[Landline] When I was your age

On being lucky

Hello friends,

Some thoughts.

BE LUCKY I: BE THE RIGHT AGE WHEN THE GOVERNMENT MAKES A CULTURAL BOOM POSSIBLE

Via The Comics Journal: Harry Nordlinger at home. Photo by Nora Wolinsky.

A few passages from a recent feature interview at The Comics Journal with Bay Area underground horror cartoonist/anthologist/self-publisher Harry Nordlinger have really stuck with me.

In his introduction to the piece’s Q & A, journalist Zach Rabiroff wrote:

At one point during the conversation, I remarked to Nordlinger that many of the rising star cartoonists I have spoken to entered the field during or just after 2020. This, he pointed out to me, is not a coincidence: it was the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic stimulus, which provided a whole crop of cartoonists with the financing and latitude to create the projects that made their names. This realization has haunted me since our conversation. It suggests that there are hundreds, thousands of talented artists, writers, musicians—creators of every stripe, whose genius we will never know about simply for want of government support of the arts in these United States. It is appropriate that in a conversation about horrors, this has been the most unsettling one of all.

And here’s the bit from the conversation Rabiroff was referencing:

Zach Rabiroff: I’ve now talked to maybe half a dozen people who all managed to publish their first “real” comic because the pandemic hit, and they had both time and stimulus money.

Harry Nordlinger: The pandemic created what will be looked back at as-- I don't know if it's a golden age, but an age of indie comics. There is a generation of indie comics that exists because of the pandemic, for sure. I would have done Vacuum Decay anyway, but I might not have gotten four issues out before my unemployment ran out. I just spent two years collecting unemployment and drawing comics. And I don't think that would've happened without the pandemic.

Vacuum Decay No. 6, edited by Harry Norlinger. Cover artwork by Karmichael Jones.

And also, people were buying comics. There was a huge online community, because everyone had free time and a little bit of money. Definitely, the pandemic is responsible for this indie comic boom that we're still in.

It's almost as though, if we had some kind of ongoing financial support for artists, we could always have this kind of artistic output.

You might almost think that's why countries like France and Canada have such good comics, just because people can live.

BE LUCKY II: BE THE RIGHT AGE, AT THE RIGHT PLACE, WHEN SOMEONE REALIZES THE GOVERNMENT IS LOOKING THE OTHER WAY

A typical mid-morning for 26-year-old me at Cafe Tropical in Silver Lake, Dec. 1996. Frosted hair, Napoleon pastry, Cuban coffee, Doo Rag shirt. Seated across from me, taking this candid cafe con leche photo: my friend Peter Relic.

After six years living in West L.A., I’d moved to Silver Lake with friends. Now, age 25, late in 1995—or early '96, I don't know— I needed to find another place to live in the area. I didn't know many people in the area, so I went to Cafe Tropical and had a look at the bulletin board. The only flyer I saw that made any sense for my $22,500/year Larry Flynt Publications copy editor salary situation was a room in a 3-bedroom house just off Sunset, near Millie's and El Cochinito. I ended up moving in to what I immediately learned was "the Possum Dixon House"; the band's guitarist, Celso Chavez, was moving out (or, wait a second, was it keyboardist Robert Sullivan who was moving out at that point?) and manager J. Scavo and the band's recently sober-ized singer-bassist Rob Zabrecky were staying on. 

I had recently started writing for free for a locally produced/published/distributed free music magazine called Strobe—hipped to it via a friend from my UCLA days—but in my early 20s I was extremely shy and weird, and although I'd been going to shows for years, I'd never made friends with anyone who made music, who ran clubs, or record stores, or record labels. I was a somewhat isolated observer. Ending up in the Possum Dixon house—by luck—changed all of that very quickly.

The house was a center of excitement. It wasn't really a Possum Dixon house—it was the manager J. Scavo's name on the lease. And Scavo was expanding his management business, which he ran out of his bedroom and the house’s attic; I think he had four local bands on his roster at one point while I was living there. People coming and going all the time—musicians, road crews, lawyers, label people, sure… but mainly colorful local scene people, of all ages¹. At some point in there somebody—I think it was Zabrecky, who was moved out of the house by that point but still coming by regularly on Possum stuff—gave me the phone number for Paige at KBLT.

Everybody seemed to know about KBLT, a music-based pirate radio station you could hear at 104.7FM. It was supposed to be run from a secret location somewhere in Silver Lake. A woman named Paige was in charge.

I made the call, and for the next three years, Paige—real name: Sue Carpenter—and I were in a relationship, a lot of it centered around KBLT, which, it turned out, she was operating out of a walk-in closet/hallway spot in her apartment a few blocks west of the Possum house. 

What Sue was achieving was ridiculous. She had a studio and a 40-watt transmitter in her apartment, with an antenna running up the side of the two-story apartment building (did the landlord know? I can't remember), which was on a ridge above Sunset, increasing the signal's range. Sue had commandeered a location on the crowded L.A. FM band that, for technical reasons, wasn't really occupied in these few square miles of Los Angeles, so KBLT (an absurd, fun name for a radio station, that I loved), as long as the station's volunteer engineers kept everything cool at the technical end, wouldn't drown out someone else's frequency. 

