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And why wouldn't you place an intricately expressive Albert Einstein head atop your latest robotic creation?
Download creepy video (mpeg, 7 MB)
More robotica exotica: Dancing robots | NASA's teen robot head | Monkey Robot | Android appendages | Found object robots | WFMU's robots | More dancing robots | Zen robots | Shacking up with a robot | And if that wasn't enough...
I think every DJ at some point thinks s/he's going to pluck out the one great song by every shitty band. (My buddy Irving remembers an 'FMU DJ who had an unerring ability to excavate the one shit track by every great band, but that's another story for some other blahger). Everyone who's had this ambition quickly realizes that most shitty bands actually have no great tracks. But a few do, and so we keep on looking.
Here's 2 from '72:
Tony Coulter digs em up with some regularity - he recently unleashed this one on us:
Dan Fogelberg, "Wysteria" (streaming mp3, expires Sept 4 '06); (Realaudio)
Here's one I found myself:
Styx, "Quick Is The Beat of My Heart" (streaming mp3, expires Sept 8 '06); (Realaudio)
(wasn't so hard since I've got like eleven of their records. Oh, DJs lose a lot of shame early on too - often in a manner not dissimilar to what a cheese-grater does)
Of course, for this game to have maximum payoff, you've gotta stick to really universally reviled acts, and that's mebbe not so simple. Every suggestion raises a thousand arguments, except in very rare cases. Judging by certain current trends, I''ve got a theory James Taylor and The Eagles are ripe for reassessment. I call the stuff "2-Lane Blacktop Rock".
Anyway, I'm asking you to play. What song gets your vote for best song by some shitty band? I offer the two above to prime your pump.
WFMU is proud to present another addition to our growing podcast roster: please welcome to the digital era, freeform radio's controversial un-mascot and preeminent grumpy old man, the Old Codger (right). Fond of old-timey music, the Codger spins classic 78s, with effusive mic-breaks that burst with elderly rage and contempt, accented by the charming tone that only a severe underbite could render. The Codger wants you to think he's the Father of Old-Time Radio -- but he's just a sperm donor.
Here's what an anonymous WFMU staffer had to say about the OC:
The Old Codger (Courtney T. Edison) is more than just a piece of ubiquitous Drew Friedman clip art who pops up with disturbing frequency on WFMU's web pages. He's REAL ... or so he claims... the second-oldest living radio personality (after 163-year-old Paul Harvey). The Codger proudly plays 78 rpm discs "like they're going outta style." Fond of Ukulele Ike, Louis Jordan, and the Brox Sisters, he's cantankerous, crude, and known for his colorfully faulty memory. He refuses to divulge his age, but insists he knew H.L. Mencken when the legendary writer was a wee lad, and he habitually taunts WFMU listeners by jeering, "I've got shoes older than you." The Codger is notorious for on-air come-ons to female admirers, often crooning that he loves "younger women -- age 45 or 50." Although never married, Edison has been linked romantically to actress/comedienne Sophie Tucker, vaudevillian Effie Cherry, R&B siren Nellie Lutcher, and TV sitcom vixen Betty Rubble. His collection of 78 rpm discs numbers 48,000, and his "bunker" also boasts 16 functional crank-wound Victrolas and nine overflowing spittoons.
Please visit our podcast page to subscribe to the Old Codger (or any WFMU podcast). Instructions on how to hook yourself up to WFMU's feeding tube via iTunes are available here.
In our occasional forays into the world of strange public service announcements, we've featured beautiful Mexican anti-drug posters, dystopian Christian nightmare PSAs (download mp3), Japanese slingshot thongs employed to dissuade subway groping, creepy Danish safe-driving PSAs, and creepier French anti-AIDs ads. But now Parumo brings us the oddest (or the most sensible one, depending on your viewpoint) public service announcement yet, an anti-suicide bombing ad currently being shown on an unidentified TV or satellite outlet in the Middle East: [download mpeg video, 3 megs, or youtube it].
As you should know by now, the chocolate Virgin is not a sex act, but rather a wad of chocolate discovered by a factory worker who thinks it looks like the picture of Virgin Mary she carries. I think it looks like a parrot, but I don't work in a chocolate factory or carry a picture of a parrot or a virgin, so I'll defer to her. Call me an unbeliever, but I'm not seeing the Virgin Mary in the George-Foreman-grill-grease stain, though I do see the resemblance to George. The Virgin Mary turtle is totally adorable, so don't you dare dis it.
