WFMU's Beware of the Blog

prunella scales

Prunella Scales.  What more do I have to say?  The stage name alone offers up  a certain oddity and eccentricity that her physical appearance continues to suggest.  I fell in love with her portrayal of Sybil Fawlty, the off color and regal proprietress of the most ill-managed guest house in the history of England.  Her economy of manner, so precise and suggestive, was a wonderful foil to the physical stammerings and mishaps of Basil Fawlty.
     Sunday night I watched Prunella in a remarkably un-Sybil role in a new Masterpiece Mystery: Miss Marple.  The Jane Marple stories have a fair dose of stereotypes, quite purposely placed by Agatha Christie to illustrate her views on the universalness of evil.  Prunella Scales played a widow, Mrs Mackenzie, whose husband was purportedly killed by the rival family patriarch, many years ago.  Now in a sanatorium, Mrs. Mackenzie recounts how she had schooled her children in a nightly prayer to seek revenge on this robber baron, and pledge their filial devotion to this adult quest. 
     The first Miss Marple story was written in 1930 England, where conventional villages dotted the green landscape, city life offering a sharp contrast to these country ways.  A small town aging spinster was invisible and powerless, a stereotype that Agatha Christie used as an asset to the stealth-like powers that amateur sleuth Jane Marple possessed.  Like Hercule Poirot, her fantastically odd Belgian detective, Jane Marple was an outsider whose abilities to observe without seeming important gave almost philosophical weight to her crime solving puzzles.  Unlike legendary minds like Poirot or Sherlock Holmes who constantly remind you of their inner crime solving genius, Miss Marple does not proselytize from the book of Jane.   She offers up idiosyncratic stories from the day to day life of her local villagers in St Mary Mead as proof of the inevitability of wrong doing.  Decades before a shift in feminist sensibilities would demand scrutiny of the multiple unpaid roles that women perform, the zing of an old lady solving a dastardly crime before the local constable could fathom its' dark belly was quite the satisfying finale.  Agatha Christie would go on to write 12 Miss Marple novels, making her one of the most beloved detectives.

     Masterpiece Mystery is running four new productions of Miss Marple stories this summer.  And of course the many fabulous Joan Hickson versions are available on DVD.  Caution: there will be graphic scenes of knitting.

Wild Oates: A Conversation With Warren Oates' Biographer

          

Writer Susan Compo recently authored an enormously entertaining Warren Oates biography and Oates fans who have not yet read the book can look forward to it with great anticipation.  For my money, Warren Oates: A Wild Life is the finest biography since 1998 when Ronnie Pugh's Ernest Tubb biography hit the shelves.  The book offers a richly-detailed and definitive portrait of Oates' intriguing life and career and upon finishing it, I decided it might be interesting to talk to the author about Warren Oates and how she came to write the story of his life.  I'd like to thank Susan for sharing several unpublished Oates photos (including above right, showing Oates in makeup for The Brink's Job) and for indulging me while I fumbled through my Brian Lamb impersonation.

Oates died of a heart attack in 1982, but if he were still with us he'd celebrate his 81st birthday on July 5.

Greg:  Let's start things off with a question about the title of your book, Warren Oates: A Wild Life.  Who chose that title?

Susan Compo:  The publisher, as happens sometimes in the book world.  I had Wild Oates, but they just didn't go for that.

(NOTE: I didn't want to see a good title go to waste, so I borrowed it for this post).

Sonic Boom, The History Of Northwest Rock From "Louie Louie" to "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

True, I usually write about the more progressive or esoteric corners of musical obscuria, but don't pigeonhole me! I do love me a good and simple three chord anthem.  I've just finished reading Peter Blecha's new book Sonic Boom, The History of Northwest Rock, from "Louie Louie" to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and I'm jonesing to dig through my attic to find all my old "Garage Punk Unknowns", "Back From The Grave", "Teenage Shutdowns" and other similar comps.  The book, which focuses almost entirely on the inception of rock through the mid 60s, does a great job of describing the complicated scene that brought about greats like The Sonics (whose incredible first record, Boom, is the source of the book title), The Wailers, The Ventures, Paul Revere and the Raiders and, most famously, the Kingsmen.  And, perfect for FMU fans, all of the obscure, short lived bands and the hits that never were are documented in passionate detail. 

