Recidivism.

[via Cable and Tweed -- grab that Ulu theme.]

Posted by Omar at 6:28 PM | Permalink | Comments

Seems like the perfect capper to a Mother's Day setlist.

Posted by Omar at 3:55 PM | Permalink | Comments

The most fun you'll ever have hitting esc / space ...

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Foo Fighters - "Darling Nikki" (Prince cover)

Posted by DOP at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments

In eary 2004, x amount touted a track from Camera Obscura's Underachievers Try Harder on his previous (and legendary) online newsletter. I liked it, but never really dove into the album -- the twee, Scottish pop pushed out at the time by my nonstop diet of a competing x tip-off: Nellie McKay's Get Away From Me. With Nellie occupied by Broadway and sans label, I should be able to devote proper attention to the forthcoming Let's Get Out Of This Country. After grabbing the excellent first single, I stumbled upon some of the surrounding tracks from the album through what the industry calls a "leak". Apparently, music record albums often appear in digitized format (generally .mp3, often collected in a "compressed" .zip file) in advance of their official retail "street date". This is wild.

Here's the title track:

Camera Obscura - "Let's Get Out Of This Country"

Bonus track: Camera Obscura - "If Looks Could Kill"

( Click here to pre-order Let's Get Out Of This Country)

Posted by Omar at 8:23 PM | Permalink | Comments

This Sunday on 60 Minutes:
Stephen Colbert On Insincerity.

Posted by DOP at 2:41 PM | Permalink | Comments

[Note: Tom linked this up in his latest fanclub email as the reason his podcasting has fallen behind. I wasn't stalking.]

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OTHER ACTIVITIES NOT RELATED TO THE CONDUCT OF THE FLIGHT.

Posted by x amount at 4:06 PM | Permalink | Comments

And the guy bringing it has a surprisingly strong delivery. I don't even know if this is PODCAST or not, but I don't care this time. I'll just leave the tab open and watch it IN BROWSER every day. Until I get sick of it. Then I won't have to worry about subscribing, unsubscribing, deleting, or WRECKING my car.

Posted by x amount at 2:42 PM | Permalink | Comments

If you are able to be described as "very urban-like," I suggest you pick a cooler nickname than "The Kentukian."

Also, Copperfield sucks at naming tricks on the fly.

Posted by x amount at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments

Jules Winfield vs. Winton Dupree:

[NSFW audio -- stick those earbuds in!]

[As WFMU's Beware of the Blog notes, the furious anger finish is classic.]

Posted by Omar at 8:13 AM | Permalink | Comments

American Treasure George Saunders returns this month with a new collection of short stories: In Persuasion Nation. You'll want to digest no more than one story a day -- of course, doing so will cause you to long for a 365 day supply. Or maybe they could shorten the year by 353 days. Either way: 12 stories, many of which you've already read scattered about. (Note: one previously published story, The Barber's Unhappiness, not collected in IPN, can instead be listened to. Also note that it is not George Saunders doing the reading. It is someone else.)

So last week, a few of us who previously provided mailing addresses in exchange for commemorative t-shirts were treated to a surprise postal package containing all manner of promotional IPN treats. Not the least of which is the signed and numbered chapbook you see embedded in this post. The rest of the loot (temporary tattoos, iron-ons, a double-sided poster, etc.) is pictorially depicted after the jump, but you might still be able to get in on the fun yourself by filling out a simple web form!

Posted by x amount at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

"You're gone, son." -- Tom, reaffirming Spike's banishment

"It was so awesome, I went to Cancun!" -- Denny Blaze on his lone vacation

"But I don't see no teepees here -- those Indians are gone." -- MC Steinberg in "Payotay"

"He's a pretty good punk." -- Petey on Pete Seeger

"The blinding, white-hot future of music as a whole." -- Anonymous on Gretchen Wilson and her nu-country ilk

"Keep that mustached trimmed." -- Tom to the star of The Birds And The Bees

"I apologize to me for saying that." -- Tom, after saying that Mike was "screening like the wind"

"Lon Chaney is going to go down as one of the most misunderstood politicians of our century." -- Keith Garfinkle on the Vice-President

"When you control the mail, you control ... information." -- Rogue mail carrier Newman to Jerry Seinfeld

"It's a competitive sport, you munch." -- Keith, informing Tom about the NESFL

[TBSOWFMU - 4/18/06 / Podmirth* / Jingle Jams / Myspace / Headquarters]

*The podcast remains a flop -- two more people signed up, but one of them unsubscribed leaving three, lowly TBS podders. Absent an influx of subscribers, Tom will pull it. Perhaps the pleas are working as Tom picked up one more last week to bring the total to four. Tell your friends. Don't let Tom get crushed by a chowderhead.

Eleventh Dream Day - "Between Here And There"

( Click here to buy Beet)

Smoosh - "Find A Way"

( Click here to pre-order Free To Stay)

Centro-Matic - "Monument Sails"

( Click here to buy Fort Recovery)

Mogwai - "Friend Of The Night"

( Click here to buy Mr. Beast)

Tilly and the Wall - "Black And Blue"

( Click here to pre-order Bottoms of Barrels)

Bonus Track for Mike the Courageous Call Screener:

Drive-By Truckers - "Like A Rolling Stone" (cover of the Bob Dylban punk classic)

Brief bit of self-promotion: My band -- The Banana Show -- is having a beer cozy release party in the back room at Pianos on Saturday, April 29th. We won't be playing any music (still trying to secure management), but I'll likely do a brief spoken-word set. Time Out New York once called me "the unholy love child of Henry Rollins and Maggie Estep". I've lined up Chelsea Peretti and Craig Wedren as openers. See you at the merch table!

Time to get blazed with some annotated highlights from an average, white, middle-class recapper who's just trying to express himself (the text is a bit rough because I was just writing it for myself):

- Tom gives a brief refresher (starts at 25:38) on Spike, the divisive, dungeon-dwelling prevert who was once a mainstay of the post-music, 8:30-ish segment. During the first WFMU Marathon show, Tom offered Spike a spot co-hosting for a full three hours, and he turnd Tom down cold, triggering a lifetime ban. Spike's been MIA ever since, but he briefly returned to the airwaves as Tom read an e-mail in his voice:

From: Spike < spike_be_goode @ gmail.com >

To: Tom Scharpling

Date: Apr 12 2006 4:20 PM

Subject: I don't do lifetime bans

Heeeeelllllooooo, Tom.

Miss me? I know the listeners do. Don't worry, I will return calling. I was to busy in the dungeon to call.

From reading the message boards, I am sorely missed. Batten down the hatches, I'll be back.

Spike

P.S. – My horror script just got greenlit; Trent's on board and he'll be producing it with Marky Ramone Films. Since it will be NC-25 and targeted towards urban areas, I doubt Lion's Gate will bother pushing it into one of your subirban metroplexes. I guess I'd describe it as a mix of Hostel, Sleepy Hollow, and Happiness, among other things. I wrote the role of a headless demonic pimp/child molester for Herman Santiago. The name of that character is "Tom Scharpling". Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Tom points out that Spike was apparently not too busy learning how to correctly use the monosyllabic "too", a skill that is normally achieved by the age of 7. (Spike was obviously deprived of the benefits of top-shelf suburban schooling.) Tom doesn’t want him back and confirms the lifetime ban, although Tom may have no say in the matter since Spike is telling him that he will make his return. At a minimum, I'd like to see one more Spike blowout -- a proper denouement, instead of his wimpy waffling on making the trek to WFMU and throwing it down with The Kid.

Brian from Higgins calls (starts at 29:38) to make sure that Tom got the check from Maggadee and weigh in on the Great Spike Debate. He votes for no more calls from Droopy Zippermouth. Brian mentions a lone upcoming show on Long Island, and Tom tells him to get some more shows going to cash in on their hott record and bring their music to the masses.

Higgins - "Town 2 Town"

- Tom's Weekly Concern: the ongoing Tall Bike War. Tom discusses (starts at 31:50) his latest battle with Brooklyn tall bike mutants, who had previously super-soaked him with acid as he was trying to eat an ice cream cone. They warned Tom that if he continued to talk about tall bike culture, they would kill him. Last weekend, Tom was having a nice family picanic -- the basket, the blanket, all the food spread out, all the trappings were in place. Then, all of a sudden, 15 tall bikes emerged from over a hill. The bikers were wearing leather jackets with "Williamsburg Forever" written on the back.

Tom was seated on the blanket with his grandmother, uncles, aunts, and the rest of the family trying to enjoy himself when the bikers ran over the blanket, smashed the food, and whipped chains around, claiming retribution. One hoodlum reached into his Meatwad satchel, retreived an issue of McSweeneys (not the softer one that looked like junk mail) and hit Tom's grandmother. (These mutants seem to take great joy in killing an injuring old ladies. For shame.) As the Scharpling clan scattered, Tom ran into an abandoned Two Guys to hide from the tall bikers. They tried to scare Tom using The Warriors-esque "click, click, click" noises that echoed throughout the store. Tom, however, was not scared and picked up a 2-by-4. As they came at him, he hurled the lumber right into the spokes, and a tall biker went flying. Tom then took some bubble tea out of his satchel and poured it all over him while giving him a warning: “You watch it!”. With his foot pressed against the tall biker's throat, Tom added: "You leave me alone!" At this moment, another biker approached from behind and hit Tom in the face with a chain. Tom was knocked unconscious and woke up in front of Northsix two days later.

Tom is undeterred and challenged all tall bikers to a fight on Friday, April 21st, vowing to finally bring tall bike culture to an end. If the tall bikers bring a knife, Tom will bring a gun; if they bring a gun, Tom will bring a bomb. Whatever it takes to protect his family. I scoured the tri-state press, but could not find anything about a tall bikers-radio host battle royale, so I'm not sure how all of this turned out for Tom. Hopefully not in Death. Behold a pale horse:

x amount & The Pathetic Parody Players - "A Horrible Thing Happened to Grandma Scharpling"

- Two Steves For Tuesday:

Steve in Grand Rapids, MI. (starts at 40:53) calls to tell Tom that he's one of the original two podcast listeners, and he doesn't want to see his radio lifeline get pulled. He also thanks Tom for sticking it to the tall bikers since he had a firsthand look at what they did to one of the Brooklyn storefronts. Steve doesn’t care about his local NBA squad (Tom thinks the team is fun and full of good guys), but he does like the Tigers. Tom thinks someone should throw a McSweeneys at the elderly Tigers skipper to wake him up. It's been 17 years since the Tigers had their last winning season, but Tom thinks the good days will return soon.

This one guy from Superchunk says: Go Pistons!

Steven in Chicago calls (starts at 44:20) to echo his namesake's support of the podcast -- he's the second of the three subscribers and usually relies on the podcast since he's unable to properly stream it while working at Reckless Records. Tom asks him about the go-to records he plays to light up customers, and Steven reveals that he'll turn to his co-workers, say "Watch everybody groove to this one!", and then spin the DC Snipers's Missile Sunset or something by Pissed Jeans. While this causes some shoppers to dance in the aisles, the lively mood is often killed by a lot of acrimony from people who can't understand why the store won't buy their scratched-up used rarities. Tom recommends playing some of the intense, ill beats and free-floating flow of Average Homeboy to blaze shoppers and get ahead of the music curve.

Tom delves into (starts at 47:04) his fascination with the work of struggling rapper Denny Blaze (aka Blazin' Hazen), who offers counter-programming to the traditional hip-hop tales from urban areas and is trying to secure a record deal. Tom thinks he's cool and talented and deserving of the star status he so desperately seeks. He's also impressed that he managed to turn a single roll of film from his one vacation into 432 fake album covers.

Is Denny himself fake? Tom finds it disgusting to think that someone concocted the Average Homeboy character as a comedic ruse. If it's real, we can laugh at Blaze's lack of talent, but if it's a put-on, we are the butt of the joke, and that is unacceptable. Tom, for one, is ashamed of a person who dared to exploit their creativity and cleverness to pretend to be something they are not. No one likes a faker.

- MC Steinberg (starts at 1:12) returns and vigorously declares that he's doing awesome. He thinks Blazin' Hazen is a "chump" who's after a portion of his rap domain. While MCS doesn't come from the "streets" per se and has never been a gang member, he's lived a hard life that allows him to bring much more depth and authenticity to his rhymes compared to the gimmicky BH. Tom points out that an entire floor would have to be removed from BH's house in order for it to qualify as middle-class; MCS doesn't even have a lawn or the requisite funds to go on fancy resort vacations (MCS can't swim anyway). MCS challenges Mr. Blaze to a battle rap and thinks a more appropriate moniker would be "Blazin’ Raisin”.

The last time MCS called, he was in the early stages of payotay addiction. He went through a rough period since then, but is now on the upswing. While he used to get a good hour of sleep per night, that did not happen while using payotay. (Sounds similar to his downward spiral circa Thanksgiving 2005 when he was waking up in the shower.) He started lashing out at his friends, most notably stabbing Bubba with a fork. He's not really sure if Bubba's is doing OK, but he didn’t stab him hard -- just enough to draw blood. However, this violent outburst did not cause him to stop using payotay.

The turning pout was when he entered his neighbor's unlocked apartment, stole everything he could carry out, and then sold it for drug money. His neighbor was not happy about the thievery, but he's old, so he half-deserved to be robbed. After this incident, MCS checked himself into the same rehab clinic that houses his mother, and plans to write a screenplay about his experiences while institutionalized.

Since MCS is an artist, he wrote a message rap to help the kids steer clear of the perilous payotay. He feels that young people get plenty of information In school about the more mainstream vices of pot, beer, heroin, Chocolageddon, cigarettes, Ecstasy, Rainbow Elixirs, etc., but they never hear the truths about this back burner drug, such as its ability to make one think they are a tree. The tune -- simply titled "Payotay" -- continues MCS's string of catchy, sing-song choruses, and it should appeal equally to urban and rural audiences:

Chorus 1:

When you're hooked to the payotay, You freak out and lose, you know

You're mind goes away, middle of the day, you lose total control

You say the Indians smoked it too, they were nice, they can't be wrong

But I don't see no teepees here -- those Indians are gone

Chorus 2:

You don't troll the streets, looking for a fixin', when you'll find it nowhere

This fun just became an addiction, my life is so unfair

When you're hooked to the payotay, You freak out and lose, you know

You're mind goes away, middle of the day, you lose total control

Tom found the new flow to be potent and thought the track has potential to be the "White Lines" for the new generation. MCS has never heard of the rap classic, so Tom GOMPs him for the egregious lack of knowledge in his chosen field.

Guided By Voices - "I Am A Tree"

- Petey calls (starts at 1:21), and he's doing pretty goob, explaining that his lack of recent calls are a result of becoming an aunthentic punk, which requires him to be mean and, thus, ignore his buddy Tommy. While listening to Elliot Smith records, Petey had an epiphany and transformed into a pink-mohawked skate-punk, much like one gains enlightenment via Buddhist meditation. Tom is not sure how the acoustic ditties of Smith would lead one down the path to punkdom, but Petey finds his work "pretty punkish". Tom thinks this behavior is more likely to result from listening to The Exploited or the UK Subs, but Petey does not consider that real punk music.

Petey believes that acoustic folk songs by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger are the real punk, but nobody understands that. He acquired a skateboard and now parades through town screaming at people, including crashing a pizza store to spit on a guy’s slice. Tom thinks he's less of a punk and more of a jerk, but Petey believes that a punk must be mean to everybody and constantly declare that they are in fact punk. Petey also convinced all of his friends to be punks, including the mutant Mack, who is now a full-on Z-Boy. Petey recently merged folk and modern punk to record an Elliot Smith cover that he believes blazes Steinberg away. The track features Petey on guitar and vocals, Mack on drums, and Boring Dan with some background vocals.

