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This year, I saw two Independence Day-themed exhibits, of
which it would be easy to categorize one as real and one as not, except that,
technically, both are “real.” Or maybe one is just as much a figment of
meaning-projection as the other. I can’t decide.
The first display was at the New York Public Library, which
was showing an original draft of the Declaration of Independence, as
written by Thomas Jefferson, along with one of the original 14 copies of the
proposed Bill of Rights. Both these documents are extremely rare, and the
Library has never exhibited them together before. Because they're so fragile,
they were on display for only three days, July 1–3.
I went to see them after work on
Tuesday, when the library was open late, and stood in line for 45 minutes,
which was totally worth it. It’s hard to write about the experience without
sounding like a Frank Capra film. The crowd was large and diverse, and
noticeably respectful. Even standing in line, everybody was polite and patient,
which is something I don’t recall ever experiencing in an NYC queue before. The
crowd fanned out once we were admitted to the room where the documents were in
three displays: Jefferson's two-sheet (front and back) Declaration, sandwiched
in glass inside two separate vitrines, so you could read all four pages; and
the large, printed Bill of Rights (one of only 14 original copies known to
exist) laid on a slanted backing inside another, much larger display case. Even
though people were allowed to crowd around the displays at will, there was no
bad behavior that I saw: Everyone waited patiently for their turn and looked as
long as they liked.
The 1960’s Brazilian art movement, Tropicália, began as a youthful
challenge to convention, and fell into being a youthful rebellion
against an unjust and militaristic government. Like many musicians
around the world at the time (Bob Dylan, The Beatles), these ones found
themselves thrust into the center of the 60’s political activism
movement, whether they were willing or not.
Tropicália began as an art movement by young Brazilians of the 1960’s
to bring the musical and cultural offerings of their nation to the
world. As a result of this desire, musicians incorporated
non-traditional instruments into their native music, primarily guitars.
The common rock ‘n roll instrument was regarded by artists of the Bossa
Nova movement, and other traditional artists, as a cheapening of
Brazilian music. It showed a disregard for heritage, and the ‘true’
sounds of Brazil. It was this music that had to come up
Jimmy's little sister had it right when she exclaimed as they listened to an elaborate radio dramatization, "It must take an awful lot of work and -- and people to put on a show like that!". Jimmy himself remained unimpressed until he was reduced drastically in size by a manic and frightening anthropomorphous microphone and shown just how complicated and expensive the whole process really was.
Although this 16-page giveaway comic book put out by the National
Broadcasting Company in 1947 is mainly a puff piece hyping all of the amazing material that one could dial up for free at home on their radios, it also stands as a fairly accurate guide to NBC procedures at that time. Still, that evil little microphone character is just scary; no way around that. We even get a glimpse of the early television broadcasting setup from New York.
So let's go on a guided tour of the most sophisticated radio organization at that time, with loads of thrills, chills, adventures, and you might even learn something along the way! All as illustrated handsomely by Sam Glankoff, right after the jump!
You know how whenever anyone brings up the topic of US sonic
weapons and music torture, someone always says, “What do they do, just turn on
WFMU? Hahahahaha.” No? Maybe you hang out with smarter people than I do. On the
other hand, WFMU has always been a leader in the irritainment industry; some of
my favorite DJs, people I’ve been listening to for decades, do shows I’ve never been able to listen to all the way through.
So I got to wondering—what is on the
playlist when our government wants to break the will of its enemies? (“Enemies”
being defined in the broadest sense, of course, in that the term has included
US citizens minding their own business in their own homes.)
Manuel Noriega vs. Van
Halen: Noriega was Military Governor of Panama from 1984-89, when elections
were held with results he didn’t like. Also, he refused to help Oliver North
with the whole Nicaraguan Contra thing. (Noriega had been working with the CIA
since the 1950s.) Meanwhile, US troops stationed around the Panama Canal were conducting
a series of ludicrously named “operations,” and then a Marine Lieutenant got
killed, and then the US invaded, which was condemned as a flagrant violation of
international law by the UN. Noriega fled to the Vatican embassy in Panama City,
where US troops laid siege in Operation Nifty Package. (I am not kidding about
that name.) They stood around outside playing high-volume rock music,
specifically the Van Halen song “Panama.” A week later, Noriega surrendered.
