WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Target: Boo-tay

Been shot in the ass lately? Maybe not, unless you live in Philly.

I'm talking bullets, not syringes, people. Since January, a new trend has transformed the city of brotherly love into a ghetto of gluteal gore: shooting enemies in the rump. Investigative reporters at the Philadelphia Daily News even put together this eye-opening timeline, profiling all 9 ass-capping incidents the city has suffered this year. The situation is so dire that on some nights, Philly has played host to more than one rear-ended assault.

I, for one, am disgusted. After all this station has done in the name of respecting the booty...

Thanks to Andy for keeping his eye on the prize

Tax Day, Medical Deductions, Role Play (MP3)

(Two helpful MP3s in this post.)

If you are living in the US, then you probably spend this weekend like me, frantically trying to find documents you need for your tax return. Or you have decided to forgo all the stress and file for an extension. I hear that there are people who file their returns early, but none of them actually listens to freeform radio stations.

It is hard to choose among the many guides which are supposed to help you file your return and cheat the IRS. Being a radio fanatic, I obviously chose the one which is most suitable for airplay, Retirement Fund #2 - The Audit, by Erik Belgum and Eric Lyon. It is the sequel to their chamber opera Retirement Fund about doggie treats, Jesus, and severed penises. Doggie treats and Jesus make a comeback in the sequel, in slightly less prominent roles. Did you know that you can claim doggie treats and dildos as medical deductions? Oh, I know you didn't. Here is the full list: Medical Deductions (MP3)

After you claimed every single expense you had in 2005 as a medical deduction, you should expect an IRS audit. Here the audio play shows its real strength, preparing you for the role plays the tax collectors like to engage in: The Role Playing Song (MP3)

By the way, you can get both Retirement Fund CDs at Deep Listening.

Heir to Bjork

Been a while since there's been a real music sensation from Iceland. Maybe with good reason.

Abbie Hoffman Makes Gefilte Fish (1973)

Abbie Hoffman Makes Gefilte Fish (MP4, 180mb)

Just in time for Passover, UbuWeb is proud to present this never-before seen footage of Abbie Hoffman making gefilte fish on Christmas Eve of 1973. Filmed with Laura Cavestani, Hoffman tells stories as he performs an elaborate ancient Hoffman family recipie before the camera (21 minutes). You can also listen to Hoffman's long out-of-print LP, Wake Up America from 1969 (MP3).

Did someone say "Donald Pleasance"??

Or was it "Rod Steiger"?

Speaking of Rod...

Oh, sorry.  You meant "Carroll"?








Ohhhhh, no.

It was obviously "Richard". 

Ponderosa Stomp Update

The annual Soul Meeting of the Mystic Knights of the Mau Mau is fast approaching.  This year's 3 day music festival will benefit New Orleans musicians messed up by the damn hurricane.  Pre-Stomp kicks off Sunday May 7 at the High Tone  Cafe in Memphis with a DJ night hosted by Buck Wilders and featuring a set by our own $$  Mr. Fine Wine. 

Also added-Record Fair on Monday May 8/10-4 PM at Gibson Guitar Factory.  Admission:Free. 

Be sure to catch DJ Rex's  interview with Eddie Bo here.  And Sonny Burgess  here .

MP3's:
Al "Carnival Time" Johnson-Lena 
Chick Willis-Stoop Down Baby 
William Bell-A Tribute To A King
Bobby Patterson-I'm Leroy I'll Take Her   

P/S Ellen's Soul Food
       Rendezvous BBQ

Boots from The Coup (Interview)

Here's an MP3 excerpt [Download Now] from the interview that Bring that Beat Back host Billy Jam conducted with outspoken emcee/activist Boots Riley of longtime Oakland hip-hop group The Coup. In this eight minute excerpt, Boots speaks on some the topics that inspired his new, politically charged album called "Pick A Bigger Weapon" that he and collaborator DJ Pam the Funkstress recorded for Epitaph. He also talks about the controversy surrounding the cover art to the Coup's last album, the September 2001 release "Party Music" which portrayed the Twin Towers burning. You can hear more segments from this interview in either Real Audio or MP3 on Billy Jam's archive page.

Minnie Riperton Attacked By A Lion

While shooting a promotional clip for her 1975 album Adventures In Paradise, the late Minnie Riperton was attacked by a lion. During an appearance on The Sammy Davis, Jr. Show she played the footage (14 MB QuickTime movie or watch via YouTube) of the incident for Sammy and her fellow guests, including Richard Pryor. Unfortunately, whoever posted this video online didn't think it necessary to include the performance that came after the commercial break. To make up for it, here are a couple of great Minnie Riperton songs from the WFMU archives:

"Les Fleurs" from Come To My Garden (RealAudio from Frank O'Toole's show)
"Turn Me On" from the first Rotary Connection album (RealAudio from Scott Williams' show)

Now that's what I call a guitar solo!

SO I says to the internet, I says "Hey internet!  Uhhh... you got anything?" 
Internet says "how bout a bunch of guitar players?"

