sonic bits

courtesy porrr1

Here's some video of the live performance Juan Matos Capote did last Friday on Radio Contrabanda.

Other sundry sonic goodness, the music of sound posts about radiOM, which has archived some interesting interviews with the likes of Fred Frith and Conlon Nancarrow. Indeed, the music of sound has chosen some more worldly & interesting items there.

road to Barcelona

Here's a recording of painter/sound artist Juan Matos Capote performing on Radio Contrabanda in Barcelona yesterday.

Along similar sonic lines, a recording by Melanie Velarde as posted on Disquiet.

Also a host of cool pics on Flickr of Velarde at work/play like this one. Or this one.

the road to Quebec

agilitynut is blogging and clicking her way up NY State to Quebec and back.

Nipper hears his master's voice.

An owl gets wise.

In the land of the Francophone Dairy Queen and the big metal crow, a whale of a time is had by all.

bubbles

courtesy bphstanley

Thanks be to the missus for digging up this endorphin raiser (in lieu of ageless gran'mas and 2nd comings) featuring The Free Design.

And now a monochrome feature of the song named after the band:


courtesy stardappledgreen

damn

courtesy chucho860

David Carradine is gone.

PCL LinkDump.

Deadlicious.

FABULON.

...:::kindertrauma:::...

Rather than Kung Pao radio, been listening to this recording made with a Buddha Machine. Posted on Disquiet.

Another funereal bit: Emerson the Vamp Slayer? Prob. better than non-Buffy Buffy.

tick tock

Again with the UBUWEB.

This time, a Ligeti piece done with 100 metronomes:

And if you want 200 metronomes, better get clicking:

courtesy emicad

very gingerly

Malingering again at UBUWEB, this hermit finds another.

That most excellent Captain who now swims in paint.

the disappearing hubcap cross

This movie, Junkopia, brought to mind one Easter morning many years ago when a hubcap crucifix was fashioned onto a metal signpost along Comm. Ave. in Allston/Brighton.

It was very cool looking but no picture was taken. It was a unseasonably warm day, too nice to stick around in the city. And later when the day trip was over, the hubcap cross was gone.

Too bad there aren't more impromptu sculptures, but at least this hubcap crucifix was photographed.

they all look like Fess Parker to me

courtesy papadydy

Even if Daniel Boone was a man, it seems that Davy Crockett was a dog.

If Sexy People is to be believed, this lil' fella "kilt him a [stuffed] b'ar when he was only three" in dog years.

Meanwhile, FABULON has sighted a wondrous vacationland where A-frames and tentacled trees and (seemingly) placid deer abide.

In sledgehammer'd submission to the rule of three, let's quote a web page of quotations quoting Groucho Marx:

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."

sci-fi avatars & voices etched in chocolate

Respectively . . .

The Music of Sound

FABULON

And from what passes these days for a mad scientist's lair, analog video synthesis and tube-derived tomfoolery on Deviant Synth.

blind soul

Pathway to Unknown Worlds posted a great vid of Robert Wyatt being interviewed in 2007.

One bit of dawn breaking on Marblehead was finding out that Wyatt's recording, "At Last I Am Free", is a cover of a Chic ballad.

Wyatt's recording had haunted me since hearing it eons ago on the Rough Trade Records compilation LP, Wanna Buy A Bridge?, but I had no clue . . .

Now, one Google search later, I find this page that brings together not two, but three versions of the song: Chic's, Wyatt's and Elizabeth Fraser's.

Damn. An embarrassment of riches.

everyone's gone to the movies

I've caught this in bits and pieces on the nuevo UHF subchannels like THIS TV and RTN's Off Beat Cinema.

But here it is for one and all courtesy Google Video and publicdomaintorrents.com, A Bucket of Blood.

Sponsored by FABULON and Ms. Blythe Danner.

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.

my cathode youth vol. 5 1/2

My buddy Al Mundy's at it again. This time on a death flight where heedless scientists die on cue.

God, I totally remember seeing this as a kid.

John Colicos, whose misanthropic heavyosity has graced the likes of Star Trek and Battleship Galactica, comes on just a little lighter than usual to serve in the screenwriter's bully pulpit as a villain with a righteous cause.

Think of it as a kinda Malthusian/eco-terrorist rip of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians.

framed by ruination

The ending scene of Andrei Tarkovsky's film, Nostalghia (courtesy lauraemarmor).

