WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Beatrice - The Story of a Dog

I spend a lot of time out on my fire escape, taking in all the surroundings and looking at all the people in my neighborhood. It's a way for me to relax. My fire escape is the equivalent to a front porch for most people. If I had a rocker I would sit on it and rock back and forth, waving at everyone as they passed by five stories below. My years of hanging out there on sunny, good-weather days has earned me many friends and acquaintances on my block. But there is one acquaintance in particular that has always left me with a sense of unease; Beatrice. Beatrice the white toy poodle...

Horror Hosts for Halloween

Now. Now is the time when ghosts walk the earth, monsters eat babies (and candy), witches ride their broomsticks... Oh, and it is Halloween today, too, I hear. Well then, what better time to take a look at one of my favorite topics: The Television Horror Host.

The floodgates for horror hosting were opened in the mid-1950s, when Hollywood, gradually getting over it's fear of the television, opened the door of their vaults and began selling the television rights for many of the retired films of the 30s and 40s. Universal especially jumped on the bandwagon, but they had a clever plan: rather than let the scores of local TV stations cherry pick only the best titles, they sold their catalogues in packages. What's that, you want to show Frankenstein? Well, bub, get ready to show The Spider Woman Strikes Back as well.

Stations responded by coming up with a gimmick that would help them package the films - especially the less recognized ones. And thus, the horror host was born.

Vampira, Zacherley, Morgus, Ghoulardi, Elvira, and many more...

Adventures In Amplitude Modulation - Part 30

Here’s the second half of the scan of the 25 meter shortwave band following my post from last week. And to be honest, I’m including it for completion rather than for compelling content. It’s international broadcasting, and almost none of it is intended for North American listeners.

And speaking of last week, I mentioned that a site I've depended on for identifying shortwave broadcasts, hfradio, has disappeared. Well, I'm happy to say it's only temporary. If you try to pull up their site you get a (MS version of MySpace) page explaining that they took the server down for some maintenance and upgrades. Should be back up in a week or two. I'd personally like to thank the proprieter of the website, Tomas Hood, for all his fine work and service to the online radio geek community.

Almost all the radio reception in this series has been recorded at night, when radio waves get the best bounce out of the atmosphere. But the 25 meter band has more life during daylight than most, and reader Ralph offered his own recorded adventure of these same frequencies a few weeks ago (which you can read and listen to here).

More than most radio recordings offer here, this is more for geeks and completists. No great music and very little English language content. However, if you were to tune in the world one afternoon you might hear voices like these, and radio noise like this.

This scan was captured around the five o’clock hour EDT on my Degen 1103 portable. The first segment of this radio adventure (in the last post) has some swell music and an interesting roundup of the weekly news from Cuba. This is mostly just foriegn language garble. But no less REAL. Most of these signals are being transmitted from overseas. However, I heard them in the Catskill Mountains. And so will you, if you download this file...

Segment 2 - 25 meter band 10-01-2006 (download MP3)

11795 - Deutsche Welle (Germany)

English service for Africa. Not coming in well, and stepped on by an adjacent station.

11800 - Radio Habana Cuba

In Arabic, with a Cuban accent. Reception isn't too bad. Wonder what they're talking about?

"Gimme a beat!": The Sondra Prill archives (video)

Blessings on the anonymous YouTube user who posted an amazing collection of videos starring one Sondra Prill from Tampa, Florida who apparently recorded cover tunes (badly) and did public-access videos for them (badly) in the early 1990s. Sondra's story was told on day #338 of the 365 Days Project, but thanks to recent innovations in Internet video we now get to see her in all her glory. The music blog Idolator, in the latest installment in their series of astounding public-access music videos, introduced me to her rather alarming cover of Janet Jackson's "Nasty" (YouTube video link), but once you hit her cover of "Pump Up The Jam" (another YouTube video link) you'll know that you're in the presence of something special: the Jan Terri of Tampa.

New Horror DVDs For Halloween

For the past couple of years I've found myself watching more and more horror films in the run-up to Halloween. Usually I start to obsess over them toward the beginning of October, but this year I started way back around the 4th of July and I haven't slowed down since. I don't have much of a taste for the current breed of horror filmmakers so I tend to focus on older things. I've seen a lot of great and not-so-great movies over the past couple of months, so I thought I'd share three of the better ones in case anyone out there is looking for something spooky to watch this week. As far as I know, all of these are new to DVD as of this year.

