Adios, Companero

""I am incredibly lucky to have spent my entire radio career doing exactly what I've wanted," says Vin. "The kind of programming autonomy I've enjoyed, on both commercial and public radio over all these years, is unique. I am grateful to all the stations I've worked on for the privilege of being allowed to wander through their airwaves wherever my interests have taken me. I am grateful to my listeners for their support and their indulgence as we shared this journey together. It's hard to let go, of course, but I always promised myself and my audience that when the time was right I would stop. How lucky am I that I get to decide even this!" 

I wanted to be Vin Scelsa before I knew I wanted to be Vin Scelsa, and before I learned that it was impossible. One of the many lessons I learned from Vin (and unfortunately had to relearn over the years) - you can only be you.

Vin seemed to know that right from the beginning, and luckily, he was able to break the rock and roll dj mold at a time when the mold was still warm and malleable.

That was in November of 1967, at a small, independent radio station in New Jersey called WFMU. It was one of those stations that were truly free-form - the host of the show basically made it up as they went along. He later wound up at similar free-form station WBAI, and then went on to a series of ground-breaking commercial rock-and roll stations in the New York area, including WABC-FM, WLIR-FM, WNEW-FM (which is where I found him), K-Rock, back to WNEW-FM and finally to alt music station WFUV with his friend, the late Pete Fornatale, another pioneer with a very different take who died suddenly and unexpectedly a few years ago. He has been doing his show, which he renamed Idiot's Delight when back at WNEW-FM, at WFUV for the last 14 years.

After almost 48 years in the business, Vin Scelsa announced *he would be retiring on May 2, 2015 during his weekly two-hour show this past Saturday night. His wiki bio is here.

No bio, however, could define Vin's show, possibly because Vin refused to be defined over the years. When I first was listening to him the first time around on WNEW-FM in the early 1970s, he was doing an overnight show starting at around 1AM or 2AM.

At that time, the overnight slot was even more relaxed than WNEW-FM's regular "progressive" format, simply because fewer people were listening and, unlike the busier day shifts, which were funded by commercials, the overnight had few if any commercials, so the station managers and programmers were less concerned about how the hosts conducted their shows.

This suited Vin perfectly. Over the years, his show has been a mix of music from The Ramones - who included mention of him in one of their songs and who were frequent guests, to discussion on topics like theater (he was an early cheerleader for Hedwig and the Angry Inch when it was originally done Off-Broadway) to books. It was through him that I found one of my favorite contemporary novels, John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, and a favorite pulp writer, Carl Hiaasen, when he raved about Tourist Season.

Now, when I say he talked about them, I mean, he talked and talked and talked about them. Vin would sometimes play extended sets of music, but when he was on a topic that interested him, he could easily go on about it show after show, and his "raps" would last - well, as long as he wanted them to last.

This drove casual listeners away, but also caused him to attract a large cult following. I remember trying to share my enthusiasm for his show, only to have friends say, 'When is he going to stop talking and go back to the music?'

Still, Vin fascinated me, and many others. His intellectual curiosity knew no bounds, and his openness and candor helped to form a special bond with his listeners. Over the years, he spoke of both his battle with cancer (which he won) as well as his on-going battle with depression. Those of us who listened for years feel like we grew up his daughter Kate, a little girl who is now not only all grown up but a published author of books for young adults. Of course, you could always hear the love in his voice for his devoted wife, Freddie.

When I started working at the radio station at WNYU-FM, there was a time when I thought I would model my show after his, something that was not only a bad idea but impossible. As a young college student, I had infinitely less to say of interest than Vin did, and besides, how to you come up with a model that the creator refuses to follow.

For years, Vin's signature opening was Dorothy's early lines from The Wizard of Oz, leading to "Toto, I think we're not in Kansas anymore," Vin dropped that opening years back. Vin dropped that a number of years back.

More recently, the opening is an imposing voice that would announce:

"Attention listeners. The following program may contain music both familiar and unfamiliar from a wide variety of genres.The following program may contain long musical sets during which not a word is spoken. The following program is not meant to be a representation of any particular theme, music genre or subject matter. It's content is solely a representation of the tastes thoughts concerns and moods of its host. It is, if you will, old-style free form broadcast radio."

Then Vin would set the "ground rules," which he adopted from Rolling Stone's David Fricke.

"Respect the elders. Embrace the new. Encourage the Impractical and Improbable without bias."

He always stuck to those "rules," such as they were.