I doubt a spoiler alert is really necessary, tho' seeing the movie might lend meaning & context to the beauty being viewed.

ruins for all

Being a sap for things lost & overlooked, had to mention the wide wide world of abandoned stuff that Noise Is Information found: Artificial Owl.

Aside from a giant train station in Detroit, the acoustic mirrors of Denge UK and the massively labelscarred concrete saucer of Bulgaria are something to behold.

No doubt, there's more.

on the Moon since the '50s

Yet another favorite clip from Slacker.

a piece of your own death

One of my favorite characters from one of my favorite movies.

Warning: mature language, surliness, cigarette smoking, humor . . .

Tho' different in many ways, he brings to mind an old acquaintance.

my cathode youth vol. 5

Again with It Takes a Thief.

That old episode I remembered is now on Hulu. Marilyn McCoo and the whole damn 5th Dimension guest star.

Advice: beware of glass sculpture and duck behind the couch. Or that "One Less Bell to Answer" (with the tacked on space trumpet coda) will toll for thee . . .

Dedicated to an Al of my own acquaintance.

my cathode youth vol. 4 1/2

Again with a Night Gallery segment, this one featuring Zsa Zsa Gabor on the wrong side of a mirror.

my cathode youth vol. 4

Yet another Night Gallery segment I saw when I was young. This one with Sondra Locke very unwisely accessorizing.

Kinda ghoulish when seen back then, the big bad brooch seems implausible and funny. Now the creepier aspects lie in the psychology of the principal characters.

ye olde drug of choice

Dude, ice cream matters.

And those jonesing in a time years ago in the land of Hampton Roads could count on High's Ice Cream.

BrandlandUSA has a great ad for High's that harkens back.

Look at that quart of fudge ripple . . .

my cathode youth vol. 3

Above is something from Night Gallery that I saw as a young kid. Now it's seem esp. twisted, but back then I thought nothing of it.

Halls of Anger

Saw this as a young kid with my mom and my sister my aunt perhaps in a downtown (pre-Urban Renewal) theatre.

And just now on This TV.

groovin' with Ironside

Can these kids' flower power match Ironside's glower power?

Storefront Hitchcock on Hulu

While it lasts . . .



And don't forget the talented & lovely Deni Bonet . . .

women kickin' butt

On the ever auspicious Friday the 13th, this one in February, Sarah Conner returns to fight Skynet. And Dollhouse, the new Joss Whedon show, premieres.

Friday generally being a dead night for television, this constitutes something of a resurrection.

Check it out . . .

scenes from the banks of Denial

(courtesy tonnerrro)

Just saw the bad news on PCL LinkDump. But will say: Lux lives, dammit.

And present these as evidence.



(courtesy mambofable)

seeing the invisible

Invisible bikini, that is.

And the blue-screened ghost within.

The brand new 21st century version of UHF funkiness expands a bit more with This TV, a network chock full of movies.

Frankly, I haven't quite warmed up to This as much as RTV.

But broadcast was one great piece of '60s teenploitation, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini. It seems to be one of Nancy Sinatra's first movies (or not), and maybe one of the last for Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff and the somewhat superannuated teen star Tommy Kirk. As promised by the title, a shapely ghost cavorts in her invisible bikini. Eric Von Zipper bikes in with his leather clad crew. And a few not-so-groovy ghoulies aside, poolside dudes play Vox instruments so the kids can dance.

As Brief Window just posted some transformation clips from The Incredible Hulk TV show, I might mention that RTV was broadcasting an episode featuring sci-fi mainstay Whit Bissell.

And a young Kim Cattrall as a Native American archeologist.

Long live the new UHF.

how do I watch thee, let me count the ways

Soaked to the bone in a cathode sea where the furthest waters include reruns of Hawaiian Eye and Car 54, Where Are You?, I'm still swimming in anything broadcast or online hosting can slosh about.

In the Homerically Simpsonian way of a rosy-fingered dawn being found in some old test pattern, I see in digital TV's birth some fringe enjoyment.

Much like UHF channels that seemed constantly up for grabs (like the early nineties' incarnations of the Boston area channel 68--first as a flagship station for the Christian Science Monitor and then as a part of Boston University [WABU]), the spare lo-res digital channels seems another bit of culture in the margins.

