Subject: [NEXTEL-1] '40 Watts From Nowhere': The Pirate Queen

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2004 03:35:42 -0500

February 29, 2004

'40 Watts From Nowhere': The Pirate Queen
By CHOIRE SICHA

Sue Carpenter was a mystery to herself. In 1995, at 28, she had spent
five dull years as a legal secretary in San Francisco. For unknown
reasons, her life's frustrations were projected onto the pitiful state
of commercial radio. Overwhelmed by this sudden hatred, she stumbled
into the seemingly all-male community of eccentric, leftist pirate-radio
broadcasters and was soon pseudonymously running an illegal radio
station of her own, the all-music KPBJ.

The editorship of UHF, a tiny culture magazine, soon took Carpenter to
Los Angeles and away, fortunately, from her
heroin-addicted boyfriend. At great cost (incurring both financial and
sleep debts) and with curious urgency, she founded a new
station, KBLT, in the growing hipster community of Silver Lake. From
broadcasting alone in her semi-soundproofed closet to an audience of
potentially zero people, Carpenter saw her baby station eventually grow
to an around-the-clock freak show.
''I'm attracted to pirate radio for the same reason I ride motorcycles:
it terrifies me,'' Carpenter writes in ''40 Watts From Nowhere.'' This
seems like an odd, inverted motivation. She is an unlikely political
spokeswoman for freedom on the dial -- she confesses early on that ''I
have absolutely no idea what's going on in the world. I don't have a TV,
don't listen to NPR and never read the newspaper.''

UHF died, and Carpenter made a nervy go as a freelance writer.
Simultaneously, KBLT took off. The band Mazzy Star played a benefit for
legal fees. KBLT broadcast bootleg world premieres of songs by Beck and
Madonna. The Red Hot Chili Peppers played on air. The Jesus and Mary
Chain came by one drunken night and spun records and playfully abducted
her stemware.  She lived through these adventures in a very real terror
of the Federal Communications Commission.

KBLT became a torture to her neighbors, a strain to her sanity and a
distraction from her journalism career. ''The music in my
house is so omnipresent that it has become background. . . . I rarely
listen anymore to the new music that comes into the station,'' she
confesses. She worked as a motorcycle instructor for extra cash;
meanwhile, the news media tried to crash her unlicensed party.

Carpenter is best on her experience as a media subject, unable to
control the journalists who wanted to exploit KBLT. She is equally
ferocious when she expresses her disgust with consolidated radio empires
and the ludicrosities of the F.C.C. itself. Also fascinating is her take
on Miami's big-time underground-radio world. The building anxiety of her
illegal-broadcast lifestyle is terribly unnerving. As the story
progresses, the F.C.C. strangles more and more pirate stations, and the
government's men in white vans draw ever nearer to sweet little KBLT.

There are frustrations to the book, notably Carpenter's opacity as to
motivation. Carpenter is a radio addict, one finally assumes, powerless
against the dream of an anarchic utopia on the air. She writes in a
straightforward enough magazine style, but veers between entertaining
overdisclosure and a seeming fear of divulgation. Obviously the book
will be of great interest to music lovers, self-publishers and renegades
in all media, and film rights purchasers -- you wonder why Carpenter
didn't forgo the book and sell that screenplay.

On a tip that the F.C.C. is coming, KBLT shuts down, then returns. In
the last days of the beleaguered station, Carpenter does
something absolutely extraordinary -- and, at last, revelatory. She has
scouted tall buildings in Los Angeles and, finding a rooftop already
crowded with antennas, installed her own among them. When the station
suddenly hisses to static one day, she jumps on her motorbike, racing to
her secret antenna. From the street she can see figures atop the
building. Surprising herself for perhaps the final time, she races up to
the roof and the long-feared Agent Smiths of the F.C.C. and boldly
claims the equipment as her own.

Choire Sicha writes for The New York Observer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/29/books/review/29SICHAT.html?ex=1078635600&en=f11abf7a264805e6&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

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