WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Dancin' Fonts

Just wanted to see if it would work. So sue me.

Videos: Barney vs Tupac, Cheney vs Scarface, Spike Jonze vs Esquivel and Mixel Pixel

All those years of Barney bashing come full circle in this video mashup of the big purple dinosaur channeling Tupac Shakur. This is nine years old, but I missed it. Soundtrack's not safe for work, so put on the headphones. Streaming video from Google, via Daddydesign.

If Barney seems to fit right into Tupac, check out how well Al Pacino's Scarface sounds coming out of Dick Cheney's head: downloadable windowsmedia video. via del.icio.us

Here's a short film from Spike Jonze called "How'd They Get There," which uses Esquivel's version of Sentimental Journey (featuring the great zoo-zoo singers) as the soundtrack. It still doesn't address the mystery of sneakers hanging from telephone wires. downloadable quicktime video.

In order to make my monthly quota of cartoon sexuality, here's a cool animated video by Devin Clark of the song Body Automatic by Mixel Pixel. downloadable m4v video file, which will play with Quicktime. nsfw due to the cartoon cunnilingus. via antville, screenhead

New York Noise Features WFMU This Week

New York City's Channel 25 TV spotlights WFMU this week on it's great music video program New York Noise, giving an insider glance at the Record Fair that went down earlier this month at the Metropolitan Pavilion. Music and Program Director Brian Turner, most likely picked for his uncanny similarity in appearance to Adam Curry,  hosts some video clips from his own collection (including Afrirampo, Lightning Bolt, Devo, Captain Beefheart (!), Deerhoof and Serge Gainsbourg), plus there are cameos from WFMU DJ's Trouble, OCDJ, Mac, and Small Change. Tune in if you're in the New York area, the show is on both broadcast and cable TV, and the episode runs Tuesday, November 29th at 10PM, Friday December 2nd at 9PM, and Sunday December 4th at 10 PM.

¡Sho' Nuff Beeyotch! (WFMU record fair crack Part 1 of 69)

'Sho' Nuff' by the group Sly, Slick and Wicked.  Nice little super duper sweet soul rarity on JB's People label.  Not to be confused with the excellent track called The Sly, the Slick, The Wicked by the Lost Generation on Brunswick.  Copped from dealer/collector/DJ Jordan, whose doubles put my shit to shame.  Man is no joke.  Thanks cousin!  Czeck it here... (MP3)

Pop music covers on an 8-bit Nintendo synthesizer

Radiohead, Queen, Survivor, Led Zeppelin, R.E.M., Slayer, and more, rocked out in NES 8-bit glory.

Download the whole NESCover collection here (68mb, at SomethingAwful.com, and requires a RAR extractor).

If you can't manage that, here's Survivor - Eye of the Tiger (MP3), as arranged by kalocin.

MP3 of Singing Iceberg

Here's an MP3 of the sounds made by Iceberg B-09A in Antarctica. It was recorded by scientists from Germany's Alfred Wegener institute for polar and marine research, as they recorded seismic signals to measure earthquakes and tectonic movements on the Ekstroem ice shelf on Antarctica's South Atlantic coast.

From the Wegener Institute press release:

Tracking the signal, the scientists found a 50 by 20 kilometer iceberg that had collided with an underwater peninsula and was slowly scraping around it.

"Once the iceberg stuck fast on the seabed it was like a rock in a river," said scientist Vera Schlindwein. "The water pushes through its crevasses and tunnels at high pressure and the iceberg starts singing.

The iceberg sounds were originally recorded at 0.5 hertz, far below the range of human hearing. The MP3 here is speeded up many times to bring the sounds into the audible range. The full Wegener Institute press release is here. Thanks Monica!

If you enjoyed hearing an iceberg sing, here's Pseu's post on the sounds of Saturn, complete with MP3s.

Cleaning Out My Inbox, Covered Face Edition

Did you know that it's a bad idea to give powerful hallucinogens to soldiers? Who woulda thunk it?  But here's a British newsreel film that proves it (downloadable mpg video). via undercurrents from a UK newsreel about British Army drug experiments.

How not to display rare records (downloadable wmv video). Maybe he can replace that cylinder here. Thanks, Listener Tom via Nata2

Touchradio has created the longest language removal exercise yet, of our own Vicki Bennet, from her program Do or D.I.Y. You can download all of Vicki's tongue flaps, uhms and ah's here.

Another creepy classic from Mr. and Mrs. Wheatley: Horrorclown (streaming Quicktime video, nsfw)

Feeling too productive at work? The bouncing girl will change all that.

