WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Newly Uploaded Bouton Rouge TV Footage of Classic Psych Bands

Mike Sin pointed this one out to WFMU staffers a few days ago to much excitement.  This Youtube Channel posted a ton of complete live sessions on France's TV show Bouton Rouge.  15 Minute sets from the likes of Fairport Convention, Grapefruit, Procul Harem, Small Faces, etc etc etc.  God bless the internet.

EUC on ESP TV# 15

Here's a clip from EUC's performance on E.S.P. TV #15 airing April 10th on Ch 67 Time Warner/84 RCN in Manhattan...

 

and tune in TONIGHT for E.S.P. TV #14 featuring Xeno and Oaklander. Airing at 10pm on Ch 67 Time Warner/84 RCN in Manhattan.

Coming soon....E.S.P. TV #17 starring Jandek...

Xeno and Oaklander on E.S.P. TV #14

Xeno and Oaklander played at last week's E.S.P. TV live taping at Present Company in Brooklyn alongside EUC, a 3D video by Ken Jacobs, "Gift of Fire: Nineteen (Obscure) Frames That Changed the World", and "Trans Trans" by Bradley Eros and Tim Geraghty.

Here's a sneak peek of Xeno and Oaklander's performance. The full episode airs next Tues. Mar 27 at 10pm on Ch. 67 Time Warner/MNN4 in Manhattan. More info at www.esptvnyc.com

 

Punk Reverance: Derek Jarman's "Jubilee"

by Thomas Michalski

Movie - Jubilee (Derek Jarman, 1978)

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After the release of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee in 1978, Vivienne Westwood, outraged at what she saw as a misrepresentation of punk, took to her then preferred medium, the t-shirt, to express her displeasure. The “Open T-Shirt to Derek Jarman,” with its wordy scrawl, is a rather confusing cultural artifact in that it now seems rather counterproductive. For starters, punk certainly had more important enemies in 1978 than a queer experimental filmmaker and visual artist, a fellow member of the counterculture whether she liked it or not, and what’s more, some of the language seems rather homophobic, being that it attributes the film’s fancier bits to “a gay (which you are) boy’s love of dressing up and playing at charades.” Of course, all of that is to say nothing of the sheer impracticality of using a t-shirt to communicate a lengthy essay. But to be fair, it was a time when what punk meant, what it was trying to say and what it wanted, was a fiercely debated topic, especially in the UK and especially among those who would claim the movement as their own, Still, in hindsight, Jubilee seems to not only encapsulate what was in the air in the late 70s, but also punk’s roots and hints of its future.

Jubilee started life as a planned 8 mm film about the actress/model Jordan, whose outrageous couture and attitude fascinated Jarman, but the project soon grew into something more ambitious, “a film about punk”, before transcending even that broad description. Writing in The Guardian, Stuart Jeffries explains that,

MV Carbon and C Spencer Yeh Live @ Roulette via ESP TV

E.S.P. TV episodes #12 and #13, taped on February 18th for Roulette's Xperimental Love Fest air this week. The shows feature trumpet and electronics drone duo Grasshopper, a kaleidoscopic set with MV Carbon and C Spencer Yeh and a 50 min piece by Little Women.

#13 aired this past Sunday, but you can see them both at the free screening party Tues. Mar 6th at Forlini's on Baxter St in Manhattan. #13 will be replayed at 9pm and ESP TV #12 will debut at 10pm sharp on Ch 67 Time Warner in Manhattan/MNN4 online at www.mnn.org. More info at: www.esptvnyc.com

In the meantime here's a taste of MV Carbon and C Spencer Yeh's set on E.S.P. TV #12:

 

The Muppet Show / Last Day at Elstree 1980

Here's a short but sweet look behind the scenes at Elstree Television Studios at the end of "season five" of the Muppet Show in 1980.

 

The Quietly Lasting Impact of Ennio Morricone and Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza

by Kathleen Furey

Ennio Morricone: La Musica Parla (The Music Talks)

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Ennio Morricone is widely regarded as one of the greatest film composers of all time. In the span of his six-decade career, he has scored over 500 films and television shows, including Fistful of Dollars (1964,) The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1967,) and Danger: Diabolik (1968.) Morricone’s scores are not the traditional, lush, string-filled scores that Henry Mancini and Max Steiner were fond of in the first part of the sixties. Instead, Morricone used sounds like coyote howls and cracking whips as well as surf guitars to illustrate the films of such directors as Sergio Leone, Mario Bava and Dario Argento.