Turns out that the track is quite faithful to the original, although it earns punk points for its subpar recording quality. Petey declares that he's against the whole world and everyone is a potential target for his newfound rage. Tom thinks this may be satire or a lampooning of one of his classmates, but Petey insists that it's a legit punk movement and his gang will ultimately rule his school.

Petey - "Needle In The Hay" (Elliot Smith cover)
Elliot Smith - "Needle In The Hay"

The Descendents - "I'm Not A Punk"

- No Smoke calls (starts at 1:31) to invite Tom to a protest at 30 Rockefeller to end hunger. No Smoke claims he will play the role of the cause's pantomining mascot, Hungerr, whose costume features a giant orange head and a big open mouth. Tom thinks that No Smoke is weaving another flight of fancy based on his sordid history of fibbery, including a two-year ruse in which Tom thought he was helping him quit smoking, when, in fact, he was lying about his nicotine addiction. No Smoke claims it's a real event that he's been planning for a year, but Tom's had enough and GOMPs the lying chowderhead, directing him to dip his head in a can of orange paint -- the color of liars.

- Anonymous calls (starts at 1:35) on the day he was ousted from his post as a high-level music editor at a high-profile weekly. He wants Tom to get on board with some of his opinions on music, and asks him which of the following albums he thinks is more important: Cowboy Troy's Loco Motive or Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation. Tom selects Daydream Nation by 1,000 miles, but Anonymous declares Tom to be wrong by that same distance. Tom wonders how on Earth he could be wrong, and Anonymous counters with a fascistic "it's just the way it is."

Anonymous then declares the limp country-rock of Tim McGraw to be a far more important and innovative than Tom faves the DC Snipers. Tom does not understand why it has to be a contest and thinks everyone is entitled to their opinions. Anonymous then discusses the band Junkyard, featuring Brian Baker of Minor Threat. He believes their self-titled 1989 debut was easily the best album of the 1980s. Tom really disagrees, but that’s why Anonymous is a published author of books and Tom is not. He then reveals (free of charge) his secret formula for the past two decades: Reactionary Viewpoint + Encyclopedic Knowledge of Rock (including fringe Forced Exposure-style fodder + AmphetamineCreem-speak = lucrative book deal.

Tom wonders if Anonymous is just being a contrarian, but he assures Tom that he immensely enjoys all of the music he lauds, stating: “I am a Gretchen Wilson fanatic.” Tom is not a fan of the genre that mixes fake country with rockin' elements from old Mister Mister songs. Anonymous counters by saying that a disparate sonic stew is essential to moving forward. He cites Cowboy Troy's "amazing marriage" of modern country and street-level, hard-hitting rap, which produces the brilliant genre of "hick-hop". Tom questions where these hard-hitting raps are emanating from, and Anonymous informs him that they come from the streets in a neighborhood that he's afraid to enter. Tom thinks it's more likely that Cowboy Troy is living in the guest house of Big & Rich's suburban castle.

Anonmyous then makes the bold assertion that B&R are "the most important artists of all-time", which prompts Tom to mockingly sing a portion of "Save A Horse, Ride A Cowboy", noting its fake rock and fake country sound. Anonymous sarcastically comments that it sounded like Tom just played the original recording over the phone. Tom's counters with a wildly sarcastic quip about being sorry that he lost his outlet for his valuable musical opinions, and Anonymous is wildly serious in vowing to find another avenue for them. He thinks it's brilliant to take the opposite side of something and wants to have lunch with Tom so he could spend two hours telling him why Sublime is a better band than The Urinals. Tom takes a rain check, which Anonymous thinks is evidence that he could not handle his groundbreaking opinions. Tom found his book with "Hell" in the title to be a kinda silly, but Anonymous thinks Tom was -- and still might not be -- not ready for its contents. He asks Tom to revisit it with a more mature mind so he can understand great heavy metal recommendations like Teena Marie's Emerald City. He lifted Tom's veil and exposed him to real metal.

Before hanging up, Anonymous requests some Ugly Kid Joe. I think it's safe to say that Whitfield Crane is a musical genius far beyond bush-leaguers like Thurston Moore, J Mascis, and Robert Pollard.

While "Hollywood" was a solid single, I disagree with Anonymous's assertion that Junkyard's 1989 debut was the decade's best album. I can think of many albums that were superior in that year alone: Bang Tango's Psycho Cafe, Tangier's Four Winds, Tesla's The Great Radio Controversy, Whitesnake's Slip Of The Tongue, Great White's ... Twice Shy, L.A. Guns's Cocked & Loaded, White Lion's Big Game, Faster Pussycat's Wake Me When It's Over, Alice Cooper's Trash, and the self-titled debuts from Dangerous Toys, Skid Row, Mr. Big, Extreme, Tora Tora, Danger Danger, Badlands, and Enuff 'Z Nuff.

- Tom's excited (starts at 1:49) about the made-for-TV avian disaster movie Fatal Contact: Bird Flu In America, set to air on May 9th on ABC, and reenacts the speculative opening scene where a guy acquires the bird flu from mouth-feeding a peanut to his diseased parrot. Tom then greenlights his competing project: The Birds And The Bees, featuring flu-ridden birds fighting killer bees on the Mexican border. The increasingly busy Stacey Keach will also star in this film, and Tom will make him feel at home by reuniting him with Christopher Titus, who will play a young scientist. Tom is so giddy at the impending cinema that he tangled himself within his headphone cords.

- Keith Garfinkle calls (starts at 2:09) to second Anonymous's music opinions and thinks that Tom should be playing Big & Rich instead of obscure stuff that nobody wants to hear. Keith thinks that people want to hear stuff that they know, but Tom thinks people also want to be turned on to exciting, new music. He agrees that people love new music and suggests that Tom play James Blunt's "You're Beautiful", but Tom declines, noting his creepy turn on Saturday Night Live. He tries again with Kelly Clarkson's "Walk Away", and while Tom can appreciate its pop craft, he doesn't feel it has much of a home on his show. He then requests "Savin' Me" and is amused that Tom cannot identify it as a Nickelback single. Since Tom is obviously into playing older stuff, he recommends queuing up "A Whole New World". Tom thinks it's from The Lion King, and Keith calls him a dunce for not correctly placing it as a cut from Aladdin

Since he's aware of Tom's penchant for loud stuff, he proposes a track he thinks will be right up Tom's alley: Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer". Tom laughs, declaring the track horrible, and Keith notes that the holier-than-thou vibe of WFMU DJs makes him puke. He's disgusted that they think they are better than everyone else because they know a lot about bad obscure bands. Tom tells him to find music he likes on another station, and Keith says, "Oh, don't think I don't." Based on the discussion, Keith predicts that Tom is the kind of guy who makes fun of our President and his administration. He's right. Keith likes Bush and Cheney because they require respect as our leaders -- we do what they say and we listen to them. Tom thinks we are allowed to have a differing opinions.

He asks Tom if he caught the clip of the VP throwing out the first pitch at the Nationals game. Tom thought it was hilarious; Keith thought it was spectacular. He claims that the pitch was clocked at 96 mph, making it the fastest pitch thrown in the entire league that day. Keith watched the clip on the fair and balanced Fox News: They showed the ball leave Cheney's hand, cut to him watching his pitch, then cut to the catcher throwing the ball back and removing his hand from his mitt to blow on it to reduce the pain caused by the force of the fireball. Keith reports rumors that Cheney is being scouted by at least six MLB teams as a pitcher, and he's sure that this will play out just like President Baseball. Tom doesn't know what that is, so Keith informs him: "The movie, you dip." The film came out last summer, but is not well-known because it was not properly pumped by Shout Films and had the misfortune of opening against box-office juggernaut The Dukes Of Hazzard.

The plot in a nutshell: President Wink Brylowski (Alan Alda) throws out the first pitch at a Mets vs. Nationals game, and it's a total scorcher. Later in the game, he easily catches a foul ball in his cup of beer. Tom thinks that it's not very Presidential to be drinking at a ball game, but this fits with the side plot in which Brylowski is known as "The Party President".

Since he shows he can field sans a glove, the Nationals sign the leader of the free world on the spot. This creates the main dramatic tension of the film -- the demands of running the country while simultaneously playing center field, pitching, and pinch-running (he's also super-fast) for the Nationals. The climactic scene involves a wise, Kissingeresque Secretary of State ( Brendan Fraser) advising the President on a nucular standoff with China. Brylowski is in the middle of pitching the final stanza of the World Series. He knows the Chinese dude has his little finger on the button and he could press it at any second. The Secretary of State sternly approaches the mound and while one might assume that he would recommend leaving the game to deal with the Chinese, Keith recites -- in serious, Germanic tones -- a line that will likely score Fraser an Oscar nomination: "Mr. President, I have one thing to say to you: strike this guy out." The crowd was somehow quiet enough to hear the line and, thus, goes nuts.

Fraser is unrecognizable as a character in his mid to late-60s, but he's not slathered in old guy makeup. In fact, there's no makeup at all. Fraser took the aging drug Oldzonareveren (presumably a product from Kern Pharmaceuticals), which allowed him to put on 30 years in two weeks. However, from what Keith has heard, there was a snag with the reversal drug, Youngoproxin. It did not take all the way, so Fraser still looks like he's in his late 40s. Keith thinks this will make for a good antidote during Fraser's next appearance on Leno. Tom informs him that the correct word is "anecdote", but Keith disagrees and suggests that Tom should try cracking a book some time.

Tom asks him to crack a dictionary, and he goes to retrieve one as he mutters about Tom being a "creep" and a "dumb cretin'. He discovers that he is wrong and appears to throw the book in anger, but claims he just placed it on a shelf ("Nothing flew anywhere"). He's increasingly annoyed by Tom's 'tude towards the VP and the Adminstration and tells Tom to mark his words that "Lon Chaney" will go down as one of the most misunderstood politicians of the century. Tom tells him that Lon Chaney is a horror film actor, but Keith is not buying it: "What a dunce you are, you don't even know who the Vice President is." He tells Tom that he lacks a broad spectrum of knowledge and there is a whole world out there beyond his stupid, obscure record collection

Keith digs his newspaper out of his recycling bin and scans the national news section. He discovers that the VP is actually named Dick Cheney, as Tom said, and he crumples the paper and "places it" next to the dictionary. Tom says it sounded like he threw a temper tantrum and believes that Keith is out of control. Keith asks for one more of whatever Tom's got, and Tom suggests looking something up on his computer since he'd like to hear that being thrown across the room. Keith believes this is the comment of someone who is not interested in ever receiving his mail again, and asks Tom how the name "Keith Garfinkle" grabs him. Tom says it doesn't, so Keith directs him to a website for some research. Keith tells Tom to click on a red tab on the left side of the page that says "Message from the Postmaster General". Tom cannot locate the tab, so Keith tells him to scroll down to the bottom of the page to see that it is signed by Edmond T. Garfinkle, Postmaster General.

Edmond is Keith's uncle and he can make one call to him to end Tom's mail delivery for life. Keith is quite serious about using his family pull: "I've done it before and I'll do it again, you fart." In the past, he's stopped the mail of various people who have done him wrong --- ex-girlfriends, jerky bag boys at grocery stores, a couple of mechanics who ripped him off, and his parents, who would not help him get out of the Marines when he realized it was not for him on the first day of boot camp. He enlisted because he thought it would be fun a la Stripes, but that film focused on the Army and the Marines were more intense with drill sargeants yelling at him to do push-ups. He wanted his folks to back his claims that he suffered from night prowls (he does not actually have the affliction), which caused him to commit heinous acts in the middle of the night. They refused, so they did not get mail service for five years -- no magazines, no bills, no paychecks, no welfare checks, no tax refunds, and no medicine. Keith tells Tom that the postal service is a powerful tool, reciting one of Newman's lines to Jerry on Seinfeld. Keith is heavier than Newman, but has still won several Wayne Knight look-alike contests due to facial similarity. Tom thinks this information takes the call to new levels of sadness.

Tom wonders why his uncle would go along with such serious malfeasance, and it originates with something Edmond did to Keith when he was a kid. Molestation? God no -- he tried to run him over with his mail truck because Keith was pressing his buttons at a family picanic in the late 80s, taunting him about his abnormally hairy arms with names like "Ape Arms" and "Monkey Hands" in front of everyone, including his new wife. Everyone was laughing nervously, but the next day, Edmond tried to run Keith over with his car. Keith threatened to call the cops, but Edmond said that he would be forever in his debt if he dropped it. As Edmond made his way up the USPS ranks, Keith remained silent to not prevent him from becoming PMG -- the grail for all the lifers. If Edmond doesn't do his bidding, he will squawk and he'll be terminated pronto. As Keith put it, his uncle "knows what side his butter's breaded on."

The best part of this blackmail scheme for Keith is that he also makes all the mailmen at the Newbridge postal branch do his daily bidding. They work for Keith as butlers, chauffeurs, wash his car, do his shopping, and buy him spank mags. They even went to Ikea to pick up all the stuff he ordered for the new addition they are building on his house. Tom assumes they are furious about this indentured servitude, and while Keith can tell that they talk about it behind his back, they ultimately have no choice. Tom is horrified and tells him that he is completely abusing the postal service workers who are already dealing with huge volumes of mail and then are stuck doing his chores because he's blackmailing the PMG. At this point, Tom is making Keith sick and is dangerously close to having his full service cut off. Keith would love to get Tom in the nonagon, the nine-sided polygonic enclosure in which he participates in competitive slap fights.

Keith slaps for the Newbridge Redfaces of the North Eastern Slap Fight League (NESFL). They are off to a 4-0 start, narrowly avoiding their first loss by licking the Westbridge Handprints in the final Slap-Off. The competitors are first divided into two age classes (14 and under / 14 and over) and then into weight classes, the real line of demarkation. Tom's impressed that Keith could get out the word "demarkation" and Keith is not pleased with the taunt ("Say goodbye to all your magazines"), informing Tom that he will soon have to buy single copies his magazines at the Spank Mag Emporium.

In the battle against the Westbridge Handprints, Keith, who is 44, went up against a morbidly obese 16-year-old named Kevin, who had a loud face. Keith can tell by Tom's voice that he has a soft face and predicts that his visage would be purple after one slap. Keith's face is tough and well-conditioned since he oils it to prevent cracking. He also oils his chins.

Tom wants to hear more about the nuances of the sport, so Keith explains that the slappers square off in the nonagon and after a whistle is blown, they can initiate their opening slap. Keith believes there is a delicate skill required to achieve the perfect slap -- not too hard and not too soft. This will be further explored in The Art Of The Slap, his forthcoming book on Slap Fighting. He loves the sound of a hand hitting facial flesh and gives Tom a few samples of self-slapping over the phone. He records all of the matches and plans to market CD of the best slaps, which he will put over a bed of classical techno to create a "slap symphony" for the Slapheads.

Keith does not understand why YMCAs and other sports clubs have no interest in hosting matches, so the league is forced to use alternate venues such as the basement of the Newbridge Pentecostal Church. Keith tells Tom that it's a gray area in terms of whether the NESFL has permission to use these locations, so they generally have to sneak in. They find a church member who looks like he wimpy enough to be easily slapped down and force him to leave a window open in the Fellowship Hall. They will then enter in the off-peak hour, such as 3 a.m. on a Thursday. They don't steal much from the churches other than some food, which is not really stealing because it's "substenance." Tom tells Keith that there is no such word, but Keith is convinced that it means "that which the body needs to keep going." He can't locate it in his dictionary, which he thinks must be old because it does have a new word like "substenance". Tom says the word was just birthed by Keith and spells "sustenance" for him. Keith finds it and once again throws the dictionary in disgust.