Peter Blecha attacks history from numerous angles.  He covers the racial impact of rock and roll.  He's got insider information on the publicists and marketers who made the deals that made the hits.  He's got behind the scene anecdotes from the bands.  For instance, in one of many sections on the Kingsmen's famous recording of "Louie, Louie", Blecha reveals that during the first take, the band's manager physically forced the recording engineer out of the studio.  During the second and final take, The Kingsmen did not even know that they were recording a final take, they just thought they were running through the song for practice.  And after hearing the playback, which The Kingsmen thought was absolute crap, the manager demanded that the band pay studio fees - when the band couldn't pay, one of their moms fronted the fifty bucks!  A good investment on her part, I must say.

The book doesn't have much coverage even of the late 60s - the way Blecha treats the subject, the late 60s were a time of decline rather than explosive growth.  As easy as it is to see where Blecha's allegiances lie, there's not much reason to discount with his taste.  Sonic Boom is a par none document of the murky, little known events that bred one of rock and roll's strongest regional sounds.

Another One Bites the Dust

Good-bye, Nickelodeon Magazine! Home in print of many fine Cartoonist-Listeners, and former employer of little freelance writer Bronwyn C.  Goodbye, too, to Radio and Records mag, dead and dead as of yesterday.

a spy i know

      My brother-in-law lives abroad, and he works for the US government.  We joke and say he's a spy, but we know he isn't much like James Bond or Jason Bourne.  If he is a spy, wow, the life of a spy is pretty flat out boring.  He is a regular old American, not one of those ex-pat types who actually relishes life abroad with all of its exotic flavor. So when he visits on this side of the pond, we frequently talk about the methods he employs to maintain the American life from afar.

     If one computerized business has changed the lives of Americans everywhere, my brother-in-law the not so official spy claims, it is Amazon. Since there aren't many books published in English on other continents this ranks high on the 21st century improvement scale.  I countered with a lobby for Netflix.  Short of living atop the now defunct original NYC Kim's video, my life would have never been so filled with a broader collection of idiosyncratic and international film viewings. I know in the eyes of a pure cinephile I am seeing them in a compromised version, but I - unlike Angela Lansbury - do not have a personal stage and cinema in my house. (I heard this little tidbit from my husband who back in the day saw a hardcore show in her old house in Montclair.)

I'm Not That Blogger

 So J.G. Ballard has died, and he was pretty old--78, I believe.
There are times when I prefer blogging to doing a radio show, but this isn't one of them. If I were broadcasting to you now, I would probably read some excerpts from some Ballard short stories, and then I would play music by some of the bands who were influenced by his work, or who quoted his work in their music, and you might be surprised: Joy Division's "Atrocity Exhibition," sure, but what about "Video Killed the Radio Star?" And there are others. (I would not play Hawkwind, but that's just personal taste.) I would probably talk about the movie "Crash" and make fun of Holly Hunter fishing out her tit at the slightest provocation.  It would probably be a nice little half hour or so, you and I together, considering the life, and the work, and all. Maybe if I were more clever, I could do all that here for you, give you the quotations to read for yourself, and set up some links to all those songs, or maybe even a video clip. But ... I dunno. It's not how I want to do it. Sorry. I'm not that blogger.

But let me at least share my favorite Ballard factoid: He started writing when he was in the R.A.F. and they stationed him in Moose Jaw, Canada, for 6 months. Jeez, you can't blame him.

Thanks for reading my blogpost this week, etc.

30 Ways to Electrocution

Old illustrations of electrical accidents from the book Elektroschutz in 132 Bildern! Weeeee!

Differently Cognitive

I don’t read a lot of fiction, because usually I find it upsetting. An author sets up some characters and gets you all interested in them, and then makes terrible things happen to them. I told that to a guy I worked with, and he pointed out that bad things happen to people in non-fiction books, too. “But those are real people, they’re not invented specifically to make you care about them,” I said. I don’t think he understood the distinction, but it makes a difference to me.

