They gave us wings to fly, but then they took away the sky

[sovay]

I am staring at the screen and crying because 99.5 WBAI FM was shuttered by its parent station today, with no warning to either the local station or its listeners. The archives also seem to be gone. My parents who lived in New York in the '60's and '70's used to wake up to its daily broadcast of Phil Ochs' "Outside of a Small Circle of Friends." I was interviewed last summer by Jim Freund for the long-running science fiction program Hour of the Wolf. Now all that history's pulled out as if it never had been. The station was a Brooklyn institution—local, political, progressive, hands-on. Syndicated nationwide content is not the same. And it cannot pretend it always was.

Comments

[sovay]

I hope they make the archives available again when the dust settles.

I hope so, too. There are decades of strangeness in there. Hour of the Wolf alone was an invaluable genre resource.

I also hope my local Pacifica station, KPFK, continues to stick around.

Fingers crossed!