WFMU's Beware of the Blog

WFMU Homepage Image Gallery

WFMU webhamster Henry Lowengard has taken all the images that have ever appeared on our homepage and has made a gallery out of them. They're all there - all the sloths, chimps, Old Codgers, dubyas, DJs, radio images - even the images that I was shamed into removing after ten minutes by our own internal Parent's Radio Council. Here's the gallery.

And let me now take a moment to thank and acknowledge Henry for founding the WFMU website back before there even was a world wide web! Henry set up a WFMU gopherspace (old-timers may remember that term...) on Echo NYC. That was the site that evolved into wfmu.org, which launched in October, 1993. Thanks Henry!

WFMU Listener Art

A few months ago, WFMU was lost in a dark wooded forest of creative blockage, with nary a flashlight or compass to guide us back to the path of artistic awareness. We sent out a desperate cry for help, beseeching listners to submit their t-shirt and sticker designs for us to have our way with, and o, were we led back to the light!

This year's Logo-Rama contest elicited the largest number of artistic submissions on record, and they were all so good that we can't help but share them with you. Take a gander at the myriad of listener art submissions right here.

The decision was tough, but we could only select 2 winners: Gregory Jacobsen's "Creepy Meatball" design (left) is featured on our December t-shirt giveaway (snag one for yourself by donating $45 or more to the freeform cause), and Nick Dewar's "Dancette" design (mock-up on the right) will be featured on a sticker to be given out during WFMU's 2006 on-air fundraising Marathon.

A big thanks to all of our artistically-endowed listeners who participated!

*

 

*

Off-Mic DJ Activities for December 2005

Ahh, the end of calendar year 2005 approacheth, and where matters of off-mic activities are concerned, we've got the proverbial bizzle in our hizzle, as the kids say. Now that our ceremonial decompression rituals associated with Record Fair recovery (let me just say that Pseu Braun gives one MOTHER of a foot massage...) have passed, we're tightening all the escape hatches for the ensuing end-of-year holiday madness that's on deck, but also pointing our collective bad selves towards tomorrow's horizons and whatever 2006 holds in store.

Take Fabio Roberti for example; erstwhile host of the Strength Through Failure program (currently off the schedule, but enjoying enormous celebrity on in the internet in archive form). Never one to be caught lounging around his stylishly decorated flat wasting time,  Fabio will soon be participating in a film presentation at the Galapagos art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The weekly "Ocularis" exhibit on December 5th will feature the films of Mr. Roberti, along with contributions from Larry 7, Jim Sharpe, Michael Wolf, and Oscar de la Renta. More info on the specifics of the screenings can be found here.

Later that week (December 8th at 8 PM), catch the L train back into Manhattan and do the thousand-meter-mosey downtown to Burrow (31 Crosby St. between Broome and Grand Streets) for Bronwyn C.'s reading of one of her self described "scary little stories" as part of the inaugeration of Burrow's non/fiction series of readings. Other participants slated to read are Jason Bitner of Found Magazine, and Glen Szabo of Sweet Action and Purple Fiction. Admission is FREE, and will feature delicious beverages courtesy of Sixpoint Craft Ales.

Sites for Sore Eyes

Ahh, the internet. It sucks company bandwidth, blows your productivity at home and in the school library, and there are naked people. LOTS of them. There are also crazy MP3s, weirdo animations, stupid movies, arty things to impress your intellectual pals with, old timey robots, and European football hooligans armed with video cameras. Ladies and gentlemen, I hereby present half an hour of your life that you will never get back.

Mile and miles of vintage arcade sounds
And not just recordings of the games themselves, but the geek-chic ambience of the arcades themselves, which I spent countless hours in as a kid, as I imagine many of you did as well. Left! Left! Bodyblow! Bodyblow! Quickly followed by the buzzsaw gun from some shoot 'em up, and the lame victory music from Tron. Ladies, have I lost you yet?

Cup stacking championship?
Next up, a salad-tossing derby.

Best Rejected Advertising
TV, Radio, Print, you name it -- All of 'em share the common theme of having been complained about by consumers. Says a lot about the national standards of "taste and decency" in the various countries of origin, especially in places like Italy, where you can't sell granola bars, carburetors, or airline tickets without a multitude of nude bodies.

Spray it, Don't Say it
The incredible beatbox stylings of San Francisco's Kid Beyond.

Google News in Map Form
Did your family Thanksgiving dinner feature one of those fist-through-the-wall styled arguments with your Dad about that kooky old liberal media? Did you, at any point summon the crusty specters of NPR vs. Fox News or New Yorker vs. The Drudge Report? This newsmap application (seems to launch best in Internet Explorer) will dazzle you regardless of your good witch/bad witch/cowboy/indian/liberal/conservative leanings.

From the WFMU News Vault: The Reincarnation of WFMU Poster

In the great tradition of WFMU-related art, here is a poster heralding "the Reincarnation of WFMU", created by an unknown artist sometime in the very-early 1970's.

As seen earlier on this blog, in the Summer of 1969, the WFMU staff walked out in protest in part due to pressure from Upsala College over their "far-out" (free-form) programming.  WFMU was off the air for about 10 months until Upsala hired a new Station Manager who would run the station with "a more professional effort"

At left (click to enlarge) is a copy of this poster which a listener donated to the station.  We estimate that it dates back to the time around when the station went back on the air in 1970.  It is a seriously groovy flyer for the night-time slots, and promises "good karma" and that "a splendid time is guaranteed for all".

Got to investigate Silophones

That picture on Bryce's recent post reminded me of the Silophone, an audio art experiment that answers the question, "Just what does audio sound like if you pump it through an abandoned 10-story-tall grain storage building in Montreal?"

The building, originally known as Silo #5, was turned into the Silophone by the Montreal artists collectively known as [The User], and has been accessible to interested parties in Montreal's Old Town neighborhood through a cool-looking installation nearby the building. You can also upload audio through the Silophone Website, or phone it in live by calling (514) 844-5555. The Website provides a live audio stream so you can hear other people's contributions or, more often than not, the quiet white noise of a completely silent abandoned building.

More Silophone info available in this NPR story from 2001 about the installation. [The User] played the Silophone on their 2003 CD Abandon (RealAudio sample from the WFMU archives). As far as I know, no WFMU DJ has used the Silophone to augment their on-air talking, but really, it's only a matter of time.

The Lost Art of Jim Flora

Purveyors of fine vinyl have no doubt come across the amazing LP designs of Jim Flora, whose illustrations graced the covers of albums by artists like Sauter-Finegan, Gene Krupa, Sidney Bechet and dozens of other jazz LPs from the 40's and 50's. WFMU's own Irwin Chusid was so enamored of Flora's art that he authored a book about him, The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora. Flora's art has also been used on various WFMU T-shirts and bumper stickers, and his style has influenced dozens of current artists such as Tim Biskup and Gary Baseman to name but two.

Recently, Irwin discovered a previously unknown cache of unpublished Flora artwork which showed a new, more demented side of the artist. From an interview with the AIGA Journal of Design, Irwin described the untombed cache of Flora art:

"A lot of his work is cartoonish. It's fun to look at, evocative of childhood nostalgia and dereliction of adult responsibility. There are clowns and kitty cats, grinning faces and beaming suns. But despite his later reputation for G-rated kid-lit, Flora, in many of these works, did not restrain himself from expressing darker impulses. There's no shortage of guns and knives and fang-baring snakes. Muggers run amok, demons frolic with rouged harlots and Flora's characters suffer from severe disfigurement. These elements - the banal and the violent - often co-exist within inches of each other on the canvas."

Here is the full interview with Irwin about his efforts to preserve and publish Flora's discovered works, and here's the great Jim Flora site.

 

A Diagram of the Home

(hommage mineur à Bil Keane)

Knob Twirling: Opposable Thumb No Longer Required

via Music Thing

 

No, the Euphonium

This Week in Sex: Trashbox

Pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable, because we've got a big sticky wad of smut for you this week. Make sure you grab a handywipe on your way out.

Plug and play. Momma's got a squeeze box, and it's the iBuzz plug-in that syncs up a vibrator to the beat of the music on your iPod. (Handywipe, please.) Wanna visit the Iorio International Accordion Museum? Me too. [via boingboing]

What not to wear:

• If anything will make you keep it in your pants, it's boxers with HIV on them. [via popgadget]
• You can wear teeny condoms, but you better not talk about it unless you are Enrique Iglesias. You know, you probably shouldn't talk about it either, Enrique.
• Backless panties: perfect for lady plumbers.
• Furry, heated wonder bra is supposed to reduce energy consumption, but it will never be made or worn, so never mind.
• Imagine how hot super-long socks are to people who think plain old regular socks are hot.
• Can't have too many novelty aprons, Dad. Now go carve some turkey.

(F:) Drive Video Vault

Rarely do my worlds collide with such hilarity as in this clip from grindcore band Dying Fetus.  To see the Blue's Clues "face" and other images from popular children's TV used in this fashion brings me great joy.  (Everyone knows that Death Metal vocals started with the Cookie Monster, anyway.)  Go on, play this video for your kids—with the given indecipherability of the lyrics, I'm sure no one's in danger, despite the title.  Here's more information about the band and the album, plus guitar tabs for the song.  [Dying Fetus - Kill Your Mother Rape Your Dog mpg]

Since there seems to be a Fall renaissance going on, it's timely to view these clips of the band in their salad days.  First, one of the earliest lineups performing "Psychomafia" and "Industrial Estate" (plus some interview footage), taken from the What's On? program in 1978.  Note the presence of original keyboardist (and Mark E. girlfriend) Una Baines.  The next clip is a raucous live performance of the song "Smile" from 1983, when the band was featured on the BBC's The Tube.  BBC Radio icon John Peel appears briefly in the intro; Peel waived his hosting fee, with the agreement that The Fall could perform on the show.  All this should make you ripe and ready for The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith, an outstanding 2005 BBC4 documentary that is so good, the lack of a subsequent DVD release would be criminal.  (RSM contributed)  [Fall clip 1] [Fall clip 2]

How cool were The Stranglers?  Look at Hugh Cornwell—you wish you were half as cool as he is in this Top of The Pops clip, where the band apes to their version of Burt Bachrach's "Walk On By."  Not the greatest lip syncher, but still way cool.  Start with a base stock of Roxy Music, add some Ray Manzarek keyboards, fold in four creative, decadent minds and stir, with lots of grit and sweat from the pub floor and voila! — one of my all-time favorite bands.  Why are The Stranglers not as heralded as some of their contemporaries from the UK punk explosion?  Was it Dave Greenfield's refusal to leave the prog era behind and cut his hair?  Perhaps they were too dark, too literary or too sexy for their own good.  The Stranglers still perform and record today, albeit without Hugh, who's busy with his solo projects, including two books and a touring/recording band.  [The Stranglers - Walk On By mpg]

They Called Her Mrs. Bowie

Don't worry, fabulous space-kittens, this isn't an R.I.P. post. Angie Bowie is alive and well, hanging out with pals like Xaviera Hollander and Mick Karn, and writing pocket books about bisexuality.

In fact, here's a cool interview with the lady with some great pictures. Better yet, you MUST see Angie in a leotard thong, with giant press-on nails and a *ahem* handsome escort in these incredible videos!

3 Videos: Subway Car Video, Ali Snubs Bush and Al Qaeda Cartoon Outtakes

Here's how to turn a subway car into a film projector, using only suction cups, mirrors and a laptop. The perpetrators in this case pulled it off in Berlin. Had they tried this stunt in New York, they'd be facing charges right now. Quicktime video for download via del.icio.us/tag/video

Last week, President Bush awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom award to Muhammad Ali, calling The Greatest "a man of peace," and "the greatest of all time." Ali responded by making the internationally accepted "this guy's nuts" sign as Bush tied the ribbon around his neck. Windowsmedia video for download

The Family Guy started off a recent episode with a great idea - what would the outtakes from an Al Qaeda "death to infidels" video look like? Of course, it ends with Stewie kicking some Al Qaeda ass, which would never happen. If anything, Stewie would join up. Windowsmedia video for download (last two via theync.com)

Audible Hiss

Came across this great site which made my heart and ears ache for my bygone days as a cassette enthusiast. It's an alphabetical photo montage of... keeee-rist... seemingly every make and model of blank cassette manufactured from then 'til now, and given that they're all the exact same shape and size, the sheer diversity of design is pretty head spinning. Gazing down the list, my eyes fell on a few that even reminded me of old tapes from my personal collection that either bit the dust eons ago, never made it out from under the seat of my '81 VW Rabbit, got left at parties, were simply tossed to make way for other obsessions, or perhaps still lurk in some dark corner of my apartment, waiting to be uncovered and reprimanded for wasting precious storage space.

For example, this little jobby here was a bit of an industry standard of the late 80s. But it's also the exact make and model of the corny mixtape I made the year before I finished high school and was subsequently carted around from punk rock shows in Trenton, to parties of older friends who'd trotted off to art school in the city, to secret skateboard spots in Pennsylvania, and then back again several thousand times over. I know this tape still resides in a bag of crap in my closet and is sun-bleached and warbled from years and years of abuse. The tracklisting is way too embarrassing to include here, but I will admit that it includes a plainly retarded segueway from the Jesus & Mary Chain into 7 Seconds. (Links to Real Audio.)

This one here had a Buzzcocks (Real Audio) mix that someone made for me. Or maybe it was just a dub from a vinyl copy of "Singles Going Steady", which probably gave the above mixtape some fierce competition for play in the boombox at some point or another. Sadly, side two of this tape featured a dub of Joni Mitchell's "Blue" album, (stop laughing) which is a great example of the classic mis-step of tape making, especially when precious boombox battery power is at risk: Don't put something you're only in the mood to hear once a year on the flipside of something you consider part of your daily personal hygiene. To this day, I can not listen to the Buzzcocks without fashioning my hair into a tidy bun and pretending to be a librarian 45 minutes later.

