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I went to St Louis for the Old School Tattoo Expo, where world renowned tattooer Lyle Tuttle celebrated his 80th birthday; here's a photo of his cake (it's the Frisco Flyer tattoo machine that he made and made famous). The highlight of the weekend, aside from reconnecting with Lyle and other great friends in the business for me- was the visit a few of us made to the 10 story City Museum there. A cross between the works of Antoni Gaudi and Mad Max, it's an amazing playground created for the most part, from junk! There was a ferris wheel on the roof, alongside the praying mantis dome, and on the same level was a schoolbus that was perched precariously with 2 wheels hanging off the roof for patrons to explore. There were slides on every floor; nope, not visual slides; the kind you plant your ass on and tumble down! One was a 10 story spiral slide, not unlike the style that comes to mind when referring to water parks. All types of sculpture and found object placement that was delightful, including an area with discarded architectural features - lions and gargoyles and lampposts, oh my! There is a section called the Enchanted Caves, which looked just like it sounded. Part of the museum had an aquarium within it; stocked with turtles and catfish, completely accessible if you wanted to pluck a turtle out of the water and walk around with him, you could! The aquarium (pictured left) was part of the maze of walk through/get lost in sculpture that made up the majority of the ground floor. I may not be describing it accurately, mostly because that's a difficult task; The City Museum defies categorization, which is a breath of fresh air this day and age. There's also a couple of bars, a smoothie joint and a thrift store within the museum's expanse, not to mention the fuselage of an airplane, a series of monkey bars that stretches countless yards, animal sculptures made of gears, a castle turret and more.
No words can really convey what goes on there; the photos featured after the jump will do some of the inventiveness and beauty of it justice, and the real experience can only be yours if you visit. Yes. It's an experiential kind of place. Show up in sneakers!
My favorite mad scientist and theoretician of electronic music, Goodiepal, has a new rant up for download. I'd also recommend checking out this BOTB post from several years ago with an amazing video lecture - this was actually what initially hipped yours truly to that which is the Gaeoudjiparl. It can take a while to digest his sometimes absurd theories, but I really do believe there's a lot of substantial and helpful thoughts on artmaking contained within that nutty brain.
A number of weeks ago, I was contacted by my friend Roderic, who plays in the Hydra Head band KNUT, for a quote about how different NYC is since 9/11 from an artist's point of view. He works for Swiss publication Le Courrier, and I thought it would be interesting to contribute to foreign language media. Here is the article for anyone curious. This past Friday, the issue came up again, but in a different way. I ran into good friend and local maniac Zenametal; curator of Zena Metal Wants to Conquer the World blog among other things. It was lunchtime on a crowded corner of Canal St., and we both were happy at the turn of events that led us to almost literally bump into each other. She works nearby and was donning fashionable duds for the office, and I wasn't looking too shabby myself. We talked for about 25 minutes, and in that time, the same gentleman approached us several times to vend what I thought he termed "dime bags". At some point I made a comment to her, since we were both looking so damn sophisticated I couldn't imagine he couldn't find anyone else in the throngs of people on a sunny Friday more suited to vend "dime bags" to. Zena, working near that section of Canal St., set me straight. In a quick debriefing, I realized that I heard "dime bag" - an old, almost expected way I had of listening to people mumbling towards me on the street. She let me in on the real words he was uttering: "diamonds, bags!" Oh! Well that sort of elevates us to tourist trash looking for a cheap but expensive looking bargain! I hadn't even noticed it was bootleg bag and bling central there. And I thought he thought we were scum! Still not buying, but a little less confused, I then saw that she was in fact, not toting a pocketbook on her lunch break, which was probably a good reason we were being hounded, not because we looked like we wanted to get stoned. So I'm really comparing from a much earlier time than 9/11; but it is interesting to notice that the things being whispered about on streetcorners are handbags, not dime bags any longer.
Long term listeners of WFMU may remember Dorian's long-running interview shows The Speakeasy or The Green Room. These days Dorian is running The Secret Science Club, which is a science lecture, arts and performance series based in Brooklyn. They host live science events for the public, featuring subjects ranging from Black Holes and Dinosaurs to Human Evolution and the Human Brain. Every month, leading scientists give talks on discoveries in their fields and unleash their research on an inquisitive audience.
The Secret Science Club has a Kickstarter underway to help expand in their fifth season. Pledge and find more info here! Find Secret Science Club's homepage here.