A truly creepy tale of serial rape by telephone, reminiscent of the famous Milgram obediance experiment. Thanks? Listener Mike

The great Bush-Blair swear-off and Anti-drug Russian waxworks, via b3ta

Six Degrees of Smoking.

Heidi Barack's musical portraits.

incriminating photos via Happy Palace and the LA Public Library:

Jesus Christ Superstar in Japanese (MP3s)

What better way to kick off Christ's month-long birthday bash than with the Japanese version of Jesus Christ Superstar? Here it is in its entirety, featuring a great Judas, a lame Pilate (a shame, since Pilate has many of the best songs), the needless knockoff song Can't We Start Again Please, inappropriate livestock sound effects and inexpicable excursions back into English.

Overture  |  Heaven On Their Minds  |  What's The Buzz  |  Everything's Alright  |  This Jesus Must Die  |  Hosanna  |  Simon Zealots - Poor Jerusalem  |  Pilate's Dream  |  The Temple  |  Everything's Alright - I Dont Know How To Love Him  |  Damned For All Time - Blood Money  |  The Last Supper  |  Gethsemane - I Only Want To Say  |  The Arrest  |  Peter's Denial  |  Pilate and Christ  |  King Herod's Song  |  Could We Start Again Please  |  Judas' Death  |  Trial Before Pilate  |  Superstar  |  Crucifixion  |  John Nineteen Forty One

If you enjoyed these, don't forget The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack in Norwegian. Lots of other MP3 posts from Beware of the Blog here.

A Diagram of the Home

(hommage mineur à Bil Keane)

Mother(s) Rage

Jesus, what's up Internet?  I know you go through your phases, but what's with this white-ladies-of-the-American-south-flipping-their-lids kick you've been on lately?  What?  You've always been obsessed by them?!  Hmmm... so you have.  And it's not just you?  I guess you're right.  Well, TV may have started it, but you've gotta admit you're sort of harvesting them.

Exhibits:

Margaret Perrin She's the one that seems to have started all this. Click to view a gag-reel of her show-saving turn on Fox's "Trading Spouses".  (Oh please, no booing, you're better than that!) Margaret is what you might call a "Good Christian Woman from Louisiana".  You are what Margaret would call a "Gargoyle from the dark side". 

Parking Lot Pariah (NSFW): And over here we've got the potty-mouthed secular (also southern) version of Mrs. Perrin.  (both of these vids via break.com)

"You should've asked me nicely, Mom" (link to clean Realaudio version, or download the totally choad-licking obscene mp3).  This is some unhinged Mom (from the south) and her dickwad 16-yr old kid, which I found on The Internet someplace.  She started screaming at him to let her use his car, so he turned on his webcam.  You only need to hear the audio.  I hear some of our DJs have tried this tactic, only to fail when the parental ass-whupping commenced.

Speaking of parental ass-whuppings, here's a thing someone wrote back in 1998, and it's all about being a mom and raging at your kid - way back in 1998!  What's more, she says all mothers got rage -- so this kinda thing's been going on since 1998, and The Internet is just now catching on? Shame on you Internet!  Tho I grant, it's not really your territory until it becomes porn -- hey, what's that?! A site that fetishizes that movie "Locked Up: A Mothers Rage" starring Cheryl Ladd as a raging mom who smokes cigarettes!!  (For what it's worth, here's Realaudio of my kid Lila flipping the tables and raging at her mother, accompanied by Nurse With Wound.)

Of course, one need not be an actual mother to be in possession of Mother Rage; no, mother rage makes plenty of allowance for human complexity.  We celebrate (flip) now with two versions of the "Dyketactic" classic from Kathy Fire, "Mother Rage".

From the WFMU News Vault: The Man Comes to WFMU

According to the Freeform Timeline,  "April 24, 1958 - WFMU's first ever broadcast. Nothing is known about it. For its first ten years, WFMU serves Upsala College students, broadcasting lectures, Lutheran services, classical music, jazz and international music."  On November 4 of 1967, WFMU's first-ever freeform show, Vin Scelsa's The Closet debuted in the midnight to 6am slot, and as seen earlier on this blog, by 1969, WFMU was getting more and more national media exposure for it's "far-out" free-form programming, and the station staff was getting more and more heat from the college administration for it, as well.    On August 31st, 1969, the staff walked out in disgust and Upsala College shuttered WFMU for 10 months. But what happened at the end of those 10 months?  According to these undated clippings (93k Jpeg) (supposedly from The New York Times), a new station manager was brought aboard by Upsala to "teach students the proper guidelines for radio"...