Purchased at Topp's Appliances in East Brunswick, NJ for the explicit purpose of making a mixtape for the pasty-faced punky maiden I was madly in love with during senior year of high school. This tape was twice as expensive as the garden variety Maxell/TDK models in regular circulation at the time, but I figured it was important to spend a little cash on the lady. She was obsessed with Depeche Mode, (Real Audio) whom I pretended to like for a little while in the hopes of earning her sympathy. Instead, after graciously accepting the mixtape from me just prior to Christmas break, she never again spoke to or made eye contact with me, having been obviously disturbed by something on the tape. (Note to current teenagers attempting to win hearts of pasty-faced punky maidens by making them mixtapes: Reconsider the inclusion of any lengthy Hubert Selby spoken word pieces as "dramatic" conclusion to side one. Though fashionable at one time, this is now widely regarded as a fiercely stupid idea.)

Helpless Man Femdom Art

Femdom Art - Drawings of little men with their heads stuck in the cracks of big bottomed ladies. (nsfw)

Bellydancers & Harem Girls!

Bellydancers and Harem Girls -- A Historical/Cheesecake Gallery

...a fantastic archive of historical bellydance photos- from nudie postcards to Hollywood starlets. My favorite is this spellbinding swollen siren.

The Prelinger Collection at Archive.org has a corpulent collection of old stripper film reels.

And while we're at it, we can't leave out The Metal Goddess Bellydancers who gyrate to the sounds of Ozzy and Twisted Sister. Oggle at their videos!

This Week in Sex: Sucktastic

Last week in sex:

• Recycle your holiday pumpkins into sex toys. Big, orange, un-sexy sex toys. (How will the diy sex toy people recycle christmas trees?)
  
• Check out what dildos went as for Halloween, and what the dildos did before that.
• Dirty laundry update: Last week we told you about vagina underwear (specifically, we told you not to wear it). This week it's frozen ground beef panties. Again, we ask you not to wear them, and we are backed up by the federal government (finally, some support here!) because the beef may have been contaminated with E. coli. Hats of Meat, however, are still tasteful and fashion-forward, wear well in the winter, and should be fine long as you don't get them near the dirty meat panties.

Last century in sex: U.S troops in London in WWII no match for "young sluts." But really, who is?

Color me horny. "Adult" paint by numbers, which is good because I don't understand the letters on that site. But that's OK, because the pictures are in the universal language of porn.

Nip/tuck. Do dogs know when they've been de-balled? I don't know if ball-replacement surgery helps, but having your owner wear a necklace with fake balls on it has to be a downer when you are trying to be a stud on the dog run.

Belly dancers. I'm not going to make fun of the 7th Annual Women's Belly and Womb Conference, where we will learn to love and know the power in our bellies and celebrate the magic of our womb today. As conference organizer ALisa (sic) Starkweather puts it, "Belly and Womb. Belly and Womb. You've got to know what's down in there. Belly and Womb. Belly and Womb. You've got to heal what you think you can't bear. Belly and Womb. Belly and Womb. Listen to your body. She speaks what's true. Belly and Womb. Belly and Womb. Honor the wisdom deep in you."  I'm listening to my belly and she wants to hurl. I'm going to honor that wisdom.

You're in trouble. They call it Urine Gone, but Urine Trouble would have been better. Order it "as seen on tv" and you get a black-light stain detector as seen on tv shows like CSI. And if you don't know why I mention this in a sex post, you aren't thinking about how gross/fun it would be to play detective in a motel room with that thing.

A blog of their own. Salon started a blog for the ladies, and lady-readers must be majorly pms-ing 'cause they HATE it. Maybe after a few days, a few pints of Ben and Jerry's, and a handful of Advil, they'll chill. One lady thinks it's "astoundingly sucktastic" to find some weird or funny or interesting tidbit in the news, add snarky comments, call it a blog, and think anyone besides your friends would care. Yeah. Right. OK. Are we meeting at the movies later? Call me! Bye! 

[You have to sit through an ad to get to Salon. Sucktastic!]

thanks to Corinna and SM Ken

"Fat Gal" by Merle Travis, now in Visual Form on WFMU's Comics Page

WFMU's Comics Page has a new addition!

Listener-artist Ken Struck created this comic based on Merle Travis' 1947 song "Fat Gal" (mp3, 1.8mb).  He submitted it to us many moons ago and has given his kind permission for us to make it available for your funny-pages pleasure.  He has other "cool comix" for sale and you can email him at Kennethstruck at aol dot com if you have any inquiries.

Ken's comic joins works by Mary Fleener, Chris Worden, and John McLeod, who were inspired by the songs of Captain Beefheart, The Angry Samoans, Arthur Lee and Love, Earl Bostic and Pastor John Rygden. 

The Comics Page also features Jim Ryan's 1989 strip "Among the Vinyl People", which serves as an amusing preview of what's in store at the WFMU Record Fair, coming this weekend. 

Enjoy the funnies, and if you are a cartoon artist who has a song-based comic you would like to submit for consideration, please drop me a line!

10, officer.

We all love music, and we all love to watch hand skills. So watch Greg Irwin and his incredible finger dexterity as he bust out moves to the beat of De'vo's music.

(The other Devo.)

"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.

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.

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.

Victoria Reveals The Truth About Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries and Jim Morrison

Here's a piece of flash art by "Victoria," who identifies herself not only as the brains behind the South Korean net art duo Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries, but also as the electronic reincarnation of The Lizard King. Shades of both 386DX and Rene's "I Am The Best Artist." Thanks Listener Charles!

Here Comes the New Technology, Same as the Old Technology

Hello, Everybody--Nice Seeing You Again.

Sorry I'm late posting this week--I seem to have lost track of everything, including whether or not I've already told you about the great Japanese CD Gramophone. See? You take all those nice free promotional CDs you've been using as coasters and pocket mirrors and put them on the gramophone and sing or talk, and then the needle cuts the grooves and you've made a wee, tinny recording of yourself. How fine is that? It costs about $30, depending on the exchange rate, from Hobby Link Japan.

But just in case someone else has already told you about the gramophone, here's the newest old technology, sure to be a hit with fans of Mac's Antique Phonograph Hour show--the Edison Cylinder Plastic Cup Recording Device!

Unfortunately, I think you have to speak Japanese to order this--the only place I've found it is on a non-English web site.  But Yuletide is coming, so put it on your list and maybe Hoteiosha will bring you one!

Me, I'm still hoping for the complete DVD collection of "The Immortal Yi Soon Shin" with English subtitles.

Thanks for reading my blog entry this week, and may God bless.
-Bronwyn C.

Nothing Exceeds Like Excess

New Yorkers love to overdo it: from caf-tunics to electroclash (RIP) to weather report-mania, just leave it to a surly, fast-talking city-dweller to obsess with unrivaled fury.

A few of our neighbors who have gone well beyond the call of duty:

Inspector Collector - dude living in a tiny Manhattan apartment is not only steward of the world's largest collection of Chinese menus, but also gathers mutilated money, toothpicks, shopping lists, and photos of tubers. Thanks Andy!

The Bubble Project (pictured, right) - one of these puppies has been placed atop an ad in nearly every subway station in Manhattan; over 15,000 of these stickers are in circulation.

SuperVillains (.mov, 48 MB) - video mix by Suckadelic and System D128; over 5 min of wicked cackling and diabolical scheming. via rumori detritus list

WFMU Art Contest

Attention artists: WFMU is hungry for tasty new T-shirt and bumper sticker designs to be used for our 2006 fundraising Marathon.

Enter our contest, Logo-Rama 2005, where fame, glory, and $300 worth of records, CDs, and/or MP3s can all be yours if the spoils of your right brain prove worthy. We're accepting both digital and analog works up until Thursday, October 20. Hit up our online store to see examples of art we've used in the past.

Digital submissions may be sent to "contest (at) wfmu (dot) org" as attachments (.jpg, .tif, or .pdf formats only, please do not send files over 1 MB in size).

Original artwork, high-quality reproductions (no slides, please), and CD-Rs or DVD-Rs containing digital files (.jpg, .tif, or .pdf only) may be sent to:

WFMU
c/o Logo-Rama 2005
P.O. Box 2011
Jersey City, NJ 07303

Artwork will be returned upon request, but please remember to provide your address.

There is no limit to the number of designs any one person can submit, but do include your full name, a valid e-mail address, and daytime phone number when submitting designs. Questions may be directed to contest (at) wfmu dot org.

Decorate your Desktop with WFMU Wallpaper

Now you too can decorate your computer desktop the way the Movie Stars do, with our amazing WFMU Wallpaper!  To take advantage of this fabulous offer, simply click the link below for your desired selection, and once it loads, right click over the image and choose "Set as Wallpaper".  Or, if your computer doesn't have that option, you can right click on the image (once it loads) and choose to "Save Image As.." and then set the wallpaper via your computer's control panel settings.  This site has more information on how to set your wallpaper up, or you can drop me a line if you are still stuck. 

Now, on to the fabulousness.  Today's selections include artwork from WFMU T-shirts past:

Making the End Times Happy Times
1024x768, 269k.
800x600, 176k.
Bruno Nadalin designed this happy-calyptic image for a WFMU T-shirt a few years back.   Perfect for the computer user who rarely leaves home.

Jim Flora Kiddie Ensemble
1024x768, 85k
800x600, 60k
Inspired by the artwork of Jim Flora, designed by Dave Cunningham for the 2003 T-shirt.  Download this one and imagine that the mad little children are responsible for all that music in your head. 

Investigate Fish Farm
1024x768, 338k
800x600, 233k
Steven Keene created this lovely design for WFMU's Marathon 2000 T-shirt.

Powered By Love
1024x768, 225k
800x600, 215k
Forget Dell.  Power your desktop with Love.  Danny Hellman designed this super-cute image for the first-ever WFMU Iron-On back in 2003.

Learn Radio
1024x768, 691k 
800x600, 445k
Impress your friends and family with this Chris Ware creation in which Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, teaches us about the wonders of Radio.

Enjoy!  And, if you would care to decorate your body with any of these designs, take a stroll over to our Olde Time Internet Emporium to take a look at our fine t-shirts, bumper stickers, and more.

Things to Think and Do

Things to Think and Do

Hello, Everybody—Nice seeing you again.

I accidentally got a job writing fiction once. It was a pretty good job, and it paid pretty well, but the problem was that I’d never written fiction before and I wasn’t sure how to do it. Up until then, all I’d written were true stories of my real life, which apparently someone had mistaken for being fictional, but weren’t. (Of course, now that I know more about serious literary writing, I understand that it’s all pretty much just thinly disguised autobiography anyway, but at the time I didn’t know that.) So anyway, I panicked, and then I read that George Saunders—one of my favorite writers ever—was teaching up at Syracuse, so I wrote to him and asked him if he would teach me writing in a sort of freelance tutoring, don’t-tell-the-University way. He said no, of course, but he was very nice about it. As far as my writing job went, it turned out not to matter too much anyway. And George Saunders is still one of my favorite authors, so I was very happy when Dr. Colby asked if I wanted to go see an adaptation of Pastoralia at P.S. 122 on Saturday.

We did go, and we had a jolly time. The story, about a guy who works as a caveman reenactor at a failing theme park, makes a fine play. I haven’t had the chance to go back and reread it, but it seemed to me that director Yehuda Duenyas did a nice job of adapting it for the stage. All the technical stuff was good, and Michael Casselli’s sets and Kirstin Tobiasson’s costumes were excellent. I don’t go to plays very often because so much of the acting just annoys the crap out of me, but these actors didn’t, and both Aimee McCormick, who plays Janet, and Ryan Bronz, who plays Ed, were outstanding. Bronz conveyed so much with just his facial expressions, which can’t be easy when you’re wearing a caveman unibrow headband. He’s no Kim Myung Min, but he’s very, very good—although it might not be so successful in a bigger theater where you couldn’t see him right up close. Pastoralia is in the wee little theater space on the 9th St. side of P.S. 122 through next weekend, and I recommend that you see it if you get the chance.

Here are some other things I’m looking forward to doing to fill time until I get my Hepatitis shots and ship out for Louisiana:

Avant Retard

People Like Us, WFMU's sound collagier and host of the avant-audio montage program, Do or DIY,  is taking a breather during our new schedule (which runs through June 12, 2006) to make time for extracurriculars.

As a consolation to her many fans, PLU is offering up a special hour-long Do or DIY super-mix MP3 download (80 MB), complete with cover art and track listing.

If that doesn't satisfy your cravings, check out WFMU's vast library of archives for Do or DIY.

Shit From an Old Glove Compartment

My Mom rarely throws anything away.  I wouldn't say that she's a hoarder of tragic proportions, not like some you may have read about, but her home is unquestionably a museum of old magazines, old clothes, useless furniture, dried-out magic markers and cat knick-knacks.  "No Surface Left Uncovered," I like to say.  Every once in a while, her hoarding leads to unexpected discoveries, like a plastic baggie full of paper items retrieved from the glove box of the Dodge I drove throughout the early 90s.  As I sorted through them, these papers recalled a tattered reality of past lives, past loves, old friends and past decadence.

I used to have an assortment of little cards like this one, which typically carried a handwritten signature on the back (otherwise it was fairly useless.)  That signature (theoretically) endowed the presenter with the ability to purchase certain "specialized groceries" at said location(s), which would not have been available to the walk-in patron.

"Song For Uncle Wiggly to Sing" - Lyrics that were never musically realized, penned for us by friend and genius painter/performer TJK Haywood aka Wooden Thomas.  His work also adorns the cover of the second Uncle Wiggly LP, Across The Room and Into Your Lap.  Here's a link to Wooden Thomas' web site, and a free mp3 from his milestone album, Age of Aquarium.

Envelope and postcard from Thailand.  Sent by Sari Rubinstein, now The Queen of Rubulad.  Inside the envelope were a personal letter to me, and this glorious postcard of the Wat Chayamangkalaram Buddhist temple in Penang.  The postcard lacked a street address, but was written and addressed in name to my friends Mark Ashwill and Julie Spodek.  I guess I was supposed to hand deliver it.  Note my proto-hip Bedford Ave. address.  Some goateed beatnik no doubt lives there now and pays 4X the rent my roommate and I paid in 1992.

Mud Wrasslin'

If you've never hit up Walter De Maria's New York Earth Room, I suggest you pay this permanent installation a visit. Absorbing the notion that a 3600 sq ft NYC apartment (within the boundaries of Soho's most precious real estate radius, no less) is filled with 2 feet of dirt boggles the mind. It also fills you with a desire to cast your shoes aside and frolic past the observation barrier to feel the soil squish between your toes.

