It's your life, it's your party...let's start a fire, let's start a riot!

What? You think I’m going to bitch and moan about how awful graduate school was for the fourth straight week in a row? Come on now – there were some good things about that school year.

I was still working in radio. That’s why I sought out graduate school. A surprisingly large number of people told me the summer before I started that graduate school was a time in their life when they found out just how much they enjoyed what they were studying. “You’ll get to see your interest from a whole new angle and find new ways to appreciate it,” or words to that affect, were how I whisked off to Allaphellan. But after that school year I really didn’t want to “do” radio anymore.

I now had the ability to teach others. Back at my undergraduate station, training was often looked at as an inconvenient necessity – we had to make sure the staff knew what they were doing but so many came across dumb as bricks or just as hard-headed that the novelty wore off quickly. Perhaps sensitive to the psyche of some students, I attempted to not talk down to them or use too much jargon early on or even scare them by reminding them that their audience was everyone in Morra County and beyond. Because of my method, I remember being thanked for spelling out complex issues in simple terms or making the new student feel at ease in their first few weeks. But after that year of graduate school I didn’t really want to try to make students understand anymore – especially those that didn’t want to learn.

Hmmm....

I guess when all was said and done, that school year didn’t turn out the way I expected.

Was it a waste of time, of money? Some might say so. I didn’t. I still don’t think it was. I think some of what I took away from the coursework and my lessons from interactions with students and faculty has come to serve me in later endeavors. Goliard’s management course was a nightmare at the time but I’ve often found myself thinking back to some of what was discussed and some of the lessons Goliard shared with us (his number one nitpick was to never hire someone who smokes...).

Then there was Merle O’Brien’s class where we had to draw up assessments of ourselves and business and then create improvement plans for each entity based on those assessments. Over the years I’ve found myself assessing and thinking of ways to improve the circumstances I find myself in. Mind you, I don’t go all out and create a multi-page, spiral-bound document detailing the minutia involved...but I’ll be honest there have been times that I thought it would help....

And while the lessons of the communication theory, ethics, and research classes don’t really come into play anymore, I smiled a little when I heard George Gerbner had died a few years ago.

It was an interesting year and, while it may have been a bit a painful at the time, I think I would go through with it again if I could do it all over.

Still, it’s hard to believe it’s been ten years.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Awful
(Auf der Maur/Erlandson/Love/Schemel)
Hole
From the album Celebrity Skin
1998

Swing low sweet cherry
Make it awful
It's your life, it's your party, it's so awful
Let's start a fire
Let's start a riot! Yeah it's awful
It was punk
Yeah, it was perfect now it's awful

They know how to break all the girls
Like you
And the rob the souls of the girls like you
And they break the hearts of girls

Swing low, cherry, cherry
Yeah it's awful
He's drunk, he tastes
Like candy, he's so beautiful
He's so deep like dirty water
God, he's awful
You're lost, oh, where's your daddy -it's so awful

And they royalty rate all the girls like you
And they sell it out to the girls like you
To incorporate little girls

Hey, run away with the light
Run away its divine
Let's run away, yeah, tonight, and
We'll steal the light of the world

Swing low, sweet cherry, yeah its awful
You're gonna ripe for the picking, it's so awful
You've got your youth
Don't waste your money
Yeah its awful
I was punk!
Now I'm just stupid
I'm so awful

Oh, just shut up you're only 16

If the world is so wrong
Yeah you can break them all
With one song
If the is so wrong yeah you take
It all
With one song

Swing low sweet cherry
Make it awful
They bought it all, just build a new one
Make it beautiful...yeah

Takin' a spin through the neighborhood the neighbors scream “whatchya talkin' bout?”

I think one major part of my demise in graduate school was the culture shock.

I had spent four years in a Communication program that tended to treat each other as family. The students worked side by side on numerous projects, the instructors were tough but fair and approachable, and in the end you sort of knew who you could rely on for assistance, be it in or out of the classroom. Each of the instructors had their ticks and quirks, true, and we respected them in the classroom, but we also had the chance to see them outside the Communication Building at events or once-a-semester department social functions. That’s when we really got to see what they were like outside a classroom; sometimes it was pretty, sometimes not.

