WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Numismaticism Update: 2013 Marathon Fundraising Edition

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.

 

 

WFMU's 2013 Marathon is coming your way!

WFMU's 2013 Marathon is approaching! Our annual on-air fundraising party hits your ears March 4th - 17th. Make a pledge now!

Check out our new 2013 swag, featuring two new t-shirts ("Alley Cat" design by Gary Panter, and "Radio Zombies" design by Mayuko Fujino), a truckload of new DJ Premiums, and more!

All new and current Swag for Life members are eligible to receive our new messenger bag, and early pledgers get first dibs on adopting a WFMU DJ or fixture!

Yo La Tengo will be playing cover song requests in exchange for pledges on Thursday, March 14th (9am-noon) on Hello Children with Faye and co-host Gaylord Fields, and WFMU's Hoof & Mouth Sinfonia close out the Marathon on Sunday March 17th with drunken live band karaoke.

Don't miss out on our biggest on-air bash of the year!

WFMU Benefit in New Orleans tonight!

Calling all WFMU fans in the Crescent City and environs! WFMU pals Euclid Records, WWOZ, WTUL, and a bunch of fabulous bands are hosting a benefit event on our behalf at Siberia (2227 Claude St, New Orleans) TONIGHT!

Quintron & Miss Pussycat
Die Rotzz
Guitar Lightnin' Lee
and more!

Hurricane Sandy caused tons of electrical damage to our equipment, and proceeds from this show will fund WFMU's efforts to prevent future electrical problems. We hope to purchase generators, power conditioners, etc.

Huge thanks to our supportive friends in New Orleans!

 

Check out this video of Quintron and Miss Pussycat to get pumped:

 

Walter Brennan's "He's Your Uncle! Not Your Dad..." (part two) and Vick Knight and the KEY Records Story

 

"A fella in the lobby asked me if we were going to record this album in stereo. I told him absolutely not. Stereo has two loudspeakers, one on each side of the set.  The one on the right is OK, but I refuse to listen to anything coming from the left.    Seriously though, if I brought home a record machine with a speaker on the left, my wife wouldn't let me in the house.  Now there's a patriot for you!"

(from side two of "He's Your Uncle!")

Today we're presenting side two of this bizarre ultra-right-wing album from 1967, luridly written and directed by Vick Knight and voiced with gusto by Walter Brennan, in continuation of the first post on this subject two weeks ago. Since then I've tried to uncover more information about the KEY records label and its strong predilection towards hyper-conservative and inflammatory spoken-word albums. Join me after the jump for this entertaining record (via mp3) and the related facts and pictures that have turned up about this under-documented Los Angeles company.

"He's Your Uncle! Not Your Dad..." By Walter Brennan

 

I had an itch to post this during the final weeks of the presidential race, but due to the record's rather hateful (but hilarious) far-right conservative script (as read by one of my record-collecting faves Walter Brennan) I elected to wait and see how the chips fell before I dove in.  Since the reptilian/humanoid candidate lost we'll now present side one of this rare little gem. Again, one of those discs that I've been DJ'ing bits of for a LONG time and I'm glad to share it in its entirety (well, side one this time anyhoo).

   As written by Vick Knight in the early 1960's for Key Records (who I'd like to know more about), it spends two full sides tearing down the LBJ administration and its 'terribly destructive' policies carried over from the Kennedy years. I got quite a shock when I first bought this and heard Mr. Good-Time Ol' Farmer Guy using his normal voice for a change and ripping savagely into anything remotely resembling liberal government policies. The stark cover also struck me as quite attractive as well.

  Both sides of the lp are continuous, so I broke it into eight parts when I ripped it to digital years ago, for easier DJ'ing and listening. So buckle up and hear a side of Mr. Brennan that you may not have heard before.

Side One pt. 1           pt. 2           pt. 3           pt.4

WFMU's 31 Days of October Going Strong

This week, WFMU launched into silent fundraiser mode with our 31 Days of October campaign, and it is going strong! In an effort to pay our bills without resorting to a second pledge drive, we decided it was better to come up with a month of incredible on-air specials, listener meet-ups, and events (while taking pledges online and through the mail).

Pledge right here!

This fall, we are offering some great new swag: our Turntable T-shirt designed by Nick Dewar, and a compilation of holiday music called "WFMU's War on Christmas" (CD + MP3 disc) with cover artwork by Mayuko Fujino.

Do not miss out on the holiday compilation, it contains an exclusive unreleased mix of "Jesus Christ" by Big Star, plus tracks by James Pants, Klaus Nomi, the Reigning Sound, and more!

