WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Car Chase Scene from "The Master Touch"

The husband and I were simultaneously cheering, howling and choking at this six minute-long car chase from The Master Touch (aka: Un Uomo da Rispettare, dir: Michael Lupo, 1972), where a peppy Giuliano Gemma leads a fist-shaking, mammoth-nosed Romano Puppo on a squealing wheels trail through the streets of Hamburg. It's arguably the centerpiece of the film itself; an excellently stylish Italian crime drama featuring Kirk Douglas traipsing adequately through typically snazzy cinematography, 70s modern architecture porn and a spine-chilling score by Ennio Morricone (Italio-horror buffs may also recognize co-star Gemma from Dario Argento's Tenebre). "Best film car chase scene ever" discussions are treacherous debate territory, and often precede film nerd fist-fights (and actual film nerd car chases themselves?) But I think we can all smile through grinding teeth and agree on this wheel-y stunner (turn volume up LOUD). Damn cardboard boxes...

The Drudge Report in Anagrams (original page grabbed 9/29/08, at 11:13:29 AM)

 

Original page at left, anagramed version on right. Click each for original-sized version (and click "enlarge" in some browsers)...

After Dark

As more and more corners of the maybe-two-decades-old internet begin to get the hairy eyeball from moi, my jaded interest keeps seducing me to cruise the most public of spaces...after hours, of course. Recently, by the Flickr-ing light of a just-lit Player No. 6, I locked-gaze under the arches with the so-very alute Hilly Blue, admiring his extra-large uploaded After Dark magazine galleries. I was too young to dig this glossy bible for confirmed bachelors and their best-est inner circles in real time, but After Dark's kangblabla photo spreads — Fire Island studs unbuttoning their Eleganza in butterfly chairs, awe sooky sooky ("you're soaking in it!") zombie disco clowns walking invisible dog leashes on Nautilus treadmills, and Aspen-bound 70's Hollywood icons gazing pensively through fringe — don't need the esoteric magnetism of personal nostalgia. Gasp! It's totally restracto, dude. There's too much to highlight here, but (plucking a random selection) check out these two clams on the half shell in roller skates pictured at left; "Chris Donovan and Craig Dudley pose for photographer Jon Stevens (seen in mirror) After Dark June 1971." Strike up the band! So bone-jack...yes, for the millionth time, and feast your nostrils on Hilly Blue's enormous Flickr collection: After Dark before 1973 (942 photos), After Dark 1974-1976 (916 photos), After Dark 1977-1979 (1,180 photos) and After Dark after 1980 (732 photos), or just bookmark it all for some snowy night in front of the fire.

Hollywood Celebrity Addresses with Aerial Views in the Greater Los Angeles Area

The completely rational new website CelebrityAddressAerial.com has assembled a database of hundreds of celebrity home addresses, with handy links to interactive satellite aerial photography programs. The site's introduction claims; "Tapping into Windows Live Local, you will get a birds eye view of celebrity houses and neighborhoods, often in amazing detail. Windows Live Local even allows you to rotate the image in four directions, north, south, east, and west." Start here.

Worst? Logo? Ever?

    The Unfair Park blog at The Dallas Observer has unveiled/uncovered the city's new logo design for their upcoming "1st Annual Hip Hop for HIV Concert." Unbelievable?
    They ask, "How many things can you find that are wrong and/or disturbing and/or disturbingly wrong with said image?"

The University of North Texas' Bruce Hall vs. The Phone Sex Tape Bandit

    Imagine if you will...something I remember hearing. It's not a memory of a sound, but of a moment — one that happened once, will never happen again, and could never be recreated. Put it into words? We'll see.
    It was my freshman year at University of North Texas, in Denton, Texas. I was living in Bruce Hall (left, click for larger), which was, and still is, the official/unofficial music and art dormitory at the school. UNT has a famous music school and a rather prestigious jazz program (it was the first university to offer a degree in jazz studies, in 1947). Therefore, a high majority of the Bruce Hall's residents were college newbies from far and wide who were dead serious about studying music.   
    The rest of the residents at Bruce Hall were art students, or maybe professional partiers who'd drop out after their first semester. But there were other misfits living there too. These were people who happened to fit right in amongst the rest of the music and art riff-raff there, for whatever reason. One guy who'd lived in the dorm for years was a blind jazz pianist, African American, overweight, around 40 years-old, who always wore a Fedora hat and dark glasses and carried a long cane to help him get around. He was way too old to be there, but made friends quick because he had a loud, boisterous laugh, and was friendly as hell (yes he was a cliche, but a good one). He also l-o-o-o-o-v-e-d the ladies, and wasn't shy about being as friendly as hell with them either, which made those resiliently sweet Texan gals well-just-never-did-you-mind. He was a charmer, and everybody liked him.
    Besides odd characters, the real catch about living in an art and music dorm like Bruce Hall was the noise...