One group of kids documented a mud wrestling fest in the Earth Room (click here to download the video, .mov file), clocking in just under a minute's worth of forbidden glory (you'll find photos of the 2003 Brooklyn Condiment War if you delve further into their site, just beware of the hippie nudity).

De Maria was an experimental recording artist, and self-released an album called Drums and Nature in 1968; click the song titles below to hear them in real audio.
    "Ocean Music" from an archive of Hatch's show
    "Cricket Music" from an archive of Brian Turner's show

Archive Goodies, now with 33% more Nuns!

First lets get these nuns off my chest. A Nun Puppet and The Pink Nun (Keeping your who-ha in check)

Now good stuff in the WFMU archives that you can be hearing (with your ears) right now!

Chris T - Aerial View : August 20th 1993 Everything you always wanted to know about Men but were afraid to ask. With special guest Ken Freedman.

Kenny G - Anal Magic : 09.17.03 (Playlist) Listen (RealAudio) Live with R. Stevie Moore, Krys O, Irwin Chusid, Vicki Bennett

Ed Shepp- The Ed Shepp Radio Experiment: July 22, 2005(Playlist)Drugs(RealAudio) This show is great! It may be his best yet.

Mark Allen - From his August 4th show (Playlist) Listen (RealAudio) - some tedious radio, in a good way!

And lastly,

Scott Williams - August 22, 2005 (RealAudio) - Listen (RealAudio) to my dream come true! Then me being a bad caller (RealAudio)

Vintage Beatnik Poetry MP3s from Cafe Bizarre

I really should have posted these the day that Maynard G Krebs passed away, but I was asleep at the bongoes that day. So here are a batch of spoken word tracks recorded at Greenwich Village's Cafe Bizarre, long before "Beat" became a parody of itself.

And while we're at it, have a look at a documentary on the Greenwich Village scene, narrated by Jean Shepherd. (via the Internet Archive)

The MP3s from Greenwich Village's Cafe Bizarre Presents Assorted Madness start after the jump:

The Return of UbuWeb

UbuWeb is back. After a summer of rebuilding, the site is back with thousands of avant-garde MP3s and is chockfull of new content including:

Music With Roots in the Aether: A seminal series of interviews and performances concieved and realized by Robert Ashley in 1976, consisting of 14 hours worth of video and audio. Subjects and performers include: David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and Robert Ashley. Robert Ashley says: Music with Roots in the Aether is a series of interviews with seven composers who seemed to me when I conceived the piece-and who still seem to me twenty-five years later-to be among the most important, influential and active members of the so-called avant-garde movement in American music, a movement that had its origins in the work of and in the stories about composers who started hearing things in a new way at least fifty years ago."

The Charlotte Moorman Archive: UbuWeb is proud to host the audio archive of Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991), containing hours worth of unreleased works and collaborations by Nam June Paik, John, Cage, Earle Brown, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Jennings, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Jackson Mac Low, David Behrman, La Monte Young, Sylvano Bussoti, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Giuseppe Chiari and others. The selection is curated by Stephen Vitiello, with special thanks to Barbara Moore / Bound & Unbound.

People Like Us: The Complete Recordings 1992-2005 UbuWeb now hosts the complete works of the UK-based People Like Us. The brainchild of Vicki Bennett, these hundreds of MP3s feature solo works and collaborations with Matmos, Negativland, Wobbly, The Evolution Control Committee, Ergo Phizmiz, Irene Moon, The Jet Black Hair People, Xper. Xr., Messer Chups, Kenny G and Tipsy.

Christof Migone: Montréal-based Migone is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. His work and research delves into language, voice, bodies, psychopathology, performance, video, intimacy, complicity and endurance. UbuWeb is pleased to present an audio retrospective of Migone's work, both solo and with collaborators. Also featured here are numerous writings by Migone, including a book-length work, La première phrase et le dernier mot, which is comprised of the first sentence and the last word of every book in Migone's library.

The Books of August

Hello, Everybody—nice seeing you again.

I thought August was a pretty good month for me. I’ve been feeling better and was able to get out and have a little summer fun--I went to a couple of parties, an art opening, and a wedding, and I saw Jean Nathan speak in Bryant Park about her brilliant book, “The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll.” But then I looked at the books I’ve read over the past month, and I started to wonder about what’s really been on my mind: Two of ‘em are about my childhood homeland, two of ‘em have the word “gothic” in the title, one of ‘em is about surviving in extreme circumstances, and one of ‘em made me think of a very dear, dead friend.

American Signs: Form and Meaning on Route 66, by Lisa Mahar (2002, The Monicelli Press). Is there anything better than reading a book by someone whose mind works just like yours? Lisa Mahar traveled Route 66 from Chicago to L.A. and analyzed the motel signs along the way--their history, evolution, construction, function, and the messages they convey--with charts, illustrations, and many photos. The fact that she even thought to do this thrills me, but the execution--the book itself--is even better. Here is the caption to one of my favorite illustrations: “Motels signs that included a saguaro [cactus] illustration were relatively common along Route 66, but none were located within the natural range of the species. This illustration, which locates the motels in relation to the plant’s native habitat, is based on an illustration in Douglas Towne’s ‘The Mysteries of the Wandering Cactus Unearthed.’” Okay, maybe she could have used a better copy editor, but the book is a real treasure. It’s 272 pages long, and I thought of Mr. Boyd as I read every page.

From the Trenches - Triac In the WFMU Live Room

They came from Baltimore to grace the WFMU airwaves; TRIAC, featuring one member of Hatebeak, were musical guests last night on Andrew Listfield's fill-in program for Pat Duncan. Listen here (about 22 minutes in) for the MP3 version of their set; here to check it out in RealAudio. Triac treated the listening audience to an onslaught of 10 songs of their trademark sludgy, furious grind. The new cd, Dead House Dreaming, that features cover artwork from artist extraordinaire Stephen Kasner, is just recently out on the Reptilian label. The Cosmic Cowboy got a good aerial shot of them while clutching onto a ceiling fan for dear life, fearful of dropping into the whirling madness of the room below. Before they left, we chatted off-mic about things near & dear; Route 17 and the Paramus Mall, a website where you can listen to the entire HAWK album and other classic 80s metal finds, cutlery and good posture. Check out the archive, buy their album, see them live, Triac commands you!

Found and Found

To beef up a previous post on found items, I discovered a wealth of links for sites offering an array of cultural detritus and other people's crap:

Found photos: Big Happy Fun House
Sound collage artist listing: Detritus.net
An alarmingly expansive collection of found items, retro-heavy: Swapatorium (be sure to click on the video link for Laffun Head)
The Grocery List Collection: yep, 800 of 'em
Snapshots: Square America
Photos and pop ephemera: Happy Palace
Halloween-related crapola: Old Haunts
X-mas-related junk: Santa and me!
More found photos, organized by year: Time Tales

Whoa people, get a life. I mean, c'mon, don't you have something better to do than live vicariously through other people's garbage? Yeah, me neither.

Pablo Picasso, He Was No Porno

Hello, Everybody--Nice seeing you again.

Nick Bertozzi is smart, funny, good-looking, and talented. Unfortunately, he’s also a cartoonist. He started out the way a lot of alternative cartoonists do, drawing his own crude, obscene, and funny comic book, “The Incredible Drinkin’ Buddies.” Then he got all artsy and drew “Boswash,” a story about a cartographer that, instead of being printed as a book, folded out like a map. He won some awards for that one. He drew a bumper sticker for WFMU in 2001. His art got better and better, and he started getting illustration gigs, and he got married and had a little girl, and his comics got more and more serious and historical, ’cause you don’t want to draw dirty stuff when you’re thinking about keeping your daughter off the pole. That’s why I was surprised when I heard that some poor guy in Georgia might be going to prison for giving away a comic book with a Nick Bertozzi story in it.

Every year, the comic book industry has a promotion where they give away free comic books. This is supposed to lure people into comics stores, as if there’s anything in there you’d actually want to buy once they get you inside. I used to love comics, but I don’t go into comic shops any more because I got tired of pimply-faced 17-year-olds calling me “Ma’am” as if it were an insult. Anyway, this guy, Gordon Lee, owns a comic book shop in Rome, Georgia, and he had a bunch of books for 2004 Free Comic Book Day that he couldn’t even give away, so he decided to hand them out to trick-or-treaters on Halloween. One of the books was an anthology called “Alternative Comics #2” that featured an excerpt from “The Salon,” Nick Bertozzi’s graphic novel about Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. You know how kids love the early cubists. Nick did a lot of research on these guys, and the story is historically accurate, including the fact that the first time Braque went to Picasso’s studio, Pablo was painting in the nude. Naturally, that’s the part of the story that was excerpted in “Alternative Comcs #2.” Gordon Lee says the comic—which has a "Mature Readers" label—was accidentally put in the give-away pile, where it wound up being handed to a 9-year-old boy. The kid’s parents complained, and Gordon Lee was arrested.

Jodorowsky On His Unmade "Dune"

The idea that 1984's sci-fi epic/cash-sucking black hole Dune starred Sting and was scored by Toto when it could have involved Alejandro Jodorowsky (Santa Sangre, El Topo, Holy Mountain), Salvador Dali, H.R. Giger, and scoring by Magma is one of the best reasons for cinephiles to thud their heads repeatedly against hard surfaces and curse the Hollywood machine. Arthur Magazine's blog just put up a few postings on this, including an interview with Jod on the prep work he did before getting booted from the project, why he felt it was important for Dali to get $100,000 an hour to play the lead in Dune, Giger's work, and some of the fantastic spaceship designs Chris Foss worked on:

“Dune had to be made. But what kind of spaceships to use? Certainly not the degenerate and cold offspring of present day American automobiles and submarines, the very antithesis of art, usually seen in science fiction films, including 2001. No! I wanted magical entities, vibrating vehicles, like fish that swim and have their being in the mythological deeps of the surrounding ocean. The ‘galactic’ ships of North American technocracy are a mouse-gray insult to the divine, therefore delirious, chaos of the universe. I wanted jewels, machine-animals, soul-mechanisms. Sublime as snow crystals, myriad-faceted fly eyes, butterfly pinions. Not giant refrigerators, transistorised and riveted hulks; bloated with imperialism, pillage, arrogance and eunuchoid science."

More on this Dune Info page as well, and here's some Real Audio (played on WFMU) of an excerpted segment from one of Jodorowsky's most incredible films, 1973's the Holy Mountain.

Do's and Don'ts of NYC Public Art

In the name of discouraging vandalism, Mayor Bloomberg recently nixed a permit for some fashion designer's unrealised block party in Chelsea, which would have featured artists spray painting graffiti onto faux subway car panels. The event's promotors are pursuing legal action against the city in the name of protecting free speech.

UPDATE: The case went before a judge... graffiti prevails over Bloomberg (thanks, Krys O.)

This little clash combined with the 14-year-long perplexing battle over the orange shower curtains in Central Park got me wondering about the filters in place for veto-ing public art displays in NYC. While I couldn't find any steadfast rules governing the selection of works, here are some seemingly objectionable examples of what slipped past the censors:

Canned food replica planter boxes (potential copyright/trademark infringement issue)
Ghetto blaster bench (encourages excess urban noise)
Cars parked on sidewalk (self-evident, illegally parked cars in any city = breeding ground for anarchy)
Lamp shades / chess pieces in the park (encourages bad decorating)
Yellow cartoon elephant (unrealistically benign portrayal of a deadly beast ... thanks Scott)

IN THE WORDS OF P-5

Hello, Everybody--Nice Seeing You Again.

The good news this week is that our friend Dave just got a new dayjob. You may have seen Dave at some of the WFMU record fairs, selling his nifty Savage Monsters posters and puppets, and if you haven’t seen him, you’re just gonna have to buy his merch online, ‘cause we probably won’t be seeing him again. The good news is his new job sounds really interesting and lets him use all his creative talents and pays really, really well. The bad news is that it’s in Cleveland and he’s gonna have to move there.

“Cleveland, city of light, city of magic,” I hear Randy Newman singing in my head, and if I weren’t writing this to you on a Civil War-era iMac running OS 1⁄3 I would hook you up with the mp3 file so you could hear it, too. It’s a song called “Burn On,” about the Cuyahoga River—the river that runs through Cleveland—bursting into flame back in 1969. But that river is always burning. Good old Time magazine once said, “The Cuyahoga oozes rather than flows.”

Cleveland, city of light and the Cleveland Indians. Nice logo, Cleveland! I have never thought of myself as being a politically correct person, but even I find the Cleveland Indians logo appalling, that Sambo-ized Red Man with the shit-eating grin. If you wear a Cleveland Indians cap in New York, you might get away with claiming it’s an ironic gesture, but it you wear one in Cleveland, you mean it.

Ohio was in the news last week when their Governor, Bob Taft, became a convicted criminal.  Convicted Criminal Taft is the great-grandson of Fat Stuck-in-the-Bathtub President Taft. (When I was trapped at the dogfood factory in Dayton last June, I saw an awful lot of Taft-sized people in Ohio. I don’t know what’s going on there, but the people are enormous.) Great-grandson Criminal Taft is the first Ohio Governor to be either charged with or convicted of a crime. After pleading “no contest” to charges of failing to report gifts and golf outings, he was convicted of four misdemeanor violations of state ethics laws, fined $4000, and ordered to write e-mail apology notes to state employees and newspapers to say he’s sorry for his behavior. This is probably the harshest part of the sentence, because Convicted Criminal Taft doesn’t use e-mail. Back in 2002, when he was pushing his Third Frontier project to turn Ohio into “a hub of new technology,” Not-Yet-Convicted-at-That-Time Governor Taft admitted to the Associated Press that he had never sent an e-mail and didn’t even have a computer on his desk. He said he preferred hand-written notes and telephone calls.

I don’t understand getting caught taking golf outings. Golf outings! Is that a euphemism for something else? If I were in a position of power, I would not be selling out my office for a golf outing. At least the Convicted Criminal Governor of Connecticut got some nice home repairs. I think he also got jail time, though, and Convicted Criminal Taft did not. In fact, Taft isn’t even going to leave office. Although in the past he’s forced out some of his minions for ethics offenses, he says those cases were different. Well, they were different—they didn’t involve him. He says he still has important work to do. Maybe he has to go door-to-door with O.J., looking for the missing $300,000 coins.