The .2 SD channel of WJAR Channel 10, the NBC affiliate in Providence/New Bedford, was for a while just a weather channel with occasional feeds of local and national forecasts.

Now it's started running cool old reruns on what it calls the Retro Television Network (RTN).

Love the '80s? There's the A-Team & Magnum P.I.

Crave something older? There's The Rockford Files and Emergency!

Get back even further to Ironside, It Takes a Thief, Adam-12 and Dragnet. And awaiting in the still & distant waters of TV syndication are Wagon Train, Bachelor Father and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

One can float in this for quite some time (esp. when trying to recover from a bad cold).

Being older shows they allow less ad time. And it's funky if oft repeated ads for Elvis and Johnny Cash gospel CDs or cheap hearing amplifiers. Or PSAs with Suze Orman speaking for the FDIC or Howie Mandel for Adult ADHD awareness.

In this time of HD/Surround saturation, who can resist all that?

Join the truly TV addicted, the Luddite and the shut-in.

Swim in that from whence all pixels flow.

Catherine Carter gives artist talk @ Opening Lines

Above is one of several artist talks presented last Sunday at the Opening Lines show at the New Art Center in Newton, MA.

There's more about the show here. A review in the Boston Globe.

And this video overview of the show from a MetroWest Daily News article:

clearly visible

Two new video favorites . . .

Paco Camino brings on the Lite Brite ad from the '70s.

FABULON takes it to the Top of the Pops with Martha and the Muffins doing "Echo Beach".

The song's signature chorused guitar riff I think I somewhat snagged in gut-bucket fashion here. Or not, who knows.

And meantime, I'm Learning To Share! is all about the groundhogs (who I fully expect to see--when the snow melts) and Spring of '62.

In lieu of anything not cold & white, one can follow the vintage breadcrumbs to reruns that may yet prove to be a powerful boost to the immune system.

speaking of green vegetables

The Yodelling Pickle, as linked on Mademoiselle Montana's Yodel Heaven (which was itself linked on Pathways to Unknown Worlds).

the 5 year old within asks

I'm sure if this crossed my mind, it has crossed a few others. All the same, I'll take the credit and the blame:

Q: What is the most presidential green vegetable?

A: Broccoli Obama.

what is our gamelan?

With a new president, our new president now sworn in, there are all sorts of questions and notions going forward.

My meme to offer rides the back of the previous post:

What is our gamelan?

Or, if you prefer, your gamelan, or mine?

(Again, leave it to Wikipedia to provide the contextual details.)

I'm still guessing as to mine, but the notion overall is:

Where for anyone does the creativity of one join in with and foment the creativity of many? Where does anyone go again and again, day-to-day or whenever possible, to offer the fruits of who she or he is to comprise an even broader harvest?

This is humbly presented as an organizing question, something that may lack any one clear or definite answer but will present any number of operative principles or best next actions.

The metaphor means to offer both community and play, structure and variation.

With the let's get together and work things out themes of late, we may want to whistle while we work. Or work as we whistle.

The whistling itself maybe being the work. The play that moves us forward.

I sing the gamelan electric

Okay, not me . . . It's The Music of Sound that's groovin' on Gamelantron, a MIDI-controlled robotic gamelan created by Zemi17 (aka Aaron Taylor Kuffner). The post has cool links to video, Gamelatron's MySpace (which, yes, is recommended).

Briefly raining on the cool parade, I would mention that in my vague understanding of the culture of Gamelan performance in its native Indonesia many community performers practice and play their various interlocking parts together in order to form a complex & shimmering musical unity. Being that we have laptops and solenoids galore, leave it to the West to rig it all up to one person's sequenced control.

That said, I'm listening to and digging what the oneness of Zemi17 is laying down on the MySpace tracks. However many people are playing, I'm a gamelan fan.

As a very amateur garage muso/person who thinks too much, I've often wondered about (tho' have yet to read about) the advent of the drum kit.

Again, much like the traditional, non-robocized gamelan, the drums within the modern drum kit were once played by several individuals. Even nowadays, think of the marching band with a bass drum player, a snare drummer, someone playing cymbals, and so on. Before the drum kit was set before the coordinated limbs of a single drummer, the deal seemed to be one drum to a person and many people playing together.

