WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Monkey Vs. Robot?! No! Monkey PLUS Robot...

Rich Hazelton alerts us to the existence of the creepiest "toy" to grace the 2005 Holiday Season: the Alive Chimpanzee from WowWee Toys. Click here to download a short video clip.

Spanish Version of Jack-FM: Hola "Jose!"

Complain about it all you want (see comments on this post and this one), but Jack FM has been so succesful that it's now expanding to the Spanish language radio market, rechristening the philosophy of "Play What We Want" as  "Toca Lo Que Quiere." Maybe my erstwhile announcer Julio can now get a job. From newradiostar:

Entravision Radio, announced today the launch of 'Jose: Toca lo que Quiere,' the first Spanish-language "Play What We Want" radio format. 'Jose,' who personifies everything heard between the music on the new format, will make his debut on Thursday, October 20th at 3:00 p.m. Pacific Time on KRCX 99.9 FM in Sacramento and at midnight, local time, on KCVR 98.9 FM in Modesto, and KCVR 1570 AM in Stockton, California, KRZY 1450 AM Albuquerque, New Mexico and KMXA 1090 AM Denver, Colorado.  'Jose: Toca lo que Quiere' (he plays what he wants) targets Hispanic adults 25-54. Featuring a mix of Spanish-language adult contemporary hits from the late 1970's to today, 'Jose' will air a wide variety of music from an array of artists, such as Los Bukis, Juan Gabriel, Los Yonics, Rocio Durcal, Los Tigres del Norte, Vicente Fernandez, Los Angeles Negros, Mijares, Alejandro Fernandez and more. "Entravision Radio leads the industry by innovating and creating new Spanish-language radio formats that are just as diverse as the U.S. Hispanic market itself," said Nestor Rocha, Vice President of Programming for Entravision Radio. "We are very excited about the launch of 'Jose' and will continue to create Spanish-language radio formats that accommodate the different tastes of groups within the U.S. Hispanic marketplace."

"...and other attactive & dynamic women..."

Because the now-defunct Aerial View somehow made it into a directory of talk radio shows, I'm constantly getting e-mail from PR firms about stupid shit like this:

*   Are you a man who places Great Value on his free time?

**Are you tired of going to lounges/clubs and having to compete with trust fund kids and starving actors for the attractive, intelligent women that really want to meet YOU?

*** What is a list of new business contacts and new friends worth to you?

As a man who works 70+ hours a week on Wall St,and who answered YES to the above question, I created Creme de la Femme for men like us. It is a new and exciting organization that is dedicated to bringing NY's elite together. Every other month, we hold parties at some of NYC's best lounges and clubs, where our network of doctors, bankers, lawyers and entrepreneurs get to meet pre-selected models, actresses and other attractive and dynamic women in a non club-like setting. We are NOT a dating service, but rather, a networking service, where our proprietary database enables our members to attend our events and potentially meet new friends or business contacts and yes, even a "significant other." In short, we are the perfect meeting place for successful men (ages 25-45) who don't have the time to go out to clubs and bars 5 nights a week and want to use their free time to meet the most attractive and friendly women in NYC.

If this is something that interests you, please respond back with a bit of information about you and a photo or 2, as we pride ourselves on pre-selecting ALL members, not just our beautiful women. All information will be kept in the strictest confidence, and further information will be sent upon receipt.

Is your skin crawling yet? Speaking of which, Creme de la Femme sounds like a feminine hygiene product, no? LATE BREAKING NEWS: It IS a feminine hygiene product! Perhaps you can come up with a better name for a service that hooks "successful men" up with "attractive and friendly women"?

This Week in Sex: Magic

David Copperfield to 'magic' girl pregnant onstage--'magic' meaning to knock her up without physical contact. If he couldn't 'magic' his way into a girl's pants in high school, why should it work now? He should try to 'magic' me interested in his magic.

Doggy style. Meat-flavored condoms for dogs didn't work, surprisingly. Dog owners were left with pregnant puppies after dogs ate the condoms.

Birds do it, bees do it, single celled placozoans under seas do it. Even the world's simplest animals have sex. But you're still not getting any. You and David Copperfield.

And animals in art do it. The Kinsey Institute gallery in Indiana is having a show called "Passionate Creatures" about animal imagery in erotic art. I didn't know we were allowed to exhibit such things any more, even though the art and objects are from the past 2,000 years, so at some point somebody must have been OK with it.

Sixth Dalai Lama: poet/playa.