Mary's spawn is also in the news: The Jesus oyster was up for sale on eBay, so it has to be real. And it didn't meet the $335 reserve, so you can get it next time. The baby Jesus appeared in an ultra sound, which is great, because usually those things just look like a big grainy smoosh. Luckily, baby Jesus looks like the dad, so however it works out, it's all good. And God Himself is trying to tell us something, but as usual not particularly clearly: The "mystery tree" in Texas leaks "God's water."
And then there's the Golden Hand of Cheesuz. I drove by this thing a dozen times with Greasy Kids Stuff DJs Belinda, Hova and Wah Wah before finally getting out of the car to take a closer look. The look did not solve the mystery of why Jesus was hovering above us as a giant glob of cheesy goo. Finally I decided that Portland is just a small city that likes to put big things, preferably dairy products, like Jesus and milk cartons, up in the air. And I'm OK with that.
"You do the best you can, you fight that technology in all kinds of ways, but I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really.... ...Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no stature to it. I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, 'Everybody's gettin' music for free.' I was like, 'Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway.'"
Interesting... last week they weren't worth anything. This week they're worth $200.00. And with a new itunes ad espousing the wonders of digital audio no less. Gotta love marketing!
All MP3 and RealAudio links are streaming links from the WFMU Archives.
Rock And Roll
Night Sun - "Plastic Shotgun" MP3 | RealAudio from Brian Turner's show, August 22, 2006
International
Tirath Singh Nirmala - "Nagg Clef Seatpoint" RealAudio from Strength Through Failure with Fabio, August 24, 2006
Experimental
Barton Smith - "Musical Box" RealAudio from Maria Levitsky's show, August 23, 2006
Dance
Lionrock - "Fire Up the Shoesaw" RealAudio from (More Than A Few) Exciting Moments with Frank O'Toole (Web-only), August 22, 2006
Ambient
Seht - "Valles Marineris" RealAudio from Evan Muse's show, August 23, 2006
Hip-Hop
Writer's Block - "4U" RealAudio from Coffee Break For Heroes & Villains with Noah, August 21, 2006
Fave Song of the Week
Barmitzvah Brothers - "Today Is Sunday" RealAudio from Bob W.'s show (filling in for Trouble), August 24, 2006
Whether or not some of these Black Francises-and-Kim-Deals-in-waiting will be called upon to be the crying tykes in "The Kids" at the forthcoming presentation of Lou Reed's Berlin at St. Ann's is yet to be seen.
From New York Magazine: (link from listener Lou Smith):
"Welcome to the age of the rocker mom. Kids who might otherwise have their parents ferry them to the soccer field are now being enthusiastically chaperoned to dive bars. Rock, once the realm of outcasts and dangerously attractive miscreants, is practically a curriculum choice. In Park Slope, after-school classes are offered at private and public schools, and Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls (an offshoot of Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls in Portland, Oregon) is in its second year. On the syllabus are the classics: Ramones and Clash and Pixies songs that youngish parents revere, and that their offspring have been hearing since birth."
It’s a sad story. A kid grows up tough in a low-rent suburb of New Orleans. He's repeatedly beaten and abused by a sick drunken excuse for a father who steals his money to spend on booze and whores and brags about it. And his mom? She escapes her hellish marriage via Jesus and the Catholic church. And for a while the boy probably sought solace from the church as well, that is until a priest or two sought their own personal comfort by digging around in the kid’s trousers when no one was looking.
Living through crap like that can mold one bitter teenager, and this one escaped all the bullshit in Louisiana one day and scammed a ride to New York to scrape together a new life. Call it self-medication, youthful hedonism or just plain inevitable, but the streetwise kid was soon abusing drugs and causing trouble on the streets of the sleazy underbelly of the mid-80's Lower East Side, where it made sense to be wild and young, and either fucked up or angry. And now he’s dead.
That said, you’d think this guy probably met his demise at the other end of a gun, knife or needle. Or maybe was just a victim of some awful medical problem brought on by years of self-abuse and self-hatred? Nope. Nothing like that. Not even close.
