WFMU's Beware of the Blog

TV Is the Government: The Underground Vaudeville of TV Party

by Gabriella Arrigoni

TV Party (Debut Episode, Dec, 1978)

Not always, actually quite seldom, is the distinction between art and absurdity a relevant one. And it certainly doesn’t matter when in a TV show you combine live music, in-studio party, fancy dress, videotapes, punk, disco, anarchism, new wave, visual arts, rap, interviews, phone-in sessions, shaky camera angles, crude advertising and live drug taking. All this featuring guests such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Lurie, David Byrne, George Clinton, Fab Five Freddy, Tuxedo Moon, Debbie Harry, Maripol, Iggy Pop, Chris Burden, John Feckner just to name a few. The uniqueness of TV Party, however, was not as a celebration of the apotheosis of the underground, but that this played out on the mass media it rebelled against.

On air for one hour every Tuesday night from 1978 to 1982, TV Party was a piece of DIY experimental broadcasting hosted and conceived by Glenn O’Brien. It pioneered an alternative use of the medium, breaking its rules by looking deliberately amateur and shattering the traditional distinction between the

The Love Song of Kim Jong Un (UPDATE!)

Kim Jong Un has a girlfriend! Or maybe a wife! Or maybe a girlfriend who is somebody else’s wife! No one at Thunk Tank Central (or anywhere else) is really sure. But last weekend he was seen in public with a young woman. Who was she?

Korea Joongang Daily says that South Korean intelligence has identified her as Hyon Song-wol, former lead singer for the Bochonbo Electronic Music Band. Hot gossip: KJU might have had an affair with her when he returned home from his Swiss boarding school. His father, Kim Jong Il, may have objected to the (still unconfirmed that it ever happened) relationship and separated the two. Song-wol might have married an army officer! She might have had a baby! But whose baby was it?

 If, you know, there even was a baby. Or if the woman in the photos with Kim Jong Un isn’t just his sister, which it might be. Whatever! Here’s the video for Hyon Song-wol’s #1 super hit from 2005, Excellent Horse-Like Woman!

 

 

Bloody Aliens And The Future Of Mankind: An Technocratic Education

by Gabriella Arrigoni

Vampires of Geona & The Masters of Geona (Gennady Tishchenko)

What's on Network Awesome today?

The Red Star (1908) is a Russian science-fiction novel describing the coming into being of a perfect Communist society on Mars, where the principle of egalitarianism is pushed to the point where even blood is a common good and must be constantly re-distributed and shared in equal parts among the whole extraterrestrial population. This process of transfusion also allows the communist Martians to overcome death and set up the basis of an immortal, omnipotent empire. In the Vampires of Geona (1991), the pterodactyl-esque blood suckers that gave the title to the cartoon are the bad guys and certainly not an incarnation of socialism, but it is not unlikely that their creator Gennady Tishchenko got to know the novel and the theories of its author, Aleksandr Bogdanov. He was one of the major representatives of that weird assemblage of science, philosophy and occultism which comes under the name of Russian Cosmism.

Cosmism's ideas about the possibility of a new man and a new society based on the technological triumph of man over nature to gain the resurrection of the forefathers, immortality and the progressive colonisation of the universe seems to fit rather well with the declaration we find in Tishchenko’s website about his own

Numismaticism Update UPDATE: OMG, Canada!

No wonder Canada isn’t making pennies anymore—they’re using the copper for their new quarters! While the US goes on churning out those sad commemorative quarters that no one even knows about (Chicasaw?), Canada is creating the Greatest Quarters Ever, oversized cupronickel disks featuring bas-relief full-color dinosaurs—four of ‘em, starting with our old friend  Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, and they are photo-luminescent so when you look at it in the dark, you see the glow-in-the-dark Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai skeleton!

And the obverse has the head of Queen Elizabeth, as per usual, but when you look at that side in the dark, you see the glow-in-the-dark depiction of her actual reptilian form!

Canadian money is so bad-ass! Next to the Thunk Tank Bieb (now the official currency of Iceland), it is the most bad-ass money in the world.

Joe McCarthy Tackles a New Foe (MP3's)

The response to Joe McCarthy's war on Communism, and its tactics, famously drew responses, comments and critiques  from many corners of the worlds of art, news and entertainment. What other aspect of life in mid-50's America played such a strong role in the work of such diverse perfomers as Bob and Ray, Pete Seeger and Edward R. Murrow, among others far too numerous to mention? On the fringes of this response were some less well-known chapters of the story. Today's example is a 10" LP by The Barton Brothers, performing a 20 minute play written and directed by Hal Collins, titled "Mister Chairman! A Point of Order", and released in 1955 on the Allo Records label.

