Drinking From A Deep Welles

The other day I found this cleverly animated YouTube video an associate of Stan Lee made featuring the comic icon saying bad words.  I suspect there are tons of recordings like this of famous people being profane, & there are some which have been withheld because it would be bad for the person involved but perhaps we'll hear them after that famous person leaves his current job.  Maybe they should release it now - he's not really doing his job anymore anyway.

My first large-scale introduction to this - well, it may have been Negativland's U2 single - but I recall getting a copy of the collection Celebrities At Their Worst! sometime in the mid-90s.  I'm not sure if it was supposed to change my mind about any of the celebrities - John Wayne is a racist dick? I would never have suspected - but what it did do is introduce me to one of my great obsessions.  & that is the track which was called on the CD (if I remember it correctly) "Orson Welles Pissing Away His Talent."

Above I chose not to embed the Stan Lee video, but I'll embed this:

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It's a cleverly animated collection of those Orson Welles outtakes.  I love them so much.  I wish I could tell you why.  I have them memorized like a favorite song.  I wish there were an entire album that proceeded in the same manner.  One time on Facebook I wrote this:

There are people out there who would swoon to the discovery of a lost John Lennon song, or a mid-60s Dylan recording session previously unknown, or Bowie tracks recorded but never released in the mid-70s, but for me I'd be utterly ecstatic if someone found just three more minutes of outtakes of Orson Welles getting pissy & haughty while doing shitty, humiliating radio commercials.

It's absolutely true.

Photographs Of Places I've Lived # 12: Avenue A

(image from Google Maps)

This little efficiency is where I lived from early 1992 till the end of 1993.  It was a very long two years, in which I had to deal with my post-college life & with the disastrous end of my first relationship, about which I'm sure I'll discuss much later in this blog when I get to those years during Self Help Radio's shows about the years of my birth in the appropriate January.  It's the apartment in the middle there, in the 4552 building but on the right, under the tree.  Number 102.  This image is from around 2014, but I don't remember my door being blue.  It was a one-room apartment - there was no bedroom - with a pretty sizable bathroom that had a closet in it, & a cramped kitchen that you saw when you enter the apartment.  The kitchen ran along the north side (we're looking west in this picture).  There were windows on that side, but thanks to that lovely tree, I never had much light.  There was also a door on the "patio" side - which meant, if the front door were in the east wall, it was in the north wall - for no real reason.  There's a dumb story about that door which kind of epitomized my early days there.

The relationship ended with lies & betrayal & it fucked me up.  Many of my friends had become friends with her over the three years we were "together," & she leaned on them a lot because of her own issues, which meant I had to deal with my friends talking about her, & letting her stay with them, & other shit like that.  I was incredibly lonely & as close to mentally ill as I would ever be.  Thoughts of suicide were not uncommon.  The nights were long & I couldn't eat or sleep & I would lie on my bed wishing my mind would just break.  Certain things kept me going, usually obsessively: Neil Young's voice, the Kids In The Hall, Ellery Queen mysteries.  I woke early & walked to campus, where I now worked almost full-time, & sat in the sun until I had to go inside.  I went to movies & plays & music shows & did everything I could to keep my brain occupied.  It wasn't enough.

One night I began aware of a scratching on that north door, a door I never opened.  Not once.  It was intermittent but when it happened, it was insistent.  Could it be a bug?  An animal of some kind?  A human?  The pain in which I lived quickly translated into terror.  But I didn't believe in anything supernatural - it couldn't be a ghost or the like.  What did I have to lose by just opening the door?

To make matters worse, it was a stormy night, with high winds.  I didn't want to go out into that.  It had to be 2 or 3 in the morning.  I'd hear the wind & I'd hear that scratching & I was frightened out of my mind.