Well, last time around, I shared a 1960's record brought to us by the right wing zealots over at Key Records, and that got me to thinking about this insane reel of tape I came across years and years ago, featuring the exceptionally obnoxious ramblings of Revilo P. Oliver. Mr. Oliver (who said that being named palindromically was a family tradition), was notable for being a white supremacist and a founding member of both the National Review and of The John Birch Society.
That's enough to peg him as a fringe-dweller right there, but Revilo (and I wish it was pronounced like "Revile" - a feeling which he inspires in me - but I think the accent is on the first syllable) later decided that 1960's American conservatism was just too liberal, and he joined the National Alliance - part of the National Socialist movement - that's right, Neo-Nazis.
The tape features two lengthy lectures, each about an hour long. His main focus seems to be on simply expressing a smug superiority, never really saying too much about what his beliefs are, but rather spewing insults, simplifying and misrepresenting the views of those he considers vermin (i.e. anyone who isn't Western, Caucasian, or who doesn't agree with him), and giving lengthy examples of idiocy on the part of specific individuals, which somehow are meant to indict everyone on the other side of whatever issue he's on about.
There is so much gold here, it's hard to know where to start, but I did find two statements quite telling. The first is when he just sort of states, as fact (and in passing) that the only civilization that matters is the one "that we, the white men of the Western Hemisphere, created". And the second is when he actually says, in reference to what he called the "baneful" effects of slavery, adds that the worst of these baneful effects were on the owners.
Hold on your hats, wigs and keys, ladies and gentlemen, and have a listen to a first class wacko, Dr. Revilo P. Oliver:
Listening to his rants, I find myself wondering - if ol' Revilo were still around today, would he realize that much of the progress that has been made over the last 30 years has been developed, improved and made ubiquitous by the more progressive humans of this era, and that many of the biggest problems on Earth during that period have come from the tyrants, the religiously intolerant and other representatives of the far right?
But then I think of Revilo P. Oliver's political descendants (in the Tea Party and their ilk), and recognize that even they have failed to perceive those developments - so I assume that Oliver wouldn't have noticed, either.
Today's WFMU Comics Supplement Section shines a light on an interesting find: the ninth issue of 'From Here to Insanity', the Charlton Comics answer to MAD magazine, originally published as the April 1955 edition. I had never seen famed composer and conductor Raymond Scott parodied in a comic book before, so this was a real shock when I stumbled upon it! In fact, this issue is full of music references, and I've included a single page feature and another short story from this same book, along with the featured tale which sends up the 'Plucky Strike Hiss Parade'.
The Hiss Parade yarn is bulging with 1955 pop culture references, most of them identifiable, but several that I can't quite put my finger on just who is being parodied, and I'm hoping our readers can help me out with those. Here in order of appearance is the group of players in this nutty story:
Our hero Raymond
Scat, who is easy enough to peg - I had never thought of his ears as being all that large (see photo), but people did look much different than in real life on camera in those earlier days of cruder transmission technology, and also the colorist made him a blonde, but did retain his mid-fifties flat-top look; the interviewer 'Dick Johnstown' - obviously drawn to resemble actor Jack Webb, but just whose name is being joked with I'm not sure; 'all-knight DJ Vary Grayface' - I don't have any idea on this one -but it's probably easy for someone with a better knowledge of 1950s DJs than me to identify; 'Spooky Lambsclub' (series regular Snooky Lanson); singer 'Dorothy Collars' - there's an easy one - Dorothy Collins, the regular singer on most seasons of the show and the wife of host Raymond Scott); 'Givesall McKillsme' - (another series stalwart- Gisele MacKenzie); 'Van Monotone' (love these names!) - no idea who he's supposed to be; an unbilled Lee Liberace sticks his mug in there for one panel; and in the third piece shown below, "What in the Heck is a Mambo?" we see Groucho Marx, who delivers a pointed MAD magazine reference and tells a character who says 'mad', "That was the lucky word!"
