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Books By Mike Feder |
Source: Current Magazine, November 5, 2001
Ask Mike Feder to describe his live radio program Hard Work, which has aired on the Pacifica Foundation's WBAI-FM for 22 years, and he responds, "I open the microphone and I just talk. I talk about sex, death, marriage, kids, things I read in the newspaper, things I see walking around on the street. I talk about everything and anything for an hour, usually without stopping." Since his radio debut in 1979, the 56-year-old native New Yorker has wowed both listeners and critics with tales of his brutal childhood and equally troubled adult life. Feder's storytelling chops have been compared to those of Garrison Keillor and Joe Frank, but he's much harder-edged than Keillor and a lot less slick than Frank, who began his radio career at WBAI around the same time Feder did. In a 1986 New York Times profile that is credited with briefly launching Feder into show biz beyond public radio, Samuel Freedman wrote: "Whether across the airwaves or from a stool at the West Bank Café, Mr. Feder brings to his stories a naked emotional honesty that is both compelling and excruciating." One of Feder's stories involves a teenager named Martin who kept running away from home to live with an Orthodox rabbi. The youngster was part of Feder's caseload when he worked as a probation officer. Feder concludes the story with the line: "If Martin could, by sheer determination and guts, still go out and try to find his rabbi, I can still go out and try to find mine.'' One newspaper account of Feder telling the story in a theater described the audience's reaction, after absorbing the concentrated pathos: "It was as if the air had been sucked out of the room." "He's a natural storyteller in a very long tradition of folks who make themselves the central character in their stories, and he's done that with extraordinary skill," says Robert Krulwich, an ABC television reporter who has been a Feder fan for years. "It feels sometimes like you're hearing secrets about him, but you realize that they're your secrets, too." Feder seems to keep few secrets from his radio audience. As he recounts in his recently published memoir, The Talking Cure (Seven Stories Press), he had an affair with one of his listeners while he was still married, and after he informed his radio audience he had left his wife and two children for the girlfriend, some listeners wrote in, saying they would no longer listen to his show. Feder's stream-of-consciousness monologues on the radio have dealt with his mentally ill mother ("I'm thinking of my mother, Who I miss so much now, even, after all these years, because I'm finally grieving for her, and I've been living half in another world for the last several months, as my poor wife can attest to"), frequenting sex shows ("I was addicted to porno films"), grappling with hemorrhoids ("What am I sitting on right now? Well, I'm sitting on my ass but I'm also sitting on a, um, stool, you should pardon the expression"), Y2K ("My daughter came back from college and went on the computer and bap, she's sending 4,000 gigabytes of who knows what to everybody in the world and changing this and changing that, punching buttons, and now I can't get on the Internet") and the times he was confined to a psychiatric ward ("I was having frequent, extremely frightening hallucinations, and I was losing track of what time it was, what day it was. Finally, I got so nuts that I couldn't stay on the outside. I had to be locked up"). Feder's compulsive need to explain himself and his never-ending on-air soul-searching clearly rise above narcissism. As the Village Voice once noted: "There's an angry intensity and sadness about him, but also a monolithic quality and sense of survival." "I'm an old-fashioned storyteller who always has a moral to the story," explains Feder. "Sometimes there's a little ambivalence at the end, but that's the moral. The moral will be that life is ambivalent. I think that the ultimate moral for all my stories is that perseverance is necessary, because it can always get better. " His audience is not the kind that programmers covet; Feder says it includes mental patients in addition to shrinks and people in psychotherapy. "I've had people call me from the actual pay phones on the wards of mental hospitals, telling me that for the first time since they were on the ward for weeks, they've had a glimmer of understanding about what they were doing there," says Feder. A number of listeners have asked Feder to help them grapple with personal problems off the air. On one occasion he agreed to do some "marriage counseling" but insists he wouldn't do that again. Asked if he is still seeing a shrink after decades in psychotherapy, Feder replies: "Oh, yeah. Sure. Till the day I die. Or he dies. Then I'll get another one." Stephen Berke, a Brooklyn lawyer who has listened to Feder for more than 10 years, says he admires Feder's willingness to grapple with intimate topics on the air. "He does that, I think, not only for his own catharsis but I think he has long since appreciated that there are many people who heal themselves as he goes through his own self-healing through talk," says Berke. Another long-time listener, Jane Shumsky, has attended some of Feder's public storytelling performances and approached him at one and said, "You don't know me but you're one of my best friends." "That's how you feel," explains Shumsky. "You just feel so close to this person. I had a troubled childhood. I struggled with depression most of my life, and he can articulate these feelings so well. It was very comforting the way he could articulate his mishigas (Yiddish for "craziness")." Sharing your mishigas is apparently a two-way street with Feder and his audience. Radio listeners who recognize his voice on the street have been known to approach Feder and tell him their sagas. "I hear people's stories in a heartbeat," says Feder. "People tell me an hour's worth of their painful stories." Monologist Spalding Gray credits listening to Feder on the radio in the late 1970s with influencing his decision to pursue a career in autobiographical performing. Gray finds the propensity to confess in popular culture distressing of late (he says "Jerry Springer" and other such trash TV programs "are just plain vomit"), but he thinks what Feder does is important because it resonates with listeners. Gray is annoyed by Feder's habit of laughing at his own jokes and stories, but admires his ability to speak extemporaneously. "He comes in with a full head but a clean slate," says Gray. "He becomes present through