Anyway, in the last few years I have found a little sub-genre of fiction that I enjoy: novels written as if by people with neurological disorders. First was Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday, 1999). This is the story of Lionel Essrog, an orphan with Tourette’s syndrome who tries to solve the murder of Frank Minna, his employer, mentor, and friend. I liked the experience of seeing the Brooklyn I knew though Lionel’s eyes. The depiction of Tourette’s felt accurate, and didn’t seem as if it were just a gimmick or even just a metaphor. The writing was excellent, and the story was satisfying. (I still smile at the memory of the two old dons, Brickface and Stucco.) I discussed Motherless Brooklyn on my WFMU book club show on August 14 and 21, 2002—which seems incredible, since it was so long ago. One caller explained the name Essrog to me, and I’ve always wondered if that was Jonathan Lethem himself, but I’ve never found out. (Update 4/3: It wasn't Lethem, it was Listener Bruce! That's good to know, after all this time.)

I Feel Bad About My Stuff

Back on November 07, 2005, at 2:50 PM, I posted here about my little hoarding problem. I’d just learned that it was called that—hoarding. I hadn’t known. (I called the post “That Boy Jumpy Sure Can Dance” for reasons too complicated to explain.) I was mulling over a lot of things then, thinking about all my friends who all had way too much stuff, and how weird it is when someone dies and all their stuff is left behind, like a hermit crab’s shell, the carapace they constructed, the junk they lived in. I was determined to dig my way out of my own problem with stuff. [I have to add that the photo above is NOT my stuff, it's from the Fairfax County, Virginia website on hoarding.]

The first step, as always for me, was to get a book. “Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding” by David F. Tolin, Randy O. Frost, and Gail Steketee is excellent. It explains what hoarding really is, and why it happens, and has little quizzes so you can figure out why it’s happening to YOU. (It turns out that Sluggo has a problem with acquiring—like bringing home dented tins he’s picked out of the trash—and I have a problem with never getting rid of anything—like all those dented tins in the basement.) I was happy to discover that my problem wasn’t quite as bad as I’d thought, because only one of the doors leading outside is completely blocked with my junk. The authors lay out a plan of little steps to take to resolve some of the problems that underlie the bigger, more obvious hoarding problem. And, you know, I started to do them.

So now it’s, like, three years later and all that junk is still there. I haven’t actually unpacked most of the stuff that I jammed into boxes when we moved into our house 14 years ago. (Although there’s another reason for that, but I’m not allowed to say.) But I am kind of working on it more, lately. A little. And then I saw two new books today, and they made me consider the Stuff Problem again.

The first book is “Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry: Saturday, 14 February 2009, New York: Strachan & Quinn Auctioneers, New York, London, Toronto,” by Leanne Shapton. This is the kind of super-brilliant, original book I always am thrilled to see actually get produced and sold in normal bookstores. It’s a faux auction catalogue of the stuff-junk-crap owned by a fictional couple whose relationship has come to an end. There are photos and hilariously pretentious descriptions of all of it (“LOT 1279  Three spice jars full of quarters. Jars in cylindrical form. Labels read ‘Spanish Saffron,’ ‘Cinnamon Sticks,’ ‘Poppy Seed.’ Kept for tolls and parking meters in the glove compartment of Morris’s Honda. Dimensions vary. $35–75”) and as you look through everything you construct a narrative of their life together in your mind. It’s kind of icky—I mean, it’s really junk, and it looks so personal, even though it’s not real. Ack!

The other book is “Flanagan’s Smart Home,” by Barbara Flanagan, a woman who believes you need only 98 objects to furnish your entire life. She lists them, and tells you which are “best”—Environmentally best? Aesthetically best? Most practical? I don’t agree with her on everything—I will never understand why anyone would want an electric blanket, for instance—but it’s a lovely idea, living in a house with a minimum of stuff. She doesn’t include art, though. Or clothes. Or musical instruments. Or books. Or a dog. Or a big box of dented tins in the basement.

Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.