No writer credits (and this is some fudged-up 'humor' writing - those MAD imitators had their work cut out for them, the scripts in this book are almost completely incoherent), but the book was produced in the Al Fago studio (so he may well have had a hand in the writing), and the cover and single page feature were drawn by Fred Ottenheimer, who also drew for Charlton's other MAD clone "Eh!", and the two full-length stories were drawn by famed 1950s-1960s comic book artist Dick Ayers.
Let's take a look at this odd and insane magazine right after the jump!
It’s hard to imagine how the studio pitch forHeil Honey I’m Home! went beyond ‘Picture it: It’s the 1930s and Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun are living in their Berlin apartment/American suburbia home. But they keep getting into zany situations because they can’t seem to get along with their Jewish neighbors, the Goldensteins! (Pause for overenthusiastic chuckles)Any post-WWII audience is gonna love it!’ Really, it’s hard to imagine even getting there, but the British Satellite Broadcasting channel Galaxy went so far as to create an entire series around the premise. Yes, I said series. The world would never know the extent of Heil Honey I’m Home!, however, since the show was cancelled after the first episode aired in 1990. Who’s surprised?
The basic plot of the first (and only) episode to see the light of day takes place around the 1938 German annexation of the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, though this is largely just an odd backdrop to Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun’s domestic issues. Neville Chamberlain does make an appearance, a fact Hitler tries to hide from his “meddling” blatantly stereotypical Jewish neighbors. Of course, the Goldensteins find out because Eva (read: women) can’t keep secrets and so they pop over to meet Chamberlain and set him up with their frumpy teenage niece. Eva Braun’s plan to get the Goldensteins out of their hair before the Chamberlain visit is to get them knocked-out drunk and “bundle them back to their
“Once in a great while, a natural phenomenon occurs that is so beautiful, so dramatic, it overshadows everything else. Sergio Valente has created a phenomenon the whole world will be watching: Sergio Valente black denim jeans. They’re more than beautiful. They’re out of sight.” This is the narration for a Sergio Valente denim ad in the jeans collection. The voiceover is so deeply impassioned. The slowly-revolving pan shots around a backlit, denim-clad behind are so intensified. The tight shots of tight asses are so all encompassing. The ad is dramatic to the point that it must be hyperbole. But you can tell that it’s actually in earnest. And the funny thing is that behind the inflated language, there’s a grain of truth to the ad. Jeans have become an unstoppable phenomenon in the world of fashion and apparel. The ubiquity of jeans has become so universal that they are almost hidden in plain view. The phenomenon really is "out of sight."
Anthropologists Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward of the Global Denim Project consider the global denim phenomenon a perfect example of the “blindingly obvious.” The sheer scale of denim’s presence has made us take that presence for granted. In Miller and Woodward’s estimation, in the majority of countries in the world, the majority of people on any given day are wearing jeans. With the exception of rural areas in China and South Asia, Miller found that when he stopped and counted the first 100 people to walk by, about 50 percent of the population wore jeans everywhere from Brazil to India, from Turkey to the
Last fall, Listener Mindwrecker wrote a fabulous post exploring the wonders of the 1960's far-right record label known as Key Records. I read it with great interest, because I've always picked up records on the Key label when they've crossed my past. They never fail to entertain, and can often inspire both a laugh and a touch of horror, within a few moments of each other.
I bet I have close to a dozen Key releases down in my "spoken word" section, in the basement, of which my favorite, and yet also the most depressing, may well be the one Mindwrecker already shared, by Walter Brennan.
