WFMU's Beware of the Blog

The Art of Standing In Line

I'm not a shopper. I can't stand indecision. Shopping for clothes for me goes like this... does it look good? Yes! Buy 2 in different colors. Leave, and hopefully never come back. It's not a process I enjoy, unless I am shopping for music. So my food shopping experience is done late night for the reason of swiftness. I'm sure you can understand this. This evening, I went to my local weenie mart for provisions. It took me about 5 minutes to select the food and  beverages I needed and I went to check out. There was a line of 6 people, and I saw there was only one automated checkout aisle open. The only employee was bagging and dealing with the malfuction of said checkout aisle. I decided to wander around instead of stand on this ridiculous line at such a late hour. After familiarizing myself with all the cooking utensils, plates and felt floor/furniture protectors and all the cakes in the bakery--who knew someone would want a Bastille Day cake-- I circled around to where the registers were, only to find there were now 11 people in the line, which I joined begrudgingly. As a notorious multitasker, standing in line rubs me the wrong way, in a BIG way. All I could do was joke about the ridiculousness of the line with my new neighbors suffering the same fate as myself. And then I remembered. About a year ago I was in the Shop Rite nearest to WFMU. I don't remember what I was purchasing. I had been in the express lane and was about 5 people back and a huge guy cut the line. You would think that he had murdered someone. He pushed past myself and all the others straight up to the cashier, and said something like "I know I'm an asshole, but I got to go!". The cashier didn't want to ring him up because he clearly cut the line in front of us, but he wouldn't leave. My companions in line were pissed and flipping out on him. It was very confrontational, and for some reason I found it really interesting.

Dance Dance (Industrial) Revolution: Musicals of the 30s-40s

By Shannon Butts

 

With technological innovations in sound and cinematography, the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood, the 1930s to the 1950s, produced musical films aimed at creating a dreamscape of Middle American values – a razzle-dazzle spectacle of modernity. In the 1930s few Americans could afford the luxury of the opera, ballet, or theatre and many did not take kindly to the ‘fast and loose’ values that came with vaudeville stages and burlesque performances; however, the new form of the ‘integrated’ musical film blended story, song, and dance to produce a middle class, middle brow, middle moral option for the populist masses. Combining the high art of operatic and symphonic style with the bawdy revues and stage productions of the ‘common folk,’ musicals had a style more aptly suited for the emerging ‘middle’ America and its vernacular idiom. Music was sung in English and usually accompanied by a lively colloquial tune while women traipsed the scene in slinky yet strangely demure costumes. Heterosexual couples would fall in love as the fantastic scenarios of song and dance subsumed differences of class, economics, or ethnicity.

Yet the musical not only mediated existing artistic forms and values, but also established a genre which reflected the new urban mass of industrial workers: the emerging modern American ‘middle’ class. Suited up in top-hat-variety-show fashion and with its pivotal plot points danced out in sequins and discreetly revealed décolletage, the musical offered a compromise in entertainment between art and industry, transforming the mechanization of the factory assembly line into the ‘happy-clappy’ rhythm of tap dance and jazz.

As America was sinking into eras of economic uncertainty and war, the musical offered an escapist option for the new urbanite class to take the dull and drab of economic depression and industrial mechanization and apply the golden light of Hollywood film. Freed from the fiscal and spatial economy of the stage and equipped with camera booms and editing rooms, the movie musical incorporated lavish sets and massive choreographed numbers akin to the Vegas pomp and circumstance of today – less nudity, but all the show stopping sparkly outfits and corresponding jazz hands.

Busby Berkeley came on the scene in the early 30s, taking the mechanization of industry to film through dance numbers that thrived on girls, girls, and more girls. Okay, sequins and camera tricks played a role as well, but mainly, girls. Building on the hurly burly of scandalous burlesque dance halls, Berkeley crafted musical numbers that featured simplistic dance styles in association with uniform geometric movement and, of course, those sparkly outfits. The camera would shoot from various angles to create an illusion of difficulty while the kaleidoscopic formations of those many women would create scenes of synchronicity rivaled only by babes in bathing caps and oh-so-modest swimming gear. Berkeley’s work centered around a basic unity of movement and shape reminiscent to the assembly line in production, establishing an industry standard for choreography and paving the way for massive productions without the need for excessive skill.