Go Swedish! - Let the Right One In

The ground is covered with a layer of snow, under that a slippery-thick layer of ice, and North Jersey looks about as much like the suburbs of Stockholm as it's ever going to.  When I think of Sweden, I think of thrashy, amphetamine-charged Death Metal, monumental acid rock, and Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in Persona.  All good things—great things even.  Now Sweden has given us a highly original, for-the-ages horror film that embraces genre, while at the same time redefining and transcending it.  Let the Right One In (2008), by director Tomas Alfredson, is based on the bestselling novel of the same name, published in 2004 by author John Ajvide Lindqvist, who also wrote the screenplay.  Already, we have a Scandophile's dream production.

I finally got around to seeing Let the Right One In, after reading the enticing coverage and receiving several personal recommendations on it.  I'm sorry on the one hand that I waited so long, though the current grim surroundings make this a perfect time to embrace such a story, dressed as it is in blood, snow and bare trees.  And though the secret is well out about this film's greatness, I couldn't resist chiming in to heap yet more praise on this landmark picture, easily one of the best I've seen in the last ten years.

Lately some of my favorite horror films are those that truly address the human condition, using horror and its fantastical possibilities as a milieu to tell "real" stories.  I've never fallen in love with a vampire, spoken with the dead or been taken aboard a UFO, though I've often wished that I had, if only as a mantle of proof that something exists beyond yearning, love, loss and bills in the mail.  When I was a victimized, outcast, adolescent monster-movie nerd, obsessed with (and equally fearful of) the darkness, much like Oskar in Let the Right One In, I didn't have an adorable, tragic female vampire living next door to nurture my spirit and calm my confusion.  So Oskar, and this film, tell that story for me.

This is about as close as I get to fully embracing any kind of heartwarming entertainment—the most touching love story anyone could tell for my singular demographic. I prefer my reaffirmation of life's value served up with mayhem, dismemberment, and tears of blood. And perhaps that's why Let the Right One In is so tremendous, and so deserving of its critical acclaim: we all want to enjoy a good horror movie and get those grisly thrills, but when a film can fascinate us in that way, shock us, but also move us in a genuine and sophisticated manner, it momentarily lifts horror out of being kooky or dismissible (Rosemary's Baby had similar impact in its day.) So with apologies to my fellow "proud horror dorks" (thanks Clayton), this is one that's just so good we'll have to share it with mainstream filmgoers, who will most certainly fall for its many charms.

Let the Right One In is also beautifully photographed, director Alfredson having a Kubrickian eye for the living spaces of working-class Swedes: the flats, apartment blocks, courtyards, hospitals and woods.  And though the film already has an English-language remake in development (reportedly to be directed by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves), it's hard to imagine removing this story from its settings and achieving anywhere near the same level of cinematic excellence.  Let the Right One In debuted on US screens in late October, and is currently showing at the Angelika Film Center in lower Manhattan.  The film will receive its much-anticipated Region 1 DVD release on March 10.

Inflatable Squirrel Carcass Top 10+ for 2008

Top 10

1 Tamar - My little locked groove contains all the music I'll ever need.

2 Getachew Merkurya & The Ex, Alemayehu Eshete and Mahmoud Ahmed with Either/Orchestra, Extra Golden - Damrosch Park August 20 - Great music, great crowd, great day, great weather, great energy, great caesar's ghost!, great job, Brian, Liz, Scott, Irene, Diane, Tony, Ken and everybody who made it work so well.

3 Et Cetera Et Cetera (Long Hair)/Joakim Skogsberg Jola Rota (Tiliqua)/Ishikawa Akira & Count Buffalo Uganda – Afurikan Rokku no Yoake (Tiliqua) - Three amazing records  take their great leap forward
and land gracefully.

4 Cecil Taylor/Tony Oxley - Village Vanguard July 17 - If No. 2 had not occured, this would have been the best performance I saw this year. In my mind second is often an honor.

5 Haris Eisenstadt Guewel (Clean Feed), Pandelis Karayorgis/Nate McBride/Curt Newton Betwixt (Hatology), Mary Halvorson Dragon's Head (Firehouse 12) - Yes, I am cheating a little here but these three are difficult to separate in my mind, since I like each one more each time I listen. There is some very tasty jazz being released currently.