Being human is tough business. From the moment we’re born, expectations are hung heavily around our necks. Parents dream of what their children might amount to and years of anxious hand-wringing begins. The pressures don’t get any easier as we grow older, either. Perhaps there’s a peak as we enter whatever one might consider life’s “twilight,” but up until that point societal pressures of finding success, starting a healthy and wholesome family, and generally being an impressive human being poke at us constantly like little needles breaching our skin. There are constant reminders too, like the people around us that seem to be more successful or happier or put together. Shit is hard, man.
But, what we often forget is that so much of our lives are wildly out of our control. You may be gunning for a promotion, busting your ass staying late at the office, taking on extra tasks but the CEO may have always had his nephew in mind. You might have the most astonishing singing voice anyone’s ever heard but the agent you audition for is more interested in finding a hot piece of ass that can only sing okay but will look amazing sprawled out on a velvet couch for a Maxim photoshoot. You can only do so much, it turns out.
That isn’t to say that hard work gets you nothing; of course it does. But, when it comes down to it, we humans have very little control on how our lives might turn out. We can make decisions, sure, and steer ourselves down certain “paths,” but what happens along those paths might surprise the hell out of us.
Jack Kevorkian believed in this. You might know him as Dr. Death, the man who helped upwards of 130
Buckle up tight, pull the skin on your face back and hang on because we're going by rocket to the moon and our conductor is none other than that audio astronaut extraordinaire, Raymond Scott, and his crew the Quintet. Actually, we'll be going on the voyage twice; once on the 10 - inch kid's record from the Children's Record Guild ( a division of the American Recording Society ), out of Toronto, Ontario, and narrarated by Ralph Comargo. The project features five 'educational' songs with music by Scott (no author is credited for the records dialogue and lyrics) and sung by the Jean Lowell Chorus. The songs aside - the real star here is the multi-part composition "Dedicatory Piece to the Crew and Passengers of the First Experimental Rocket Express to the Moon", which has a lot of arrangement packed into a little package (and one of the longer song titles anywhere). The full album art can be found here.
Scott had released this cut on one of his series of Audivox records (AL -5000) in 1950 and the kiddie version dates from the same year. That rocket has some pretty big wings on it - ! Riding that solar breeze, I suppose. This charming ep is similar to many other 'space education' records from the next decade, except for the intricate, high-energy Raymond Scott touch, always distinctive. We also have the original Audivox-label instrumental version on the launch pad for your perusal (From the Basta cd release Ectoplasm), which seems to be the same recording, different mix. I had been curious for some time to place the two versions side by side, and so here we have two space journeys, Raymond Scott-style.
“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.
Moog gets all the credit. The iconic American company is pretty much synonymous with the synthesizer and the genesis of electronic music as we know it today (despite the fact that few people even know how to pronounce “Moog” correctly). The name pops up fifteen times in the Wikipedia article for "electronic music". But Moog is not the only synthesizer game in town. In fact, all over the Western world, scores of composers and inventors had begun experimenting with electronic music even before the production of the first computer-generated sound in 1957. Perhaps the most important of these composers and inventors were three Englishmen; three unsung heroes whose names pop up exactly zero times in the aforementioned Wikipedia article but whose influence on music, electronic or otherwise, cannot be understated: Dr. Peter Zinovieff, Tristram Cary and David Cockerell, the founders of the London-based Electronic Music Studios (EMS) and inventors of the VCS3 synthesizer.
What the Future Sounded Like is the first of several documentary shorts directed by Matthew Bate. Today, when electronic flourishes from auto-tune to synthesized beats grace the majority of popular music, he has done us a great service by sharing his look at the groundbreaking work of EMS. The engaging interviews are complemented by impressive archival footage, photographs, trippy video montages, and the fascinating electronic musical selections.
After World War II, Britain, along with the rest of the world, was ready for a change -- and a young man named Tristram Cary was no exception. Cary entered the war with dreams of being a classical composer. While serving as a radar operator, Cary had his first experiences with German tape recording equipment and became infatuated. He began to experiment with the alteration of tape in his compositions. This young style of composition was known as musique concrète and is an important precursor to electronic musici. Despite the fact that musique concrète was largely avant-garde, Cary's career as a composer began to take off as he began to incorporate more and more electronic elements into his compositions. Cary's score for the Doctor Who series provided many households' first exposure to electronic music.