Jus' sayin': As in the case of so many feats of technological leverage, more & more sound is made and/or marshalled by a single person.

stepping (down) off the grid

If life beneath the high tension wires is not for you, maybe let La Monte Young (via Singer-Saints) bring it down a little closer to home.

grid worthy

InfraNet Lab posts about the electrical power grid both as big damn infrastructure and the natural world's marginal respite from humanity.

Also mentioned is the On The Grid photo show ongoing in Providence RI, which seems more than a good case for the latter.

My agoraphobic, Stilgoe-esque reaction is that the world is too much with us sentient bipeds as well.

If you too are ready to switch off/on/out/whatever, you'll see me there. But only if I don't see you first.

way too many dead folk

Pat Hingle . . .

Eartha Kitt, on Christmas Day, of all days . . .

Now Patrick McGoohan. Remembered on PCL LinkDump. And on Deadlicious with plenty of Prisoner related & other follow up.

Don't anyone else go dyin' if you know what's good for ya . . .

my cathode youth vol. 2

Looking for the theme to It Takes A Thief, I fell further back into the snowy standard def. recollections of way too much TV viewing.

At Mark Little's MyThemes.TV, there's a scary amount of TV themes awaiting. The Prisoner, F Troop, Petticoat Junction or whatever'll match your nostalgia jones is there.

Found via a collection of It Takes A Thief opening clips on mystery writer Chris Well's blog, Learning Curve.

And now this gratuitous embed of the opening credits to Cimarron Strip courtesy saishutu . . .

my cathode youth

Some say it takes a village to raise a child.

I'd say It Takes a Thief . . .



Meaning the late '60s/early '70s TV show starring Robert Wagner (the above epi featuring none other than Susan Saint James).

And co-starring Malachi Throne, an oft-time heavy who had indeed played the heaviest of such, Niccolo Machiavelli, jus' y'know hanging out in the American Civil War in this episode of The Time Tunnel:



Anyway, in It Takes a Thief, Malachi works for Uncle Sam and has Robt. Wagner doing the same with cool theme music, international locales and so on.

And if the online rerun gods are kind, maybe they'll get around to posting my favorite ancient TV memory.

A third season episode in which nogoodniks force Marilyn McCoo of The Fifth Dimension to add a trippy coda to "One Less Bell to Answer" that will cause a glass sculpture to shatter and kill some dude they want dead.

Looking forward to that . . .

the days of wine & Peggy Lipton

While continuing to (sort of) recover from a bad chest cold/flu/Lord-knows-whatever, I deplete hulu.com's precious supply of Psych and Burn Notice reruns (my spouse, in like condition, reads about cholera stricken London).

Time for serious anti-viral entertainment . . .



An episode of Ironside featuring Lee Grant and a Quincy Jones cameo (not just his excellent theme music).

Having avoided respiratory distress for some years, I've only now realized that Barbara Anderson, who played Ironside's cop gal friday, also did a great bit on Star Trek as the wiggy daughter of a mass murderer turned Shakespearian actor. She puts the high gloss on psychotic break.

Meanwhile, Raymond Burr seems not surly enough by half in these less gentle, House-crazy times, but suffice it to say he's knocking it out to the cheap seats circa 1967. And doing it for the orchids.

lit up like an angel

Or thereabouts.

Simulcast on uberkayness . . .

merry freakin' Christmas

Tho' not much in a blogging mode, I thought in the space between "bah" and "humbug" I'd mention:

On Stax o' Wax, Lee Liberace tickles the ivories and otherwise says happy holidays to y'all.

On Brief Window, ye olde yuletide cathode OD awaits at BeTaMaXMaS! Garfield, John Cougar Mellencamp and Sir Gary Coleman conjoin in the molten goo of '80s holiday TV to say "Wha' chu caroling 'bout, Willis?"

Meanwhile on FABULON, Wiccans with a thing for gelatin and formica can forego any crappy gift ideas and give instead The Housewives Tarot.

Cheapskates, tire-kickers and window shoppers will enjoy the HT's fun, festive Flash demonstration.

Beats the living solstice out of a Chia Gaia or, um, Samhain . . .

what I didn't know about poinsettia

Plenty.

shifting allegiances

No greater a sea change than the one between Nixon '68 and McGovern '72 . . .

(simulcast on uberkayness)

cheery-colored funk

Heck, I forget where I read about Pathway To Unknown Worlds, but expect to experience lost time and the like.