But I didn't open the door.  No, I quietly opened my front door, to peep behind the small, I guess decorative, stone wall to the door's right.  The light from my apartment would help me see what was there, if anything.  So I closed the door quietly, slowly looked past the wall - only to find a flyer of some sort put there by a restaurant advertising delivery.  There was one on the door to the apartment opposite mine.  The person tasked to spread those coupons around didn't know the doors were for the same apartments, apparently.  I felt like a fool.  I might've just let it stay there all night if I hadn't mustered up a small bit of courage.

One thing to say about this place: for a brief time, the first woman to really love me lived with me here.  I wish I had been well enough to return her love properly.  It would take a decade for me to be able to be a good partner, that's how utterly fucking destroyed I was.  I would hurt so many people - I would hurt myself a great deal - in the next few years.  She moved out because she couldn't still be with me if she lived with me, & I understood that.  But those few months - I believe from August 1992 to December 1992 - I remember them fondly.

Another thing is that a childhood friend from Garland stayed with me briefly when he came down looking to relocate.  He would actually move into a place across the street from the house where I rented a room but never lived.  When my lease here ran out, he encouraged me to get a place with him, which I did.  Although it didn't quite go as well as we hoped.

Self Help Radio 112420: Glam & Glamour

(Hair & stripe from the album cover for Aladdin Sane of course.)

Yes, last night's Self Help Radio featured little - if any - actual glam music.  A listener - who asked me to play David Bowie & I didn't - said he did hear some glam influence.  Which I guess is possible if one is writing a song about glam.

But the show was also about glamour!  Which comes from glam.  Which reminds me, why is it glamour with a u but glamorous without a u?  & isn't it weird to write "a u."  Since the letter u is a vowel, you feel visually it would be more correct to write "an u."  But since the letter u is pronounced "you" (or sometimes "yew") (& often "yoo" as in "yoo hoo!") & there's a consonant in the pronounced world, we have what I call the "hard article" a rather than the "soft article" an.  Which is also why we say "give me an m, Pat" on Wheel Of Fortune when clearly it sound be a m, because m is a consonant.  & by the way, I don't mean a m like "ante meridiem" & don't even get me started as to where it's even possible for noon to be 12 pm - which is to say "post meridiem" since "meridiem" means "noon."  12 am could be either noon or midnight in this scenario & what a headache that would be.

Was I supposed to be talking about something else?  Oh yeah, my new etymologically-based stand-up is coming to a YouTube near me sometime never.  Also, this week's show can be listened to if you want.

The glam & glamour show is at the Self Help Radio website now or whenever you're ready.  Please remember that you'll need a username - which is "SHR" - & a password - which is "selfhelp" - without the quotation marks - to listen.  It's nearly three hours long!  It gets kinda tedious.  Sorry.  What happens on the show is detailed below.

Self Help Radio Glam & Glamour Show
"Glam" Icehouse _Primitive Man_
"This Is The Glam" New Wet Kojak _This Is The Glamorous_
"Glam!" Leila K _Carousel_

introduction & definitions

"Glamour Girl" T-Bone Walker _The Original Source_
"Glamour Girl" Tony Lake _Teen Town U.S.A. Volume 9_
"Glamour Girl" Harvey Scales & The Seven Sounds _Back Then One More Time_
"Glamour Girl" Harold Hopkins _Big City Soul 4: 60 Northern Soul Classics_
"Glamour Girl" Chicks On Speed _Chicks On Speed Will Save Us All!_

interview with the Rev Dr Howard Gently

"Glamorous" Gary Myrick _Language_
"The Glamorous Life" Sheila E _In The Glamorous Life_
"The Glamorous Life" Cool C _I Gotta Habit_
"Glamorous Life" Lolly Pop _Lolly Pop_
"Glamorous Nights" Stevans _Rupture_

interview with "appalachian glam" designer Rock Hart

"Glam Saved The Day" Pocket Rockets _Love Or Perish_
"Glam Racket" The Fall _The Infotainment Scan_
"Glam Rock Cops" Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine _Straw Donkey... The Singles_
"Trash Glam Baby" The Boomtown Rats _Citizens Of Boomtown_
"Glam Slam" Prince _Lovesexy_