Such was the fear of McCarthy and his power, that the album - despite being released after public opinion and his Senate colleagues had turned against McCarthy - carries text on the back cover almost begging the listener to understand that it's contents are SATIRE, and that SATIRE is really OKAY. Oh, it's also that rare, special brand of SATIRE - "HUMOROUS SATIRE"! After going on to say that their album contains a caricature (capitalizing that word, while spelling it wrong, by the way) of the manner of presentation of a political investigation, they even assure us that "any similarity to any persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

I'd love to say that hiding behind this timid, apologetic marketing lurks a great work of satiric, biting art, but...I don't actually believe that to be the case. This is fairly hamfisted stuff, in which McCarthy's doppelganger gets upset at being denied his favorite meal, and then becomes suspicious of the red.... well, I'll let you hear it and find out.

The Barton Brothers - Mr. Chairman! A Point of Order, Part One (MP3)  | The Barton Brothers - Mr. Chairman! A Point of Order, Part Two (MP3)  | Album Front Cover (JPG)  | Album Back Cover (JPG)  | Label (JPG)

And now, if I may toot my own horn a bit, I'm very happy to say that an album's worth of humorous songs I recorded in the mid 1990's, and distributed privately on cassettes in 1997, has now been released by the fine folks at the online Happy Puppy Records label. It's full of originals, in addition to a couple of parodies, a song-poem cover, and even a cover of one of my beloved Star Ads. Have a listen, if you will!:

The Many Moods of Bob

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.

Where We At

Smiles of a Summer Night

SEE YOU IN HEALTH: The Thunk Tank guide to the 5 most likely things that will kill you to death

Half of Thunk Tank almost died last week, which made us realize that we owe it to you, the WFMU Listener, to alert you to the Five Most Likely Things That Will Kill You (this week). Consider it a public service. (You’re welcome.)

1. All-Drug-Resistant TB. Okay, it’s not bad enough that you keep taking antibiotics for your headcold (Das viral!) and using antibiotic soap to wash your crusty dishes, which caused multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis even in a young female ginger who is also a lawyer and lives in London (much to the surprise of the BBC). No, now your stupid antibiotic lip gloss has caused ALL-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis, which is just in India now, but will be killing you sometime next month.

C. Northcote Parkinson - The Sequel (MP3's)

Nearly two years ago, I posted an album featuring C. Northcote Parkinson speaking on the subject of Democracy. I mentioned that, when I had picked up that album, I also got two more albums in what was a ten part series of interviews with Parkinson, regarding various political systems. Since then, I've had a couple of requests to feature the other two albums, and so that's what I'm doing today. Album seven in the series covered "Dictatorship", and album eight covered "The Russian Communist Theocracy"

Like the Democracy album, both of the other album covers were badly damaged in a flood, so I can't offer up scans of those covers (all of which were identical, except for the volume and title), but I will share this quote from the back:

"Dr. Parkinson adheres to the pessimistic belief that democracy died a long time ago as a creed and an inspiration and while he feels that dictatorship is the characteristic 20th Century form of government, he believes that all systems end to bear the seeds of their own destruction...that no one system is best for all countries and for all times".

C. Northcote Parkinson - Dictatorship, Part One (MP3)  | C. Northcote Parkinson - Dictatorship, Part Two (MP3)  |  C. Northcote Parkinson - The Russian Communist Theocracy, Part One (MP3)  | C. Northcote Parkinson - The Russian Communist Theocracy, Part Two (MP3)

Strange Bedfellows: A Rockabilly Session and a Voice of Reason on Anti-Communism (Exploring My Reel-to-Reel Catacombs, Volume 25)

"One never know, do one?" - Fats Waller

Today's tape was intriguing enough when I heard the first six minutes of it. When I heard the remainder of the tape (which also indicated what that six minutes had been recorded over, I was even more fascinated.

Recorded over the initial third of the tape, at 15 IPS (the speed often used at recording studios), in whole track mono, after some initial setting up sounds, were versions of two Rockabilly classics, the first being "Heartless Woman" (most often associated with Terry Noland) and the second being "The Fool" (Sanford Clark's huge hit from 1956). There is no indication anywhere on the tape or box as to who is performing on these tracks, or even that they exist on the tape.