Amidst all those high kicks and shuffle ball changes, the audience was also presented with the overall idea of homogeneous figures in mass. The uniformity of movement extended to the uniformity of dancers, all dressed alike in groups, all performing the same steps and projecting the same image of smiley happy people holding hands. For the 1930s and 40s, this was what it was all about – ‘we all have to work together if we are going to make it’ – whether in a bread line, chorus line, or a factory assembly line. The individual faded and the production was the ‘thing,’ choreographed cogs in a musical machine.

But it was not merely the massive dance choreography that interpreted a modern middle working-class America, the basic music constructions alongside the moments of dance took on a clicking and clacking reminiscent of the machine room floor. Even with big band or jazz compositions carrying the melody, there often still remained an underlying staccato beat or bass ostinato that invoked the repetitious sounds of industry. As films moved from massive dance choreography to more character driven performances in the 1940s, the solo stars such as Ginger Rogers or Gene Kelly emphasized this ‘clickity clack’ even further as tap dancing became a thoroughly integrated ‘American’ style of musical dance. The toe taps and heel clicks resonated the mechanisms of modernity - the steady threshing of machines, passing of trains, and ticking of the time clock. The ‘tip and tap’ dancing invariably was incorporated into the music, the dancer’s feet acting as the percussion to the horns and brass. And at some point, the instruments would fade out, leaving only the metallic clicks of ‘shuffle ball change’ to soundtrack the moment. And boy did these soundtracks sell!

American movie musicals not only reflected industry, they became an industry, a factory of films putting Hollywood on the map while commodifying and proliferating the idea of the American ‘popular’ for almost 30 years. Music, dance, even the modern idea of celebrity emerged from the musical film industry. Songs such as “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, “Cheek to Cheek”, and “Over the Rainbow” topped music charts while actors like Fred Astaire and Judy Garland became household names both in the United States and abroad. The film musical became a product just like any other, manufactured and shipped out to the masses. Encoded in these films was not just optimistic evidence of mechanized industry, but the proposed values of mainstream middle America: freedom, love, friendship, work, leisure, and success as well as ideas of race, religion, and sexuality that shaped public perception and established normative behaviors both at home and abroad (Bruce Babington and Peter W.Evans). Regardless of accuracy, the industry of American-‘ness’ was projected in the light of a movie screen. Yet, for all the optimism and elegance, the amalgamation and mediation, the pomp and circumstance of song and dance, the musical was a piece of work, a medium through which America ‘worked out’ issues of industry and identity through popular entertainment.

Kinda puts “Whistle While You Work” in a different light.

[1] Bruce Babington and Peter W.Evans. Blue Skies and Silver Linings: Aspects of the Hollywood Musical. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1985. Print.

 

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Wild Things

Lady Gaga take note: Troggs cover inside a bubble, petting a deer. *1982*

Hallucinogenic Celluloid: Salvador Dali's Soft Self-Portrait & Destino

by Dr. Elliott H. King

“Nothing seems to be more suited to be devoured by the surrealist fire than those mysterious strips of 'hallucinatory celluloid' turned out so unconsciously in Hollywood, and in which we have already seen appear, stupified, so many images of authentic delirium, chance and dream.” -- Salvador Dali, 1937

Born in the Catalan town of Figueres near Barcelona in 1904, Salvador Dalí (1904—1989) was a gifted artist from an early age. As a teenager, he travelled to Madrid to attend the prestigious San Fernando Academy of Art (Picasso’s alma mater), and by the late 1920s he had already earned a reputation in Barcelona as an excellent draughtsman and scandalizing provocateur. Dalí’s first “big break” would come not through painting, however, but through film, when in 1929 he collaborated on a seventeen-minute short with his school friend, Luis Buñuel. The film, titled Un Chien Andalou ("The Andalusian Dog"), was intended as an “anti-art” film that would shock the establishment. It went so far as to even include scenes of putrescence – ants and rotting donkeys among them – to suggest the “cultural cadavers” that needed to swept aside to make way for the new art. Although Buñuel famously reported that at the first screening of Un Chien Andalou, he carried stones in his pockets to hurl in the event that the audience revolted, somewhat to his and Dalí’s disappointment the film was an immediate success when it premiered in Paris. Indeed, its disturbing opening, in which a razorblade slashes a young woman’s eyeball, remains one of the most celebrated sequences in all of cinema history.

