Adam @ Rusty Mike Radio

Israel's Middle Classes Rise Up

2011-08-02T04:47:00.000-07:00

Israel is experiencing a summer of discontent: Tent cities have sprung up in response to rising housing costs; Dairy products have suffered mass boycotts that have turned that industry upside down; doctors & nurses have been involved in industrial action for over 120 days and now parents with strollers have protested the prohibitive costs of child rearing in Israel.
First, lets dispense with that these protests are not: they are not an Israeli 'arab spring'. The Arab Spring demos are about fighting for basic democratic rights. Autocratic arab states have been prepared to kill these people rather than allow them say in the way their country is run. Here in Israel it could not be more different, because Israelis have enjoyed those democratic rights since the founding of the State of Israel. In fact, these demos are a reflection of the vibrancy of our democracy. No, the Summer of Discontent in Israel is about the Middle classes: People who's education and careers would normally lead them to basic financial security, but in Israel they find themselves increasingly unable to move forward with their lives: Wages don't stretch so hard working people find themselves working two jobs and spending even less time with the families they are working to support; house costs in cities where they make their homes are rapidly becoming prohibitive leading to a generation of Middle Classes facing the prospect of never getting a foot on the housing ladder; early child care is so expensive that it is hardly worth both parents going to work, and yet impossible to make ends meet if they do not both have jobs; and the cost of basic utilities keeps rising whilst wages more often than not, stay static. This then is the root of the Summer of Discontent: the middle class of Israel feeling squeezed, overburdened and as a social class, burnt out.
There are many ideas floating around, and I do not pretend to have the economic or political knowledge to say what we should do, but I do know,as a member of this middle class in Israel, that we have to do something soon! Ideas that listeners have suggested include state support for early child care (Mishpachtonim) so that going back to work after maternity leave does not mean a drastic cut in take home pay; reducing the number of flat taxes such as VAT (Ma'am) and increasing means based taxes; less child support emphasis on larger families (aimed at the poorest HAredi & Arab sectors) and more on smaller families; rent control for cities like Jerusalem where the middle classes find themselves priced out of the market by wealthy absentee overseas owners and Haredim moving into areas making them inappropriate for other sectors; Increasing local and purchase taxes for overseas owners as well as incentives for absentee owners to rent or sell to locals.
My fear is the result of all this dissent will be either a 'band aid' over the concerns - some type of appeasing gesture that does not address the genuine pressures on the Israeli Middle Class or it will being the Netanyahu government down which will almost certainly dispel the anger and cause the tent cities to be taken down, but will then lead to business as usual. This is Bibi's fault, but it's also Olmert's Sharon's, Peres's, Rabin Shamir and Begins ! This has been 25 years in the making, but if we don't want to see the growing Middle Class exodus of Israeli's and Anglo Olim then it needs to proper long term policy decisions to be made a sea change in thinking toward Israel's Middle Classes.

Improving Our StationGet to know Our Little Jerusalem Studio

2011-07-06T05:12:00.000-07:00

I know that in radio we use our voices to paint a picture but I thought it might be nice to tell you a little about our little studio and show you a photo as well

(Left - presenter Dina Pinner chats with a guest)

When you tune into any radio station, it is very hard to picture the environment the presenter is broadcasting from: The studio may be huge, he may be self presenting, or he may be staring through a piece of glass at a studio producer who presses the buttons, he may simply be sat at a desk with a couple of mics, it may be live or pre-recorded. The listener merely hears the voice through a speaker & imagines the rest.

In our case we have a small tidy little studio, buzzing with computers and illuminated by several screens. We self produce and most of us are self taught in the art of broadcasting. We hope the audience accepts that we are regular a bunch of English speaking "Israeli's by choice" living and working in Israel and talking about that life with passion. We play great music and interview fascinating people!

Our studio has a glass door into the corridor of the AACI offices and any visitor heading for our meeting room passes us. I often find myself losing my flow of words in mid sentence because I glance at the door and some old man or little kid will have their face shmooshed against it!
There are two desktop computers in the studio and 3 screens: One PC has only a single task which is to stream our output to the world. It's keyboard probably gets used once a week at most, but the other is our "studio" PC and is the heart of Rustymike Radio. It stores over 150,000 music tracks, many hours of recent archived shows, jingles, promos, ads and more. It also runs the studio DJ & automation software which will happily select & play music, ads, and pre-recorded shows for weeks if there isn't a live presenter. When we are live, the studio PC is used to queue up songs, surf the net, play the news and just about every sound other than human voices that the listener hears! On one terrible day a year ago, as I played the last track of my show, it crashed and in fact it was a very poorly computer indeed. For three days we had to run the studio from laptops and cd players..it was a nightmare. Restored to full healthm the Studio PC gained new respect on it's return to duty!

Of course the most recognizable feature of a studio, and one that has survived the demise of record decks, carts & reel to reel tape machines that filled the first radio studio I worked in, is the mixer. We use a 12 channel Yamaha and that does the job nicely, balancing the 3 studio mics, headphones, telephone hybrid and external feeds from our laptops and iPods. We still have a double professional CD player in the studio and some presenters turn up with a stack of discs but in my case, even though I broadcast 5 days a week, 4 hours per day, I probably play no more than 3-4 tracks a week from CD. Its an MP3 world these days!

Mic's don't change much either. The main presenter has a very posh and expensive AKG mic that has the advantage of being more forgiving if we move away from it a little when chatting with guests or queing up music while we speak. The other two are less expensive AKG mics but they sound really good as long as people talk right into them.

That's basically it .. our little world! We all hope you'll tune in, hit the chat live on the Rustymike Web player and let us know you are out there!