"Potentially the most blasphemous movie since Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

So they are filming this very heavy movie on my street. The film is called "Across The Universe" and is directed by Julie Taymor (who directed 'Frida'). Guess what the movie is going to be? What the world so needs right now: a baby boomer self-congratulatory sleaze-fest. According to their write-up, it will be "...a psychedelic musical love story using famous Beatles songs as the source for a whirl-wind tour of the sweeping changes the world experienced in the 1960s" And guess who's in it? Bono! Barf? The set designers have shamelessly raped and pillaged the "charming" Lower East Side at the intersection of Rivington and Clinton streets with super-faux, super-cheeseball 1960s ephemera, ham-fisted graffiti, fake store fronts, period cars with "love 'n peace" painted on them... and even piles of fake trash covered in psychedelic colors (piles of trash that are bolted to the sidewalk so no one steals them) Brilliant! I'm used to having my eyes assaulted with crackheads and stabbings and obstacle courses of dog doo... but now this? One business (I think it's a Korean nail salon) has had it's frontage transformed and has now become... that's right: The Black Panthers' headquarters! They even slathered 60s graffiti and a fake beatnik coffee shop sign over the front of ABC No Rio... ugh... please kill me now.

The Shemp Meditation Tape

Back in the late 1980's as the New Age movement peaked, WFMU agonized over the fact that the station had absolutely nothing to offer the Windham Hill crowd, which was fleeing the station's membership rolls in droves. The solution was to place Dave the Spazz under house arrest until an appropriate audio solution could be assembled. The result was the Shemp Meditation Tape, which Dave described this way:

Recommended for new age nitwits and chucklefucks alike....scientifically mixed in Shemp-A-Rama for your enlightened casaba-banging pleasure.... Soar the Horwitz heavens and become one with Shemp's karma on the Heee Beee Beee Beee side... transhempify your mind and cook your chakras on the life-infirming Ahh Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha side.

The Shemp Meditation Tape went on to become the top selling item in WFMU's well intentioned but fatally flawed Catalog of Curiosities, which was in business from 1993-1997.

Heee Beee Beee Beee side (MP3)
Ahh Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha side (MP3)

(Produced under armed guard for WFMU by Mahavishnu Dave Thespazzyrama in the palatial Spazzintologist Compound.)

Bathtime in Clerkenwell MP3 and Video

Everytime I play the song Bathtime in Clerkenwell (MP3) on the air, I get calls and e-mails about it. It's by the band (The Real) Tuesday Weld, from the soundtrack to the book I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan. I haven't read the book, but the soundtrack is great. As is this cool black and white animated video of the song (wmv video file), by Alex Budovsky, which apparently won the best animated short award at Sundance last year.

What's On My Micro, Part 2

I'm back on the bus to NYC.  Off for a while, then on again.  Such is the life of a perpetually dissatisfied freelance worker.  The need arose, then, to refresh and revise the playlist on my Micro, resulting in the new inclusions below, though all but one of the artists are not terribly new (I must be at risk of High Luddite status; so few new artists impress me anymore.  With a few notable exceptions, new bands seem to often be just an amalgamation of older, better influences, unworthy of the sum of their parts.)

I also want to retract the statement made in my previous post about certain artists not qualifying as "music for being on the move."  Sooner or later, the complexity of moods triggered by commuting, and the city environment, will require a little Stockhausen or MB.

Apollo - Apollo (1970) - A gutsy Finnish rock act who were very much of their time, formed by members of the popular 60s group Topmost.  The album is evenly split between Beefheart-style screwy blues guitar numbers, and Aphrodite's Child-esque string-soaked prog ballads.  [mp3]  [mp3]

Association P.C. - Erna Morena (Live) (1973) - Pan-European improvisational rock band, with similarities to early Soft Machine.  Noodly psychedelic extrapolations, with some very rewarding emergent themes for the patient listener.  I wish more of their catalog were readily available.  A detailed information page about the band can be found here.  [mp3]

Bladder Flask - One Day I Was So Sad That the Corners of My Mouth Met & Everybody Thought I Was Whistling (1981) - Two sides of mind-warping sound collage created by the Rupenus brothers, aka The New Blockaders (see below).  The Rupenuses were also the masterminds behind the Mixed Band Philanthropist project and LP from 1986.  [mp3]

Haikara - Another great discovery in early 70s Finnish rock, Haikara were more progressive and complex than Apollo (above), with inventive song structures that sometimes incorporated Scandinavian folk themes.  Essential for fans of Arbete och Fritid and Panta Rei.  [mp3]
 

Distended Fertile Guts Bubble Over As Big Meaty Hooves Fondle Ripe Udders Slipping Out Of Flirtatious Finery

Project P (NSFW) is an odd fetish site dedicated to digitally morphing porno photos of women into pregnant animals.