But here another prime example, an album featuring a speech by Dan Smoot, publisher of The Smoot Report, in which he extols the virtues of Mr. D. B. Lewis, who was a manufacturer of pet foods. (Smoot, it would seem, was a true believer. Not only was he associated with the Birchers, I learn from Wikipedia that he later went on to oppose George H.W. Bush's candidacy for the U.S. Senate on the grounds that Bush's positions were essentially those of a Democrat!)
It's amazing to hear, in this speech, which took place at some point during the run-up to the 1964 election, the same rhetoric, the same ideas, and in places, close to the same slogans, as those espoused in recent years by members of the tea party and its offshoots. Time, it's sad to say, doesn't do away with all bad ideas - "those who cannot remember the past..." and all that, I guess.
If anyone is interested, there could certainly be more Key Records mayhem to come!
With North Korea in the news almost every day recently, I thought it was high time to revisit the box of tapes I first wrote about in September of 2011, the tapes from a Lieutenant Colonel stationed at an Army hospital in Korea, in 1954, to a family member in New Jersey. You can read the brief introduction to the tapes in that post, here.
And now that my beloved reel to reel machine has returned from several weeks in the electronic hospital, I can continue the Reel-to-Reel catacombs series, and this seemed like a natural place to resume. Today's two offerings are both from a short time before the July, 1954 tapes offered up in the previous episode, specifically from March 20th and May 25th (the latter starts with a moment of music, which ends quickly).
I suspect that his machine was running slow as he recorded the tape on March 20th, as his voice sounds much higher upon playback during that tape than it does on any of the other tapes.
These tapes don't offer any great insight into the Korean conflict, which had ended its "hot" phase the previous year, but there are a few references to current events - most interestingly, perhaps, a story about a sudden change in the currency being used where he is stationed, and the likely reason for it - in the midst of more everyday comments such as movie nights and references to friends and family. But all the while, the speaker, who calls himself "your Bill", remains a fascinating and entertaining man to listen to.
Almost undoubtedly, there are other tapes from before, after and in between the dates of these tapes, as well - until I have listened to all of them, I won't know for sure what time period they cover, and there are a bunch more to go. As I said before, if there is interest, I'll be happy to share more of these tapes in the future.
In todays Comics Supplement we'll learn a bit about the early years of synchronized film sound and we'll find out about the USA's favorite fiddler (in 1947 at least).
About all that we know about the featured TRUE Comics is that they were produced as a subsidiary to Parents' Magazine, which was edited at the time by Clara Savage Littledale (about whom there is more information here, and also over here). The books themselves were edited by Harold C. Field, and art-directed by Ralph O. Ellsworth. Artists and writers were not credited (although a frequent writer for the series was Louis Wolfe, so he may well have scribed these two stories). They are fun books, and well-produced, though.
Let's check out excerpts from two issues of the 1940s right after the jump-!
One word you should know when watching “Onibaba” is “bukufu.” The word is Japanese, but I promise if you search it you won’t have to clear your history. I’ll save you the trouble though (in case you’re afraid to look it up), and tell you that “bukufu” originally referred to the tent or housing of a military General or Shogunate. Later, during the Kamakura, very brief Kenmu and longer Muromachi period (the film takes place at the beginning of this period) “…it came to mean the seat of the Shogunal Military Government; later, all forms of military government.”
Hachi, one of the three main characters, returns as a warrior deserter. He references the two warring sides in the battle for land and power. Kusunoki Masahige fought for Emperor Go-Daigo and his Court against Shogunate Ashikaga, who fought for the (as he felt, “marginalized”) warrior class. Both sides seemed to be hard up for fighters as Hachi says he was offered the opportunity to live after capture as long as he
Carrier Belleuse Pierre La Maison De Musique (Public Domain)
This April, WFMU and the Free Music Archive are challenging artists everywhere to create new recordings and contemporary arrangements of historic compositions available in the public domain. We’re calling this our Revitalize Music Contest.
To inspire entries, we’ve handpicked a selection of out-of-copyright songs with compelling lyrics, beautiful melodies, and unusual stories. Keep in mind that unless materials are listed in our contest repository, the recordings of performances we link to are still within the scope of copyright. After learning about the songs and contest rules here below, you can browse our pool of entries and submit your own here.