Un Chien Andalou also caught the attention of a group of avant-garde writers and artists in Paris: the Surrealists. The Surrealists were interested in liberating thought and expression from the moral and aesthetic concerns imposed by society, and they saw in Dalí and Buñuel’s film a parallel to dream states and the Freudian psychoanalysis that drove their own explorations into the subconscious. Dalí quickly became a fixture of the Surrealist group, contributing important ideas and texts including what he termed “the paranoiac critical method”: a self-induced “psychosis” that led him to see double-images in the world around him that he would ultimately represent in his paintings.

Dalí’s fame during the 1930s was meteoric, not least thanks to his famous “soft watch” painting, The Persistence of Memory (1931), which toured the United States extensively in the early 1930s and was for most Americans their first exposure to Surrealism; by 1936, his photograph (taken by Man Ray) was on the cover of TIME magazine. Dalí’s popularity antagonized the other members of the Surrealist group, as did his political ambiguity when other Surrealists were taking resolute stands against the rise of fascism in Europe. Relations became strained after 1934, and by May 1939 Dalí had been officially expelled from all official Surrealist activity.

Dalí’s expulsion from Surrealism began a new chapter in his life. With his wife Gala, Dalí moved to the United States in 1940 and embarked upon his quest for wealth and celebrity status, channelling his creative imagination to everything from neckties to ashtrays. He turned to designing jewelry with the flamboyant Duc Fulco de Verdura, who had opened a showroom on New York’s Fifth Avenue. He also supplied regular artwork for Vogue and Town and Country magazines (he provided Vogue’s cover art in 1939, 1944, and 1946), designed for the ballet and the stage, and became a sought-after book illustrator. Between 1944 and 1947, he produced fifteen collages to advertise Bryan’s Hosiery, and other artworks were used to sell Johnson Paints and Waxes, Chen Yu lipstick, and Leich’s “Desert Flower” perfume. Dali insisted on the artistic legitimacy of these projects, saying, “I am a man of the Renaissance. . . . I would sign a pair of pants if someone commissioned me to. After all, Michelangelo . . . designed the uniforms for the [Pope’s] Swiss Guards. . . . I feel no separation between myself as an artist and the mass of the people. I stand ready to design anything the people want.”

With Dalí’s move to America also came a public rejection of his surrealist past and an embrace of what he now called “classicism”, though various elements of his earlier style – including the ever-present double-images – persisted. Among his most notable 1940s projects were his forays into Hollywood. The Hollywood “dream factory” embraced Dalí’s dreamlike aesthetic, and the artist himself was eager to disseminate his work to a wider American audience. Unfortunately, most of Dalí’s visions for film would go unrealized – his 1937 script for the Marx Brothers, titled Giraffes on Horseback Salad, for example, and arguably also the dream sequence he designed for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound, the final cut of which bears little resemblance to Dalí’s original designs.

A more successful collaboration would come in 1946 with an animated short made with Walt Disney Studios called Destino (1946). Dalí had met Walt Disney in 1945 at a party hosted by movie mogul Jack Warner – a meeting that seems to have gone prodigiously well, as shortly afterwards the artist travelled to Burbank, California to begin work on an animated film set to music in the style of Fantasia (1940). Destino would be based on a song of the same title by Armando Domínguez, and it seems the word destino (“destiny” in Spanish) “sent Dali into raptures”. Disney paired him with experienced animator John Hench and gave him more or less free reign to create as he liked, resulting in many fantastic scenes – optical illusions, double-images, and dreamlike transformations.

Unfortunately, after months of work, the cartoon was shelved, with Disney growing increasingly sceptical over whether the public would appreciate a wacky Dalí cartoon. The film remained untouched until 1999, ten years after Dalí’s death, when Disney’s nephew, Roy Disney, decided to resuscitate Destino. Produced by Baker Bloodworth and directed by French animator Dominique Monfrey, the finished Destino premiered on June 2, 2003 at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, where it was met with wide acclaim, including a 2003 Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film.