1.) Unknown - Set Up (MP3)   |  2.) Unknown - Heartless Woman (MP3)  |  3.) Unknown - The Fool (MP3)

Well, as soon as these recordings end, the rest of what they were erasing shows up, at 7 1/2 IPS and again in whole track mono. And it is just as fascinating as that Rockabilly session, and yet couldn't be more different than it. What remains are three full episodes (and a fragment of a fourth) of a show hosted by Edwin Randall, short radio shows he hosted for The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, and on which he was joined by Harry P. Cain.

A quick internet search - and I don't for a moment claim to be an expert on any of this - shows that Harry P. Cain was a senator from Washington, and that he served in that position just long enough to develop strong ties to Joseph McCarthy, and join him in the legendary crusade against Communists. This has tended to paint him with the same brush with which history has painted McCarthy. However, once relieved of his seat in Congress, Cain was appointed to the Subversive Activities Control Board, where he began to question some of decisions being made in the name of protecting the nation from Communists, particularly in the area of violations of civil liberties. After making a point of raising these concerns in a variety of ways, he alienated those with whom he had previously worked, including President Eisenhower, and he resigned from the Control Board.

It would appear that these radio shows date from near the end of Cain's time on the Subversive Activities Control Board. They mention his three years on the Board, a time frame he never actually reached - he resigned after 2 1/2 years! The interviews are primarily focused on his concerns about civil liberties, and he brings up several examples of questionable use of Government power, as well as how difficult it was for the little guy to fight back. With one of ideals of The American Friends Service Committee being social justice, a radio show produced by that organization would have been a good fit for Cain to express his views, as they were near the end of his tenure on the Control Board.

(The very last bit is a very brief fragment of yet another show hosted by Edwin Randell, which itself was mostly erased by the show featuring Harry P. Cain. It was on the tape, so I included it.)

4.) Edwin Randall and Harry P Cain (For the American Friends Service Committee) - Fragment and Full Episode 1 (MP3)  |  5.) Edwin Randall and Harry P Cain (For the American Friends Service Committee) - Full Episode 2 (MP3)  |  6.) Edwin Randall and Harry P Cain (For the American Friends Service Committee) - Full Episode 3 (MP3)  |  7.) Edwin Randall and Bill Hoisel - Fragment (MP3)  | Tape (JPG)

A Joy Division in Nazi Disneyland

Last week the web was wriggling with outrage over The Disney Store Corporation offering for sale a Mickey Mouse™ T-shirt in the graphic style of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures albumcover -- not that the iconic white-on-black waveform image (plucked from the Cambidge Encyclopedia of Astronomy by drummer Stephen Morris) was any stranger to absurd marketing schemes.

 

Glenn Beck / The Invisible Committee

Oldie but Goodie

Collaboration between Glenn Beck and The Invisible Committee

- - -

Glenn Beck lives and works in Dallas, TX

You can purchase The Coming Insurrection here

TV Is the Government: The Underground Vaudeville of TV Party

By Gabriella Arrigoni - Collection: TV Party

Watch more on Network Awesome

Not always, actually quite seldom, is the distinction between art and absurdity a relevant one. And it certainly doesn’t matter when in a TV show you combine live music, in-studio party, fancy dress, videotapes, punk, disco, anarchism, new wave, visual arts, rap, interviews, phone-in sessions, shaky camera angles, crude advertising and live drug taking. All this featuring guests such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Lurie, David Byrne, George Clinton, Fab Five Freddy, Tuxedo Moon, Debbie Harry, Maripol, Iggy Pop, Chris Burden, John Feckner just to name a few. The uniqueness of TV Party, however, was not as a celebration of the apotheosis of the underground, but that this played out on the mass media it rebelled against.

CYBERPUNK’S NOT DEAD!

By Chris Cantino

Doc - CYBERPUNK (1990)

Watch more on Network Awesome

Marianne Trench’s 1990 documentary on the world of cyberpunk observes digital outlaws on the forefront of new technologies, fighting for freedom of information. Founded upon the spirit of the first cyberpunk novels by William Gibson, the movement is a networking hub for politically-concerned technophiles who poke around inside protected digital databases and occasionally wreak mayhem by inducing malicious software. Sometimes for fun, and sometimes to extract information, the hackers are concerned with increasing access to knowledge and generally throwing a wrench into the system. Often set in dystopic near-futures in which the lower class is dramatically underrepresented, cyberpunk (and sci-fi literature in general) helped develop the context in which we discuss the arrival of new technologies: with a guarded interest, and sometimes fear that they might eventually wreak similarly undesirable results.

Unfortunately, this cyberpunk prescience is starting to look less and less like fantasy. Gibson once described his fictional futures as “social Darwinism designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button,” where the ones calling the shots cut corners at the expense of the

The Atomization of The Image

May you live in meme-ingful times.