When I met Luis Fernandez de la Reguera he was a bartender at the Lakeside Lounge. It was 1997 and I had just moved to the into a cheap little East Village sublet that happened to be right next door to the place. I spent plenty of nights on a Lakeside barstool, often enchanted and entertained (and occasionally disturbed) by the antics and anecdotes of Luis. And as I’m writing this I wish I could remember more of his wild ass stories. But quite often, our time together at the Lakeside would last far beyond closing time and some of the details are rather blurry.
Artist Matt Hope has created HornMassive, a 2-ton, 2000-watt steel and aluminum horn sound system on wheels. As far as I can tell it's mostly been used at a few raves but hopefully a mutual friend can introduce him to the guys from Konono No 1 at some point.
This massive horn reminded me instantly of the wonderful pictures of Japanese War Tubas and various acoustic location devices used during WWI and WWII to detect the noise of distant enemy planes approaching. In England, the preferred devices for this sort of enterprise were concrete sound mirrors which dotted the UK's southern coast and many of which are still standing today.
A few years back, Danish artist Lise Autogena embarked on a new project to create a pair of contemporary sound mirrors that will allow people across the English channel to converse with each other, an especially ambitious (and seemingly impossible) goal considering that Matt Hope's 2000 watt device is touted as being able to be heard 1 kilometer away.
Says Autogena in a 2001 Guardian article
"I love the fact that it's such an awkward, failed technology, which hasn't been covered up... New acoustic technology in America can isolate sounds. So when you stand at a certain point in the mirror, you'll be able to hear the voice of the person standing by the mirror in France - but only at an exact spot in the mirror. Move just a centimetre and the sound will disappear."
Link to Autogena's Sound Mirrors Project. Original Hornmassive link via VVORK
As the content industry grapples with
whether they should finally make peace with this new-fangled technology or continue arming their lawyers with thousands of cease-and-desist letters, it's difficult not to giggle at the old fogeys up in the boardroom. MP3s and digital videos have been around for over 10 years... time to update that business plan? Nah, let's kick and scream for a bit longer.
If you haven't been following the latest round of hilarious tribulations involving the RIAA, the MPAA, and the internet, you are missing out on some seriously great fun. Let's start with America's favorite past-time: lawsuits.
MPAA sues millionaire for allegedly downloading Meet the Fockers via Bit Torrent. Millionaire says nuh-uh, he already bought that stupid movie. MPAA says they'll forget about the whole thing if millionaire settles for $2500. Millionaire says f-u, I'm gonna shell out way more than that just to prove you wrong in court.
The RIAA, on the other hand, prefers to sue dead people, grandmas, and folks without computers for illegally downloading music. More recently, they've brought the smack down on their own customers: intimidating music fans who post lip-sync videos on the internet and threatening sites that host guitar tabs for pop songs. How dare you enjoy our music? How dare you. Clearly these unsanctioned activities must be stopped; Fergie is going to starve tonight because you posted a video on You Tube of your friends dancing along to "London Bridge" in your living room. I hope you're proud of yourself. The RIAA's latest PR flub involves a nastygram sent to the Astronomy Department at Penn State, who dared to have a professer named Peter Usher and the MP3 of an astronomer-produced a-capella song about gamma ray satellites on their server. The lethal combination of Usher + MP3 on any website clearly means some illegalism is going on. Thanks to Penn State, poor Usher had to get a second job to pay the bills.
For more on RIAA scare tactics, read the layperson's guide to filesharing lawsuits, posted on the Digital Music Weblog. Or go straight to the source, and check out the RIAA's own anti-downloading propaganda video. Weird Al has issued a musical rebuttal, but it's about as funny as those net neutrality songs.
I confess to being a sucker for things I don't understand, be it the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, the mass appeal of David Hasselhoff, or the Hungarian language. Similarly, pop songs can often be notably improved when they are covered by an obscure band in an incomprehensible language, preferably in Kobaian, Klingon, or Spanish. Thanks to Hermanos Calatrava, we have such an improvement over David Bowie's original classic Space Oddity. Oddly, it is also called Space Oddity (mp3).
