cyrano | Plumbing the depths of the Signal

One of my friends, in response to one of my radio posts, wrote me the following:
You know what I'd like? Could you explain to the heathens in the audience (me) about this radio show thing and how one might access it, and why you decided to do it and all the human interest stuff that you seem to assume we already know? Because I want to support you but I'm a little confused and not sure what it is to support. So... could you unpack this a little more?

You know me; I'm a big fan of unpacking. The metaphysical navel gazing that asks "Why do we do this? Why do we then not take it to its logical conclusion? What makes that so important to us?" That sort of thing. Plus, I don't want my friends to be confused, especially if I can help with that.

We begin at the beginning. Which is to say, in college, where so very many things started. The local college station, KBVR FM (You can't lead the pack if you whine like a puppy!), put out a call for DJs, asking for students to volunteer for staffing hours. Now, my best friend l2g and I were students at the local community college, but the ad didn't specify *where* one should be a student. So we went undercover, and we got through orientation without anybody asking to see IDs or asking what dorm we were in, and in time we managed to get a shift. We were on the air, real live DJs. We spent about a year in terror that at any moment Logan (the Program Director--we idolized him) would discover our forged credentials and we would lose our time slot.

But in the meantime, we were having the time of our lives. Nobody could see us, which freed us a great deal from our embarrassment. Many times, we got the feeling that nobody could *hear* us either, but that meant we could experiment and nobody would notice if we fucked it up. We amused ourselves with some creative radio patter, we discovered a world of new music, and we thrilled to the moment-to-moment demands of peforming live. I also did some DJing on campus for dances, with Mike Wright (Mister Wright), a station compatriot. It was probably one of the best times of my life. I eventually became an OSU student, and thus 'legit'. But the atmosphere at the station changed over time, and I was no longer working in the place I loved. As was to become my habit, my career at KBVR ended in a dramatic blow up over a long-simmering confrontation.

Fast forward to about two years ago, when I said for the 2349872395625937th time "I miss doing radio. I wonder if there's something around here I could do...." Except this time I actually started doing some research, and discovered Stanford's public radio station. I took the DJ intro class, and started working on my air test when it became obvious that I would be moving away. The wind firmly removed from my sails, I dropped the program after thanking the folks involved. (Trent! Shout out if you ever see this--you're magic.)

L2g and I had, in the early days of them Interwebs, considered going to the World Wide Web as a sort of digital pirate radio station, but at the time royalty charges were horrendous. (Thousands of dollars, as I recall, regardless of size of audience or revenue.) Last year, I went to check how things had changed, and discovered Live365.com, a site which offered the economy of scale. They paid the massive royalties and, for a much smaller monthly fee, offered storage space and bandwidth. There was no live aspect, which made me sad, but it at least covered some of what I wanted to do. (I wanted to share my music, I wanted to talk about it, I wanted to perform, I wanted to entertain people.)

And so I put together a broadcast program, upload it to the website and make it pretty, and then I "Go Live"--click on the 'broadcast' button and start sending that program. Right now, it's about four hours of material and it stays live for two to three weeks. If you want to hear that program, you can either go to Live365.com and do a search for "Vitamin Cyrano" in the Find Stations that Play box in the upper right corner (which should bring up the Vitamin Cyrano station) or go directly to http://www.live365.com/stations/member_10218275325 if you can remember that URL.

If you like it, keep listening. It's free. If you like it and hate the ads, you can become a VIP user. (Which actually makes me a few cents.)

If you want to support this endeavour, which would of course please me to no end, then tell friends who you think might like it. Play it when other people are around so that when they ask "What is that?" you can tell them. I've posted on OKCupid, on LiveJournal and FaceBook--the more people who know it exists, the more people will probably listen. I'm making posters, because I remember growing up in a college town where the tarry rough light posts were papered over with band promotions, with community events... a sort of underground communication. I printed out one of the posters and put it on my cube at work. One of my friends recorded some mp3s for me to use as audio drops in my show. (Holla, guest DJ roisnoir!) I wrote to Lee Press-On about getting paid to do one, but I haven't heard back from him.

tl/dr: I have an internet radio station. It doesn't make me money, but I like it. I hope you like it too.
Did this help to make more sense of it?