Day Of The Zombiez

This blog has two great pieces of news today.

The first piece of news is about today's Self Help Radio, which will air from 4:30 to 6:00pm CST on 91.7 fm KOOP Austin, also on the web live at koop.org. (I'll archive it this weekend so you can listen, if you want, over the Halloween week.)

1) The show is about zombies. I have more songs about the living dead today than you have brains for zombies to eat. Word.

2) I have very special guests today. They are none other than the illustrious Kim & Philip from the King Philip XII & Kim-rific Hour on KVRX Tuesdays. I am a fan of their show, & they've promised to bring lots of information about zombies up to the show today & make me feel kinda dumb.

The second piece of news is something someone asked me to do a while ago & I finally got around to doing it, & I hope to do it fairly regularly (monthly to start), which is this: make a mix that is not as radio-oriented as Self Help Radio - a CD-length series of songs that sound good & taste swell on your ear buds.

Introducing: Self Help Radio EXTRA!.

It's a mix of music I've been digging lately, a lot of it new, all of it awesome. It's saved as a single mp3 so you can just listen to it as a mix - without any of the airbreaks, radio spots, or other interruptions that makes radio the truly fucking annoying medium it is. Wait. I shouldn't say such things!

Please have a taste of Self Help Radio EXTRA!, & look at the lengths I'll go to get some friends off my back.

& please listen to Self Help Radio today! It'll scare the week out of you, just in time for the Halloween weekend!

Wash This Space

I regret that I never learned how to scratch. It looks & sounds like a lot of fun. I have pretty big hands, though, & I'm old, old, old, &, as they always taught us, scratchin' is a young man's game.

God, I was such a snob when I first heard scratching. I'm actually still somewhat snobby - although I call it being OPINIONATED - but not uppity - & one way I am still snobby is I can be very dismissive of things because of context. I totally think that's valid, by the way - there's time enough to prove me wrong if you give a shit what I think, baby.

But I was like thirteen when I first heard that Grandmaster Flash song & it pains to remember my sniffly, "That's not music!" I probably also said "Hrrumph!" just like that, because I had read it in a Richie Rich comic & thought people actually said "Harrumph!" when they were indignant. What a maroon. Why didn't I get beat up more - or at all?

Anyway, this has nothing to do with what I want to tell you, but I'll tell you tomorrow. I have TWO things to tell you tomorrow. But that's tomorrow. Today - well, I'll dream that I learned how to scratch.

Whither Zombies?

The zombies will be here any minute. I have only a little time to write. To anyone out there who gets this message - Austin Texas is overrun by zombies!! & it's not even South By Southwest!

This is how we heard that it happened: It seems that, a week ago, at one of those "humorous" driver's ed classes they convince you to take to not have to pay more insurance, a group of fundamentalist evangelical born-again college Republicans & a slightly terrified group of bored hypersensitive acne-scarred virgin physicists & biology majors from several Austin universities - all of whom just happened to be there - got into a conversation about "creating life" & "the Endtimes" (a witness there said that it was like watching two groups of people who spoke different languages talking & acting like they understood one another). They apparently really hit it off.

Armed only with ideas, a Bible (curiously, that was out of ideas), & the keys to a chemistry lab, the science nerds first cooked up some meth, then, with the born-agains praying & egging them on, they apparently discovered a way to make inanimate objects come back to life. When the meth lab exploded (as meth labs must inevitably do), the bodies were mixed with the formula, & soon there were zombies rushing throughout the entire campus.

This unholy group had soon consumed most of the city below the river (which, you know, the city could totally live with), but a blockade at the bridges over Ladybird Lake failed when the zombies found a way to use the little paddleboats to cross. Also, due to a recent reenactment of the Charles Whitman shootings, & the beginning of Hunting Season, the city was experiencing a shotgun shortage.

I am currently locked in my offices, but there are zombies at the door. I've managed to meet a beautiful woman & I was thinking that, with the end being so near & all, she might be interested in some kind of relationship, but it turns out she's more attracted to my girlfriend. Just my luck. I have however managed to build a homemade taser. I am totally ready to make a run for it.

Please do NOT come to Austin unless you can help. Right now, the plan is to lead them up I-35 & get them to Georgetown where we hope they'll be meet the people who live them &, noticing all they have in common, will blend in with the population & settle down to enjoy the strip malls & chain restaurants & the endless waiting in cars in between buying stuff & sleep.

Rats! They've broken down the doors! Got to go!

Preface To Zombies: Are We Dead Yet?

