April 11, 2018

HBM096: Are We Still Afraid?

April 11, 2018/ Bethany Denton

Here Be Monsters is almost 100 episodes old. It’s grown a lot since Jeff was a scared 22 year old learning audio editing in his basement. So as we approach the milestone, we take a look back, check in with some of our memorable guests, and take the chance to answer some listener questions while we’re at it.

Content Note: Recreational drug use, deaths (intentional and accidental), eating disorder, language, and sex.

On this episode we’ll hear updates from or about:

Luke, Griff and Ira from HBM076: Griff’s Speech
Remi from HBM080: An Ocean of Halves
Tariq from HBM077: Snow on Date Trees, Then on Pines
Tyler from HBM052: Call 601-2-SATAN-2
Patti from HBM054: Flaming Sword of Truth
Erin from HBM064: A Shrinking Shadow
Jacob from HBM015: Jacob Visits Saturn, HBM072: Ant God

▶ You can call us any time at (765) 374 - 5263 ◀

Bethany Denton and Jeff Emtman produced this episode. Nick White is our editor at KCRW.

Producers: Jeff Emtman and Bethany Denton
Music: The Black Spot, Flowers, Lucky Dragons, Serocell

October 11, 2017

HBM082: MI5 MI6 KGB CIA

October 11, 2017/ Bethany Denton

John Barner spent his entire childhood fiddling with his dad’s shortwave radio, picking up transmissions from all over the world. He like the way the sounds crackled, and the voices speaking foreign languages, and the eerie whine of transmissions coming in and out of static.

Content Note: Language

One night John got a phone call from one of his friends who also had a shortwave radio. “I think I just found spy stuff,” John’s friend said, “come over.”

John and his friends had found a number station, coded transmissions broadcast on unlicensed frequencies. Number stations are believed to be a form of espionage where intelligence agencies broadcast encrypted messages to field operatives. But no government has claimed responsibility for their existence.

Number stations come in many forms. Some are beeps or sustained tones. Some are repeated bars of familiar folk songs. The rest are strings of numbers and words from the phonetic alphabet.

Spectrograms of suspected number stations. ⤴

John, like countless other shortwave enthusiasts, has been captivated by the mystery ever since discovering them as a teenager. He used to try to crack the coded messages, thinking he’d stumbled on the X-Files.

Henry Cooke, a technologist and number stations enthusiast, believes that its the indecipherable code that makes number stations so alluring. He’s found internet forums dedicated to tracking number stations broadcasts and even videos of radio sleuths claiming to have found broadcast locations. Henry believes this to be a type of modern folklore; that shortwave enthusiasts trading theories about the origins and meaning behind the number stations are almost like telling ghost stories around the campfire.

Garrett Tiedemann produced this episode. Garrett also produces the podcast The White Whale. Bethany Denton edited this episode with help from Jeff Emtman and Nick White.

Number Station recordings courtesy of The Conet Project. Full archive can be found here.

Music from John Barner’s new album, Shadow Time.

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June 07, 2017

HBM080: The Ocean of Halves

June 07, 2017/ Bethany Denton

Remi Dun enjoys her job. She's good at it, she makes good money, and she generally enjoys her clients’ company. And although her job rarely gives her sexual pleasure, one client with a curious tongue gave her two surprise orgasms. Another client doesn’t know that she stops making sexy faces as soon as he can’t see her. And another client simply wants companionship—his dad died recently and he’s still emotionally raw. And yet another client wants a rubber band around his balls—the thick blue kind you find on broccoli in the grocery store.

Content Note: Sexual descriptions and swearing.

Remi is a part-time sex worker. She uses pseudonyms. She’s not out. She worries that her friends would see her as destitute and her parents would convince themselves they’d been bad parents. Still, Remi finds joy and security in her secret second job. She hopes to someday be out and proud, like the ones who have inspired her.

Balancing her “daytime” and “nighttime” selves is part of a bigger plan: to create a financial stability, to be fierce, to practice her feminism, and to develop her own romantic relationships with partners outside of work. Though, sometimes she feels lost in her identities, swimming in what she calls “the ocean of her halves.”

Remi contacted us to share her secret. We mailed her a recorder for several months to record diaries and sounds from her life. If you have a secret you’d like to share, please get in touch.

Bethany Denton and Jeff Emtman produced this episode. Our editor at KCRW is Nick White. We are a part of the Independent Producer Project of KCRW.

Music: The Black Spot, Serocell

The contents of Remi’s bag, laid on a bedsheet. Contents include coconut oil, wet wipes, money, mouthwash, hosiery, lube, tampons, pepper spray / mace, condoms, cell phone charger, deoderant, eye drops, and cosmetics.

We’re on Season break! We’ll be back with Season 6 starting in the fall. Thank you for your supporting comments on Twitter, your reviews on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, and your likes on Facebook. We’re already working on Season 6. It will be even better.

May 10, 2017

HBM078: Sagittarius Has $45

May 10, 2017/ Bethany Denton

Sagittarius has been good for the last year. That’s what he told us. He told us that the cage that Luna designed for him is working. She controls his money, his businesses, can read his email, can see his bank accounts, and can track the location of his phone.

Please Note: This episode contains frank discussions of sexual addiction and desire. All names in this episode are pseudonyms.