An old Mormon hymn with a beautiful melody that first came to our attention when Haruomi Hosono (of Yellow Magic Orchestra) recorded a version. You can stream this version for inspiration. It features lyrics by Jeremiah E. Rankin (1828-1904) and music by William G. Tomer (1833-1896).
In addition to showing up constantly on TV, movies, and when you open musical jewelry boxes, this song has been recorded by Bing Crosby, Roy Orbison, and (our personal favorite) Justine and the Victorian Punks. It was originally a parlor song by Stephen Foster (1826–1864) that was published posthumously by Wm. A. Pond & Co. of New York.
A comic song that was performed by Al Jolson in his show The Honeymoon Express. It's also notably been sung by "outsider" musician Tony Mason-Cox, an Australian insurance agent who believed himself to be the reincarnation of a black slave from 19th Century Alabama. It was written by Billy Merson.
Felix Arndt (1889–1918) wrote this novelty ragtime-style piano roll as an engagement gift to his fiancée (and later wife), Nola Locke. He died just three years after it was published, and lyrics were later added by James F. Burns.
One winning song from our pool of entries will be given a Rebecca Black "Friday" treatment. We’ll be hiring a music video professional to create an original music video that showcases the winning song and shares it with a wider audience.
Our judges include Edward Guo (Founding Director, IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library), April Ledbetter (Dust-to-Digital Record Company), Laura Cantrell (Singer-Songwriter), Joel Meyer (Executive Producer, WNYC's Soundcheck), Adam Green (Editor, Public Domain Review) and Ken Freedman (Station Manager, WFMU). They'll be evaluating entries based on originality, creativity, artistic merit, adherence to the "Revitalize Music" theme, and general musical appeal. For the songs we’ve chosen above, we welcome exact covers, in-exact covers, repurposed elements, mashups, stems, and everything in-between.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Entries should be comprised of music that you create yourself, material that's in the public domain, or other material that you have express permission to use. Keep in mind that most recordings and performances of these public domain songs are still within the scope of copyright.
Entrants must create accounts on the Free Music Archive in order to submit to the contest. This way we have your info. You can sign up here.
Entries must be in the form of an audio recording and in MP3 format, stereo bitrate 192kbps or higher (256kbps preferred).
Entries must be submitted using our form here. You can submit as many entries as you'd like.
Songs enter the public domain when their copyright expires or if the song’s author has forfeited rights and dedicated the song to the greater good. The Public Domain Review explains the public domain eloquently as an "invaluable and indispensable good, which - like our natural environment and our physical heritage - deserves to be explicitly recognized, protected and appreciated."
MORE ABOUT CC0
While most songs enter the public domain because of old age, Creative Commons offers a CC0 Public Domain Declaration that allows artists to dedicate their work to the public domain. It seems fitting that entries to the contest will breathe new life into the Public Domain by returning to whence they came. These new works can then be more easily shared, remixed, and built upon during the contest and after the contest ends. We imagine these entries being used in video projects, coursework, video games, podcasts, and beyond.
Using CC0, you waive all copyrights and related or neighboring rights that you have over your work, such as your moral rights (to the extent waiveable), your publicity or privacy rights, rights you have protecting against unfair competition, database rights, and rights protecting the extraction, dissemination, and reuse of data. More information here.
SOLAR (Sound of Los Angeles Records) was THE hottest R&B label of the late 1970s and mid-‘80s. Rivaled only by NYC’s Salsoul Records, SOLAR successfully bridged the delicate gap between disco and funk during a period where both genres were struggling to find an identity in the post-Carter/pre-Reagan administrations. Buoyed by bouncy rhythm tracks and appregioed synths, SOLAR’s Jheri curl-slick music embodied L.A.’s hip (and stratified) cultural identity. From backyard boogies in Compton to roller-skating jams at WeHo’s Flippers, SOLAR kept the City of Angels – as well the world – dancing on sunshine.