Tom asks him if he's ok, but he tells him to hold so he can answer the door. Tim, one of the postal workers, is at the door to chauffeur Keith to "Sexapades". Keith tells him that he does not need a ride there until midnight, and Tim enters the house. Keith becomes frantic, calling Tim a jerk and telling him to leave. Keith then asks Tim why Mike, Glen, and Kenny are there with hatchets. As they approach, Keith pleads to settle it like men and slap it out. He starts yelling in terror and the call is disconnected. The postal workers had their comeuppance. Hopefully Werner Herzog was there to film it. Tom does not expect another call from Keith Garfinkle.

- With the theme song contest approaching its May 2nd finale, Tom plays (2:46) two new entries: "The Best Show Fanfare", an instrumental entry by The Rank Amateurs, and The Plarns' "Best Theme #1".

Tom gets a call from Seafaring Willis, who is angry that he paid $13 to overnight his "Tom's the Bomb #3" theme and Tom didn't even play it. He asks Tom if he's purposefully torturing him, and Tom wonders why he sent a package overnight to a weekly radio show. Tom promises to play it next week. This is the same guy who was thrilled with Tom's "The Pouting Prince" marathon premium, having been sent into convulsions from seeing a previous autographed picture of Tom.

On the next ... The Best Show on WFMU: Denny Blaze evaporates Steve Blue's juice live on the air, Anonymous calls to discuss the comparative quality of the Volcano Suns' The Bright Orange Years and Kix's Midnight Dynamite, and Bryce Prefontaine runs some lines from a script about the world of competitive eating that Tom co-wrote with Steve Harvey. All of this assumes that Tall Bikers didn't knock El Goodo unconscious with a hardcover edition of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and slice his juggler vein with the companion DVD from McSweeney's #11.

Eleventh Dream Day - "Axle"

Posted by Omar at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments

I'm pretty impressed with Anderson's vocal delivery ("Making movies. How do youdoit? What'sitlike? Lemme just tell these guys one thing."). Apparently, the guy can bring it in front of the camera as well.

Posted by x amount at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments

"But Stoltz proves you don't necessarily need to provide the clever update freshness. You can just bring it like we've heard it. Straight up. And if the songs are good, the songs are good," said x amount, referring to Kelley Stoltz's slight tweakage of the pop classics. Though obviously even more faithful, it's pretty much the same deal here. No need to shake the sheets when you can just smooth them out with "Sid N Susie" harmonies.

Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs - "Care Of Cell 44" (The Zombies cover)

Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs - "She May Call You Up Tonight" (The Left Banke cover)

( Click here to buy Under the Covers, Volume 1)

[More Left Banke goodness here.]

Posted by Omar at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments

Me myself personally, I think that we have been bamboozled, hoodwinked, flimflamed, I'll tell ya' it's a real skin game.

Posted by DWC at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments

Posted by Omar at 6:12 PM | Permalink | Comments

Are you intimidated?

Posted by x amount at 3:53 PM | Permalink | Comments

No it is not it is a fantastic piece of documentation.

Posted by x amount at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments

Sorry to bust out the hoary, hacky American Pie reference as my way in, but John Simpson's "personal favorite" distracted commuter example is pretty fun.

I have had to cut down on the video iPod business recently -- unless I'm just sitting there in complete stop-and-go grossness, it's just too hard. Or maybe I'm in a GOOD MUSIC cycle right now?

Posted by x amount at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments

Ultimately though, it's the mental excursions allowed by the UK's "bathing costume" terminology that make this article really work. Detachable wings, glitter, a tail, feathers, googly eyes, etc.

Posted by x amount at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments

Fatboy Slim remixes it:
James Brown - "Payback (The Final Mixdown)"
Jean-Jacques Perry - "E.V.A. (Fatboy Slim Remix)"

Posted by DOP at 8:14 AM | Permalink | Comments

Jack White Coke commercial.

It initally reminded me of Gondry, but it was done by a Nagi Noda. He ripped off his own video for Yuki's "Sentimental Journey".
Make sure you at least fast forward to the very end.

Posted by DOP at 3:16 PM | Permalink | Comments

This article about product placement says nothing you didn't already know, but it omits the following key point: one way I received validation as a youth was seeing Agnes DiPesto and the rest of the Blue Moon Detective Agency equipped with glorious beige 128k Macs.

Posted by x amount at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments

Here is George Michael's band, The Long Goodbye. It also makes me very happy to see that Cera and Shawkat are all friended up with relatively unblemished-by-us-outsiders MySpace pages. You know, like real kids!

Posted by x amount at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments

"You're gonna have to taste my wrath soon." -- Zeph Marshack, threatening Jeff Feuerzeig for being unreceptive to his documentary film ideas

"Game. Set. Match." -- Jeff Feuerzeig on being defeated by Buffalo '66

"Freddie, not that far off." -- Andrew from the Danielson Family on Tom almost getting his name right.

"Am I dreamin'?" -- Philly Boy Roy, wondering if he had heard himself on the radio

"I bite no one’s style!" -- Tom, when accused of lifting playlists

"The kids didn't have the pipes." -- Bryce Prefontaine on the contestants during American Idol's Queen night

[TBSOWFMU - 4/11/06 / Podmirth* / Jingle Jams / Myspace / Headquarters]

*Only two subscribers as of 4/11/06. Radio Zero has 5! Enlist in the Podcast Army. Tell a friend about the fun. Boom, boom, zip.

Birdmonster - "Skeleton Suit"

( Click here to buy No Midnight)

Eagles of Death Metal - "Don't Speak (I Came To Make a Bang)"

( Click here to get sentenced to Death By Sexy)

Boris - "(weird Japanese writing aka Track 7)" [Wata!]

( Click here to pre-order Pink)

Quasi - "Alice the Goon"

( Click here to buy When The Going Gets Dark)

Grandaddy - "Rear View Mirror"

( Click here to pre-order Just Like The Fambly Cat)

Finally, Giant told me to post this:

Lair of the Minotaur – "Metal Juggernaut"

( Click here to pre-order The Ultimate Destroyer)

Note to Tom: last Thursday, I heard Acapulco Rodriguez giving out the exclusive Best Show number that sets you back $50/week. I tried calling to issue a cease-and-desist order, but could not get through.

Annotated highlights of the last of the steam-powered radio programes:

- Tom plays a new game (starts at 33:41), and while it was not officially named, I am going to call it "Eccentric Emotional Moments" (EEM). Tom's setup was that one thing that is weirdly unique amongst all humans is that everybody can get choked up over some off-the-radar moment that only affects and speaks to them. In other words, not just some intentional heartstring-tugger like the father-son catch in Fields of Dreams, the end of Titanic, or, say, just about any scene from 8MM. Mike the Courageous Call ScreenerAssociate Producer is up first:

When Mike was a kid, his family was watching Lassie, and his older brother was on the floor in front of the television, engrossed in the sad episode featuring the death of a dog. When the show ended, he turned to his family and said, “It’s so sad", revealing that he had been driven to tears. Tom thinks Lassie is meant to be emotionally manipulative, thus not exactly what he was after.

Tom admits to being one of five people on Earth who gets emotional during Pee Wee’s Big Adventure when the titular hero saves the day by darting in and out of a burning pet store to rescue all of the animals one by one. Despite his hatred of snakes, Pee Wee ultimately saves them as well before passing out on the sidewalk. Tom can’t help it -- he's moved by how giving Pee Wee is for choosing the pets over his beloved bicycle. Also, if you didn't think the best way to stop kids from trying crack cocaine is via a bizarre man-child wearing a bow-tie then you'd be dead wrong.

TRocks is moved by many moments in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, especially when Splinter informs the turtles that they have passed their last test and declares his love for them. While these mentor-student sentiments have universal appeal, TRocks correctly notes that, for most people, the emotional tug would be negated within the context of four ninja turtles receiving words of wisdom from the spirit of their almost-deceased rat sensei. However, he teared up and struggled not to cry as recently as a few weeks ago. Tom thinks this shows TRocks to be a deep and soulful person, and Mike the Associate Producer got a bit choked up by the call.

Mike is still trying to think of a moment and turns to animation for some ideas. Tom suggests the scene in the experiemental Water, Water Every Hare where Bugs Bunny fills up a glass at his water cooler in the midst of sleeping through a flood. He's eventually washed out of his residence and floats his way into a mad scientist's castle. W,WEH or Baseball Bugs are Tom's fave BB cartoons; for me, it's hard to top Bugs and a plump Nazi.

Weepy Chicagoan Scott is a bit embarrassed to say that he was hit hard by nostalgic footage in used in bank and car commercials a few years ago -- a deep-voiced narration about the power of innovation as the Wright brothers achieved liftoff in the background. "Spitzer" in the FOT Chat suggested that Scott's call was a snoozefest, but Tom thought it was very well-modulated and clearly the work of a sound engineer extraordinaire. I'm no audio guru, but I thought it was a good call in terms of tech specs and content.

Chris L is worn out from dodging all of the excitement in Maryland and cried on an off throughout the colliding nerds documentary Spellbound. He viewed it the day after the Super Bowl and had a revelation that while the National Spelling Bee is a pointless competition, it's no more meaningless than various celebrated jock things in American culture. It's the one chance for nerds to shine, and he wanted them all to win, choking up with each misspelled word. Prediction: Chris L will end up with tear-soaked crab cakes while viewing Mad Hot Ballroom.

Emerson from Chicago was set off on an existential bender after seeing Judge Doom dip one of the dancing shoes into his chemical dip (turpentine, acetone, and benzene) to test out its ability to kill cartoons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Emerson was devastated for days, contemplating larger issues of life and death. (He also proposed an interesting theory re the snooze button chat quip: perhaps Spitzer detected the sound of an alarm clock in the background and was directing Scott to silence it.)

Stefanos from the Isle O Staten took a break from tanning salonery and pimping his sick ride to discuss a scene in an animated version of Frankenstein where the monster gets the hint that his hijinks are messing up the lives of those around him, and decides to jump off a cliff. This was too psychologicaly harsh for the 6- to 8-year old crowd and it sent Stefano under the coffee table with his cousin, where his mother and aunt found them crying and hugging each other. They laughed in the faces of their children. Proud moments.

Shael from Middletown, NY was devastated at age 13 by the "Presence" segment of the 1987 Japanese anime collection of artsy shorts, Robot Carnival, which he saw on the Cartoon Network in 1995. In the short, an inventor is life is unfulfilled so he embarks on a secret project, using parts from a junkyard bin to build an eerie and life-like robot girl. He teaches her how to be a person and she ends up leaving him. Years later when he's an old man, he's sitting on his porch waiting for her and as she moves towards him, she slips and shatters into sand-fine particles and blows away in the breeze.

Here's an Omar EEM three for Tuesday:

1. A scene towards the end of Trent Strauss's underrated It’s Raining Membranes: a Jesuit priest (C. Thomas Howell) strangles five members of a rival parish with rosary beads, skewers them, douses them in gasoline, and leaves them to spit-roast in a picnic area behind the church. He speeds away in his Hummer and while stopped at a red light, a deluge of human and animal membranes fall from the sky to remind him of his myriad sins. He gets out of his car and is devoured by a trio of cannibals (Stacey Keach, Elina Lowensohn, and David Cross).

2. "I've had a rough year, Dad." -- Chas Tenenbaum (Ben Stiller) to Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums.

3. "Hot Chocolate": the hilarious and moving final scene of Buffalo '66. It's both a satisfying end to an extremely unique character study and a joyous ode to a singular artistic vision. The scene is certainly intended to pack somewhat of a punch, but it comes at the end of a film that is anything but standard Hollywood heartstring fare. It accrues power from an odd comic rhythm -- its unmitigated Galloness. The performance in the scene is masterful: Gallo, clad in leather jacket and darting around the store with jitters from newfound happiness (having just aborted a grisly murder-suicide attempt involving former Buffalo Bills placekicker Scott Wood), confirming with the coffee shop clerk that the hot chocolate is indeed hot and requesting that he "Make it good, good one". He then inquires about some heart-shaped cookies and buys two: one for Layla and one for another patron so he can take it home to his girlfriend. Then this:

BILLY BROWN
What do I owe you?

CLERK
Okay, let's see

(Starts ringing up the items)

BILLY BROWN
Go easy. Easy, easy, easy.

CLERK
Okay, okay.

BILLY BROWN
Easy.

(Register clattering)

CLERK
Four bucks on the nose.

He tips the clerk $1 for no reason, and leaves the store. The camera then closes in on a vase of roses that fades into a shot of him and Ricci -- her Gallo-applied blue eye makeup particularly vivid against the reverse-stocked neutrals -- entwined on a hotel bed as Yes's "Sweetness" leads the way to the end credits. The sequence retains its original potency even after 25+ viewings.

Vincent Gallo - "Lonely Boy"
King Crimson - "Moonchild"
Yes - "Sweetness"

( Click here to buy the Buffalo '66 soundtrack)

- Jeff Feuerzeig (starts at 1:04) returns for a post-release chat now that his cinematic quilt has become "sausage in the corporate machine". He casts a colonic hex on the Boston Herald's James Vernier (who still gave the film an ok B-) and The San Diego Union-Tribune's David Elliot for bucking the general consensus and being in over their heads when reviewing TD&DJ. Elliot found DJ's art childish and bad, and felt Feuerzeig circled his subject like a "besotted bug". Vernier didn't embrace DJ, claiming he made Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar "seem as huggable as Forrest Gump by comparison." Feuerzeig's sources at the Landmark Sunshine confirm that the film is a laugh riot compared to Crumb. Tom is a big fan of Crumb, but had to shower after seeing it. In short: Jeff believes he made a "love bomb" of a film, and is disappointed that it has spawned some haterz in certain markets.

- Zeph Marshack checks in (starts at 1:28) and claims he had another run-in with Mike the Associate Producer, who was rude and threatened to throw a shoe in his face, though he would never cop to it. He asks about a rumor he read the other day on Velvet Rope that suggested that Feuerzeig made Mr. Johnston act like he did for the benefit of the filming. Jeff assures Zeph that there was no acting in the film and that it was a legit documentary.

Zeph then asks if it's true that Feuerzeig is going to make a documentary about "Monoman" (aka Jeff Conolly). Jeff's a fan of The Lyres and calls "She Pays The Rent" a masterpiece; Zeph is partial to On Fyre, and thinks the band kind of lost it after that. Zeph then offers a series of documentary subject ideas: Todd Abramson, Dan Zanes, Richard Barone (perhaps titled Maestro Barone or Drums Along The Hudson), and Jason Ringenberg. Jeff does not believe he's the appropriate person to make these films, which makes Zeph madder than a rattlesnake at a Thai wedding. Jeff will soon taste his wrath.

The Lyres - "She Pays The Rent"

The big news of the Feuerzeig call is that he hopes to make a Vincent Gallo documentary called Saint Vincent. Do it! Call Hank Rank and tell him to put that Soup Can on the market! While he has not officially approached Saint Vincent, he's been doing research for years. Jeff and Tom discussed Gallo's Republicanism, which would be ripe for exploration in a documentary that would try to illuminate the man and his Art. Tom wonders if it's just a case of intentional contrarianism to rile people up, but Jeff believes it's a legit political stance.

