I inquire if anyone since then has ever sought an autograph.  "What?" Mr. Russell replies with a glare of suspicion, then punctuates with a litany of inebriating gulps.  "Well, I met a devotee once when I first came here to So-Cal, at Saugas Cafe actually, the greasy spoon diner where James Dean bit the big one.  You know?"  Well, sort of.  Nickel-and-dime reports have it that James Dean dined at Saugus just before "biting the big one" nearby in a highway conflagration.  But I simply nod.  Bill continues, "I think she said she was from Ohio -- now that's far enough.  I guess, you see, WECI in Richmond resides at crossroads in the proximity of actually six million people inside of a hundred mile radius."  He forms his arms into a big toilet-seat-C. "We didn't get out to a hundred miles of course, but we sure gave a lot of people the chance to tune us out."

      The so-called new age radio show persisted like a bad cough for four years on WECI public radio in the small City of Richmond, Indiana.  Despite continual collation of programming, politics and personnel, somehow, under the neglectful eye of a discombobulated management, Synthesis lived.  Until it died.  That January day, co-host Bill Russell arrived at work to find the nails already snug in the coffin -- more like, plunged through the sad carcass of every CD of his new age music collection, each and every one artfully skewered against a hardwood studio door. "Okay, I suck at paper work," disclaimed Russell, now an MFA graduate from CalArts.  Apparently, the powers that be grew impatient with Russell and co-creator/co-host Jeff Lehman's CD cataloguing non-practice.  "But, the managers never heard us, never caught on to what we were doing."  Like vomiting ham in higher planes of existence?

      At this juncture, discordant with his gentle mode of delivery, Russell loses himself and messenger alike in a web of truly awful undergraduate years war stories, really bad behavior at the dinner table like percussive laying face in plates of spaghetti, the spewing of grape juice and meat-fat performed in concert with the poetics of dearest friends (including Synthesis co-host Jeff); and harrowing accounts of near collisions with retributory airborne clay mugs.  "They advertised us as a 'new age music show', never actually listening to us, never knowing that we did all things but.  Mostly.  I'm mad that the station destroyed an enormous..." he gags, "pile of music just because idiots like me never get around to logging it.  Oy.  The freebie tonáge de CD's that came in the mail ... was small time, sleepy music.  Of all places, a radio station should be -- it's its duty to archive music, particularly the weird and rare, you know?" Russell emphasizes this with a bizarre twist of lips and limbs, then adds:  "I love the outfit.  Anyway, the show was by then already dead.  Just -- Jeff left for seminary at the end of that third year.  After that, the real personality of Synthesis, which arose of our combined moronic, uh, ness, was gone.  So okay, it was time to mince and package that badly tendered lump of horse."  Tripped up by this metaphor I catch a bit of beer froth in my sinus cavity.

      The next three years Russell spent producing industrial films for community projects.  He gained TV experience while producing videos at a local-access television station.  In the mid-nineties he moved on to California to attend art school.  There he met Jill.  And unto the firmament lay face one Channel 8, like Sasquatch a scarcely confronted -- nonetheless widely mulled over in the margins -- etherification.  In came the third and fourth authors of the ensuing Channel 8 epic, one David Luben, brainmaster of The Juan Valdez Show, a non-narrative serial legacy which is still holding its own in the underground scene; and the anonymous person of the fist in Arthur Panda, creator of the equally significant and much alive Great Exploitations.  "Pornographic cable access!" the fist describes it gleefully.  "Everything went on air under Telecommunion except slights on our fellow CalArtians.  Don't ask, don't tell, don't give me no minimum technical standards....  This is how cable-access works best."

      Perhaps proffering this breed of anarchy occasioned something no less fascinating than C-SPAN of the id.  Perhaps, this is how the happening that was Channel 8 1994-1997 fixed the attention of the outside, earned such stature among an underground elite and tendered posthumously a smattering of seeds to bear of revolution fated in the next century.  Ripplings of hearsay, for starters, about orgies behind closed-circuit doors, the leaps into legend of unconvention simply must be talked about, now, on a polluted, overheated rock leeching all our sensual and spiritual free energy faster than we can replenish it, in a nation and state of citizens per capita incarcerated more than anywhere else in the world.  "Word spreads, transmogrifies into whatever the hell, flourishes ... in the crevices.  Ding! A legend under ground," a puppet conjectures.  "People drool over Channel 8 without ever having seen it....  Though I suppose there might be videotapes of it out there to eke it along."  At this juncture, at my urging, we all agree to move our communion far away from the developing CalArts cavern of intoxication.