SOLAR dawned in the mind of Dick Griffey. A music industry heavy with a keen interest in Black entrepreneurship, Griffey launched the label in the summer of ‘77 as an outlet to foster underrepresented talent in the record business. The early artist roster included Shalamar, The Whispers and Carrie Lucas,
Occam’s Razor teaches us that the simplest answer is usually the correct one, but try telling that to a dedicated conspiracy theorist. It’s not that life isn’t complicated, or that crazy things don’t happen, but a simple explanation (Oswald Shot Kennedy, a weather balloon crashed at Roswell) is mathematically far more likely than one involving vast sinister cabals and little green men. The persistent tabloid-fueled belief that Elvis Presley did not in fact die on August 16, 1977 is no different. The simple explanation for what happened that day is that years of stress, health problems and raging pill addiction finally caught up with the iconic rock star in the form of a massive heart attack in his Memphis bathroom. The complicated explanation could, honestly, be just about anything (time-travelling ninjas), but the most commonly circulated is the one put forth in the amazing 1990 home video The Elvis Files, that Presley’s “death” was actually an elaborate hoax perpetrated, kind of half-assedly, by the United States government.
The hour-long special is hosted by none other than Bill Bixby, best remembered for playing Bruce Banner to Lou Ferrigno’s Incredible Hulk on the late 70s/early 80s TV series (technically, he played “David Banner”, they changed it because CBS thought “Bruce” was too gay). Bixby was a natural choice for the job since he had actually starred alongside Presley in two of his movies, 1967’s Clambake and1968’s Speedway, and
"It started in a barber shop in Warren, Ohio..." Today we meet the methodical man who spurned cooked-up publicity feuds and gimmicks and made a sensation with only his pipes and his handsome five-foot nine-inch, 160-pound cleft-chinned self.
You'll guess soon enough who beat Crosby, Sinatra, and even Dick Haymes in the Billboard polls during the month of this issue of Picture News, issue #2, from February 1946 (artist and writer unknown).
We'll also learn about the wacky DJ from Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey who insults his radio sponsors on the air every morning - and they love it!
All this excitement awaits in our sixth Comic Supplement Section here at BOTB, come and join us right after the jump!
We're thrilled to collaborate with Awesome Tapes From Africa this
weekend to present the most interesting and inventive collection
of African videos this side of Khartoum. Guest curator Brian
Shimkovitz culls from his deep knowledge of African music to deliver collections of African TV commercials, Pop Music of Pre-War Somalia, even the outrageous 2002 film, "Sharon Stone" - a classic Nollywood drama about an overly ambitious woman willing to do anything to make it to the top.
Of course the mainstay of Awesome Tapes From Africa is incredible music and here's an ocean of amazing music captured on
over-saturated film and video. He elaborates about the Live Music Show above:
"It doesn't get any better than this! The music of Sudan is as varied as
the country is large (as Africa's largest country, it's about the size
of America's Midwest). Over the years the traditional sounds have seeped
into popular music, as shown by Sudan's many TV stations. Watch some
classic gems from a small selection of Sudan's most revered artists.
Explore the web using Google Translate to help with the Arabic names and
discover tons more where this came from"
Congressional Republican economy terrorists have been
holding the country hostage for a while now—Sequester! Fiscal Cliff! Debt
Ceiling! Meet All Our Crazypants Demands or We’ll Blame Obama!—and people who
don’t enjoy negotiating with terrorists have been looking for a way around
dealing with them. How can we keep paying our bills if there’s no money in the
bank? Well, one obvious way would be to print some more money.
Technically, the Government can’t print more money, but the Federal Reserve can. (They are not the same thing
and if you don’t know this, that is because you are not a nutbucket conspiracy
theorist like me. Most normal people do not know how the Fed works.) BUT: Back
in 2011, a Constitutional law professor at Yale started talking about an idea
to take advantage of the one way in which the Government can mint more money: commemorative coins! The Secretary of the
Treasury is allowed (31 USC § 5112!) to strike platinum
coins in any denomination. So all the Secretary of the Treasury has to do is to
mint two one-trillion-dollar platinum coins, deposit them with the Federal
Reserve, and hey presto! It’s all good. (And go to hell, Repubican
economy terrorists.)