Putin Summer Retrospective

As befits the future Savior of Humanity (or at least the Savior of Blonde Russian Gymnasts in the Duma), Vladimir Putin has been extremely busy this past summer. One of his major tasks has involved recruiting new members of the Putin Pals, his protective managerie of super-powered animal agents. Thunk Tank Cohost Jay and I often wondered why it was that the Putin Pals did not have any bird members, when their primary mission will be to defeat the insect forces of MANTIS. How is it that Putin would recruit a Were-Whale before he’d got even one bird? (Anuka, the Flying Donkey, does not count as a bird, because: Legs. Hooves. Hair. Mammal.) Naturally, the Leader was just waiting until the time was ripe, and this summer he finally judged time to be squooshy and soft enough to unveil his Craneforce. Dressing in the uniform of a Crane Obergruppenfuhrer—sort of a white hazmat jumpsuit with weird black goggles—Putin jumped aboard Craneforce One and led the baby cranes on skywriting maneuvers high in the sky above Moscow, where they wrote “Surrender, Pussy Riot!” in smoke, and also in Russian, not English. And Cyrillic. Cyrillic letters are really hard to make in smoke, but of course Putin enjoys the challenge.

Sportsy Talk: Olympics Update!

Mitt Romney, former head of bribery-ridden Salt Lake City Olympics 2002, started off his Big World Diplomacy Tour (Three Whole Other Countries!) by pissing off his first hosts so much that the Prime Minister of England dissed him in public. Score!

Just because the London Games have involved social cleansing, Brand Police,  a ban on fish and chips without the fish, strikes, threatened strikes, security failures, rooftop rocket launchers, a battleship in the Thames, official mascots with security camera eyes that “record everything,"  a logo that looks like a sex act, the worst font ever of the 21st Century, empty seats, insulting flags, inappropriate remarks about beach volleyball, and badminton scandals, it doesn’t mean they’re not, you know, well-organized.

Then there was the Opening Ceremony. You’d think Mittens would have liked that Opening Ceremony, with its salute to the Poors Who Knew Their Place back in the England of the Industrial Revolution. The part he probably would not have liked was the part we didn’t get to see here in the US—the tribute to the victims of the 7/7 attacks. London won the right to host the 2012 Olympics on July 6, 2005, and on the next day terrorists detonated four bombs on London subways and a bus, killing 52 non-terrorists and wounding 700. The two events are linked in people’s minds, and the ceremony featured a moving version of the hymn “Abide with Me” sung by Emeli Sande, and a dance choreographed by Akram Khan. I couldn’t figure out why NBC cut this part of the program to run some stupid interview with Ryan Seacrest and Michael Phelps—which they reran the other night!— because I thought the point of American news media was to keep us in a constant state of fear about terrorism, and wouldn’t a tribute to terror victims help with that? But then the next day NBC said they cut the tribute because it “wasn’t tailored for the US audience.” So now I know that the main goal of American media isn’t to keep us frightened, it’s to keep us ignorant.

Here's the censored part of the ceremony:

 

MP3 - A Crash Course, guest post by Jonathan Sterne

Today, there are more mp3s in circulation than all other recording formats combined. This alone would be cause to write a book about them, but I became fascinated with mp3s because of how they are made. An mp3 encoder uses a mathematical model of the gaps and absences in human hearing to remove some of the data in an audio file, in order to make it smaller. If the encoder “thinks” you won’t hear part of a sound recording, it yanks it out on the encoding end, so that the resulting mp3 file is smaller, and therefore easier to transmit over data lines or to stockpile on hard drives and flash memories.

I wanted to know where this model of human hearing came from and what it could tell us about our contemporary sonic culture. The result is my new book, MP3:The Meaning of a Format.

The technology behind the mp3 is called “perceptual coding,” and I quickly discovered it has deep connections to the development of hearing science and telecommunications over the last hundred years. Everything we think we know about hearing in the state of nature is a result of the interactions between ears and media in the 20th century.

MP3s also point to the importance of compression in the development of communication technologies. Each generation of new media is usually sold to consumers as being of higher definition and greater verisimilitude than its predecessor (think of how DVDs and Blu-Ray have been marketed, for instance). But developments in compression and lower-definition transmission are equally important for everything from telegraphs, to telephones, to color television, to satellite transmission to the internet. This other history is less apparent because it is manifest inside our hard drives, and inside the massive infrastructures that allow us to move data around. It is not as shiny or sexy as the latest consumer gadget, but it could well be more important for everything from aesthetics to policy.

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!

 

 

Print Fiction

Print Fiction is an online exhibition curated by artist Michael Alfred Seibert.

Jayne and Jackie!

