The Inbox Crowd

Much thanks to the weirdo who thought he would repay me for the suggestion of the album cover to name matching game yesterday with a link to Puzzlefarter. Yes, I've been playing it. No, I am not very good at it. That should come as a relief, but it does not. I like to win!

I am about to go record the airbreaks for the Trash show. I have a special guest, a person who writes books about the garbage of famous people. Do you think he'll smell nice? I hope so. It's a smallish place where we record. One unpleasant aroma could ruin the whole session. But the show will be great. Trust me on this. Much, much better than the imaginary one I did in my head four years ago. That one sucked.

Do feel free to send me links to ridiculous online games that are a complete waste of time. Otherwise I'll do work, & no one - not even my boss! - wants to see my do that.

& do find me tomorrow afternoon at selfhelpradio.net for this week's show - all about trash. I haven't heard it yet, but I think it'll be awesome.

Not Any Longer Confessive Obpulsive

Ack! I can't stop playing this game! It's a game where you have like twenty seconds to match nine album (or CD) covers with the names of the record. I'm not very good at it, though. The category I most find myself in is "alternative" although if they had a category called "records Gary's brothers had that he rifled through continually when he was a young kid" I'd be awesome at it.

There were certain records I would never have listened to, not in a million years, but whose sleeves I found amazing, like a panel of a long comic book the rest of which existed entirely in my head. For example, the cover to Queen's News Of The World (the image doesn't show you how the record folded out), which I would never, even as a kid, have listened to of my own free will, although, of course, I've heard the songs "We Will Rock You" & "We Are The Champions" more times than my mother ever told me she loved me. But the cover! An alien made of stone killing all those hippies! The stories that album cover brought into my head!

There were other memorable ones, but I can't find images of them online - I guess they were not as famouss, or maybe I'm remembering the names wrong - but games like this do make me miss vinyl & the attention lavished on album covers. Maybe I suck at the game because most of the records in the "alternative" category are from CDs & who the fuck pays attention to a CD cover?

Record collecting friends back in the day often would distinguish between a "great package" - the music & the presentation were both great - & great records that had shitty sleeves & great sleeves hiding awful records. Middle- to late-period 4AD records often got that last complaint - 23 Envelope did a smashing job with the sleeve but the record is unfuckinglistenable. Do you hear me Ultra Vivid Scene? Do you?

(That's not really my opinion. I was in character! Plus, that first Ultra Vivid Scene record, the one with the toothbrush on the cover - that's not a very good presentation for a decent pop record.)

I do miss vinyl, but not enough to actually buy it. Ack! What a pain in the ass! It's so much easier to be digital. & maybe I'm a philistine, but it sounds fine to me. But perhaps the vinyl-o-philes are winning. Which is great. There'll be more records whose sleeves I don't recognize in work-habit-destroying games like this one.

No worries! My iPod will tell me what the sleeve looks like!

Whither Trash?

If there's anything you must take away from a cursory glance at post-ideological America in the twenty-first of all possible centuries, it's this: the fucking place is a mess. What the hell went on here? Your father & I were just gone for the weekend & we come back & - I mean, just look at Wyoming. Look at it.

I am completely ripping off a Kids In The Hall sketch right now. I can't remember much of it, so I can't find it in their episode guides or on YouTube, but I know a Kids In The Hall sketch when I rip it off. & that's one of them. Maybe.

I would also like to point out that it's the second time this week I have used some sort of construction involving "the 21st century." I believe on Monday I used the phrase "the twenty-first of all human centuries" & just above I noted that this was "the twenty-first of all possible centuries." I would like you to incorporate this sort of talk in your everyday language. & not just about centuries. It helps to imagine that you're addressing a large audience. A large, nude audience.

