Self Help Radio 010215: Cracked

(Original picture here.)

I cracked the new year.  Sorry.

Would you believe it came cracked already?  Do you remember how 2014 arrived?  The same people brought this year to us!  "Contents may settle during shipping" & all that.  I bet they dropped 2015 because they had too much to drink on New Year's Eve!

Anyway.  Here's a show about all kinds of cracks.  Plus there's an interview with David Fruchter, who has written a book called "The Autobiography Of Crack," & Marge Most reports on Lexington's crack epidemic, & I talk to the enigmatic creative type who calls herself "The Artist Later Known As Craquelure."  All that & lots of music, too!

The show is at the Self Help Radio website.  Pay attention to rudimentary login/password info.  That keeps malicious bots from shutting down my site.  The songs I played are listed below.

Happy new year!  Thanks for listening!

(part one)

"Cracked" Happy Birthday _Happy Birthday_
"Crackin' Up" Bo Diddley _Go Bo Diddley_
"Cracking Up" Nick Lowe _Labour Of Lust_

"Blue-Tailed Fly (Jimmie Crack Corn)" Pete Seeger _American Favorite Ballads, Volume 1_
"Cracker Jack" Janis Martin _The Female Elvis: The Complete Recordings, 1956-1960_
"Mein Herz Hat Einen Knacks" Liani Covi _Mein Herz Hat Einen Knacks_
"Alle Frauen Dieser Welt" Gerhard Wendland _Pop In Germany, Vol. 2_
"Crackity Jones (Demo)" The Pixies _Doolittle 25_
"She's Crackin' Up" Cosmic Psychos _Go The Hack_

"Facts About Crack" Trendy _I'm Just The Other Woman_
"Who's Got The Crack?" The Moldy Peaches _The Moldy Peaches_
"All The Young Children On Crack" Television Personalities _My Dark Places_
"Genius Of Crack" Tsunami _World Tour & Other Destinations_

"Cracka" Mike Birbiglia _Two Drink Mike_
"Stuff Up The Cracks" The Mothers Of Invention _Cruising With Ruben & The Jets_

(part two)

"Cracks In The Sidewalk" The # 1 _The Collector_
"Stepping On The Cracks" Green Peppers _Domino Mornings_
"Cracked Wheat" The Go-Betweens _Send Me A Lullaby_

"Cracked Actor" David Bowie _Aladdin Sane_
"She Cracked" The Modern Lovers _The Modern Lovers_
"Crack" Big Black _The Hammer Party_
"Suzi Crack" Arts & Decay _Shadowjesus_

"Crackin' Up Over You" Roy Hamilton _Dark End Of The Street, 1963-1969: The Operatic Soul Of Roy Hamilton_
"Cracked Up Over You" Lee Rogers _Rare Soul 45s_
"Crack In The Sidewalk" House Of Freaks _Monkey On A Chain Gang_
"Cracked Open" The Manhattan Love Suicides _Burnt Out Landscapes_

"I Can't Crack" Furniture _The Lovemongers_
"Crack-Dream-Over" Data Bank A _The Birth Of Tragedy_

Whither Cracked?

Happy new year!  Another long year of Self Help Radio!  Oh, sorry about that.

A show about cracking (but not a show about crack) (although there will be some content about crack, it can't be helped) probably came to me while listening either to the first Modern Lovers record (where you discover that she cracked, I'm sad, but won't; she cracked, I'm hurt, you're right) or perhaps the record Aladdin Sane (where you are told to crack, baby, crack, show me you're real).  Most likely both at a similar time.  Such is the way ideas fester.

Somewhere however there's the song "Anthem," by Leonard Cohen, which I won't play tomorrow, but which has the immortal chorus:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

Why won't I play it?  It's really long!  Maybe I'll play it on the show before Self Help Radio - I'm subbing that show tomorrow.

Tomorrow!  From 7 to 9am!  (Plus the two hours before, freeform radio.)  WRFL Lexington, 88.1 fm in town.  WRFL dot FM online.  Hopefully at the Self Help Radio website later in the day!

Happy new year!