Cary teamed up with fellow electronic music enthusiasts Cockerell, a brilliant engineer, and Zinovieff, a who had built his own studio in a shed behind his house. Zinovieff is the real star of the show. It is a mystery as to why he is rarely mentioned in the same breath as other electronic music pioneers. The hardware that Zinovieff and company used was probably the most powerful in the country outside of an academic or military settingii. In fact, one of his primary goals in founding EMS in 1969 was to find a way to pay for it all. One interviewee credits him with “using computers in a way that would become commonplace in the mid-eighties, and he was doing it twenty years earlier with equipment that was large, unwieldy, and not designed for the purpose.” Entire genres of music owe a huge debt to his ambition and vision. In crediting him with creating the first sampler, Cockerell unwittingly points out that even hip-hop owes a great deal to Zinovieff.
What EMS accomplished is all the more impressive considering the musical environment of the time. The sounds they were interested in producing were completely at odds with popular and classical music. There was, of course, no corner of the Internet in which they could hide and build a cult following, as they might today. Rock and roll was king, and the music that their equipment was capable of producing was very far from rock and roll. Despite Cary's success as a composer, the odds seemed to be stacked against them. As you watch the footage of Zinovieff's 1967 computer concert, it is useful to keep in mind that Beatlemania was rampant and Woodstock was only two years away -- that'll help you recognize just how unconventional that performance must have been.
Luckily, EMS struck gold with its design of the first portable synthesizer. It became extremely popular with rock and roll artists, especially those of the progressive persuasion. Known as the VCS3 (short for Voltage Controlled Studio with 3 oscillators), it was employed to great and famous effect on songs such as The Who's “Won't Get Fooled Again” and Pink Floyd's “On the Run.” Among the other artists who used the VCS3 are Kraftwerk, Roxy Music, and Hawkwind (that's Lemmy's first band, metal fans). Lord knows, if Kraftwerk is using your stuff, you've had quite an impact on the world of electronic music. EMS would go on to create many different synthesizer models in its ten year run. However, the VCS3 would remain its most popular model (and still goes for many thousands of dollars on ebayiii.)
From their post-war experimentation to the full-on embrace of synthesizers as musical instruments in the sixties and beyond, the three men of EMS have been able to watch electronic music grow from bleeps and bloops to a full-blown scene, complete with obsessive fans, designer drugs, and a seemingly infinite number of sub-genres. More often than not, EMS is unfairly reduced to a footnote along the lines of “See: Dark Side of the Moon.” Perhaps the short life of the company is to blame for this. Maybe it's just because some other filmmakers got around to making the Moog documentary three years earlier. But make no mistake: Without the three men behind EMS, their unusual ideas, and innovative equipment, electronic music would not be the same.
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.
Recently I went to The Netherlands for the Roadburn Festival. Thanks to Duane Harriot for running the Fun Machine for a week and not wrecking the gears! Last weeks episode was a full three hours of music and photos from the most enjoyable fest I have ever been to, and if you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it (not because it's my program, mind you - it is my taste, but it was really programmed by those who put Roadburn together- thank them, not me)!
Since last year's festival was disrupted by a pesky volcanic eruption, I thought it would be wise to take an extra day ahead of the festival and eliminate the stress factor. I made my ever important sleeping bag connection ahead of time, and decided to head over to the town of 's-Hertogenbosch to check out the Jheronimus Bosch Art Center.
All of Bosch's works are in name museums, so I was not sure what to expect. This town probably would have no one paying attention to it except for their famous, intensely talented son. I'm not going to even go into describing his artwork here; if you are unfamiliar, go check out a link or two and get the scoop on this man.
The Art Center is housed in what had once been a church. It looks like a church, but when you step inside, all your senses tell you nearly right away (there's a large red curtain that separates the entrance from a lot of the exhibit area) that you may have actually stepped into a delightfully quirky version of hell. There is a telltale sculpture outside as well to tip you off, that in most ways, this was not going to be a religious experience, at least of a churchgoing nature.
The helpful women at the desk were concerned with the size of my backpack and could see I was being taxed by it's weight. They took it off my hands immediately although there was no coat room. The entrance fee was laughably cheap and I was given an audio guide to boot. It was when I got to the other side of the curtain that I thought to myself "I'm going to be here for hours and hours"...