 

 

"Wow!"  I says, "Yngwie! A guy from Styx! Some other dudes! You got any more?"

Internet says thisaway...

(Here's The Note (wav, 26K) they're all reaching for; and for more of this sort of thing, check out the Hall of Douchebags.

UPDATE, later that same day:  by the way, I've already added more, and I'd love to expand this thing to ridiculous(er) heights, so check back often -- and send me your pics!

Hans Grüsel's Kränkenkabinet Performs Live on WFMU

Synth-happy noisemakers Hans Grüsel's Kränkenkabinet took a detour from their recent appearance at NYC's No Fun Fest to perform live in New Jersey on Bill Zurat's show.

Here's how Bill describes the band:

Imagine a post-apocalyptic nightmare world where mutated Hans Christian Andersen characters play noisy synthesizers stretched through an assortment of brain-bleeding sound effects and oscillators and you'll be halfway to a good description to the sound of Hans Grüsel's Kränkenkabinet. This San Francisco outfit has released their new album HAPPY AS PITCH (available on the CIP label) following the two stunning albums that devastated these airwaves last year. Lucky for us, Hans has Gretel and Johan Livingston Grüsel lending a hand during the performance. Be prepared for a rare opportunity to hear these Teutonic hellions twist your unadulterated synapses.

 

Listen to the live set, archived here:  Real Audio  |  MP3

One look at this photo of HGK (top left) should indicate that a radio performance does not quite capture the unique quality of the band's performance antics in their entirety. Luckily, volunteer Phil Catalano was around with a video camera.

Download the video of "Tea For Two" (mpg, 55 MB) and see why tap dancing is the new black at WFMU.

Lars or Michael?

 
   

No?

What the World Abuses, Trenton Uses

Numerous mentions of Trenton's infamous punk dive City Gardens have been made on this blog in the past. For anyone who grew up in the 80s in the suburban badlands between NYC and Philly and maintained even a peripheral interest in unpopular music, the storied bills the club regularly featured are today the stuff of legend. Located in a warehouse-like space in a stereotypically dicey neighborhood, City Gardens was a massive space where touring bands as varied as Black Flag, The Pogues, Flipper, Joan Jett, Venom, the Swans, Smithereens, Tackhead, Toots & the Maytalls, Kreator, and Ice T could make stops and draw hundreds of kids from across suburban Jersey and Pennsylvania. Anyone who had an interest in what was being played on Central Jersey's many great college radio stations at that time (but who lacked the ability to get to the major cities to the north and south) found godhead at 1701 Calhoun St.

City Gardens had its share of problems. People bitched incessantly about the door prices, and for a while, the threat from the local skinhead population was palpable. On the upside, the clubhouse-like environs fostered by its proximity to the suburbs exposed a lot of very young people to a pretty radical range of sounds and ideas. I've always felt that, in turn, this helped foster the huge aggregation of great local bands (the Scornflakes, Sticks & Stones, Cleft Palate, Ween) and fanzines (Stranjer, This Zine Sucks, Skin Trade, Alive & Direct) that gave this particular scene its unique, if sometimes dubious reputation...

Although City Gardens closed down in the early 1990s, the club's promoter (as much a legend as the space itself), has recently updated his website with a boatload of archival material that spans the years 1984-1990. Special attention is worth paying to the "punk card" archive, where you can troll through some choice reprints of flyers touting the huge, the not so huge, and the now comically unbelievable way in which they were paired off on a nightly basis. Recall, or imagine for the first time: The Mentors opening for the Cro-Mags? Living Colour with the Swans? L7 and the Dayglo Abortions! Psychic TV and Frightwig! There are also some MP3s, and a small archive of live band shots (including a few scenes of classic, teenage moshpit slaughter.) Enjoy.

MM's Heavy Rotation: Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds

"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us."  -- The Eve of the War. (mp3, 16mb)

Wunnerful Wunnerful

The Getty Museum's Devices of Wonder is a virtual wunderkammer full of edutainment gizmos from the 1600's--1800's.

via the always cool MUG

An open and suspiciously familiar letter (MP3)

Griffen's Paraders featuring Arthur Sterling - "An Open Letter To My Teenage Son" (MP3)

Yes, it's a remake of the classic Victor Lundberg Libertarian rap from the 1960s (as heard on Ken's classic comp The Happy Listener's Guide To Mind Control) by somebodies or somethings calling themselves Griffen's Paraders featuring Arthur Sterling. Sadly, the rest of the album is merely a selection of public domain patriotic tunes; there are no other speech-song remakes. You don't get, say, a retelling of Jarrel McCracken's "Game of Life", Byron MacGregor's "Americans" or even a remake of a beloved Jack Van Impe sermon. But it was worth getting just to prove to you, the WFMU listener, that someone actually thought it was a good idea to do a remake of "An Open Letter To My Teenage Son". I can only hope that the 9/11 remix is in the works.

