# 1,001 …. #1,002 … In late May, the “Songwriters Open Mic” tv program reached a milestone: 1,000 weeks on the “air” at CTN, Community Television Network, the public access station in Ann Arbor. The first, weekly half-hour episode of the show was broadcast on October 11, 1996. Now, it’s nearly 20 years later, and our 1,0003rd week on CTN is the week of June 17, 2016. (And it’s still fun for me to do it.)
The show has offered the original songs of hundreds of songwriters from the local area, and occasionally from out-state Michigan and out-of-state as well. The monthly “live” open mic, where we videotape the performers, is still going strong on the first Tuesday evening of each month at Oz’s Music Store in Ann Arbor. Occasionally, I also record “on the road,” such as at the Lamb’s Retreat for Songwriters, up in Harbor Springs.
What makes it possible to put all this local music on local tv? It’s called Public Access Television. It’s part of our national law, and one important player in that law was Senator Barry Goldwater –he is partly a hero and partly a villain, so there is something in it for a person of any political persuasion.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-access_television
Suffice it to say that I have a legal right to make tv programs and put them on the local cable tv station. These public access channels are non-commercial and non-curated — although it’s reasonable to say that I do the curating for my shows. But the basic idea is that there’s no Sony and no ABC-Disney and no Viacom influence in what goes on CTN, or any of the hundreds of public access channels around the country. Some channels are hotbeds of political free speech and agit-prop; others routinely broadcast the meetings of their local city councils and commissions and school boards. There are one-off shows and long-running series featuring comedians, preachers, and artists and musicians of all stripes. Local historians, local talk shows and how-to programs. Local not-for-profits explaining who they are and what they want to accomplish. There is such programming all day long on three channels in Ann Arbor: Comcast 16, 17, and 18. (Cable companies pay cities a franchise fee, which enlightened towns like Ann Arbor use to fund the entire cost of CTN, including studios and equipment available to residents, as well as access to the cable “airwaves.”)
My first production for CTN was in the 1980s, a short concert featuring a modern dancer and a jazz saxophone player, both U of M graduates. More recently while doing the Songwriters show, I also made a set of three music videos using baseball footage from my son’s high-school teams. And a lecture on Detroit’s architecture and ongoing revitalization. And a couple short films about non-traditional college students. I’ll do more. As the Wikipedia article points out, the look and feel and “production values” of the shows on commercial TV and on PBS are superior to most of what is on public access, and certainly superior to my work as a non-professional; but I insist on good quality audio, and other than that, I feature the local angle on creative work and play.
Public access tv is readily extended these days from the local cable hook-up to the internet via live-streaming –which CTN currently provides for the Songwriters shows — and Youtube, Vimeo and innumerable other video possibilities on the web. My modern-dance program was shot on ¾ inch tape, and available only to local cable subscribers, way back when Senator Al Gore was just dreaming about the internet (and writing legislation and pushing for funding.) Lots of changes in the technology. You might not find too many occasions when Goldwater and Gore are linked as collaborators, but I see a deeply shared sympathy they had for the idea of “access” — via tv and/or the internet — to widen the active participation of citizens –that’s everybody — in educational, governmental, and cultural activities. In context, 1000-plus weeks of the Songwriters show is simply what Goldwater and Gore had in mind. Maybe Gore will take credit for inventing “Songwriters Open Mic”? I’m OK with that.
“It is time to reinvent the Internet for all of us to make it more robust and much more accessible and use it to reinvigorate our democracy.” (Al Gore, 2005)
Jim Novak
jimnovakmusic@gmail.com