Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s news, fermented:
Just me today, with a few weekend reads.
First up is this reverent overview of pirate radio stations in Brooklyn. Amid the regulated airways, high-cost real estate, and all the other commodified places and spaces of New York, wafts the magic of pirate radio. David Goren says it best:
“With a handful of decades-old, analog tools — an antenna, a transmitter, and perhaps an amplifier, too — anyone can broadcast to their neighbors, in theory. However, like so many urban spaces, the electromagnetic spectrum is contested territory. Despite strict regulation and rampant privatization of the airwaves, so-called pirate radio stations have been operating throughout New York City for decades. Since at least the 1990s, in Brooklyn (but not exclusively), illicit stations have cropped up within immigrant enclaves whose cultures are so often not reflected in the programming prerogatives of major channels and sanctioned low-power alternatives alike.”
Place-based sound is unique; it cannot be picked up and put down somewhere else. This, among many other factors, is I think what makes a place home. Thinking about sound and locality and what makes my place different from yours, I stopped at this headline: There’s No Such Thing as a War “Over There” Anymore.
In short, globalization and climate change and nuclear weapons all add up to our collective fates being tied up in each other. This is really scary—there are a lot of powerful people undeserving of trust in this world—and, also very cool. If I’m doing something to shift the balance away from injustice and extraction and destruction over here in my little corner of the world, it’s not unreasonable to see that as deescalating the global hurtle towards catastrophe.
In the interest of knowing my aforementioned little corner, I spent some time this morning with Burlington-based Seven Days VT, which will soon be my local paper. I found this gem about how the Lumière Brothers, early innovators in film and color photography, had a factory in little Burlington, across the ocean from their other ventures. Why? Well, a few reasons, among them the French speakers and the local dye factory—reasons that make setting up shop “over there” very compelling.
Hoping you find some time to be in your place this weekend.
A little sign of spring in Providence, RI