Currently there is an exhibit entitled "Guitar Heroes" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It runs through July 4th, and if you have any thought about a music exhibit "fitting in" to the premise of an art museum, think again. The show is put together with the utmost detail, and my accompanying photos are going to focus on that exact thing, in a different way; detail...after all, you all want to visit the MET and behold the show for yourselves- from the craftsmanship of the luthiers of northern Italy years ago right up to the Four Seasons guitars created by John Monteleone, I'd hate to spoil all the up close opulence with some quick pix.
The exhibit is divided into 5 parts: two historical eras; and then focusing on three primary Italian-American craftsmen in New York: John D'Angelico, whose New Yorker guitar model Chet Atkins likened to owning a Rolls Royce; James D'Aquisto, who offered special innovations like sound holes that can be opened and closed to create tonal differences; and John Monteleone, whose varied background in his father's design workshops opened his mind to liquid design sensibilities, as shown here on 2 detail shots of the Sun King guitar.
My Grammy Carlton always said, “You can never have too many books!” and sometimes we owned as many as 20 all at once, including the Bible and a volume called The Library of Universal Knowledge (the Practical Self-Educator). Since I intended to know everything when I grew up, I began working my way through the Great Books on a recommended reading list I found somewhere. It was a good list, in that I read some books I would never have considered, or even known existed—Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand and Stars, for instance. It was good to have a plan and a focus, although I didn’t understand that my list wasn’t THE list; I didn’t realize that the list of books considered great would change over time, and that Saint-Exupery might not be the immutable cultural touchstone I assumed he was.
Before I found the List, I went to our little local library to browse and check out any book that interested me. But once I had my Plan I went to the library only to order certain books, or pick up books, or put books on hold. It’s only lately that I’ve rediscovered the joys of random reading. I have three main sources for books nowadays, and have very little, if any, control over what is available to me. I get books from the “new” shelf at our small public library, from the “take-one-leave-one” at the train station café, and from a friend of mine who sends me discarded review copies from her job.
The “new” shelf at our library features recent acquisitions from the county library system. This means that most of the books won’t actually end up in our library, although we’ll be able to order them later, if we want to go to the trouble. I usually don’t. Sometimes the selection seems like a total hodgepodge, and sometimes it’s like the autobiography of one of the librarians. Suddenly there are several books about couples therapy and divorce mediation; after a few months, those are replaced with a bunch of books about menopause and cooking for one. But occasionally there is a book that makes you wonder how it slipped through: I found The History of White People on the New shelf, and was very glad for that. Author Nell Painter is a historian who retired from Princeton, and while she obviously means this book to be an accessible introduction to some concepts from whiteness studies, I suspect the major points I took away are a little too glib. But here’s what I got out of it: The whole concept of “race” was made up by 18th-Century Germans and there’s no science to support it, IQ tests are crap, anarchist beliefs were a sign of racial inferiority, and my ancestors weren’t considered white until fairly recently. Except for the annoying way illustrations are cited in the text, The History of White People is a good read and feeds my confirmation bias pretty well.
The take-one-leave-one (the "tolo”) is a large bookshelf at one of our local coffee shops. You can take any book you see there, and keep it for as long as you like—forever, if you want—as long as you replace it with another book you don’t want. It seems as if a good number of people in our village work in publishing, so there are often some pretty interesting books at the tolo. That’s where I picked up Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, an 800-page historical fantasy about Napoleonic-era English magic (or, you know, magicke). I did read the whole thing, and concluded that author Susanna Clarke can write, but she can’t tell a story to save her life. A reader who hangs around for 800 pages wants a well-constructed plot. When I took Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell I replaced it with Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face (which I’d bought and read after my latest disfiguring face-cancer surgery). But after I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, I put it back on the tolo.
My friend A., who works at a great metropolitan newspaper, has access to the book reviewers’ discards, and often sends me little packages of books. This is not quite random, since she has an idea of the types of things I like to read, but it is actually more random than the New shelf or the tolo since I have no say in the books that she picks for me. Recently she’s sent me The Poisoner’s Handbook, by Deborah Blum. It’s a history of forensic medicine in New York City in the early 20th Century, featuring New York’s chief medical examiner, Charles Norris, and toxicologist Alexander Gettler. It’s like a true crime-science thriller-history mash-up, and thoroughly enjoyable. Good science, good writing, good story—a good book!