The Jesse Helms Wrap-Up

There have been a few mentions on the blogismord this week of the 1991 TAG Helms Seven action, coming on the heels of the death of Senator Jesse Helms. Our own Blog Prince Mark Allen (pictured in the middle/back on the right side photo) was a part of the team that wrapped a giant condom around the Senator's home. I say it's well worth re-reading his account of this brave and brazen protest on our blog here.

House on the Rock

I realize that Alex Jordan's House on the Rock, in Spring Green, Wisconsin, has been covered thoroughly on the pages of this very blog before. But, while rummaging though dusty old photographs in my hard drive I remembered that Jim and I visited the place several years ago, and I never got around to putting the photos that I took up on the web in any capacity. This is in part because most of the pictures I snapped—during our endless, day-long walk through the attraction's dreamy, fluctuating, warrenlike corridors—came out too dark and blurry (I'm no wizard when it comes to dark settings and digital cameras). Nevertheless, eons later I've weeded out the ones that turned out okay enough, and uploaded them onto a 66-photo Flickr set. As I've said, images and stories of people's visits to House on the Rock have been on the internet for a while now...but I hope that some of my detailed pictures can at least offer a few unique glimpses of it, perhaps for people that can't visit the actual place because they live in an iron lung or something like that.

Flies

Happy summer everyone! The common housefly (aka the Musca Domestica) is a cosmopolitan pest that propagates in regions where there is human activity. The housefly is thought to have formed as a species about 65 million years ago on the part of the planet now known as the Middle East, and human migration has resulted in the fly’s dispersal around the globe. A fly’s body consists of three main parts; its head, the thorax in the middle, and the back end which is the abdomen. There are two small antennae jutting out from the very front of the head which help the insect to detect motion (also aided by the tiny hairs covering the fly’s body, which pick up changes in air currents, as well as smell and taste). But the most recognizable part of a fly (up close) are its eyes...

The Grainy, Xeroxed Pages of My 9th Grade "New Wave" Fanzine

Are you ready for some nostalgic "ha-ha's" at my expense? Embarrassing ones? Good. Way back in 1980/81, my 9th grade friend Curtis and I made a Xeroxed cut-and-paste "New Wave" magazine called Propaganda, and gave it away to all of our friends at Clark High School in Plano, Texas (click below to see each page). I had forgotten about it until a few years ago when somebody sent me copies of some of the pages they'd stashed away (which were already copies of copies of copies). The pages were washed out, gritty and hard to decipher, but I definitely remembered the whole thing. Then I forgot about it again. But recently, someone sent me crisp scans from some of the original "master" pages, which look even better than the original photocopies probably did (what is it about Xerox paper that doesn't ever yellow, even after a quarter of a century?) Now, kick and scream as I click and drag you through my cut and paste past...

Googling My Keyboard

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Hot Poop "Does Their Own Stuff!" - an interview with Larry Praissman and Tom Burke