I was asked by the woman with whom I live (is she a girlfriend? is she a partner? why would we give a shit about such labels?) while previewing songs for my show this week, which will be about zombies, why the songs keep mentioned shopping malls in relation to zombies. All I could say is that, in the zombie movies I've seen, the people being chased by zombies end up a lot in shopping malls. I don't know why that is. Except that it might be handy - food & weapon-wise - to be in a shopping mall when one is being chased by zombies.

Also, there is the ironic note that most shoppers in a mall are zombie-like - as close to being zombies while still alive as possible - so zombies are quite at home in a mall because it's made for zombie-ish beings.

I feel I should also point out that I've never been involved in a zombie walk. Not because I didn't want to, but because I've never been asked. But maybe I shouldn't wait to be asked - I should just get involved.

I have nothing really to say in this preface except I haven't been in a mall in probably a decade. Mostly I miss the nachos. & the bored & cute goth girls at the Body Shop. Where are their zombies, like Prince Harmings, coming to take them away?

Why do a show about zombies? Ask me tomorrow.

My Teeth Seem Unhappy

I had two or three comments about our dying republic, but I was instead reminded that you don't care any more - that you have in fact lost the will to want more - & also you had some interesting black & white photographs you wanted me to want you to sign - all to the tune of particularly tiresome 80's rhythm & blues - the type with lots of plunked bass sounds created by synthesizers made almost entirely out of cheese - so I decided instead to eschew the regular rant in famous of something that holds as much water as a healthy kidney: self-promotion.

Is it promotion if I just tell you what it is that I do regularly? Does it offend you if you knew I'd do it anyway?

Here it is: I do this show, about which this blog is loosely based, & every week I take this show, about which this blog is tightly biased, & archive it on a website, which was created for that purpose. That website is called selfhelpradio.net & there you can find last week's show (the theme of which was "Go!" & during which I became slightly intoxicated thanks to a strange mis-use of calomine lotion) there. It should cheer you up, or, if you're sufficiently cheered up, it should depress the hell out of you.

Don't believe me? Then go listen. I'll be here when you return with your tail between your legs.

Like A Cold-Cocked Swami On The Road To Satori

Busy is my middle name. Busy busy busy. Busy busy busy are my three middle names. I like to write in this blog at least four times a week, weather permitting, but I was too busy to write yesterday. I know that made the entire state of Delaware unhappy, but, in my defense, they're not all that cheery to begin with. They only have three counties! It's like being Luxembourg!

Sanitation issues aside, I will continue my tradition of doing radio shows on Friday today as well as the eminently boring tradition of discussing what must be to you highly uninteresting dreams. To wit. I woke up less than an hour ago in which I had a dream wherein:

- I was on a plane & was conscripted to hand food out to the passengers;
- I ended up in New York with a crazy woman trapped in a giant, newly made "Hobbit Park";
- & I visited another community radio station & it was like a compound, with the people there not wanting to discuss "business" with me & what appeared to be entire families sleeping in the halls.

I could go into more details, & I will, only I won't write them down. I could also talk more about the show I will do today in about seven hours, & I will, but only on the telephone with my optometrist. What? So he cares about such things. You should be so lucky to have an eye doctor who takes an interest in something other than your eyes!

But I will say this, as I am constantly saying & as you pretend you don't hear: Self Help Radio, the "Go" show, five years on the air oh wow!, at 4:30 pm CST, live on koop.org, archived this weekend at selfhelpradio.net. Tune in. I am asking sweetly.

Whither Go?

I started doing Self Help Radio five years ago this month. My playlists from 2002 show that I did my first Wednesday show as "Self Help Radio" on October 9. But I really had a show for a few weeks before that. I just wasn't posting playlists.

Because I am a sentimental fluff, I have decided that, every October, I'll "re-do" a show as an anniversary tribute to the show. I buy myself a nice dinner, pay a prostitute to make fun of me, & pour gasoline on myself in a room made of plastic. & if I live through it, I revisit an old theme.

Last year it was "Weekends." There's no playlist for it on my playlists from 2002 page (although mp3s of the show & the playlist are on my playlists from 2006 page) because I did it on a Friday. So too did I do this week's theme, which is an exploration of songs with the word "go" in them, on a Friday. So unless you were listening - & I know you weren't - you won't know what I played then & what I'll play now. Nyah.

Happy anniversary to me! Five years is a long time to be doing the same thing. Ah, who am I kidding. I've been doing the same thing for years. Still, happy anniversary to me!

Preface To "Go!": Floss In The Pocket, Page Nine

(This is an excerpt from a novel I will write in the future when I am strapped to a chair during the Star Trek/Star Wars Wars of 2032. I will have placed it into a time capsule which I dug up in my backyard thirteen years ago. To the sound of cats sneezing.)

"Ah, the sound of cats sneezing!"

"Why do you say such things?" said I to the aetherized sky.