Jeff proposes a WFMU "Gallothon" to raise funds for the film. Sounds like a good idea. Maybe Yo La Tengo could stop by and do some Jackson C. Frank covers. Vince could contribute some premium swag -- Mouse Pledge gets you an autographed Dick Cheney lithograph. Lots of fun talk about the wild Vincent Gallo merchandise boutique, and a few items were added since the show, most notably an escort service under miscellaneous (No way Jose!). This is some of the funniest stuff on the entire Intronet.

- Rick in Newbridge calls (starts at 1:37) about the rumors that Feuerzeig was going to do a documentary on Marky Ramone. Jeff's a huge fan, but thinks Marky is doing fine with his own documentaries. Ron agrees, but thinks that in Jeff's hands, the films could be even greater than they already are. Tom and Jeff suspect the caller is Marky Ramone, as Jeff met him on a plane a few months ago and remembers the voice. Ron denies it, but plugs Marky's new line of Satin Shine house paints in black leather. At some point, Rick changes his name to Ron and parts with a "Hey! Ho!", the final tip-off for Jeff. Tom is not 100% convinced it was Marky and will review the tapes later. It's possible it was Earthdog Fred doing some impressive voicework.

- "Freddie" from Danielson returns to The Best Show fold (starts at 1:44) to inform Tom that his name is actually Andrew. He recounts his younger days of rocking out and jumping on his bed while listening to the Violent Femmes and the perils of trying to impress his friends by showing them pictures that appear to be from Halloween.

Andrew has been working with his agent to put his oldest brudder in his place and take over as the captain who steers the Danielson ship. Tom wants to help Andrew by bringing his dirty songwriting chops and guitar playing to this new rock duo. Andrew unleashes Philly Boy Roy-inspired pronounciation of "xylophone", which he blames on having a piece of cheesesteak in his mouth. He tries to emulate PBR as much as possible, though he's never seen the local legend, who is spotted about as frequently as Bigfoot.

Daniel calls to weigh in on the trash talking, and Tom informs him that he's no longer the boss of the family -- Tom Smith has taken over. Andrew will start blowing him away after he and Tom finish the song "Baby Wants To Boogie", which will sound like slower Foghat, early ZZ Top, and Black Oak Arkansas. Sample lyrics: "Baby wants to boogie all night/baby wants to boogie all night/Shake it to the left/Shake it to the right/Baby wants to boogie all night." Andrew and Tom win in 2007.

Tom warns Daniel to stay away from the weirdo in Polyphonic Spree and wonders if a Danielson-Spree fight could be arranged. The Danielsons would likley win easily due to their South Jersey corn/tomato field attitude, Pennsylvania Dutch strut, and diet rich in shoe-fly pie. They have also been known to successfully wrestle bears and will enlist SoupJam Stevens and/or awaken the Jersey Devil from the Pine Barrens, if necessary.

- Philly Boy Roy calls (starts at 1:57) because he just tuned in and heard these guys talking and thought it was him. Andrew is pleased to hear a local and PBR gets some geographical particulars from him (lives in the heart of cheesesteak town in West Philly, but not as far out as Yaden), but says "No thank you" to Daniels stomping grounds of South Jersey and will not go near Exit 2 off the turnpike. Tom asks PBR what he thinks of the forthcoming 12-on-48 Danielson-Spree bout, but he needs to hear their music before delivering a prediction. While he hasn't heard any songs, he's pretty sure that the Spree are a terrible, "low-rent Flamin' Lips" after reading about them in four publications.

He's intrigued by Danielson and hopes they will play a show in Kensington or Fishtown because places like The Kyber are too far in-town for him. He tells Daniel and Andrew to keep it real and gives "props back to youse guys" before requesting to hear a cut.

Danielson Family - "Did I Step On Your Trumpet"

( Click here to pre-order Ships)

- The one e only Bryce calls (starts at 2:24) to help Tom chill out after getting revved up by the kids who were sticking it to him for playing a Death Cab For Cutie song that was not within the traditional playlist purview. "It's only music," says Bryce, and whenever he gets bummed out, he just takes a sip of tea and he's not bummed out anymore.

Tom speculates that he just took a bong hit, but Bryce says that's for Tom to say because he doesn't want John Q. Law on his butt. In addition to the tea, Bryce is feeling good because he just purchased Jerry's toilet. Tom's asks who Jerry is, and Bryce says that's like saying "Who's Jesus?" He bought the can from from Hank, a guy he met at a Rat Dog show. He would hang out with Hank in the parking lot and often go to Denny's or back home during Drums Space, returning to the show while Drums Space was still going on. He sold Bryce the toilet that day and installed it while Bryce was in his room doing something. It was dark and his vision was a little clouded by tea smoke.

During the call, Bryce goes into his bathroom to check it out and bathe in its glory. He begins to think that the toilet looks a lot like his old one except it now has a Dancing Bear sticker on it. He thought that he and Hank were tight bros, but he now believes he got scammed. The real JG toilet is currently missing after being stolen from online casino GoldenPalace, which often pays boxers to tattoo their website on their torsos. Bryce's brother, Brent, got it the URL tattooed on his face, but forget to collect his money because he was too baked.

Bryce and Tom engage in an extended guessing game of how much Bryce paid for the faux commode and eventually land on a price tag of $58,500. The last time Bryce had been ripped off that badly, he bought a bail of oregano, exhausting money he had earmarked for an McMansion. The toilet ruse has made Bryce madder than a rattlesnake at a Thai wedding, and when Tom seeks some clarification on the meaning of that phrase, Bryce retorts: “It’s self-explanatory, you dummy.”

Bryce switches the topic, asking Tom if he saw that night's episode of American Idol. He gives Tom a hint as to the evening's sonic inspiration by singing an alternative version ("Weed on your face") of Queen's "We Will Rock You". Bryce didn't like the show and has been bombarding the AI message board with suggestions for improvement. Tom is not surprised to find out that Bryce's desires a seven-hour Grateful Dead night. Bryce worked out a setlist:

Kelly - “China Cat Sunflower”

Bucky ("He’s a contestant, you dummy") - "Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleloo"

Paris – “Wharf Rat”

Taylor – “Tennesse Jed”

Tom wonders where the hits are, so Bryce gives him:

Chris – “New Minglewood Blues”

Elliot – “New New Minglewood Blues”

Ace – “US Blues”

Katherine – “Estimated Prophet”

Bryce offers a few non-Dead alternatives: "One Toke Over The Line", Ben Harper's "Burn One Down", and Steppenwolf's "Don't Step On The Grass". Tom doesn't think it's a good idea to mix techincally-sound cruise ship singers with endless Dead jams. Bryce then reveals that the most important ingredient of the show will be requiring the contestants to get baked with him prior to performing. Ryan Seacrest will still do the intro and prep stuff, and then Bryce will do power bong hits before and during the program. Phil will also be there playing bass solos. Tom does not immediately identify Phil, and Bryce says that is like saying "Moses, who?" This prompts Bryce to ask Tom if he's heard about Moses, the latest addition to the Paltrow clan. Tom doesn't care about that stuff, but Bryce thinks it's the coolest and appreciates the streak of creativity and not caring that shines through when parents unleash these kinds of names on their children.

When Bryce has a kid it will be named Kreutzmann Phil Lesh Mountain Girl Garcia Brent Mydland Pigpen Keith Godchaux Prefontaine. The late Steve Prefontaine, the greatest American distance runner, is Bryce's uncle. He liked one of the foot race movies about Steve (presumably the far superior Without Limits) and hated the other one.

He played an ice cream salesman in one of them, but was cut from the film because he was too baked and nobody could understand what he was saying. In his scene, Steve enters the stadium and signs some autographs before looking into the ice cream cart. Tom runs lines with him and Bryce recreates his performance on the day of filming: He delivered the opening of "Hey, Steve, [long beat], you gonna win today"? before yelling at the director for a line reading, which an angry script supervisor gave him. Bryce took a sip of tea off to the side of the set to clear his mind, and then yelled "Action!". He was supposed to ask Pre if he wanted some pre-race fudge ice cream, but he went off-book and asked him if he wanted a bong hit.

Bryce thinks it’s 3 a.m. instead of 10:47 p.m. since it seems like he's been talking to Tom for hours instead of about 20 minutes. He plans to take one more sip of tea and then kick Hank's ass. He tells Tom not to be surprised if he reads about a murder-by-bong in the next day's Newbridge Times. If he finds out that Tom rats him out to John Q. Law, there will be two area murders.

Here are two tracks that will be peformed on American Idol by Lindsay Weir and Jeffrey Rosso:

Grateful Dead - "Box of Rain"

Grateful Dead - "Ripple"

- The Kid was riding high at 999 Myspace friends, and had some trouble selecting someone suitably deserving and cool for the prized 1,000th slot -- a commitment deeper than any marriage. Some contenders did emerge: Elin from Danielson, the voice of Master Shake, Katie (who earned points for Top 8ing The Leather Uppers). Others were nixed due to dirty talk, illustrations instead of photos, crazy page effects, and not being fans of television.

- The show was closed out (starts at 2:57) by a theme song entry from DJ ERT ("Petey vs. Led Zeppelin vs. ERT"), as the contest is drawing to a close. The winner will be announced during the Theme Song Spectacular on 5/2/06!

On the next ... The Best Show on WFMU:

He's baaaaaaaaaaaaack (can't wait to hear how his prose compares to his droopy phone voice), there will be no discussion of Tom Hazelmyer because the world needs more people being FOR stuff, and Dane Cook calls to discuss his vast collection of tough t-shirts.

Trust The Kid's ears:

Fleetwood Mac - "Monday Morning"
Death Cab For Cutie - "Company Calls"

Posted by Omar at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments

Tony Brummel congratulates Steve Jobs on beating cancer. Victory!

Posted by x amount at 3:29 PM | Permalink | Comments

We have to get a copy of this to DOP. And then we really gotta start recording our conversations...

Posted by shillak at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Comments

Posted by x amount at 10:05 AM | Permalink

Here's a track from the forthcoming (6/13/06) Regina Spektor album, Begin To Hope. It's tastier than a box of tangerines and a pack of Camels. You can also drop $2.97 for three more tracks at the iTunes music portal: "Fidelity", "Better" (featuring guest guitar work by Nick Valensi of Strokey-Stroke), and "Summer In the City".

Regina Spektor - "That Time"

Bonus track:
Regina Spektor - "Chelsea Hotel" (Live on BBC Radio One)

Posted by Omar at 7:12 AM | Permalink | Comments

Fun post over at unkut.com about Corky Nemec aka Parker Lewis, Ed Lover's birthday party, and MF Doom.

Posted by DOP at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Comments

Remember when x amount bought Lateralus and kinda liked it? That was awesome. So all this rocking out so far this year -- In Flames, The Sword, the Lerche, etc. -- was just a primer for this:

Tool - "Vicarious"

Bonus track:

Tool - "Jambi"

( Click here to pre-order 10,000 Days)

Posted by Omar at 9:08 PM | Permalink | Comments

I certainly can’t get behind Dan LeRoy's Thunder Lightning Strike = Paul's Boutique comparison in terms of the music -- even sociologically, I'm not sure the argument stands up. 1994-5 is so very much not 1989, and I had to double up and check to make sure that the virgin-eared largehearted boy wasn't ghost-authoring these book notes. But I'll cut him some slack since he so completely nails the brilliance of "Shake Your Rump."

On the Car Wash soundtrack, [Rose Royce's "6 O’Clock DJ (Let’s Rock)"]'s just an instrumental throwaway, a little over a minute long and notable only for the fatness of its Moog bassline. What Matt Dike and the Dust Brothers did with that sound on "Shake Your Rump," however, is remarkable; they chopped it up, turned it inside out and made it groove in a completely new way. If you had to pick the most memorable audio component from Paul’s Boutique, this sample would probably be the winner – and it wasn’t just some great hook ripe for the plucking, either.

-- Dan LeRoy, from his book notes submission for The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique (33 1/3).

Rose Royce – "6 O’Clock DJ (Let’s Rock)"

( Put your money where your mouth is. )

I remember trying to mine the samples on PB (pre-Internet!), and stumbling across the Car Wash OST. I was so excited -- I'd heard tales of how the Dust Bros. had completely plundered the record. This was it! I would now have two albums worth of perfection! But no. Hearing Car Wash well after memorizing PB reduced the soundtrack to a big mess of quiet, powerless music with stray bits of sample fodder strewn across it. Talk about disappointment.

Posted by x amount at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments

I would play this J-Live track right after the Cut Chemist from earlier in the week.

J-Live - "Don't Play"
Mass Influence - "All Out"
L'Roneous Da'Versifer - "L'Chemy" (Amazon)

Posted by DOP at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments

I thought perhaps I'd been drugged by Dr. X and thrown into a Delorean for a ride back to 1988, but this is indeed the new Billboard 200:

Adrien Begrand's review nails O:M II -- it's a solid, respectable sequel to their masterwork, and a nice return to form after three, largely-hideous long-players.

Queensryche - "The Hands" (from Operation: Mindcrime II)
Queensryche - "Eyes of a Stranger" (from Operation: Mindcrime)
Queensryche - "Queen Of The Reich" (from the Queensryche EP; Highly Recommended if you have any stray chandeliers that could use a good shattering.)

( Click here to buy Queensryche records)

Bonus clip: Silent Lucidity

You certainly already own all the Poison hits, so here's my fave "deep cut":

Poison - "Valley Of Lost Souls"

( Click here to buy Flesh & Blood)

Is somebody trying to whack "randy rocker" Bret Michaels?

Posted by Omar at 7:28 AM | Permalink | Comments

One of my all time favortie bossa nova songs plus a remix.

Cal Tjader - "Soul Sauce" (Amazon)
Cal Tjader - "Soul Sauce (Fila Brazillia Remix)" (Amazon)

Posted by DOP at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Comments

Rian Johnson, the writer/director of the high school noir Brick, sometimes does one-take covers of songs while under the influence of alcohol and procrastinating on script writing. Here's two of them:

Rian Johnson aka The Preserves - "Save Me" (Aimee Mann cover)
Rian Johnson aka The Preserves - "You're In Maya" (Mountain Goats cover)

Posted by Omar at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments

I thought these guys retired? Turns out they are stubbornly insisting on releasing new albums, so here's two tracks from the forthcoming Rather Ripped -- "What A Waste" will be played acoustically on the season finale of Gilmore girls next month. Hopefully with some Kim (Lane & Gordon)-Sebastian Bach harmonies.

Sonic Youth - "What A Waste"

Sonic Youth - "Rats"

Posted by Omar at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments

After looking at this picture, this has officially become my new favorite website.