Furball Gallery
Hugies Gallery (no animal morphs here! Just plain old digitally morphed gigantic bellys!)

The site also offers fantasy stories and short animated movie clips.

We Call It 'Carbonated Sugar Water'

What do they call it in your neck of the woods? Visit this non-scientifically-derived interactive map to find out which regions of the U.S. use the terms soda, pop, or coke in reference to soft drinks (pop wins the majority by a narrow margin). via wohba

But that's not the disturbing part... oh no. Delve a bit further to find out what the non-conformist Americans are calling cavity fertilizer in lieu of the 3 most popular answers. "Sodie," "tarzan slam," "drank," "large farva," and "tonic" appear to be popular.

If you're feeling nostalgia for old coke, new coke, tab, or crystal pepsi at this point, take a listen to this fantastic episode (real audio) of WFMU's Aircheck program, featuring soft drink jingles of the 1960s.

Or, listen to the "best soda song ever" according to Mike Lupica: Negativland's "Drink It Up" (real audio).

Hooray for Friday!

Congratulations FRIDAY!

The Village Voice recently named Friday on WFMU the Best Day of Radio in their recent "Best of NYC 2005" issue.  Props were given in particular to Doug, Monica, and Mike Lupica, who has, in fact, moved to Monday nights from 8pm to 11pm since the new schedule went into effect (pre-publication of the Voice Best ofs).  Doug and Monica still start off Fridays with a bang, and drivetime is now hosted by the delightful Donna.  Check out the full praiseful listing here.

 

Aquarius Records: An appreciation

Lunches at WFMU are always a fun occasion. The last time I was at the station at lunchtime, one of the things that came up was the enormous glut of music that mp3 blogs and file sharing has made available to us and the resulting consequence of "music overload".  Nick Southall wrote a great piece on Stylus a few weeks ago that captured this feeling very nicely.

Amid all the chaos, however, you sometimes are fortunate enough to find like minded people out there who do your dirty work for you and help curate the countless new releases and re-issues that come out every month. Enter Aquarius Records who were guests on Brian Turner's show yesterday afternoon.

Festive Fall Decor

You can make macabre dried-apple heads using knives, bowls and ingredients found in nature.                      

         

Decorative shrunken heads can easily be fashioned using knives, pots and ingredients found in nature.

Robert Ashley's "Music With Roots in the Aether"

Robert Ashley's Music With Roots in the Aether (1975)

14 hours of video (.avi & realvideo) and audio (MP3) of Robert Ashley interviewing composers David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros and Terry Riley. The pieces are broken down into one-hour interviews and one-hour live performances, all from 1975. Check out the Robert Ashley files: they're chilling. Very rarely seen since its filming.

They Did The Mash, They Did The Climate Mash

Admit it, you thought Bobby "Boris" Pickett was dead, didn't you? Just in time for Halloween, the only recording artist to place the SAME song on the Billboard Top 100 THREE times (#1 in 1962, #91 in 1970 and #10 in 1972) is back with a global-warming parody of his own Monster Mash: Climate Mash.

Prince on American Bandstand, 1980 (video)

Here's a fairly gigantic video clip of Prince lip-synching on American Bandstand in early 1980, after the release of his second LP Prince (mpg file, 94mb!). The lip-synching, crotch grabbing and dancing are all well and good (and impermissible in today's broadcast environment), but the best parts are Dick Clark's attempted interviews with His Majesty. Prince exudes total indifference to Clark and to this, his first big national moment.

via del.icio.us/tag/video

Martin Plays Stratego at the FCC

Since the FCC has been mysteriously quiet on the indecency front for nearly a year, we were beginning to think that the issue was waning into oblivion under the commission's new conservative Chairman, Kevin Martin. It turns out that Mr. Martin has been a busy bee after all, quietly arranging his pawns for what we imagine will be a renewed battle against the first amendment.

To remind you, the most recent indecency mess started with America's traumatic exposure to 19/32 of a second of nipple during the 2004 Super Bowl... this was followed by a high-and-mighty, 11-month-long decency harangue from the right, which included a skyrocketing number of indecency complaints thanks to one christian organization, legislation that would catapult indecency fines far beyond rational numbers, a smattering of censorship-happy indecency rulings, and widespread confusion concerning non-sexual fucking. But the FCC suddenly shushed itself on the subject last December, and has not issued an indecency fine since.