There were numerous movie and cultural references win Vin, from the title of the show, also the name of a 1939 Clark Gable musical, to Dorothy, who stuck around for the end of the show with "Oh, Auntie Em, there's no place like home," to his interviews with indie-filmmakers like John Sayles.

As with the saying above, Vin was always discovering young and promoting young artists, while his movie references often came from an era where entertainment and stars were bigger than life.You could still hear in his voice the young boy whose mother listened to soap operas and talk shows and his dad, who listened to WNEW-AM and shows like Milkman's Matinee with Sinatra and Basie.

Respect the elders. Embrace the new.

He made the sequeway between Dinah Washington and an up-and-coming singer-songwriter, or Louie Armstrong into Chris Stamey seem natural, because it was for him.

Although he often talked of his love for going to the movies, he was too young to have gone to movies of Hollywood's Golden Age there, likely learning them, as I did, watching them late at night on local independent TV stations. My friend, and award-winning writer/director Ray De Felitta speaks of this in his informative blog, Movies Til Dawn.

He talked often of his time as kind of a tour manager/keep-him-out-of-trouble guy for legendary Townes Van Zandt, and would always work on original material, such as the "letters" from "T-Shirt and Razoo Kelly."

Whenever a television or radio host we enjoy chooses to call it a day, our first instinct is to ask for more. In the past year, that included David Letterman and Jon Stewart. Think how odd that is. It is like the title of a musical by Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts called, I Love You. You're Perfect. Now Change.

We love them for being different, but we don't want them to decide when it is over. Do we really want them to become Johnny Carson, dragging on and on because he didn't know how to end it? Do we want it to be like our favorite TV shows that "jumped the shark?"**

Over the last few years, Vin had cut back his four-hour show to two hours, and began doing more of his shows from "Studio V," a remote studio he set up in his home in New Jersey, although he then went back again to recording two hours live at WFUV's studio, and two hours pre-recorded the week before.  It was clear to anyone who truly appreciated Vin's unique voice that the thrill was going, and he always said that when it was gone, his show would be as well.

He kept his promise.

An archive of some of his recent shows can be found here, and if you go to Youtube, there is more. If you are interested, the only way to have an idea of what a Vin Scelsa show is like is to listen to one.

Of course, there was one defining moment for Vin during his commercial radio days, though it was one that was neither intended nor sought. Vin was on-air when John Lennon was shot, and he got many people through that night.

Understand that this was before the days of social media, where all news is brought to our every device instantaneously. I was at a bar that night, a more than a little tipsy, when someone said to me that John Lennon had been shot.

I didn't pay it much mind. How could it be true? Who would want to shoot John Lennon? I put it out of my mind until I got home, turned on my favorite, Vin, and heard Imagine.

It was like a cold bucket of ice had slapped my face. I knew it must be true. And like many other listeners, it was Vin that took me through that night.

Inspiration is not imitation, and while I failed miserably at the latter in my college radio days, I realized somewhere during the life of this blog that Vin's willingness to stray from the straight and narrow path helped me to feel confident often drifting off-topic in this blog. This time it was not by design, but I know it was somewhere, in the back of my mind.

I will miss his shows, but wish him the best of luck with his long-time send-off.

Adios, companero(s).

*The photo of Vin in that blog was taken by David Vanderheyden, who I worked with in my college radio days at WNYU-FM)

**A phrase coined after Happy Days had run out of ideas and had an episode with Fonzie surfing and jumping over a shark.

January Blues

"Last night's storm was fierce
As I can see from this morning's
Thick blanket of snow
Rising to kindle woodchips
In lonely Shigarati Village"
-Lotus Moon: The Poetry of Buddhist Nun Rengetsu

File this one under "mundane but true."

Generally, I try to steer clear of any topic that might be the subject of a local news feed, no less a ""slice of life" piece.

Those of us who chose a freelance life know that at times things will be slow, and in New York, things will generally be slow in January. Nothing new to see here.

Normally, January doldrums are no more common for me than the need to "do something" on the weekend, seeing as I can just as easily be working on the weekend and off on Wednesday.

Like most of us, I have a routine between gigs. A little more time meditating. Start or get back to a writing project. Of course, the endless round of emails, phone calls and resumes sent in search of the next project.

This is not usually accompanied by anything more than the usual angst, depression, doubt that all of us working in this business experience.

This year, though, was a little different. I share here not to wallow or complain - my life is good - but because I know how much we all share bits of the same truth; how what we think is unique to us is actually being felt by others in some way.

Consider this my turn in that virtual support group.

This January, I came off a rather hectic ride that goes back through most of the last year. It included working on a short, directing a play, shooting that play as a short film, dozens of budgets, and rewriting a horror script for a producer I know.

