Send us your stories. We’re still here.

We’re not streaming right now… we hope to again in the future, but we’re continuing to build the radio archives in the meantime! Send us your stories (ejohnsonn00 [at] gmail) and we’ll post them here! If you have images to include on the site, send them as well.

For now, friends, you can check out these super radical jams while we snooze our computers.

 

A nice mention from the SF Bay Guardian!

Last week’s cover article in the SF Bay Guardian was about the fight to save KUSF, a wonderful local community radio station that was recently sold to a big media group out of southern CA.  The whole situation highlights how little community radio is left in the bay.  It’s frustrating and sad.

But right at the end is a really nice mention of our project, and a hope that more DIY radio will continue to pop up around the bay!

“…Some people are even willing to take the ride into DIY low-power terrestrial radio. I stumbled over the Bay Area’s latest on a wet, windy Oakland evening at Clarke Commons’ craftsman-y abode. The door was flung open and a colorful, quilt-covered fort/listening station greeted me in the living room. In the dining space, a “magical handcrafted closet studio station” provided ground zero for the micro-micro K-Okay Radio — essentially a computer sporting cute kitchen-style curtains and playing digitized sounds.

A brown, blue, and russet petal-shingled installation looked down on K-Okay’s guests as they took their turn at the mic. And if you were in a several-block radius of the neat-as-a-pin house-under-construction and tuned your boombox to 88.1 FM, you could have caught some indescribably strange sounds and yarns concerning home and migration. I drove away warmed by the friendly mumble of sound art.

Who would have imagined radio as an art installation? Yet it’s just another positive use for a medium that has functioned in myriad helpful ways, whether as a life link for Haitians after the 2010 earthquake or (as on a recent Radio Valencia show) a rock gossip line concerning the Bruise Cruise Fest. As Waits puts it, radio is “about allowing yourself to be taken on a musical journey rather than doing the driving yourself online.” Today it sounds like we need the drive to keep that spirit alive.”

Tonight! Show! Party! Fun!

Come on over to 3909 Clarke Street tonight (7-10pm) for our opening, closing, and fun fun gathering!

Sit in the the fort, eat popcorn, drink cocoa, listen to live performances by Mountainhood, Jo Boyer, the Beach Mansion Karaoke Band, and more! Bring the kids!

SF International High Students Read Their Poems

On Tuesday, 17 students from the San Francisco International High School (a public school for recent immigrants inside of Mission High School), shared their poems about where they are from.

Listen to students read their beautiful, insightful, and moving poems in our radio archives, or find individual students’ poems here.

Kart’s Poem

I am from Estonia
I am from cold and warm
I am from winter and summer
where houses are small and gardens are big.

Where I am from, celebrities don’t exist.
Where I am from, the United States is everyone’s dream.

I am from big forest,
little lakes,
deep swamps,
and endless moors.

I am from Christmas,
which smells like gingerbread and apple pie
melting in your mouth
and it tastes sooo good.

Ronaldo’s Poem

Fear of forgetting my own language
Fear that my brothers will say you are not my brother
Fear of my friends killing me
Fear of losing my parents again
Fear of not having money
Fear of killing myself
Fear of my government reporting me to my country

A President’s Day Special: Ron Ragin!

To celebrate (We Don’t Need) Presidents Day, we welcomed a friend whose name bears a striking resemblance to The Gipper.  We like this Ron better.

If you missed Ron Ragin’s live show this morning, you can catch it again in our archives! Or just click in here: To Georgia, With Love

It’s a mix of southern soul, 90′s hip hop and R&B, and a cornucopia of other music from around the world.  Interspersed are his poems from a new collection-in-progress.

_________________________

Vespertine

Middle Georgia earth does not give when you dance
you can‟t dig your fingers into it
if you fall
it will tear off your skin
burn your knees, make you
stand up straighter

The earth softens only where things are growing

Most nights
I would stand in the yard
east of our red brick home
long grass
tickling my ankles
gently cupping my feet

I‟d stare at the stars
head craned up in odd angle
arms limp at my sides
spinning in slow circles
eating the sky with my eyes

Under full moon the land glows blue
if you are patient you can see
by the light
some creatures show themselves
only at night
fireflies, coyotes, roaches
pine needle percussion and cricket song
the whip of thick kudzu ropes
hopscotching the wind

I could feel the forest watching me

From: Ron
To: Ma Frances

Dear Ma Frances,

I am your great great grandson, Ronald Wayne Ragin, III. I am the son of Ronald Wayne Ragin, Sr., your great grandson; son of Herman Cicero Ragin, Sr.,  your grandson; son of James “Bus” Ragin, your son. I don’t remember Great Grandaddy James, and I don’t actually know too much about him. But I’ve heard a lot about you, Ma Frances. I hope you don’t think me rude. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to talk to you. I don’t know how to pay my respects from this far across space and time. I don’t know the proper words. I guess I shouldn’t be looking you in the eye or be all up in your mouth…

I‟ve been told that you were a powerful woman. Legend has it, you used to beat up white men who tried to mess with your children. I hear that you could handle a shotgun, that you had broad shoulders and strong legs. They say you had a laugh loud as summer thunder. I imagine you cracking pecan shells between your knuckles and making up your own cake recipes. I picture you waking up before the sun to grab your plough and sewing before you went to sleep each night.

Ma Frances, can I ask you some questions? Did you believe in God? What did you pray to him for? What was your favorite song, your favorite food? What was your favorite time of day? I‟d like to know how you named your children and what made you get out of bed on days when you didn‟t want to. Do you remember what your mother smelled like? Did you like to sing or dance?

I sing, Ma Frances! It’s where my power is. No, I mean I SANG from somewhere deep inside me. Just below my navel, Gramma. I feel you there.

I will write more soon.

Love,
Your great great grandson,
Ron

mountainhood home!

coming to K-OKAY RADIO today: michael hilde of mountainhood! tune in today in early afternoon as he shares his homespun tunes & tales and we all sit around wrapped up in quilts and eating vegetable soup. pull on your warm dry socks; it’s a lovely grey day and let’s color it seashine.

if you missed the live broadcast, you can download michael’s segment from our archives.

Fort-Home & Mystical Mathematics

With the radio station up and running (K-Okay!, 88.1), we’ve focused our attention on finishing our collapsible home/ radio listening station/ fort.

Made out of equilateral triangles of bedsheets stretched over wood, lots of thread, some old clothes, and some hairbands, they can be assembled into infinite home-shapes.

The triangles are looking beautiful, the nights of sewing are getting later, the piles of thread and fabric scraps is climbing higher, and the whole thing keeps feeling a little more magical.

Maybe it’s over-worked, late-night delirium, but here’s our explanation for the magic.  It’s a nod to the absurdist-physicist who is sharing his home with us for this month, it is a shout to our amateur geometric mystics a continent away.  It’s the lasting intrigue of the Platonic Solids.

Platonic Solids are 3-dimensional convex solids made entirely of matching equilateral shapes.  Like a cube.  Or a pyramid with a triangular base.  There are only five possible Platonic Solids, and three of them are constructed of equilateral triangles.

An ancient cult mathematicians called The Secret Brotherhood, headed by Pythagoras (of Pythagorian Theorem fame), ascribed cosmic meaning to the five solids.  Their emblem, the pentagram, lives on into occult eternity.  Like modern physicists, they sought to explain the fundamental elements of the universe.  Along with a friend, Empedocles, they ascribed an element to each solid, and the fifth, 12-sided solid, represented the entire zodiac and the universe as a whole.

Our equilateral triangle shapes correspond to fire, water, and air.