New Year's Eve

According to some noodling & calculation & stuff, I did 92 (!) radio shows this year.  Technically, nineteen or twenty of those were not actually on the radio (they were podcasts), so the number is more like 72 - but surely that's still kind of impressive.  It means I was on the radio an average of every four or five days.

But that's misleading, since fourteen of those shows were my summer blues show, Woke Up One Early Morning Blues.  I did the show before Self Help Radio, so I wasn't really on the radio more, I just did two different shows in a three hour period.

So if you say I did 58 radio shows this year, you can say I was on the radio an average of every six days.  I wish I weren't so anal about making unfactual claims, especially when those claims aren't really about anything important.  Oh, fuck it.

I did 92 radio shows this year!

Of those shows:

55 were Self Help Radio shows
23 were sub shows on WRFL
14 were Woke Up Early One Morning Blues shows

How did I get 55 Self Help Radio shows in a year that only has 52 weeks?  Easy.  I made up a "Self Help Radio Week" in March & did five shows that week.  I probably won't do that again, mainly because I'll be out of town during Spring Break, &, anyway, I'd hate to ask the other RFL morning deejays to give up their time slots for me.  It was also exhausting!

For Self Help Radio:

I explored 44 new themes.
I did seven "regular" shows (my birthday, Valentine's Day, anniversary, Halloween, my wife's birthday, my favorites of the year, + Christmas)
I did four "indiepop a to z" segments.

But all of this is just me being goofy about a radio show that very few people care about.  Maybe you're one of them, & if you do, & you like my nonsense, you're someone I should thank for making 2014 a fun year to be doing my teen-aged radio show.  I do this because I have a weird compulsion, but the fact that sometimes there's someone listening - & that someone is you - makes it even more fun for me.

Thank you!  Have a happy 2015!

Naps A Lot

2014 was the year of the nap.  At least for me.

I nap because I usually stay up late.  I stay up late because I nap.

I knew a guy who went home after work & took a thirty minute nap every day.  Thirty minutes!  It takes me a half hour to work my way into a nap!

Sometimes napping is about being tired.  Sometimes napping is about napping.

I dream a lot when I nap.  I can't be sure, but I'm guessing I'm in REM sleep for more than 70% of my nap.

That's not possible?  It feels like it's possible.

I just read this at this site:

Some scientists believe dreams are the cortex's attempt to find meaning in the random signals that it receives during REM sleep. The cortex is the part of the brain that interprets & organizes information from the environment during consciousness. It may be that, given random signals from the pons during REM sleep, the cortex tries to interpret these signals as well, creating a "story" out of fragmented brain activity.

I love the idea that dreams are the result of our brain confusing itself.

Now.  After all this.  It's nap time.

Sticking Stories

I don't know if anyone is ever telling the truth.  When I tell stories, I assume I'm telling the truth, but recently a friend told me a story that I had told him two decades ago as if it had happened to him.  Both of us routinely tell each other things that we did that we don't remember doing.

Did we?  How can we be sure?

In that spirit, I don't entirely believe anything that's a personal anecdote from someone I either don't know very well or don't see enough to communicate with them regularly.  & I'm highly skeptical of the rest.  I treat them as perhaps colorful fictions, like mediocre movies you find yourself watching in an afternoon with nothing else going on.

& I assume it's going to get worse.

There's so much time in our lives to fill.  I've had so many long conversations with friends, & once the internet was invented, complete strangers, that I haven't the slightest memory of.  Most interestingly, some of those conversations happened on the telephone when long distance calling was quite expensive.  I think I can remember the contents of maybe a dozen phone calls.  Those late night conversations, especially when I was young - they are lost to the ether.

What's fascinating to me is that people who are much older - & I assume myself, come to think about it - they tend to tell the same stories over & over.  Like all the time they've lived can now be summarized in shorter & shorter anecdotes.  As we get older, it seems, many of us become a Reader's Digest version of ourselves.

I loved those conversations, I loved the feeling of connection they gave me in lonelier parts of my life.  Friendships & love happened because of those conversations.  If all I have left now is the memories of having the conversations, I allow myself a bit of self-pity to begin to dread those memories going away, too.

I know it doesn't happen to all of us.  But I can't imagine I'm going to be one of the exceptions.