      Luben takes us to a hidden, dim, pleasant loft hanging over the theater department's machine shop.  On the way up I hear a passing paper-mache urinal on legs call out: "It's Mr. Channel 8!"  Which Mr. Channel 8?  Comfortable now amid fellow sleepy refugees, St. Jacques joins us via speakerphone.  I press for details.  "Inquiries into Channel 8 come to us from, god, all over.  The curiosity is there."  Thanks perhaps to the fronting of underworld blockbusters like The Spirit of Christmas (hapless precursor to South Park), The Farting Evangelist, The Exploding Whale and CalArts originals, Ernie and The Juan Valdez Show.  "So I guess Channel 8 interests people.  It teases out some pick-a-little talk-a-little from the outside world." As echoes of My Fair Lady surface fast in my foggy brain, the retired station manager morphs into a hand-wringing old fart:  "What the hell is going on up there on that ... aah, crap of hill!  Hill of crap!  Arrh!  It's art!"

      For years, Russell tells me, Channel 8 idled at CalArts as conduit for rented videos, electronic experimentation, bulletin board communiqué, catch-all for film school class projects and simulcast outlet for stage performances.  After 1992 the channel suffered two years of non-operation, cinched in a Northridge earthquake.  That year of 1994 a handful of artists found themselves plucking phoenix feathers from cold and muddy ash.  As Student Council Vice President, performance artist Jill St. Jacques enlisted Bill Russell's help taking on a labor of love; with barely two thousand dollars wrenched from the clenched fists of Art School Daddy, they rebuilt Channel 8, made it better than it was before.  Bionic media, wholly art student TV fueled with one ram-shod TV switcher and video getup for editing, powering a new 24-hour cable-cast capability.  The product?  A human product indeed:  Telecommunion.  Graduate Jerry Prum recalls, "I remember what the school channel was like before Nice and Tight", referring to progenitors Bill and Jill; "White letters on a blue backdrop, announcements of deadlines and calendar stuff.  Sometimes Rambo."  It was closed-circuit-school-television of closed-circuit-school-television proportions.

      A brief tour revealed to me some of what has made TeleCommunion's surviving host Channel 8 tick:  A vascular linkage to inlets of activity -- involving a coffee shop, a radio station, a cafe, a production studio, and video-phone transmissions from far away places -- everywhere an orgy of electronic inter-put.  In 1995, environmental artist Michael Matthew laid down the first conduits to bring online Tatum Lounge, the coffee shop at home on institute grounds.  With this, Matthew bestowed members of a very wacky art school -- the students of all disciplines, faculty as well as visitors like myself -- access to the air, giving common folk a way around the limits of proprietary technical space and giving Channel 8 its unique flavor topping that of even New York City cable-access.  Concurrently, filmmaker Bill Russell designed and maintained a loopily stylized 24-hour/day cable-cast of all these signal feeds montaged with his own astoundingly weird improvisations, garnished with artists' videotape submissions and simul-casts involving the KAOS Network of East Los Angeles and other feeds.

      So, yes, Telecommunion is gone, probably merely moving onto its next incarnation.  The hip Channel 8 continues as does its host, the infamous CalArts, as does the super-host, a wily, wacky world of art.  And what's next for the men and women behind Telecommunion?  "I don't know," responds Russell.  "Something else for people to drool on and never actually see;" he grinds out those last few words.  "Maybe web-casting?"  Just in the same way that co-host Jill's famous California roadside posturing as homeless-with-shopping-cart, dousing herself in gasoline and setting herself ablaze, could overpower the fast flex of stiff necks in fast cars fixing so hard to deny the subtotal inequity of their investiture, likewise the ephemeral Telecommunion's hedonistic paradigm bash has compelled the incredulity of vast subcivilization -- the vanity of an ironically faceless infantry sliming under hot, white glare, across blistering asphalt and half-bitten dust to extract mere splinters of an art colonial's enamel rot, for to sniff, poke, pass hand to hand unto stunned legions in wait; to move as contraband bits of allegory and video slug suggestive of such the unfathomable as Hin Yin for Men and The Butthole ID.

      Perhaps an archetype like Channel 8: TeleCommunion is so craved in the ravishing global village that a mere oral account, the coveted dog-eared artifacts of it, suffice to amplify this wacky ancient cablecast.  This despite the reality, as far as I can discern, that only CalArtians and occasional visitors to the art collective ever witnessed Telecommunion firsthand -- and in that, "most people never bothered to watch it," asserts Bill Russell, one of the principle bearers, "probably didn't even know it existed.  I mean, what is that?"  An emperor in the raw?  Go figure.