Oh, get your mind out of the gutter. If it was something like that, she’d be blogging about it herself in one of her genius entries for This Week in Sex. DJ Amanda and I went to see the New York Dolls at the heinous South Street Seaport last Friday, and that was my big night out.
The bands were set up to play in front of a very large sailing ship, and David Johansen wore a Cap'n Crunch hat and made pirate references. DJ Amanda and I said, “Arrrrrrghh!” but nobody else did. The New York Dolls sounded good and the show was enjoyable, even though there are only two original Dolls left. Their new songs were okay too, except that sometimes it sounded as if they don’t quite know how to play them yet.
The opening band was called the Tralalas. They featured the best beats and riffs of the 1980s, with four girls singing Go-Gos harmonies in front of a band made up of guys. One of the girls seemed pretty miffed that the crowd wasn’t that into them. I spent most of their set wondering how we could get away from the scary, scary white-eyed devil in the green striped shirt, and what kind of drugs he was on, and whether he would actually hurt us.
Here’s what I wondered while the New York Dolls were playing:
Is it hard to grow your hair that long when you’re as old as David Johansen?
Why is this the first live show I’ve ever been to where I can understand all the lyrics?
How long will it be before one of the Wall Street guys hollers out a request for “Hot Hot Hot?”
Why do Wall Street guys wear loafers without socks to work? Or do they just take off the socks when they want to go out and look casual?
If David Johansen and Iggy Pop had a fight, who would win?
Is that apparently unattended black backpack on the ground in front of me going to blow up?
Should I stand closer to the backpack so it’ll definitely kill me if it does explode?
Wouldn’t dying right away be better than living in a hospital with half my face gone?
Why does this fat guy think that bringing his girlfriend an energy drink when she asked for a beer is a good idea?
Did David Johansen ever think in 1973 that in 2006 the New York Dolls would be playing a free show in a tourist shopping mall?
Why doesn’t Sylvain Sylvain be quiet?
Is a song punk if it has harmonica in it?
Then when the show was over I wondered why they shut down the damned Dunkin Donuts at 9:00 PM on a Friday night and where the hell we were supposed to get a cup of coffee down there, but that was pretty much it.
Thanks for reading my blog post this time, and may God bless.
Got some free time the first two weeks of November?
Do you have $7,600 - $13,240* burning a hole in your pocket?
Yes and yes? Well, friend, you might be interested in this. British singer-songwriter John Otway is organizing his 2006 World Tour, and he is bringing his audience with him. Otway scored a 1977 UK hit with the song "Really Free" (mp3), and also charted in 2002 via a concerted fan campaign with the chemistry-themed song "Bunsen Burner".
Starting the last week of October his band and 300 fans will embark on a world tour with gigs in Liverpool, New York, Las Vegas, Sydney, Dubai, Shanghai, and London. Otway and his humongous entourage will be travelling via chartered jet. The cost? A mere GBP 4000 for economy seats and GBP 7000 for luxury business class (plus accomodation and show tickets).
This website has all the details about the tour, or you can read this news article, and if you like to learn more about John Otway, check out his official website here.
* based on today's GBP > USD exchange rate via oanda.com
Hey, if you're going to go on Starmania (Austria's version of "American Idol") and do your death metal warmup exercises, at least make sure you can do them for more than 5-10 seconds without running out of breath. Check it out (YouTube link, via sneakmove).
Thanks to Ben's lucid analysis of Osama Bin Laden's supposed infatuation with Whitney Houston, which you can read here, the missing link to a months-old quandary has now been brought to light...
For those uninitiated with traveling back and forth between WFMU Fun HQ in Jersey City, NJ, and New York City proper, the trip involves an underground train known as the PATH, which terminates in the empty pit that used to hold the haunches of the World Trade Center. A few months ago, I arrived at the WTC PATH station to discover the flyer to the left plastered all over ticket machines and structural supports. I snickered, thought about grabbing one, but didn't want to invite any glares from the suits I'd be sharing the train ride to Jersey City with. Thankfully, when I got into work, I was delighted to find that someone else more brave than I had snagged a flyer and posted it outside of WFMU's Studio B, where it has remained ever since.
None of us quite understood what the flyer's author was getting at, which line of logic he or she was following, if any, until today. Thank you, Benjamen Walker, for throwing some light on this issue! Michael Jackson caused the 9/11 disaster, inciting the wrath of Al-Qaeda by way of Whitney Houston.