Smut via Satellite

Thanks to the 2004 Indecency Shakedown, the FCC's ever-wavering policy on fleeting instances of 'fuck', that expensive teen sex orgy on CBS, and finally the 10-fold indecency fine hike, broadcasters are on high alert to squelch just about anything that might classify as smut to someone. Many TV and radio stations are going beyond the call of duty to prevent nary a naughty thought from airing, just the beginning of this new era of self-censorship. WFMU is even broadcasting on a delay, with the addition of a bright red "delete" button which I have overcautiously employed to eliminate the song lyric "ship" far too many times to count.

While most of us small-fish community broadcasters fear that depriving listeners of seafaring nouns undermines the very core of our democracy, the big-fish TV networks are finding these first amendment concerns a convenient and compelling basis for a court battle with the FCC.

Unfortunately, the big-fish radio stations don't seem to get it. They are currently campaigning for the FCC to impose more indecency restrictions. Counterproductive? Seemingly.

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB, a trade organization representing over 8,000 radio and TV stations) is bent on extending indecency enforcement to satellite radio. NAB's CEO submitted an embittered letter to the FCC last week (you can read it here), frustrated with the fact that profanity aired on broadcast stations is now subject to a 6-digit fine, while 'fuck' flies freely on satellite radio. Cable and satellite TV and radio remain exempt from FCC indecency regs because consumers must willingly sign up and subscribe to these services; by doing so, they are welcoming the possibility of Howard Stern's poopy talk reaching their smut-loving ears. Broadcast stations, on the other hand, are subject to FCC indecency standards because they are freely accessible to everyone... and for god's sake, The Children might be listening!

Sean Landers - The Man Within

MP3 - Sean Landers "The Man Within"

18 minute rant by NYC-based artist Sean Landers on how he is the best artist that has ever lived in the history of the planet Earth. Obsessive, narcissistic, egotistic, breathless, maniacal, and seemingly endless, the most amazing thing is that Landers actually believes every word he says. (You may remember Landers in the 1990s when he did that last page comix for Spin Mag). Could be my favorite piece of audio art of all time: Guaranteed, you've never heard anything quite like this.

Witches and Pumpkins (MP3, videos)

Halloween is only two days away, and this blog already brought you great costume ideas (and I would like to add my suggestion, the "what were they thinking" Heidi costume pictured to the right) and scary audio and video which might come in handy at your own personal Satanic rituals. And don't forget older postings, like the bag of Satanic goodies Ken posted on 6/6/6, or the Halloween safety tips from last year. We wouldn't want you to fall into the street while trick-or-treating.

However, never before have we addressed the economic problems of real witches, who have to pay rent and high long-distance phone bills. Not many artists in the course of history have had the guts to tackle such a controversial topic, but fortunately there was Flossie and the Unicorns, the puppet band of Quintron and Miss Pussycat. Listen to the docudrama The Halloween Puppet Show (mp3) from their first album LMNOP and prepare to have some of your old cliches and prejudices about witches shattered.

Another serious issue around Halloween is the arrival of the Great Pumpkin, anxiously awaited every year by Linus van Pelt. While it was generally believed that the Great Pumpkin is a fictional character (YouTube evidence in form of a Peanuts episode), it recently turned out that this belief is fatally wrong (YouTube proof in form of a Robot Chicken episode). You better get yourself a Kite-Eating Tree before Tuesday.

Want some scary entertainment on Halloween night? I'd suggest "Scary Mary" Poppins (YouTube link), but leave the kids at home. Or even better, feed them to hungry witches or to the Great Pumpkin.

Second in our Continuing Series of Disturbing Cleavage Animations

Now Playing at Pyongyang's Fatherland Liberation Day Theatre

American Film Week in Pyongyang is upon us once again, and The Pyongyang Chronicles has put the schedule online here. The festivities kicked off last Monday night with two showings of Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion. The film portrayal of Garrison Keillor's radio show is described by Kim Jong Il's mouthpiece thusly:

The sad tale of the last broadcoast of a historical radio show that is about to be shut down by capitalists who want to destroy the historical monument it is housed in to build a parking lot. Not only do they end up destroying the studio, they also ruin the enjoyment of millions of listeners of the radio show. This movie proves the lengths capitalists will go towards oppressing others for their own profit. Even though the studio will be destroyed, the evil imperialist man gets what is coming to him in the end, proving the old saying "what goes around comes around".

Friday night's showings were the Mandy Moore / Macaulay Culkin vehicle Saved, which is (accurately) described like this:

A comedy about a pregnant teenage girl who becomes an outcast by the crazy religious fanatics in her town. The town residents believe in some silly "big man in the sky" and try to force their oppressive and very false and outdated religious beliefs upon everybody, including sending pregnant teenagers and homosexuals to concentration camps to "re-educate" them.