As with many “surrealistic” films, the plot of the completed Destino is difficult to convey, though fans of Un Chien Andalou will recognize a swarm of ants emerging from a hole in a man’s hand – reflecting Dalí’s 1920s interest in putrefaction and recalling the same swarms of ants that attack the soft clocks in The Persistence of Memory.

Dalí would never abandon surrealism. Despite his distance from the group’s other members, he insisted that he was, in fact, “more surrealist than the Surrealists”. His comic moustache, deliberately exaggerated speech, and bizarre antics would make him a star, often overshadowing the importance of his art (which he identified as only a small fragment of his personality). Of the many films that were made about Dalí’s life and art, perhaps none captures his clownish personality paired with extraordinary artistry as effectively as Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí (1967). This “creative documentary” by director Jean-Christophe Averty and narrated in English by Orson Welles was shot on location at Dalí’s home in Port Lligat, Spain, and includes such arresting (and suitably “surrealistic”) scenes as Dalí ecstatically playing a piano filled with cats – a reconstruction of a ‘cat organ’ in which a line of cats is fixed in place with their tails stretched out underneath a keyboard so that the cats cry out in pain when a key is pressed. Dalí, it seems, also associated pianos with sexuality – a link formed in his childhood by a book of venereal diseases that his father left open on the family piano to teach his son the perils of promiscuity. Other episodes in the film are no less peculiar: The artist marching triumphantly across the Spanish landscape throwing fistfuls of feathers into the air with a plaster rhinoceros head in a wheelbarrow at two children dressed as cherubs in tow is a prime example, as is the moment in which he emerges from a giant egg, spraying milk, “symbolic blood”, and “symbolic fish” across the Mediterranean beach.

Welles describes Dalí as a “prince of paradox”, but amidst the humorous hijiniks, Soft Self-Portrait proves to be one of the most informative documentaries on the artist’s life, detailing his emergence as an artist in the 1920s, his important contributions to Surrealism in the 1930s, and even his antecedence to 1960s Pop Art (Andy Warhol would later admit that he loved Dalí “because he’s so big”). The film is certainly not as well known as it should be, and the final sequence – an elaborate “happening” in which Dalí encloses himself in a clear plastic dome to “paint the sky” – confirms that Dalí was an extraordinary artist well beyond his heyday in the 1930s.

Dr. Elliott H. King is a Lecturer in Modern Art at Colorado College and a leading specialist in the work of Salvador Dali.  He received his PhD from the University of Essex, working with renowned Dali scholar Dawn Ades, and has lectured and published widely on Dali's work, spearheading the critical rehabilitation of the artist's 'late' (post-1940) production.  He was recently guest curator of the exhibition Dali: The Late Work, at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia (catalogue published by Yale University Press, 2010).  Other publications include contributions to the Dali Centenary catalogue (2004), the 2007 Tate Modern/MoMA exhibit and catalogue Dali & Film, and his 2007 book, Dali, Surrealism and Cinema.  His current research interests include intersections between Dali and Andy Warhol.

Read and Watch at Network Awesome

 

Remembering Ari Up; FMA Tracks Posted; Punky Reggae Birthday Party (Sunday)

As a large percentage of you probably know, Ari Up (Slits, True Warriors, and a/k/a Medussa) passed away this past October, but not without leaving this planet with an abundance of music, memories and occasions to remind us of her soul. Ari struck me as someone who couldn't be "turned off"; sadly with her passing, we know that is not true, and it still seems unreal, in reflecting on the vibrancy she had. Those of us who witnessed her perform, witnessed her living life - exclamation after exclamation, present to every second she had. She would have turned 49 on Monday, and at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Sunday 1/16, will be the "Ari Up Punky Reggae Birthday Party", featuring members of the Slits original and current; the True Warriors, a later group that Ari fronted, and many many more guests.

The show at Music Hall of Williamsburg on Sunday is a benefit and proceeds will go to The St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Tickets are available here. Leading up to that, there were 2 special programs aired on WFMU this week;

On Miniature Minotaurs with Kurt this past Wednesday, we heard a set from the Ari Up & the True Warriors' performance from Santo's Party House from October 2008, courtesy of Punkcast.com- the playlist from that program here. 

On the Fun Machine on Tuesday of this week, I aired a True Warrior's set that I had the pleasure of engineering when they played on Pat Duncan's program May 8, 2003.

