The New Yorker's First Cover
Most of this program was taken up with R. Paul talking about The New Yorker magazine on its 100th anniversary. The first five years of the magazine are in the public domain now and they can be reproduced quite nicely from the DVDs of The Complete New Yorker Radio's Pickles of the North talked about what's left of the CDC tracking diseases and we talked a little bit about the current crisis that's being created by Donnie Bonespur
Trump and Leon Skum. There isn't much to be added to this page, but I might plug something more into it.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday March 12, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
These meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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The New Yorker magazine is 100 years old now. I think it first hit the newsstands on February 15, 1925. The date on the cover of the first issue is February 21, 1925, but they always got it out a week before the cover date, an old custom among magazines. I remember reading it when I was in the army, especially when I was in the battalion library in Long Binh, Republic of Viet Nam. It was so good to read something that wasn't related to the army. And they talked about things in New York City, where I longed to be. I'm not sure that we always had The New Yorker at that library, but I was so glad to be able to read it, even the trivial stuff like ads for things. It was so different from the culture in which I was immersed then.
I haven't actually read The New Yorker in years, at least not the issues put out in recent times. We were gifted a copy of The Complete New Yorker by a friend at WBAI some years ago. It was put out on DVD in 2004, and it goes from the first issue in 1925, to the issue of February 14, 2005, 80 years of the magazine. Typically, I decided to start reading it at the very first issue. There is no way that I'd live long enough to read all of that, especially since I'm going through it very slowly and only getting to it sometimes. I did start reading the first issue and now I've gotten up to the issue of October 30, 1926. Not exactly a lightning pace.
The early magazine does a number of things for me. It gets me out of the present. Reading an old magazine can do that since magazines are always about what's going on around the time of publication and they continue for issue after issue. I've run into the similar phenomenon of being brought back in time by various periodicals that I've read on Project Gutenberg. But the issues of The New Yorker that I've been reading are from the 20th Century, and even though they're from a time before I was born, and when my parents were toddlers, there is enough stuff about New York City in there that I can relate to much of it.
The early years of the magazine are out of copyright now. The law in the United States of America is that after 95 years something that was printed is in the public domain. And if you make a faithful copy of that thing, which involves copying two dimensional media, then you can't get a new copyright on it. So the early issues of The Complete New Yorker are in the public domain. This is why I've been able to use a cartoon from a 1925, issue as the graphic for my evergreen announcement in the Upcoming Programs
part of the WBAI Web site.
Lipstick
Prohibition had been in full effect for years when The New Yorker first appeared on the newsstands and the people involved with the magazine were dead set against it. So we have them making fun of prohibition itself, the drys
and the people, especially the sky pilots, who vigorously promoted it. Here's the first paragraph from an article in the September 25, 1925, issue of The New Yorker written by Morris Markey, Ten days of desperate sleuthing brings the conclusion that there is something more in the present shake up of prohibition forces than the mere agonized writhings of an uneasy and ineffective body. There is, to be blunt, a definite motive behind the reorganization effected by Secretary Mellon, with the approval of President Coolidge. And the affair is not, despite the cynical insistence of my bootlegger,
The reference to Secretary Mellon was to Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, yes, that Andrew Mellon. The writers exposed corruption and laughed at the law, routinely printing the prices of bootleg hooch in the magazine, which annoyed both the government people who were in charge of enforcing Prohibition and some of the bootleggers who had a harder time charging more than the prices quoted in the magazine.just a new shake up so they can give us guys a new shakedown.
Also in the September 12, 1925, issue they had the start of a regular column called Tables for Two
written by Lipstick, aka Lois Long. In that episode she actually recounts being in a speakeasy when it got raided. Her columns of that era were always approaching speakeasies and such with a matter of fact attitude. It certainly made an impression on me, since I was raised on episodes of the TV series The Untouchables when I was in my formative years.
Reading The Complete New Yorker has also given me some history lessons. I've had to find out more about enforcing Prohibition. I've read about any number of scandals and I've learned about international relations and this new guy Mussolini who was in charge of Italy. I've also read about Madison Square Garden being set up on Broadway, the one I went to, and about the brand new, in 1926, Holland Tunnel. It's been quite a treat. I wish I had more time to read these old magazines that treat history as a current event.
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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