Then, of course, there was line producing a feature.

At the beginning of the feature, in early prep, I was still trying to do changes for a few features and polish on the horror screenplay, to the point where I could not finish everything I was doing. There was the inevitable irony that every freelancer experiences, having to turn down work because I was so busy, knowing there would be a need for that work once the feature was over.

The Universe provides, but it does so with a twisted smile and a sense of humor. You have to learn to laugh along.

A busy year would segueway (sorry, I hate the new spelling "segway" - the root word is segue!) into a feature where any time I could get four hours sleep or do one thing at one time was a good time.

When that feature ended, there were the holidays, which have been quiet for me for years. My birthday comes right before Christmas, so I am used to celebrating it with some level of solitude, and learned how not to get bummed about that. This year, however, I had a small but wonderful gathering with people who meant a lot to me, a combined celebration of The Feast of Seven Fishes, a Southern Italian tradition, with my birthday.

So it was that the year ended much busier and fuller than usual for me. Alas, ever silver lining has a cloud lurking around the corner, so a wonderful year, a nice retreat, and then a Monday. January 6th, where I woke up and had nowhere to be and nothing I had to do.

Top all of that with this vortex thing that seems determined to give us a winter more appropriate for Buffalo than Brooklyn and you have the January Blues.

Sure, there was catching up on this blog, and the usual work search, but then what?

I have a few writing projects I am toying with now, and finally got the chance to work on the editing for the short I directed. Hopefully, I will have a cut for you here in a week or so - feel free to judge for yourself!

Thankfully, my Zen practice and years of therapy have left me more prepared for these times, and like the rest of us, I'm slogging through. There are good prospects for work coming up, and I am going to get to some short stories I have wanted to finish.

Short stories and possibly a web series pilot - we'll see. The latter has been on my back-burner for a while, and maybe it's time for me to try the almost no-budget thing, the Kickstarter thing, and get this done. I still don't know that I feel comfortable asking the folks I know to send money multiple times a day, but if I get the group I'd like to get together, it will feel more like it's for us, than for me.

A new screenplay? I don't know. I have a number of screenplays, three of which have been produced in one form or another. None have earned me more than a pittance, and the practice of preparing budget for wonderful scripts for others only to see those project not get funded have left me with the same lack of enthusiasm for venturing there that restaurant workers have eating out: when you've been in the kitchen, the food doesn't look as good.

The latter reminds me of one upside to this slow-down; the chance to get back to reading, Currently alternating between some Zen writing, the collected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the latest Carl Hiaasen novel Bad Monkey. Each of these are good for different moods.

Hiassen has long been a favorite of mine, ever since Tourist Season. Shockingly, only one of the Miami columnist's novels was directly made into a movie, and that was a disastrous mess based on Striptease. Hiaasen has a great joy in his dark heart, and his villains (usually corporate types from outside Florida looking to destroy more of it's natural beauty for a buck) meet their deaths in ways we root for from the moment we meet them. That the movie version of Striptease choose to water this down was nothing short of a crime against humanity.

In Bad Monkey, Hiaasen's "hero" is a Key West detective who is "busted" down to a food inspector - "roach inspector," as he calls it - for using a vacuum extension in a way it most definitely was not intended on the husband of woman he is sleeping with. His experience seeing what goes on in the kitchen leaves him getting skinnier and skinnier as he cannot see his way clear to eating any food served him in a restaurant.

One of the Zen readings I finished was by my original teacher, the amazing Myotai Sensei (Bonnie Myotai Treace). The poem at the top of this post is from her short work, Winter Moon: A Season of Zen Teaching. (The link to the book is along the right, if you're interested) One of the things I love about Myotai Sensei is her impish sense of humor, the way she makes her teachings simple without being simplistic. An astute writer and editor in her own right, Myotai Sensei shares the poem above as part of the never-ending lesson not to judge but to see things just exactly as they are, without adding a layer to it.

So it is that I do not see this down time as some sort of eternal punishment or hardship, but merely as one moment which will pass, and lead to another moment when there is work.

This post started with me wanting to describe January Blues, and somehow turned into a book review of Carl Hiaasen and a Zen teaching. This was definitely not where I thought it was going when I started it, but if you follow my blog, you know this sort of stream-of-consciousness will pop up more often than not.

Hope you enjoyed the ride. If all goes well, in the next post, I will be sharing a version of the short film I directed, and then back to the turn of the 21st Century. and to the movies I worked on at that time. It's been a while since we got back to the timeline, and I think that time is getting closer.