Pledge for WFMU's Lift-Off campaign: December 8th!

One week from today (December 8th), WFMU will be taking pledges over the air to send Station Manager Ken aloft with helium balloons! Tune in or watch our live video feed to witness the madness firsthand! The pre-game show begins at 9am, and we'll be taking pledges 11am-noon.

The launchpad: WFMU's parking lot. The vessel: Ken's favorite lawn chair. The fuel: your pledges, realized as giant helium balloons; for every $1000 we raise, we'll attach another balloon to Ken.

If we're successful, we'll raise $180,000, and Ken will lift off! Pledge online or over the phone between 11am and noon on December 8th at (800) 989-9368. We've even got shiny new swag for the taking: a t-shirt designed by Tom Frost, and a WFMU baseball cap! Help us make radio history!

New goodies added to the WFMU Store

'Tis the season to consume, and here at WFMU, we've just loaded up our online store with a ton of new* items.

From Woof-Moo T-shirts to knit gloves to our Locked Groove LP to Dave the Spazz's Best of LCD book to WFMU's Savage Pencil-designed 2010 SXSW Poster, you're sure to find a great gift for that special freeform radio fan in your life!

   

 

 

 

 

 

* WFMU's online store is a clearing house for the extra items we have left over after our fundraising campaigns. If an item or size runs out, we do not restock it, so act quickly!

Pretty Girls In Mini-Skirts (MP3s)

                   

Today's post deals with the ever ascending hemlines of the late 1960s and early 1970s and a handful of country songs that address the topic. It serves as something of a sequel (or maybe it's a prequel) to a recent foray into the world of country songs about hot pants.

As the narrator in the YouTube clip below says, try this on for thighs.

Jim & Jesse  -  Pretty Girls In Mini Skirts  (2:20)

Rodeo Jim Peters  -  Country Girl In A Mini-Skirt  (2:28)

Red Simpson  -  Mini Skirt Minnie  (1:57)

Johnny Collier  -  Mama Wears A Mini Skirt  (2:10)

Wayne & Wanda Raney  -  Grandma's Mini-Skirt  (2:41)

Granny Of The Beverly Hillbillies  -  Granny's Mini-Skirt  (2:24)

RIP POCAHAUNTED: YOUR SPIRIT LOOMS ON, A EULOGY

I first heard of Pocahaunted in college while trying to figure out a thesis topic for a Native American Issues class back in 2007. At the time, there seemed to be a whole re-colonization of the "New Weird American" sonic landscape by an influx of mostly urban white psych // folk // noise outfits stomping their moccasined-feet and thrashing their headdresses to bands with names like Indian Style, Truman Peyote, White Rainbow, Broken Deer, Animal Totem, Totem, Totem Music, Totem Spirit Field, Neon Indian, Neon Navajo, Apache Beat, Crazy Horse, Our Brother the Native, Inca Ore, The Ghost Shirt, Creepy Teepee, Wovoka, just to name a few. I decided to look into this movement further, then discovered Pocahaunted and became unwittingly sucked in to their mysterious spook-a-delic world.

I must say that after seeing them live several times and getting to know some of the members over the years, I realized that despite their name, Pocahaunted transcends the "just another hipster band trying to be Indian" indictment. In fact, they transcend most catch phrases people try to throw at them. Conversely, they are a rotating collective of down-to-earth individuals who are constantly evolving and transforming themselves and their music to produce an alternate reality that is far from escapist, and instead perhaps even closer to the magical and sacred essence of being truly human.

Their last album title, "Make it Real", is a dubbed out, trance-testament to connecting to the "real world" through entering it's dream core, its sacred center, its magical portal lined with facepaint, glitter, and palm-tree graffiti. Pocahaunted conjures the mystical through the gleaming teeth of open smiles. Making it real doesn't mean taking yourself seriously. A lone stuffed Garfield perches stoically on top of a guitar amp blaring divine riffs that swirl around keyboard stands draped with fake flowers and mics magically transformed into ritual may-poles with silk sprays of neon fabrics. Figures appear donning facepaint and sequinned outfits, like some shamanistic-alien-divas performing an exorcism on the set of 80s glam metal music video shot on Neptune.