Finding The Real Israel

2011-05-03T05:07:00.000-07:00

There's a multitude of images of Israel in the world - there's the CNN / BBC image of a war torn land, filled with violence, divided by a giant wall, and run by an arrogant military; The Islamist almost medieval blood libelous view of Israel; There's the Christian image of Israel, which is a place where you can see the footsteps of Jesus at every turn, a country of biblical sites linked by air conditioned bus rides; theres the Jewish day school Israel - a country of kibbutzim, pioneers and wars to memorize; and finally there's the Israel you never really get to hear about, which is where I actually live: It's the real Israel - the country of honking cars, learning to speak Hebrew, dealing with a new education system. A country with a vibrant theatre & arts, beautiful views & promenades, frustrating bureaucracy, amazing medical services, horrendous drivers; a country that beats to the rhythm of Judaism in all its forms...it's the Israel that myself & the other staff & volunteers at Rustymikeradio.com try to present in our programming every day.

Yesterday is a great example of what I am talking about - Yom Hashoah (Israel's Holocaust remembrance day) - Elsewhere in the world a holocaust remembrances would focus on the history, the evil, and the suffering, tempered with synagogue services & school choirs singing but here it's different: This is a country where a high percentage of our citizens are survivors or decended from survivors and where few do not have family members amongst the Six Million. It makes Yom Hashoah immediate & relevant & not historical or stale. Our station, along with every other radio station in Israel played only sad music, & no advertising or jingles & our interviews had a connection with Shoah education, & events . At 10am every person in this country stopped what they were doing for 2 minutes while the sirens wailed. It's a uniquely Israeli experience as an entire nation stood silently by cars, in supermarkets, schools. hospitals & in their homes. We broadcast that siren to the world. Its a powerful annual moment of national unity, and we try to share the feeling here with Jews & friends of Israel worldwide. Next Monday is Yom Hazikaron (Remembrance day for our fallen soldiers & victims of terror) when we'll do this again. Rustymike Radio will relay the experience of the Yom Hazikaron from our anglo-Israeli perspective to the world. You won't see that on the CNN , Sky or BBC and if it is mentioned it'll be in the context of current affairs & moral equivalency. For us its Israel, it's who we are, where we live, what we have suffered & what we have achieved despite that.

I think the reason Rustymike Radio is so vital is that it is that while the CNN Israel does exist in places, that isn't the Israel I live in. There's a missing voice talking about the real country, its laws, customs, events, people, problems, kids, elderly, humor, arts, and yes sometimes we talk about the "Palestinian question" too - thats part of our life here, but only part & by no means the biggest part. If you want to know the rest of the story then you only need to sift through our several hundred podcasts or listen to a few hours of live output to find it.

Social Networks: Adults are babes in the wood compared with teens !

2010-10-24T07:44:00.000-07:00

The phenomenon of Social Networking in the form of Twitter, Facebook, youtube, etc is well known to most of us. Millions worldwide share the minutia of their lives on one of these networks from the trivia of what they ate for breakfast to the emotion of births and deaths, love and breakup. I readily admit that my Facebook page is a window into my life and my Twitter account is a powerful tool publicizing Rustymike radio's output. Marketing, and celebrity life will never be the same again, and birthday cards are a thing of the past now that we have 'wall's to post on.
However the potential that us 'older' social networkers have tapped into is nothing compared to the heights that teen are taking these new forms of communication:
Last year i interviewed three young Jewish teens whose 'Hug A Jew day' Facebook page garnered millions of friends, and sparked campus and school events worldwide. They had more people looking at their page than the New York Times sells newspapers on an average day and when I asked them what more they wanted to say to these followers, they had no idea!

Lucas Cruikshank on the other hand had lots of ideas, and has become a very wealthy young man thanks to the massive success of his alter ego called Fred Figgelhorn. You've probably never encountered this annoying series of videos on youtube, but as of October 2010, the Fred channel has received over 98 million channel views, over 625 million video views since its launch, and over 2.0 million channel subscribers, it is listed as the number two all-time most subscribed YouTube channel and 99.9% of his viewers are under 16 ! Simon Cowell would kill for figures like that for American Idol!
One enterprising youngster you will have heard of unless you have been living under a rock is Justin Bieber. He became one of the top recording and performing artists in the world over the past 18 months, all thanks to a fan base he cultivated from his living-room on youtube.
Millions of kids are broadcasting their adolescent anxiety, loves, & frustrations on social networks, sharing their skills, fears and nascent beliefs for all to see. They communicate not just to their best friends as we did in our teens, but to hundreds, often thousands of their peers. They galvanize support for ideas that go 'viral', fans for their talents (check out Greyson Chance's story when you get a moment !) and often broadcast the negative destructive side of their adolescence. One young teen called Joe was at one point New Zealand's most popular youtube video maker, as he displayed his confusion about his sexuality to the world.
Social networks have the power to broadcast peoples ideas, all of us are aware of that, but it is the kids who know how to utilize this power to a level most of us "drinking coffee at Starbucks" tweeters cannot imagine. In their hands they can take the number one record away from established stars and elevate one of their own to world stardom, and as we have seen in the US recently they can drive other teens to suicide.
It is more than a little scary and these kids in a few years will be running the social networks that our generation invented, utilizing as adults the power to communicate they have been developing from their bedrooms while we tweet.
One can only imagine what their kids will do with social networks given the advances in mobile communication. When the internet became popular people commented how small the world had become. I sit in a studio daily using that small world to broadcast from Israel, but if the internet made it easier for us adults to communicate,then social networking has made it possible for our teens to share their consciousness.