The State of Ohio, in its infinite wisdom, gave $50 million dollars from its investment fund to a well-connected Republican named Tom Noe so he could invest the money in rare coins and baseball cards. (Baseball cards! Too bad they weren’t looking to invest in comic books, ‘cause I’ve got some old issues of Catwoman   I’d be happy to sell to any savvy Republican investor.) Alas, it turns out that $300,000 worth of gold coins have been lost in the mail. Don’t you hate when that happens? And then about $12 million is just missing, and nobody knows where it is.  Tom Noe—whose strip-mall coin shop went under in 1992, leaving him $16,500 in debt—was contacted at his million-dollar Florida home, but he said he doesn’t know where the money is, either. I wouldn't put my savings (which currently total $204) into rare coins, so how could the state of Ohio think it was a good place to put their $50 million? Why didn't they just buy 50 million dollars’ worth of lottery tickets? Or they could have bought 50 millions dollars’ worth of Amway products and gone state-to-state, selling them to Missouri and Nebraska.

But don’t worry, Ohio—President Bush is there for you. He’s reported to have reacted calmly to Criminal Governor Taft’s conviction, just as he reacted calmly to the results of his personal friend Rafael Palmiero’s drug test. “Governor Taft apologized today, he has paid the fine and said it was a serious mistake, and the President accepts that,'' White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said. So there. And remember which state put Bush over the top in the 2004 election—because he certainly hasn’t forgotten. As our friends Pizzicato Five say: “OHIO!”

Thanks for reading my blog entry, and may God bless.

This Week in Sex: Meat!

This morning, a guy at work told the whole office about a dream where he created a new sandwich. It was made of a hot dog with rings and rings of calamari on it--he gestured sliding all the rings on. Then all the guys started talking about what condiments would be on it (both mustard and red sauce, if you must know). Am I the only one who thinks they were talking about more than a greasy hot dog with shmutz all over it it? Yes, apparently I am.

It's so hot that you could fry an egg on the sidewalk (you know it's summer when the news desk tricks the cub reporters into trying to do that). And it's also so hot that an art salami left in a pool of water all summer started to get stinky. It got so stinky that they didn't want to keep it around, even as art. 

Meat doesn't grow on trees. It grows in a dish!  We live in a glorious age, when it's possible to grow "something like spam" (which is something like meat) "at an incredibly high cost." The result is supposed to appeal to vegetarians, because it's meat without murder, and carnivores, because it's meat and they love meat, but it will appeal to neither, because it's synthetic meat sludge. Incredibly costly synthetic meat sludge.

Stop the presses...Meat does grow on trees! Magical sausage trees.

No, wait...Meat in a can. I'm sticking with good old meat in a can.

Pig art personality test. I care little for details.

And the wiener is...not you. The Oscar Meyer Ride of Your Life Contest has ended, but you can get Bologna Song ringtones to ease the pain. 

Sausages and prepared meats from A to Z. OK, from A to W(iener). There is definitely a marketing opportunity for sausages and prepared meats in the  X, Y, and Z categories.   

"Send a salami to your boy in the army" has a nice ring to it, but not as nice as "send a salami to every soldier in the 42nd Infrantry Division serving in Tikrit." Operation Salami Drop: “We know there are a bunch of homesick men and women over there, and to be able to do something. ... How do you put words to it? You have to do something. I can do salamis,” Marc Brummer said. Marc Brummer, will you marry me?

Pigs in space. You know the Chinese are sending pig sperm into space, right?

So to recap: Meat sludge in a museum is art. Meat sludge in a lab is science. Bologna is in your phone. Salami is flying to Iraq. Sperm is flying to the moon. But a hot dog in a dream is just a hot dog.

This Week in Sex: Spit, Don't Swallow

Portraits of Paris Hilton, Ruben Studdard, and some other people I don't know who they are, in bubble gum. Because the media, like, chews you up and spits you out, you know?

Most importantly, you can commission a portrait in bubble gum. My holiday shopping is officially done.

Voyeurs' Delight

Hit up Found Magazine's Find of the Week page for oodles of found object zen.

(Thanks to Karrie for the hint)

For your found audio needs, look no further than WFMU's own Audio Kitchen archives, where dusty unlabeled casettes unearthed from thrift stores open a portal to the sordid lives of strangers. The Audio Kitchen is also available as a podcast, which you can pick up by visiting WFMU's Podcast Centralia page.

WFMU Fashion on the Road

Hooray! On my way to WFMU Thursday I saw TWO people wearing WFMU t-shirts. TWO I say! TWO sightings! Good lord, this is exciting, and the fact that I didn't kill either one of them while driving is just as amazing as the sightings themselves. The first was a guy on a motorcycle wearing a blue metalflake helmet coming out of the huge post office in the bowels of Kearny. He was sporting the "Learn Radio at Home" shirt by Chris Ware that we still sell in the WFMU webshop; it looked comfortably broken in. The other fella, who was helping/teaching someone how to park their car on the street in Jersey City was wearing a sweat-stained vintage "Stop the Descent" shirt. I always chuckled to myself "Stop the Decent" whenever I wore mine  (pictured right), as WFMU has to stand for something, and although indecency by FCC standards is not really what I meant, being anything but decent in today's society is commendable and completely in line with my Beavisian humor. And just because I mentioned our gear & the only link in the posting is to our store does not mean anyone put me up to this. OK, Ken, let go of my hair....

You're fuckin' pretty loud, New Jersey!

Because it's an utter act of criminal negligence that this is not readily available via a quick google search, we hereby present to you the mentally-defying sounds of the between-song banter that tumbled from the mouth of Venom vocalist Cronos when his band played at City Gardens, (Trenton, NJ).

Venom - Spoken Excerpts Recorded live at City Gardens (Download MP3) (Not safe for work)

Backstory: In 1986, Black Metal legends Venom played what some thought of as an unlikely bill with Rollins-era Black Flag at famed punk dump City Gardens, in scenic Trenton, New Jersey. The club was a magnet for all types of unsavory social elements -- skinheads, criminals, bikers, leather-studded punks, people who liked Meat Beat Manifeto, and so forth. Anyway, the punkers, metalheads, and general thugs who turned out for the show not only got to witness two of the more badass bands of the era sharing a stage, but were also treated to some of the most (unintentionally?) hilarious between-song stage banter ever, courtesy of Venom's knuckle-dragging vocalist Cronos.

Wm's DVD Hit List

DVDs have been around long enough that releases pandering to more obscure tastes are now a given.  (If you remember, it took CDs a while to delve into the farther reaches of "good" taste; now we hardly blink when confronted with a 19-hour G.I. Gurdjieff box set.)  I no longer have any doubt that I will someday hold in my hands DVD reissues of WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Dellamorte Dellamore, Elevator to the Gallows and the works of Kenneth Anger.  There are a few films recently (and not so recently) surfaced on DVD that warrant mention, both for their outstanding quality as films, and for the celebratory fact that someone had the cojones to put these titles out.

The Ultimate Camper-Slasher Film
Forget Friday the 13th.  Forget the whole series.  Jason Voorhees (one of the dullest characters in the horror genre) has nothing on a couple of inbred Virginian twins.  Whatever camp appeal the loosely strung together kill scenes of the Friday series may provide, Just Before Dawn (1980) is guaranteed to thrill on a more sophisticated and cathartic level.  A worthy descendant of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Just Before Dawn has a subtlety and lingering creepiness not seen too often in this genre, i.e., what you don't see, or what you see quickly out of the corner of your eye, is ultimately more unsettling than any graphic gore that could have been provided.  Shriek Show's reissue packs a full 2nd disc of cast and crew interviews, trailers and stills galore.  Click here for my full review posted on the IMDb.

Eye Myth
I’m a whore for the early days of experimental film, especially of the 50s and 60s.  The thoughtfully-assembled, gloriously remastered Stan Brakhage double-DVD on Criterion (rel. summer 2003) was therefore a must-have.  Brakhage’s goal was to liberate the eye from learned perceptions, i.e., "How many colours are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'green'?”  Nowhere is this notion more manifest than in Dog Star Man, presented on disc 1 of the set.  In addition to the images filmed, the actual negative was painted on, scratched and distressed any number of ways.  The result is a fast moving (but not un-soothing) cavalcade of color imagery and superimposition.  That said, the sheer beauty of Dog Star Man, and many of the other films in this collection, will likely keep the uninitiated from feeling bored or over-articized; inasmuch as these are unquestionably experimental works, lacking plot or narrative, they are nonetheless accessible to anyone with a relatively open mind and a set of working eyes.  (Note: Some films in the set are not for the faint-hearted, including unblinking autopsy footage and a live birth; these are not, however, typical of what’s presented.)

July Indoors

Hello, Everybody--nice seeing you again.

I had to spend most of July indoors, so I've been doing a lot of reading. Here are some of the books I've read in the past month.

Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger, By Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson, artwork by Alexis Rockman. (2005, Villard Books). Margaret and Michael are a writing team, and I don't even understand how that works. I think of writing as something solitary and painful, like pulling out your own teeth with a pair of pliers, but somehow they sit down together and write the most interesting and fun books and articles about natural history stuff. While they were doing some research at the American Museum of Natural History a while back, they came across a taxidermied specimen of the extinct Tasmanian tiger and fell in love with it. (I'm not sure how that works, either, but to each his own.) They ended up traveling to Tasmania with their pothead artist friend, Alexis, and his girlfriend, and a friend of a friend, and all sorts of things happened including that they learned the verb “to quoll.” Their book about their adventures in Tasmania is extremely amusing and good-humored, just like Michael and Margaret. To celebrate the publication of Carnivorous Nights, they had a party and taxidermy competition at Pete's Candy Store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. DJ Dorian  was one of the judges, and my armadillo handbag, Randall, won a prize. It was one of the most fun parties I've ever been to, and they said they're going to do it again when the paperback comes out.

(P.S.--The picture of me making a face with Randall Handbag is not the best picture of me ever posted online. This one is better. I can't wait to hear this edition of Chris T's “Communication Breakdown, 'cause I think Jeff is a nice guy and would look really good in a fireman's outfit.)

Moravagine, by Blaise Cendrars.(Copyright 1926, translation 1968, published in paperback 2004 by New York Review Books.) I came across this in Posman Books when I was looking for the new translation of Don Quixote. The cashier guy who usually rolls his eyes when I come up to the register with something like Happy Kitty Bunny Pony got all excited when I plunked this book down on the counter. He wanted me to come back and let him know how I liked it. I dunno. Maybe I would have liked it better in 1926, when it was written, but it kept reminding me of the scene in the first Austin Powers movie where Dr. Evil says he want “One MILLION dollars!” Ooh, Blaise Cendrars is so pervy and evil! Plus, I just couldn't get into the whole deal with Blaise Cendrars being a pen name or an alterego or whatever, and the whole artifice of his background: “What is true? What is false?” You know what? I don't much care. But maybe I just need it explained a little better. I wish DJ Rix  would read this book and tell me what he thinks of it.

The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Captial: The Masons and the Building of Washington, D.C., by David Ovason. (2000, HarperCollins Publishers.) I do believe David Ovason had something to say when he wrote this book. What was it, I wonder? I finished this book--all 465 grueling pages, including the notes--in July, but I've actually been reading it every night for over a year. I could never manage more than about a page before I became unconscious. It is the most soporific volume I've ever read, and I recommend it only as an infallible aid to sleep. I plan to donate my copy to the WFMU station library.

Happy Kitty Bunny Pony: A Saccharine Mouthful of Super Cute, by Charles S. Anderson Design Co. with text by Michael J. Nelson (2005, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.) Did you believe me when I said I bought a book with this title? I got it to cheer myself up, and because looking at it doesn't require any thought process whatsoever. There are pictures of kitties and bunnies and ponies, and some duckies, too, though I recommend caution when purchasing books that are authored by a Co. Michael J. Nelson turns out to be one of the guys on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Sometimes he's funny, and sometimes--especially after the first 100 pages of cute pictures of kitties, bunnies, ponies, et cetera--he sounds like he's trying a little too hard. I don't exactly regret buying it, but it is the only book I've ever tried to get Sluggo to store on his bookshelves.

Meditation as Medicine, by Dharma Singh Khalsa, M.D., and Cameron Stauth. (2001, Fireside.) One good thing about getting cancer is that it can make you more receptive to trying new things. In the first part of this book, Dr. Khalsa is very careful to explain kundalini yoga and meditation practice in terms of Western Scientists-and-Experts' research into the endocrine system, glands, the vagus nerve, neurological PET scans, spatial-temporal reasoning, and so on. Obviously, this is aimed at people who are really skeptical about mudras and chakras and whatnot. All I know is that I get up every day at 5 AM and take a cold shower anyway, so I figured I might as well try the rest of Dr. Khalsa's program. I had a very dramatic reaction the first time I tried the medical meditation for the immune system, and I felt really good all day. I'm still not sure what a chakra is, but I'm actually not sure what my thymus gland is, either--that doesn't mean either of them is nonexistent. Right now a new copy of the hardcover version of this book costs less than the paperback on Amazon.

Pet Architecture Handbook, by Tokyo Institute of Technology Tsukamoto Architectural Laboratory and Atelier Bow-wow. (World Photo Press, not sure what year.) This book is not by a Co., it is by an Institute. Or a Laboratory. Or an Atelier. Sorry I don't have a picture of it. It's  a collection of photos and brief descriptions of 73 wee, tiny, eccentric buildings--most of them commercial spaces--in Tokyo, plus project proposals for 8 more itty-bitty buildings. Sluggo gave me this book to read and, while it is cute and interesting, it puts me to sleep almost as fast as the book about the Masons and Washington, D.C.

Here is a book I read a long time ago, and talked about on my old book club show on WFMU: The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll. The author, Jean Nathan, is going to be at the Bryant Park reading room this Wednesday, August 10, at 12:30. I wish I could take my copy of the book for her to sign, but I'm still spending all my time indoors. I thought you might want to check it out, though. It's a really good book, and I think the paperback's just come out.

So that's the full report on my month of reading. Thanks for reading my blog entry, and may God bless.
-Bronwyn C.