Morricone’s unusual musical tastes led him to join the Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, an avant-garde free-improvisation group founded by Franco Evangelisti in 1964. The group functioned as “musical scientists” of sorts, dedicating themselves to using anti-musical systems and noise techniques (again, using sounds like cracking whips and animal howls to accent musical styles like surf guitars) to mash together musical stylings from the fifty years leading up to the group’s formation. The group labeled their technique “Instant Compostion.” Nothing was ever composed on paper, just recorded directly to tape.

These unusual techniques helped provide Morricone with some of his most memorable film scores. The theme from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly has had a major impact on westerns. The musical scores for

E.S.P. TV Episode #9: Erica Magrey and YOU

Going back a bit, as we prepare the new E.S.P. TV episode #12 taped last week at Roulette in Brooklyn for their Xperimental Love Fest, to bring you this...

E.S.P. TV #9 taped late last year at The Schoolhouse and featuring performances by Erica Magrey and Brooklyn synth duo YOU. Animations also by Clara Kim and Amy Lockhart courtesy of Aboveground Animation and video by Ania Diakoff.

 

The Pope of Trash: John Waters

by Whitney Weiss

Talk Show - John Waters

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When I was 22, I was lured to Provincetown (once a thriving hotbed of underground artists and cultural revolutionaries, now home to condominiums and dogs in strollers) by the promise of relatively easy money and the opportunity to meet my favorite living director, John Waters, who spends his summers there. When the film festival brought Jane Lynch and Gael Garcia Bernal to town, I kept my eye on the prize: a man whose own twenties were spent living in a treehouse and having sex in the town cemetery, activities that seemed to have been replaced by the current crop of twenty-somethings with shopping at Marc Jacobs and fucking in the gym.

While the money never came that summer, a chance to speak with The Pope of Trash did. One balmy evening, he and his boyfriend were sitting on a bench in Town Square while I walked by on my way to

Peter Cook and 'Derek and Clive's' Last Album

With some friends working on a Peter Cook / Dudley Moore project recently, my mind wandered back to thinking about the many hilarious and truly outrageous things that they had filmed and recorded over the years. Someday I'll do a long article about them but for today I just want to talk about one of my favorite comedy albums as a teenager - Derek and Clive / Ad Nauseum.  My record-buying budget was slender in those days (1979), and I recall vividly how upon seeing the new copy of Ad Nauseum in the store, with its cleverly designed cover and special screen-printed clear bag I had to have it. But as usual with my "going up to the city to buy new records" trips, this meant that some cheaper lps would be sacrificed altogether in order to get the higher-priced import vinyl (Ad Nauseum was on Virgin Records, right when they went from the sweet little painting of a virgin on the label to the more punk 'side one RED and side two GREEN' format).

Here's a (NSFW) sample of one of the few fully pre-scripted scenes from this record:       Horse Racing   

The Music We Would Be Playing, if We Were Playing Music

Besides being WFMU’s first callerless call-in show, Thunk Tank rarely features music. Every week we go through the new CDs that have come into the station, and find a few we like, and bring them into the studio, and then don’t play them. If we were playing music, though, right now we would be playing a lot of banda, a style of brass-heavy oompah music from the Mexican state of Sinaloa—also home of the pointy boots!

 

But that's tribal music, not banda. Banda instrumentation includes accordions, tubas, sousaphones, slide trombones, clarinets, and a drum with no kick pedal and a manual hi-hat. Diligent viewing of Mun2 TV has convinced Bronwyn that banda songs are mostly about fat pizza delivery guys who get beautiful girls, and young busboys who get beautiful girls, and school janitors with beautiful janitress girlfriends who can’t stop looking at the high school girls.

more videos beneath the fold...

Glenn Beck / The Invisible Committee

Oldie but Goodie

Collaboration between Glenn Beck and The Invisible Committee

- - -

Glenn Beck lives and works in Dallas, TX

You can purchase The Coming Insurrection here

TV Is the Government: The Underground Vaudeville of TV Party

By Gabriella Arrigoni - Collection: TV Party

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Not always, actually quite seldom, is the distinction between art and absurdity a relevant one. And it certainly doesn’t matter when in a TV show you combine live music, in-studio party, fancy dress, videotapes, punk, disco, anarchism, new wave, visual arts, rap, interviews, phone-in sessions, shaky camera angles, crude advertising and live drug taking. All this featuring guests such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Lurie, David Byrne, George Clinton, Fab Five Freddy, Tuxedo Moon, Debbie Harry, Maripol, Iggy Pop, Chris Burden, John Feckner just to name a few. The uniqueness of TV Party, however, was not as a celebration of the apotheosis of the underground, but that this played out on the mass media it rebelled against.

