"Welcome to Holler to the Hood..."

"Hello everyone, and welcome to Holler to the Hood, the show where friends and family call in and send messages to their loved ones incarcerated in central Appalachia. Unfortunately, we're having some technical difficulties in the studio tonight, and we're not going to be able to broadcast any of your calls."

These words will, in future generations, be remembered as the first words Cameron Zohoori ever uttered on live radio. Lovely. Apologies and disappointment.

I went in to Appalshop well ahead of time tonight, paranoid about forgetting something and wanting to leave plenty of time for preparation. Turns out this was a good thing, as I got there and discovered that the radio board in the WMMT On-air room downstairs had been broken. When this happens, they move on-air broadcasting to the upstairs studio. For most shows this is merely an inconvenience; they simply take their music, interviews, etc. upstairs and plug them in. Our show is a bit different. We can't take calls live on the air, because of the risk that we'll accidentally air obscenities from a few callers (few and far between, but something we can't risk - the FCC would be all up on me). So we play music on the air and take calls upstairs, recording them for playback during the last hour of the show. But when the on-air operation has moved upstairs, we can't take calls at all, because the equipment is broadcasting live.

So I'm sitting here for three hours, playing (really good) hip hop music, and answering the phone off the air, telling disappointed mothers, wives, husbands, fathers, children, and friends that they can't talk to their loved ones tonight. My first night, and all I am is a bearer of bad news. Ah well, this is the world of community radio, I suppose. Hopefully we'll have the equipment up and running next week. In the meantime, I'll be sitting here, reading books about being a prison guard, listening to music, and occasionally getting up to do the robot around the radio studio.

4 down, 4 to go

I can't believe I'm halfway done here. And I've only posted once. How unacceptable.

A few quick things, some pictures, and I promise more posts from here on out.

Since we last spoke, I've been quite busy here in Whitesburg:

My 'real' boss, Nick Szuberla, arrived a couple weeks ago, and Julia, my less real (?) boss, left on Friday to go to a program in California for a month or so. So things are a little different around the office. We're working on a couple really cool projects. We ordered a bunch of Flipcams which we're going to send out to Thousand Kites contacts around the country to make a sort of collective criminal justice documentary network. I'm doing a bit of video work, a bit of graphic and web design, a bit of database management, and a lot of conceptual and logistical work to figure everything out.

We're also going to do a short, guerilla-style documentary about a town nearby that's been severely impacted by coal mining and trucking in the area. Nick and I are planning an overnight trip sometime this week to shoot, edit, and distribute a video piece for a group working on the issue. I'm really excited and will be sure to update.

Since Julia's gone, starting tonight I'll be doing the weekly Holler to the Hood radio show all by my lonesome. That's right, I'm going to be on the air, spinning tunes and taking calls, with little-to-no radio experience. In all seriousness, it should be a lot of fun, though I am a little nervous. Remember to tune in, music from 7-9, calls from 9-10 (ET), WMMTfm.org.

The Cowan Creek music school didn't work out for me, but it was a lot of fun hearing Stella practicing the banjo throughout the week and performing at the end. She's actually pretty good, and is continuing to take lessons till she leaves. I'm working on getting hold of a fiddle, because I've arranged for a few lessons from a former Appalshop intern (a Wesleyan University student) who's also spending the summer here, and is an incredible fiddler.


We've gone on a few trips in the past couple weeks. We did Lexington one weekend - walking around, talking to the locals, perusing antique and thrift stores, cool coffee shop, gorgeous movie theater (but terrible movie - Easy Virtue), and fancy Indian dinner - and just yesterday went to Asheville, NC, which was a lot of fun, similar laidback walking around and eating/window-shopping itinerary. We had planned to go to Cumberland Gap, one of the few places in the world you can see a moonbow, for a camping/paddling trip, but Scattered Thunderstorms suggested Asheville as an alternative adventure, and we accepted.

We also recently climbed nearby Pine Mountain, first to a waterfall and a couple days later the full hike to the top. As with a lot of our activities around here, a few other Appalshop interns/employees came along as well.

Check out the pics, and I'll be sure to post more frequently in the weeks to come, and get some more pictures up soon. Adios!

Bad Branch Falls

Hiking to High Rock

High Rock, the highest point of Pine Mountain, the second highest mountain in the state.

Post 1 and Week 1.5

Hey everyone!

So starting a blog seems to be the thing to do. It'll be good to document my time here, and I hope you all enjoy hearing about life here in Whitesburg. Posts will probably alternate between long descriptions of my activities over a couple days and short nothings when I'm bored or have nothing to say.

First up, a recap of everything thus far (I'm a little late getting into the blogging game):

I arrived here Friday, June 5, after navigating 35+ hours of airports, airplanes, and airstrips to get here from Istanbul, Turkey, where I had been on a Yale University Reach Out trip and just chilling with Elaine (but that's a story for another day). My little Delta regional jet was supposed to land in Charleston, WV, but the pilot couldn't get a clear view of the runway through the fog, despite three harrowing attempts. So we were rerouted to Huntington, WV's Tri-State Airport, where they planned to refuel but eventually just bused most of the passengers over to Charleston. I called Julia (my co-worker/boss) and had her pick me up from Huntington instead. In the meantime I lounged in one of the dozen or so white rocking chairs that were the only seating in the airport's one tiny terminal.