M. C. Escher would have shopped there...

The curious new Viktor & Rolf boutique in Milan has fashion lovers hitting the ceiling. The Dutch fashion duo created it alongside architect Siebe Tettero and designer Sherrie Zwail. Shop to your hearts content... but bring some Dramamine. The clothes are the only things in the store that are not upside down - even the store's facade, front door and fitting rooms are inverted. Neck braces and LSD not included (and if you're wheelchair-bound, just stay home... please). You can read about it here, here and here. For a slideshow of the store, go to Viktor & Rolf's web site (after getting through all the Flash stuff, click on 'boutique.')

Vintage Wet Look

"Over the years, the styles of clothing have changed along with the technical quality of the photography.

What has not changed is the enjoyment of experiencing wetlook, as reflected in these images."

Vintage Wet Look

via JAF Project

Abandoned Amusements

Abandoned amusement and theme parks left for nature to reclaim.

This site contains a stunning series of photos of an abandoned Japanese amusement park. The first few pictures of a rotted roller coaster are especially creepy as they were taken in the morning fog. page 1 - page 2 - page 3

Suzy Poling, an Oakland photographer, has a great photo series of an abandoned theme parks called Hidden Village. She also features a spread of old delapidated theatres: Palace of Mold

Defunctparks.com features many snapshots of parks in their heyday alongside the current state of rot: Rocky Glenn Park in Lackawanna County, PA - Mountain Park in Holyoke, MA - Idora Park in Youngstown, OH - Chippewa Lake Park in Chippewa Lake, OH .

IllicitOhio.com made a trek to the PTL's Heritage USA.

Pacific Ocean Park decimated through time.

Here is a promotional film for Santa's Village (mov. file) from Extinct Attractions, a site that preserves Disneyland's and Disney World's past through interactive DVD documentaries. They also archive information, pictures and sounds of theme park rides, attractions and brochures. Browse around a bit, they have a few more video clips.

Take a listen to Goosy Goosy Gander (mp3) and The Happy Dragon's Tongue (mp3) - they are part of a collection of field recordings from theme park rides and attractions recorded and compiled by Melinda Simon and Mark Fay and released as "Songs for Little Ones" on Dish Recordings in 1997.

The Racially Profiled Mugshot of Dorian Grey

Worried about your own potential for terrorism in America's airports and subways? Sooth your orange-level jitters at FaceAnalyzer.com, an online face photo analysis service that not only racially profiles you before you get a chance to get hassled by bored, underpaid security personnel at LaGuardia, but also decides what gender you are (in case you're confused), rates your "gay factor," lets you know how well you get along with "Boss Types" and "Drifter Types" and "Academics" (all three of which could easily be pipe bomb makers), and lets you know if you suffer from any personality disorders or rage problems.
    Submit a clear face photo (you ham!), and then you're ready for scrutiny! Oh yea, you have to register at the non-secured site first. Anyway, the binary panel not only judges you like the book cover you obviously are, but it also matches you up to other terrorist cells... oops, I mean "friend groups" so you can hook up with like-minded, free-floating agents who can equally fool security devices. You can all then get together for an explosive night in the city and paint the town red! So take your best surveillance camera-ready, racially-neutral face shot over to FaceAnalyzer.com, where the terrorist threat color code is always a pastoral shade of green, and your mug shot can be cast in a permanent tint of (Dorian) gray...
    I did a little experiment at FaceAnalyzer.com, I submitted two photos of myself...

Graffiti Analysis

Here are some great movie files from the Graffiti Analysis Project, which "makes visible the unseen movements of graffiti writers in the creation of a tag". Also includes stills, individual galleries for the featured artists, and an overall explanation of the project. (Watch the "View Capture Device" short first, to get a handle on how this works.) All the movies were shot in and around NYC and are accompanied by some piece of ambient music that I know I've heard on FMU, in an art movie, or in a Snickers commercial. I will buy a cookie at the Jersey City Au bon Pain for the first person who ID's it for me.

OCD Screen Savers

UK design company Nowwashyourhands has got 40 or so great screen savers ready for download. Many of them are obsessive compulsive enough to save even Tony Shalhoub's monitor from burn in. This is especially the case with #20, a looped animation of hand washing. Other good choices include the disturbingly bloody #37, the trouble making ape of #31 (perfect for any Dave the Spazz fan) and the office inspired labyrinth of #19. There is also some slick wallpapers so check it out.

The Amazing Topography of Iggy Pop's Chest and Arm

 

No foolin'.

Damn.

(Click here to stream audio of The Ig's sweetly submissive appearance on the Dinah Shore Show, wherein he is grilled by Dinah alongside David Bowie and Rosemary Clooney. Or Rose Marie. Or possibly the cast of "Really Rosie".)

Free Speech Audio Experiment

Check out One Free Minute (some audio not safe for work), an audio experiment that gives anyone who calls in one minute to anonymously vent, rant, proselytize, sing, or grunt. Each caller's minute is recorded, and played back during One Free Minute "performances." Some dude used his minute to cluck the theme to Beverly Hills Cop like a chicken (streaming MP3). Want to top that? Call (800) 931-5056 to participate.

Click here to read a short article about the project in Wired.

Thanks to listener Marisa for the heads-up!

Cleaning Out My Inbox

With all today's brouhaha about the Governator's five million dollar muscle magazine shilling contract, how come nobody is praising Ahnuld's fine work on this amazing Japanese commercial? (quicktime .mov file for download) via Cynical-C Blog and imockery

Chris Cunnigham's most disturbing Aphex Twin video yet, the not-for-the-squeamish and not safe for work Rubber Johnny (shockwave video). See, I told you that chihuahuas were not of this world! Thanks Brian!

Following up on Dave the Spazz's coverage of The Beach Boys own Mount Rushmore, Rich submits this Leni Riefenstahl-esque tribute to Freddie Mercury. And for all you Queen fans, here is All Your Base set to Bohemian Rhapsody (flash page).

Cool gallery interface from a Spanish artist.

Bawdy Songs, erotic toasts and lascivious recitations.

For fans of big ass horns. Thanks Kevin!

Fury Fest: France's Answer to Heavy Metal Parking Lot

For Diane's accompanying audio archives on Fury Fest 2005, click here: Realaudio | MP3. For the playlist, click here and for the bigass Fury Fest Foto Gallery, click here. 

After the bloodbath in Paris, see this blog entry, was I really ready to go to LeMans for Fury Fest, the best metal/punk/heavy lineup of the summer for three days of camping and partying with my horns up? Hell yeah!

June 24th, Friday, my friend Rob & I were off, leaving from Paris for an uneventful but safe drive to LeMans once we found the Peripherique (the highway that encircles Paris, and basically the "way out"). Fury Fest was right next to the LeMans raceway at Le Parc Expo du Mans, but although the two sites were next to each other, both were huge and I could not get a decent photo of the racetrack from the site, it was still too distant.

We met friends near the festival entrance & proceeded to set up camp; putting up the tents was the easy part - finding an area where we'd be able to find our tents at night while in any condition, that was a bit trickier. A spot by a light pole was perfect, and the labor was done in minutes, voila!

The festival was set up with three stages, all inside; total band count for the festival is a whopping 96, and as far as I know, the only band who did not make it was Murphy's Law. Most of the bands on earlier in the day are given half hour sets, then 45 minutes to about 25% of the performers, then the headliners get anywhere between one & 1.5 hours to play. The Velvet Stage would be the first one I hit today; Belgium's Leng Tche, featuring the vocalist from Aborted on drums was on at 12:55. The Velvet Stage is the smallest

Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists

" The Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists is a veritable rout dedicated to a shared mandate to advocate the showmanship of oddities; espouse the belief in natural adaptation and mutation; and encourage the desire to create displays of curiosity."

Also try their "Beast Blender" where you too can create animal monstrosities!

Art Robot Heaven

A robot invasion is scheduled to take over Dublin this weekend. Find out more about the Robot Talent Show, download the ArtBot Theme Song (MP3), and cruise through the links for each participant, as some are quite impressive.

There are a few video clips embedded deep within, perhaps most entertaining are the Altoid robots and the stuffed animal robots arguing in German (wmv file).

And we've got plenty more robot videos available from previous posts.

Sound Dough

Make a glorious racket that obeys the laws of an intricate visual entanglement with Le Ciel Est Bleu's La Pâte à Son:

" The Pâte à Son (Sound Dough) is a sound toy and compositional tool conceived to encourage musical experimentation. Drag instruments, switches, and transporter pipes from the conveyor belt to the checkerboard above to make music. Rotate the pieces. Choose a melody. Change pitch, tempo and volume to fine-tune your composition. "

via We Make Money Not Art

Microchip art

Geeks with too much time on their hands etch designs into silicon wafers. View the gallery here.

Cleaning Out My Inbox

The world's ugliest dog has been located. Styggeste hund, indeed. (via b3ta)

Dschinghis Khan and Cheesy Eurodisco completionists might want another video of the band in action, this time doing their society thing with an orchestra and everything. (Realvideo clip for download, via Listener Ed)

"Put the camera down and worry about your friend." (streaming quicktime video, via fazed)

And you thought it was wet in Glastonbury? (Doh! This is Glastonbury)

Expansive art/photography site with many well known photographers and works. (via peremeny.ru)

Great page of Brazilian Bossa Nova and Samba MP3s, via Listener Zach.

How do you get extra credit from Professor Fuck? (via b3ta)

Nice street art / graffiti sketchblog.

Live in a giant coconut or create your own flying carpet. (via gizmag)

Go get lost in superbad.

Where sheep are nervous.

Paris Becomes Land of the Dead, or an Exercise in the "Six Degrees of Separation" Theory

WARNING!! GRAPHIC GROSSNESS APPROACHETH!!  I can see the question marks over your heads already... it's really very simple. I witnessed an event on my recent trip to Paris that made me think I was in the new George A. Romero film, "Land of the Dead", or at least on the special effects lot. Oddly enough, I had just been to the catacombs - foreshadowing has never been so obvious.  On the Seine, a river known for the beauty that surrounds it, I hop on one of those giant tour boats for a spin up around Notre Dame and back to kill about an hour. It's the equivalent to the NY Circle Line. I'm on the top deck snapping pix of the bridges from underneath, the amazing architecture lining the Seine & just trying to ignore the obnoxious tourists on this vehicle. I, of course, am far from obnoxious and minding my own business. It starts to rain a bit & I go downstairs to the glass enclosed area, sheltered but still easy to take a gander at what Paris has to offer from here. There I am standing in the front of the boat next to a gentleman who I took no notice of previously (and that would change SOON) staring out the huge windows. The rain kicks up a notch and a gust of wind slams shut one of the giant glass and metal doors at the front of the boat. The tourist next to me (a middle aged asian man) turns to me with his left hand raised vertically, knuckles toward me and lets out a grunt/uhhuhhhhgh/death metal rumble sound. I look at his hand and make a similar sound back to him, definitely more high pitched, less like a death metal vocal than he did, perhaps a bit more black metal. His fingers had been cut off below the first (top) knuckle...

My Commodore 64 Secret Life

I grew up with a Commodore 64 as my best friend. The C64 offered a new world to escape to from the banality of 5th grade. This is a story I always tell and people respond with a blank stare eventually uttering, "What was the point?  That's pretty stupid." So you just shouldn't bother reading this.

When I was ten I acquired a 300 baud modem. Services like Quantum Link (later to become AOL), which were primitive chatroom networks, soon lost appeal after I was repeatedly kicked off for excessive cursing. I started logging on to local BBSs (bulletin board systems) where a SysOp (one lonely guy) set up his computer to receive other users one at a time. The BBS’s featured message boards and download/upload areas. I was still involved in the real world of life, not totally ensconced in the world of computers, but I was looking for a way out, something new that would let me escape the constant ridicule of being fat and weird. Unfortunately these local BBSs were not the answer because they were usually run by old geezer hobbyists and most of the BBS members were from his close circle of friends.  On the message boards they usually talked about RUSH.

Flogging a dead horse?

I Hate Horses.

Lap Juicer

The Lap Juicer is designed for lap dancers in clubs. They can make a tasty cocktail for eager clientel who can't touch, but who can drink juice!

The Lap Juicer is on exhibit at London's Victoria & Albert Museum till August 29th 2005, as part of the Touch Me exhibition.  They are also available for order.

via We Make Money Not Art

The Shirts On Your Back

As many of you know, WFMU thrives due to the dedication and support of many people: DJs, listeners, volunteers, the staff. But there is also a somewhat neglected group: the artists and designers who have kindly provided us with the visuals for our many geegaws and gimcracks. Listed below are the websites of many of the artists whose imagery has adorned our t-shirts. Click on their names to go to their website.

Jim Flora: Popular designer of record covers of the 1950's and influence on many current artists. He is our first posthumous designer, responsible for this popular shirt and hoodie (with a little help from our very own Dave Cunningham).

Jonathon Rosen: Responsible for the freeform-defining "Head In The Hand" shirt.

Mary Fleener: Her cubist cartoon style graces this fabulous shirt.

Eric Walczak: The fine vinyl adorning this tee was designed by Mr. Walczak.

Rodney Allen Greenblatt: Rodney gave us this shirt that proves once and for all that you can teach an old dog new tricks, or a new dog old tricks, or something like that. (Image to the right is by Rodney Allen Greenblatt.)

Gary Taxali: Gary is responsible for the pale, crying sissy rodent you see on the bodies of so many WFMU-types.

Renee French: Not only do we have a crying rodent, but also a flying rodent. Actually a floating rodent, courtesy of Ms. French in both his and her styles. (Image at top left of this post by Renee French.)

Chris Ware: The best read among our shirts by the creator of Jimmy Corrigan.

Mark Zingarelli: Mark designed the shirt for this year's marathon. I've already had someone try to speak to me in Spanish while wearing this shirt. (Image at left by Mark Zingarelli.)

Steve Keene: The most prolific painter of our age graced our heavy cotton tees with a fine painting of the entrepreneurial spirit in action.

Unfortunately, several of the artists who have designed t-shirts or sweatshirts for us do not have websites dedicated to their fine efforts. These include:

Drew Friedman: The man responsible for our beloved icon. I cannot fathom why there is not a Drew Friedman webpage.

Marco Almera: There was a www.marcoalmera.com. That's how we found out about him. Several webpages have links to it but it currently does not exist.

