concerning the dynamiting
One of the more successful projects I’ve assigned in the “Making Alternative Media” class I’m teaching this semester is research presentations. At first, I hoped students would have alternative media texts in mind to present, but, due to the lack of political engagement on the part of my students, I wound up assigning topics for my students to research and present. While this annoyed me at first, it’s also proven to be an opportunity for me to learn more about a topic without doing the legwork. While students didn’t surpass my knowledge on topics like The Church of the Subgenius, I learned quite a bit about The Realist and the “What Would Jesus Drive” campaign. It’s also nice to see the familiar from a different perspective.
I assigned one student to present on Houston’s Pacifica affiliate, KPFT. (I tried to assign Texas-related projects as much as possible.) Worried there might not be much information about the station’s history, I poked around the internet and found something quite interesting. Although I’ve studied Radio, TV, and Film in Texas for the past four years, I never knew that the station’s transmitter was bombed twice in 1970, KPFT’s inaugural year. The KPFT site has a short movie up promoting the station and discussing the bombing. Unfortunately, the video is so compressed that the viewer mostly sees artifacts, but it’s still an interesting view into the historical moment. One thing I find surprising is the use of lite classic rock like Simon & Garfunkel and James Taylor in the soundtrack. I’m not sure if these artists were associated with left-wing political movements in 1970, but, although Houston was home to some amazing proto-punk bands like the Red Krayola, the connection between punk and leftist politics was yet to be made.
