Tuesday, June 07, 2016
Temporal borders
Saw the single word NIGHT at top of a website. Probably a typo. Fragment of a headline or something. Briefly imagined a Night edition of a website. Doesn't exist now, but would have made sense 50 years ago. BORDERS used to separate night from day in business, newspapers, radio. Night and day were separate editions, separate provinces.
Now everyone (who has work) is expected to work all hours when needed. No boundaries.
As a kid I appreciated the night side of radio, both AM and SW. Most AM stations signed off around sunset leaving a sparse but widespread crop of DX. When the ionosphere was right you could easily hear Edmonton and Caracas, Boston and San Francisco on BCB. "Mexican" stations were run by Americans taking advantage of looser laws, and often featured wild preaching or strange rants. (Thanks to Goat Gland Brinkley for inventing the setup!)
Closer to home there were two distinct approaches to night service among the few stations that stayed on.
KOMA in OKC had rock-n-roll for the youths. WIBW in Topeka had swing for the adults. Big bands were still going strong in the late '50s, and WIBW carried live broadcasts from the Avalon Ballroom in the evening. After midnight they switched to half-hour transcriptions of records plus DJ comments. Most of the records were solid swing, some were 'novelty numbers' that have disappeared now.
Full autopilot was illegal. The station had to have an engineer/announcer awake and ready to handle emergencies. Reassuring for the listeners, and a job for an engineer.
We have one limited remnant of the Night Province in Art Bell's show. That's about it. Everything else is intentionally timeless and borderless, a show without a temporal country. Time of day is never specified, even day of the week is never specified.
As an adult I switched to the reassuring side of the desk when I worked night auditor jobs in motels. The place was in my hands. I enjoyed the sense of being responsible for the safety of sleepers, and I carried out the responsibility. I belonged to the night and the night belonged to me.
Later on I moved into day jobs. Though more skilled and sometimes better paid, I was never given the same level of responsibility. Never carried the keys.
Perhaps I was accurately seen as a Migrant in the province of daylight.
Closer to home there were two distinct approaches to night service among the few stations that stayed on.
KOMA in OKC had rock-n-roll for the youths. WIBW in Topeka had swing for the adults. Big bands were still going strong in the late '50s, and WIBW carried live broadcasts from the Avalon Ballroom in the evening. After midnight they switched to half-hour transcriptions of records plus DJ comments. Most of the records were solid swing, some were 'novelty numbers' that have disappeared now.
Full autopilot was illegal. The station had to have an engineer/announcer awake and ready to handle emergencies. Reassuring for the listeners, and a job for an engineer.
We have one limited remnant of the Night Province in Art Bell's show. That's about it. Everything else is intentionally timeless and borderless, a show without a temporal country. Time of day is never specified, even day of the week is never specified.
As an adult I switched to the reassuring side of the desk when I worked night auditor jobs in motels. The place was in my hands. I enjoyed the sense of being responsible for the safety of sleepers, and I carried out the responsibility. I belonged to the night and the night belonged to me.
Later on I moved into day jobs. Though more skilled and sometimes better paid, I was never given the same level of responsibility. Never carried the keys.
Perhaps I was accurately seen as a Migrant in the province of daylight.
Labels: defensible times, Old Economy Steve, skill-estate
¶ 12:57 AM
