WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Miceniks (1960)

I love depictions of the beatnik lifestyle in popular culture of the fifties and sixties. Hilarious bastardizations appeared everywhere, in comic books, pulp paperbacks, LP covers, comedy sketches, film scenes, radio comedies and on down the line. That's why you should revisit the great website Like, Dreamsville and that's also why you should watch this fun Paramount cartoon from 1960.

Exercises in Internet Avoidance, Part Two: Strong Bad Email

Watching funny cartoons on the funny Internet can get in the way of important things like incessantly checking email and downloading ribbons of underground metal and free improv radio broadcasts and stuff. In fact, I had been so busy checking email and, uh, previewing CDs which I then deleted and ordered from Amazon that I totally missed out on Homestar Runner, just like the same way how everyone always knows about everything before me until someone said something about going to Crazy Go Nutz University and I was all "Wisconsin Tourism Federation?" I was soon set straight.

Homestar, a sort of emasculated Trix rabbit with a lisp is kinda funny, but I immediately took to this grouchy Mexican wrestler guy who guess what he does? It's so cool. He checks email ! So here I was watching this little Mexican wrestler guy that sounds like Jack Klugman and looks like an egg, but it was all like distracting me from checking my own email. But so then get this, I found it on DVD!

So like, really, the whole nonlinear thing of the internet makes me nervous. There was this blob of episodes to watch and I couldn't remember which ones I'd already watched and I was worried about finding the ones I liked again and I was kind of freaking out, so the DVDs are cool for that because they're nice and orderly and stuff. Well, except for these bonus feature Easter egg things which you have to find and then you forget what you're doing and next thing you know you're missing your window for downloading another demo by another French black metal band.

So yeah, I got a couple of the DVDs, including SBEmail's 50 Greatest Hits which was of course the most economical option because they were the greatest and because it actually contained 50-five greatest hits, including "Radio" (see up above), a valuable episode on death metal and "Personal Favorites" which is like a meta sorta besta within the greatest hits.

In short, my live is richer now. I have begun faking a Spanish accent when writing emails, even though I'm not really sure that's what Strong Bad's accent is really. And my bandwidth is reserved for more important things, like tracking down Slits bootlegs. Now if only they could figure out a way to put emails on paper and bring them to my door.

They Laughed When Bill Took Music Lessons By Mail

Images I Enjoyed in Comics This Week

 

Images I Enjoyed in Comics This Week

    

Morgue Story & The Dead Outside

Of the films I saw in the San Francisco Roxie Cinema's 6th annual Another Hole in the Head festival, two features stood out high above the lot: the Brazilian horror/comedy Morgue Story (Sangue, Baiacu e Quadrinhos), and the almost static, post-plague survival drama from Scotland, The Dead Outside (trailers viewable at those links.) These are two very different films, to be sure, but they share two significant common ingredients: an empowered, gutsy heroine, hell bent on survival (these chicks are neither skinny, nor do they shriek and fall down when running); and a visual and color palette that distinguishes the story immediately as its own universe. (Sadly, I left town the night the tantalizingly Mother's Day-esque Run! Bitch Run! premiered; anyone who's seen it should feel free to chime in with their thoughts.)

Morgue Story is a taut, clever and grisly horror comedy with an Evil Dead II-like dual sense of calamity and humor that leaves nothing off the, uh, slab. When Ana, a successful graphic novelist (who has nonetheless lost at love, and whose most famous character is a "living dead") ends up not-quite-dead in the morgue, she runs afoul of a sleazily efficient, God-fearing necrophiliac coroner. Also in the mix is a self-effacing cataleptic, who looks like Lux Interior's younger, paler brother and may just be an (albeit weak-willed) ally for our heroine. The three spar off verbally and physically as the English subs fly by, unpredictable shifts of power occur, and you find yourself reacting with equal measures of laughter and revulsion to the fairly graphic scenes of necrophilia. Everything is shot in grey, green and sepia tones, the washed-out institutional colors perfectly underscoring the essences of death, depravity and sickness. This is the only film I saw in the whole festival where the crowd immediately erupted in enthusiastic and unanimous applause at the conclusion. That tells me the world needs more necrophiliac comedies—or at least this one.

