On Wednesday, I got the sweet chance to sit in on a CiTR show, UBC’s campus radio. Just walking into the CiTR clubroom is an adventure. The aura is one of a medieval pub, of which every person has a unique story. One of which a dragon was slain with the toenail shavings of several yaks. Another of which an evil wizard and a noble gladiator had a lute-off, ending in the establishment of Lute-apalooza. It was a pretty special vibe.
The hallway walls are decked with newspaper comics, everything from Calvin and Hobbes (the apex of smart humour) to Cathy (the other end of the spectrum). Long hair and jovial faces line the halls, a Christmas-like sensation of music, ghosts of Christmas Lennon, Cobain and Hendrix, always apparent. I ventured through the station to Val, the host of Folk Oasis, the show I’d be sitting in on. She was talking to Matt Masters, a country singer from Calgary who had come in to play on the air. He was such a swell guy, embodying the fun-loving country attitude of a well-off cattle rancher albeit brandishing a sharp comedian’s wit. I sat in the studio, about the size of a rez room, amazed at the computerized function of what we hear on the air. It’d be like drilling to the centre of the earth, fighting off the hellish layers of magma and molten metals, to get to a small control room where a guy in an Urban Outfitters shirt and slurpie in hand was deciding the fate of humanity.