WFMU's Beware of the Blog

66 Clips of Monster Music / Halloween Playlist on Youtube

This being my favorite time of year, I've collected 66 of my favorite video clips into a youtube playlist.  They are of a slimey, zany, Halloweeny nature;  Vintage commercials, cartoons, sitcom interludes, and fun loving monster music spanning a few types of interdisciplinary [ghoul] schools of thought.   The moon is nothing but a circle of ghosts!  

Elisha Shapiro, Nihilist (mp3)

"We're celebrating the disintegration of order, reason and rules. I just hope we're not too late."

Elisha Interview

Elisha Comedy Bit

After a turbulent run in high school, my perspective started to morph from an "us versus them" approach to a more suitable "me versus them", and a desire to have as much fun as possible with it. Jello Biafra had painted himself into a corner, KMFDM had become caricatures of themselves, and even though Atari Teenage Riot could continue to bolster their jack-in-the-box reactionary teenage angst, I was no longer in a mood for catch phrases or campaign slogans of any kind. Before long, I was hanging out in my friend's basement bathroom that he'd converted into a bedroom, watching the mushroom cloud sequence from Dr. Strangelove on repeat, doing excuisite corpses, making pornographic collages, writing for and publishing "dadaist" zines (which also included pornography), and setting random things on fire. It might be cliché in a round-about way, but it sent the ball rolling in a lot of different directions.

Trenton Willey: Poor Homeless Comedian VS. A Swarm of Rabid Swamp Cakes (NSFW) (mp3)

The content presented herein will most likely offend someone's sensibilities, in some capacity or another, and there are profanities as well as haphazard juggling of taboo subjects in an insensitive fashion involved, and the reader should consider herself WARNED about them!  If every generation is doomed to fear for the following one, Trenton Willey may be one of our foremost warning signals.  Some of his shenanigans might be unsettling, but they do at times bring to mind how we are in a time where the swastika is almost as innocuous as the fanny pack.  We are drowned in the tedious irony of bad fashion in a decade without any distinctly remarkable cultural shifts beyond that of the push for recycling, and in light of this, Trenton, a Maine native, comes off like some kind of ham fisted crankhead beatnik of a spiritual leader.  

While it may seem buffoonish at first, Willey's surrealistic stream of brutish puns and  psychedelic one liners eventually seem like they are transcendent; Some kind of ultra reality where humor is only the pretext for the sort of nonsense that finds us leaving theaters feeling drug-addled after a particularly mind bending movie, or just guiltily laughing our asses off. He appears as someone who happened to take mental imagery of dinosaurs, care bears, made for TV movies, and soap operas, along with mass murder, racism, sexual abuse, daily news, political correctness, and various media histrionics all into the blender of his mind, set on liquefy.  But rather than presenting these sometimes turbulent concepts as a means to shock people with the severity of them, he presents them with the sort of aplomb that one might expect from Mister Rogers and in the context of total madness.   When I heard that Trenton was talking about going for the Guinness Book of World Record for the longest stand up comedy set (40 hours), I invited him to do stand up on the phone for 6 hours with no audience, to be aired on my radio show.  

I'm fascinated by the concept and the purported benefits of image streaming, and I'd be happy to uphold someone who would be able to go through with it, especially if he is keeping with this style of slinging  ludicrous word diarrhea throughout.   It would certainly add to his body of work; endeavors  such as interviewing his father about gay animal marriage, making a play with a dead cat, the animated film "Hair Camp" (featuring Venus, a vegan cannibal Venus flytrap with a British accent), teaching invisible children about death (WARNING: this one is particularly viscous), a group protest where every person protests something different, stabbing himself during a knife dance, and getting chased by hecklers.  In this case, Trenton didn't make it 6 hours, his phone kept dying.   I believe he can do it.  Instead, the series of recordings start off with a pretend interview with a dinosaur, and a decline into drunken depression/distant, pitiful domestic arguments that bring to mind Happy Time Harry.  Trenton granted permission to air the entirety of the recordings unedited.    Below is a video clip of Trenton's stand up, as a tooth sandwich appetizer.

Trenton Part 1

Trenton Part 2

Trenton Part 3

Trenton Part 4

 

"Sometimes I Kiss You Not To Hear You Speak": Margaret Chardiet's Pharmakon

As a person who's been working at haunted attractions since I was 14, and as someone whose job has evolved to include screaming with unwavering voracity, I've come to be able to pick out people who do the fake screaming; yelling from the throat rather than the chest, using mannerisms to punctuate a form of beckoning that otherwise leaves much to be desired.  I can tell you that Pharmakon is not one of those people.  The work of Margaret Chardiet encapsulates by far the most authentically hair raising maelstrom of shrieks that I have heard in a long time, and the end result of her creative output finds me at the only point where I would use words like "gut-wrenching" for want of better ones.  

While I don't own all of her material (it is scarce), and I've yet to have the luxury of seeing her live, I'm also impressed by the bounty of staunchness; the facilitation of quite poetic lyrics and dangerously musical noise elements in a genre whose simple-mindedness often seems to be seen as its strength.  While others are releasing short run cassettes on a monthly basis, or performing live with lyrics so precocious that they're written out on crumpled notebook paper (I've been guilty of this); Chardiet's work, which has been in existence for over 3 years, is sparse and pronounced, well produced, and most importantly an opus rather than a document.  In the videos of live Pharmakon performances, the absentee accoutrements of studio settings are augmented by a menacingly cat-like swaying, focus and intensity. 