Come see The Dead Outside expecting buckets of blood and non-stop zombie action, and you will be disappointed. The Dead Outside is more the zombie-film equivalent of listening to your favorite Oval LP, which turns out to be not at all a bad thing. Moody and hovering, with an excellent soundtrack that veers from drony buzz into gentle piano melodies, The Dead Outside reads like a side tale to 28 Days Later if directed by Atom Egoyan. As with Morgue Story, the action here centers on an unconventionally attractive heroine, a hard-boiled, chip-toothed goth girl who's slaughtered her own family in order to survive, and is played with resonance by Sandra Louise Douglas (who seems destined to flash her violently blue eyes on bigger screens.) The danger in The Dead Outside is less in the infected that keep getting stuck in the barbed wire outside, than it is in the minds of the survivors who must live out the daily drudgery that is post-zombie-plague existence. Again, the expectations of horror purists may be let down here, and the film also loses minor points for dropping critical exposition to the lack of subtitles (it's been a long time since I saw Teenage Fanclub, and my Scots is rusty.) Though The Dead Outside does have a few scenes of seat-jumping zombie action, that won't be why you remember it. Its muted blues and greens, and matter-of-fact realism, tell a very atypical and understated horror tale.

P.S. - I'll be returning to weekly broadcasting on WFMU this summer, after a ten-year hiatus. Tune in for the premiere of My Castle of Quiet, Wednesday, June 24, at 8 p.m. ET.

The Don Martin Dictionary

In 1837 Paterson township seceded from Essex County, New Jersey. It became the silk production capital of the country when it was incorporated into burgeoning Passaic County. Paterson would eventually stake its claim to several pivotal figures of the 20th century and at one point or another they all called Paterson their home: Lou Costello, William Carlos Williams, Uncle Floyd, Allen Ginsberg, Bert Wheeler, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Prince Randian and today's blog topic hero--Mad's Maddest Artist, Don Martin.

At some point in the 21st century an obsessive genius/knucklehead spent too much time compiling the only database that matters. This link is especially for those who need to know right now what the Batmobile with a flat tire sounds like.

The Don Martin Dictionary

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.

Drew Friedman launches new website

Expert illustrator and longtime WFMU art contributor Drew Friedman recently launched a new website featuring his fine art prints (with the help of Irwin Chusid and Barbara Economon).

For those of you who may not be familiar with Drew's work, he was the creator of WFMU's semi-grotesque mascot, the Old Codger, contributed illustrations for our Crackpots & Visionaries cards, and designed a WFMU t-shirt and bumper sticker. Drew and his brother Josh Alan once guest-hosted for Kaz on WFMU in the 1980s, as well.

Dave the Spazz calls Drew "one of the funniest stipple cartoonists of the '80's and '90's is now one of the funniest illustrators of the 21st century. His work is as hypnotizing as Basil Wolverton's at his best. Drew Friedman is the Albrecht Dürer of liver spots."

Dorks, Blue-Tang, Mr Wonka, Sprocket Man, and Awkward Families

My "Awesome Internet Images" folder has been filling up lately thanks to these sites.

Designer Logan Walters loves him some Wu Tang, but hates him some Wu Tang album cover art. And so he dipped into the history of Blue Note and is working on remaking all the Wu Tang albums in that legendary style. (Via Animal New York)

Another nice design project is Spacesick's "I Can Read Movies" series in which 70s book covers meet classic geeky films.

 

The University of Nebraska library offers up an online archive of government produced comic books. This includes everyone from Charlie Brown to Captain America to Wonder Woman and Superman pitching various public service announcements. But it's the lesser known projects that really grabbed my interest: WISHES & RAINBOWS, a trippy kids story from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; THE STORY OF BANKS, in which a group of hippie teens learn how to use a bank; the EC style drug scare comics HOOKED and TEEN-AGE BOOBY TRAP; and the truly lame superheroes SPROCKET MAN (he rides a ten-speed and carries a giant gear shift) and RAY CYCLE: RECYCLING SUPERHERO (he's from Connecticut). (via Slog)

If you like to make fun of your childhood self for loving computers, Star Wars, and all things nerdy, you can put your own photos up for all to see on Dork Yearbook.

More embarrassing than an airing of your kiddie laundry is the world of Awkward Family Photos. Take a break from Mother's Day and see what some truly uncomfortable family situations are like via the site that kicks the Olan Mills love up a notch.

 

The best one of all is NSFW, and therefore, after the jump....

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.

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.

Some Things to See

I hate the New York Times, (aka the Big Grey Pack o' Lies) so when some guy tried to hand me a free copy of a “special edition” last Tuesday, I almost refused to take it. Usually the free ones are sponsored copies, with a big ad wrapping the outside. But this one just had a headline that said, “Iraq War Ends.” So I took it, and walked away reading it, and every story was about how Condoleezza Rice was apologizing for lying about the weapons of mass destruction, and President Bush had been indicted for high treason. The whole thing was a brilliant, 14-page parody. I turned around and went back. “Who are you guys?” I asked.