Gallery: "Casually Pepper-Spray Everything Cop" meme. Endless pics. (Well, as of last count, 502.)

This collection of images is noteworthy for a number of reasons. Let's get the obvious ones out of the way first — sort of clear the quad of the passive resisters, as it were:

1. Holy Hell! There must be a LOTTA people out of work, or slagging off while AT work! (Duh.)

2. Humans are creative things, once given a fun theme to riff on.

3. Humans demonstrate a persistent need to distance themselves from the heinous.

4. Gee, that cop's had his share of donuts.

5. Lotta art majors among the out-of-work creatives mashing photos up...

My RadioVision of the Great Icelandic DJ

Back in 2010 I posted the video for the Best Party's campaign song here on Beware of the Blog. The Party—which was started as a satire of regular Icelandic politics—actually won a majority in their local election, and their founder and chairman, Jon Gnarr, became mayor of Reykjavik. Now, through the magic of Benjamin Walker, and due to some mistake that no one can explain, I am to meet His Honorableness, Mayor Gnarr, and his chief strategist and campaign manager, Heida K. Helgadottir, when I introduce their keynote address on Saturday at the WFMU Radiovision Festival.

I became an Icelandophile when I worked at the dog magazine, whose offices were two blocks from Scandinavia House. I often went there for lunch at the AQ Café, and would check out their art exhibits and excellent film series. It was at Scandinavia House a few years ago that I saw the documentary Kurekar Nordursins, and became a huge fan of the great Icelandic radio DJ, the Cowboy of the North, Hallbjorn Hjartarson. The film records (in what feels like real time) the 1984 Icelandic Cowboy Festival, which took place in a tiny northern fishing village and seemed to consist of a lot of drinking, some music, and occasional attempts to ride shaggy little Icelandic ponies while drinking or singing, but mostly drinking. I was so inspired by it that I tracked down Cowboy DJ Hallbjorn and wrote to him, hoping I could get him as a guest on WFMU. I imagined gathering up donations of moldy country vinyl at the Record Fair and shipping it off to Skagastrond, Iceland, and becoming radio friends with this international superstar.

But then months passed, and I had given up before I finally got a reply. DJ Hallbjorn had to go to a great deal of trouble to find someone who could translate my email into Icelandic and then translate his reply into English to send to me. Of course, I had no idea he didn’t speak English. He plays all these American country-western songs on his radio station, so I just assumed … Plus, I’m American, which is also why I just assumed… Anyway, I felt bad for putting him to so much trouble, so I didn’t write again. But now, every year when the Record Fair comes around, I think of Hallbjorn Hjartarson and wish I could send him some Little Jimmy Dickens records.

And this year, tomorrow, I will get to meet real Icelandic People and ask them if they know Cowboy DJ Hallbjorn—it’s a very small country, plus he is extremely famous, so they might! I just hope Jon Gnarr and Heida K. Helgadottir speak English.

 

Try to Remember the Days of September

  

I skipped all the coverage of the 9/11 commemorations today. The message seems to be “Never forget,” but what is it that we’re supposed to remember?

I remember 9/11 very well: the immediate realization, when the second plane hit, that this was no accident, the WTF moment when we heard the Pentagon was burning. I remember trying to get to WFMU to do my first show afterwards, and being turned back by NJ State Patrol officers until I figured out an alternate way into Jersey City. I remember insisting that Sluggo and Dog Baxter go with me to the station, because I did not want to be separated from them again … just in case. I don’t remember exactly what I said on that first show, but I know that one longtime Listener was so upset by it that I had the archive deleted. So now I never will know for sure, but I can’t imagine I expressed anything except bewilderment and deep anxiety. 

I remember seeing TV news reports—with video—of the small plane coming from the west, hitting the west side of the second tower, the man with the British accent describing it to the female reporter as a small plane, like a Piper Cherokee or Dakota. I haven’t looked for that footage on the 9/11 Television News Archive because I suspect it’s not there.

Like the TV archive, lots of information is suddenly appearing on this 10th Anniversary: the Marine Major who was in the command bunker under the White House when Robotic Lord Vice-President Cheney gave the order to shoot down Flight 93. (But then the passengers crashed the plane, so they didn’t have to shoot it down after all. >Whew!<) The “eyewitness video of the Flight 93 crash site,” released only now that the anonymous videographer has died—shot from a hilltop 15 miles away and showing some smoke on the other side of faraway trees. The audio of all but a big missing 30-minute chunk of FAA and NORAD recordings made that morning. The FBI explaining that they simply forgot to tell anyone about the wealthy Saudi family who, shortly before 9/11, disappeared without a trace, leaving their luxury home and all their luxury belongings—except for a computer and the contents of a safe— after meetings with Mohammad Atta. Do you remember how no airplanes were allowed to fly for days after the attacks? Do you remember reports that President Bush made an exception for a planeload of wealthy Saudis who wanted to return home? Because I do. I remember that.