In person, I'd be surprised if Margaret weighed more than 100 pounds, but she seems to strike fear in people, and rather than barrelling through the audience pretending to lose her proverbial shit, for her, it looks more like she's using members of the crowd to conduct electromagnetic energy.  In the relatively short time that Chardiet has been active, she's also worked with WORK/DEATH, BLOODYMINDED, and Ryan Woodhall (Yellow Tears).  The night that she came to Chicago, I absolutely could not make it, but I came home and listened to her EP on repeat for several hours, a danger to myself; brooding, manic, and very angry. All the alcohol in the world couldn't calm me down (but I'll be damned if I didn't try).

 

 

 

 

 

Pharmakon - live @ Germ Books 06-26-2010 from Breathmint on Vimeo.

 

Cliff "Effin" Edwards AKA "Ukelele Ike": Night Owl (mp3)

Cliff Edwards - Night Owl

Cliff Edwards went from being a carnie and a saloon singer to one of the forerunners of ukulele music and scat in the '20s.  His style was known as "effin", in which someone would try to impersonate a kazoo or a trumpet rather than making jazzy shooby dooby sounds and things like that.  Also known as "Ukelele Ike" (that's how they used to spell it), Edwards came to prominence with his version of "Singing In The Rain", and is best known as the voice of Jiminy Cricket singing "When You Wish Upon A Star".  In addition to making appearances on The Mickey Mouse Club, Gone With The Wind, and various other acting, radio, voice over work, including a weekly vaudeville television show, he's also somewhat notorious for songs that were banned in their time such as "Paddlin' Madelin Home", "I'm Going To Give It To Mary With Love" and "I'm A Bear In A Lady's Boudoir".   Edwards and Buster Keaton propped each other up with overlapping binges to make music between filming.

On into the 40s, Cliff's corner of the music spectrum started to become more schmaltzy, where crooners like Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee overtook the public's eye.  Ike was more or less forgotten after his heyday, and with Disney secretly supplementing his medical expenses (or habits), he died quietly in 1971, in poverty after a lifelong addiction to drugs and alcohol.  There is a Ukelele Ike LP with cover art by Robert Crumb from 1975 that emphasizes both the Disney and the dark side, but I think "Ukelele Ike" should be as familiar to the general public as Fats Waller.  "Night Owl"  is my favorite song in the world, and even though my ukulele sits in the corner waiting, should I ever pick it up and learn how to play it, it would be solely because of this song alone (that's what I bought it for).   Tiny Tim is great and all, but Ukulele Ike is for the children!

Have A Nice Day: An Interview with Boyd Rice

article by Arvo Zylo

  In a round about way, Boyd Rice has led a charmed life. But in a lot of ways, maybe not always a charming one. He's been called a Nazi, a Fascist, a Social Darwinist, a Satanist, a misogynist, a misanthropist, an abusive alcoholic, and in no uncertain terms, an asshole. He's been appointed to high ranks while also harboring a strong friendship with Church of Satan founder Anton La Vey, and he's visited Charles Manson on a daily basis at one point in the 80s, also rallying, if only symbolically, for the lifer's release from time to time. Christian Radio Televangelist Bob Larson interviewed Rice in the early 90s, where he faced the mother of Sharon Tate in favor of Manson and Satanism.

He's got an ex, Lisa Carver, the mother of his child, that wrote a book where nearly half of it portrays him in a, let's just say, a highly unfavorable manner. Earlier in his career, he encountered a fair amount of protest, especially regarding his collaborations with the neofolk band, Death In June, whose lyrics and art allude to Nazi imagery. Rice has appeared in a teen magazine with a member of the American Front and on a racist television program called Race and Reason. Some of his recorded material employs ideas akin to Social Darwinism, and even in some cases, he describes people in general as a “stupid, lifeless, shuffling horde”. An album called Hatesville details a fun loving kind of sadistic mind state, a single by his one-off side project The Tards mocks the less fortunate, and a song called Alone With The Calm describes a peaceful place away from disruptive noise and “unruly niggers”. Some of his writing, even if, perhaps in jest, portrays women as a species of people who are only in power because a man allowed them to be. And in the face of a world oozing with political correctness, disillusioned by American culture's omnipresent lip service to equality and diversity, as well as a pervasive onslought of “professional victims”, as Adam Parfrey put it, Boyd Rice refrained, more or less, from apologizing or explaining himself in any kind of empathetic manner. To be fair, he has casually mentioned that he would prefer to hang out with a dominant black person than a dull one of any race, and when he describes fascism, he speaks of it as if it is something that happens in nature, not something that needs to be enforced by a group of idealists. Rice, at one point,said that women are often too emotional (to say the least), but he also said that, like people in general, he gets along well with plenty of women who stand apart from the rest. And further, all of the aforementioned has happened over 15 years ago, some of these views have clearly morphed over time. Still, it might seem like this is an introduction to a brooding sociopath on the surface; surely a person who is brutally honest, for good or ill. But speaking to him on the phone, both on and off the record, he's a soft spoken gentleman with a strong sense of humor. Almost every account of meeting him comes with a resounding: "He's the nicest guy you could ever meet.". Where most people see two sides to every coin, Boyd seems to see 3, 4, or 5, and overall, it is because of making this observation that I decided to write a letter to Boyd Rice, asking him to grant me an interview on my radio show close to 5 years after his last one, and more than a few years after his proclamation that he would no longer grant interviews outside of personal inquiries.

Continue reading the full interview below...