Esp. as it points you toward The Old, Weird America, a blog exploring the music of the Anthology of American Folk Music. Or to a cool collection of pre World War II Japanese music recordings.

Meanwhile, Deviant Synth grooves on Eric Archer's altered Seeburg Select-A-Rhythm.

And Synthtopia enlists The Human Aftertaste [bevare bevare: savage muso-humorists that'll make you laugh or hurl or both] to make a point about the almost total uncoolness of males playing keytar.

pinned down

Even when it wasn't cool to wear one's heart on a sleeve, such as these [from the likes of Rough Trade Records] could be worn on the lapels of a thrift store jacket.

Folks used to call them influences.

vanishing point

A few dispatches from Afton Mountain, an old tourist stop near Skyline Drive:

Recent images of the abandoned HoJo's.

Earlier images of the abandoned Skyline Parkway Motel (now demolished) and the HoJo's.

And oh, yeah, even more recent images.

(Kind of an uberkayness thing as well, so simu-posting there . . .)

rockin' in the park

Thanks to mugsford, here's a clip of the Cashmere Jungle Lords playing one of my favorite tunes of theirs, "Not the Hurtin' Kind".

an orbit tracing inner space

Thom Ayers, who has brightened the interweb with the wit and invention of FABULON, is getting back to his music.

Along with his earlier collaboration, Arcanta, Ayers is now performing on his own. His song currently in rotation, The Only Lament, is reportedly a "work-in-progress", but it already travels the dramatic arc that only a human voice can carry.

singing out of doors

Now that New England autumn is slipping away into cold bare trees, the troubadour duo that is Aunt Mimi arrives just in time with a YouTube channel & not one but two new videos.

And ever popular is their first video.

ain't nobody's fool

Good ol' Dolly back in the days of the Porter Wagoner Show. Courtesy bwr15.

Wandered across this video after viewing this item at PCL LinkDump.

And if Ms. Pardon ain't bringin' enough 'tude for you, here's a Diana moment from FABULON.

holding on to Halloween

Here's a jaunty Halloween tune from the Boat Lullabies.

One can venture into the Bridgewater Triangle . . .



Or hang with Spiderman and such.

assaulted, a-peppered and a-roasted

Here's a bit of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (courtesy spazchop), a TV movie circa 1980 starring Jeff Goldblum as Ichabod Crane, Meg Foster as Katrina Van Tassel, the very cool Laura Campbell as the self-possessed Thelma, and John Sylvester White as the exceedingly loopy Fritz Vanderhoof.

Indeed, the best thing about this adaptation is the cast of off-kilter characters. Worth catching the other segments.

Here's a later one featuring Thelma and Katrina joining forces and a visitation by the late Winthrop Palmer ("They killed me, you fool . . ." @ 8:12):

from Bjork to Karlheinz to Daphne

Synthtopia posts about a Bjork article on Stockhausen.

Following that up I run across cool pics of British music pioneer Daphne Oram.

And from there go on to find this fascinating page about her early wartime years at the BBC.

weasel urine for the people?

Huh . . .*

Oh, I was just thinking of mentioning the poet James Tate when Poem of the Week obliged by posting one of his poems.

While locked inside a Barnes & Noble earlier this month, I had time to wander and saw two recent books by poets I'd seen read way back in my long ago student days.

One is The Ghost Soldiers by the aforementioned Mr. Tate. Great book full of nutty/spooky/beautiful prose poems. Contemporary fables, if you will, or won't. (*Perhaps not--see page 29).

Two is The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems by the poet Tomas Tranströmer. Also worth your glance--here's some online T. to prime the pump.

Much like International Talk Like A Pirate Day (which I leave to Alan Tudyk and other experts, but all the same . . ), I hope there is some worldwide observance/emulation/whatever of these two writers.

These books should help us prepare.

star wipe constellation

More Videos

Purist wags will no doubt wonder if PiL ever used so many star wipes in a video. Who can say . . .

Would like to see a vid for "Sister Europe", but this seemingly post-reunion clip of "Pretty In Pink" will work.

More Videos

inner city sanctums & lone prairies

Pruned posts about Articles of Faith, a series of photos Dave Jordano took of small storefront churches in Chicago.

Also worth viewing are Jordano's other photo series like Prairieland
(one favorite image here and another) and Chanute Air Force Base.

if I were a Partridge, and you were a lady

Brandland USA the website posts about NBC plans to revive the Partridge Family.