Steve and Eydie! The Andrews Sisters! Rudy Vallee! The Mills Brothers! Nat King Cole! And Frankie Avalon?? It's "The Golden Circle"!!! (Exploring My Reel-to-Reel Catacombs, Volume 24) (MP3's)

Mixed in with a dozen other as yet unlistened-to tapes I grabbed from the basement a month or so ago, I found one five inch reel which certainly stood out. It contained a recording of a TV show, which I've since learned aired in November of 1959, hosted by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, titled "The Golden Circle". This show does not appear to be readily available, as far as I can tell, online or in video collecting circles. It should be interesting to those who enjoy this era of music, but it's truly "Gold" due to one moment which occurs about halfway through.

The idea was to include performers whose work put them into the pantheon of greats - Music and musicians whose records have "Gone Gold", and have sold a million or more copies. And the line-up, for the most part, lives up to the billing:

The tape recordist missed the opening of the show, so the tape starts after the opening comments, and most of the way through a performance by The Andrews Sisters, who then (after a few comments from the host) do a medley of more of their hits. Steve Lawrence then does his Bing Crosby imitation, and he and the Andrews Sisters sing "South America, Take It Away", which also includes a lengthy band interlude. Then follows the first ad (all the ads are for Oster products, and all are unfortunately cut, to one degree or another).

The Golden Circle – Segment One (MP3)

The show returns, and Rudy Vallee shows up! He does a song and banters with the hosts (It's "Kookie, Dad!"), before performing his hit "Kitty From Kansas City" with Eydie and the backup singers. I love Vallee's early records, and it's sort of sad to hear him here, either unable to sing or choosing not to, and instead, talk-singing the lyrics. After the song, Steve indicates that the grandchildren of Rudy's fans are crazy over that Frankie Avalon, who steps onstage to sing his latest hit, "Venus".

THEN the fun begins! There is some goofy bantering about how Frankie needs to learn how to handle his money, which somehow leads into the unlikely event of the night: Rudy Vallee and Steve Lawrence dueting on Lloyd Price's then-recent hit song "Personality", with the lyrics indicated as advice, directed at Frankie Avalon!

The Golden Circle – Segment Two (MP3)

There's A Super Genius In All Of Us

In February of 1990, I xeroxed 2 pages of the New Yorker magazine, to hold onto what I considered one of the funniest pieces of writing ever. It was titled Coyote V. Acme and was penned by regular New Yorker writer and NJ resident, Ian Frazier. In a nutshell, and I'll post part of it after the jump, Wile E. Coyote, plaintiff sues the Acme Company for product liability and the injuries he sustained over his career at Warner Brothers Entertainment. It's written in legalese and describes so well some of the cartoons and shenanigans involved, that you'll be able to be there with Mr. Coyote when he endures a violent feet-first collision with a boulder. Frazier published a book bearing the same name in 1996; a collection of his short humorous pieces, and has other books to his name, some humor collections like Coyote V. Acme, others full length adventures. I was reminded of the original piece the other day and wanted to share some of it, since it's been sitting xeroxed in my file cabinet in the FUN folder for decades. Ian's books are available through several online retailers. This time of year can be one of reflection and I'd like to look at the attempts of Mr. Coyote to capture his prey over the years, and the purity of his actions. Wile E. Coyote; Genius, and at some point in the Roadrunner cartoons, upgraded to Super Genius, was dedicated and single minded. He'd have made a great employee at the time of his upswing into the public eye. He was inventive beyond belief, and even when the same item would malfunction three radically different ways, he would remain a loyal customer of the Acme Company. Brick and mortars would die for a shopper like him! He is a reminder to all of us that perseverance and hard work pays off, or at least keeps you gainfully employed, and that there's a super genius lying in wait inside all of us. Perhaps it just takes an anvil to the head!  There was a response to the article published in 1995, I'm not certain of the source, which more or less takes the stand that since our beloved Mr. Coyote quite often looked directly at the camera before sustaining injuries that the Acme Company's products caused, that he was faking the extent of his physical damage. Imagine that!