For Pocahaunted, the concert space is an ontological theatre where the real is subverted into a dreamtime that is equally playful and tangible as it is intense and untouchable. "You've got to save yrself", they croon, and they are. Britt and Amanda are dedicated raw foodists (yes, even on tour). Leyna is moving to NYC for pilates training. They are still actively committed to running Not Not Fun (a label with a growing formidable roster of like-minded DIY psychedelic wizards and noise shamans), and continuing to make music through their various other equally mind-melting projects (Robedoor, Psychic Reality, LA Vampires, Sun Araw, Best Coast to name a few). They have internalized the sacred space their music creates and seem to be taking a break to maintain the "realness" of that space within themselves. I have no doubt that this is just the marker of one energetic phase of their creative evolution. In the meantime, Pocahaunted's ghost will continue to haunt the sonic landscape, and I gratefully surrender to its possession.

Beaming out much love to Britt, Amanda, Diva, Leyna, and Ged for your future endeavors.

They said they came in a Scion; I saw no such vehicle, and am pretty sure it was in fact a bio-powered starcraft. OPPONENTS Live on WFMU's My Castle of Quiet, 6.9.2010

Brooklyn's OPPONENTS are currently riding their own, hard-to-define wave of greatness, with, one assumes, more greatness to come. These two sets stylistically encompass so many things I love --- grisly analog throbbing ala the horror soundtracks of 70s/80s cinema; beatific, long-form "head" music; echoes of the Con Schnitzler holy duality of Rot and Blau; and the casual intensity of brave young men with good ideas, coupled with the belief that there are no "rules" in how you get your music made.

OPPONENTS' live performance on the Castle waxes scary as often as it trips out, takes off and floats, and simultaneously at that. Set 1 features some deliciously in-your-face analog bubbling, that once layered with Aaron's processed vocals and mic sounds, gives the feeling of a super-creepy inter-dimensional kids' party—ya can't leave 'til the kid opens ALL his freakin' presents, and some of the packages are stained dark red. Set 2 feels like immediate bad news at the graveyard—you all shouldn't be drinking here! There are haunting electronics worthy of the aforementioned Schnitzler, and early TG. Both sets come off deceptively through-composed, in a series of well-taut "movements" that rise to a logical conclusion. Maybe Joshua and Aaron are not of this Earth, entirely...maybe the kids with the crisscrossed human/alien DNA are now coming of age and making music. When Josh slips onto the drum kit in the middle of Set 2, you know for sure that anything can happen, and does.

I never got to attend the groovy goings on at Berlin's Zodiak club, as I was six years old in 1970, and lived in the states—so the live dazzle of OPPONENTS foots that bill for me. Joshua and Aaron work so well together as improvisors, and I stress again that they are just now hitting their stride. I Swarm With a Thousand Bees, their CDr on Obsolete Units, is a must-have, and the as-yet-unreleased Together We Will End the Future, what I've heard of it anyway, is the fully fleshed slam-bang version of what's only hinted at in these powerful sets.

OPPONENTS

We Came in a Scion Part 1

We Came in a Scion Part 2

Thanks as always to engineer/ sound-guy extraordinaire Glenn Luttman, who for the last year (along with Irene Trudel, who engineered for Ghost Moth) has aided me immeasurably in bringing some of the finest local electronic music to WFMU's airwaves; and to Tracy Widdess for taking my sloppy, in-the-moment iPhone captures and consistently making them into art. Thanks again to OPPONENTS.

High Heels But No Soul (MP3s)

 
Lonzo & Oscar  -  High Heels  (3:07)

Billy Brown  (The Country Gentleman)  -  High Heels But No Soul  (2:49)

Paul Harper And His Westerners  -  High Heels And No Soul  (2:53)

       

Shop WFMU this Holiday Season

WFMU has just added a glut of goodies to our online store, giving you even more reasons to sit on your ass and CONSUME.

New crapola includes:

- WFMU Fly Bumper Sticker (by Travis Pitts)

- 50th Anniversary T-shirt (right, by J.D. King)

- Where's the Beat? Live at WFMU, double CD

- Golden Airwaves: 50 Years of Freeform, gold vinyl LP

And be sure to browse our other amazing t-shirts, stickers, CDs, tapes, temporary tattoos, night lights, messenger bags, books, posters, DVDs, and other fabulous items that are sure to delight that special weirdo in your life.

