and this
one I'm partly reading it because the title of this
poem is like two of the episodes of this show
crammed into one title, which is from the Paris Commune
to the Kronstat Rebellion. Ooh really, yeah, they shall rise up, heroes.
(33:30):
There will be many, none will prevail against them. At last,
they will go saying each I am one of many.
Their hands empty save for history. They die at bridges,
bridge gates and drawbridges. Remember now, there were others. Before
the sepulchers are full at Ford and Bridgehead, there will
be children with flowers there, and lambs and golden eyed
(33:52):
lions there, and people remembering in the future.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
That last line, people remembering in the future. I mean,
isn't that what we're fighting for. Isn't that what this
is all about? You know?
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah? And that like their hands empty save for history.
Like the thing that we are bringing to this fight
is that we come from something and are part of something,
you know.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
And that we we were talking in the previous episode
about how these things are so tenuous and worth fighting for.
But like the importance of telling those stories accurately. Even
if they don't have them in the history books, people
aren't learning about them in school. We can always do
what we can to make sure folks know that this
is our history, our shared, messy, complicated, beautiful history together.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Yeah, totally. And it even helps to remember that they're
also all fuck ups, right, Yeah, because you don't have
to be like, oh, I once did something that wasn't great,
like fucking.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
All out here fucking snakes just like the rest of us.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Totally just the snake fucker's a history making the world
a better place for most people. Yea, and yeah, so
the this guy he sets up the literary salon with
other people. In his sixties, he moves to Santa Barbara
and tries his hand at teaching. He's kind of avoided
academia until then, but by his seventies he's like, now
(35:10):
fuck this, and he goes back to doing what he loved.
He's actually he's one of the originators as far as
I can tell. Oh, this is one of those things
where I'm like, I sort of assume black people did
this first, but I could be wrong. He traveled around
and read poetry accompanied by jazz musicians, and he's seen
as like one of the people who sort of brought
that idea around. But I don't know it specifically said
he's the guy who did this, and I just always
(35:31):
have a skepticism. But now he's connecting in his seventies
with something he did fifty years earlier when he was
like twenty in Chicago. That's kind of cool. That's a
kind of a nice way to end your life.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
You know.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
He'd been a Buddhist for a very long time, and
then on the Easter before he died, he converted to
Catholicism without abandoning Buddhism or anarchism. As far as I
can tell.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
It just was like Buddhist, anarchist Catholic.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Sure, yeah, why not? And I think it's interesting last
week when I talked about her a couple weeks ago,
at some point I talked about the socialist photographer. Oh
you remember, you were talking about air, the weird air
people who go around hot air balloons and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
So I ended up talking about this photographer who invented
a ton of new types of photography called Na Dare,
(36:20):
whose socialism is completely forgotten about, who helped Paris during
the siege of Paris and the invented air mail by
taking balloons out of the city with letters in them.
And he is the person who was like an important
photographer artist. He was literally one of the first Bohemians,
(36:41):
well besides people from Bohemia, which is an actual place,
So being a Bohemian is one of the first examples
of cultural appropriation of a name by Western people, even
though the Bohemia is a white place, but it's an
Eastern European place. Anyway, I did not know this. Yeah,
it's part of I think the Czech Republic now and
at least I have been to Bohemia, and it was
in the Czech Republic. I don't know if it continues elsewhere. Anyway,
(37:01):
In the eighteen forties, thirties and forties there were the
first Bohemians and they were like hobo radical traveling around,
sleeping under bridges, making art, being weird hippies, right, And
he was one of the very first original Bohemians. And
he then and I can use him to connect the
revolutions of eighteen forty eight to the Impressionists, because he's
(37:24):
the one who his salon or his gallery maybe a studio,
was the first place to have an Impressionist exhibit. And
I think it's cool that I can now then do
the same thing one hundred years later, where I can
connect to Chicago wobbly hobo, who witnessed the end of
the classical era of socialism and anarchism, organized the first
(37:45):
exhibition of the Beat poets.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
That is so cool.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Yeah. As for what that has to do with radio,
I'll tell you. After these ads, I.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Forgot that that was what we were talking about er back.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
So there is more to tell about the history of
public radio that I want to learn, and I just
have so much time in my life and I want
to try and get things right instead of doing a
really glossing over stuff. But rex Roth and the people
around him, especially the other Pacifists who he was part
of the same social circles as, were essential to the
(38:28):
birth of public radio because they founded a radio station
that is still around today that some of my friends
have work on. It's KPFA ninety four point one on
your FM dial in the San Francisco Bay area. It's
part of the slightly broader PACIFICA Radio network. Have you
heard of PACIFICA Radio?
