NEWS FLASHES
GAY LIFE GOES ONLINE
SAN
FRANCISCO – More than 200 hours of
The Gay Life,
a public-affairs radio series from the 1970s and '80s, have been made available
for free listening at the website of the GLBT Historical Society. The offering
is the opening salvo of a campaign to preserve the society's vast audiovisual
collection and make it available to the public. The project to build an
electronic Gayback Machine (apologies to TV's Mr. Peabody) is led by volunteer
John Raines. It can be directly accessed from any browser at http://www.glbthistory.org/gaybackmachine
The digital files will serve the needs of archivists,
researchers and the just plain curious. The interface allows visitors to search
for media content by date, topic, or speaker. "Aside from their historic
significance, I'm amazed at the quality of the recordings," said Raines, who
spent countless hours capturing reels of audio tape. "Voices from the past, such
as Harvey Milk and Del Martin, come alive and sound as if they're in the room
with me. These master tapes were professionally produced and have weathered
storage in great shape."
The Gay Life aired locally on KSAN-FM from the late '70s through 1984. It was produced and hosted by veteran journalist Randy Alfred, who is thrilled to hear his program come back to life after 30 years. "John has done an amazing job of moving this material into a new medium for people to learn about our history as a community," enthused Alfred. The Gay Life was the first regular gay programming on a commercial broadcast station in the U.S. The shows now available on the internet represent a sonic time capsule of six epoch-making years in Bay Area, national and international GLBT history, in the political and cultural history of San Francisco and California, and the first years of AIDS and the community's complex responses to the epidemic.
San Francisco's GLBT Historical Society collects, preserves, and interprets the history of GLBT people and the communities that support them. In addition to its archives and educational programs, the society will open a permanent museum in the Castro district this year.
SCOOP'S NEWSCASTS DOWNLOADABLE
Wes
"Scoop" Nisker, who created a new way of presenting news on KSAN, has made some
of his historic audio collages available for downloading at his web site,
www.wesnisker.com. Included in the
retrospective are Scoop's features on: The War, Kickin' The Dick Around,
It's Oil Over Now, Turn On, Drop Out, EEk-ologu and others. Scoop also offers
CDs and DVDs of his unique commentaries.
WARDELL PLANS BENEFIT FOR HAIGHT-ASHBURY FREE CLINIC
San
Francisco: Kenny Wardell has announced plans to revive the long-lost "Live
Jive" tapes. He borrowed a friends reel-to-reel and started listening to
some of the old tapes of the series he produced for KSAN. "Live Jive" was a
'best-of' compilation with tracks from some of the hundreds of live shows KSAN
broadcast for more than a decade. "I must say some of this is fucking great,"
Wardell enthuses.
The webmaster appreciates hearing from you now and then. Are you all living "lives of quiet desperation," or just not doing anything you can talk about?
"I used to be a headline, but now I'm just Old News " . . . Lloyd Jones
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