A Thanksgiving Prayer from William S. Burroughs

Straight from Blame-America-First World Headquarters to your hard drive, here's a Thanksgiving Day prayer from William S. Burroughs, from a video directed by Gus Van Sant (mpg video for download). In this 1986 poem, Burroughs salutes our nation of finks "where nobody is allowed to mind his own business." And he throws in a few bad words for the KKK, Prohibition and "Kill a Queer for Christ" bumper stickers for good measure.

Back & To The Left

You all know what happened 42 years ago today in Dallas...

Order NOW To Guarantee Delivery By Christmas!

I usually make my own Christmas cards but time is collapsing on me this year - so I checked eBay and came across the awesome Sebastian Bach card you see to the right. The same seller also has cards featuring Cinderella, Def Leppard, Poison and even Rick Springfield! Nothing says "Birth of the Saviour" like Rick Springfield in your mailbox, eh?

Mark E. Smith Reads Daily Football Results

Face it: Mark E. Smith could fart in a bag and we'd think it's funny and a grand artistic statement by which future gaseous emissions ought to be measured. So looky here (right-click to download 6M Real Media file) and get a load of The Fall frontman's visit to a local UK sports desk, to which he was invited for the purpose of reading the daily football results. The beginning and middle are kind of brain-numbing, but the end is priceless. (Via Jon Solomon)

And when you're done with that, check this (older) but equally enthralling clip (streaming Real Media file) of the Mad Man of Manchester's reflection on the passing of John Peel. At about the 2 minutes mark, he does the funniest thing you will ever see anywhere. Liz Berg and I nearly passed out from laughing and replaying it. (Via Mr. Science)

Cooking With Brother JT

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania's Brother JT is a man of much talent, as we have seen in his almost 20-year discography both solo and with the Original Sins (who, by the way, reunite on WFMU December 13th for a live set). We all knew JT could bring the psychedelic soul, but how many of us knew that his greatest talent was in the kitchen? Thanks to JT for allowing us to put up an excerpt (17 MB wmv file) of his rejected program submission to the Food Network (you guys are real rubes for passing him up). The entire DVD Someone's In the Kitchen With JT (which also features as 2000 tour documentary called Southern Discomfort), is available along with many of his non-visual confections at his site.

Knob Twirling: Opposable Thumb No Longer Required

via Music Thing

 

Blubber Chicken and Middle-Class Pie

Hello, everybody—nice seeing you again.

I was reading a social history of housework, because that's the kind of thing I do for fun, and in the chapter on cooking the author said that now that a whole generation has grown up eating Hamburger Helper, that's what Americans think home cooking is. They associate a good, home-cooked meal with Mom dumping the contents of a box into a pan and mushing it up with some ground beef. This made me feel very un-American, because I'd never eaten Hamburger Helper in my life. Then one night I happened to have a pound of ground beef in the Kelvinator, and it was a night Sluggo wasn't going to be home for dinner, so I decided to experiment. I walked to the store and, mirabile dictu, Hamburger Helper was on sale that week. There were a lot of flavors; I hadn't expected that. I didn't know which was the correct, all-American flavor to get, but there were empty spaces on the shelf so I figured probably the "regular" flavor was already sold out. I wanted to do my experiment, but I wasn't so committed to it that I was willing to get a raincheck and another pound of ground beef the following week, so I finally chose "Oriental" because its name seemed more politically incorrect, and therefore more all-American, than "Stroganoff."

Well, it was dreadful. The predominant flavor was salt, apparently as an attempt to disguise the bizarre chemical flavors of the other ingredients. I like salt—I sometimes snack on sea salt straight from the box—but Hamburger Helper was too salty for me. I am sorry for the Americans who eat this stuff, but on the other hand I'm not a foodie, either. Foodie food is peculiar in its own way. For instance, foodies are responsible for blubber chicken. For hundreds of years, American cookbooks have advised folks to roast a chicken by letting it sit in a 350-degree oven for an hour or two, depending on the weight of the bird. It was delicious, and it was fool-proof—but unfortunately it wasn’t foodie-proof. Pick up any new-fangled foodie cookbook, and you’ll discover that you should be putting your chicken in a 500-degree oven for a while, and then lowering the temperature for another while, and then you will wind up with a nasty, undercooked, blubbery bird which apparently you are supposed to pretend to enjoy because if you don’t you are an unsophisticated rube who only wants your food to taste good.