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Oh? I know PACIFICA very well. Shout out to PACIFICA.
I used to give them lots of money.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Fuck yeah. Whenever I hear the first, I'm always like,
is at the first in America? Is at the first
in the world? I don't know right, but either in
nineteen forty eight or nineteen forty nine I have read both,
they start at PACIFICA Radio. Theodore Rojak wrote in an
Anarchy magazine in the nineties, I think says quote the
(39:12):
first PACIFICA station, KPFA, which broadcasts like BBC local radio
on a UHF signal, was founded in nineteen forty eight
in Berkeley, California, by a group of local citizens, mainly
pacifists and anarchists. Its first station manager was a guy
named Lou Hill, who was a pacifist and if you
want to check off another mark on your cool zone,
(39:33):
bingo a quaker. They formed Pacifica Radio to finance the
whole thing, and it's also still around today. And the
idea that they had was a magazine of the airwaves,
supported by subscribers. And it's funny because like reading that,
I was like, oh, that makes sense, it's a radio magazine.
(39:53):
But all clicked together when I finally read that. I
don't know how much it is these days. It started
at twelve dollars a year with discounts for students, and
then soon those fifteen dollars a year. But you also
clearly don't have to subscribe, right, Like it's on the airwaves.
You can just pick it up.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
If anybody lives in the DMV area. WPFW is a
Pacifica station. They've got them all. You can just like
listen to it even today.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Yeah, it's such a cool model, and I see why
it's like it's hard. It's a hard model. For them
to get to do, but also like any media organization
that started in nineteen forty eight that's still around is succeeding.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
Yeah, they clearly are doing something right.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Yeah. By the early sixties, they set up sister stations,
and I think the first ones are in LA and
New York. And because they were responsible only to their listeners,
to their subscribers, they were able to play things over
the airwaves that other stations would bulk at. And not
just like edgy politics, although obviously they're more capable of
doing that, but they can do longer form stuff. They
(41:00):
can be like, you know, we don't have to just
do like the three minute version of something. We can
do the sixty minute version. We can do the sixty
three and a half minute version of something, and we
can have more diverse points of view. When they first launched,
they were able to pay their workers through the subscription model,
but tenuously so, and I think they invented this, but
(41:22):
I could be wrong. Marathon broadcast fundraisers.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
I associate that with like PBS, but they were doing
it first.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Right because PBS didn't exist yet shame of course, So
they would do marathon broadcast fundraisers that I think they
invented to cover the gap between the subscription costs and
their operating expenses, and then by doing that, they also
realized that they had some of their most creative content
(41:50):
was the subscription like fundraisers, and volunteerism was an essential
part of it, with most people chipping in unpaid. And
this was seen it's kind of one of these things
that like, our attitude around this is like shifted a lot,
you know. It's like the like amateurism of the Olympics
was seen as this important part of the Olympics, whereas
eventually people were like, yeah, but what about people who
(42:11):
weren't born rich, who like need to get paid to.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Do it if I want to do it, but I
can't do it for free because I have the need
to eat and pay rent.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
Yeah, totally. Now, if we all teamed up with some
amateur landlords and some amateur restaurants and some amateur like
get a.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Whole amateur society.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Thing going, I think it's called communism, and you do that,
but you know whatever, And so volunteerism, like rex Roth
talks very positively about the volunteerism that made pacifica radio happen,
and I like don't know one way or the other,
but I'm personally glad that a lot of our culture
has moved to like the kind of fuck you pay me,
like in order for people to create radical content or
(42:50):
do things like that. But of course I say that,
and you know it's complicated. And rex Roth contributed content
to Pacifica every week, and his circle was a huge
part of its founding. Early PACIFICA Radio included Paul Goodman,
who's the philosopher of the New West. And there's Alan Watts,
who was the anarchist who introduced Buddhism to the hippies.
(43:12):
And I'm sorry. And Kennis Rexroth wrote about Pacifica nineteen
sixty one, quote it is a non commercial, educational FM
station owned and operated by Pacifica Foundation, a democratically run,
more or less cooperative board of local leaders of every variety,
united largely by their sense of community responsibility. He also wrote, quote,
(43:36):
more than any other factor, it is KPFA that has
set the character of San Francisco culture in the post
war period. And so again that influence, like I read
a bunch about like they were hugely important during the
sixties movements like the anti war movements. They were kind
of one of the only places you could get real
(43:57):
news about what was happening in Vietnam and the United States.