"Why do you require such explanations?" said the sky. Or did it?

Surely a talking sky was the least of my concerns. On a dying planet, a sky does not talk, but cries.

& on the fourth day, it rained buns.

"Is this the way you cry, my friend the talking sky?" said I to the bun-filled heavens.

"Jesus," replied the sky, "were you dropped on an obvious tree & hit every branch on the way down?"

"Let's us not argue let's," said I. "Instead, let's us listen to the music in the air let's."

But there was no more music to be heard. Instead, the avant guards made noises with the clipped samples from old, old informercials. What else could we do? We danced.

& on the seventh day, the world began its decades-long death rattle.

"Oh shit," said the sky.

But I was not sad. Not in the leastest.

"Ah," said the sky. "You fuckers with short lifespans get all the breaks."

"Tee hee," said I.

(Page ten may or may not appear some time in the past. You might want to wait, however, until it will be published nearly a quarter century from now.)

That Line That People Didn't Hear The First Time

I like to come & write in my blog on Mondays because no one really fears the monkeys like I do on a Monday. Let me rephrase that. Normally the monkeys are not "scary," yet we fear them. Isn't that what they tell you when you take your first Signs & Omens class? That fear is not at all about being scared of scary things? No? The kids these days. I tell you.

Anyway, the monkeys being at bay (wherever bay may be) (may be bay be?), I am usually, of a Monday, able to come around to your domicile or workstall & say, in my bloggish way, I know you didn't listen to my show on Friday because I saw you getting arrested on "Cops" on Saturday, but since I know you got out on bail on Sunday, I'll write to you here on Monday & tell you you can listen to the show you missed all the rest of this week, because it's available on selfhelpradio.net...

But I can't say that today. & it's not just because of the monkeys. Although they probably were involved with you getting arrested on Friday.

I can't say that not because there wasn't a show on Friday - there was, even though the monkeys tried to stop it, as usual - but I can't put it out there for you to listen to because it was programmed by my apprentices, & they have yet to send me their playlist. The nerve! After all I've done for them! Raising them from whelps into whippersnappers! I feel so neglected!

What I can share with you is this: I subbed Mojo Time yesterday & played lots of scratchy country blues for ninety minutes, & that show is available over at selfhelpradio.net. Does that make you happy? Is there anything else I can do for you?

Let me know. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Ack! Monkeys!

Except All The Runners Are Lame (Literally)

Since the show is about the weather today, can I point you at a URL where you can listen to an entire record of weather songs?

Then go here for Singing Science Records. Oh boy!

The weather is getting pretty in Texas now. I like when Austin cools down a little, when the sun is not a scorcher but a warmer. As I wrote this, I thought three things:

1) Boy, weather is kind of a dull thing to talk about.
2) But, isn't it something that we always talk about?
3) & isn't that because it's kind of like an introduction - you know, "How's the weather out there?" Or, "It looks like rain!"

Why do human beings have such a hard time talking about things that matter? Is it because we're fundamentally afraid someone will disagree with us? Or that someone will be provoking an argument?

I dunno. Tomorrow on Self Help Radio, though, we talk about the weather. Dig.

Whither The Weather?

Oh my god, thank you my apprentices for that awesome title for this blog! I know, it's a Mr Show quote, but still - how often do I get to quote Mr Show?

All I can say is, good for my apprentices! (They'll be doing the show this week, & they thought up this theme.) I mean, everyone talks about the weather, but no one does an entire radio show about it!

You should tune in! Listen to Apprentice Gary & Apprentice Stephanie do their thing! This Friday at 4:30pm CST on the air at 91.7 fm & online live at koop.org. We might even have weather reports. Oh, but please god, no Weather Report. That would make me sad.

Preface To The Weather Show: A Brief History Of Apprenticing

It's often said that there are no more good ideas, or that at the very least all the best ideas have already been thunk up. Maybe so. But it seems like a lot of the good ideas haven't yet been used, so maybe the people who think up good ideas are just waiting to see the current ones get some action before working on more.

Take, for example, apprenticing. In general, we don't apprentice anymore. Or maybe we just call it "interning," since an intern can be made to do menial work & not necessarily be promised to learn a trade or craft. But surely the idea of a newcomer learning from an old hand is a good one. & it's one that seems beneficial to both - after all, if you have to teach your own work, you learn more about it, like learning a different language helps you examine your own.

Nothing I am saying here is in the least bit profound, & wouldn't be to a blacksmith in 1513. But for an enterprise as fraught with complication as "community radio," it seems like a broadcast station with virtually no paid staff, run on a shoestring budget with virtually every task done by volunteers, it seems like such an entity would want the best possible way - not to mention the cheapest & least onerous - to have brand new participants learn as quickly as possible the ins & outs of not only the mechanism for making radio, but also how the station works. Therefore: an apprenticeship system.