The trillion-dollar-coin idea started being talked up again
a couple months ago, as the Sequester approached, and it was even endorsed by
some Celebrity Economists, but in the end Jacob Lew was confirmed as the new
Secretary of the Treasury and even if he tried to issue The Coin, no one can
read his handwriting and the Treasury would probably just issue a couple of
platinum Slinkys instead.
Still, I do believe we could apply the trillion-dollar-coin principle
to raising money to support WFMU.
When Former Cohost Jay and I decided to
produce our own Thunk Tank currency (the Bieb, the official currency of
Iceland!) we discovered that it is illegal for anyone but the Government to
issue specie (coins), but anyone can issue paper money. (So we did.)
Why should we continue with the annual Marathon and the Record Fair and the
Secret Off-Air October fundraiser and the Superstorm Sandy Wrecked the Station
Special Appeal and Station Manager Ken in a Lawn Chair Attached to Weather Balloons, going back to the Listeners for their support again and again, just because
we’re a Listener-Supported station? (And God bless the Listeners, they have been
fantastic!)
All Station Manager Ken has to do is issue a 1-milion Bieb
note (which trades at a rate of 1 Bieb to 1 US dollar), deposit the note in the
WFMU bank account, and then pay all our bills! (Or just deposit 10,000 100-Bieb
notes, because I think there are plenty of them lying around the station from Thunk
Tank’s overproduced Marathon premiums.) Assuming the bank that has the WFMU
bank account will accept it for deposit, which maybe they will not.
Alas, the one- trillion-dollar coin is not to be. The main
problem seems to have been that it would have called attention to the fact that
our entire economy is based on the fiction of fiat currency and debt. So I will
never be able to add the Biden Commemorative $1 trillion dubloon to my
collection, and I also still have never got a Guam quarter, either, so what’s
up with that? You can still use your Federal Reserve-issued currency to support WFMU, though, so go to wfmu.org and make your pledge now.
Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and thanks for supporting WFMU.
Gamera was both a reaction to, and a reflection of, the genre Godzilla1 created. For better or worse, Gamera also helped shape the future of giant monsters (or kaiju2).
The character was supposedly created from a vision of a turtle in the
clouds on an airplane flight by Daiei Motion Picture Company president
Masaichi Nagata. But, it is just as likely an attempt by Daiei to get on
the bandwagon created by Toho’s giant monster over a decade earlier.
Nonetheless, “whether or not you think Godzilla is better, you simply
cannot deny that Gamera has successfully survived…to arrive at the point
that he is at today.”3 However crass and commercial the
intentions may have been in its creation, Gamera carved out its own
niche as a unique, unusual cultural icon.
Daiei studios first attempt at a giant monster movie was a
rear-projection based, Bert I. Gordon-esque, giant rat movie called “A
Swarm of Beasts,” which was scrapped. Nagata’s turtle idea was taken up,
and the decision was made to go with the Godzilla-like method of a man
in a suit, certainly helped by “the fact that men in suits are
infinitely easier to control than live rats.”4
The first Gamera film in 1965 is very much like the original 1954
Godzilla: a serious reflection on the toll nature can take when provoked
by man. “But even here, at the beginning, we can see his creators at
Daiei
Today let's learn about the song that killed! Not just
on the charts but really killed them dead, in several countries even.
I've had records that killed parties and DJ sets, but I generally avoid pieces that actually do murder.
Who composed this gem? What was the piece? All this and more (including how RIPLEY's caused 'The Star-Spangled Banner' to become our National Anthem) - right after the jump! And don't worry - there's no mp3 files or sheet music to accidentally kill you - WFMU wants you back at the blog for more future amusements!