Name That Tune

The Girl Next Door (if you live in Malibu)

Today is a propitious day: The Hannah Montana Soundtrack I pre-ordered months ago from Amazon.com finally arrived. La Montana is portrayed on TV (dramatically and musically) by spunky tween-queen Miley Cyrus, 13-year-old daughter of (program co-star) Billy Ray. Maybe I should watch the show, but gravity can't pin me to the couch even long enough to enjoy complete episodes of would-be faves like South Park and Chappelle. (Say what you want against ADD—it cures TV addiction!)

Pending victory over videophobia, the Hannah CD will do. As a 55-year-old AARP-registered male with a Seussian distance from kids ("You have 'em, I'll amuse 'em") and 30+ years airtime here at the free-form factory, I'm not Radio Disney's target demo. (Turning 49, I sighed, "Advertisers no longer care about me"—then realized: When did they?) Hannah's lyrics evoke the hopes, dreams, and rockstar fantasies of prepubescent girls, but the music is captivating to these pre-senescent ears. It's everything catchy pop should be: frothy, harmonic, propulsive, memorable—that is, it's formulaic. And irresistible. She's The Monkees in a pleated mini.

Miley is young, glamorous, and probably makes enough money in a week to support WFMU for a year. Not that we're expecting her pledge.

Dracula: Terror in the Snow!!!

Just in time for Halloween and the upcoming ski season, here is the blood-chilling tale of Dracula:  Terror in the Snow! (mp3, 21MB)

As in my previous posts about The Man-Thing and The Curse of the Werewolf, this mp3 comes from the "Power Records Monster Series" put out by the Marvel Comics Group in 1974.  The idea was for the "action to come alive" as you listened to the record and followed along in the accompanying comic book.   

This story certainly does come alive... or rather, it comes UNDEAD!!!!!!!!!  Enjoy!!!!

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Grand Funk Railroad (MP3s)

Are you aware of the strange things that Don does to his fans to Make Them Scream For More? Have you ever wondered why Mark has this powerful need to Do His Thing?  And what about Mel and his Burning Desire To Satisfy? Well, wonder no more, because Ernie Tucker has all the answers on this 1972 LP, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Grand Funk Railroad: Side One (25 meg MP3)   |   Side Two (29 meg MP3).

This was the hotly anticipated followup to Mr. Tucker's Everything You Always Wanted To Know About David Cassidy and the critically acclaimed but commercially disappointing, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About The Osmonds.

I tried playing this on the air yesterday, but it turned my stomach after several minutes and I had to bail out. Once the screaming teenage girls fade out, one is left with way too much information about Flint, Michigan's Thrilling Threesome With The Hot 'N' Heavy Sound, and how they Get Their Kicks just by doing What Comes Naturally, Babeee!

Thanks Brian and Megan.

The Greatest Halloween Costumes of All Time

I thought I was the cat's ass in Kindergarten with my Space 1999 set-up, but clearly there were some REAL costumes out there. Indeed, it takes a cool kid to wrap themselves up in a vinyl approximation of Vicki the Robot from Small Wonder. From Retrocrush via CSTB.

An Aural Halloween Trinity: Scar Stuff, Arch Oboler, Reverend Frost

Spooky, scary, creepy, crawly mp3s after the jump.

Monster movies are great, but there is nothing like the imagination, jolted by a dose of cheesy drama, to really bring on the shivers. As a kid one of my favorite things to do every Halloween was to scan the record bins at the department store looking for scary records. Sound effects, ghost stories, novelty song compilations - I would save up my allowance for weeks in preparation of the night when I could hide in the basement den with all the lights out, except for a few flickering candles, and scare myself until I pissed my pants (not that ever actually...um, just forget I mentioned the last part).

When it wasn't Halloween season, there was always the local library. There I could find copies of old horror and thriller broadcasts from those golden years of radio drama. Again, late nights, darkened room, wet pants (doh!).

As I grew older I became obsessed with making Halloween mix tapes that combined everything from garage to punk to spooky blues to old horror movie trailers to...well, Thriller. You kinda have to have Thriller in there somewhere. By this point I had a firm grasp on my bladder.

I thoughtlessly left my childhood treasures behind and those mix tapes were all given away. But thanks to this new-fangled thing we call the "internet", I can relive those glory days of spooks and thrills as I complete the cycle of life and head into my Depends years (did I really bring that up again? Sorry).

Many spooky souls have taken it upon themselves to share their love of the season. Here are my favorites for each of my three categories of aural Halloween fun: kiddie records, radio thrillers, and mixes. Take some time, turn out the lights and hasten thee to the following bloggers....if you dare!