We are supposed to Never Forget, but there are also things we are never supposed to remember. The former “Freedom Tower” is now “One World Trade Center” because, says Chris Ward, director of the Port Authority, the name Freedom Tower would be likely to recall “painful memories of the 9/11 attacks.” So, never forget that we were attacked, but just make sure you remember those events in a way that’s not, you know, in any way uncomfortable for you. The Port Authority and Mayor Bloomberg are working hard to “rebrand” Ground Zero. It’s the World Trade Center now—and don’t you forget it. 

The Cerberus of September from David Zung on Vimeo.

 Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.

 

It Takes a Nation of Billions - Adam Curtis' The Century Of The Self

By Scott Tienken

Watch more on Network Awesome (Plus the other 3 parts of this doc!)

Adam Curtis’ 2003 Documentary The Century of the Self  gets right to the business of reminding us what a mass of consumeristic sheep we have been molded into.

He provides us with the story of Edward Bernays(1), the nephew of Freud who adapted his uncle’s theories concerning animalistic drives and deeply-sunken baser motives for the purposes of propaganda and, far more pervasively, advertising and politics. We are relentlessly reminded of our tendency toward self-interest, vile competitiveness, shallowness, and weak-minded caprice.

This is not unfamiliar territory in that we’ve been reminded of our tendencies towards conformity, self-gratification, and egoistic drives well before Freudianism put the whammy on our way of thinking about ourselves. What makes this a very valuable document is that the level of conversation is a bit more

Alternative 3: The Hoax Behind The Conspiracy

By Tom Keiser

Watch More on Network Awesome

“It makes no sense. I mean, how can people just vanish off the face of the Earth in this day and age?”

In 1977, a conspiracy was hatched involving writers, actors, politicians, scientists, and Brian Eno. The British television series Science Report was about to be cancelled, and its scheduled April 1 finale gave the creators an opportunity to prank those who believed everything they saw on television, and those so skeptical of everything as to see conspiracies all over the place. The resulting program, Alternative 3, is a classic in fake news programming; The War Of The Worlds by way of the BBC’s 1957 spaghetti harvest hoax.

Alternative 3 is presented as an investigation, with an aborted episode of Science Report as the frame. Twenty-four people interviewed for a Science Report episode on Britain’s “brain drain” have gone missing, including three profiled before the introduction.  Over the next hour, further pieces of the puzzle are put into place, connecting the disappearances to the death of a prestigious astronomer, the drunk ravings of a former astronaut, and the theories of an early proponent of the climate change hypothesis, Dr. Carl Gerstein. Contemporary news events, such as the Tangshan earthquake and United Kingdom heatwave and drought in 1976, and the North American mega-blizzard of early 1977, hint at a more destructive event than even the producers of The Day After Tomorrow could have imagined.

[Excerpt from e-flux Journal] Hans Ulrich Obrist, In Conversation With Julian Assange, Part I

HUO: Do you have dreams for the future?

JA: Yes, many. I’ll tell you about one, which is interesting. Orwell’s dictum, “He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future,” was never truer than it is now. With digital archives, with these digital repositories of our intellectual record, control over the present allows one to perform an absolutely untraceable removal of the past. More than ever before, the past can be made to completely, utterly, and irrevocably disappear in an undetectable way. Orwell’s dictum came about as result of what happened in 1953 to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. That year, Stalin died and Beria fell out of favor. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia had a page and a half on Beria from before he fell out of favor, and it was decided that the positive description of Beria had to go. So, an addendum page was made and sent to all registered holders of this encyclopedia with instructions specifying that the previous page should be pasted over with the new page, which was an expanded section on the Bering Straight. However, users of the encyclopedia would later see that the page had been pasted over or ripped out—everyone became aware of the replacement or omission, and so we know about it today. That’s what Orwell was getting at. In 2008, one of the richest men in the UK, Nadhmi Auchi—an Iraqi who grew rich under one of Saddam Husain’s oil ministries and left to settle in the UK in the early 1980s—engaged in a series of libel threats against newspapers and blogs. He had been convicted of corruption in France in 2003 by the then magistrate Eva Joly in relation to the Elf Aquitaine scandal.

(read the rest...)