Although I’ve come to prefer getting books for free via random reading, I do sometimes break down and buy something I’m especially interested in. This week I bought and am reading Molecular Gastronomy and The Black Swan. I’m not far enough along to review them yet, but I think I want to marry Nassim Taleb.
Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.
If WFMU reaches our Lift-Off campaign goal this Wednesday and sends Station Manager Ken into space with 25 tanks-worth of helium balloons affixed to his lawn chair, it will be a triumphant moment. Can you picture it? I'm not actually sure what it's going to look like (fortunately there'll be a live video feed) but I can already imagine the feeling of looking up at the sky to see Ken -- a tiny speck burried in a sea of multicolored balloons -- and all of us down in the parking lot here in Jersey City smiling with great pride, just knowing that the station will be able to stay afloat through the frigid dark winter months ahead. Why? Because everybody chipped in -- either by pledging to the station and/or by putting their lives at risk -- to keep freeform radio afloat!
But did you know that our visionary leader would not be the first person to take flight through the power of helium? In fact, there's an entire website devoted to "Cluster Ballooning," and I've been reading up on some of the most famous examples in an online science magazine called the Darwin Awards:
Father Adelir Antonio de Carli (left) was a Brazilian priest who attempted to break the world record for helium-propelled flight back in April 2008. The stunt was meant as a fundraiser for his parish. He set flight from the port city of Paranagua on April 20th 2008, never to return.
In 1982, "Lawn Chair Larry" (right) spent 16 hours on his favorite lawn chair eating sandwiches and drinking beer at 16,000 feet above Los Angeles. "The Federal Aviation Administration was not amused," but he did inspire a whole generation of cluster balloonists.
Both of these stories end in tragedy, but WFMU's story will be different because we are taking some precautions. For example, they didn't think to use a safety harness, or to hire a sniper to take out a few balloons in case the wind picks up and Ken floats into air traffic control space (good idea Rich Hazelton!). Many of us have even gotten a jump start on pledging, since pledge-fuel is the only variable that is not yet fully accounted for. And earlier today, Ken was hovering right outside my window testing the strength of his harness. Hey wait a minute -- he's still out there! And his harness seems to be holding strong despite today's snow flurries and 10-degree wind chill... that is a good omen.
As we prepare for Wednesday morning's launch and figure out a safe place to store these 25 extremely volatile helium tanks, I'd recommend reading more about the history of helium-balloon powered flight and watching a rare video of Father Adelir Antonio de Carli after the jump.
Also, be sure to tune in to this Tuesday's Thunk Tank (7-8p ET). Station Manager Ken joins WFMU's Chief Science Office Bronwyn C. to discuss the aeronautic research behind Wednesday's lawn-chair-and-balloon fundraising launch.
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!
On the last Thunk Tank show, we talked about Thanksgiving travel and the TSA. Listener Steve emailed us the following:
“You guys are having fun at the expense of new travel security measures. And they are a pain in the butt, no doubt. But there is a problem and you're not offering alternatives to a real problem. Why aren't you in any way critical of the reasons for the necessity of these things? Just wondering.”
Since we’re having a special guest (Rudy Delson!) on our next show, we thought we’d answer Listener Steve here on the Blog.
1: The TSA scanners are a virtual strip search. The Fourth Amendment says, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated ...” How is it reasonable to require every single traveler to submit to a strip search?
2. The TSA scanners are not safe. Jason Bell, a molecular biologist and biophysicist, has reviewed the TSA’s own safety reports, and has concluded that people should opt for the pat-down search rather than go through the scanners. Here are some (long) quotes:
“Essentially, it appears that an X-ray beam is rastered across the body, which highlights the importance of one of the specific concerns raised by the UCSF scientists... what happens if the machine fails, or gets stuck, during a raster. How much radiation would a person's eye, hand, testicle, stomach, etc be exposed to during such a failure. What is the failure rate of these machines? What is the failure rate in an operational environment? Who services the machine? What is the decay rate of the filter? What is the decay rate of the shielding material? …These questions have not been answered to any satisfaction …” And also: “… the statement that one scan is equivalent to 2-3 minutes of your flight is VERY misleading. …relating non-absorbing cosmic radiation to tissue absorbing man-made radiation is simply misleading and wrong. ... a total body dose is misleading, because there is differential absorption in some tissues. … Even more alarming is that because the radiation energy is the same for all adults, children, or infants, the relative absorbed dose is twice as high for small children and infants because they have a smaller body mass (both total and tissue specific) to distribute the dose. Alarmingly, the radiation dose to an infant's testes and skeleton is 60-fold higher than the absorbed dose to an adult brain!”
