WFMU's Beware of the Blog

OMAP, "Walter Mondale is Eating His Chile" video (1983)

OMAP is a garage band.  We clear on that?  The Beginning of the End fronted by Twink...garage rock.  '68 Comeback and The Oblivians are not garage rock.  It is critically important we all take notice of this valuable distinction--proclaimed courtesy of the one-off, genderless YouTube enigma known as Elbowknees, son or daughter to either an OMAP guitarist or the drummer.

Let's see if I got this straight--overtly political archival footage and lyrics, gratuitous vocal echo/helium effects and more guitar feedback than James Stockdale's hearing aid...obviously garage rock.  There--that's finally settled (Elbow, ya poor thing; I think somebody needs to retake that Musical Genre course).

Despite Elbowknee's astute postulation--if you get right down to it, Cocteau Twins are nothing more than ethereal garage--I am quite enamored of his/her old man's project, itself unfortunately a one-off endeavor.  Again, very intoxicating spastic psychedelic echoes of B.O.T.E. kicking the base for Mr. Alder, he while presumably under an early 'shroom phase.  Where have you drifted, old men at play?  I don't know about you but I want OMAP back on the map.

The Inflatable Church

 

This is so moronic but, then again, so endearing to my implacable love of kitsch.  You and your boo can now get hitched in an inflatable church.  Perfect for those English, Belgian, Dutch and Spanish couples who won't be celebrating Earth Month and assembled by the European promotional structure manufacturers Innovations Xtreme Inflatables, this monstrosity is also a 2004 Guinness Book inductee for being (according to the incredibly vague search engine synopsis) "...the world's largest inflatable church in the world".  The damn organ is even inflated and they airbrushed the stained glass windows.  Could lazy be any more as lazy does? 

The Saint Louis Metro Evening Whirl: The Greatest Newspaper Ever Printed

Wangstas, here's a caveat: Don't mess with the Whirl with the balls its got.

First-degree murderer?  This 50,000 subscriber local crime fighting publication says it's your ass!  Armed criminal action?  You best stop sitting on the edge of the bed and picking your feet in Poughkeepsie (or "East Boogie") 'cause the St. Louis Metro Evening Whirl's got a hunch that you're a yella son of a bitch who better start running.  (The actual home website's right here; only problem is you can't access the "more" link at the end of the Leonard Taylor story nor any of the stories "under construction" as the site is still in the process of getting established (siiiiiigh), making this site not particularly worth navigating.  This 2004 Riverfront Times article and the Whirl's MySpace page will be of much better help in acquainting you with this uproariously entertaining paper).

The CKLW 20-20 News/Quahog 5 News of tabloid newsprint publications, the Whirl's police blotter-style capsule reporting continues in their 70 year-long standing tradition, still going about nine steps further--nine very risky steps--than blotters in your daily slickly pretentious, impersonal Chicago Tribunes, Washington Posts or my city-of-residence's dearly beloved Post-Dispatch.  This November 2006 article from Believer (a great literature mag in print form and on-line published by McSweeney's) chronicles the Whirl's history.  Original founder Benjamin Thomas ripped into St. Louis's crimelords seeking mayoral runs and teachers gettin' busy with students (the story that gave birth to the Whirl; two high school teachers brought a group of boys to the country for picnic and were alleged to have sexually assaulted them) with an explicit aplomb that would shock readers today. 

The Voluptuous Horror of Első Emelet

Music videos within music videos--a stylistic device upon which you'd have thought early- to mid- 80's video directors would have pounced on an epidemic scale.  Not by a long shot.  Here was a chance for the cream of New Wave and power pop to gratuitously plug another favorite singer's or band's videos and, in essence, invent music vid product placement.  An idea that would surely have been tossed out right off the bat by innocent, vulnerable and completely unimpressionable eleven year-olds, right?  Obviously, it wasn't the winning formula...except for one band.  One musical entity would ever concoct it, use it and pioneer it: Dire Straits.

About two minutes into "Money for Nothing" another video suddenly appears.  Some pretty boy wearing a badass red muscle shirt and hair vaguely reminiscent of Magne Furuholmen/Bono circa "11 O'Clock Tick Tock"/Brenda Fricker whirls around to face the camera in a great stop motion effect that makes him seem bionic.  Another minute thirteen seconds later there's a black and white video of a woman in her late twenties, early thirties in alluring black lace stockings and white panties (that more or less double as toilet paper) glaring seductively and taking her frustration out on a kiosk.  This band, its song and accompanying clip--The Ian Pearson Band's "Sally"--are completely fake.  Ian Pearson isn't even a musician; he's the animator of "Money for Nothing" and close friend of the Knopflers.

The other, however, is totally real, and this is where it gets kinda scary.  The first video is from a band called First Floor--the real English translation of their real Hungarian moniker, Elso Emelet.  The English song title is "Baby, Baby", although I'd bank on the literal Hungarian title being somewhat more nuanced  (Anyone happen to know to what "Allj vagy lovok" translates in English?). 