In nineteen ninety six, they gave us democracy.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Now, I don't know if you're gonna get into this,
but like, I'm a big Carlin fan. They had the
whole I think in the seventies, like they aired a
and fact check this, but they aired an uncensored Carlin
special and it was like meant to be like indecent,
and they took it all the way up to the
Supreme Court, and it was this like foundational thing of
(44:28):
free speech and like what you could say over the radio.
I find this to be so fascinating. And like you,
if you didn't have Pacifica Radio setting up shop, you
would not have any kind of situation where it's like
leftist folks trying to set up their own conglamorates. So
like Air America Radio probably wouldn't exist. That's why we
have Mark Marin. Like so many things down the line
(44:49):
of history exist because of PACIFICA Radio really setting this
standard very early. It genuinely is such a cool history.
Speaker 1 (44:57):
Yeah, no, that's amazing. I honestly, like I basically was like, oh,
I ran time to go any further with this. At
this point, there's so much more I want to know
about public radio, and like, yeah, it seems obvious in
retrospect that it came from radicals, right and PACIFICA radio.
I just assumed it was from low West coast, so
it is the Pacific Ocean. But like, in retrospect, I'm like,
(45:18):
it's probably because of Pacifism, you know.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
I feel like on this show, it's always like, oh,
the Pacifists, we're doing something and it's cool.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
I know, I know, And every now and then you're like, okay, Pacifists.
Sometimes people need to shoot the Nazis in World War Two,
I'm discussing Europe. But god, yeah, anyway, that's what I got.
It's some of the history of public radio. You know.
I think I probably could have done this with a
bunch of the founders. Is tie them into these things
(45:47):
where it's like it's not coming out of nowhere, it's
coming out of this like you know, it's like through
him being part of the IWW, I can tie him
to Lucy Parsons, who was born enslaved and is like
one of the founders of the labor movement in the
United States, you know, and it's like, we can make
these direct through lines to now to the things that
(46:10):
are happening now, and that pacifica radio still exists, and
we come from somewhere and that just means so much
to me.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
We come from somewhere. That's such a beautiful way to
put it. Yeah, folks should support media like this, like
I think. I mean, it sounds so silly to say
now more than ever, but these things are tenuous and
it's just so cool that what you've just described, like
WPFW is the preset radio station in my car. Oh cool,
next time I get in my car, it'll be playing.
(46:38):
It's like, the reason why that is the case is
because of all of this history that came before. I
just find it so so beautiful.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
Yeah, well, you got anything you want to plug.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
You can listen to my podcast. There are no girls
on the internet. Yeah. Also, I should have said this
last time. You should support statehood for DC, and you
should check out Free DC and Harriet's Waldest Dreams and
any other folks who are doing cool work to fight
for the self determination of the residents of the District
of Columbia, of which there are more than half a million.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Of us speaking of a now more than ever, like
it must be such a like, you know, statehood for
DC is like always made sense because there's people who
live there, right and the whole taxation with that representation thing,
but like, yeah, now more than ever, you know, like, oh,
a loophole that was left in the government that everyone's like, ah, no,
(47:28):
one's going to take advantage of that.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
Don't even get me started, Mark Lord.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Well, you have a recent episode of it could happen here. Well,
I guess it's actually a couple weeks older. I do.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
We're actually Garrison and I are going to do another
sort of thirty years of our thirty years Scott thirty days.
That was a slip. It feels like thirty years. About
thirty days since Trump announced the takeover of DC's police force,
et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, so I don't know when
a layer, but it depending on when you're listening. You
(48:00):
could listen to that.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Cool, what do I want to plug? I have a substack.
I write almost every week, and I actually wrote a
longer piece, not longer, it's actually shorter than the script,
but I wrote more about some of this poetry and
kind of my feelings about reading Rexroth and all of
that stuff. And you can check that out for free
on my substack, which is Marto Kildoid at substock dot com.
(48:24):
Ian you got anything you want to.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
Plug, Yeah, just check out all the feeds for all
of our sub series within it could happen here, including
cool Zone Media book Club. You can now find dedicated
feeds for all those subshows. And yeah, just you know,
keep fighting the good fight.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
Hell yeah, all right, see y'all next week.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
Bye bye bye.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
Mm hmm
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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