There is much more, including Bell’s call for the TSA agents to be equipped with radiation badges to monitor their own exposure. You can read Bell’s full posthere. (Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.)
3. BUT! You don’t have to go through the scanners, you can opt for the “pat down.” Still an unreasonable search, and guess what? The TSA agents don’t change their gloves for each one! That hand going down your pants carries the cooties of 1,000 junk-touchings. The TSA’s own bloghas a lot of posts about the problem they’ve had with spreading scabies at Boston’s Logan Airport. Scabies today, flesh-eating bacteria tomorrow, n’est-ce pas?
Finally, to address Listener Steve’s question about the “necessity” of strip searching all travelers: What is the reason for it, really? Does it really make traveling safer?Really?
Ask yourself: Are you safer today than you were on September 10, 2001?
While driving earlier listening to an AM health-centered show, the doctor/DJ/host, asked his assistant if he liked "thrash music", their banter sort of went off into space, as the assistant seemed to have a grasp on some metal genres: "glam metal, death metal, viking metal, grindcore", yet the doctor had nothing to ground himself with, and at some point mentioned the Yardbirds, Barry Manilow and Phil Ochs ... regardless, he referenced this study, which reports that no matter what kind of music you listen to, if you're studying, it's still detrimental to your final outcome, especially if you're memorizing. What was amazing was that they kept on playing excerpts of Death Angel's "Thrashers" over and over again, repeatedly asking the question "do you like thrash music?" and joking. It's wonderful when the unexpected pops up, especially this 1987 gem, much like the first time I heard Peaches by The Stranglers opening the movie Sexy Beast...well, actually that was cool; this radio experience was just funny. Of course, I do need to mention here that former frontman of the Stranglers, Hugh Cornwell, will be gracing the WFMU airwaves by way of the Fun Machine on Tuesday, Oct 26th, and he's touring on a new release: New Songs for King Kong, note: even King Kong should not study wearing headphones, but I am not going to be the one to tell him! In another study about exercise and music, a study linked here relates the findings that although music is a great motivator in exercise, there are limits to it's benefits. The piece is not the shortest piece in the world, but I found it interesting that the average human (not the WFMU listener) liked the same music more JUST because it was sped up. To go back to the question of "do you like thrash metal?", well maybe some do and they don't even realize it! To conclude, when we really get into music itself being exercise, like these conductors pictured above (study from 2007 here), or the theory that Slovenian outfit Laibach had, that Bach's "Die Kunst der Fuge' was intended as an (intellectual) exercise rather than for performance- so they used it in their performances with physical exercise being performed, just makes a brain wonder, or at least start doing push-ups. And if you think the guys up top in the B/W photo are not exercising, think again! Note: Death Angel also has a new record out, it's calle Relentless Retribution out on the Nuclear Blast label. It's been awhile for releases from Barry Manilow, Phil Ochs, and the Yardbirds! Laibach is doing some live dates in Europe and the UK at the end of 2010.
There were about a million great shows that I missed this week: Goatwhore at Europa (friend review: "One of the best bands I've seen this year"), Buzzov'en at Public Assembly (friend review: "pretty close to great"), The Vibrators at the Bell House, etc. However I did have the extreme pleasure of attending several shows. I got out to see Accept and Kings X at BB Kings on Monday. As expected, Kings X went on at 7:53 for an 8pm time slot. Vocalist Doug Pinnick (pictured right) requested the AC be shut off for the sake of his voice; the club complied and we all got sweaty! But in the mood of the set, they were upbeat and spot on. Kings X reminds me of a mellower, more heavily grooved Queens of the Stone Age, but originating years and years prior. They are a band that probably never made a ton of money, but are amazing players and always put their heart into their shows. Satisfaction level: 4/5, Surprise level 2/5. Next: Accept took the stage with new vocalist Mark Tornillo. This could have been wrong, jokelike, corny, cover band-ish--I mean it really had the potential to be terrible. I know Tornillo has been with them for more than a year now, and by the way, their new album Blood of the Nations is GREAT but a presence like Udo Dirkschneider's gotta be missed, no? Hell no! Purists, don't sell yourself short of a great time, expand your horizons and go see Accept- you'll have a blast!! Tornillo, who hails from NJ; has pulled this off perfectly! He had been the vocalist for TT Quick - a band that never really got it's due back in the day.