the radio. I think he works much more off the top of his head [than I do] and trusts his memory." So far, a survivor at WBAI Feder's foray into live radio began during a two-year stint as assistant manager at WBAI in the late 1970s. During the first couple of years his show was almost entirely personal stories, but these days he only tells stories about four times a year. Feder used to have guests on his show, mostly authors and spiritual personalities, but no longer does so. Every couple of months he takes listener calls when he's "tired or unprepared." Taking calls from listeners is like "dogpaddling when you're too tired to swim," Feder says. "To me, it's no challenge." A version of Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" sung by Nina Simone is used to open or close Hard Work. But Feder rarely uses music to create breaks in his monologues, and he never voices over music. "It seems to me that the power of the word gets diluted by having music punctuate it too often or played under it." Feder says that, more than anything else; his shows are controlled by his mood. When he talked a lot about being depressed, he says, he lost listeners. "I had a lot of people writing me, saying, 'I can't stand how you're talking about how awful everything is. I'll catch you later in your life."' Although WBAI doesn't pay him for doing Hard Work, radio has still been good to Mike Feder. When he needed a day job in the 1980s, one of his listeners got him a gig as a paralegal at a big law firm. Of course, the law office provided grist for his storytelling. ("I would get on the radio and say how I didn't do anything in the last month except read books or make fun of lawyers to the point of utter viciousness and I come in the next day, and they would say, 'Great show.' If I were them, I would have fired me.") Another listener provided him with an apartment when he separated with his wife. His third wife, who has the pseudonym Rose in his new memoir, also came from his listening audience. These days, Feder doesn't tell stories about "Rose," but another woman he was once intimate with was so upset by the stories he told about her on the radio that she sued him and WBAI. A stipulation to the settlement requires that Feder no longer tell stories about the woman. Feder also refrains from telling stories about the major Hollywood movie star who befriended him following the rave 1986 New York Times review of his work. As a result of the Times piece, Feder was hired to write a sitcom pilot based on the stories he told about his stint as a probation officer, a publisher issued a book of his radio stories, and the big talent agency International Creative Management pursued him. But Feder's show biz career soon fizzled, and he simply carried on with the radio show. Sometime around 1987 Feder sent a recording of one of his shows to Minnesota Public Radio, hoping to, interest the network Work to a national audience distributing Hard Work ence. He says MPR sent him a letter, rejecting the program as "too raw and too New York." Shortly after the rejection, Feder uplinked one of his shows on the public radio satellite without promoting it. The program ran on three small stations and Feder says he got letters from the station managers saying they had never heard anything like it and inquiring whether they could get more. But that's the last time any of his work was distributed nationally. In the early to mid-1990s Feder approached Samori Marksman, then WBAI's program director, about syndication, but, according to Feder, Marksman had no interest in offering Hard Work to Pacifica and its affiliates. "Pacifica should offer Mike nationally," says Larry Josephson, a former WBAI station manager and now a veteran independent public radio producer. "Mike's an authentic genius. He's a true voice of New York." Asked why someone with Feder's talent isn't on nationally, Josephson replied: "He's a radio artist. He's not a hustler or a marketer." Feder is also not diplomatic. For years he has been outspoken, both on the air and off, about alleged anti-Semitism at WBAI. In 1988 he was suspended for a month after denouncing a black producer at the station as an Israel-basher. In 1994 he made local headlines by asking listeners on the air to help him document anti-Semitism on WBAI. Feder is one of 13 current and former producers at the station who signed a letter in September sent to the Pacifica board decrying a "rising tide of anti-Semitism" at WBAI. Pacifica said anti-semitic programming has no place on the network and vowed to root it out. Feder has charged that there is "a virulent strain of anti-white racism" at the station. WBAI, says Feder, is now a place where someone like him is no longer welcome. "They seem to want to make it a black radio station," Feder told Current. "And the new audience that they've developed over the last several years and especially over the last nine months kind of reflects that." Feder has stubbornly disobeyed the Pacifica-wide edict prohibiting the discussion of network or station politics on the air. For a while it looked like his long run on WBAI was about to end, as it has for so many other broadcasters ousted during Pacifica's present troubles. Despite a clash with station manager Robert Daughtry, however, the manager "seems to have temporarily calmed down, backed off a little," says Feder, who expects to be back in the studio as usual on Friday. For Feder, even pledge drives can be an occasion for talk about Pacifica's problems. On Oct. 19, during his first pitching shift in the fall marathon, Feder urged listeners to pledge money despite what he called the anti-white racism and anti-Semitism heard on the station. He raised $4,500 during his shift. Feder told his listeners he was displeased with the policy of not announcing on the air the amount of money pledged by listeners during pledge drives, a practice that began after Utrice Leid was appointed interim station manager last December. Leid was recently promoted to the job of directing national programming for Pacifica. Last February, Feder says, he raised $6,000 in one hour of pitching without using premiums. "I refuse to use premiums because I don't want to bribe people to support public radio," he says. "I believe people should pledge for the abstract principle of free speech and public radio, not because they get a damn totebag or a book. If you want to go shopping, go to the mail." Feder still believes deeply in the concept of listener-sponsored radio. "I think it's one of the best reflections of American democracy that I've ever seen," he says. |
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