    There are memorable album covers, and then there are memorable album covers. If you've ever seen the cover of Hot Poop's one and only release Does Their Own Stuff!, I doubt you've erased it from your frontal lobe. Discovering it was released in 1971 makes it twice as not-forgettable (click image above for larger view). In a grainy black & white photograph (which has all the composition and exposure of a police murder scene crime photo) a man takes a dump onto a plate while another hands more plates to a group of hippies passed out on a pile of old junk. They appear to be using syringes to inject the man's shit into their veins (one is passed out, or dead). This is all happening in some abandoned-looking barn-type space (Spahn Ranch?) On the back cover, the top half features the same five people standing in a field with some donkeys. The lower half shows them opening their coats to reveal their nude bodies, with the male and female genitals switched on each person (this is pre-Photoshop era, but post-Christine Jorgensen). In both scenarios, there are proud smiles all around.
    Lots of mystery surrounds the band Hot Poop, and this LP (which is a sought after collector's item in some circles—only 500 were made). Hot Poop were indeed a real band from Isla Vista, California, formed in the early 70's, with five real people, real instruments, real songs, real songwriting and little tours and everything. It seems that might need clarification because, well... look at that cover! Hot Poop were, in ways that are obvious now, just slightly ahead of their time.
    What you're wondering: the music on Does Their Own Stuff! is similar to many of the crazier, avant-leaning rock acts popular at the time, but Hot Poop sound more lo-fi, scrappier and much sillier (at least on this LP). There's also an odd, 1950's-style rock n' roll vibe running through these songs, which have titles like "My Baby's Dead," "Wing Wang" and "Dance To The War."
    Founding Hot Poop members Larry Praissman (that's him on the front cover, relieving himself) and Tom Burke agreed to answer a few questions for me via email, and clarify much of the myths surrounding the band (and that LP cover). Larry Praissman played lead guitar and rhythm guitar, and backing vocals in the group, as well as co-wrote all of their songs along with the group's lead vocalist and guitarist Tom Burke—the man who also conceptualized that album cover. Read on to hear Larry and Tom tell you anything you could possibly want to know about Hot Poop. Needless to say, the band's story is a bit of a bumpy one...

Just Say No(t really)

The year was 1987, a day I'll never forget. One of us held the wheel steady while the other took his pants off. "Rembrandt Pussyhorse!," "No... 'King's Lead Hat!,'" "No! No...Spleen and Ideal!" we kept shouting over one another. The crummy cassette player that was screwed sideways into my dashboard squeaked out something too distortedly to be understood anyway. Our excited fumbling made the car sway, which otherwise sped a relatively straight 80-mph line down I-35, the interstate that separates Dallas and Austin. It was a distance my friend Buck and I had traveled countless times, sometimes at 1AM to make a party at 3AM. But this was the first time we were doing it like this...

Gog (1954, directed by Herbert L. Strock)

Ever look suspiciously over your shoulder when you're alone in a room with your toaster oven, or your curling iron? If you were living in the 1950's, you might have. The post-war, high-technology prosperity of the space-racy 50's had many people feeling the future had sort-of already arrived. Amongst the glut of science fiction films made during the era, imagining "tomorrow" often meant imagining technology that had already infiltrated everyone's front lawns. Hence, films about machines and technology running horribly amok became adequate therapy for audiences unable to express fear of progress, which was unpatriotic. The scientists in Herbert L. Strock's Gog (1954) who create and work on amazing robotic inventions are all pipe-smoking, condescending creeps with pointy goatees, foreign accents and an open disdain for simple American etiquette. (click below to see Gog)...

Early Science Fiction Fanzines: A Cover Gallery

A long time ago... when coin-operated Xerox copiers were the highest of high tech in an otherwise drearily lo-tech world, and versatile home computers were still a wet dream...fans of science fiction brandished colored paper, scissors, glue sticks, staplers, ring binders, pens and ink—to boldly go where no man (or woman) had gone before: the late-70's / early-80's science fiction fanzine. With both feet planted firmly within their own earnest interpretations of graphic styles of the present (particularly romance novel cover paintings and, to a larger extent, high school yearbook page layouts), these thrifty fans nevertheless weren't afraid to look forward at what other people in the present thought the future might look like one day. And they drew, cut and pasted everything they saw. The homespun tomes would lay prostrate, arranged according to genre (each wrapped in glistening shrinkwrap, and hope...and maybe a little bit of The Force), usually splayed across unfolded card tables at science fiction fantasy conventions, hawked quietly by costumed fans planet-wide. These self-published nuggets might have disappeared down a black hole if it hadn't been for the archive-ally inclined internet, which simultaneously revolutionized science fiction fandom while obliterating many of its older styles...forever. Click below for a kaleidoscopic cover gallery of pure past paper magic—with web links guiding you to names, dates, auctions, sales and the occasional full-disclosure. [WARNING: about 150 small images will load]

Missionary encounters extremely bizarre skin condition in Eastern Europe (part 4)

For those that have been following the story of Ioan Tudor in Romania, the man who suffered from the bizarre skin condition (here, here and here), the latest on the story follows below...