“We’re the New York Times Special Edition,” one guy said. Well, I knew they weren’t from the real NYTimes because even though they spelled Condoleezza wrong, the rest of the writing was really good. Then some guys with a video camera stopped me and asked what I thought of the paper, and I told them how fantastic I thought it was. It wasn’t until a few hours later that it occurred to me that I didn’t know who the video guys were either.

Today I finally got around to trolling Youtube for footage of me holding the Special Edition, and I didn’t find any, but I did find a pretty funny video called “Killing Time with Bronwyn C.”  by Listener Devtrash. I watched a bunch of Listener Devtrash’s videos and really liked them, and not just because of the Bronwyn C. one.

Listeners still send me notices about their upcoming events and shows, although all I can do is pass them on to the station’s “Upcoming” list or tell you about some of them here. Listener Bill K. let me in on the Kim Deitch retrospective at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA), and Sluggo and I went to see it on Saturday. (It costs $5 and is there until Dec. 5.) We’re old fans of Kim’s and it was nice to see work from various points in his career all on display in one place. But the real revelation, for us, was “Dial M for Monster,” the silent monster movie he and his brother and friends made when they were kids. Mummies! Aliens! Vampires! Giant rubber lizards! The H-bomb! It was pretty great.

Then, as long as we were having Art Day, we stopped by Spencer Brownstone Gallery on Wooster Street to see the new Tessa Farmer show. Farmer’s sculptural installations, made up of dead things and crap she’s found lying around, hover on the rusty tin-can edge of kitsch. We were looking at the skeleton of a Whippet dog with a dried-out wasp nest inside it and an upside-down roadkill frog sticking out of a hole in the side of its skull. “Like a turducken!” Sluggo said. But then there are all the insects, and the itty-bitty skeleton “fairies” made of bladderwort fiber and termite wings, incredibly tiny, and some with horse-skull heads. In 2007 Farmer had a residency at the Natural History Museum in London, and the best of her work is like the specimen’s revenge. At least it makes you look, and think. We liked it a lot, and I recommend you see it if you get the chance. The show will be up until December 13.

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

Doing the Math with Megan M.

This off the AP Wire last night:

"A 28-year-old man who attempted to pay for his bar tab with gum wrappers was arrested after a scuffle with a police officer on Tuesday night, authorities said. A bartender told police the man was playing pool with an open bottle of beer and spilled some of it on the table. She said he first tried to pay his $32 tab with a credit card, which was declined.

When police arrived and ordered the man to pay his tab, they reported that he began counting out gum wrappers as if they were cash."

Now, anyone who isn't a drunken idiot can tell you: gum wrappers ain't worth squat.

When I first read this story, I thought that he might have tried to pay with Bazooka Joe comics, in which gum is also wrapped. The comics could also be argued to possess a monetary value, as they are redeemable for valuable prizes such as x-ray spectacles and gold-plated insignia rings. This, of course, led me to the question: How many Bazooka Joe comics would it take to pay a $32 bar tab?

Let's do the math, shall we?

Using the information gleaned from this circa-1985 comic, we can infer that, at that time, 195 comics were worth 40 American cents.

Ergo

.40 = 195 comics
32/.04 = 80
80 x 195 = 15,600 comics would cover a $32 bar tab

These numbers have obviously not been adjusted for inflation, and time constraints prevent me from further calculations. I am leaving it up to you, the Beware of the Blog-reading mathemagician, to help me figure out this weighty problem.

Images courtesy of The Onion and childofthe1980s.com

Dig Us Digging the Lameness

With WFMU's annual CD & Record Fair revving up for this weekend, I thought now would be a nice time to dust off this brilliant strip by Jim Ryan, which originally appeared on the back cover of the station's 1996 Catalog of Curiosities:

Bottled Violence now Bottled Friend?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to my buddy Tim for snapping a pic of the bar sign. We're going through some pretty dire times here in the USA, and I'm certain that $1 beers, free BBQ, and marathon happy hours are much appreciated by anyone who took a good look at their most recent ConEd bill.

But I just can't help but feel sorry for poor Ian MacKaye, a principled man who has been up to his neck in Minor Threatxploitation. Over the last few years, Nike knocked off a piece of MT art, and a not-so-hot hot sauce almost used the label design below (they had the decency to ask MacKaye and company first). More recently, a goateed Sir Ben Kingsley was filmed copping MacKaye's style. At least the bar above is showing the Redskins game...