Good fan-minded suggestions there as to family dynamics, who should pimp whom.

My only ideas so far: have Danny Bonaduce play the new Reuben Kincaid.

Or perhaps have him play the grown Danny Partridge who will now function as the beleaguered agent to a younger, even wilier Partridge. Get Shirley Jones as Grandma P. and go all multigenerational.

Meanwhile, aside from the small auxiliary concerns like what kind of music would a 21st century Partridge play, the producers should give care to what hip guest stars they can enlist to give the P. Fam. some street cred while only slightly subverting their family-friendly premise.

If Richard Pryor guested in the old series (view epi here), who might do it now?

half melted candy corn for the ears

Halloween selections vol.1 and vol.2 at audiokayness.

Where ghosts bustle or lounge about, drink 'shine & play Misty for us.

Or where things are too goofy, too loopy or unhinged not to wear a foil hat.

the gnarly Civil War

File under "puppy dog tails":

Saw this on PCL LinkDump, a set of Topps Civil War cards.

No close perusal on my part, but the card titles alone ("The Angry Man", "Bridge of Doom", "Charging the Bullets") are amazing, much less the actual illustrations.

See y'all at the Antietam ComicCon . . .

God bless the Colonel

Does this album cover prefigure the Taco Colonel?

Think on that while I take a bucket of the Original Recipe into suspended animation.

past the point of comprehension and good sense

A friend and a friend of the friend mentioned 2 cool blogs that will prob. break my brain. Yours as well, perhaps.

Being a recovering thrift store record shopper, I really liked this particular blog and this particular entry of 3 young ladies (or simulacra thereof) ready to serve. I'm set free to find a new illusion . . .

As for #2, I'll just say Paco Camino.

Oh, and adventure . . .

And, um, cheap cassettes (which I remember well).

send in the clowns

As illustrated on deadlicious.

As performed by Cloris Leachman on FABULON.

As played over a proto-boombox on I'm Learning To Share!.

the devil and Richard Hell

. . . are meeting death at not just any crossroad, but Au carrefore étrange.

Oh, yeah, devil, Richard Hell. Richard Hell, the devil.

(Not a commentary, just clever shorthand/idle pointing. Back to napping now . . .)

reading or just read

The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard

Fun 'cause of Joe Harvard's interjections about his wild teen years in East Boston or chatting with Jonathan Richman. Interesting 'cause there always seems to be another story or another point of view on the Velvets, Warhol and all that.

Sudden Music and Why Birds Sing, both by David Rothenberg

Sudden Music is fun 'cause of the folk stories the author uses. Interesting because I don't know if I agree with his eco-aesthetics, but who wants to read a xerox of one's own notions.

Why Birds Sing is fun & interesting because Rothenberg goes at birdsong with science and poetics.

Both books (or at least the editions I borrowed from the library) have CDs of Rothenberg's music which I haven't truly listened to yet. Entirely an indication of my unwillingness to load a CD player (even greater than my hesitation to crack a book).

Back to napping . . .

where trouble goes angels follow

(Courtesy 8270laneman.)

While more of a fan of The Trouble With Angels (Hayley Mills, Rosalind Russell and so forth and so on), I like the theme song to Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows.

Likewise, I caught the start of Modesty Blaise which I hadn't seen since watching it as a kid on late night TV. Unfortunately I saw no video clip of the opening credits, but that theme's great too.

napping

As unterkayness continues to mention the same favorite blogs over and again, the fave blog & whatnot roster in the right hand column has been expanded.

And unterkayness takes a long nap to dream, reflect and otherwise do nothing for a while.

In the interim, the expanded list of usual suspects will serve you well.

the results are in

Poll One asked . . .

dogs & cats: at odds or in cohoots?


100% chose "Yes. Wait, what was the question."

Now we know for certain.

Poll Two asked . . .

do you believe in polls?

100% of those responding chose "I believe in wizards."


Had I voted, I would've chosen "Crickets know my name." But the people have spoken.

And the crickets will surely bide their time.

second that emotion

As announced on The Boat Lullabies, Square America has just put up Moving Pictures, a series of photo strip animations.

Funky Junk Trunk gives us Rita Tushingham.

FABULON presents not one but two Yvonnes.

And I'm Learning To Share! dusts off one crazy TV tray.