Here are a batch of links to WFMU T-shirts by the following artists:

Bruno Nadalin | Takeshi Tadatsu | Joe Siena | Bill Graef | Alex Ross | Burt Schlatter and Jim Coppola

And for all you longtime listeners to the station, there were indeed shirts designed by Kaz, Mark Newgarden and Joost Swarte. However, since their shirts are no longer available and their designs grace other WFMU product, we will deal with them in another post.

Eat More Shit More

This guy swallowed a camera, and seven and half hours later, voila! 

Female Masking

"Behind my mask I am not me but a new personality ... much more exciting ..."

"Latex smoothes your face ... you are drawn inwards ..."

Do these quotes sound familiar? If so, this website is for you!

Female Masking Homepage (potentially nsfw)

Momus Performs Daily in NYC

Nick Currie aka Momus will be performing live daily (for free) in Chelsea until July 15th. He'll be doing spontaneous live storytelling along with vocal treatements by Neen artist Mai Ueda in the gallery.

Look Down

Formerly reserved for me when I catch you talking about Tom Cruise, looking down can now be used for the blowing of your mind, with art.

The artwork of Julian Beever uses a distorted perspective to give the illusion of three dimensions. It’s like that Hans Holbein painting you didn’t understand in grade 10 art history. He draws some cool stuff like Tony Blair falling down a well, a rescue operation not involving gravity, reality based pop-up ads and himself. Via:Flaphead.

If you prefer your visual perception sober but want your preconceptions about the connection between Stanley Kubrick and Jupiter squashed, see Toynbee Tiles.

Do Not Offer Sheep Food or Documents

The Warning Signs of Japan, featuring wide-eyed caucasion children, ultra-cute animals, and stick figures engaged in all manner of mayhem. via del.icio.us

Blowguns, Beach Whistles...

"Blowguns, Beach Whistles and the True Definition of Powerlessness" is the name of a video project by Scott Harrison, illustrator and tattoo artist extraordinaire. And you thought I was writing a summer account of some kind of altercation with a life guard... No really, you need to check out his website, but beware; cartoon genitalia abounds...as he warns. The project is available for your viewing pleasure on his site - it's a collection of stories told by tattooers all over the globe (I think they are all tattooers..?) From the mundane to the "too much information- I don't feel like eating anymore" category, the yarns are worth a viewing. His site "links" page has a link to this fine radio station front and center - reason enough to check out his pristine yet disturbing artwork - TONS of it, and the artwork of many others. You'll need a day to browse - the man is obsessed with eggs methinks, but you will come back again and again. Scott is also a part of a 6 person show (the website says 6 tattoo artists but it's actually 5 plus a NJ photographer) that is traveling the United States; this gallery gives you the lowdown on that... coming to a town near you!

Cleaning Out My Inbox

Time to move this stuff from my inbox to yours...

One of the true wonders of New Jersey.

Japan-bashing artwork by Korean schoolkids.

Finally, a roadmap to the wide world of sexual deviancy. Human Furniture? Turkey Men?

Amazing German karaoke version of Bohemian Rhapsody (MP3). I've got a ton more stuff like this to put up in the next few days, watch for it!

Cool trippy movie called Ministry Messiah by Dutch filmmaker Gints Apsits (Quicktime).

The Museum of Retro Technology, including rocket powered bicycles and alcohol-fueled record players.

Van Gogh's letters, indexed by keywords like "venereal" and "hallucinations."

A Russian painter's incredible online gallery and even more incredible gallery interface.

All hail The Toilet Union.

Catalog of various end-of-the-world scenarios.

Wonderful art by Alex Gross.

The Fifty Greatest Song Parts. It would be fun to do a FMU version of this.

Copyright-free spoken word samples of famous literary works via Penguin Books.

Beautiful gallery of early photographic technique of cyanotypes by photographer Edwardo Aites.

Good new mashup of Led Zeppelin and Snoop Doggy Dogg (mp3).

Do Not Click On This Link. 

Thanks del.icio.us, boingboing, peremeny, Sarah, Music for Maniacs, fazed, beatmixed, J-Walk

Dada Doll Aggregate

How many times have you endured some melodramatic doll painting representing the artist’s precious suffering and overwhelming mediocrity? Remember the art teacher’s video art in Ghost World? How about a Rasputina CD cover? The use of the doll in art has been seriously marred by weepy-eyed nostalgic Victorian aesthetics. Please dry your eyes with these Dada & Surrealism inspired Doll artists:

Hans Bellmer. – German Surrealist Bellmer would construct his waifish beauties, disassemble them and reconstruct them into grotesque bulbous heaps, the vulva always exposed. The dolls are always adorned in mary jane shoes.

Jake & Dinos Chapman –These brothers build hilarious mutant children out of reconstructed mannequins…genitals usually replace facial features and they all wear sneakers. more images here

Real Dolls (nsfw) – These highly detailed, custom built sex dolls are extremely creepy in their realism. Some photographers of Real Dolls like Elena Dorfman and the uncredited pictures on this page (nsfw) blur the line between reality and fantasy.

Van Sowerwine – This Australian artist creates interactive installations where the viewer can manipulate the residents of a doll house. Surreal and awful outcomes occur. Play With Me (installation documentation – quicktime video) - Expecting (interactive quicktime video)

Peter Caine creates juvenile and very hilarious doll tableaus. Think Paul McCarthy with intentionally shoddy craftsmanship. Take a look at Michael Jackson and Doodoo-Head Boy (quicktime video..nsfw) and SLICK WILLY (cubscout Bill Clinton) (quicktime video).

Christmas In June

I thought that Christmas In July had been cancelled due to budget cuts, but apparently it's merely been moved up to June. How else to explain the sudden appearance of these pages in my inbox?

Jesus is back and his name is Ted.

Christ approves of anal sex and threesomes.

Freaky paintings of Patriot Jesus.

Spend your True Christian Dollars with Miss Poppy. Be sure to pick up an armed fetus. 

Thank You? Jesus, Rich, Superfrankenstein and del.icio.us

German Street Art

Incredibly extensive online gallery of German street art and graffiti. via

Rush Limbaugh Art Gallery

The Limbaugh Letter is the newsletter for fans of The Rush Limbaugh show. Now the cover art of The Limbaugh Letter has been assembled into an online art gallery by Doug Henry, the man who has portrayed Rush slaying various liberal dragons over the years. But under the guidance of The Limbaugh Letter's editorial staff, Rush doesn't stop at slaying dragons. Henry's brush has portrayed Rush slaying donkeys, Rush boxing, Rush dousing the wicked witch of the east, Rush as Indiana Jones, as General Patton, as Santa Claus, as a Jetskier, and my personal favorite, Rush as a hippy. Thanks Rich!

Girls and Corpses

"You know you've been thinking about it... dreaming about it... well now, here it finally is! If you're like me, you like two things, beautiful girls and rotting corpses. So, I thought, why not bring them together in one magazine?"

GIRLS AND CORPSES!

link via szanalmus

Abu Ghraib - Is It Torture? Or Is It ART? You Decide!

Conceptual surrealistic photography through the ages: (above, figure 1.a) U.S. soldiers make a point by photographing themselves with naked Iraqi prisoners' bodies stacked in the form of a human pyramid, Iraq, 2004. Contrast this with (above, figure 1.b) famed photographer Philippe Halsman making a point of complimenting Salvador Dali with naked women's bodies stacked in the form of a skull, in his portrait "Dali's Skull," New York, 1952.
(click to enlarge images)

People Like Us new Film: Story Without End

A new short film by WFMU's own People Like Us can be downloaded or viewed here as a streaming file from the Internet Archive. People Like Us' weekly radio show, Do or D.I.Y returns to the airwaves on June 15th and will air each Wednesday from 7-8 pm, following Seven Second Delay. Do or D.I.Y is one of 15 WFMU shows which are available for automatic mp3 download via podcasting. Currently, we're podcasting the old Do or D.I.Y shows. On June 15th, we'll begin podcasting the new ones.

Buffies (First Season)

LINK: Quicktime Movie, 9.7 MB
Every utterance of the word "Buffy" made during the first season of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer," totaling nearly one minute.

It's an artwork by the great Chuck Jones (the Chicago-based aritst, not the also-great animator). Be sure not to miss his Isolation Studies which include audio edits from the TV Show "Loveline" (MP3s) Names, Numbers, No and Yes, Alright, Okay, Goodtimes. There's tons more great stuff to explore including Jones' original MP3s of  State Songs and the bizarre Penguin Rants. Finally, check his series of bizarre links pages starting here.

Mammatus Clouds

Mammatus Clouds. Who knew? via del.icio.us

Art Dorks

Created by Brendan Danielsson, Art Dorks is a gathering ground for artists of the “Pop Surrealism” persuasion.  The online galleries feature established artists such as Chris Ryniak, Charles Glaubitz, Farmer Bob and Nate Williams alongside up-and-coming talents such as Matt Pasquarello and Travis Louie.

The layout is quite beautiful and includes a message board forum and a daily updated blog. Are you an Art Dork?

I've translated your franchise... IT'S A COOK BOOK!

Most Hysterical Photographs Of The Year Award goes to The Billboard Liberation Front, who yesterday altered a billboard in San Francisco to feature an obese child (probably a leftover from The Maury Povich Show) in sick Ronald McDonald make-up, an alien, a McDonald's golden arches logo, and the words "TO SERVE MAN." The clincher was the animatronic Ronald McDonald feeding a cheeseburger to a mannequin of the enthusiastically wide-gomped fat child, both sitting right in front of the billboard. The perpetrators then dressed as screaming versions of Ronald McDonald and Hamburgler, and celebrated with chants and helium balloons of Ronald's head. Turns out the plan for McDonald's take-over of the eating habits of the planet was nothing more than an extraterrestrial domination and enslavement plan lifted right out of a "Twilight Zone" episode. After the celebration in the park (in which some great photos of gasp-inducing Ronalds being cuffed and hauled into squad cars were taken) the BLF then moved... like an undulating sea of yellow, red and white vomit... into a nearby McDonald's location, where the nightmarish reverie commenced. These photos literally had me laughing so hard I spilled my piping hot morning McDonald's coffee into my lap and I'm getting my lawyer on the phone right now! Photos found on BoingBoing and also Laughing Squid. Great photos.

The Way To Do A Parade

The people in Nantes, France really know how to do a parade. During a festival commemorating Jules Verne, a giant marionette climbs out of a huge barrel, mounts a mammoth mechanical elephant and parades through the streets. As the parades through the streets, the French giantess takes a shower, sucks a giant lollipop and rests on the elephant's tusks, before she is ultimately hoisted into a giant rocket and set ablaze. Great photo-montage here, with quicktime videos. The site is in French, but just follow the arrows at the bottom of each page. via del.icio.us

Staring into the thin air...

  I was thinking that if the drinking/running club Hash House Harriers was to merge with the ham transmitter-chasing T-Hunters or Bunny Chasers , another club could form comprised of drunks running around the woods looking for radio signal sources.

Speaking of my listeners, two of them sent some blog fodder. Listener Laurie wanted to share Joe Pernice's indie version of MTV's Cribs . Listener Tom inadvertently mentioned poutine which I was ignorant of, and hope to remain so (at least in practice). On the Canadian tip, enjoy the Crucified Mountie visions of painter Michael Harris.

The Vivisectionist's Monster Mash

Take a hallucinatory, glue-fumed, nostalgic stroll down memory lane with Ed Moore's gallery of vintage Aurora Monster Model Kit instruction sheets... as well as other ephemera from an era where "dripping blood" typeface was di rigeur, and Vampira's airbrushed cleavage caused more than the dead to rise. The black and white model instruction sheets, with their vivisectional horror icons and M. C. Escher-esque complexities of lines, arrows, grafts and chart intersections, are works of art in themselves, suitable for framing. How old do you have to be to understand something this complex? Perhaps huffing itty bitty jars of model paint and tubes of lemon-scented super glue puts it all into crystal clear perspective. I remember I actually had one of these kits as a little kid (I think it was the Wolfman) and I couldn't bring myself to paint over the glow-in-the-dark plastic, for some reason it seemed blasphemous. Ed's site has tons of info on the artists responsible for the "look" of Aurora and other model companies' product and packaging.

Japanese Manhole Covers

The Japanese make some bad ass manhole covers. via fazed

Russian Art Site

Dont let your ignorance of the cyrillic alphabet keep you from this excellent Russian art site (but do let a lack of bandwidth or flash keep you away). Despite the language barrier, there's tons of chance entries to surrealist and fantasy art sites, like the galleries of Maria Isabel Arango or Ernst Fuchs, Jessiekitty's intriguing bondage blog, world press photos of the year, and the work of P Grik. And of course I had to go to a Russian site to find a great blog from our own backyard, the Wooster Collective's celebration of street art. There's a link there to us as well, otherwise how would I have found this?

Can I get you some Pizza Shooters, Shrimp Poppers, Extreme Fajitas or Dog Blood?

In our nauseatingly dumbed-down and meta-hollow times, where the art of rebellion has been diluted with weak imitation and over-repetition, its par for the course to note the practice of the society-aimed prank fading painfully, painfully, painfully into nostalgic blurbscurity. But assimilate not! The absolute genius Rob and his great friends over at the legendary Cockeyed.com are thankfully still carrying the torch of the hilariously rude, even if just on a small scale. Instead of initiating their prank at the geopolitical level... they decided to start at the level of restaurants where the decor consists of street signs indoors, stuffed alligators with sunglasses on them, and waiters who sing you your Million Dollar Birthday Fries. Rob and friends secretly counterfeited a mock-up of a TGI Fridays menu, and sent copies to friends all over the country to slip under the laminated menus of their most despised strip mall TGI Friday's locations, when wait staff and gorging families were distracted by their overpriced globs of deep fried flour.

Welk-O-Rama

Scroll down to Sister Carrie's website devoted to everything Welk.

Science Delight

Satisfy your inner-geek. Check out Princeton University's first ever Art of Science Competition in all of its gray matter glory.

via wohba!

