solitude & the inverted fedora

I'm Learning To Share speaks volumes on Jughead's hat.

Yes, Jughead of Archie comics fame. It's like a doctoral thesis on American Studies in a tasty Flintstones chewable.

the music of sound posts the coolest article ever on The End of Solitude. Recommended, as in very.

If that sounds like no fun, FABULON will show what your friends really think of you no matter how much you text them.

In any case, whatever your state of popularity, please consider doing this:

Stand up and walk away from your computer and go outside somewhere where the birds vastly outnumber the people. Phones and iPods off, just you alone with whatever's happening.

black and white and read all over

I've pestered the heck out of friends with one emailed URL after another from VietNamNet. (Who knows why, as I'm the same provincial East Coast American who digs Kung Pao FM.)

Here's a story about Vietnam's National Poetry Day festival held this past February.

And another quite fascinating human interest story/fable/poem of sorts about a farmer, his wife and the field they've given over to 10,000 storks. An eco-tourist spot has come of their work.

As one visitor observes: "It’s nice to relax in a hammock in the garden and feel the wind from the river. At sunset the land turns white with all the returning storks."

Meanwhile, one reads in AOL of Ruppy the red fluorescent puppy.

Bea, we hardly knew ye

But we'll miss her all the same.

As evidenced at Kindertrauma.

On FABULON, she's addressed as Dame Beatrice.

On And Now the Screaming Starts, said form of address should most certainly be used by a pack of raptors.

Or else . . .

profit to the people

Maybe I watched way too many episodes of Kung Fu.

Or I just love heavy-handed irony and Chinese classical music way too much to worry about the trade & diplomatic repercussions of a FM radio station riffing on the Cultural Revolution.

But here it is: Kung Pao 100.5 FM ditching the previous rock format for Chinese classical music.

Give it a listen and you'll find it replete with goofy gong-bashing segues and giveaways like the Kung Pao Cash Cow.

And DJs intoning nonsense like "Kung Pao 100.5 FM--Listen every now and Zen."

Or "Made in China--exclusively for Hampton Roads."

The station website likewise pours it on with hooks like the People's Party and the Insurgent Club.

Not to mention the soon-to-be-popular Take Your Bills And Divide Them Among The Community contest: "Send us your paycheck and listen for your name to get some of it back."

Things gets a bit broad now & then, like when the Station Manager alludes to drinking sake. (Eh, um, dude, sake's a Japanese beverage, do your market research.) And sometimes we're hanging with Cuban DJ 'Che or Suon Pheakdei, the Cambodian Ryan Seacrest.

But it's all for laughs (& well, for me, the music).

And no Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany's moments quite yet.

The station's slogan is: You Will Listen. And indeed you may.

Expect to see many drive-time listeners down in the Old Dominion clutching their Little Red Books.

Many thanks to the Daily Press article for the heads up.

all reverbs great and small

The music of sound brings Mohammed, or rather Alvin Lucier & iterations thereof, to the giant dual reverb tanks. Concrete water tanks 33 feet (11 m) high and 21 feet (7 m) in diameter.

Bigger still is the Silophone in Montreal.

I haven't the math or the will to figure the dimensions of that half-million gallon tank.

It all sounds pretty big.

Synthtopia is getting small with Circuit Girl's hacked floppy disk reverb. Which is glitchy & neat & super resourceful, but this old-schooler would like to see someone get all analog & Echorec with those floppies and hard drives.

In any case, good to see yet more fresh meaning given to renew, reuse, recycle.

Synthtopia also posts about Lou Reed's live performance of his paean to feedback, Metal Machine Music.

Billy Squire video digest

Johnnyuma of PCL LinkDump does such a good job of describing the video/enumerating its many sins that I saved myself the time and just read his commentary.

Taking Trilling for Austen (see Whit Stillman's film, Metropolitan)?

I think not.

Poes over bros

And Now the Screaming Starts posts about The New Yorker's recent ruminations regarding one Edgar Allan Poe. And various fictional ones spawned thereafter.

Meanwhile, downstream from Richmond, there's skulduggery on the James.

Kinda an ub' thing again, but it seems not once but twice that one mandated Jamestown Ferry security dude or another (perhaps lacking the masonry skills to wall folks up in wine cellars) tried to poison a coworker.

Not cool . . .

In case it all reads like something penned by a lesser Poe, here's the text from the Smithfield Times:

Instead it’s been the security guards themselves that have committed the most serious offenses.
In 2004, a security guard put cleaning solution in a co-workers drink in an attempt at poisoning, according to media reports.
A second case occurred in 2006, when another security guard put hand sanitizer in a co-workers drink.
Both guards were arrested and charged with attempting to poison, a felony.

Evidently, when offered the milk of human kindness, one should run a tox screen.

Hell, yeah

There's a great Roz Chast comic where she's a worried mom imagining all the crazy crap that could happen at some birthday party her kids are attending.

One of the best bits therein is an exchange between two boys:

"Matches are cool."

"Hell, yeah . . ."

So is this long ago posting and comments enumerating the youthful hijinks of yore.

(Okay, kids of today--put down the Wrist Rocket . . .)

The Rock and Roll Public Library

Thanks to a post on ephemera, googled the CHELSEA space site where there's been an exhibit of Mick Jones' Clash memorabilia & whatnot, The Rock and Roll Public Library.

CHELSEA space has tons of images of the show * plus the opening. Also links and such including one to a Flickr set of photos.

Hope the Ramones or somebody also has/had a storage space out there that's about to enter the public view.

[*Personal goofy musictronic fave is pic of a WEM Copicat tape
delay.]

where the grazing is good

Tho' the whole cows and country deal is more of an uberkayness thing, ub' is wearing a bit of a black armband these days.

So here's some bucolic decay. The architecture's cool (and should be preserved, ideally), but I'm here to see & hear the cows convene.


(courtesy undweller)

Feel free to stay a spell for whatever reason.

links to Laurie

Pathway To Unknown World has a link to audio of an interview last fall with Laurie Anderson. It gets kind of distorted at times and glitchy toward the end, but is very interesting.

Here's a quote of hers from back in the day posted on The Music of Sound. One of several bits of sound advice.

And she's been spotted during a flyby of FABULON.

black light radiation

The Boat Lullabies serves up a video of a man singing & playing in a new, as yet unfilled 1/2 million gallon water tank. Like a vast piano with the sustain pedal weighed down--every note goes on forever.

Blind Pony Books leads us down to a vein of Merle Travis' buried verse.

And to keep it country while observing the rule of three, we'll stumble into Easter morning with the Man in Black:



(courtesy Carters01)

well contained

The Music of Sound shares images and sounds from some groovy art installations done inside freight containers.

In a similarly spatial way, A Journey Round My Skull brings us In the Grotto.

And whether they're entirely true, FABULON presents the images & statistics of various 1940s Hollywood hotties, er, um, glamor gals.

see y'all at the fair

Donna Lethal posts on PCL LinkDump about the fine poster making Yee-Haw folk. Gotta love their county fair poster.

Saving your dough for malt liquor on the midway, maybe hitch a ride.