6 HexLove / Faulouah Free Jazz From Slavery LP (Weird Forest) - "fun lil' mindfook, innit?"

7 A Power Greater Than Itself - George Lewis - This book offers tips on how an organization, in this case the AACM, can retain its dignity and its purpose from conception through the succession measured in various increments known as people, time, community. If both people and time meet the organization's definition of “good” then the combination should beget successful relationships/community. Success being a term best measured on an evolutionary scale; toss the "are" in revolution and live the "will be". Relationship/community provides the key to “will be”; success suffers the loss of "will".

8 ICP Orchestra - Abrons Art Center September 6 - Go see them. Their new CD Live at the Bimhuis on the ICP label also belongs on this list.

9 Huutajat - PS 1 September 14 - There are several current performers/groups I do not think I will get the chance to see live for any number of reasons but on Sunday, September 14, 2008, my favorite large chorus of shouting men took over the courtyard at PS 1, thereby eliminating one from the list I'd most like to see dwindle to nothing (hint to booking agents: Pascal Comelade would eliminate another). If I was a church, they would be my choir.

10 What It Is - Lynda Barry (Drawn and Quarterly) - Possession of creativity with intent to distribute: an oblique strategy of encouragement and therapy.

Skip James Biographer Interview

The following article and interview with Skip James biographer Stephen Calt was submitted by WFMU listener Brian Berger, and is exclusive to Beware of the Blog. Thanks Brian!

“They’re slick, but they can stand another greasing.” Thus Skip James on the two men who had recently discovered the 62-year-old Mississsipian and were now waiting for... what, precisely? James wasn’t even a forgotten figure, he was almost entirely unknown outside a tiny, fervent group of blues record collectors. He hadn’t been a professional musician for decades, yet his young white admirers were anxious to hear him perform and, hopefully, record again. James was rightly wary. He knew nothing of folk music or blues revivals. As for records, he’d made them before and not been well rewarded.

Nehemia “Skippy” James was 28-years-old when he arrived at the Paramount Records facility in Grafton, Wisconsin. James had come north by train, his ticket bought by a 36-year-old white man H.C. Spier, a talent scout and music store owner in back in Jackson. Spier sold a lot of records, almost all of them to blacks, so who had any better idea what new sounds might sell? James had impressed Spier at an audition and so off James went. In Grafton, James was under the aegis of another white man, 37-year-old Art Laibly. He was the director of Paramount, the once flourishing “race” label of New York Recording Laboratories; in fact, a confusingly-named part of a Wisconsin furniture manufacturer, the Port Washington Chair Company. Under Laibly’s supervision, James performed at least 18 songs— thirteen on haunting guitar, five on madcap piano; two were gospel, the rest secular— over the course of a few days. Foregoing flat payment in lieu of future royalties, James returned to Mississippi to await his greater fortune.

Mr. Shifrel Does It Again

When I had a radio show, I used to buy the newspaper every day. I’d read it on the train and tear out articles I thought I might want to talk about on the air. I always had a small plastic bag of little torn-up bits of newspaper with me, just in case I suddenly had to go broadcast someplace. I once read that you can tell how much you like someone by how many newspaper articles you’d want to share with them, and if that’s true then I liked the Listeners better than anybody else in the whole world. But now that I’m not on WFMU, I’m also not buying the paper.

By “paper,” you know I mean the Daily News, right? Every time I mention how dreadful the New York Times is, people get all agitated and start missing the whole point of whatever it is I’m trying to say, so I’m not going to talk about that right now. I do just want to mention, though, that when I went to Thanksgiving dinner last Thursday, Hostess Listener Peggy was in a tizzy because the turkey was cooking MUCH too fast and it looked like dinner was going to have to be served an hour early, before some people even arrived. I asked her how she figured out how many minutes per pound to roast the bird, and she looked kind of panicked and said she’d found it “online.” But later I overheard her telling another guest that she’d got the minutes-per-pound info from the New York Times. (She knows how I feel.) “Wrong again!” I hollered. Well … I’m just saying.