He says that the next time he messes up, Luna will leave him, and take the kids with her. Avoiding this scenario makes the cage worth it.

Sagittarius is a sex addict. His therapist told him that naming his addiction would be a good way to compartmentalize it. So he chose “Sagittarius”, a name he stole from the bow-wielding centaur of astrology known (in part) for emotional recklessness and who is represented by the planet Jupiter.

Sagittarius first emailed us back in 2016, after we published an episode called HBM060: The Predators of McNeil Island. In that episode, we talked to Chris, a man once deemed by the state of Washington to be a Sexually Violent Predator. Chris told the courts that he’d changed, no longer felt desire to be devious. Sagittarius identified with Chris, saw himself as a version of Chris that had never been committed or sent to court. But Sagittarius wrote to say that, personally, he’d never say “never” again. He’d been wrong too many times.

Despite receiving some treatment, and despite the cage, Sagittarius does not feel cured of his addiction. He is actively hoarding cash, $45 of bills he keeps in his backpack. A secret kept from Luna. Another $100 and Sagittarius could break free from his cage, and pay someone to have sex with him.

In this episode, Sagittarius takes Bethany and Jeff on a walking tour of his New York City “hotspots” he used to frequent, and then takes Jeff on a late night bike ride to Battery Park, where his father once took him to see the Statue of Liberty.

Bethany Denton and Jeff Emtman produced this episode.

Music: The Black Spot, Phantom Fauna

Sagittarius depicted by Jehoshaphat Aspin in a 1824 etching. Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.

April 26, 2017

HBM077: Snow on Date Trees, then on Pines

April 26, 2017/ Bethany Denton

Muhammad Tariq still doesn’t know who the men with guns were. They wore masks on their faces when they came into the teachers’ lounge. His small, gender-integrated school in Panjgur had been anonymously receiving literature that scolded them for teaching girls. Tariq and the other teachers didn’t take it seriously until the six men showed up.

While they beat the maintenance worker with the butts of their guns and smashed the office’s computers, one of the masked men mentioned that he knew who Tariq was, that he knew Tariq’s history of educating Pakistani girls, his plans to turn them against true muslim religion and culture.

After just fifteen minutes, they were gone again. Tariq doesn’t know why they didn’t take him with them, as his province of Balochistan sees regular abductions and murders and sectarian violence (see documentary below). Balochistan is also home to separatist movements, notably the hyper-nationalist Baloch Liberation Army.

Documentary on Balochistan conflict, from Al Jazeera

Estimates for numbers of the disappeared Baloch people vary greatly, from 1,000 to about 20,000. Since 2010, Human Rights Watch has documented first hand accounts of disappearances, which often happen in broad daylight.

After the incident in his school, Tariq feared for his life; said he needed to get out of Pakistan. So he applied for and received a J1 visa, a cultural exchange program run by the US State Department. After the visa expires, J1 recipients are supposed to return to their home countries.

In 2015, Tariq took a plane from Karachi to Washington DC, and when his J1 program was up, he filed for asylum with a personal certainty and faith that it would be granted to him. The USCIS is supposed to schedule asylum interviews within 45 days, with a final decision within 180. But (as of April 2017), the wait time for the initial asylum interview is an estimated 2 to 5 years.

Until Tariq gets that interview, he’s in a state of limbo—legally allowed to stay in the United States, though unable to find good work or afford college.

Tariq moved to Seattle, where he met his fiancé, Catherine Adams. She hadn’t ever met a Muslim before, and she had a conservative, christian upbringing in rural Oregon. She'd only ever heard and seen negative stereotypes of men like Tariq before they met. But they fell in love quickly and are planning to get married late in the summer of 2017. They’ve since moved to Catherine's small hometown of Medford, Oregon.

On this episode, producer Jeff Emtman met the couple for a dinner of Pakistani biryani and apple pie, just three days before their move from Seattle, to Medford.

Music: Lucky Dragons, Serocell, The Black Spot, AHEE

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The apple pie featured in this episode. State of Washington pictured in crust cut-out.

January 18, 2017

HBM071: The Evangelists of Nudism

January 18, 2017/ Jeff Emtman

Human anatomy photo via Wikimedia Commons

Growing up Mormon in Montana, Bethany Denton had a phrase drilled into her mind from an early age: “modest is hottest.” To her, it became a mantra even while many of her friends, especially other girls, struggled with Mormonism’s strict modesty standards. But never Bethany–she was fat enough to know that no one wanted to see that anyway.

By the time Bethany moved to Washington State for college, she had rejected the church and was looking for new, broader experiences. She got a job as a campus security officer, started drinking, and began wading into feminism. She looked for new, non-Mormon role models to help her find adventure. That’s when she met Helen, a punk rock pirate who invited Bethany to join her for an all-expenses paid nude vacation, courtesy of an eccentric tech millionaire who evangelized the merits of nudism.

Bethany said yes, and went with Helen to California to bake in the sun for a week, and to learn about the body she’d been hiding for the past 20 years, learn to decouple nakedness from sexuality.

And when she returned, she felt utterly changed. But she’d soon tearfully discover she was not entirely untangled from childhood guilt.

Names in this story have been changed.

This episode was written and produced by Bethany Denton, and was edited by Jeff Emtman. Nick White is HBM’s editor at KCRW.

Music: Nym, Half Ghost, Lucky Dragons

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