27 photographs of a T-shirt with Albert Einstein's face on it, shifted slightly each time

I have an old T-shirt with a black and white photo of Albert Einstein's face silkscreened on the front. This shirt is almost a quarter of a century old—I got it when I worked at Bill's Records in Dallas, Texas (from 1985-87). For the last several months this T-shirt has been neatly folded and placed on the top of a stack of shirts in my studio. The stack gets moved around repeatedly. I am amazed that every time I looked over at that stack of shirts with Einstein's face on the top, a completely different person is staring back at me. Sometimes it's downright eerie. Obviously, whenever the shirt gets moved, its creases and ripples shift ever so slightly, which affects the "expression" of the silkscreened face photo. The face on the T-shirt is always of Einstein, but isn't Einstein necessarily. Sometimes the face looks funny, and sometimes it looks menacing. I have recreated the effect for you here: these are 27 photos of the same shirt, shifted slightly each time...

Dark Rides

I recently tried to look up the history of automated funhouse rides at amusement parks...you know the ones you ride through the dark and all the automated stuff pops out at you? I was disappointed at the lack of information that comes up when you punch "funhouse" into Google (the Stooges album hogs all the links). I soon realized that this is because the official name of this type of ride is not "funhouse," but "dark ride." I'm the last to know. A dark ride is any amusement park attraction that plops riders into a mechanical car and follows a single track through a dark, often serpentine, indoor space—surprising them along the way with spooky/gross-out tableaus, pop-out surprises, jolts and scares. The original versions of dark rides were very low-tech affairs, and about a hundred or so of these functioning relics still exist in the U.S (see here). But the dark ride is a classic (as well as a cultural reference point) that has expanded into its own modern variations. The attraction pinpoints a complex, collective psychological allure that remains enticing and curiosity-piquing for people even today, even if they only experience it's concept in a video game or YouTube clip.

What Would It Be Like To Be a WFMU DJ on Another Planet?

What would it be like to be a WFMU DJ on another planet? Let's explore the possibility, using the planets of our own solar system as examples! We'll begin with the farthest-away, newly demoted "dwarf planet." If the four floors (and don't forget the basement) of the WFMU in building in Jersey City was to be planted firmly on the ground somewhere in the middle of Pluto (a solid 70% rock, and 30% ice), and you were broadcasting from that building, you'd find little light, few friends, and would probably be complaining about the building's heating system not working right. It would no doubt be remarkably lonely doing a radio show, literally billions and billions of miles away from the "WFMU 91.1 FM East Orange, WXHD Mount Hope, and wfmu.org on the web" that existed for you on Earth as a station ID only...yet now is oh so very far away (overnight shift anyone?). But whatever you do, make sure you don't step your suicidal outer space self outside onto the deck of Studio A for a cigarette break, or step outside at all, because Pluto's atmosphere is extremely tenuous, consisting mostly of nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane (plus wear a hat, it's 508 degrees below zero fahrenheit). But, feel free to throw on a long Stockhausen CD and go look out the studio windows pensively—Pluto seems designed for such daydream-y behavior. The glow of Pluto's frozen methane, ethane and carbon monoxide "lakes" will look stunning from the second story atrium window as well, as they reflect sunlight coming from 3,670,050,000 miles away (give an take a million, due to Pluto's notoriously erratic orbit path). As for Neptune...

I Wish They All Could Be Gyaru Girls

The following is a snippet of conversation between me and Ed Shepp at the recent WFMU Holiday Party:

Mark: No Ed, I've never tried Norival. By the way, I like the black around your eyes.
Ed: Oh my God! I wanted it, but wasn't sure I applied it right -- I just took the pencil and went like *r-e-e-a-a-u-h-h* around each eye.
Mark: It looks great, it's smeared perfectly, like you're in rehab and have dark circles.
Ed: Oh my God! That's what I was going for!
Mark: It's like the opposite of those girls in Japan, the "Gyaru" girls.
Ed: What's that?