Also, the price of the Daily News has suddenly gone up to 75 cents, a 50% increase, and there are free newspapers in New York: AM New York and Metro. I did a comparison study a while back, and decided Metro was better, so that’s the one I look at. Just after Mr. Obama was elected, Metro ran an article on the three major assumptions of white supremacists, which was very interesting and not something I saw anywhere else. But sometimes I do fear that by not reading the Daily News every day I am missing some excellent writing. Here’s an example of a lead sentence that was in the News one day a few weeks ago when I happened to buy a copy:

“Laughed at through her childhood and abandoned by her parents, a dwarf madam who led a runaway Brooklyn teen into a life of prostitution heads to prison today.”

“Wow,” I thought when I read it, “that sounds like Scott Shifrel.” In fact, it was; his byline was at the bottom of the piece. Scott Shifrel writes news leads that are like little 36-word Dickensian novels. He wrote my very favorite sentence ever, one of the best sentences ever written in the English language:

“A baby, jammed in a shoebox amid a swarm of cockroaches, a pile of drugs, and a loaded handgun, was well cared-for and loved, her teenage mother insisted as she was released from jail yesterday.”

I loved that sentence so much that I interviewed Scott Shifrel on my old FMU radio show, “Killing Time with Bronwyn C.” (Sorry I don’t have a link, but it was on the October 12, 2007 program, about 20 minutes in. If you want to hear it you have to look under the archives for a different show called “Bronwyn Knows Best with Bronwyn and Kelly.” But Kelly’s not on “Killing Time with Bronwyn C.”) Mr. Shifrel was a great guest, and very interesting, and also modest—he gave his assistant credit for coming up with the word “swarm” in relation to the cockroaches. After the show I emailed him and told him he could come on “Killing Time” anytime he wanted, which I suppose made me sound like the Kathy Bates character in Misery, but I meant it. Of course, so did she.

After that show, Listener John emailed me and recommended a book called Novels in Three Lines, by Felix Feneon, a collection of three-line items by M. Feneon that were published in a French newspaper in the early 1900s. And the fine writer Barbara Henry, who composes her poetry with words from that one newspaper I’m not mentioning here, has told me there’s another poet—the managing editor at another newspaper—with whom she discusses the literary merit of newspaper leads. (You can hear Ms. Henry read some of her poems on the April 25, 2008 “Killing Time” show.) So apparently there’s a little literary tradition here, but to me, Scott Shifrel is the king. I’m just sorry I’m missing all his writing now, and I’m sorry I don’t have time today to get into a critical review of those late-'90s Food Emporium flyers that used to be so genius.

Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.

Aaron Cometbus on Put the Needle on the Record TODAY

Fans of the excellent COMETBUS fanzine series will want to check out Billy Jam's show this afternoon at 3pm. Cometbus creator/writer Aaron Cometbus will be dropping by for a chat with BJ the DJ, who says,

"Veteran punk rock drummer & author Aaron Cometbus has been gaining notoriety since the early 1980's when his pioneering East Bay punk band Crimpshrine arrived on the scene. Around the same time he launched the now legendary, long-running Cometbus series, at first a rough, stapled, handwritten Xeroxed punk fanzine -now a soft cover book format that is available only at small independent bookstores and music stores and which the author insists on selling cheaply - only a few dollars per copy. Before he exits the New York area next week to head west for the winter, the artist will stop by WFMU...."

Listen live today at 3pm, or check out Billy Jam's archives if you miss the live show.

All of WFMU's special upcoming programs, including Michael Shelley's interview with legendary Beach Boy Brian Wilson tomorrow morning, are listed here.

Nice #4, the Zine You Could Play on Your Turntable

Several weeks back, while preparing for my contribution to WFMU's week-long celebration of the 7" known as Singles Going Steady, I rifled through the comps & splits 7" drawer and found the most frustratingly unknowable pair of records. They were clear flexis, seemingly torn from a magazine, bearing the word "Nice", the attribution "BarDor Productions", and a number (5, 6, 9 and 10), and that was it.  These records were anonymous, and possibly orphaned.  With such a near-complete lack of info, I had no choice but to listen.