Chiller Theatre Expo - Not So Scary (well, maybe) Seen Report

Movies, Toys, washed up tv celebs, full fledged rock stars, idolized actors, people in costume, special effects gurus, bats - real ones, tattoo notaries, magazine publishers, and the dorky collector who only comes out of his cave to collect more crap & then store it in mom's basement (where they still live) - they were all there 3 weeks ago at the Spring 2005 Chiller Theatre Toy, Model & Film Expo in Secaucus. It takes the entire weekend to sift through everything - here's the rundown; I hope you have a hour...  There are several innovative toy manufacturers now, one there was Living Dead Dolls  - a ghoulish twist on the girly doll; pictured here is Redmond Gore, a Teddy Scares creation - cuddly and scary - each bear has it's own bio... Redmond, for instance used to be a bus driver and his favorite color was BLOOD RED. Redmond, of course, is dead. Other vendors there specialized in Nightmare Before Christmas goodies (yes, still), japanese toys; even welded action figures. On to the meat of the show; the dreaded celebrities; Tonya Harding was there, selling ice skates, boxing trunks and I'm sure her mother if you'd take her.

Draaiorgel!

These beautifully ornate Dutch street organs, or "Draaiogels" populate Holland streets.  Some beefy thick-neck turns a crank and the mechanical organ churns out a tune.

I once conversed with a Holland native on Soulseek about these organs:

"I hate them.  They're operated by drunkards, usually with their retarded brother, always smoking a cigar.  Then they get very belligerent when you don't give them money.  I hate them"

I would rather have these beauties on the street  than your average busker bleating out bland renditions of Billy Joel songs!

Dutch Street Organ - De Vijf Beelden (mp3)
Dutch Street Organ - De Arabier (mp3)
Dutch Street Organ - De Vijf Beelden (mp3)

Draaiorgel website - complete with info on collections, events and CDs.

French AIDS PSAs

I wrote about Public Service Announcements last month and included some beautiful Mexican PSA art. Not to be outdone by the Mexicans, the French have released a few PSA posters about AIDS prevention that are, how shall we say... rather saucy. Click here to see them. (Not safe for work. Unless you're French. Or a spider. Actually, you would have to be both. via b3ta newsletter.)

The Picture of Everything

Looking at Carrie McLaren's Stay Free Daily blog today I was reading about artist Howard Hallis, who was slapped with a takedown order from Chick Tracts for his parody of one of their comics. What really blew our minds was his ungodly detailed Picture of Everything, which literally IS. I mean, it makes the Sgt. Pepper's cover look like a work of minimalism. Click on sections to see upclose details of individual corners of the universe, and positioning your browser over a topic gets a pop-up TAG of what it is (see the Current 93 band logo in one closeup depicted here). We spent the entire afternoon marvelling at the array of stuff: band symbols, every comic character under the sun, every spaceship that's ever been on TV or in the movies (including the bone-shaped one from Spaceballs), and just everything other absurd image you can think of ("my mother next to Christo's Umbrellas"). And then you can go underwater in the pic and a whole new universe opens! Jump in, spend an hour. Or a week.

Will That Be 32 or 128?

Aware of my fascination with alimentary simulacra, my friend Todd once gave me a bunch of fake sushi for my birthday.  Unfortunately, they had a storage capacity of 0 Megabytes.  Todd, you dick.

Fantastical Figurations

The Fantastic in Art and Fiction:  images from Cornell's Divison of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

You may also enjoy the compendium of alchemical imagery at Adam MacLean's large website, where I learned how to extract antimony from its ore.

David adds Dream Anatomy, an exhibit at the National Library of Medicine about the history of anatomical imaging.

     

Cylindrical, Toroidal, or Spherical?

In the 70s, NASA explored various ways of configuring Jehova's Witness colonies in space.  The experimental community at left featured an unusual airlock which sealed with a giant compact disc.

[via Exclamation Mark]

Jim Roche "Learning To Count"

WARNING: Not safe for work. Not safe for home. Not safe for your car. Not safe for anything.

MP3s:
Hippys Are Living Proof, 1971 (3:31)
Every Man, Woman, And Child, 1972 (7:53)
Fight It Out, 1972 (11:46)
Bubble Blower, 1972 (5:08)
Straight Razor, 1972 (9:14)
Mama Bear, 1972 (8:50)
Power Poles, 1973 (3:31)
Swoops Down Outta The Sky, 1975 (12:33)
Cadillac, 1973 (5:52)
Store Up Your Treasures in Heaven, 1974 (7:29)
Whatcha Doing Down There Boy, 1975 (7:32)
Whatsda Matter Wid Jew, 1977 (5:33)
Lucky T's Texaco, 1975 (6:17)

In the 1970s, Jim Roche, a performance artist from the deep South, made his way into the New York artworld and began doing pieces in galleries where he'd go into a trance-like state and channel redneck characters from his home turf. The result was this 2 LP set, "Learning to Count," released in 1982 by a museum in Kansas. These are the most intense audio works ever put to vinyl: insane rants, heavily racist, sexist. Many, many people will be offended by Jim Roche: the refrain of "Hippys Are Living Proof" is "Hippys are living proof that a nigger will fuck a dog." And it gets worse. Much worse. No one is spared: Jews, Asians, Hispanics, etc. are all targets of Roche's rage. Needless to say, we don't endorse Mr. Roche's fantasies, but for intensity's sake and for true horrifying outsider madness, nothing -- we repeat -- nothing outdoes this.

"You kids turn down that damn room tone!"

While there's no answer to the philosophical questions laid down by John Cage's classic "4:33," this of course hasn't stopped many artists from taking a hearty stab at a conceptual rebuttal anyway. Some (perhaps without even trying) get closer than others.

British artist and musician David Cunningham takes the natural "silence" of random public and private spaces, and subtly amplifies it to the foreground. Using a location's own real-time audible (and inaudible) "background" noise as a source, Cunningham installs simple equipment (a microphone/speaker/amplifier/noise gate set-up) that records, amplifies and loops the natural sounds refracted within each location, feeding it back to the space itself in real time, re-focusing people's ears to "listen" to sounds in quiet spaces where they might not normally do so. The goal of his Activated Space project is "...to develop and present a series of installations that alter an architectural space to allow its resonant frequencies to become audible and interactive." 

Secrets on Postcards

Since January, people have been mailing their deep, dark secrets, contained on anonymous postcards to this address:

PostSecret
13345 Copper Ridge Rd
Germantown, Maryland
USA 20874-3454

They're up for the whole world to see here.

Something To Do

Han Hoogerbrugge is one of the finest artists on the internet. His world is the one I sometimes find myself in when I am sitting in an office without windows, the lovely color-neutralizing glare of fluorescent light making it almost impossible to see the computer screen after several hours of mind numbing excitement leading to nowhere but a paycheck. 

Nina Paley is a cartoonist who did some decent work for Dark Horse a few years back. I'd kind of forgotten about her until I found out about her latest project through grow-a-brain: Sita Sings The Blues. Sita is a series of cartoons telling the story of The Ramayana with soundtracks from the 1920s. These are charming, and charming is a word that is rarely uttered by these cold, harsh lips. Warning: these will take a little while to download.

Eiland is one of my favorite comics featuring the work of two great artists Tobias Schalken and Stefan J. H. van Dinther. Their webpages are filled with strange comics, animation and games. Enjoy.

Vienese Actionist Films (1970)

Otto Muehl Manopsychotisches Ballett (1970)

What could be more fun than Vienese Actionist films? You know the Vienese Actionists, don't you? They were a bunch of Austrian artists in the 60s who sliced open cows and rolled around naked fucking each other, soaked in animal blood. While most of this stuff has been relegated to the dustbin of art history (with the exception of Hermann Nitsch), we've uncovered a prime document of the period by gang leader Otto Muehl. It's a film in two parts and features all sorts of great stuff: nudity, fist fucking, animal sacrifice, dildos and group groping, all to the strains of Charlotte Moorman's cello. True art, in our humble opinion. via UbuWeb

Oo.

O   O   O   O   O   o

Original Hater

Canada's own GX Jupitter-Larsen needs no introduction to noise aficionados. His project The Haters has been exploring decay and nihilism in sound for over 20 years. Some of his projects have included amplified staple guns, replacing the tone arm and cartridge of a record player with an amplified toy shovel and designing noisy and destructive items with Survival Research Labs.

Here's a clip showcasing Haters alternatives to the playback of pre-recorded music (quicktime - right click and "save target as" on your PC)

GX also has a spot on the web for some short video clips of his projects here. 

ADDENDUM!! GX was kind enough to write in: As ALTERNATIVES TO THE PLAYBACK OF PRE-RECORDED MUSIC. It really does means a lot; thanks. There's just a little something I want to bring up. If I may be so bold as to to point out a correction I think should be made: to call me or The Haters "Canada's own" is very misleading. First of all, I am a US citizen. I might have grown up there, but I haven't been back in over 20 years. Secondly, The Haters actually started in New York City when I lived there in 1979, before I went back to Vancouver to go to film school. Actually The Haters were based in San Francisco two times longer than in Vancouver. For two years (1991 & 1992) The Haters were actually based in Bordeaux France (where I was living at the time). Forgive me if I seem piety over this. Thanks again.

ALL THE BEST GX (back in Hollywood where he belongs)

FUCK YOU, Frank Lloyd Wright

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!!!!!!!!!!

It Must be the Russians

Inspired by the chatter regarding THE RUSSIANS on this blog lately, I was reminded of this great link to old Russian Propaganda, Entertainment, & Military posters that was sent in by Listener Joe.

Which, in turn, reminded me of the (many) relevant tracks by one of the 20th Century's greatest poets, Attila the Stockbroker, and from his brilliant "Ranting at the Nation" LP, we present the following MP3s of intellectual accompaniment:

(Right click to download)

They Must be Russians

Russians at the Henry Regatta

Russians in the DHSS

Russians in MacDonalds

I first heard Attila on college radio back in the 80s and was immediately transfixed by the clarity of his rants, his often-hilarious demeanor, and what remains a wholly unchallenged sense of smart assed-ness. Some of his more recent works can be had by going here, or for a further taste of what Attila's been up to, here is a droplink to the RealAudio archive of his appearance on Pat Duncan's show from July of 2002.

While we're giving it up for the Russians, let's also pause and reflect on the sexual-hygenically minded brilliance of early 80s po-punk-new-wavers They Must be Russians and their cautionary epic "Don't Try to Cure Yourself" (Right click to download MP3) as well as this RealAudio nugget from WFMU's Listener Hour archives. November 2nd, 2002 edition with your host The White Russian. Сразить, мои друзья!

Mao-ee Wowee

Now, I’m no art phag, but I do love me some commies. A friend in SF clued me in to Sui Jianguo’s “Sleep of Reason” exhibit that’s happening at the Asian Art Museum over thar. If you look closely, the sleeping Mao is surrounded by armies of plastic dinosaurs (images stolen from this blog). Click here for a candid photo of Marx during a recent sabbatical he took from being dead.

What kind of pinko station is this, anyway?

The Eat “Communist Radio” (MP3)

Real Audio from the WFMU Archives (mostly from Comrade Freedman's show):
Kenny G reads Karl Marx
Red Shadow (The Economics Rock & Roll Band) “Understanding Marx”
Felix Kubin Backed with Quotations from Chairman Mao 
Alabama Three "Mao Tse Tung Said"
“Commie Lies”
Lulu Bellle & Scotty “I’m No Communist”

Rainy Day Fun #1

"A Humument", last published in 1997, is a difficult-to-find, work-in-progress where the artist Tom Phillips creates his own version of W.H. Mallock's "A Human Document." The artist has now made the last published version available here. I first read about this book in the first or second issue of Wax Poetics where the author of the piece saw it as an early example of sampling and finally saw a copy when I visited the home of fellow DJ Bryce. It is a one-of-a-kind book that speaks to the various voices floating around your skull. I found out about its availability on the internet through wood s lot.

A Trove of Avant-Garde Films

A trove of free historic artists films by Kenneth Anger, Luis Bunuel, John Cage, Guy Debord, Marcel Duchamp, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Robert Morris & Stan VanDerBeek, Isidore Isou, Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg, 37 short Fluxus films, Hans Richter, Harry Smith and Jack Smith.

Spice Up Your Desktop

Admit it, those awful screen captures from the leaked Carrot Top sex video are not an appropriate desktop wallpaper. Don't blame yourself, I too question Microsoft's decision to ship them with XP, but there is hope! Listener Jeff here with some desktop wallpapers that could easily make you the most popular person on your network.

Animals always make adorable desktops, who wouldn't want to store MP3s on this sloth, these grizzlies, a pizza party, or this precious little moment which I should point out is totally unrealistic.

First off, beavers are not friends with squirrels, they're far too smart to be seen with them. Secondly, just for the sake of argument lets say the beaver was “a little slow” or something and decided to befriend a squirrel, they wouldn't value a flower like we do. They are incapable of understanding it’s fragile beauty. That's really what separates the human from the squirrel. Unlike these filthy rodents we've got a little thing called civilization and it doesn’t matter how often they keep me awake all night with there constant scratching and chittering, they ain't never going to be the top dog. You hear that Tufty? NEVER. Maybe if they stopped stuffing their cheeks for a couple minutes they could make something of themselves like their relative the pigeon. That's an animal that had the good sense to quit chittering and do their duty overseas like a true patriot. Countless carrier pigeons lost their lives fighting the Nazi war machine making sure today’s lazy squirrels have the freedom to spend all day jumping from tree to tree, ignorant of the harsh reality of the real world. Notice I didn't mention thieving seeds from bird feeders? That's because incase the name “bird feeder” didn't clue them in, those seeds are FOR BIRDS.

I could go on but in honor of the brave carrier pigeon here are some hyper patriotic wallpapers, which are very hard to find on the internet. We have Lady Liberty/Flag/God, Eagle/Flag/Derby, Flag/Wordy Text and Flag/Bush/Clock/Fear/Lecture. Happy Wallpapering and remember, tiling is so Windows 98.

(Thanks Scary Squirrel World for incriminating information)

When It's A Slow News Day

...give the fans a headline like this: Korn Guitarist Says The Jesus Tattoo on His Hand Keeps Him From Masturbating. This information from an "interview" on the guitarist's own website. Apparently he left Korn a month ago & thinks everyone cares about what he's doing, or, uh, not doing. To help all of you shortcut this one, the article is boring and barely mentions music; seems like a staged Q & A, and frankly,
I blame Korn as being partially responsible for the downfall of heavy music, so no one should be hangin' on this guy's words. However, sometimes a good headline is enough to brighten your day.