Anyhow, through intense YouTube snooping I've discovered something extraordinary: these Eastern European pop studs are actually incorrect gangsta ballbusters.  Absolute white outsider bou-ghetto instigators.

Think Oingo Boingo when they were still the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo and Bill Nelson collaborating on an album and singing all the lyrics in Hungarian.  Word of caution: Their videos are as tedious as watching seaweed float.  But, oh, to the glorious heavens above (baby, baby), the music is breathtaking.

Guy's a Hack--And I'm Talking About Zimmern: An Open Letter

Dear Mr. Zimmern,

Congratulations...ya blew it.  Gary Kroeger, tell him what he's won!

Three months ago or thereabouts my wife, Angie, and I noticed on TV Guide Network the words "Bizarre Foods" one night listed as next on the Travel Channel, 'bout 9-ish, Central Standard.  Hmm, wonder how 'bizarre' he's talking, we ruminated.  Yeah, we'd been heavy mackin' on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, Guy's Big Bite and Paula Deen's Home Cooking months longer before our new discovery.  Fieri pops nations hard with the Bloody Mary Flank Steaks and Paula is, without the slightest equivocation, on a solar system-wide mission to make sure every man, woman, child and extraterrestrial on God's green earth and the planets surrounding it is administered at least a quintuple bypass.  If it kills her, we'll all cross that bridge together having pounded down the fruit (pies) of a bountiful (Southern fried chicken) harvest.  Paula Deen got game, y'aw.

But, like curious little sculps, Angie and I just had to peek behind the Bizarre Foods curtain and see what all the carrying on was about.  OK, a guy willingly chews then swallows whole balut, goose intestines on bean sprouts and nutria?  This we have to see.

It was perfect.  A perfect show for this obsessed fan of the extremely maladjusted and strange in most categories (food very much included), even if the closest I've ever come to "thoroughly disgusting" or eating outside what is raised on a farm is unagi sushi and shark.  Angie, on the other hand, would rather have given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a shark.  You champion the lost (if not entirely unchartered) art of culinary masochism as well as travel the earth to further champion gastronomic awareness.  It's perfect American voyeurism for Americans who believe voyeurism is a grave and unforgivable sin or otherwise.  Short of interspersing the bull decapitation archival scenes from Mondo Cane throughout for comic relief, Bizarre Foods is (I should say was) cool and just over the top enough.

Until I read your blog.  You went too far.  You went way over the top.  Would over the top two layers of the Earth's crust just about do it?  You went further over the top than you would have if you'd eaten tempura-style fresh warthog feces.  You went further past it than I would ever dreamt of having gone if the two people you targeted had actually deserved it.  They didn't.  Paula Deen and Guy Fieri are two of the most genuinely cool and hilarious people on television.  Aside from that, they are courteous and respectful; if they can't be courteous and respectful, at least tactfully civil.  They are no doubt tactfully civil enough to stop and realize when they've said too much.  Mr. Zimmern, I believe this is your stop. 

Guy Fieri "coming off like an overly rehearsed hack...", huh?  Okay, if the narration over this part of the Vietnam episode where you're attempting to goad your host into eating a snake's gall bladder isn't "overly rehearsed", I'm the current Dalai Lama.  That's not polished, Andrew...that's shining the shoe until the damn scuff comes OFF.  Those four words in parentheses about Paula Deen?  You don't even want to know what I think of you now.  Got a pencil, a brand new notebook and a couple hours to spare?

How does it feel to lose a viewer and a fan?  Your comments themselves may have been as long as it takes you to chew and swallow a maggot, but they said more than every word in my post put together.

Thank you,

Jonathan 

Forty People Working Behind the Scenes in TV/Film With The Same Names as Famous Fictional TV/Film Characters

Right on, spunky chookens, for $400,000 big bad smackers to ‘FMU!! Since I’m not Kenny G I won’t list four hundred people—forty will have to suffice. Nonetheless, to celebrate this auspicious milestone, here are in fact forty complete strangers with the dire misfortune of sharing their given names with only one other complete stranger…who ain’t real.

1: Shower curtain rings (?), “Getting Away With Murder” (1996)

2: Animator, “The Mad Magazine TV Special” (1974)

3: Actor, “Barry” (2006), “All For Melissa” (2007)

4: Sound designer, “Call Girl Wives” (2005);

Writer, “Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog” (1998)

5: Actor, “Out of Order”, (2003)

6: Actor, “Golf Punks” (1998)

7: Rough inbetween artist., “Anatasia” (1997)

    Inbetween artist “Bartok the Magnificent” (1999)

Meow Mix

Cats is rippin' it up on tha ones and twos...real cats.  These MC's (M'Duffy Catz) are the number one stunnas.  Of mice, that is.  Wreckin' and checkin', spinnin' and grinnin', thumpin' and bumpin', these is some baaaaaad felines, ya heard?  Na?  Well, they did; you done just interrupted their privacy, DAAS.

Severed Heads: 1977-2007

The Heads are calling it g'day.