To Live and PXL in LA

I haven’t been to LA since living there in '89-'90.  I drove a front-end loader at a garbage plant in Long Beach on Terminal Island for 8 months and shot footage on my Fischer Price PXL 2000 camera that I had bought at Toys-R-Us for about $100.  The camera uses audiocassettes to record audio and visual simultaneously, running at about 5 times the speed the tape normally runs on a tape deck.  The best description I’ve heard compares the b&w picture quality to a Chuck Close painting; grainy, fragmented and blurry.  I documented a whole lot of junk on my PXL, particularly while living in LA for those 8 or so months and had two short films in the 'PXL This 14' "festival" held every year in LA.  By “festival” I mean night-of-PXL-films- at-a-small-video-gallery. Last Friday afternoon I realized that the 15th Annual ‘PXL This’ festival was happening on Saturday the 19th at Sponto Gallery in Venice.  I done did book my flight and arrived in LA Saturday morning at 11AM.  All told, I spent less than 24 hours in LA County.  I had to take a nap the minute I arrived at my hotel and then went down to the beach in Santa Monica to see how commercialized everything had become.  I can’t say I recommend LA for a single day when flying from NY, the whole time I felt like I was on the verge of a mental coma.  I’m not one of those New York types that hate LA., I honestly could live on either coast.  But I must say, it is a strange and curious place.  It’s just so…. different (from New York).  Take the weirdo’s for instance.  They have their whole own breed of weirdo’s out there, I can’t even relate.  More like hippy-Manson-weirdo’s than your East Coast, city-bred weirdo’s.  West Coast Weirdo’s seem more like they’re on Angel Dust than actually 'touched'.  And another thing that stood out was the LA Homeless Army.  I guess you could say that the homeless population in LA seems a lot bigger and possibly more intelligent than our NYC homeless, it being warm and beautiful in LA all the time.  LA’s homeless don’t live in the subways, they live under palm trees, next to flowering Bird of Paradise plants , which until yesterday, I had never seen except in the florist.  Our homeless are defiantly quieter, too.  Being homeless in LA practically requires that you walk around shouting inanities into the air, or dance in the street, or do things with a plastic bag that I can see on next season’s runways.  So that night, after my nap, after my walk, feeling like I was coming off drugs and knowing I had about 5 hours left to enjoy myself, I drove my rent-a-car to Venice for the big PXL event.  Evidently, PXL usage is alive and well, which was a real treat, having never seen any PXL films beside my own.  And boy was there enough PXL to go around, 4 full-blown hours worth, mommy.  People are putting a lot more thought into it than I am.  Evidently other PXL’ers actually try to make something whereas I just aim for throwaway whatever-ness.  My entry, of course, was totally retarded; titled '10 Movements-America', it consisted of random footage from a family reunion in the Live Free of Die state of NH.  My mom kept running us up there in the early 90’s saying that my grandmother was sure to be taking her last breath any day then.  One of the ‘PXL This’ organizers, Eli Elliot, my personal heaven sent PXL guru, edited my footage in the name of art and turned my scrap shots into a titled, credited, edited PXL film.  Without him, I’d be nothing.  LA in a day, what the hell!?

Air America's Next Big Mistake (part 2)

(Read pt. 1 of this post here)

     "Has anyone ever heard of Rachel Maddow?"
                                               - Rush Limbaugh

Yeah Rush, we sure have. And by now, so have of you.

That little quote has been an oft-played sound bite at the beginning of The The Rachel Maddow show since it debuted on Air America last April. And the fact "El Rushbo" hadn't discovered Ms. Maddow last spring can probably be based on two things-- For one, Limbaugh most likely knew nothing about Air America, beyond that fact that TV stars Al Franken and Janine Garofalo were a part of it. And the other reason Maddow was probably off the Limbaugh radar back then was his comment came at the dawn of Maddow's new sub-career as a liberal TV pundit. And it isn't hard to imagine that most of Limbaugh's media intake (beyond the likely emailed orders from Rove staffers and the heralded "stack of stuff" his staff prepares) would come only from television.

For most people, Maddow's program airs when they're unconscious. On the radio from five to six in the morning from the Air America studios in New York, The Rachel Maddow Show is a hot coffee jolt of headlines, breaking stories, and some news almost no one else is talking about. And twice each program, you get 2 off the wall satirical newscasts from Kent Jones. The hour goes by fast, and by the end you feel a little smarter. She's like that.

Rachel Maddow is a unique and powerful new media entity, and a young honest voice in the age of Bush II who offers challenging facts instead of raw malice against all the madness the administration propagates.  Maddow is a Rhodes Scholar and a proud "out" lesbian who comes across on the radio as warm, sincere and a little fierce. Her approach to radio has a paced athletic quality that makes her a bit of a current events trainer on the radio. I imagine it's the perfect show to accompany a gym regimen. Maddow never goes over the top, but the pace is rapid, and to the point with context. She maintains good humor and spirit in the face of bad news and strange times. Combined with the sharp humor of Kent Jones, her program is an informative and practical way to deal with the onslaught of nauseating news, and to keep up with the bad guys.

No, the Euphonium