Posted by shillak at 8:25 PM | Permalink | Comments

Laurindo Almeida & The Bossa Nova All-Stars - "Desafinado" (Amazon)
as used in Beck's "Readymade"

Stan Getz & Luiz Bonfá (w/Maria Toledo) - "Saudade Vem Correndo" (Amazon)
as used in The Pharcyde's "Runnin'"

Posted by DOP at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments

"Chit chat chit chat all over the Internet." -- Classic schoolyard taunt

"Corn has never looked so sexy." -- Tom Scharpling on the maize maidens from Hee Haw

"If this game was a casino, you'd be doing a dance right now cause the little sireen would be going off over your slot machine." -- Tom to a man who's seen Hot Tuna live four times

"Are the guys from Part Chimp ashamed of how hard they rock?" -- Tom, so close to the perfect throw

"Say what you will about their music, the guys had nice coats" -- Larry Smirthwaite on Hootie and The Blowfish's outerwear

"Oh, Daddy's back!!!!" -- Larry after drinking some "Mountain Dew"

"Youdoin'rails?" -- Larry, repeatedly inquiring as to whether Tom was snorting cocaine

"I'm young!" -- Tom on the perceptions that his radio voice conjures a much older man

[TBSOWFMU - 4/4/06 / Podmirth / Jingle Jams / Myspace / (Mostly) Mouthbreather-Free FOT Zone]

Elope - "Dragonstone"
Elope - "Not Even Close"

( Click here to buy 3WD)

Tommy Keene - "Going Out Again"
Tommy Keene - "Turning On Blue"

( Click here to buy Ten Years After)

Robert Pollard with The Ascended Masters - "Supernatural Car Lover" (Live at the 40 Watt, 1/26/06) [from the forthcoming Normal Happiness]
Robert Pollard with The Ascended Masters - "Fair Touching" (Live at the 40 Watt, 1/26/06)

[Go here to download tracks from three forthcoming Fading Captain releases: Keene Brothers, The Takeovers, and Psycho and the Birds. And go here to follow the progress of Phil Szostak's Pop Zeus -- a comic book tribute to GBV.]

Annotated highlights of the top-notch,top-tier, top-shelf, terrifically taut, tentpole show, ably hosted by Tom's twin brother, Donald Scharpling:

- Tom recaps (starts at 25:20) last week's discussion of the mutant bike syndrome, where he used TBS as a pulpit to attack the Brooklyn street filth. He took tall bike PR Minister Purple Shirt to task, causing him to fold like a cheap camera under the glaring lights of justice. This segment touched off a new TBS War and the opposition is a bit more prickly than the Poster Kids. The other day, Tom was strolling through NYC just trying to enjoy his ice cream and take in a warm Spring day. At nightfall, Tom found himself on a darkened, strange street as tall bikers surrounded him. Tom told them he was not looking for trouble, but they informed Tom that he had indeed found trouble as a result of his big mouth. One of the bikers pulled out a vial of acid and threw it at Tom, scorching his arm. They warned him that if he continued to use the WFMU airwaves to riff on tall bike culture, he would be killed.

The bikers were also swinging chains, and one mutant was wearing a filthy leather jacket littered with gang lingo that Tom could not fully make out because he was too busy dodging steady streams of acid.

The gang then executed a horrifying thrill kill: as Tom writhed in stinging pain on the sidewalk, the bikers circled around an old lady and her grandson as they carried bags of groceries. The gang's leader emerged and whipped the old lady with a chain until she hit the ground and was pronounced dead. Yes: these hoodlums offed an old lady just to watch her die. Another gang member provided the young boy with a programming note: "Watch the 10 O'clock news; you're gonna see all about your grandma."

Tom noted that one of the filthmongers was giggling throughout the murder as though he was seeing a show at the Laugh Factory. Tom did not find any humor in the event and is not scared of them. He will continue to expose tall bike culture.

- Tom dips into the mailbag (starts at 31:56) and expects crickets to pour out of envelopes, but instead finds various theme song entries, including an overnight pack from Seafaring Willis containing a re-recorded theme along with photos of a child, a bird, and a cut-out of the Gorton's fisherman from a box of fish sticks.

- Tom asks listeners (starts at 35:35) for help identifying an .mp3 sent to him by FOTer sparkiepop. The song stumped the denizens of L.A., but Tom is confident that his musically-advanced audience could quickly name the mysterious keyboard melody, supposedly from a hit song circa the late 70s/early 80s. Add it to your playlist!:

Unknown - "Mystery Keyboard Replication"

While it was not identified, many songs/bands were eliminated from contention: "Game of Pricks", Jesus Lizard, MIDI Orchestration Demo, "Turn The Beat Around", Uncle Kracker, "Straight Outta Compton" (Tom sings a bit and thinks it's close to being correct), Babyshambles, the new Best Show theme song, and "Cum on Feel the Noize" (also sung by Tom). I've listened to the track 343 times since the show and came up with two possibilities: Celtic Frost's "Circle of Tyrants" and A Tribe Called Quest's "Bonita Applebum".

Nina Gordon - "Straight Outta Compton"
N.W.A. - "Straight Outta Compton"

- The "Am I The Only One On Earth" game makes it debut (starts at 42:52), and Tom starts things off with AITOOOE who thought that Shaun of the Dead was just OK. Tom's not sure what the big deal is about this C- zombie picture.

Other Tom entries:

AITOOOE who has never seen a full episode of Law & Order in any of its nine variants. The Kid's got no time for Law & Order, and neither does Mike the Courageous Call Screener.

AITOOOE who misses Mort Downey, Jr. Tom thinks about him all the time, as though he were a lost relative.

AITOOOE who has not seen Titanic. Tom actually saw a half hour and was not pleased with the cinematic depiction of the hemmorhaging of $$$$$$$$.

AITOOOE who would rather watch Jay Leno's monologue than David Letterman's monologue. Tom finds Leno to be a consistently and irredeemably awful host of The Tonight Show, but Dave used to be something special and is now just a cranky old guy. Tom watches Leno because it's a perversely fascinating peek inside the worst dynamic of American comedy -- a left/right politcal scorecard approach to joke writing to achieve a pallatable center for the masses.

Here's a full roundup:

- Scott from Chicago: AITOOOE who gets a really violent, sickening reaction to the sounds emitted by the rock group Steely Dan. He is not, as Tom also hates them, calling them "bad stereo demonstration rock". However, those Steely Dan gold discs are also very effective when used as part of an elaborate sonic ruse.

-Listener Normal Dave in NYC: AITOOOE who hates Pulp Fiction. Dave was revolted by the film, which he found to be puerile and lacking any kind of compelling center. He called the fractured narrative a cheap film school storytelling gimmick rife with pointlessly hip violent gags and stupid dialogue. I think Dave will enjoy Grind House.

- Matt in East Orange offers a film trifecta: AITOOOE who hated Wild At Heart (Metacritic confirms my perception that this was not a widely-beloved film beyond certain cinephile circles and Lynch loyalists.), hated Pulp Fiction, and has never seen E.T.

- Jeff checks in from an East Hanover gas station en route to rock a Belty-haunted Home Depot by purchasing mouse traps, fertilizer, and grass seed. AITOOOE who thinks that Some Like It Hot is not funny at all. Tom is generally with him, declaring the film "funny-ish" in a dated way, but not actually full-on funny. Jeff can't locate all of the supposed great lines and neither he nor Tom are buying Tony Curtis doing Cary Grant. Tom thinks the best thing Curtis ever did was the narration for Hollywood Babylon II. There was also discussion of the Curtis-Roger Moore pairing as two playboys sentenced by a judge to solve crimes in the camp classic The Persuaders.

- Beau, a sports enthusiast from Hotlanta, brings it: AITOOOE who has extremely vivid memories of being babysat by Roy Clark from Hee Haw. The babysitting session apparently occurred in a trailer home while living in El Paso, TX (4th-worst city in America, but filled with proud, stuck people), and also included Buck Owens and one of Clark's cornfield beauties. In his memory, Beau was stuck in his playpen, heard trains roaring nearby, and was generally ignored by Mr. Clark. His parents deny that this ever took place and Tom sides with their logic over the 3-year-old version of Beau, suggesting that as he slept in his crib, they watched either Hee Haw or Petticoat Junction and his malleable mind concocted this faux brush with celebrity sitters.

The late, great:

- Christopher from Cranston, RI: AITOOOE who has a fear of small children (primarily ages 3 to 6) with adult-sized eyebrows. Tom asked him what he would do if he became a proud parent and discovered one morning that his new toddler had these ghastly brows. The solution would be that he'd abandon his family by taking the next Greyhound bus out of town. Christopher notes that he had normal eyebrows as a child, but grew into an adult man with large eyebrows. Huh.

- Rock star Ted Leo: AITOGOE who is insanely frustrated and made awkward and sad by the current male obsession with body hair removal. Ted's part Italian so he's got something going on hair-wise, and he's also half Irish, which leaves him with skin that doesn't tan (bummer at the Siren Festival) and the dreaded monobrow. Ted recalls the glory days when Hollywood studs could opt to go au naturel with their chest hair and still be thought of as desirable men. Tom tells Ted not to worry about the bare-chested, twentysomething jerks parading around the MTV beach house, because when they hit their 30s, their dancing days will be over.

This prompts Tom to issue another entry: AITOOOE who is repulsed by the Isle of Staten youth who have abandoned the crazy good 'ol disco times with their buddies for a faux-hard mobster stance. Tom encountered some of these would-be Sopranos outside of a tanning salon acting as though they were running some top-shelf criminal show, when they were in fact running the Office Max across the street. Ted predicts that none of them had any chest hair, but Tom is certain that they will obtain big fat guts when they hit the 3's.

Tom ultimately declares that Ted is like Charles Atlas kicking sand in the face of his audience. Speaking of Atlas, after an embarassing encounter while spring breaking at Lake Newbridge, I have enrolled in the Atlas regimen. A week from now: the new, improved Omar.

I also think it's time to launch a HOF campaign for Mr. Ted Leo. My only reservation is that I saw some pics from SXSW and detected an unmistakable "steroidal fury", suggesting that Mr. Leo is juicing with performance-enhancing drugs in an effort to retain a competitive edge over younger musicians and potential battle rap challengers. These rumors have swirled around for a few years in various Intronet message forums, and I just saw a sample chapter from Under the Sheets, a meticulously researched tome that claims to have evidence that Ted used something known as "The Creem" while recording parts of Hearts Of Oak and upped his program for Shake The Sheets due to jealously over the critical and commercial successes of Franz Ferdinand, Wilco, Arcade Fire, and Kanye West. Since Lookout and Touch & Go had no extant policies forbidding these substances at the time, the RIAA has assembled a commission comprised of Gerard Cosloy, Henry Rollins, Kurt Rambis, renowned nutritionist Udo Erasmus, and Tom Delay to investigate the matter and quell growing public outcry. Many are calling for an asterisk to be included in past Pazz & Jop poll rankings. Pitchfork and other media outlets have termed the investigation a "witch hunt" solely targeting Mr. Leo, but it should be noted that the commission's scope also includes Spoon's Britt Daniel, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, and Brendan Benson, who unveiled his new body -- and some muscular leads -- at a recent The Raconteurs gig. I still say that Ted is worthy of the HOF, which already contains the controversial Officer Tom. Ted's Best Show, semi-hirsute body of work speaks for itself, and his 2006 contributions have been very impressive -- his genre-jumping defeat of MC Steinberg, rescuing the Build A Movie Game from potential decommission a few weeks ago, and now his smooth chest AITOOOE uneasiness. Vote for Ted.

The Raconteurs - "Intimate Secretary"

-- ????: AITOOOE who feels that he has to see three or more rock bands that begin with each letter of the alphabet three times or more each. He gave some examples:

R: Rolling Stones, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and The Ramones

M: Mountain, The Moody Blues, and The Manhattans, which may soon be upgraded if he can manage to catch Motorhead or Motley Crue one more time. He's confident that he'll manage the Crue, but other bands that sit at two can eat away at him, such as Van Halen, who may not tour again, though Tom thinks it's even money that they will tour between now and the 4th of July. If the tour happens, it will be very, very scary.

H: Hot Tuna (4x), Heart, and Herman's Hermits (1x). Tom is baffled that he went back for a fourth serving of Hot Tuna, but it was the result of seeing them as part of a show featuring The Band, which he needed to add to his B stable. X is understandably a problem, as he's only seen the band X (total ear candy) once. Perhaps we can help this guy out by luring Andy Partridge back to the road.

Tom congratulates him on being the only person on Earth doing this. His friends think he's nuts, but he can't stop and Tom understands that everyone has their idiosyncratic endeavours to get through this hard life. He has also seen the original incarnation of a band for all but four letters of the alphabet. Completed letters include S (Sex Pistols) and T (Twisted Sister and Ten Years After w/ Alvin Lee).

Tom wonders if he is often compelled to see a letter-closing band he doesn't like instead of a band he actually does like. Such a conflict did indeed arise: his C roster was Chicago, Crosby Stills & Nash, and The Chi-Lites, but rather than upgrade with a third Cheap Trick show to close out the letter in a proper way, he saw The Doors. Tom is rooting for him to enjoy music and not always play the letter game when determining what shows to attend.

In '88-'89, I flirted with a streamlined variant of this quest, which was to see every band that started with the letter W. I got off to a great start with Whitesnake, W.A.S.P., Wiggy Malmsteen, White Lion (5x), and Warrant, but became disillusioned after Kip Winger pulled a last-minute cancellation due to an injury he suffered at ballet practice (later revealed to be a ruptured groin due to an "overly aggressive demi-plié" in an exclusive interview with Metal Edge's Gerri Miller), so I dropped it. Earlier this year, I contemplated getting back into The Game with an '00s twist -- seeing every band with "wolf" in its name, but figured it would be too time-consuming.

- Local strip club mogul Joey Gavone interrupts the game (starts at 1:12) to tell Tom that he's bored with his stints on David Lee Roth's radio show and wants to take his act to The Best Show. However, Tom doesn't double dip and has no use for a bum's table scraps. TBS is unfit for preverts calling from the Bada Bing to pollute the clean, family show with dirty talk. Gavone -- a Roth guy for life -- is quickly GOMPed.

- Stefanos from the Isle O Staten calls as he's crusin' the boulevahd to grab some ice cream at Sedutto's and check out some comic books at Jim Hanley's. He points out that in addition to a fat gut, the tough-guy Islanders will enjoy some skin cancer in their 30s. He also plays the game: AITOOOE who at some point in their life thought that Sandra Bernhard was hot. He's not alone, as Tom owns up to finding her interesting looking. I'd add that in addition to interesting, I always found late 80s/early 90s Bernard a bit scary. I have vague memories of some late night show she did on HBO (I think it was some kind of one-off and might have been "live"?) that seemed like it might be titilattin', but it was just weird.

- DJ Terre T: AITOOOE who will have the white-hot The Black Hollies play live on her radio show on Saturday, April 8th sometime between 3 and 6 p.m. This was seemingly a lock, but due to a personal tragedy of a band member, the peformance will be rescheduled.

The Black Hollies - "Tell Me What You Want"

-- Larry Smirthwaite calls (starts at 1:31) for Carl to obtain J146/147 because "that fat bitch and her stupid husband" got a call from their sitter about their unruly kids and had to bail early. Tom informs Larry that he misdialed and reached a radio program. Turns out that Carl is Larry's employee at Mr. Coatcheck, the biggest freelance coat-checking business in America, and he's calling from a party he's working.

Tom gets Larry to stay on the line and explain the nature of Mr. Coatcheck's operations. Unlike the old days when there was a coat check in every restaurant, the business has shifted to setting up a coat check area for select clients at various corporate events and private parties. Mr. Coatcheck, which earns Larry a seven-figure annual income, has provided services at events for VH-1, Puma, Apple, Revlon, RJR Nabisco, and, most recently, Blender magazine, where he checked Lindsay Lohan's coat. Larry drops two little-known facts about Ms. Lohan: she loves Altoids and owns a Starsky & Hutch keychain.

Tom assumes that Larry found these items by spelunking into the the troubled starlet's garment, but Larry denies going into the pockets of patrons. Larry explains that through the natural movement of the checking process, a coat is often subject to what the industry calls "twindling" or "reverse-twindling" -- a piece getting turned upside down, often resulting in pockets being turned out and contents falling to the floor. When these items hit the floor, they enter a finders-keepers "no-man's land" and are rarely returned to the owner. This is in line with the rule of the coat check world that states: "On the floors [ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch] it's yours", the middle section representing the 6.25 seconds that the owner has to claim their belongings before they are forfeited to the coat checker.