You know what? I was totally not ripping off a Kids In The Hall sketch up there. It was an homage. Which reminds me. I once used the word "homage" in a phone call to someone who probably never called me back, but I pronounced it "hommedge." A friend who was sitting next to me corrected me when I got off the phone. He asked me where I heard the word & why I was pronouncing it wrong, & I said (which was true) that I had read it & never heard it spoken. That happened with the word "ascertain" too. & "metropolis," which I used to pronounce met-ro-pol-is, not muh-trop-o-lis. Oh shit! Maybe that dude didn't call me back because I mispronounced homage! What a judgmental fuck.

It might not be a Kids In The Hall sketch, but I'm pretty sure it is. I seem to remember Dave Foley in it. They throw a party & they trash the country & they have to clean it up before their parents get home. Who else could it be? That sketch freaked me out the first time I saw it, in a similar way to how I felt the first time I saw the Monty Python Olympic Hide & Seek. That gave me nightmares.

I wasn't writing in this blog in 2004, but since I did an imaginary radio show about trash then, you can go back & read my imaginary blog where I imaginarily discussed why I chose that theme. I can't imagine I ripped off the Kids In The Hall at that time - but I probably did.

Preface To Trash: Wait! Didn't You Do A Trash Show Before?

I got this email from the little voice that lives inside my head:

Dear fuckface,
I know you pride yourself on being "original" & "edgy" & "heterosexual," but I am writing to inform you that you are totally re-doing one of your old themes this week. Ha! This is hubris, my friend! Your pride goeth & then you fucking fall! Because you're all like "I never do the same theme except when it's a special event because I am that good a deejay & I am also a girl waah! waah!" But ha ha! You did a "trash" show back in the summer of 2004! What do you say to that?
love,
your inner voice

I wish I could tell you how kind it was of my inner voice to write me an email. Normally it just engenders in me tremendous guilt & shame that I can only forget about with massive amounts of alcohol. This may mean that our relationship is getting better.

What my little voice tells you is true, & you can see it on my website on the page of 2004 playlists. According to this page, on June 30, 2004, I did a show about "Trash." But wait! Look what it says next to it: "Imaginary Radio Show # 3"! What could that mean?

It means that, in the summer of 2004, I was not doing my radio show. The reason for it had to do with internal KOOP politics - I had offended the regime in power at the time, & they used their cronies to accuse me of stuff, which resulted in me not doing a radio show for a couple of months. In the interval, I pretended to do radio shows - if it happened now, I'd be doing podcasts - but then, I just posted playlists. I probably also burned myself some CDs to listen to, or to send to my girlfriend, who was in New York that summer. I just didn't want to get out of practice. The point is, I never really did a radio show with the theme of "trash" - I just made a playlist. Is all.

Hey! I just got another email from the little voice that lives in my head:

Dear douchebag,
You win - but only on a technicality. Next time, though, I bury you. I fucking obliterate you.
can't wait for dinner,
your inner voice

If my inner voice ever figures out how to text, I will be in all thirty-two kinds of hell.

A Punishment Of Britches

Let it never be said, in the annals of all humankind, in this choked & stinkish blog-o-sphere, where altitude & attitude trump rectitude & pulchritude, where each voice is equal in theory but unreadable in practice, where one is judged by content management systems, network & web page affiliations, ad clicks & crossover marketing potential, as we hunker down in this, the twenty-first of all human centuries, where challenges are affirmations & every diagnosis is also a prognosis, where the last of labels shall set us all free, where the digital boundaries are drawn by RAM & CPU, not by surveyor & natural landmark, where the slowly disappearing highway on the emptying American terrain reappears in our mind, unbounded, in leaps & bounds, at the outset on its last legs, fetid, fertile, fanciful, false, the whole slew of this & that not to replace those & them, but to render them neutral & neutered, to placate power while posing as populist, where... In this... Let it not be said... As we in this century are... Uh... Fuck!

I lost my train of thought.

Oh, well, why not just go listen to the "Pale Show," this past week's episode of Self Help Radio, which is available for your listerine pleasure at selfhelpradio.net. It's free of harmful ultraviolet rays, although it may have dangerous musics.

Seriously, though, I was going to say something meaningful up there. It's just, fuck! I lost my train of thought.