WPSU Fund Drive

The most fearsome plague has descended upon us: another public radio fund drive. But this time don't just cave in. Don’t let the guilt trip take a bite our of you, don't automatically surrender to the threat that if you don't pay up, all you will have left is Rush Limbaugh and Christian rock on the dial.

Put your diva on, get a little radical—tell the whiners what you think, really think of their performance, all year round. How many times have you said you cannot stand one more "This I believe" segment. The national broadcast gave it up months ago, but here in Happy Valley we continue to be smothered with sentimental clichés.

Are you worried that Christine Allen's voice is not squeaky enough? You want to hear a women with an even higher pitch? One that will send dogs howling?

Do you think the folk show should be even goofier?

You want to hear more experimental jazz but not at ten in the morning, but perhaps at night after a whiskey?

Tell the programmers. They will trot out endless testimonials about how important NPR is, yet nary a voice mentioning how easily they cave in to perceived right-wing criticism. Sometimes the cosmopolitanism is unbelievably bland. To say nothing of the classical music selections organized around the birthdays of famous composers. Perhaps you have heard that Mozart overture 10,000 times already and you would not mind something else.

We live in a small town, there aren't that many people writing checks, you can have some influence. Maybe add a little heft to this tepid public radio station called WPSU.

New Decade Named

So the decade we are concluding has a name stuck to it, the 'noughties', a tag grounded in the two zeros of each year, but suggesting both nihilism (an old boyish favorite of mine) and mildly provocative behavior. The pretty English lady up the street likes to use 'naughty' a lot, so I have gotten used to seeing it in print, and this swift summary of fashion tries to herd all the naughtiness into a string of styles. The best thing about the Guardian's fashion history is the narrators voice--it speaks with fey ironic certainty.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/audioslideshow/2009/oct/20/review-decade-fashion

Lou Mastroianni

One of the weird things about growing up is watching how the past gets recycled. Today's NY Times video is on Fellini's La Dolce Vita. But before it comes on we hear a video clip of a band singing "All you need is love" for an advertisement. Then on to Marcello Mastroianni, who is presented as one of the great screen actors. If somewhere in your adult life, you discovered that life and marriage was not so simple, you watched Fellini, maybe more than once. So as someone who has run through all the Mastroianni and Deneuve and everyone else, it is more than a little distressing to see the NY Times explain, again, how excellent they all are. Is there some automatic erase function in culture? Nevermind remembering Homer, can we not remember the early 60s? The first time this phenomenon hit me was reading the New Yorker. They had an article in which they mentioned Lou Reed. But they could not just say, Lou Reed says . . . . Instead they wrote "the singer, song-writer, Lou Reed says. . . " As if Lou Reed were the same as Paul Anka. As if he needed an introduction. Did anyone reading the New Yorker really need an explanation as to who Lou Reed was? Apparently some (young) editor was concerned, and out of that little concern, I grew worried that Lou Reed, for all is obnoxious ego, was no longer self-evident—much like Italian cinema.

Time's a Revelation

In contrast to Allison Kraus's big time pop sensibilities, I always thought that Gillian Welch was the grad student, who tried not only to capture the tone of small town country music recording, but who wanted to write lyrics from within the consciousness of rural folk who had not yet caught up with modernity in the 1960s. So when I drive to the country to bring my daughter to a party in a new house with old furniture to meet a mother who speaks slowly to the sudden crowd of parents in her living room, I know that Gillian Welch is right to sing her cautious songs about that new fangled music. There are folks in long country roads who still hold onto their parents' way of talking. They may not sing that way much, except in church, but Gillian Welch moves us to listen like the young girl that the country grandmother of the country mother once was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db_7Lr5Rb3Y

Drummers

As a boy in the 70s I thought that the guitar solo was the most important moment in a great song, ok, given the cult of Jimmy, Jimi, Pete and Eric that was unsurprising, but now it seems that that the drummer is carrying the song, at least in British bands. Was it started by the Libertines, in a fine Clash remake, wherein the drums and the charismatic leader singer carry the whole effort: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2oTuxXjbO4

We know that U2 have relied on bass and drum forever, but the Arctic Monkees are also completely dependent on their banging drummer. No more Stairway, its all in the pounding as shown in their celebrate video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF978AgLyaY

The Arctic video for Crying Lightning is, on the other hand, just an awkward copy of the Pogues' adaptation of Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa, something like Stonehenge on a boat

Mullet, Its History

Few investigate the origin of the mullet, and surely the history of this hybrid cut is older than this video, but it is worth noting that Bowie is a stage in its development

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejQS9kQDXmk&feature=PlayList&p=D737F223BD384FE1&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=13