A Germs Whisky Christmas: Cruising For Oki-Dogs

December 23, 1979, Germs play the Masque Christmas Ball at Whisky-Au-Go-Go, performing what would be dubbed on-stage "art" by singer Darby Crash, self-proclaimed "Manimal" and possessor of "television and supervision," who read "every Bible story," and was educated in mind-control by public school Scientologists, an A+ hustler whose world-famous catchphrase was "buy me a beer" and whose demands for "beer and damage" do not go unheeded this night. Watch as Darby, spolight directly in his eyes, eats a lit book of matches, transforms into a panther, demands each audience member "hit the person next to you," sets fire to his (A+) lyrics (balls-on-fire-great teenage Blake) all before guitarist Pat Smear kicks a bouncer in the head (several times+) for crossing number one invisible line in rock n roll: the artists own the stage.

Nashville and the Gospel Subverted Truth

By Kristen Bialik

Movie - Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)

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Nashville Tennessee has earned a star on the map for many things: state capital, “Music City,” “Athens of the South,” and for Robert Altman fans, the site of the 1975 classic Nashville. Befitting a place known for twangy tunes and an imitation Parthenon, Altman’s two and half hour long tragi-comic epic follows 24 protagonists’ lives as they’re interlaced in the Nashville music industry and political scene. The stories are snapshots over a 5-day weekend ending in political rally for an outside (and unseen) presidential candidate running on the Replacement Party ticket. At the same time, most characters are all reaching for some level of fame or success in what’s portrayed as a microcosm of the United States, and one that is personally shallow, politically empty, and commercially tapped-out.

Though many fans and critics believe Nashville to be one of Altman’s greatest films, actual Nashvillians and country music die-hards looking for an extended tribute were more than a little disappointed. Both camps took the film pretty hard, seeing Altman’s signature cynicism as unduly harsh and patronizing. The

To The Song To The Siren

Caught this Tim Buckley performance from the non-stop-excellent media feed of master drummer Hamish Robert Kilgour, whose brother once asked the immortal question, "Is it wrong or is right to be a beatnik?" Pulled from the final episode of The Monkees, in which the Pre Fab Four tussle with a sentient potted plant from outer space, Buckley's immaculate "Song To The Siren" is as out of place as can be. Out of place even further in its inclusion on Buckley's farthest-out studio album Starsailor, where it lies hidden behind a wall of free jazz shreik and moan, the free-floating 12-string strum, like lapping waves in the sunset, further rippled out in electric reverb. 

Masters of Communication: Charles and Ray Eames

By Robert Ham

The Films Of Ray & Charles Eames (part 2)

Watch Part 1 of The Films of Charles and Ray Eames

The spare beauty and narrative economy of the film work of Charles & Ray Eames should really come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the couple's design work. Their fabric patterns, chairs, buildings...everything they did was approached with an eye for combining simplicity, functionality, and beauty.

Applying those principles to films is a much trickier prospect than one might realize. Just take a look at any Hollywood creation from the last 15 years and you'll see what I'm talking about. In comparison, the Eames films are almost meditative to watch. They unfold slowly and patiently, getting the subject matter across using simple narrations and augmenting it all with a bouncy jazz score. It is impressively easy to drink in and absorb everything they are trying to accomplish and, yes, communicate.

Because for as much as scholars like to point to their 1968 documentary Powers of Ten as being their

CYBERPUNK’S NOT DEAD!

By Chris Cantino

Doc - CYBERPUNK (1990)

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Marianne Trench’s 1990 documentary on the world of cyberpunk observes digital outlaws on the forefront of new technologies, fighting for freedom of information. Founded upon the spirit of the first cyberpunk novels by William Gibson, the movement is a networking hub for politically-concerned technophiles who poke around inside protected digital databases and occasionally wreak mayhem by inducing malicious software. Sometimes for fun, and sometimes to extract information, the hackers are concerned with increasing access to knowledge and generally throwing a wrench into the system. Often set in dystopic near-futures in which the lower class is dramatically underrepresented, cyberpunk (and sci-fi literature in general) helped develop the context in which we discuss the arrival of new technologies: with a guarded interest, and sometimes fear that they might eventually wreak similarly undesirable results.

Unfortunately, this cyberpunk prescience is starting to look less and less like fantasy. Gibson once described his fictional futures as “social Darwinism designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button,” where the ones calling the shots cut corners at the expense of the