Was It Something He Said?
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Berns has produced over 400 episodes and featured more than 1,000 local performers. He’s built an audience, he says, mostly by catching channel surfers on their way to something else. He claims Songsation is the station’s most popular program and the most watched noncommercial TV variety show in the country. So he was taken by surprise two days before Christmas, when he got a call from CAN TV program director Lesley Johnson informing him that he was being booted into a late-night slot because of his show’s “mature content.” On December 1, he was told, the station received a viewer complaint about a fake commercial for a Flubber condom; as a result Berns was being exiled to the graveyard, 11:30 PM on Thursdays–a change he’s sure will cost him his audience. “There might be a small fringe element that watches television on Thursday night at that time. Does that compensate for losing a prime-time slot? [For me] it’s starting over from scratch.”
He wonders if the show’s political content, which has increased over the last few years and he says elicits more complaints than the raunchy humor, might be the real problem. He responded to 9/11 with a three-episode memorial that consisted of two speeches by him and a one-hour segment showing only the words “Impeach Bush and Cheney before they start World War III.” The lectures suggested that, in his opinion, the Bush inner circle might have organized 9/11. In any case, he says, he’d like to negotiate with CAN and would be willing to alter the program to suit them if he could hang on to his time slot. CAN executive director Barbara Popovic denies that political content had anything to do with the change. “We wouldn’t do that,” she says. Rather, Berns’s programs “are in the area of indecent speech,” which, by city ordinance, can only be broadcast after 11 PM.
McLeod’s framed certificate from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is one of about three dozen pieces in “Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age,” a multimedia exhibit opening here this weekend after a one-month run in New York (where it was mounted by Stay Free! publisher Carrie McLaren). Local sponsor In These Times will host the show in its offices from January 25 to February 21. The Chicago exhibit includes artists like Dick Detzner and Stuart Helm, formerly known as King VelVeeda, whose work parodies corporate culture and tests the limits of trademark law. The purpose of the show is to “look at the phenomenon of tightening intellectual property controls,” says In These Times associate publisher Jessica Clark. Related events include two nights of film, video, and sampled music during the Around the Coyote Winter Arts Festival and a panel discussion February 15 featuring Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, who just took a beating in the Supreme Court on his challenge to a 1998 extension of the copyright term.