It would not surprise any of you to know that I am a record collector. Many of us here at WFMU would lead much more spacious and comfortable lives if our record collections didn't take up the square footage it did. So
be it. I am always reading the latest articles on how to take care of these precious pieces of vinyl better; how to resurrect a bit of warped garage sale vinyl, and the safest way to re-stick labels to said round flat plastic pieces. I read this article a little while ago about using wood glue to remove dirt from records. My brain kept bugging me to try it, so after about a year of dawdling, I did. Read the entire article if you wish, it's very informative as to why wood glue won't adhere to vinyl, and other questions you might have before diving in. As interesting as it was to do, I heard no difference on my subjects! I could see a bit more of a sheen to them, but I recorded each record before and after and found
no real noticeable difference. I did this experiment with a couple of garage sale 45s, and maybe they were as clean as they were going to get. Regardless, I thought I'd show y'all some of the progress pix I took-of course, the result could have been far better, but you, dear reader, get me with failure as well as with triumph. The first pic is the glue application before the "easy removal tags" have been added. The
second photo is (yes, eagle-eye, it's a different record) how the record looks in it's drying state: glue smoothed out by use of a credit card, and easy removal tags in place. The last two are before and after shots of one of the 45s I used in the process. Slight difference in sheen. As for
my garage sale "finds", I'll share with you this week's lot: a Phil Silvers die-cut cover
of the Broadway show Do-Re-Mi, which was about jukeboxes and part of the "music industry". The record is in great shape, and I love the Hirschfeld-esque illustration of Silvers on the cover. A second art-related find is the album by Sailcat, with
cover art by none other than Mad Magazine'sJack Davis - see an amazing collection of his works on this Flickr album I found. As far as 2-pieces go, Sailcat pales in comparison to Dark Castle- live pics here, who are on tour with Nachtmystium and Zoroaster into October. Photos taken from the Knitting Factory show this past week. Top pic = Dark Castle, bottom pic = Nachtmystium. And, no, the vocalist for Nachtmystium does not sport a mohawk; it's just one of those action photos! Dunno if you'll hear Sailcat on a future edition of the Fun Machine, but you can be sure there'll be some Dark Castle, Nachtmystium and Zoroaster soon! Out of the three, Zoroaster has the most recent release (their third), is called Matador and is on the E1 label.
Last month, Billy Jam had asked me to help him with a remote broadcast on September 10th, to which I obliged happily, not entirely taking note where it was going to be. I put the date/time in my schedule and was going to get the details closer to the broadcast. I got directions emailed to me a day before the remote and the descriptions "treacherous", "fire trap", "sketchy", "caution", "down the cliff", and "deadly", were all within the body of this email. As was "X Ray Burns"... I thought to myself "this is either going to be a blast, or it'll be the last day of my life!" I packed my bathing suit and went headfirst into the broadcast that Billy titled "Dirty Jersey: Throw the Needle in the River": featuring Bill Rapp, Wheeler Antabanez, The Two Maks (Weird NJ), X-Ray Burns, Diane Kamikaze, DEMER, & Gentrified. All NJ aficionados, homeboys, homebodies, historians, hooligans or devotees, in their own way. If you haven't checked out the archive of the show, check this minute long YouTube blast for a taste of how the entire 3 hours went down - and literally almost washed down the river if it weren't for some quick troubleshooting by Liz Berg back at the compound.
Once upon a summer day, before humanity crawled awkwardly off of their dirt clod and into the spaceways, they dreamed of heroism and poetry and a state of grace somehow to be found out there beyond the envelope of earthly dreams. As they stumbled wildly on they sang a song to boast of their confidence, wisdom and sincerity in this terrifying endeavor. Are we smaller or larger in relation to our desire to be one with the vast black spaces?
Before we touched the outer stars and planets, there were words and images of fearful and mysterious dreams to be entered into at our peril. Some offered words of hope but mainly they lied about the sky, which was yet to envelope us in a blanket of shame at our ignorance.
Today for your DJing pleasure, we present a few old outer-space motion picture introductions, of the sort that we heard again and again, blending into a mantra of our future 'command' of the outer vastnesses.
I hope you enjoy these snippets of innocent science scheming and dreaming.