Mad Cow Rising

I am writing from home, sandwiched between a heavily flowering magnolia to my left and a lovely Victorian house to my right that is being bulldozed to shreds, now looking a lot like a spilled can of Potato Stix.  I imagine all of the thousands of meals that were served up in that 110 year-old kitchen; many cooked without modern conveniences...like indoor plumbing.  Just thought that needed noting.

You don't need me to tell you that everything is political; even the food that we so innocently eat.  The Food and Drug Administration, which once upon a time was created to insure consumer safety, now seems to operate as a branch of the wild and wooly industries it was built to protect us from.  A notable incident several years ago allowed industrial milk farms to add Bovine Growth Hormone to milk cows in an effort to stimulate milk production.  (BGH is banned in Canada and Australia, and limited in the EEU)  Organic and non-organic farmers who tried to label their untreated milk 'free of BGH' were forced to jump through incredible hoops and maintain terrific paper trails in an attempt to thwart labeling.  Our government protested that farms using BGH feared that their milk would look tainted (p.s.- IT IS!) and consumers would choose the hormone free milk and wreak havoc on the milk industry.

Presently, Creekstone Farms in Kansas is suing the USDA to be allowed to test every head of cattle for Mad Cow Disease.  Current government monitored testing reaches only 1% of the American cattle market.  Healthy cows are not routinely tested, only downed and dead cattle are checked.  Apparently the Feds are afraid of what the testing may reveal about out "healthy" cattle industry.  More cows tested would lead to proportionally higher percentage rates of disease and destroy consumer confidence in red meat.

Adventures In Amplitude Modulation - Part 15

If you’ve followed this blog series at all, you know that it’s based on audio content, specifically radio reception I’ve recorded. After featuring shortwave radio in the last four posts I was ready to go back to some of the sounds of medium wave (AM) again. However, recordings I had thought I would feature were either of poor quality, not all that interesting, or missing in action. What’s worse, it took a few hours of listening and searching to figure this out.

Actually, it would have been easier to comb through some shortwave recordings I have ready to go, but now and then I do want to talk about AM radio in this series as well. While it isn't as exotic as shortwave, the AM band is very 20th century-- an era I’m still rather fond of. Instead of spending additional hours digging through boxes full of cassettes and trying to find something compelling I decided to do the obvious– turn on the radio.

In previous posts where I’ve gone over some AM stations, I’ve barely touched the higher half of the band. There’s a reason for this. A big chunk of the AM up that way is allocated to local and regional broadcasting. In other words, there aren’t any far off high power stations to clearly hear and savor. And unless you’re near one of these minor signals at each 10 kHz stop on the AM band all you usually hear is a cacophony of low power stations meekly throbbing from afar.

Just for fun (and to generate some content for this damn blog post), I decided to explore this AM wilderness late Sunday night (the wee hours of April 10) and record the results. There are no 50,000 watt powerhouses from 1230 to 1490 kHz (and none past 1680 kHz (including the medium wave band extension up to 1700 kHz in the U.S.). And frankly, there’s not much compelling English language programming to be found from New York City on this segment of the AM band. During the day, once you get past WLIB (Air America’s home base/NYC outlet) at 1190 kHz almost everything is in another language. Mostly Spanish. At night it’s not a lot different except that multitudes of non-local low power stations fill the holes on the dial. You’ll hear a lot of that in this recording.

All-Terrain Bots

Meet the new sport utility robot line:

Prancing Headless Robot Dog (wmv, 11.5 MB) Includes side-impact beams. Cup holders extra. 

Rough-and-Tumble Oversized Insectbot (mpg, 28 MB) Rugrat model.

Roachbot (wmv, 6 MB) Marsupial on downers, cockroach on speed.


via Wohba

So so many robots...

Universal Ideas And Pigeons (mp3)

(UPDATE: Now with 50% more pigeon poisoning fun. 3 MP3s at the end of this post.)

There are many historical examples of ideas whose time has come, so that they are discovered independently by different people at the same time. Just think of the invention of calculus by Leibniz and Newton in the 17th century (though according to Wikipedia, students should blame some guys in India who lived 300 years before that), or the invention of booze in China and the Near East about 9,000 years ago. One of the universal ideas which came to fruition in the 20th century was the idea of poisoning pigeons in the park, in the spring. Yes, it is that time of year again, so get your cyanide ready and check out your local parks. This post is intended to give a little background and provide the soundtrack to this favorite pastime of modern urbanites, in English and German.

As with many simultaneous discoveries, things are a bit murky, and plagiarism accusations abound. However, the following facts are certain: There are two different songs about poisoning pigeons in parks, both written in the 1950s, one by American mathematician and satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer, the other one by Austrian political cabaret singer Georg Kreisler.

The Velvet Underground on Lawrence Welk

So great to see this rare TV performance from a 1968 Lawrence Welk show here (download video, 5 megs, mpeg file), or stream via, what else, You Tube. Good to see the Velvets inspiring the audience to cut a rug, which probably didn't happen much at Max's Kansas City where people probably stood around being uber-cool.