I had the pleasure of speaking with Jayne County on my program on Thursday; she hit the stage at Bowery Electric on Thursday for the Max's Kansas City Alumni Reunion shows (which goes on through Sunday). Check the archive for the interview. I heard that Jayne might be at La Mama before her much anticipated Max's reunion performance, so it was off to the Ellen Stewart Theatre first! The La Mama show was- Jukebox Jackie: Snatches of Jackie Curtis -an exhilarating collage performance containing elements of the Warhol star's life; poetry, film snippets, songs and great vignettes. The final performance is on June 10th. With a killer cast: Justin Vivian Bond, Bridget Everett, Cole Escola and Steel Burkhardt, the production was a huge pleasure to take in. Jayne County did indeed grace the theatre-goers with her rendition of Max's Kansas City, as seen here as an encore to the show. She was gone in the blink of an eye (aye aye!) as soon as the show was done, and was soon to get onstage with her alma mater, so to speak, the Max's Kansas City Alumni Reunion show. The shows run all weekend at Bowery Electric, check their site for scheduled shows!

 

 

WFMU auctions off original Max Tundra album art and more!

Thanks to a generous donation from glitch-pop superstar Max Tundra, WFMU has the original album artwork for his fantastic 2002 release "Mastered by Guy at the Exchange"... and we're auctioning it off on eBay!

The painting is by Dando Moore, and measures a little bit larger than 12" square.

We're also selling off a few rare records:

The Wozard of Iz LP- 1968 hippie parody of the Wizard of Oz, by Mort Garson & Jacques Wilson.

Arto / Neto "Pini, Pini" 12" single - no wave from Arto Lindsay and Seth Tillet, released on Ze Records in 1978.

Get on over to WFMU's eBay page and start bidding!

 

 

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

The Heretic Children Of The God Emperor of Dune Messiah

A strange coincidence when you are writing about someone, up against a deadline, and they die. No time to go back and make it a memorial, no point in going forward with what would now be an obsolete piece. A stranger coincidence in that the now never-completed post was to be about a never-completed project of Jean "Moebius" Giraud, the legendarily failed film collaboration with Alejandro Jodorowsky: Dune.
What follows is a free-imagining of a re-imaginging of the negated future of that impossible past:

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

10 Seconds from Every Top-100 Song Ever + A Free Cut-up Software!

1959 | 1960 | 1961 | 1962 | 1963 | 1964 | 1965 | 1966 | 1967 | 1968 | 1969 | 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 | 1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011

In 1959, Billboard began releasing their annual charts of the top 100 songs of each year.  Here are mp3s with 10 seconds of every single top 100 song ever.  Follow the lists along with the music on this site.  There are some errors here, so bear with me and do point out major imperfections in the comments.  If you've been following my column in the past, all of these mp3s are improved versions, with crossfades in between tracks and smarter choices of clips.

I produced these supercuts with a software that Frederic Cornu and I developed together.  Fred is a genius and I'm eternally grateful to him.  This software is VERY SIMPLE to use and 100% FREE.  It simply takes a music playlist of your choice (from iTunes or a similar program), finds the loudest point of each song and stitches all the songs together.  These supercuts are useful to condense information and I think they're totally beautiful too.

In a few minutes, you can easily make supercuts of your music collection, even if you are a luddite.  Download the file below, unzip the folder and click "Run Supercut-O-Matic"...there'll be a button to press in the program to give you further instructions.

UPDATE!  You can get improved versions of the Supercut-O-Matic at this link.  The new version gives you more options, such as changing the size of each clip, the crossfade, and more!

Download Supercut-O-Matic for Mac (2mb zip file)

Download Supercut-O-Matic for Windows (3mb zip file)

Source code for Linux

Once you've made your files, send them to me (contact info is provided in the program's helpme file) and I will release YOUR MUSIC on a CD!  Do you have a completist collection of yodeling music, blues singers, minimal-synth, presidential speeches or tuba solos?  Use Supercut-O-Matic and SEND ME THE RESULTS!  Please do contact me with any feedback.

"Supercuts Supercut", a CD with the best submissions I get, is available to anybody who pledges $75 or more to my radio show in the current WFMU fundraising marathon!  Use the widget below to pledge to the greatest radio station on the planet and help us broadcast for another year.  Also, if you pledge $30 or more to my show, I will remix a top 100 song of your choice LIVE on the air.

WFMU's 2012 Marathon begins next week!

WFMU's 2012 Marathon is approaching! Our annual on-air party throws down Feb 20th - Mar 4th.

Check out the new 2012 swag, featuring our Biker T-shirt designed by Lightning Bolt's Brian Chippendale (left), a truckload of new DJ Premiums, and more!

Pledge early to get our Vintage WFMU Pack or a Prize Account. Early pledgers also get first dibs on adopting a WFMU DJ or fixture!

Yo La Tengo will be playing cover song requests in exchange for pledges on Friday, March 2nd (9pm-mid) on Pseu Braun's show with co-host Gaylord Fields, and WFMU's Hoof & Mouth Sinfonia close out the Marathon on Sunday March 4th with drunken live band karaoke. Don't miss out on our biggest on-air bash of the year!

 

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.