WFMU's Beware of the Blog

From the Eaten Ogress to the Berzerker, and all that lay between; Wretched Worst LIVE on WFMU's My Castle of Quiet, 3.16.2012

(mp3s below the fold)

So it goes with "heavy" bands nowadays; it's the ones that defy easy genre-fication that are closest to my heart. Sure, black metal is amazing, but it's the projects that don't let the sound play them that really shine. And so it is with punk-noise bands like Drunkdriver, Tinsel Teeth (ed., avoid name dropping), and our guests a few weeks ago, Wretched Worst.

Wretched Worst appeal to me in the same way Flipper does, that feeling of almost falling off the building, as though things might get reckless in the room at any moment. And they carry on the tradition of anything-goes experimentation, forged by the Subterranean Records scene in the 1980s, where one can just grunt, or make one very sparse, metallic noise with great earnest, or let a good, collective drone just go, for five or more straight minutes. Noise-brut, one might call it. These indefinable, maniacal songs are regardless quite pleasing to the ear.

But make no mistake, one could also hear Wretched Worst and get none of what I just wrote, and just find their head swirling in heart-jarring thrusts, very sexual and wildly human. Hard as hell. L'humian désenchaîné.

Numismaticism Update: Oh, Canada!

When was the last time you looked at a penny? I did when I noticed they’d suddenly begun looking like arcade tokens. which apparently started two whole years ago. But I didn’t even notice when they just went random with Scenes from the Life o’ Lincoln, which I guess was in 2009, although I’ve never even seen one of those. Where are all these weird pennies that are supposedly in circulation? Are people snapping up all the pennies and putting them in bottles on the dresser, like with those state quarters? (I still do not have my Guam quarter!) It’s not like they’re melting them down for the copper (currently trading at US$8,526 per tonne on the London Metal Exchange), since pennies aren’t made of pure copper anymore, they’re made of zinc drenched in creamy milk chocolate and covered with a thin candy shell. Right now the U.S. Mint could be putting anything on the backs of pennies, how would I know? I actually don’t know. What does a 2012 penny even look like?

Remember when all the paper money started going strange? The government said it was because they needed to make it harder for counterfeiters to make fake bills. But now every $20 bill I see looks totally different from every other $20 bill. I don’t even know what they’re supposed to look like anymore, which seems to me would make it easier for counterfeiters. Just hand me a green piece of paper with the number 20 and an engraving of Andrew Jackson’s face, that you can fold to see the burning Pentagon, and I will accept it in exchange for my goods and services.

This week in International Numismaticism, the Canadian Government Inc. (Stephen J. Harper, prop.) announced that it would no longer mint pennies—meaning Canadian pennies, which are copper-plated steel and nickel. It costs the Canadian government 1.5 Canadian Cents to make one Canadian Cent, so that just isn’t working out for them. BUT: It costs the U.S. Government 1.7 US Cents to make a US Penny. Does the US continue making pennies just to have somewhere to put their Picture History of the Deads? Here’s my idea: Canada can just start using US pennies.  Let the US absorb the cost, and get your currency made for free. There’s no reason one country can’t use another country’s currency as their own legal tender; it's happened before. For instance, Panama and El Salvador both accept printed paper US dollars (including the $20!) as legal tender. And it’s been about 16 months since Iceland—which has never had a penny at all!—adopted the ThunkTank Bieb, and everything’s going great over there.

The Story of Lucille and Charlie (Exploring My Reel-to-Reel Catacombs, Volume 27) (MP3)

On today's tape (recorded sometime in the 1960's), a gathering of friends had been puttering along nicely, if somewhat boringly, being recorded for posterity. But at some point, one of the men present mentioned that he had a story he'd written about people he knew in childhood, which he intended to submit to Reader's Digest, and perhaps other magazines.

A bit later, he got around to reading his story to his friends. It turns out to be about life in 1926, at age 11, and specifically the two kids in his neighborhood, a boy and a girl, who were quite a bit more precocious than their peers, professing as they did to knowing about any and all things regarding sex. It's not a long or complicated story, but it is a little slice of life, and one from a very different time and place. Rather than summarize his story, I think I'll just let the listener experience it:

Unknown - The Story of Lucille and Charlie (MP3)