Radio
TUNE IN HERE
Read Ani's letter about the launch of Righteous Babe Radio
FEATURED POEM
Dr. Ryan J. Petteway is a social epidemiologist and assistant professor in the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health, where he teaches on Gender, Race, & Class, Community Organizing, and Public Health Law, Policy & Ethics. His scholarship integrates critical theory, participatory research, and decolonizing methods to engage notions of epistemic, procedural, and distributive justice within public health knowledge production processes, particularly as related to “place” and health. You can find more of his poetry at POETRY//Bars, including the National Poetry Month prize-winning piece TOGETHER//Untethered. His recent public health article here: On Minority Health Month, Public Health Critical Race Praxis, and a Critical Need for Imagination
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MASKS//Exposed
Can covering coughs
cover the costs of our American production?
Crises manufactured in the mouths of demagogues,
Idiosyncratic idiocies adorned in red ties
Defending insipid claims of intelligence,
Suppressing science,
Ignoring centuries of proof
Embodied in the bones and lungs of our lost:
America has never been asymptomatic.
Testing for pathogens,
Finding ourselves
In the streaks of Western blots,
Unapologetically contaminated.
Wiping door knobs we wouldn't turn
For a neighbor who doesn't speak our language;
Searching for solvents to absolve our apologies
As the world becomes a 5G autoclave;
Covered in breaking coverage of tolls
Counting the uncovered,
The unhoused, the unfree, the uninsured, the undocumented;
Uncovering the umbilical cord of infection:
How do you quarantine racism?
How do you "flatten the curve" of capitalism?
Patience? Hope?
Hope is an accelerant in an arson of indifference.
And we, are not the resistance—
We are the Remakers.
We must burn their corneas,
Corner their consciousness
As wolves conditioned on the flesh of lies,
Tear their tongues for origami appetizers
On a glass tabletop of truth—
Organized to shatter, to cut;
To dislodge patience from the bends of our bones
And prayer from our cracking fingers,
Because god, is a lobbyist.
The fire is here
And, no, our ride is not arriving.
It has been consumed by the flames of an arc
Fashioned from our sweat,
Funded by the tithes and taxes
Of a hopeful populace that depletes toilet paper
And leaves matches fully stocked;
Washing virally exploited hands with antibacterial soap,
Massaging monetized fear into palms
Dying to be raised as fists—unpaid.
Sick: Now leave.
A drunken reality exposed by social distance,
Rubbing sanitizer on distilled inequality:
Let's put a mask on it, call it covid.
Or call it "Chinese,"
Or call it whatever the fuck we want
As long as we don't dare dream to call it enough.
At what point, exactly, does "it" become what it is?
When an actual pandemic poses no threat
To dreams of going viral?
When a president lays bare our true pathology in an ode
To Ivan Drago—because what's a death to a dollar,
A “problem” to a patent, when there's a promise of a check?
As my brothers build and operate the warehouses,
My father trucks the products,
My mother stocks the shelves,
My partner treats the sick;
As our loved ones' skins scorch to dust
In sterilized boxes,
Should we wade through the world we made,
jealous of the material
Melting away inside?
Or purchase stock in natural gas?
I'll wait.
#TheRonaNextTime
#IThinkillCallitCovid
#Covid19Goddamn
FEATURED BOOTLEG
This week: Kansas City, MO 10-24-2014
October 24th, 2014 at the Uptown Theatre in Kansas City, Missouri. A trio show that almost counts as a quartet thanks to Jenny Scheinman as she joins Ani, Terence, and Todd for more than half the show. Adding a beautiful layer to songs such as Fuel, Angry Anymore, and Ani's take on Pete Seeger's Which Side Are You On? Also featured in this show is the elusive track The Whole Night and the show-closing Overlap sends fans home on cloud nine. New bootlegs featured every week, airing Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights at 9pm CDT and Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings at 4am CDT.
FEATURED CONVERSATION
This week: This Epic Life
WOODY'S VOICE
Join the Woody Guthrie Center on Sunday at 12pm and again at 4pm CDT for "Woody's Voice" on Righteous Babe Radio. "Woody's Voice" will explore struggle and overcoming issues together, and you'll be hearing from Woody, artists who collaborated with his words, and some new music that continues Woody's message. The show is curated by the Center, with Ani hosting and sharing our message. We will rebroadcast Woody's Voice at 12 pm CDT on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
Historians are fond of saying that the past doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes. To understand the present, we have to understand how we got here. That’s where this newsletter comes in. Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of American history. She believes that you can’t get a grip on today’s politics without an outline of America’s Constitution, and laws, and the economy, and social customs, her newsletter explores what it means, and what it has meant, to be an American. These were the same questions a famous observer asked in a book of letters he published in 1782, the year before the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur called his book “Letters from an American Farmer.” History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure rhymes. We will broadcast a recording of Ani reading the daily letters at 6pm, 11pm and 8am the following day CDT.
You can find the Letters and more about our Resident Professor here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
Hear Ani's first Letters from an American broadcast below.
HOLLY MIRANDA DJs
Holly Miranda curates an hour's worth of music by herself, Chris Maxwell and Ambrosia Parsley. The three are currently quarantined together in Woodstock, NY and spend some time sharing their songs and stories. Airing this Saturday at 4pm CDT, Monday at 8pm CDT and Thursday at 8pm CDT
We are looking at RBR Radio as an open source opportunity. We hope to integrate podcasts from like-minded souls around the world into the fabric of RBR Radio. We would love to hear your thoughts and ideas as to what it is you would really like to have discussed and represented musically on this your radio station. Please send submissions and ideas to radio@righteousbabe.com. The RBR content management staff will review all submissions and ideas presented.