We drove down to Whitesburg, seeing gorgeous, lush mountains on all sides, only occasionally marred by a coal mine or two. After reading the background material on Kentucky that Vicki sent us, I was expecting a coal mining war zone to have devastated the mountains as far as I could see. But though its effects are felt everywhere, they seem to keep the destruction at least out of sight of the highways. Kentucky is beautiful, and my surroundings as we drove into town exceeded all my expectations.

I stopped by Appalshop and met a few people, meeting up with Emma before heading to our house just up the road (Stella was out of town for the weekend at her cousin's bar mitzvah). Our house... it's cozy and picturesque (read: small and old) but really pretty nice. It's nestled in a little valley (I mean holler) with a small brook that follows the road down into town. I quickly settled in and collapsed on my bed as sleep deprivation completely overpowered jet lag.

Saturday morning (well, almost morning) Emma and I walked about 20 minutes into town, lacking Stella's car. We stopped in at the library to get cards and the Summit City Lounge, the town's main bar/cafe. That night we went back to Summit City to hear The Corduroy Road, an Athens, GA folk/americana (according to their site) band that put on a really good show. I also got to meet a a few more Appalshop interns (Catharine, Chloe, and Elizabeth) which was fun.

The next day Stella got back, so the whole gang was home. I had my first trip to Food City to stock up, and we attempted (and failed) to go for a short hike to Bad Branch Falls.

My first week was divided up into two major categories. The first was getting to know the people, the project, and starting my various jobs with Thousand Kites. For those who don't know:

In 1998, as co-hosts of the rural, Appalachian region's only hip-hop radio program, Thousand Kites media artists Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby received hundreds of letters from inmates recently transferred from distant cities into two new, local SuperMax prisons. The prisoners’ letters described racism and human rights violations, and Szuberla and Kirby responded with artistic projects, including bringing hip-hop artists together with mountain musicians and organizing radio broadcasts for prisoners’ families.

In prison slang to "shoot a kite" is to send a message. Thousand Kites is a national project that works directly with stakeholders using communication strategies and campaigns to engage citizens and build grassroots power. It uses performance, web, video, and radio to open a public space for incarcerated people, corrections officials, the formerly incarcerated, grassroots activists, and ordinary citizens to dialogue and organize around United State’s criminal justice system. (from Thousand Kites)

I've been working on going through the project's considerable collection of audio material, from poems, interviews, radio shows, original songs, raps, etc. It's pretty much just lying out on desks and tables with no organization, so I'm cataloguing and indexing everything to make it more usable. I'm also researching new ways to use social networking tools to connect people to the project (Myspace is apparently really big with prisoners), figuring out how to use the project's database of contacts for various networking goals, coming up with new ways to get content for the site, and experimenting with 'Flipcams' and figuring out how people can use them to make documentaries and other content for the project, among other things.

But what I'm most excited about right now is the project's "Holler to the Hood" weekly radio show. It's a show broadcast on Appalshop's radio station (WMMT 88.7) where family and friends of people incarcerated in prisons and jails in the region can call in to give shout outs to the prisoners, who listen to the broadcast inside the prisons. It's a really cool way they've figured out to connect people to their homes and loved ones, especially considering that many of the prisoners in the area are 'shipped' here from out of state (a good chunk of the calls come from the Virgin Islands). The show plays hip hop music for two hours (which was what initially attracted prisoners to the show) while taking calls, and then plays them back in the last hour. Julia has done the show for a year now, and it provides a really interesting window onto not only the issue as a whole, but sometimes the details of people's lives as well. I've been helping out the past couple weeks (the recorded broadcasts are at thousandkites.org), but come July, I'll be doing the show all on my own. Listen live Monday evenings from 7-10 ET to hear yours truly on the air.

The second thing last week was spent on was Appalshop's annual Seedtime on the Cumberland festival of music, film, crafts, arts, and so on. The festival was Thursday night through Saturday (hopefully pictures coming soon), but setup started long before that, and taking everything down and cleaning up is still not quite done. So a lot of my time was spent on manual labor and doing odd jobs, as well as documenting the whole process and festival on a Flipcam for promotion and archival purposes.

The festival itself was really fun. It wasn't as big an affair as I had expected (partly because of the torrential rain we've been having at least every other day), but the music and films were great, with a good variety of genres and old and new performers. Highlights were the literary reading, the Appalachian reggae of Ras Alan, banjo from Lee Sexton, and watching Appalshop films from the 1970s. Oh, and eating deep fried snickers bars, pickles, and oreos (not in a row). Again, pics to come.

This week is off to a slower start than last. One possibility I am excited about is the Cowan Creek Mountain Music School next week. Stella is going to be taking banjo classes, and I'm working on joining her there to learn the fiddle (fingers crossed it will work out).

There's plenty more I could tell, but there's also plenty of time in which to tell it, so that's it for now. Tonight we're going out to Jim Webb's place (he's an old-timer at Appalshop with some fantastic property on nearby Pine Mountain where he hosts the annual Tacky Lawn Ornament and Pink Flamingo Soiree, among other things) for a barbecue to celebrate the successful completion of Seedtime.