interview with glam expert Madeline Bowie

"Glamour Gap" Marine Research _Sounds From The Gulf Stream_
"Glamour & Glitz" A Tribe Called Quest _The Show (Original Soundtrack)_
"Ice (As If She Could Steal A Piece Of My Glamour)" Alec Empire _The Golden Foretaste Of Heaven_
"Glamour Job" Bulldogs _Top Tiers_
"French Man Glam Gang" Luke Haines & Peter Buck _Beat Poetry For Survivalists_

interview with Glamorous Magazine editor & publisher Dame Edwina Boogles-Smyth
Ned Dry presents Portland recording artists Lieutenant Corporal McCheese

"You (Chunka, Chunka) Were Glamorous" The Legend _Creation Soup Volume One_
"Glamourous" Jetlag _9:15 To Nowhere_
"Glamour Girl" Louie Austen _Iguana_
"The Glamour Chase" The Associates _Wild & Lonely_
"Shamrock Glamrock" The Bundles _The Bundles_

the penultimate airbreak (nothing special happens)

"My Glamorous Mother" The Gonks _Five Things You Didn't Know About The Gonks_
"Astral Glamour" Homosexuals _Astral Glamour_
"Glamour" Low Life _Downer Edn_
"Be Glamorous" Charlie Boyer & The Voyeurs _Clarietta_
"Money Fame Glitz Glamour" Joy & Revolution _Love Is Kind_

conclusion & goodbye

"Glamour & Glory Blues" Curtis Jones _Complete Recorded Works In Chronological Order Volume 4_
"So Glamorous" Sam Cooke _The Complete Singles 1956-1962_
"Chip Pan Glam" The Understudies _Indietracks 2009: An Indiepop Compilation_
"Hand Glams" Ty Segall _$Ingle$ 2_
"The Glam Dicenn" Julian Cope _Floored Genius 4: Brain Donor_

Whither Glam & Glamour?

(image from here.)

The question is: will there be actual glam on the show where the theme is (at least one-half) glam?  This is the show, after all, which had "lullabies" as a theme, but didn't play famous lullabies unless they happened to call themselves lullabies.  The answer to the question is: I think so but I'm not sure.

What I can say is that glamour is such a big concept that I felt the need to narrow the theme down to songs that mention glamour itself.  Which is generally how I do things.  But sometimes I feel the need to say it out loud.

Other than that - oh, am I supposed to tell you why there's a show about glam & glamour on late Monday night tonight?  I wish I knew.  Seriously, I came up with this theme a month or two ago when I was doing what seemed like a radio show every other day.  It's all a blur.  It's still a blur, actually.  Is there a Self Help Radio tonight?

Yes, at midnight, till 3am, on 90.7 fm KBOO online at kboo.fm.  The least glamorous person in the world will be talking about glamour.  The least glam person in the world will be talking about glam.  Maybe you can tune in.

Preface To Glam & Glamour: A Shameful Confession

(Aren't all confessions a bit shameful?  Or can you imagine a shameless confession?)

The reason the show this week has a two part theme is:

1) The fear that there wouldn't be enough songs about "glam" alone or "glamour" alone &
2) The fear that if I played songs about "glam" it would somehow not fit the theme "glamour" because of
3) The fear that someone listening might not know "glam" is short for "glamour" so
4) It's really just one theme said two different ways but that's not a reason I'll end with
5) Three hours is a really long time to do a radio show & the more themes in more parts I have
6) The more likely it is that I'll actually fill three hours.

That's all.  I really need to get to bed now.  I am nowhere near finished with this show so tomorrow is gonna suuuuuuuuuck.

& no, I don't mean for you having to listen to the show, I meant for me having to put the show together.

Although...