Larry wants to know if Tom has any publishing contacts because he recently completed work on The Coats I've Checked, a coffee table book documenting his quarter-century in the coatchecking business. The book is heavy on his encounters with various celebrities, such as Harrison Ford (super-nice Ralph Lauren leather jacket), Andy Griffith (high-quality tweed), Hootie & The Blowfish (nice coats and good guys, except bassist Dean Felber, whose pocket contained something unspeakable), Jason Alexander (carries a carefully-pruned, vanilla bean car air freshener in his coat), and G.G. Allin, during Larry's brief stint at the Pyramid Club in NYC. Larry said that Allin owned one of the weirdest coats he has ever checked as it appeared to be smeared with chocolate, which alway struck him as odd. Larry says that Allin was a nice guy who tipped with a kind of foodstuff that looked like a clump of goobers. Tom does not desire further details.

Larry's memorable first celebrity coat check was Billy Barty's gorgeous camel-haired overcoat at a party thrown by Gene Wilder in Manhattan circa '81. Larry was enamored with the coat and acquired it under a provision of coatroom law that grants the checker not only the coat's contents, but the coat itself if it hits the flloor. Larry pretended that the coat was stolen (by someone other than him), and Barty was enraged. Larry did not fear any bodily harm since the client was only 2' 8", but did end up reimbursing Barty $350 for the coat with money that "fell out of" the coat pockets of Charles Grodin and JoBeth Williams. In addition to any found cash, Larry earned a hefty fee of five figures for eight hours of work at the party. Larry tells Tom that his coat-checking talent is commensurate with that level of compensation, which prompts Tom to make a sarcastic crack about the challenging nature of the craft. Larry is not pleased and warns Tom that he will soon be dripping not with sarcasm, but with blood.

Larry also discovered a lot of Bolivian marching powder in the pockets of Grodin and Williams, which led to his first taste of The White Lady, with whom he's had a tumultuous love affair ever since. While Larry is obligated to report any nose candy or Mary Jane to the police per the National Union of Coat Check Workers (NUCCW) bylaws, it is optional whether one has to actually inform the authorities. Larry argues that the celebrities would prefer their drugs to be silently stolen by a coat checker then have the find babbled to the tabloid press.

In the odd event that someone catches Larry in the act, he'll often pretend he doesn't speak English, muttering something in Spanish (Larry is also fluent in Holland) like "me no comprendo ... leche". If that doesn't swing them, he informs the patron that his wife just bit it and starts crying. Generally, they will either drop the issue or sue the company that hired Mr. Coatcheck over lost items. The power of the union (Larry is NUCCW shop steward) prevents people from suing Larry directly, plus by the time any papers were filed, he'd change his company's name. If sued, various other unions (truckers, caterers, custodial) would join forces with the NUCCW and pull out of a given event, an act that Larry thinks is "America in a nutshell". Tom finds threatening to shut down an event because people are trying to retrieve their rightful belongings is a sleazy maneuver, but Larry can't help it if people don't put things solidly away in their pockets and accuses Tom of being a union-hater and sounding like Bill Walton.

Larry recalled a run-in with Walton at the last ESPN party he worked. Larry thought Walton was a creep and a bit of a douche for threatening that if anything bad happened to his coat, it would be Larry's funeral. Having already done several rails, Larry was in no mood for his s hits, so he planted some of The White Lady and called the cops. Walton was escored out of the event by police in front of Julius Erving, Larry Bird, Dennis Rodman, and Magic Johnson. Tom's horrified, but Larry says that if he was privy to the 'tude Walton was exuding, he would have done the same or worse.

In Larry's buzzed mind, Walton was attacking him with a machete, though he now realizes that Walton was unarmed and the perception was the result of a drug-induced freakout from a mixture of The White Lady, E, crystal meth, weed, vodka, wine, beer, cider, and rum.

This reminds Larry of a wild, full-on satantic ritual he worked for Procter & Gamble executives in the Ohio woods sometime around '84'-85. The event featured priests, debauchery, and, though he can't confirm it was authentic, a sacrificed chick. Larry checked P&G employees' regular overcoats and dispensed black capes, and prior to Venom's set, he did some rails with frontman Cronos. He still corresponds with him, but has lost touch with Abaddon. Larry can't believe that Tom works at a radio station, but could not instantly identify Abaddon as Venom's drummer. By the end of the evening, every executive was knocked flat on their back by plenty of Newcastle Brown Ale.

Along with the P&G gig, Larry's book also touches on the period when CBGB's owner Hilly Crystal hired him to check coats at the Sunday Hardcore Matinees throughout the summer of 1984. Larry assumed it was an overcoat-laden, hardcore pornography show but it was actually "hardcore punk rock 'n roll". Larry didn't dig the music, but grew to be friends with a lot of the guys who came to the shows, such as Vinny from Agnostic Front, James Hetfield, all of The Ramones except Tommy, and JFK, Jr., who checked out 7 Seconds. He hated the band and left after three minutes, which gave Larry enough time to twindle his coat (J. Crew), finding only a pack of matches.

After 27 years in the business, Larry is most fond of the top-shelf coats worn by Keith Richards, Scott Weiland, Robert Downey, Jr., Chuck Negron and Sly Stone. Tom senses a pattern indicating that all of these owners may have had controlled substances in their coats, and Larry does remember finding a lot of stuff on the floor on the nights he checked for them.

The weirdest celebrity coat he checked belonged to Fred Stallone, the odd, younger brother of Sly and Fronk. One night, Fred's coat got turned over and Larry saw that it was filled with thousands of loose Skittles. To this day, Larry does not understand why Fred had that much mouth candy with him.

In 1985, Larry told Hilly that he'd had enough of the hardcore shows, so he got put on the night shift and checked at shows for obscure bands like Camper Van Beethoven, Dinosaur Jr., Scruffy The Cat, and Poi Dog Pondering. While there was no snow during the SxE-leaning hardcore shows, Larry was now skiing downhill every night. The coat check room became known as ski lodge, and Larry was called "The Railroad Captain". One night, Ric Ocasek came to CB's with his wife, who was even hotter in person than she was on the posters Larry bought as a kid. (Tom preferred nerdier wall art.) Larry was a "big fan of her body", so he had to get romantic with her coat while gacked on coke. Paulina came back to the coat check area to get some cigs and caught him in the act. While Ocasek seemed supercool in The Cars' videos, Larry's antics made him madder than a rattlesnake at a Thai wedding. Surprisingly, Larry was fired for the incident.

Other romantic encounters with the coats of sexy celebs: Loni Anderson, Charo, Teri Hatcher, Gillian Anderson, Jessica Alba, all of the 1999 Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, The Bangles, Erika Christensen, Shirley Manson, John Madden, Oprah Winfrey, Joss Stone, Bonnie Raitt, and a Bush girl trio (Barbara, Jenna, and Laura) during a White House gig: "Laura would have a bird if she knew what I did to that parka."

Larry is also collaborating on a bio-pic with extreme filmmaker Trent L. Strauss called Lighthouse. Synopsis: Greg (Smirthwaite), a superhot, coat check God, works at The Crystal Room in NY, breaking up mob fights and getting it on with superhot chicks in the coat room. One day, he gets a call from Michael, his coat-checking mentor. He's opening a new restaurant in western Maine called The Lighthouse, which will serve mostly crab fare. The Lighthouse's primarily clientele is super-rough, hardcore fisherman, who are constantly getting into fights, throwing nets on each other, and stuffing fish in each other's private areas. Michael wants Greg to come work for him because his two previous coat check guys where killed by local fisherman.

[At this point, Larry pauses and returns to the phone with quickened speech -- "Isounddifferent?" -- but he disputes Tom's charge that he has just done a rail and claims it was simply a few sips of Mountain Dew. He also notes that he can't wait to start dancing.]

Greg accepts the job and goes to what Larry terms "Hell on Earth". He starts cleaning house there and things are going so well that The Lighthouse starts stealing business from The Golden Wharf, the other big seafood place run by Captain Logan. Logan wages war on the staff of The Lighthouse by ordering his henchmen to throw a burning row boat through the front window of The Lighthouse, causing the coat check room to go up in flames. Someone had checked their baby, and Greg hears it crying, so he rescues it along with two other checked kids to save the day.

Now it's Greg's turn to go wild and throw down some hard revenge on Logan. Greg's initial idea was to use his fists, but in order to make it more exciting, Strauss suggested shredding the faces of the henchmen with a motorboat engine. In the film, Greg will complete that task and then sneak into The Gollden Wharf's coat check room, where hid in the huge coat pockets of Ukranian giant Leonid Stadnik.

Larry wanted Greg to beat Logan with pans from the kitchen, catch him in a net, and throw him in the water. However, Trent rewrote the scene so that Logan is impaled on a giant skewer and lowered into a boiling pot teeming with sharks and crabs, resulting in a lot of squirtage from all the usual places as he's eaten alive. In an homage to The Toolbelt Killer, Logan -- now reduced to just stumps -- gets saved by the ghosts of a Viking fisherman since The Golden Wharf is built on an old viking burial ground, a thematic staple of Strauss's films. The Viking ghosts start wailing on Greg and peel his face off, but Greg eventually turns the tables and saws off the private parts of the ghosts and Captain Logan with a rusty harpoon razor.

Tom will not see the film, but Larry hopes that he will see The Lion, The Witch, and The Coat Check, another film he's working on. In this film, Larry goes back in time and gets a job as a coat check guy at Adolf Hitler's favorite restaurant. Hitler comes in and checks his coat, which is booby-trapped by Larry, allowing him to kill Hitler, become the Fuhrer, surrender to the Allied forces, start a boogie-woogie band, and have a lot of sex.

Larry has also become enamored with branding from watching The Apprentice. Tom tuned out of the show, so Larry gives him a brief recap noting that two Jewish guys declined to do their assigned tasks on the Sabbath and that Trump has alread booted the hottest chicks.

Larry's new line of coat check products includes "Coat Check Math" -- books and flashcards that help kids learn math. Larry is confident that this will be popular with kids since they love coats and love to turn them in to people and hopefully get them back. The series will include word problems like:

Mr. Rehnquist goes into de Medici's restaurant and his party checks 16 coats, which are added to 32 coats already in the room. Two coats are lost, but two more come in, and one is lost.

Answer = 47

He's also prepping a television series called Hidden Coat Confessions, a take-off on HBO's super-erotic Taxi Cab Confessions. In the series, hot coat check chicks will reveal their most intimate secrets via cameras hidden in the pockets of checked coats. Larry notes that fatties will not be allowed on the program and that he speaks for America with that discriminatory policy.

Finally, there's the R. Kelly-inspired Trapped In The Coat Check, written by Larry and currently being financed by a group of Chicago investors led by Ferguson Jenkins. Larry hopes to get either Stanley Kubrick (The Hills Have Eyes) or Orson Welles to direct the project. Tom points out that both filmmakers are dead, but Larry thinks Tom's stupid. Larry promises to prove Tom wrong by meeting Kubrick in an hour twenty at an Avis parking lot in Camden, N.J. Larry is a bit concerned about the location since a Google Earth search yielded a darkened, abandoned lot with gang members and a burning car. He begs Tom to join him by cutting him in 50-50 on the project and letting him play a character in Lighthouse who gets split in half with a tuna saw. Larry is bringing $10,000 in cash and almost a pound of something else to the meeting and promises that he and Tom will have champagne and cocaine and rock through the night.

- Tom chats with Emily (starts at 2:32), a young artist who lovingly rendered Tom as a 65-year-old man. Tom first met her when she was a 2006 WFMU Marathon phone volunteer, discovering that his radio voice made her think he was 63-ish, as opposed to a youngster still in his 30s. The voice and her creative imagination led to the above drawing, which she says was overly influenced by Larry King. (I also detect a bit of Groucho Marx and Gene Shalit with a Barry Dworkinesque reverse-mohawk.) The real image she wished to convey was a thinner, more gray Tony Clifton. Some callers/chatters weighed in on the voice-age issue (ranging from the blunt "ugly and balding" to Tom Leykis to Dena from Red Bank's healthy and virile 44-year-old) and someone really nailed it: Philip Seymour Hoffman's Lester Bangs in Almost Famous. I had already seen a pic or two of Tom prior to ever listening to the show, but if I could retroactively come up with an initial visual image to go with the voice, PSH's Lester would be pretty close. I probably would have pegged the age at around 35-38.

Huey Lewis and The News - "The Power Of GOMP"

- Theme Songs Lightning Round (starts at 2:42):

Larry and Shasta's "You Deserve The Best" (Michael McDonald homage), Starguarder's "Come On In" (short and sweet), Petey's Father's "Bring It On" (Faffer's 58th entry in the contest), Scallop's fun clip montage, and Folk Star Bob's "Sit Back And See", my fave entry of the night.

There was also a fakeout trifecta from the My Brother And Me guy, using the monikers The Summer Snowmen, Frozen Heat, and Big Ums. Tom suspects it's a mutant tall biker who has hours of free time. Tom recommends that the perp ease up on the gas pedal and do some homework or read a book. Ah, the folly of youth.

Michael McDonald - "Ya Mo B There"

On the next ... The Best Show on WFMU: Tom welcomes co-host Keith Stevens, from the best radio station on Earth -- Zarephath, N.J.'s WAWZ. The Bad Guys melt when faced with this dynamic duo of family-friendly fun.

Robert Pollard with The Ascended Masters - "Don't Stop Now" (Live at the 40 Watt, 1/26/06)

Posted by Omar at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments

Cut Chemist's other new track from the forthcoming The Audience's Listening. And the bossa nova vocal sample.

Cut Chemist - "The Garden" (iTunes)
Astrud Gilberto - "Berimbau" (Amazon)

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I'm late to the Wonder Showzen party, but I dove into season 2 last week and have been YouTubing s1 clips, mainly searching for the work of Beat Kid Trevor, an investigative reporter who's part Kermit the Frog and part Sacha Baron Cohen (the inappropriate high-five requests are certainly a Borat homage). His season 2 work -- a romp through a beauty pageant and a stint outside a Catholic church while dressed as the Pope's rotting corpse -- has been top-notch, top-shelf, tentpole stuff.

"Gamble, gamble, gamble ... DIE."

Posted by Omar at 6:23 PM | Permalink | Comments

At least twice as long as it needs to be, but X will like it anyway.

Mantronix - "King Of The Beats" (Amazon)

Posted by DOP at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments

Gruber always fires me up. This is the write-up I've been waiting for since Apple dropped the Boot Camp [Clik!] news yesterday.

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When I first met DOP, I'd already been playing his self-produced demo tape on the show for a few weeks. LL from Criminal gave me the tape, said that a little white kid was behind it, and that it was really good hip-hoppy stuff. She was right. Anyway, I started into my show and in rolled this weirdo-looking dude who was the antithesis of the standard white-kids-trying-to-look-black that typically showed up to pimp their stuff. He had horrible long hair and big sunglasses and some sort of trucker hat-like thing. This was 1996, I think? Anyway, he kept coming back to the show, week after week. I eventually learned that the hair was a wig.

So Juiceboxxx is the new DOP, updated for the '06. He's also a little white kid, likes to wear the funny get-ups, and makes devastating hip-hop. I mean really, really great stuff. Where DOP's early business was more Shadow and Dust Bros-inspired, Juiceboxxx dabbles more in the 82-87 timeframe, both beats-wise and simplistic rhymes-wise.