During this downtime, Kevin Martin replaced Michael Powell as chairman of the FCC, a staunch anti-porno advocate was hired as a policy adviser to the commission (reeking of a renewed censorship campaign), and another indecency complaint against Howard Stern was filed, but all the while, the feds have been receiving fewer and fewer indecency complaints from the public they've been itching to protect.

This latest report confirms that Martin is taking baby-steps by placing the "right people" in key positions before launching into full-blown attack mode. We're predicting another onslaught of indecency fines in the near future, but there's one small detail that could potentially derail Martin's gravy train. He is a strong supporter of a-la-carte cable programming (which, of course, the cable industry strongly opposes), and we think he'll try to tack on some pay-per-channel cable language onto any new indecency regs/decisions.

America will then be presented with an interesting battle: religious fundamentalism (anti-indecency groups like the PTC) vs. the almighty dollar (cable TV lobbyists). Who will prevail? Stay tuned...

Who's the next Tupac...

... Kurt Cobain or Elliott Smith?

Bern Porter: The Last Acts of St. Fuck You

The Last Acts of St. Fuck You (MP3)

A 9-minute vitriolic spew of enormous demonic proportions by the outsider visionary Bern Porter. If ya love it that much, you can download the entire text here. And if yr still interested, here's a gang of his found poems.

Not Quite Quiet Time

Maybe we FMU folk just don't want to be alone in our own heads. We constantly placate ourselves with sounds.  Soothing and dreamy, digitally produced hums and blips, orchestrated and melodic, indigenous chanting, or as is often in my case mostly cacophonous, repetitive and sense-crippling . Whichever our pleasure, constant sound appeases us like a back rub after a breast feeding (including the regurge on the shoulder part).

So it came as a bit of a shock to discover via a couple of hours of slack research that there are those who might enjoy a some quiet time. Like the freaks at Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, or their weirdo crunchy S.F. brethren Sound Pollution dot org who would accuse members of our little community of being "Sound Abusers" with the following modus operandi:

The Psychological profile of a sound abuser:
From our studies, people that use noise in situations that are not qualified as an emergency, expose these forms of behavior:

1. Lack of awareness
2. Lack of responsibility
3. Intentionality
4.Selfishness
5. Lack of respect for others
6. Lack of respect for one self
7. Defiance, abusive behavior

Hey, what about number 8: Animal Masturbator? I can't understand people who feel the compulsion to make lists anyhow. Speaking of which, schizophrenics manufacture their own internal racket, as dramatized in this compelling audio slide show provided by your mental health care pals at National Public Radio. Sounds pretty hellish, huh? Almost like drilling a hole nine miles down into the Earth's crust to hear the Cries of The Damned.

Back to the Books

Hello, Everybody—nice seeing you again.

I was very busy in September, and I only finished reading two books. I didn’t realize until I began to write this entry what it was that the two books had in common. Here, look:

The first book, “True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa” is by Michael Finkel, a former writer for the New York Times who was fired after being accused of inventing part of a story he wrote for the Sunday magazine section. This struck me as amusing and ironic, since I’ve always referred to the NY Times as “The Big Grey Pack of Lies,” although now that I’ve read Professor Frankfurt’s little book, I understand that it is actually “The Big Grey Pack of Bullshit.” (You can’t say that on the radio, though.)

In his book, Finkel describes writing the story that got him fired. He was assigned to write about the use of child slaves in cocoa production in Africa, but when he got to Africa he discovered that the story was pretty much a fabrication. Then, when he got home, his editors at the Times really, really, really wanted him to write the story from the point of view of one particular child cocoa worker—so Finkel invented a composite character and wrote the story, and then he got caught. He was home feeling sorry for himself when he got a call from a reporter in Portland who told him that a guy accused of murdering his family in Oregon had been apprehended in Mexico, where he was hiding out under the name “Michael Finkel from the New York Times.” This was so bizarre that Finkel got in touch with the guy and began a correspondence with him. The guy’s real name was Christian Longo, and although everyone is supposed to be entitled to the presumption of innocence, there is not one sentence in Finkel’s entire book that would lead you to believe that Longo was anything but guilty of the murder of his wife and three children. And yet, Finkel himself seems unsure of it all the way. He’s so flattered that some baby-killer would appropriate his identity that it’s not until he actually attends the trial, sees Longo in the courtroom, and picks up on the reaction of everybody else that he realizes that—quelle horreur!—Longo is probably a sociopathic mass murderer. Finkel himself comes across not as a bad guy, but just totally, terminally clueless.

In Praise of Gibberish

Here's an idiotic and hilarious video clip about the joys of gibberish, and the power of peer pressure. via Hemaworstje via catmanandmary