I dropped the needle on one side... and heard some twisted gamelan-like orchestra recorded through 20 years of gauze; flipped and dropped it again... a disaffected woman's retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood" as though it had all just happened to her, on the Lower East Side; switched to the other disc and it's like The Inflatable Boy Clams hitched a flying saucer ride.  Everything I heard I absolutely loved.  All the voices sounded familiar but alien; all the music seemed trapped in time, though not in the dated sense.  I asked everyone in the WFMU office what it was - no one knew. 

Googling "Bardor Productions" yielded 2 hits, one of which blew the case wide open: a link to a single Irwin Chusid playlist.  I got on the horn to my ol' pal pronto, and within minutes the mystery was both solved and deepened.  Within a week, the record was mine - a gift.  Nice!  Keep reading, and it's yours.

Mele Kalikimaka!

DJ Kelly and I have a little contest going to see which of us will be first to hear Christmas music being played in a store. Of course, Kelly has a big advantage since she actually goes to stores. (I believe this may have something to do with her having so-called "disposable income," with which I have very little personal experience.)

Last Thursday, October 30, the night before Halloween, I was in a Rite-Aid looking for those little orange- and black-paper-wrapped molasses candies with the peanut butter centers (I love those!) and the stock guy was already taking all the Halloween stuff off the “seasonal” shelves and throwing it into boxes, while open boxes of Christmas merch stood nearby.

Then the next morning, on Halloween, I got a voice mail from the little Spirit of Christmas herself. “I have not yet heard Christmas music,” she said, “but I have to tell you that Christmas stuff in the stores is at the point of, like, the big pimple on your chin that’s just all white and totally ready to blow any minute. That’s the state we’re in with Christmas—PRE-fucking-Thanksgiving, mind you! Anyway, have you heard it, ’cause you know, things move a little faster in New York City, so I thought maybe down at Grand Central they’re already giving you a Christmas enema.”

Ummm … no, not yet. Although I did see Christmas stuff on sale in late August this year, and I think that’s the earliest ever. Meanwhile, I got this awesome press release for a book that I think is going to be the number-one best-seller of the season: Scared of Santa! It’s, like, 250 photos of terrified children.  “Destined to become a holiday classic, Scared of Santa is sure to delight anyone who has felt Santa’s velvet grip, even those who had managed to suppress the memory,” says the press release. It’s the kind of brilliant idea where you wonder why no one ever thought of it before.

So keep your ears open for Christmas music, and remember—You’d better watch out!

Thanks for reading my blog post this time, and may God bless.

The Greatest Book in the World

Found by me on top of a garbage can in the East Village last night.
The brats of My Super Sweet 16 can have their bowtied BMW's, peer auditions for their VIP areas, Marc Jacobs giftcard baskets. When pimply, bespectacled kids get to be thrown around by Ozzie Newsome, have Burt Reynolds impersonators, and feature live elephants at their Bar Mitzvahs, there is simply no comparison.

WFMU's Musical Cookbook now on sale!

We know all of you Iron Chef addicts out there have been waiting for a new extreme culinary experience to sweep the nation. Well, friends, that moment has arrived!

WFMU is now hawking our musical cookbook, To Serve Man.

It's a 96-pager in full color, featuring tons of recipes from your favorite freeform DJs, PLUS 2 CDs of musical selections to be paired with each dish. We're talking breakfast, snacks, appetizers, drinks, main courses, and desserts! Omnivores, vegetarians, carnivores, alcoholics, and freegans, we've got you covered!

Head on over to our online store to order a copy for yourself or for that special non-photosynthesizer in your life.

Public Collectors

Public Collectors, an archive project led by Chicago artist Marc Fischer, consists of informal agreements where collectors allow the contents of their collection to be published and permit those who are curious to directly experience the objects in person.

In addition to hosting collection inventories, Public Collectors also includes digital archives of out-of-print publications, relics of the pre-internet music underground and random ephemera such as a collection of "do not disturb" signs.

Some highlights of the digital archive include:

A self-published collection of stories and illustrations by Michael Gira that was only available on the Swans' 1997 tour.