San Diego Seen Report

So last weekend I went out to San Diego for a tattoo/hot rod convention. The first song I heard on the radio once I hopped in my rental vehicle (NOT a hot rod) was Let's Go by The Cars...not a bad omen; hell, at least the weather was decent. Featured at the show was Barris Custom - they had their Munster Koach there & were selling some great swag (I felt compelled to buy every mini tiki patch they had). There were plenty of other car customizers there, and a ton of really great tattooers as well. On Friday night I headed up to northern San Diego to catch The Weirdos and Duane Peters' Gunfight play in a pool hall. Does punk exist in San Diego anymore? I'm not sure... I had a great time & both bands were smokin', but the turnout was really frikkin crappy. In attendance: Mike Palm of Agent Orange, so I was in good company, but still felt bad for the bands. This kind of thing drives me nuts... a band I adore is playing, the show is underattended, so I get a great place near the stage that I don't have to get bloody for & get to talk to the band longer than I would because NO ONE ELSE IS THERE. It's the "My Band" or "everybody's band, including mine and I stand in the very back so my nose doesn't get broken.. again" syndrome, and I've suffered from it often. I get great stories to take home, but the band probably lost their shirt(s), and that sucks. I did get to have a conversation with John Denney, vocalist for the Weirdos about crop circles; that'll stand out in my mind for awhile - so I guess I will just deal with the ordeal of being torn on this front. This was a "My Band" night & I won't apologize for it, I mean, really, I flew across the country and then drove almost an hour; by the time the Weirdos went on I think it was 4am NY time, so yes, I earned that, even though I wish they could have sold more merch and didn't get tossed out of the club as soon as they were done playing! So much for respect & the San Diego scene.
Back at the convention on Saturday, sets by Go Fast, The Saddle Tramps & Honky all kept the crowd happy, but there wasn't a local band in sight. Now I know that San Diego is home to Cattle Decapitation and the Locust, but is that it? I'm not going to blubber about what I didn't see, and I was only there for a weekend, but when the east coast show queen comes to town, well, you'd better deliver! Sheesh. Basically, the convention was a success, the weather cooperated; people had a howling good time (sometimes too good), and that's all she wrote. For now.

How to Procrastinate: Tip No. 5A—Drown Kitties (continued)

Swag protest via kitties update:

Mark Magowan sent us a note saying "we are all so sorry," and included this picture. 

By "we are all so sorry" I think he means "we have your number, irredeemably promiscuous promoters of satan's work in swag."

Next time: everything you've been waiting for.

Back In The Day

Here is a stunning collection of Old School Party Fliers from the likes of Buddy Esquire and Phase 2.

Blackcrack (MP3) to browse by

How to Procrastinate: Tip No. 5—Drown Kitties

SWAG PROTEST

The U.K.'s Foreign Investment art group has announced that it will drown three kittens to protest the Tate Modern's commodification of conceptual artist Joseph Beuys.

In a statement, they said that they are "really angry about the current Joseph Beuys exhibition, where the Tate Gallery has decided to take upon itself to sell key fobs with little bits of felt inside, small blackboards with chalk, jigsaw puzzles and biscuit tins making a mockery of the artist's work. [...] On their website they describe him as being charismatic, innovative, influential and unconventional, so they key fobbed him."

The event will take place in a special at home exhibition in South London on Monday, February 28, 2005. For information contact mcgowan1@camb.linst.ac.uk.

The artists feel they have no other option but to drown the kittens, saying, "We feel really bad about the kittens but it's the Tate Gallery's fault blame them."

If three kittens = a key fob, how many get offed for a clock?

(Oh yeah--Next time: porn, but not just any porn, Jersey City porn.)

Copyright Criminals

Here's a link to a ten minute long trailer for a forthcoming documentary on sampling and copyright. The doc will be called Copyright Criminals and it's by Kembrew Mcleod and Benjamin Franzen. The trailer contains clips from copright / sampling superstars Lawrence Lessig, Pete Rock, Matmos, DJ Qbert, Negativland and even our own Vicki Bennett. Link to Quicktime movie.

A Visual History of Whispering Imps

Isn't there supposed to be an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other? I guess not. Check out a visual history of whispering imps on magic posters.

Deep Wireless Festival in Toronto

There's not many radio festivals out there, much less radio art festivals, but a big one is coming up in Toronto for the month of May. The Deep Wireless Festival will feature a month-long celebration of radio art, radio artists, sound artists, sound installations, and even broadcasting! Among other radio artists in residence at the festival will be Gregory Whitehead, of Kenny G's scream-a-thon fame. (mp3)

Big hot dog tramples wealthy liberals in park, makes mean face, enjoys refreshing beverage

I was figuring that since everybody and their brother was in Central Park last weekend for the unveiling of The Gates, one of my esteemed FMU colleagues would've already posted about it here. We are an arty bunch, after all... Here's a rather gigantic photo of the exhibit as seen from space, courtesy of the very cool and very addictive Space Imaging website.

I've been reaping a lot of joy from the predictably cartoonish response the exhibit has earned from people who thought it was a complete waste of time. I got into one such argument with my brother, who loudly declared via email from his suburban tract-mansion that The Gates were "stupid", "a waste of money", and "not real art". Having known my brother long enough to realize when he's baiting me with editorial nonsense picked up from some easy cultural whipping post like Fox News, I sweetly pointed out that the project was self-financed, wasn't costing the city anything, and was in fact creating jobs as well as generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in business for local bars and restaurants that all the visitors were promptly descending on all weekend. (My companion and I had to beat it all the way down to 23rd and 9th to find a restaurant that wasn't totally packed.)

As for the idea that the Gates were not "real" art -- a popular opinion also espoused in a few of the raggier city dailies, by dorks in golf pants, and by a bunch of artists who paint tourist portraits in the park for a living, well,  that's an opinion too stupid for even me to bother arguing. "I don't like it" is a perfectly valid artistic opinion, but apparently not enough for the modern and sophisticated naysayer. It's more important to  declare yourself the absolute authority and expect the rest of the world to live or die by your expert judgment. Eh? EH???

Truth be told, I wasn't particularly bowled over by The Gates myself. I only found it visually stimulating once I got up near 80th Street and was able to look back towards Columbus Circle with a bit of elevated perspective. The more enjoyable parts were being out on a beautiful afternoon, appreciating all the work and planning that went into pulling off such a monster project, watching little kids try to climb up the posts, seeing the celebrity couples strolling around holding hands, watching teenagers send text messages and walk their robot dogs, and generally making mental notes of all that other faux-pastoral small town horseshit people always carry on about when they write about New York City.

As for the Gates not being "real art" idea, I found myself once again fighting the creeping urge I always get in these instances to pinpoint a really upsetting or challenging work of creativity, and proudly display it as an object of appreciation for people who share my brother's artistic outlook. Musically, this is a common and easy practice for many of us who spent our teens living out the under-achieving, negative asshole stereotype like I did. Arriving at WFMU later on in life with some kind of profound agenda at hand, these issues are routinely worked out of our systems on a weekly basis and reflected in the music we choose to play. For me, an earlier example harkens back to when I first started doing radio in 1992, which was just about the same time that the Spin Doctors were becoming popular. At my old radio station, whenever I would get a request for said band, I would instead play music by  quasi-legendary Trenton noiseniks the Scornflakes, (click to hear RealAudio archive) who had a record out that I was able to scientifically prove would make all fans of the Spin Doctors feel like shit about themselves (forever.) I admit, doing this was immature but was (and still is) very satisfying. There's still some part of me that appreciates the heedless joy of being stared at blankly by Joe and Mary Suburbanite for expressing an appreciation of something edgier than The Little Mermaid.

Of course, achieving that kind of satisfaction on the visual arts front can be loosely approximated any number of ways. One favorite that recently snapped back to my immediate focus would be Ron Mueck's "Mask", which I was able to view in all its terrifying splendor last November at the Saatchi Gallery in London. This photo doesn't do it proper justice, but when you walk into the gallery and are directly confronted by it, your bowels will definitely do that same rumbling bass thing you hear at the beginning of the Scornflakes track. (It's gotta be close to 15 feet tall.)

And make no mistake: Any number of the exhibits at the Saatchi would utterly terrify the lightweights and pansies who were frightened by the big, mean orange shower curtains in Central Park. I definitely recommend shelling out the money to visit the gallery if you're ever in England, no matter how bad the exchange rate gets.

While it's a no-brainer that Mask would upset my brother (I think he liked the Spin Doctors after all), London is inconveniently far away. There's no way I could get him into a museum like that or have him sit through even the first minute of a Scornflakes record. So clearly, an easier way for me to have some fun with this familial argument and flesh out my responsibilities as the creepy little brother is to rough up his email box with a link to this mind-bending commercial for Afri-Cola, created by Charles Wilp in 1968. That'll give him nightmares. (You can  view many more decidedly un-commercial commercials for the fizzy beverage on the Afri-Cola website, most of which will handily relegate all that overhyped hooey seen during the Superbowl to the trash.)

If that doesn't work, I'll invite him to have a seat and enjoy a good long stare at Ivan Witenstein's fantastically jaw-dropping hot dog sculpture. Yes, my friends... that is indeed a six-foot hot dog squirting ketchup and mustard all over itself with a stillborn black infant emerging from the lower quarters. It's called:

Watch her younger year by year
Stare her back in time,
Teach her the four food groups
Hotdogs, pussy, beer, and crime.

Try rationalizing that one for someone who as a teenager didn't have any better records for me to steal than ELO, Linda Rondstadt, and the Beach Boys' "Endless Summer".

(Thanks to Listener Jen, Listener Jaybob, Brian Turner, and Dan Ruccia for link-assistance and inspiration.)

 

How to Procrastinate: Tip No. 2—Rasterbate

You heard me.

A raster is essentially the bit-mappification of a digital image that plots the original onto a grid. The “Rasterbator” takes the image in the grid and works some crazy math mojo on it, and you can print it out as a HUGE multi-page pdf.

If you are simple-minded and like things big (say, if you are from Texas), this is the way to go. But if you are more artsy-fartsy, you can make the cells in the grid more abstract.

Like this little fella: from a distance it’s just a penguin, but up close it’s Art.

(Since I am not just a procrastinator but a lazy, plagiarizing procrastinator, I stole this idea from Shannon Holman, Poet Laureate at Apartment Therapy, where you can steal lots of other ideas.)

Next time: porn. I know I said that last time, but I got distracted by Rasturbation.

John Cage & Morton Feldman: A Conversation

I love this 3-hour conversation between Morton Feldman and John Cage recorded in 1967. An excerpt:

Morton Feldman: Well, this weekend I was on the beach.
John Cage: Yes.
MF: ... And on the beach these days are transistor radios.
JC: Yes.
MF: ... blaring out rock 'n' roll.
JC: Yes.
MF: All over.
JC: Yes. And you didn't enjoy it?
MF: Not particularly. I adjusted to it.
JC: How?
MF: By saying that... Well, I thought of the sun and the sea as a lesser evil.
JC: You know how I adjusted to that problem of the radio in the environment?  Very much as the primitive people adjusted to the animals which frightened them, and which, probably as you say, were intrusions. They drew pictures of them on their caves. And so I simply made a piece using radios. Now, whenever I hear radios - even a single one, not just twelve at a time, as you must have heard on the beach, at least - I think, "Well, they're just playing my piece."

My Bathroom is a "Private" Kind of Place

Everybody like a little privacy while going to the bathroom, right? That's why we run off into the bushes when nature calls on the great highway of life. (MP3 download of American Standard's pro-bathroom privacy anthem.)

Listener Stephanie submits these two pictures of a new public bathroom in Houston. (Apparently, London also sported one of these last Fall.) On the outside, it looks innocent enough - clean even! Mirrored walls suggest a public toilet that might not require you to turn your smeller off for the entire experience. But take a step inside and the walls are revealed to be one-way mirrors.  Now you're taking a dump in the middle of a town square, surrounded by your fellow citizens. You got a problem with that?

The toilets are the brainchild of artist Monica Bonvicini who wanted to see if people would "defy their own embarrassment" by using the free public stalls, which operate under the title "Don't Miss A Sec." Of course, these mirrored outhouses also happens to be a godsend for folks who like to have sex with themselves or others, but prefer to avoid the pesky imprisonment that sometimes accompanies such behavior.

I think I''d prefer the public toilets of Berlin, which descend into the bowels of the earth on an elevator in between uses, where they are sprayed and disinfected with post-Nazi-like precision. But that's just me.

DJ Food's Raiding the 20th Century

To celebrate the long-awaited arrival of our cheap bandwidth, and to test the limits of our servers as well as my own common sense, I'm making this great hour-long celebration of sampling, mashups and general sonic tomfoolery available for 36 hours or so. It's called Raiding the 20th Century - Words and Music Expansion featuring Paul Morley, and it's by Strictly Kev, although DJ Food also figures in here somewhere also.

I played a few excerpts of this on my show last Wednesday, but frankly, my attention span has suffered irreversible damage from years of living in New Jersey, so I didnt play anywhere near the whole thing and probably wouldn't until next summer, when Re:Mixology will hopefully come back on our schedule.

So download this sucker while it's available, if you got yourself one of them new-fangled broadband connections. It's over 70mb tall, so be patient. Big Momma MP3 Download.

UPDATE: Our server is handling this file just fine, so I'm going to leave it up after all.

La Monte Young (1965)

Forty-Two for Henry Flynt by La Monte Young performed by Peter Winkler (gong) at the Third Annual Festival of the Avant Garde in San Francisco, 1965: A very rare MP3 of Young's from the incredible trove of avant-garde archived KPFA radio shows (many dating back to the 60s and 70s) and MP3s at the Other Minds Archive. "42 for Henry Flynt" probably has not been written out as a composition. The number in the title changes from performance to performance, depending on the number of repetitions of the sounds. The orchestration is flexible as well. This realization was performed by Peter Winkler on gong and was recorded at the Third Annual Festival of the Avant Garde in San Francisco, 1965. Its hypnotic character made it a favorite of KPFA Radio listeners for several generations.