Check out this interview Billy Jam did with Ian MacKaye last year (real audio archive).

UPDATE: Thanks to Jim for alerting us all to the tattoo pic.

The Cartoon Dada of Massimo Giacon

Since the early 80s, Massimo Giacon has been at the center of an Italian cartoon renaissance, producing cartoons, illustrations and designs for Italian magazines such as "Frigidaire", "Alter", "Dolce Vita", "Cyborg" and "Nova Express". I originally came across the work of Giacon when I was trying to find information on the 80s dada/synth/noise group Spirocheta Pergoli, of which he is the founding member. I was glad to find an inventive artist whose playful but grotesque visual work is a perfect companion to his strange and ridiculous music.

Unfortunately, Giacon doesn't have a proper website, but you can view some work at his MySpace page, which also includes musical projects from the last ten years. Images from his 2001 solo show Philosophers in the Pop Planet can be viewed here.

I had posted the Spirocheta Pergoli EP on Cake & Polka Parade a couple years ago but here they are again if you missed them.

Spirocheta Pergoli - Fuzzi Bugsi Tumpa il Bongo
a1 - Merendine | a2 - Pistole Giocattolo | b1 - Pianto di un Coniglio a Molla | b2 - Fuzzi Bugsi

Mambo 4 Woofmoo

Artist Jim Flora probably never listened to WFMU. He was a fan of Bix and bebop (i.e., foot-tapping jazz) and the Budapest String Quartet, none of which garners heavy rotation on our "free-form" airwaves. Yet Flora unknowingly contributed to WFMU's visual identity several times in recent years. His cartoonish figures have appeared on a station t-shirt, hoodie, bumper sticker, and Marathon mailer, as well as an oversized canvas banner displayed hither and yon.

Flora wasn't aware of these adaptations of his work because he passed away ten years ago today at age 84.

The images were used by WFMU designers thru arrangement with the Flora family, with whom I've worked for several years archiving and cataloging the artist's vast (and largely uncirculated) fine art collection. Flora's 1955 Mambo For Cats LP cover (re-purposed at left by co-archivist Barbara Economon) is one of his most iconic illustrations. Flora's hyperactive gremlins frolicked across dozens of quirky album covers for Columbia in the 1940s and RCA Victor in the 1950s. Today his work adorns new CDs.

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.

George Carlin 1937-2008

This is a re-post from two weeks ago. Who would have thought this mini-tribute would suddenly join legions of others?

Anybody associated with comedy in any capacity naturally acknowledges the profound breadth, influence, ability and genius of George Carlin. His has been a long and varied career, and with any artist whose work spans multiple decades, eventually people forget what that person's career was like at the start if they knew about it at all.

George Carlin was originally a member of the comedy team Burns and Carlin with the very funny Jack Burns. When the two split up, Burns persued acting and would replace Don Knotts on The Andy Griffith Show as Mayberry's new deputy. Burns eventually found success in the seventies with Avery Schreiber in the comedy team Burns and Schreiber, and was also the primary director of The Muppet Show. He also attacked Andy Kaufman on that famous episode of Fridays. Carlin, of course, followed a solo path that took a fascinating few years to come to fruition.

After splitting with the world of comedy teams Carlin struggled to find his voice as a solo performer. He was an impressionist for several years and a very, very good one. To this day there are no other mimics who have mastered a Mort Sahl or Lenny Bruce that I know of. Both of Carlin's vocal impressions of the two comedians whose footsteps he follows in are bang on. Listen to Carlin's impersonation of Mort Sahl off the only comedy LP of Burns and Carlin (pictured) here. There has recently been a sudden influx of early George Carlin stuff on YouTube and that's what I'm sharing today.

George Carlin as mystery guest on What's My Line (1969)
Jimmy Durante introduces George Carlin on The Hollywood Palace (1966)
George Carlin on The Merv Griffin Show (1965)
George Carlin on the obscure game show The Game Game (1969)
George Carlin on Playboy After Dark (1970)
George Carlin on The Mike Douglas Show (1972)
George Carlin's acting debut: That Girl (1966)
George Carlin with The Doors and The Committee on The Smothers Brothers (1968)
George Carlin and Flip Wilson on Johnny Carson (1971)
Another Carlin appearance on Carson (1972)

And a great new "classic Carlin" YouTube channel here.