If tchotchkes aren't enough, perhaps a frameable gift of fine art is the ticket. Look no further than WFMU's art site. We're offering lovely prints by the likes of Eine, James Siena, Chris Johansen, Alexander Ross (left), Nicole Eisenman, and Jim Torok, as well as an adapted Jim Flora piece.

All art and crapola orders received by Thurs Dec 17th at noon (EST) will be delivered in time for x-mas.

Great Men Repeat Themselves

 

Homer and Jethro  Great Men Repeat Themselves

Melbourne Sharpies

Lobby Lloyde and the Coloured Balls play "G.O.D.", Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs on the bill (neither seen), 1974 in Melbourne. Killer.

This Week In Crossdressing: Manbras, Drug Addict Aliens and Pickle Surprise!

For a minute there I thought Japanese culture was odd.  Mostly because of facial saline implants.  Now I know they are visionaries, all of them - man bras have become a very hot (and hotly debated) item in Japan.  The Reuters report on the top left covers the emerging trand (you like that pun?).  On the top right is the trailer from a cult classic, 1982's Liquid Sky, about aliens who get high off of the endorphins in the brains of of heroin addicted models.  Anne Carlisle stars as both a male and female junkie models.  Fans of cinematic camp will be equally pleased by the film as fans of minimal synth - watch this scene and you'll understand.

Tom Rubnitz was known in the 1980s as a central artistic figure in NYC Village's drag queen scene.  His short on the bottom left, Pickle Surprise, features none other than RuPaul.  A whole bunch of his other videos are up on Youtube.  Bottom left are some highlights of an episode of Ring My Bell, a transexually themed internet call in show that tends to get pretty wild.  Is it too late in the post to say these videos aren't safe for work?

Nouvelle Vague Live at WFMU - hot vidz!

Oh my gawd, y'all, when these people were in Love Room, it was all I could do to keep myself from reaching through the glass and gently stroking their faces as they sang.

The two sexiest voices in English-speaking Frenchpop, covering Sex Pistols, Violent Femmes, Depeche Mode, and Talking Heads....DANG!

Listen to the whole show here.

Thanks a zillion to Aldona Watts and Raymond Park for doing the video.

2 MORE VIDEOS AFTER THE JUMP!

Nouvelle Vague's new album "NV3" will be out in September.  It features guest performances from Martin Gore (Depeche Mode), Terry Hall (The Specials), Ian MacCullough (Echo and the Bunnymen), and Barry Adamson (Magazine).

July 4th pin-up: hot fox diplomacy

Current occupation: Governor of Alaska
Age: 45
Residence: Wasilla, Alaska

Little-known public official interviewed in the August 2009 issue of Runner's World magazine:

"I feel so crappy if I go more than a few days without running. I have to run. No matter how rotten I feel before or during a run, it's always worth it to me afterwards. Sweat is my sanity. A great frustration I had during the campaign was when the McCain staff wouldn't carve out time for me to go for a run. The days never went as well if I couldn't get out there and sweat. ...

"I went for a run at John McCain's ranch a couple of days before the debate with Joe Biden. My favorite thing in the world is to run on hot, dusty roads. I don't get enough of that in Alaska. So I was in heaven and there were plenty of hills so I knew my thighs were going to just throb and my lungs were going to burn and that's what I crave."

Palin intends to continue running because she feels a commitment.

Chrome Hoof - Circus 9000 (video)

I have to admit to a certain weakness for circus music and musicians performing in costumes, like good old Mr. Bungle or Les Georges Leningrad. Now the Brits have their contenders, too, here is Chrome Hoof performing Circus 9000.

YouTube: [link]

Sharon Tate, Commie Cheesecake

This Sharon Tate pictorial, shot by photographer William Helburn, appeared in the December 1967 issue of Esquire.  Is this the birth of the appalling communist chic movement?  Probably not, but I really don't know.

Unenlightened rube that I am, I've never been able to grasp the kitschy appeal of the symbols of a brutally repressive totalitarian movement.

        

More semi-risque photos after the jump.....

A Study In Crust Pants

One of the overlooked aspects of the Amebix reunion shows this year: some fans had the same pants as the last time they saw them play. An overview via Terminal Boredom, forwarded by Steve Hesske.