Sue had a dayjob as an editor, and later, as a freelance journalist. KBLT was, you could say, a hobby. But it was a social hobby, because Sue opened the door to her apartment to local volunteer deejays who'd do weekly two-hour shifts. (At one point, KBLT was broadcasting live 18 hours—that is: nine deejays—a day.) So: Completely illegal. No staff. All volunteer. And Sue was pulling it off, with members of the community, for the community. 

Everyone knows the pleasure of sharing music you're excited about with friends; imagine the pleasure of sharing music you're excited about with your friends, with your friends of friends, with neighbors and people you've never met. That's what FM microradio can be. At its best, that’s what KBLT was.

1997 or 1998 at KBLT, me (at left) with my guest dj, local resident Glenn Danzig. (Photo by... Sue? Not sure.)

KBLT was illegal, but stayed on the air during this period because the FCC was not enforcing the law—apparently the agency was awaiting a judge's ruling on some kind of lawsuit, brought by extremely smart and savvy microradio advocates, before it would start shutting down the crop of illegal microradio stations like KBLT that were cropping up across the nation. 

Sue had recognized this was a lucky moment when someone who wanted to do pirate radio could actually do it and get away with it. No one knew how long this moment could last … the key thing, from my point of view at least, was to have the vision, the courage and the savvy—all of which Sue had in spades—to seize the lucky moment.² As an old Digger would say, to try to be righteous. To do the best one can with the opportunity, the opening, the rupture in things as they usually are. To broaden it.

What Sue did, with the members of the community that joined in, is the subject of a 40 Watts From Nowhere, a self-funded documentary she is making now. Turns out that Robert Sullivan from Possum Dixon had shot hours of footage of KBLT, its people, and its Silver Lake environs, that everyone had forgotten about it. Sue is combining that trove of vintage, candid footage with fresh present day interviews with KBLT alumni and others. Here's a trailer: 

There's a Kickstarter campaign to help Sue get this film done. We gotta push this kind of thing forward, because KBLT was a living example of a very different way of doing culture—of doing local community—from what we usually get.

The Kickstarter ends March 24. Please contribute if you're at all able.

BE LUCKY III: DON'T GET DRAFTED IN YOUR TWENTIES

What you do in your early 20s doesn't necessarily determine the rest of your life, but for most of us, it’s got to have at least some kind of indelible effect. All that energy, all those hormones and fears and pressures. Chance choices, meetings, encounters, connections, opportunities. Pandemics. Unemployment benefits, stimulus checks. Debt. The memories are vivid because it’s a time of heightened and novel adult experience.

I was fortunate in my early 20s, especially if I consider the experience of those in my family who preceded me.

My dad, Edward, was drafted into the Army in October 1967 at age 23, during the Vietnam War. He lucked out and completed his 730-day tour of duty in West Berlin instead of southeast Asia. 

Going another generation back: In December 1942, at age 23, my dad's dad—my grandfather, Sherman—enlisted for a four-hear hitch in the Navy, which he regarded as better for him than getting drafted by the Army. My grandpa saw overseas service in the Pacific Theatre aboard the USS Winged Arrow from February 1944 through the end of war in December 1945, fortunately never seeing direct combat.

In his autobiography, my grandpa wrote about leaving for the Navy:

That holiday season was different from any other that I have ever experienced. I was excited and fearful about an unknown future. [My wife] Margaret and I got together both in Berkeley and in Riverside but I don't remember the details. She came down [from Berkeley] to see me off on the train and I almost didn't go. It's a good thing Dad was there to push me aboard.

Going another generation back: My grandpa's dad — my great-grandfather, Willard—as a college senior, at age 23, was drafted by the Army in 1918, as World War I was raging.  His high school sweetheart girlfriend, my great-grandmother Skipper, married him immediately. My grandfather wrote:

[Willard] was initially assigned to the Presidio in San Francisco to teach recruits about chemical warfare. He was later sent to Fort Benning, Georgia to prepare for overseas duty. Fortunately, the Armistice saved him from going to Europe, and he could return to [Skipper] and Arlington, where they finally started their life together.

Four generations. I was the only one with the fortune to avoid being pulled into wartime military service. From the Riverside Press-Enterprise, 1973.

Trying to keep some perspective in dismal times,

fondly,

luckily,

Jay Babcock

Arizona

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1. Brightest memory: home from work one late afternoon in 1996, walking in the front door to be confronted by an impromptu, partial rehearsal is going on for The Low and Sweet Orchestra, one of Scavo’s bands I hadn’t previously paid much attention to. I was struck dumb. There, on accordion, riffing away, in our living room at 1418 Golden Gate was James Fearnley of the Pogues, one of the LSO’s members. Imagine being serenaded by James Fearnley on accordion on your return home from work! What good fortune.

2. Like, for instance, what people have been doing recently at L.A.’s Graffiti Towers. See “The Abandoned Luxury Towers That Graffiti Exposed” by Corinna Knolls (New York Times, March 3, 2024).