But this is just one mystery that has been solved from the Kola Boof memoirs. Other points that demand investigation include Osama's love for Van Halen, the B-52s song "Rock Lobster" (real audio), and the TV shows MacGyver and Miami Vice. The only explanation I can come up with is that Osama Bin Laden is actually from New Jersey.
Sudanese scribe Kola Boof has perhaps the best book tie-in for the upcoming five-year anniversary of 9-11. Her autobiography details a juicy affair with Islamic Fundamentalist Osama Bin Laden - excerpted in the recent Harpers and now making furious rounds on the internets (link). And while there is some debate on whether Kola Boof is telling the truth or pulling a James Frey, what grabs me is her accusation that Osama had the hot-hot-hots for American Pop Star Whitney Houston:
"Boof says bin Laden couldn't stop talking about his favorite singer and had lofty plans for her. "He said he wanted to give [her] a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum. He explained to me that to possess Whitney, he would be willing to break his color rule and make her one of his wives."
But bin Laden's murderous side also emerged in his fantasies about the pop superstar. "[He would say] how beautiful she is," Boof claims, "what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband - Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed, as if it were normal to have womens' husbands killed."
Perhaps THIS is the key to understanding Osama's murderous rage:
1992
July 18 - Whitney Houston marries Bobby Brown
December 29 - Osama carries out his FIRST strike against the United States bombing the Gold Mihor Hotel in Aden, Yemen.
1997 - 1998
July 1997 - Whitney's single My Heart is Calling fails to chart, precipitating a painful protracted absence from America's Top 40 (May 1997 - January 1999)
January 1998 - Osama signs a Fatwa authorizing the killing of American civilians as they are obvious agents of "oppression" who stand in the way of "justice."
August 7 1998 (2 days before Whitney's Birthday) - Osama kills more than 220 people and wounds more than 4,000 in simultaneous explosions at US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Kenya.
2001
September 7 - Whitney takes the stage at Michael Jackson's 30th anniversary blow out at Madison Square Garden (Youtube link). The press mocks her skeletor frame and suggests she is now a drug addict.
September 11 - Osama takes out New York's WTC towers setting off the war on terror ... which will probably never end.
RecordTurk.com has compiled a wonderful collection of album art from Turkey's golden era of garage rock and psychedlia (sometime also called Anadolu Rock... an excellent primer can be found here). For the uninitiated, the last few years have seen a flurry of re-issue activity of releases from artists such as Edip Akbayram, Erkin Koray, and 3 Hur-el as well as many comps (Hava Narghile,Turkish Delights, etc.). Unless you have a stoner uncle from Istanbul, much of this music has been extremely hard to come by until the somewhat recent string of re-issues and now on RecordTurk you can browse through all the accompanying album art of the era.
For good measure, here's a mp3 from Edip Akbayram's eponymous 1974 album: Degmen benim gamli yash gonlume (7MB).
Youtube also has a few interesting treats, albeit most of them from the late 70s: there's quite a few videos out there by Boris Manco including the following cheesey video. And when looking for videos for Edip I found a clip with music by Seha Okuş. It appears to be the final few depressing minutes of a 1972 movie called Dönüş.
Purveyors of truly demented music, the Cardiacs' nonpeggability may be one of the reasons for their lack of exposure in their British homeland press, creating a ridiculous blender of sharp power-pop, crazy circus music, punk aesthetic and dense flurries of prog. Think a more synth-heavy Drums and Wires-era XTC, excuse the lazy journalistic term, on acid (yes, it has been said), while chasing its tail around at high speed cramming in as many notes and time changes as possible and you get sort of a picture of what's going on here. While that may seem either exciting or dreadful to you personally (reactions to me playing them on air and to associates are quite polar to say the least), they definitely have a following of hardcore fans, myself included. My Finnish pal Jussi, whom I tip the hat to for this amazing video (10MB mpeg download or view here) has even flown on occasion to England just to see them! Despite having quite a few albums, you can't find them in too many places, though your chances in the USA are good here. Word has it that Ipecac Records has some reissues up their sleeve, but for now I guess those are just rumors. More videos of them on You Tube too, of course.