That spirit seemed to be lacking when I went off to graduate school. Granted, I had spent three or four years with these people and was now far away and as new as a Freshman on their first day of college in my role of graduate student and station manager. I knew I wasn’t going to fit in with either students or faculty on my first day. The problem was that it was nearly impossible to want to fit. Sure, the students were the easiest to work with; I was close in age to many of them and could relate to some of what they were going through as far as being college student (grades, graduating, etc.).

The faculty was another matter. Schmoozing has never been my forte and so I may have come off a bit aloof. Still, I did try to meet everyone and assist whenever it might be needed (such as proctoring a test or assisting a professor in the classroom). But it was hard to want to work with some of these people. Like Dr. Goliard, who would call you aside just to tell you he was busy and couldn’t talk to you about your degree plan but then would sit in his office with the lights off. Or Mrs. Shelly Yarbrough, the radio station faculty advisor, who dismissed my write-up of the student who mouthed EBS tones instead of running an EAS test because the student “plays such good music.” Or Theodore Siamun, the kindly but tired department head, who I perceived as ready to retire at the drop of a hat. Yes, maybe if I stuck around longer than a year I would have gotten to know these people better. Perhaps I would have figured out how to overcome their oddities and allow them to see me excel.

Another problem I had was the excess baggage from my undergrad years. In four years I had built myself up to be a respectable and trusted member of the radio station staff and through this trust was named Program Director for my final semester. I also had gotten to be pretty good at editing (both analog tape and digitally) and I thought I might be able to apply some of this talent in my role as station manager.

Wrong. I knew going in to this role that I would be on the opposite side of the chasm than I had been the previous school year. Students would still be running the station and doing all the things I had done, but now it would be me standing stand back to monitor and guide them along the path. I didn’t get a regularly scheduled news or music shift; I sat in an office and worked at the public file or coordinating event with the school or public. I didn’t get to go out on remotes and make wry observations about the people I saw; I taxied the equipment from my office to the remote site and made sure the students didn’t have any problems. I didn’t have office hours to sit in room and listen to new music; I had office hours to read and formulate thesis topics that would be of interest to graduate instructors that seemed cold and disinterested in everything else I did.

The whole town of Allaphellan seemed cold and distant or just plain bizarre for my own liking, too. It was smaller in population than where I was as an undergraduate, but yet students stayed in town for the weekend. And what was there to do? Driving around there were a number of strange sights to behold: the phallic-shaped Veterans monument across the street from the courthouse; an old Rock Fort that had been a mercantile, hostel, church, jail, speakeasy, trading post, post office, and now some sort of museum; and a bulbous water tower you could see from campus with a series of strange blinking lights on its top and statue of Omphale at its base. And that’s not even taking in the campus itself. Plus who could forget that high school rock band that was all the rage that year...ugh.

This town was a strange place and I was all but glad to fly away after the school year was completed.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Last Stop: This Town
(Eels/Michael Simpson)
Eels
From the album Electro-Shock Blues
1998

You're dead, but the world keeps spinning
Take a spin through the world you left
It's getting dark a little too early
Are you missing the dearly bereft?

Take a flight
and you could be here tomomorrow
Take a flight,
well, you could get here tonight

I'm gonna fly on down for the
last stop to this town
What?
I'm gonna fly on down and fly away, well alright

Get down

Takin' a spin through the neighborhood
The neighbors scream
Whatchya talkin' bout?
'Cause they don't know how to
let you in
And I can't let you out

What if I was not your only friend
in this world
Can you take me where you're going
if you're never coming back

I'm gonna fly on down for the
last stop to this town
i'm gonna fly on down then
fly away on my way

Get down

Why don't we take a ride away up high
through the neighborhood
Up over the billboards and the factories
and smoke

i'm gonna fly on down for the
last stop to this town
Yeah
i'm gonna fly on down then
fly away on my way
Fly away
Get down

Professors muddled in their intent to try to rope in followers

After I had been accepted to graduate school it became necessary for me to visit the campus and apply for an assistantship. This meant that I would pay for graduate school by accepting to work 20 hours a week at the campus radio station as Station Manager. It was a sort of vicious cycle but it was something that made sense: I wanted to keep my hand in radio and there was a station in search of a sucker...er, station manager (right).