Last month, after twenty-eight years of plunderphonic, electro-dysfunctional skullfuckery (well, closer to thirty, actually, if the “1977” on the cover to the forthcoming five-LP box set is their real ‘birthday’) Tom Ellard and Severed Heads made it crystal clear the lid to the coffin was being closed on any further collaborations with those who were enough of a threat to themselves and others to join him and, thus, the band responsible for the very first album released as an MP2—for good. Visiting hours are over. The family requests you not send flowers. Keep the gifts.

Dead eyes closed.

Nevertheless, all told, SH released 18 albums, the first five full-lengths and two EP’s unleashing the absolutely vindictive, unbridled experimental dementia for which a small group of doting tossers (this writer included) still lustfully pine. At the tender age of 16 I heard “Brassiere, in Rome?” and that was it; no more Mighty Lemon Drops or Xymox for me. Tape manipulation and unmetered beats were my new dextroamphetamines of choice. Then Stretcher (1985) came along and, for the most part, the Heads really just begun channeling New Order from there until Under Gail Succubus. With the exception of “Petrol”, “Mambo Fist Miasma 2” and “Don’t Say It”, Stretcher was the beginning of the end of the Severed Heads I cared about.

But do not mourn this passing. There are probably as many past and present Ellard and Garry Bradbury solo projects--about fifteen for Ellard, six for Bradbury--for every song they ever cut as Severed Heads since ’79: Coklacoma, Pissy Relay Switches, Inch Urch, Hiroshima Chair, Wet Taxis, the like. If you get right down to it, Ellard is the Robert Pollard of experimental electronic music.  In March, though, he will be releasing his own Box, only this time a final celebration of the Heads by showcasing their deranged beginnings instead of a final mourning.  Unfortunately, for the time being, you have to own a phonograph to buy it.  Adenoids: 1977-1982 is a collection of five vinyl LP's featuring all tracks from Ear Bitten, Clean, and Blubberknife as well as previously unreleased Mr. and Mrs. No Smoking Sign--the pre-Heads group with original founding members Richard Fielding and Andrew Wright. 

The New English

There is an ethnic derivation of English mysteriously absent from the SIL International Ethnologue database: Schizophasia.  Mysterious because it is no longer only spoken by "Schizophrenics".  We have, among others, Paula Abdul and Shirley Phelps-Roper upon whom to heap eternal gratitude for that.  Each, upon returning from her own (ahem) "inward sabbatical", had been rigorously taught this hitherto non-indigenous language (by Walter Skinner, of course) and now wish to indoctrinate us in hopes of fostering deeper rapport and understanding between mainstream schizophrenics and the rest of us--who will become schizophrenics very soon if January 20th of next year doesn't hurry the fuck up and get here.

So, until the SIL International Ethnologue database at long last recognizes the legitimacy of Schizophasia as English's triumphant replacement, you can study up on common Schizophasic phrases for "Don't eat the chicken" or "Has anybody ever told you you look just like Amanda Plummer in "Freeway""? by these other native speakers:

Gerald (Pts. 1 & 2) / Heather / The real James Bond / Henry Wallace, artist (Pts. 1 & 2) / Unknown

Here are two speakers of a sub-IAL dialect first discovered in the 70's called Disassociative Pidgin English (formerly known by the peculiar designations "Multiple Personality Disorder" and "Disassociative Identity Disorder"):

Jaid / Some woman who calls herself "RainbowsBubble"

Here I Come To Save The Dazed

Bruce Wayne...owner of a private technology firm, philanthropist, Episcopalian, halfwit millionaire, uppity faux playboy, Caped Crusader, Dark Kni...

Episcopalian?

Hey, fictional average Joes with secret alter-egos--or, in Batman's case, fictional secret alter-egos with secret average Joes--have the right to worthily magnify, too.  Superheroes can make negligibly impetuous decisions from time to time ("Bruce Wayne, Dick...pleased to make your acquaintance") or might need a little hand to revive a dead guy (The Thing evoking the Godhead in Yiddish to attempt saving the life of Yancy Street's resident pawnbroker, Mr. Sheckenberg).  Nothing's ever dictated they can't summon the lean, mean Lamb and the Heavenly Host Posse when confronted with an ethical or spiritual quandary they can't seem to lick on their own. 

Let's face it; batarangs, lassoes or forms of a methyl trichloride-soaked towel or 5th Avenue bar laced with a gentle laxative don't lend much credence if, in some of the more heavily devout cases, they're not backed up by the messianic seal of approval courtesy of--dare I say--The Backhand.  The Big Black Bat, Zatanna (eclectic Pentecostal Dianic Wiccan--hoooo), The Man of Steel (Kryptonian religion AND Methodist) and many more are humbly belting out rousing flourishes of "Kumbaya" around the ecumenical campfire in this canonical compendium of superpower sectarianism.  Don't ask me how these creeps found their way into the circle.  Yeah...not warmly invited.

Anyway, praise the Lord--and pass the Holy Bat-Drinking Water Dispenser!!