A Short History of Beijing

Robert Crumb's "A Short History of America" is one of my favorite pieces of art (link). In 12 panels he is able to capture the utter madness of 'progress.' I am working in Beijing this week marveling at the hundreds of new buildings that were most definitely not here when I visited last summer. People were bemoaning the construction when I first visited in January of 2005, today there seem to be twice as many cranes and construction sites. I keep thinking of Crumb's piece - I hope to find a photographer who has a modern day "Short History of Beijing" I am sure someone has done some interesting time-lapse photography of this amazing city's progress into the future -  I will add a link to this post when I find him or her - but for now check out this photo stream from Flickr (link) photo via pmorgan (link).

Isn't it obvious?

Viva, Patty and Ann sing their top hit bottom miss "Why Do You Think You Are Nuts?" on an unidentified cable show. Is this the best hopefully forgotten 80's cable access nightmare, cruelly recusitated through the web, since Lucille Cataldo performed "Hairdresser, Hairdresser" on Stairway To Stardom?

FCC Media Consolidation Town Hall Meeting, 10/19/06

Two members of the FCC rolled into NYC last week for a town hall-style meeting aimed at gauging public opinion on media consolidation. The feds are considering a relaxation of the media ownership laws that prevent one company from owning newspapers, TV stations, and radio stations in the same market. As expected, these meetings have generated widespread public outcry for the feds to maintain current ownership restrictions.

Although the two commissioners in attendance, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, are both clearly against consolidation (in addition to being the FCC's only democrats), this series of public hearings are a very wise PR move on their part. It will be mighty difficult for the commission's pro-consolidation republicans to justify relaxing ownership rules while also considering the public's concerns about big media. Homogenized sounds on the radio, masked advertisements in TV news, and negative portrayals of minorities are all issues that the public correlates with media consolidation.

Lucky for you, the WFMU Street Team was on the scene to record last week's public meeting in all of its glory. [ Download the proceedings ] (real audio, 28 MB)

This sucker is about 3 hours long, which may seem a tad daunting... until you read through the shortlist of highlights I have lovingly provided below. If you don't have the stomach for 3 hours of testimony from an angry, raucous, leftist mob, fast forward to these crucial moments:

FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein's comments - 14:32

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps' comments - 26:16 (he sounds just like Maxwell Smart!)

An elderly lady sticks it to The Man - 1:27:42

Afrika Bambaattaa (!) gives testimony - 2:05:09

Take-the-airwaves-away-from-those-obscene-media-molesters rant - 2:35:28

Well-spoken teen waxes eloquent: hip-hop on the radio and institutionalized power hierarchies - 2:37:55

If you would like to file a comment with the FCC regarding media ownership, visit this page. More information is available here and here.

Wide Weird World of Shorty Petterstein (Henry Jacob MP3s)

When the history of freeform radio is written, KPFA from Berkeley will figure prominently. It was on KPFA in the late 40's and early 50's that some of the first audio experiments and collages took place on a broadcast station in the US. And one sound artist who influenced KPFA from afar (and then became a programmer there) was Henry Jacobs.

Jacobs got his start in radio on a Mexican border blaster, but eventually settled in Chicago where his love affair with reel to reel tape manipulations and audio experimentation gave birth to a weekly radio show called Music and Folklore (a Best-Of was later issued on Folkways Records). KPFA aired the Music and Folklore shows, so when Jacobs arrived there in 1953, he was already known. In the bay area, Jacobs fell in with Alan Watts and Ken Nordine and collborated with Lenny Bruce and Karlheinz Stockhausen. (Lenny's first LP, Interviews of Our Times, was a Jacobs project.) Jacobs went on to co-invent the concept of Surround Sound at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco, and he was invited to the Brussels World Expo in 1958 to recreate it. He also went on to produce ground-breaking television, and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1964. A few years ago, Important Records issued a Best-Of Henry Jacobs CD and DVD called The Wide Weird World of Henry Jacobs.

Here is his 1950's "comedy" LP, The Wide Weird World of Shorty Petterstein. Click the image on the right for the album's annotated back cover.

A History of Jazz   |   Origins of Jazz Terms   |   Do You Want A Little Lovin?

Chess (3 Dimensional)   |   Rock and Roll Interview with Jump Caulkenburger

Georges Mother (The Classic Psychopath)   |   Guitar For Sale

Telephone Interview (Another Service Of Your Local Telephone Company)

Drums In My Typewriter   |   A Visit To My Best Friend's Girl

Mental Blockages   |   Breaking The Habit   |   Quiet Children

Self-Analysis - A Frank Admission   |   It's No Laughing Matter