This Juiceboxxx track I'm posting will crush you. It is a bona-fide computer speaker rattler in the grand tradition of cheerleader routine dance music (a style that needs a blow-out post of its own).

Juiceboxxx - "Do You Want 2 Hear It?"

( Only 8 bucks for the full record. WORTH IT. )

Bonus "Thunder Jam #1" video for the full visual effect:

Posted by x amount at 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments

I was really hoping Baldwin would be playing a cast member of the sketch show. Instead, he'll be playing the next best thing: Dr. Red Duke.

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The original BBD. With a Prince vocal sample. On the strength!

Black By Demand - "Dearly Beloved" (Amazon)

Posted by DOP at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments

DJ Mark The 45 King in '87 on both the beat and the mic.

The 45 King - "A King Creation"

(via Unkut.com)

Posted by DOP at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments

RECAP CULTURE NOT FOR SALE!

"The man in the bicycle shop?!" -- Phillip Drummond, shocked to find out the truth about Mr. Horton on Diff'rent Strokes

"Where are your tall bike heroes now?" -- Tom Scharpling, proud 53-year-old, to tall bike apologist, Purple Shirt

"He buried Orson Welles that day." -- Jeff Feuerzeig on Daniel Johnston's 1990 WFMU broadcast

"My eyes see what they see." -- Philly Boy Roy on The Sopranos

"Thou Ain’t Lived Till Thou Did Rails With The Hooters." -- Philly Boy Roy, quoting Biblical scripture

[TBSOWFMU - 3/28/06 / Podmirth / Jingle Jams / Myspace / (Mostly) Mouthbreather-Free FOT Zone]

Daniel Johnston - "Museum Of Love" (from Yip/Jump Music)
Daniel Johnston - "Walking The Cow" (from Continued Story/Hi, How Are You)
Daniel Johnston - "Living Life" (from Songs Of Pain: The Early Recordings Vol. 1)
Daniel Johnston - "Monkey In A Zoo" (from Songs Of Pain: The Early Recordings Vol. 1)
Daniel Johnston - "True Love Will Find You In The End" (from 1990)

( Click here to buy DJ records)

Or, if you prefer, you can head to the last remaining Crazy Eddie outpost on Route 22 just outside of Middlebridge -- it's now mainly an adult novelty warehouse (some insane specials right now; I highly recommend "The Dillenger" in mahogany), but there's still a small selection of CASSettes and vinyl. Go there NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Annotated highlights of the action-packed excitement (this recap is dedicated to Jillian Barberie):

Yeah, but did you have to use ACID?! It's so ... gruesome!: Mutant train gang known as "The Station Agents" hit DK & B in Newbridge last week as part of their latest anti-consumerist spree. Local authorities believe this is the work of rogue Small Train crusader Ruben Arness (aka "Josh Acid"), who's been vandalizing local hobby shops for selling model trains instead of forcing people to cobble them from refuse. He's said to sport holsters containing vials of acid, which he uses to "sting" storefront windows with his rantings. In a recent interview in Port Morris High School's Patriot Press, Mr. Acid broke his media silence, saying the public should be happy that he is "killing fake model train culture" and offered a disturbing defense of his weapon of choice: "Acid is like a woman, a good one will eat right through your pants."

- Tom digs into (starts at 25:00) the cover story in The Village Voice about tall-bike gangs attacking culturally inauthentic Brooklyn storefronts. All of these recent read-and-condemns (placate-hatin' Chris Klein, flip-floppin' Mike Jeffries, etc.) suggest that Mr. Tom Hazelmyer should brace himself for El Goodo's eventual smackdown.

They were meant to be edgy advertising, those tall bikes towering in Brooklyn Industries windows, but somebody—or somebodies—took their presence personally. The bikes, each essentially a pair of ordinary cycles stacked into a single ride six feet high, had been in the clothing stores for less than a week when a saboteur etched a protest in acid.

"Bike Culture Not for Sale," read the runny white lettering found February 23 on the glass at the four Brooklyn Industries outlets in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Bike culture? Tom: "Bikes are for sale!"

The Park Slope store's assistant manager, McKenzie Rollins, first spotted trouble when she came into work the morning before and found someone had messed with the gate locks overnight. "They looked like someone had inserted something—maybe a screwdriver—to screw them up," she says, folding a retro '80s T-shirt with a cut-out neck. "We had to buy new locks."

The next morning, McKenzie found the graffiti. "They knew it wouldn't come off," she says. "This was malicious. They could have left a note. They could have gotten in touch with us about their concerns." But who could be so enraged by using a bike to pitch hipster duds? Another saleswoman suggested something curious, that it was local members of something called "tall-bike culture."

Tom thinks that the gangs should attack an actual bike store and suggests a possible target: the bike shop run by Mr. Horton (Gordon Jump, RIP) on Diff’rent Strokes. Horton's deserving of the acidic rebuke for his filth moves in the 1983 two-parter, "The Bicycle Man". His transgressions include trying to seduce Arnold and Dudley with wine (nice voicework by Tom when reciting this Mr. Horton line: "Hey, Ahnold, you know over in France, kids your age drink wine.") and eventually attacking Dudley in the stock room. The supposed friendly neighborhood merchant was in fact a stone-cold child molester.

This, of course, was a classic storyline in Very Special Episodes of 1980s sitcoms. Another standout is the 1982 episode of Family Ties ("Give Your Uncle A Kiss") where a longtime family friend and co-worker of Stephen Keaton known as "Uncle Artie" is in the throes of a mid-life crisis and treats Mallory as his personal Fun Kit at the PBS station's fundraiser. These episodes were always bizarre (often veering into unintentional comedy), riveting, and fairly frightening. For weeks after viewing a molestation-themed VSE, I would enter the local baseball card shop in a paranoid state, thinking the warm, "Heeeeelllllooooo there, son" greeting was merely part of a ruse that would end with a glass of Pinot and a trip to the back to look for that Don Mattingly rookie card I wanted.

Tom finds it hard to believe that the planet's problems have been eradicated to the point where people could reasonably worry about clothing stores displaying bikes in their windows. Tom speculates that TGI Friday's -- and many other theme restaurants -- could be a future victim due to its old-timey wallcoverings.

As for the dude with the paper bag over his head, Tom says that if he doesn't want people looking at him, he shouldn't ride a 9-foot-high bicycle. Also: acquiring acid to burn store windows = not a great use of one's time.

Mutant bikers, went the prevalent speculation, had just been heard. New York's leading tall-bike gangs, Black Label Bicycle Club and C.H.U.N.K. 666, are dedicated to fashioning "mutant" bikes from discarded scraps and spare parts—for love, not money.

A Web search turns up the direct e-mail address for "the Smelter," from C.H.U.N.K. 666's New York chapter. Finally, the Smelter—also known as Kansas—calls from a friend's funeral in Chicago. After mentioning that the club has talked it over, he gives the cell phone number of fellow C.H.U.N.K.ster Marko Bon, who goes by the name of Darko.

"I'm definitely part of consumerist economy," says Darko (aka Purple Sweater), 30, a chisel-featured creative director for the Ralph Lauren website who lives in Manhattan. "I don't think that earning a living is counterintuitive to making a bike."

Tom is baffled that a guy who peddles sweaters for Ralph Lauren is lecturing him on consumerism. Clothes Culture Not For Sale!

Businesses hoping to cash in on the cachet of mutant bikes could never grasp the kinship of the clubs, Darko insists. "The essence of any bike group is based on the fact that when you're riding these bikes, because they are made haphazardly, they break down. So we're always stopping and helping each other fix the bikes. That's where the camaraderie comes in." The name "C.H.U.N.K." isn't an acronym but instead a reference to the pieces of tubing, machinery chains, aluminum siding, and other scraps riders weld together. The New York chapter has a work space called the Shack, near the clattering J tracks in Bushwick, where some members also live. "When you're riding a bike and somebody says, 'These bikes are great, can I buy one?' The answer has always been, 'No, but you can make one,'" Darko explained. "And if they're interested, they can come to the Shack and we can build one together."

Tom wholeheartedly supports the communal kinship and fun of building bikes – that’s a legit hobby. However, if someone doesn't have time to build one at the Shack, he believes they should be able to purchase one.

Darko first learned of the tall-bikes flap at Brooklyn Industries stores from a private listserv dedicated to mutant-bike clubs. He said, "My feeling was, why are there tall bikes in the windows? It is so unnatural to build these bikes for any type of profit." He immediately called Brooklyn Industries' Williamsburg office to inquire about the displays.

Whaaaaaaaaat? Tom: "How dare you. I condemn C.H.U.N.K. 666!" Tom is angry that Brooklyn mutants have so much free time and decides to open a tall bike store and get the bikes stocked at WalMart.

At this point, resident Best Show tall bike expert Purple Shirt calls (starts at 36:00) to offer his perspective. PS's HOF status is certainly well-deserved -- he delivered a thoughtful, passionate defense of bike culture, although he was unable to sway Tom that much. He did get Tom to admit that tall bikes are cool, and he believes that the attacks are the work of one bad apple who doesn't represent the true philosophical core of the tall bike community.

Tod Seelie, 27, is an avid cyclist who over the years has befriended members of tall-bike clubs through Critical Mass rides and while studying photography at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. For the last three years, he has photographed the Brooklyn chapter of Black Label.

"To use tall bikes in a window display seemed shallow," Seelie tells the Voice. "Tall-bike gangs have a very heavy base of anti-consumerism. They live in warehouses, and all their clothing could fit into a tall duffel bag. A lot of them are dumpster-diving people. The idea is to avoid consumer waste."

Tom accepts no blame for their dumpster-minimalist lifestyle and finds it ridiculous that he would have to consult with the gangs before he put a baseball card in the spokes of his bike in order to avoid getting acid dumped on his head. PS says they are good people who throw wonderful events, not acid. Tom wants PS to condemn them all. He refuses to do so.

While Tom's fine with the gangs having a lifelong tall bike party, he objects to their quest to put the bikes off-limits to the general pubic and set the parameters for defining bike culture solely within their "nerd clubs".

PS thinks it's good that the media outlets are talking about bikes and suggests that both sides went too far, with Brooklyn Industries displaying inoperable tall bikes in an effort to drive sales of clothes and accessories made in Malaysia. (PS was not particularly impressed by BI's efforts to donate $2 from the sale of messenger bags to Recycle-a-Bicyle.) He asks Tom what he would think if Brooklyn Industries launched a Philly Boy Roy week and marketed it with mannequins (presumably of Frank Rizzo) in its windows. Tom said he would have no claim to such a campagin and Philly Boy Roy would have to address it. Since the show aired, BI did start a Philly Boy Roy promotion: a free hoagie and copy of The Hooters' Nervous Night with any purchase of one of dem Bullfrog Bags. Yeh.

Tom points out that he sees offensive stuff all day, but chooses to ignore it and elevate people instead of attacking them. PS tells Tom to get a tall bike to elevate humanity even more, but Tom prefers to equip his car with wide fenders to go after tall bikes. He vows to put PS's bike on its side by using acid canons to squirt its back tires. PS wants Tom to attend the next Bike Kill, which Tom dubs a Renaissance Fair for Brooklynites. Tom is amazed that even though the Renn Fair workers are trying to live like its 400 years ago, they are still cleaner than the Bike Kill attendees. Tom calls for PS to ban his son from becoming dumpster-diving, Brooklyn street filth who can't even run a Target and take advantage of its generous return policies.

In the last few years, tastemakers have begun calling on Black Label and C.H.U.N.K. Rumor has it that Rolling Stone and MTV have asked Black Label members to cooperate for feature stories, only to be declined. Darko says magazines such as GQ, Details, and The New York Observer have contacted C.H.U.N.K., and no wonder. The club's beer-soaked signature shindig, the Chunkathalon, has one event called Flaming Bikes of Deth. It involves draping chicken wire with rolls of kerosene-soaked newspaper, adding firecrackers, then hauling the exploding rig around on a cycle. On a quieter day recently, club riders saddled up and tried to eat a hot dog at every Gray's Papaya—a mission Darko says was foiled by widespread nausea at the 11th location. (Hot Dog Culture Not For Sale.) They're friendly to reporters, but usually say no. "C.H.U.N.K. has no interest in commercializing bike culture," Darko says.

Tom gives some more details on his plans to commercialize bike culture: "Tom's Tall Bikes" will be located in Williamsburg and offer domestically-made tall bikes. If any hoodlum vigilantes come around, Tom will be on the roof with a machine gun loaded with acid. He will gun them down and then take their tall bikes, spray paint them, and sell them in the store. Tom compares the bikers to nerds who refuse to acknowledge the existence of Star Wars episodes I-III.

Tom will ultimately co-opt bike culture, much like Myspace crushed Friendster in the online social community racket. Tom will wear a bandana and a crazy leather jacket to become "Bike Dude" -- he'll never actually be seen riding a tall bike but will serve as their official spokesman. Tom also has plans to market tall exercise bikes to Brooklyn gyms. PS is not sure if there are any Crunch locations in Brooklyn because his frequent bike riding makes gym visits unnecessary. Someone on the chat offered another merchandising suggestion: McTallBikes toys that could go in McDonald's Happy Meals -- not unlike the viral marketing of early Daniel Johnston cassette distribution.

Other mutant-bike clubs, however, dispense with any attempt at cloaking themselves in enigma. Skunk, 36, called from Massachusetts to talk about SCUL, or the Subversive Choppers Urban Legion, a gleefully nerdy sci-fi-based club whose members calls their bikes "ships."

Tom condemns The Village Voice for such a superficial, meandering piece that glorifies hoodlums. Tom now trades in his acid canon-enabled car for a garbage truck, which he will use to hunt down hoods and crush their tall bikes. PS agrees that there are much more important issues that deserve attention, such as the rampant development in Brooklyn with its shady political deals and destructive cranes.

Tom tries to get PS to repeat "I, PS, aka Tall Bike, hereby on March 28th 2006, fully condemn all actions taken by bike culture", but PS counters by pointing out the good things about bike culture: eco-initiatives like Critical Mass and Transporation Alternatives, the Tour de France, and Lance Armstrong, who, Tom points out, did not make his bike from parts found in a garbage dump. Tom now abandons all vehicles and will fight the tall bikers on foot, taking on as many as 10 at once. While the gang members swing soup-can maces and bridge-railing jousting lances, Tom will defeat them using only his hands, feet, and suburban wit. Tom believes that the mutants are soft, rich kids that have gone to seed. Bike culture has a new enemy: The Kid.

Tom realizes that he will need a fake mustache and a voice scrambler to safely attend a Bike Kill, although he wonders if the bike guys have radios or computers since they have to build them from soup cans and chicken wire. Computer Culture Not For Sale. Using bare-knuckled fists of fury, Tom will send them back to their parents' gated community in New Canaan, crying as they frantically buzz to be let back into the castle's safety. PS also hates rich kids, coming from the middle-class suburbs with a father who worked for a soap company.

Tom concludes by informing everyone in tall bike culture that PS is a double agent who will catalog their actions and report back to Tom and the NYPD. PS can't have it both ways. He's in too deep.

Further viewing: Rachel Myrick's Bike Kill and Jacob Septimus and Anthony Howard's B.I.K.E.

10-speed calls (starts at 59:00) to introduce a conspiracy theory: Brooklyn Industries was pulling a bit of a 1-2 by soaping up their own windows to get some pub. Tom needs more time to digest the theory. Interesting. What was it that PS’s father used to do? Access. Motive. Follow the soap.