It was during the previous spring semester that I first visited the campus to meet with the graduate school coordinator. Perhaps that encounter should have tipped me off about this wild idea of mine. The man I was introduced to was Dr. Oliver F. Goliard, Ph.D. Yeah, that’s how we were introduced, too. He seemed like a nice guy, albeit one who might have been in the throes of academia for a bit too long. Or, as one of my fellow graduate students reflected later, he had “his head up his ass” too long. True, Goliard had been at the school for many years, and was the first faculty advisor at that radio station, a position I was to believe he had only relinquished in recent years. Of course first impressions said otherwise at the time and I left campus feeling confident that I would return that fall to not only begin work on an MA but have a job lined-up for the foreseeable future.

Dr. Goliard was, to put it bluntly, strange...strange looking and strange acting. He looked waxy. He didn’t have a hard, chiseled face but a loose, floppy one; the skin seemed to ripple each and every time he smiled, which we in class soon learned was not often. Topics that usually made him smile were his education, his career, and his ability to come up with long drawn-out responses to questions he alone knew the answers to. In short – the guy liked to talk. He also liked taking off his glasses and striking studious poses when confronted with questions, though he usually deflected these inquiries back to the students. I suppose this was a teaching method.

His mannerisms were also legendary, or so claimed some of the graduating undergrads. I eventually took to calling him the “Artful Dodger” because of his wildly successful ability to dodge questions and interactions. One of my earliest memories was shortly after the start of the fall semester and I happened by his office, he inside with the door open. “Good morning, Dr. Goliard,” I said, walking by on my way elsewhere. He hollered out to come back – “What? Who goes there?” – he had missed who it was. I walked back and again said, “good morning” and added a “how are you” out of courtesy. His brow wrinkled and he hissed in a short breath of air as if this was a major distraction from whatever the hell he had been doing. “Well, yes it is a good morning but I’m afraid I’m a bit busy right this moment and not able to sit and talk with you, Marty. If you want to come back later and schedule something then....”

After a few interchanges like this you can imagine how hard it would be when you were required to talk with the guy.

At the time I didn’t know...and it’s a theory I never got back to exploring later...if this attitude was something that was to be expected in all graduate schools or if this was a persona he had adapted to give him that superior-like quality over his peers. Was this talking down an intentional quirk of professors to determine how tough first-year students were, or had the few of us in Goliard’s class found a rare specimen of academicus pompous? Was it his job to act like this or was he simply doing what came naturally? Yes, some of the other graduate professors were a bit aloof, too, but they could at least be approached and were known to crack a joke or two now and then. You know, in other words, appear human. Did Goliard feel superior because he had been there longer than everyone else?

I don’t know, but it got to be a sad state of affairs very quickly.

There were probably other sad professors out there and I found it droll that R.E.M. released an album that same year semester that could have almost been Goliard’s anthem.

Or maybe my anthem...because I was starting to hate where I wound up, too.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Sad Professor
( Peter Buck/Mike Mills/Michael Stipe)
R.E.M.
From the album Up
1998

If we're talking about love
Then I have to tell you
Dear readers, I'm not sure where I'm headed.
I've gotten lost before.
I've woke up stone drunk
Face down in the floor.

Late afternoon, the house is hot.
I started, I jumped up.
Everyone hates a bore.
Everybody hates a drunk.

This may be a lit invention
Professors muddled in their intent
To try to rope in followers
To float their malcontent.
As for this reader,
I'm already spent.

Late afternoon, the house is hot.
I started, I jumped up.
Everyone hates a sad professor.
I hate where I wound up.

Dear readers, my apologies.
I'm drifting in and out of sleep.
Long silence presents the tragedies
Of love. Not the age. Get afraid.
The surface hazy with attendant thoughts.
A lazy eye metaphor on the rock.