A collection of children's graffiti from antique sources

Transcripts and audio documentation of conversations with a developmentally disabled man about music, split LPs and Super Nanny.

Issue #19 of French artist Bruno Richard's Elles Sont De Sortie- an insane, beautiful and obscene art magazine published in the early 80s with Pascal Doury. In addition to Richard's early work, Public Collectors also includes a show catalog from an exhibit curated by Marc Fischer that documented nine years of mail correspondence between Richard and Fischer.

All publications are provided as high quality PDFs suitable for printing. I did not provide the direct links because I want you to pretend like its old times and dig around a bit.

Magic Eye Paintings Are the Magic Eye Paintings of Magic Eye Paintings

I am so rarely in on the joke that it makes me sad.  I'm almost always on the periphery, wondering at the secret whisperings of others.  "What happened to Bill?  Oh, he put on weight; his wife is cute though."  No metaphor illustrates this unfortunate social marginalization better than that of the accursed Magic Eye Painting.  I hate you, Magic Eye Paintings; I am smarter, more complex and special than you'll ever be.  Still, I don't have an ethereal image of a schooner or a terrier "hidden" inside of me.

For example, in the pattern of roses to the right, one supposedly can see a ghostlike image of "Your Mother After I Fucked Her" –€“ just not working for me.  In the "trippy" pattern below left, if one takes great care not to look too hard, supposedly the image of "Bums on a Chow Line" will eventually reveal itself.  In the third image down on the right, if one presses one's nose to it and then slowly backs away while "unfocusing" one's eyes, the magical image of "Michael Moynihan Fan Base" will show up.  NO IT WON'T!  It just won't.  Ever.

People will tell you, "Don't focus your eyes!" –€“ "Don't look directly at it!" –€” "OK, do you want me to tell you?  It's a clown—€”don't you see it?"  Nope.  No clowny for William.  What I do see are the manufacturer's deliberately obfuscating "instructions" for "3D viewing" here.  The truth, however, and by this I mean an objective, The-Beatles-were-pretty-darn-good kind of truth, is that there's NOTHING THERE!  Excuse the caps, I forget myself...but really, come on:  there simply are no hidden images within Magic Eye Paintings.  There are, however, two kinds of people.

Good writing 101 tells us to never use clichés.  In fact, Paul R. Hensel, a damn funny guy from the Department of Political Science at Florida State University says, "Avoid clichés like the plague."  But in this case I couldn't resist saying that there are really only two kinds of people (I also couldn't resist starting this sentence with a conjunction—See!  Anyone can write advertising copy!): (1) Those who pretend to see the hidden images in Magic Eye Paintings, and with a wink and a nod conspire to continually mock and subjugate person type two; (2) those, like myself, who are honest people, freely admitting that there's simply nothing there and getting treated the fool for it.

Magic Eye Paintings are also a fine metaphor for all conspiratorial shams that pit one sector of the public (the "seers," if you will) against the other ("non-seers"), similar to the classic Emperor's New Clothes, but a move executed not out of courtly propriety, but rather a subtly malicious need to forge an elite subgroup (which is usually in fact the socially dominant majority.)

Take this sentence:€“ "Wilco are the Magic Eye Paintings of Rock."  This simply says that some are "in on" the less obvious, deeper meaning of the subject, and some are not—€”the perfection of my metaphor suggesting of course that there may indeed be no inner meaning to glean.  Philip K. Dick once said when asked for "a short, simple definition of reality":  "Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away."*  You all have my permission, in fact I encourage you, to stop believing and then see what's still there. 

With respect to the fact that Magic Eye Paintings as a phenomenon are somewhat passé (and the perception of them as frustrating unquestionably the fodder of 90s sitcoms), this has been brewing within me for several years; I choose not when the information is ready to be released.  Let us not forget the multi-million-dollar industry in books, prints and other Magic Eye ephemera; the allusion to some sort of postmodern, sci-fi, Sharper Image-style psychedelia (whose blasphemy simply cannot be tolerated); and most importantly the cabal that unites those irritating ball-busters in a movement against us honest, truth-seeing and truth-telling people.
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*from VALIS, copyright © 1981 by Philip K. Dick.