- Major Tom has a friendly and serious chat (starts at 1:03) with Jeff Feuerzeig, the Sundance-winning director of the hot new documentary, The Devil And Daniel Johnston. While there was no goofing around during the interview, Jeff and Tom pointed out that the film is often very funny as Daniel Johnston is a gifted comic performer who views his life as an adventure filled with humor despite the tragic maelstrom that has often enveloped those around him. Tom assures the listeners that they will only regret seeing the film if they don't possess a functioning heart.

With his Jersey street cred intact, Feuerzeig made a case that Hoboken and WFMU can claim DJ as much as Austin, TX., and the film's genesis dates back to a 1990 broadcast on the The Music Faucet with Nick Hill. Leading listeners to believe he was peforming from a West Virginia mental hospital, DJ had people glued to their radios for an hour of self-interviews in multiple voices, elaborate comedy skits, improv songs, and a recording of "Speeding Motorcyle" with Yo La Tengo. Feuerzeig said it was the greatest radio drama he had ever heard -- much scarier and more real than Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" fakeout. The Devil and Daniel Johnston (early title: Yip/Jump Movie) is that broadcast brought to cinematic life after four years of work that included pouring over collected press clippings, Super-8 comedies, and transcribing hundreds of 90-minute tapes -- an audio history of DJ's entire life.

The goal of the film was to break through the noise of the quick-and-dirty VH1 "Behind the Music"-style music exposes to create a richer portrait of an artist closer to a work like Terry Zwigoff's Crumb and shot on film instead of DV. The completely independent production was aided by the financial stewardship of Hank Rank, who despite snowballing costs did not want any creative interference on the project and was willing to use his Andy Warhol soup can painting as a potential financial safety net if excessive losses were incurred.

While Feuerzeig doubts that the film will cause people to become instant fans of DJ's music, he and Tom discussed the universal, Woody Guthrie-esque appeal to its fragile beauty and innocence, illuminated by stories about a 22-year-old Berkeley-based DJ who was driven to tears by her first exposure to his songs and other new fans who are responding to the arc of the wayward carnie going from nestling homemade tapes next to McDonald's customers' cheeseburgers to having his artwork displayed at gallery retrospectives.

The interview also explored the delicate balance of the fascinating raw abandon of a mentally-troubled artist and the potential to turn it into a exploitative carnival where the audience is laughing at the performer. The comparison point was Wesley Willis (RIP), who has shared bills with Daniel Johnston and is often dubiously lumped alongside him in the so-called "outsider art" genre. Tom feels that unlike DJ, Willis's act was a sad and depressing spectacle where he was trotted out so hipsters could have a laugh at the fat black guy using a cheap keyboard to deliver quotidian three-chord rants punctuated by corporate slogans.

Some FOT chatters felt that Tom and Jeff were being mean to Mr. Willis, discounting the genuine enjoyment he got out of performing; Tom countered by suggesting that the real meanies were those who pretended he was a rock star and lead him into the circus tent for public consumption. My experience with WW is limited to that period of a few months back in 1996 when he released those records on American and got a burst of media attention -- profiles about a schizophrenic singing on the streets of Chicago, headbutting all of his new friends and selling napkin drawings to Billy Corgan and other celebrity fans. Truth be told, I got a few chuckles out of his songs and found it somewhat intriguing, but, in retrospect, Tom's right about the ickiness of the enterprise. (For the record, my all-time fave WW lyric is "I will always love you like a milkshake" from "Liz Phair".)

As Feuerzeig's Google Alerts confirm, a lot has been written about DJ and the film in recent weeks. Here are some links:

- Guardian profile

- Houston Chronicle profile

- Fluxblog review

- Pitchfork feature

- Slant feature

- Los Angeles Times interview

- L.A. Weekly review

- Salon review

- New York Press review

- The Onion review

- The Village Voice review

(Like Fox News, I strive to offer fair and balanced recaps, so here's Kenneth Turan's negative review -- he found the film tedious and overly self-absorbed.)

Here's a parting quartet of DJ-related tracks. If you don't own the McCarty record, take immediate action to fill this void in your collection.

Yo La Tengo & Daniel Johnston - "Speeding Motorcyle" ["Hi, band!"]

( Click here to buy Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo)

Jad Fair & Daniel Johnston - "I Did Acid With Caroline"

( Click here to buy It's Spooky)

K. McCarty - "Hey Joe"
K. McCarty - "Wild West Virginia"

( Click here to buy Dead Dog's Eyeball: The Songs Of Daniel Johnston)

A few bad apples and crackpots in the FOT chat were causing a bit of a ruckus during this interview and Tom was prepared to fight them over the quality of the film. Tom thinks these babies need a spanking, but perhaps a Queens-style flogging soundtracked by some hardcore doo-wop is in order:

Ghostface - "Whip You With A Strap"

( Click here to buy Fishscale)

- Tom accidentally plays The West Cost Experimental Pop Band's cover of Frank Zappa's “Help I’m a Rock” (he intended to play “I Won’t Hurt You”), which delights Philly Boy Roy, who calls (starts at 2:26) to declare Zappa his favorite music of all-time. PBR's heyday was around the time of Zappa's Sheik Yerbouti, and he makes requests for tracks from Joe's Garage, Hot Rats (specific request for "Peaches en Regalia"), We’re Only In It For the Money, and Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar. Tom denies them all.

PBR then invites Tom to the Philadelphia Folk Festival in Schwenksville to show him how they really throw down. Tom's not familiar with the town, which prompts PBR to ask Tom if he actually lives on Earth. PBR explains that Schwenksville is out in the country, west of Lansdale, Harleysville, Upper Southford, and Lower Southford. While it's Mennonite-laden, he doesn't hold it against them. He explains that Mennonites are a step hipper than the Amish because they watch television, drive cars, and there's a proliferation of them at gentlemen’s clubs.

Tom’s so rattled by the hippie-drivel that he digs himself further into a Zappa hole by lapsing into Mahkyesque mispeak, claiming that Zappa "wasn’t anti-unfunny". PBR believes that this proves Tom's love for Zappa, and after years of hating The Best Show, he's now a fan.

PBR recalled seeing Zappa at the Tower Theater in 1978 (I assume he'll be there on June 11th for the Zappa Plays Zappa Tour de Frank), which marked the first time he every did a pony keg. PBR downed two pony kegs by himself and was joined by Steve, Kirk, and Keith, who he met that night. They are now all deceased due to excessive partying that caused them to fall into the same quarry in separate incidents four years apart. PBR thinks it "kinda crazy", but moves on because he didn't call to talk about them guys.

He called to talk about something he's really excited about: his new fantasy board game called Crawlspaces & Cheesecakessteaks. The game is inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and takes place in the magical world of Philadelphia.

Tom does not know enough to declare his love for C&C, so PBR gives him the rules: A player rolls dice to become any one of hundreds of famous Philadelphians from its founding in 1682 to present. For example, you could take on the form of Ben Franklin, TO, Betsy Ross, Frank Rizzo, or even the drummer from Man-Man. Tom's never heard of them and neither has PBR, but PBR says they are the hippest band out there now and 37 times more far out than the Zappa track Tom played. Once you've morphed into a Philly hero, you can traverse the city stomping out evildoers such as Aaron Burr, Albert Einstein, Brian DePalma, Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Martha Stewart, Southside Johnny. Tom points out that these victims are all from New Jersey, something that just dawned on PBR. He's fine with it because he believes NJ is "Evil Central: Ground Zero" and smells like an armpit ... or a crotch.

In C&C, you can also roll dice to become characters from The Sopranos and take on New Jersey evildoers. Tom points out that the show takes place in New Jersey and PBR calls for him to holdonasecondthere! PBR claims the show is about a Philadelphia singing group and notes that the opening credits show the lead character -- Fred Detweiler -- driving south on the NJ Turnpike en route to what appears to be either Lansdale or Ambler.

PBR has watched the show religiously since its premiere, but has yet to actually hear an episode. Unlike the hoity-toity residents of New Jersey who live in beachside castles and use doilies for toilet paper, PBR's family don't have the funds for anything beyond basic cable so they don't got no HBO. Faced with this dilemma, they watch it at 2 a.m. in the parking lot of a Circuit city, either in Manyunk or the one at the Granite Run mall in Media. The whole Zielger clan sits at the front of the store and stares through the glass doors at screens about 25 feet away. PBR is a pretty good lip reader, so he figures out the plot and tells his family as they chow down on hoagies and watch the images of the Detweiler clan's adventures in the music business.

Needles to say, PBR's plot and character descriptions are a bit irregular around the margins. In his mind, Fred, the big guy with the pet bear, is the group's lead singer. Tom is puzzled and PBR feels the need to start schooling him in The Sopranos lore. In season one, Fred gets bad leg cramps and visits Dr. Detweiler to get some leg cramp pills. They talk and it's revealed that Fred’s on shaky ground with his keyboardist wife, Sheila, and his son prefers to work at Pat’s Steaks instead of continuing with the group. This sets off a rivalry between Pat’s and Jim’s Steaks. Fred's not sure how to resolve the dispute so he firebombs Jim's. Tom hasn’t picked up on all these plot twists and thinks that PBR is filling in a lot of blanks with very creative embellishments. PBR thinks he's smarter because he can figure it out without sound and calls Tom a dummy for suggesting that the lead character is actually named Tony Soprano.

PBR jumps to season five when Fred realizes that Dr. Detweiler is his cousin and they make love. Tom suggests that PBR is unable to detect dream sequences, but PBR insists that what he saw was real and "so happening". PBR then informs Tom that West Philly Bobby, the group's baritone, gets killed early on and is replaced by a guy with weird teeth called Roosevelt Avenue Mike, who PBR previously saw as an old-timey music fan in an art film about two nerdy girls. PBR screened Ghost World by peeking through his sleeping neighbor's door late at night. He also watched two titallatin' Andy Sidaris films not sanctioned by Rhoda: Malibu Express and The Picasso Trigger.

So anyway, Roosevelt Avenue Mike missed a performance, so Fred went out to his house near Warrington and accidentally shot him in the face with a gun he found. Tom sees this as further evidence that PBR has completely misinterpreted the program. PBR asks Tom about Old Verne, Fred's spectacled father and manager of the group. Tom issues another character corrective, but PBR finds the name "Uncle Junior" outrageously incongruant -- the first half commanding respect with the latter half suggesting a man who would wear a derby or beanie propeller hat. PBR finds Vern to be hilariously crabby and recalls a scene in which he recited the line: "Oh, Fred, you make me as mad as a rattlesnake at a Thai wedding." Tom is certain that the dialogue is not accurate, but PBR is confident in his lip-reading skills.

PBR tries to find some common ground with Tom on Fred’s Fonzlily-pompadoured cousin Todd. Tom tells him that he's talking about Silvio, but PBR finds it laughable that Tom would suggest that the character was a woman instead of a dude. Todd does do doo-wop, but Fred wants to stay contemporary, like current South Philly faves Gavin DeGraw and Kelly Clarkson. Tom is losing his patience and PBR is becoming more riled up, calling Tom a "stupid, dumb, dunce jerk" for trying to convince him yet again that the show is named after an Italian crime family instead of a (practically) Mennonite singing group. In the most recent episode, PBR saw Todd being carted off to the hospital after getting food poisoning from a bad hoagie purchased at a NJ Wawa.

Tom asks PBR about the final scene of the season premiere where "Old Vern" shoot the guy he calls "Fred" in the season opener. PBR did not see this -- he saw Vern simply pointing a metal stick at Fred. Shawn the Skunk is the black sheep who is having an affair with Sheila. Fred and Sheila love each other, but want to go their separate ways creatively, much like Stills & Cross or The Hooters' Hyman & Bazillian. PBR proceeds to name the entire classic-era lineup and informs Tom that he did coke with all of them from 1983-1989. He still snorts the occasional rail and thinks it's probably approved of in The Holy Book.

PBR changes the subject back to Roddy, the little fat kid who doubles as Fred's valet and drummer in the group. He wants to see if his main Roddy plotline matches up with Tom's: his biggest scene ever a occurred a few seasons ago when he was taken to a hotel in the city to get an exorcism to rid him of chronic, diarrhetic demons. Tom doesn't recall the scene and PBR says it looks like someone don't watch the show. Tom reverts back to the double negatives by saying "don't not watch", which PBR hails as a blessing since the Greatest Love Of All is to talk like someone from Roxboro.

PBR also informs Tom that he killed him in a recent game of C&C. He flew across the city as Julius Erving and stabbed Tom in the face with a sharpened peanut chew because he was trying to suck the funny out of David Brenner. He promises to do it again with future Scharpling kills coming from a juggler vein severed by a throwing star made from a sharpened Kandy Kake. Tom doesn't know what to make of all this, but tells PBR that it sounds like he's having a blast filling in all the story details on The Sopranos to make it Philly-centric. PBR warns Tom that if he doesn't watch himself, he's gonna get filled in by some Yeunglings down below. PBR declares victory over Tom and gives him an inside scoop that Fred will grace the cover of next week's TV Guide. PBR won't read it because he already knows everything he can and wants to know. He also can't afford to buy it because his pencil factorty job was outsourced to Trenton and he won't commute because of the bad air. To him, Philly is a paradise compared to Jersey's hades.

I picked up a copy of C&C at Brooklyn Industries (Fantasy Game Culture For Sale) and played as Cinderella bassist Eric Brittingham, killing Tico Torres, Dave "The Snake" Sabo, and the drummer from Higgins with a sharpened rod of ring bologna.

PBR is bored and might go to 7-11 to read rock magazines until 4 a.m. since he's on the outs with Rhoda. His mag of choice is Revolver because he likes to keep up on some of the heavy stuff like AFI. He tells Tom that he thought Fallout Boy were great a on SNL, but Tom disagrees. As a result, Tom will get also get some franks down below.

Tom can’t win. Whah Whah Whaaaaaaaaaaah.

Frank Zappa - "The Sheik Yerbouti Tango"

Hose it down:

Volcano Suns - "Laff Riot"

On the next ... The Best Show on WFMU: Tom morphs into Arnold Diaz and BRINGS IT, Joey the Pimp calls to discuss the juice he brings to his new radio obsession, Spike slinks back to the fold to announce his plans to launch Droopy Zippermouth's Discipline Den on WFMU (a mixture of The Beatles, doo-wop, and the horror film soundtrack work of Italian prog-rockers Goblin), and the Good Guys win because Free Form Radio Culture is Not For Sale.

Posted by Omar at 7:27 AM | Permalink | Comments

Scientific evidence suggests that even the fetuses inside of mothers watching that commercial are getting (1) dumber and (2)...

Posted by x amount at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments

How would you say that your material has changed with time?

I think it's become a little more of a meal rather than little snacks. You first get up there and you're like, "How can I take this idea that I have and make a little comedy snack out of it." I think, now, when I get on the stage I'm trying to, like a chef, a four-course dinner onstage. A couple of times a year, you come off stage and think, "I came pretty close there. That was a nice, well rounded meal I gave them." People react to that. They come up to you later and say, "Hey, that was great. You really brought it all together." I feel like they sense that. If you try to serve up something that's not just little jokes, if they get a sense of who you are or you give them a hint as to what's going on with you, I feel that that's what I'm striving for lately. If you ever get close, it's a real kick in the pants and I enjoy it.

-- Tom Shillue, in this big, long interview. And it sounds like the second CD he'll be working on is gonna be gold.

[via Laughmachine.]

Posted by x amount at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments

Bear witness.
I'm the one that does the rockin', all my sounds are legit.

Super Lover Cee & Casanova Rud - "I Gotta Good Thing (Remix)"

(via the now dead Vinyl Addicts)

Posted by DOP at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Comments