Late afternoon, the house is hot.
I started, I jumped up.
Everyone hates a bore.
Everybody hates a drunk.
Everyone hates a sad professor.
I hate where I wound up.
I hate where I wound up.

No, don't say a word: leave while you still can, put out your light

It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years.

It was just over ten years ago that I decided that it might be “fun” to pursue a master’s degree in communication and that it might be “fun” to use my combination of education and experience and teach students about the basics of audio production. Yeah...that just sounds like a hoot. Really now, come on – I was just fresh out of undergraduate classes and knew firsthand the attitudes and aggravations that we caused. Why on earth would I want to put up with it on a regular basis?

Why indeed.

The catalyst for my desire to attend graduate school seems to have been lost to the ages. I do remember working alongside John Fletcher (of “What’s New Wednesday?” fame) during what would have been my junior year and discussing our futures. He was originally from Lima Valley, a town about an hour’s drive west, and commuted a couple times each week to a radio station he’d been with for close to a year. This was to be his after-college future: getting his feet in the door with commercial radio work all the while knocking on doors to cater his audio production know-how. My future wasn’t as clear as that, nor was that a future I totally wanted to chase, either. I remember being somewhere with my parents around this time and the salesman asking what I was in college studying. When I said “radio communication,” he answered back quickly with the comment, “ah, goin’ to be a DJ – that’ll be cool.”

No, it wouldn’t. It would be moronic to think that I would spend four years of my life gazing giddily at the stars so I could be one of those knee-biting shills. I didn’t want to settle for that sort of mediocrity and knew I could do something more with my talents. But there was the looming question of what it was I would be doing once I graduated. The answer was painfully obvious: I didn’t know.

I also knew I didn’t have any problems leading classroom discussions, as I found myself doing a few times my senior year. For example, during the fall semester I took the required Program Planning course whose final project was doing the necessary “legwork” to put together some sort of television program. We didn’t actually produce our programs but instead learned what all it would take to put something together (i.e. budgets, rights, scheduling, scripts, etc.). However my project must have hit a nerve with the instructor because he invited me back the following semester; instead of the class putting together their own programs, we would all work together to accomplish the program I envisioned the prior semester. On more than one occasion that instructor turned the class over to me to discuss our mission and what we needed to do to meet our goals. It wasn’t teaching per se but it gave me a chance to be in the shoes of those that led and figure out some of what it took to be in that position.

So it was through these and other channels that the idea slowly formulated in my head that “you know, this graduate school thing would give you the chance to teach and allow you to stick around a university setting.” On paper it sounded like a grand idea; perhaps not an easy one, but I had come out road tested on other challenges so I wasn’t too hesitant at this point.

It was just that my expectations collided with reality in the worst way.

Speaking of other mistakes, Better than Ezra put out a quite contrary album in 1997 called How Does Your Garden Grow?. My undergrad station practically had the core singles from Deluxe and Friction, Baby in constant rotation and they were always well received. And then came this album...one that no one seemed to know what to do with. We put the first single in rotation but its sound was not “Good” or one that was “Desperately Wanted.” We were disappointed. Apparently we weren’t the only ones: Elektra Records dropped the group and it would be three years before their subsequent album surfaced, Closer (2001).

Of course, I don’t consider my year of graduate school a mistake....

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Beautiful Mistake
(Kevin Griffin)
Better Than Ezra
From the album How Does Your Garden Grow?
1998

photo stills
in your wallet with the unpaid bills
and you show it like it means something
you could never know the pain it brings

and here you are
standing in our drive
(when absence suits you best)
letters and your cards
with no return address

now you come around
now you come around
your familiar sounds
we are your beautiful,
we are your beautiful mistake.

waiting for this day
well i memorized the things i'd say
how you broke her when you disappeared
how i hear her say,

"you'd make your father proud."
it echoes through the years
as if i could forget all a mother's tears

no, don't say a word
leave while you still can
put out your light

now i guess you're going
a figure through the door
and your taillights faded
like twenty years before