ESPN is cool, but San Jose Channel 15 is cooler.

The new apartment I moved into has cable, and I’m a new man. And although I was excited about ESPN (and basically any channel that expands my viewing options beyond Law and Order and CSI reruns) I’ve decided that nothing beats Channel 15—our local community access television. Peep the line-up: In the few hours I had it on while moving furniture, I watched sermons on three different religions in three different languages, two shows on paranormal activity, a kids mariachi group dance in the back of a parking lot, and one dude yell at his camera crew for a half hour straight. It was the best. The Civic Center channel is cool, and lets you get a glimpse into the political machinery at City Hall, but if you want a ground up view of San Jose, its diverse interests, beliefs, and unadulterated directions, Channel 15 is your looking glass.

In an era where anyone can communicate to the world—via blogs, YouTube, podcasts—there is something to be said about the hyper-local communicator. Media-sharing is at its finest when it can initiate a conversation, a back-and-forth. But in certain media, like community access television, it can actually create communities by pronouncing an identity in the public space that otherwise did not exist. That is essentially what community access television has done by allowing anybody who has any inkling to share themselves with their local city to do so for 30 minutes a week. On Channel 15, known as CreaTV, San Jose community members get to assume a public identity that they decide on, rather then what is determined by the rest of society’s expectations of them, their station in life, or even what the rest of the planet calls “normal.”

When I watch the square dance king, the weed queen, the cooking expert, the stand up comic, the gospel rapper, the psychic healer, I wonder what they are like off camera. Are any of these larger-than-life characters the guy dropping off the mail (I know a mailman that did a show on labor rights), the woman sitting at the bus stop, the groups of kids skating in front of city hall? Do their neighbors, co-workers know of their community access stardom?

Nobody is getting paid to do these shows, so their commitment is something deeper, more personally important, and perhaps even vital in this media- driven world.

My favorite is when we get to be a fly on the wall to witness the conversations that occur in the unseen San Jose—the spiritual healers, philosophers, political thinkers, and historians who walk among us daily. Those shows are the meeting places for the like-minded, where they can talk about the urgent issues for them, and speak about it in their own terms. I saw a show on a comic books convention a while back. I didn’t really understand the terms, didn’t know the heavyweights that were interviewed, but I just dug the passion. It’s when they act like they’re on a closed-circuit channel, and no one else but their own insular community is watching, that public access feels just right.

Although I’m a new Channel 15 viewer, I got introduced to public access by a friend seven years ago. At the time, he was temp assembly worker, a couple years out of high school, and while he looked like any other early twenty-something, he, in his heart and mind, was a big-time TV producer. He didn’t actually produce a television show, but that didn’t stop him from drawing up comedy skits, or taking about the local music groups he thought the rest of the city should know about.

Soon enough, my friend got his shot. He said that he was on his couch watching the community access channel when a show came on which had a scene where the camera was fixed on a toilet bowl, and was airing excrement being flushed. Transfixed for a moment, he told me, that was a catalyst moment. “I realized that if I was literally watching shit on TV, why can’t I make a show?” He signed up, waited about a year, got his slot, and produced a show called Open-World, which is perfect.

My friend was in special education classes all through his school career. The message he and his mother got from most of his teachers and administrators during parent-teacher conferences was that no one should expect much out of him. I remember him telling me that he spent a lot of time smoking weed and watching movies like The Little Mermaid. The world didn’t expect much out of him, but inside, he was plotting, planning and refusing to settle into the limited life that was laid before him.

His show, which is still on TV (it airs on Thursdays at 11:30) is crazy. The ad for it says, “skits, music, news, and anything else we can fit in half an hour.” And he’s not playing. The show’s anthem is a Vanilla Ice song, my friend oftentimes wears masks of cartoon characters when introducing segments, and it is the only place on TV where you’ll a local rally spliced with a Ninja Turtle segment. But like many of the shows on Channel 15, Open-World, as a production, is a story unto itself.

When creating a cast, my friend, having the odd curse and blessing of being so unique he just didn’t make sense to authority figures, gathers a group of the least-likely TV stars. He composed a crew mainly with former special-ed classmates, and random people he met late at night downtown. What was amazing was how dear they held the show, and their new status as TV producers. Indeed, most of their answering machine greetings now include their names and the phrase “of Open-World TV.” It had become their new identity, and what made them different is what made them a star.

I’m still into all the YouTube, Facebook, tell-the-world media that is becoming available and changing the media landscape, but I really hope community access television survives and persists. It lets me know who’s really in my city, and who they really want to be known as. And for something free, that is an invaluable gift.