When I came to KOOP in 2000, the training process was perfuctory at best: three consecutive Mondays of "training," a ten question "test," & you were left to do what you needed to do as a volunteer. Most of the people who came to be "trained" left - there was nothing there to encourage your participation in KOOP except your own motivation. & by the way, there was also no reason for you to even hope to get a show, but that's another story.

I stuck it out because I love doing radio, & I'm also creepily stubborn. I became part of KOOP's Training Team & watched as dozens of great people came to KOOP & then left, simply because the station didn't have a process to nurture involvement. Surely that could be changed! Surely there was a good idea out there so we didn't have to invent one!

In 2005, I took part in a process to redefine the training system & the programming policies. You can see those policies here. One part of the policies is that now training takes a little longer than a month. More like six months. & while you're being trained, you are assigned to a current KOOP programmer - as an apprentice - to learn the ropes. You're given something to do as you become involved.

I don't know if KOOP did anything like this in its first ten or so years of existence, but boy, isn't it a good idea?

This is a long-winded way of saying that I have two great appentices this season & I am giving them my show this week. They want to do a show about the weather. Okay! I'll be there to make sure nothing gets broken - you know, except my heart - but it's all them. Ninety minutes of apprentices gone wild. & why not give them the show? How else are they gonna learn how crazily easy it is to do Self Help Radio.

Oh, wait.

Bitten Too Too

The crisis that is this blog continues unto the present day. Are there no more insights from my electronic pen? Do you wish perhaps someone could put your neighborhood in context? Perhaps this can help. I can do more than this.

Or wait. You can always visit the Self Help Radio website to listen to last week's show. If you missed it. Or if you heard it. Especially if you heard it. It's more confusing the second time around.

I am public announcing something on this blog in a month's time. It will not have anything to do with a coupon. Are there other blogs you would like me to emulate? I could perhaps have more found art here. Or maybe flash movies in which you are allowed to do things "creatively" without marking up real paper from real dead trees. You can suggest whatever. I am all years.

New features! A change of cologne! A chance to win twelve dollars a minutes for forty days & forty nights! Styrofoam! Something that reminds you of something else! Redesign! Remix! Repackage! Reticence! All coming up on the new, improved Self Help Radio Blog!

Or, wait, maybe not. I've been a little tired. Also, I'm going to Dallas tomorrow & where will I get a computer then? Are you still counting my keystrokes? What a weirdo.

Best If We Don't Stand Up

Did you know? The Lucksmiths are in town tonight. It's a happy occasion, & far too rare!

& the KOOP Membership Drive continues apace. According to our website, we're at 36,000 - which means we're very close. Pledging during my show will not only give me happy shivers, but will also help the station end the drive early. So you can get back to your regularly scheduled listening. Oh boy!

We adopted a new child last week, as I detailed here, & he has already decided he doesn't respect my authority. He loves running around like an idiot, though, which makes him one of the family.

I'm not feeling terribly clever right now, but my show will be cleverly delicious tomorrow. Maybe I'll even find something nice to say here.

Instead, you can read a great column by Sam Harris. I love him.

Whither Marc Bolan & T Rex?

I love Marc Bolan. I love that he's born to boogie. I love his hippy-dippy shit & I love his crazy rock & roll songs. It's the essence of rock & roll to me. Idiosyncratic, sexy, danceable, singable, swingable. I love him so much I named one of my cats Bolan.

He died thirty years ago, killed in a car, & we lost a lot. "Life's a gas," he sang, "I hope it lasts." It doesn't, but how rare that someone can give as much to the world as Marc Bolan!

So I am celebrating him. It's also KOOP's Membership Drive. You know. Give us money. But even if you don't, know that this unbeliever is sharing something with you that's as sacred as it gets.

Preface To The Marc Bolan/T Rex Tribute: Crystals In The Urine?!?!

This is a strange & lovely collection of found photos of one woman.

I had a best friend in first grade but though he & I continued for ten more years of school together, we weren't as close as at the first. He disappeared I think around ninth grade, but we were barely more than acquaintances by then. Strangely enough, as in a weird Dickens' chapter, I ran into him in my third year of college. We became friends again, probably better friends than even first grade.

He lived in a big Austin house (rented) with squeaky hardwood floors & high ceilings, with two or three other dudes. One of them was a very big fellow who wouldn't have been out of place as the scary fat guy at a frat party, who told me once that, if you have have sex by rubbing your penis between a woman's breasts, it's called "the Hawaiian muscle fuck." (It looks like the Urban Dictionary agrees with him.) His other roommate was a skinny dude with a comical face who had apparently been to England once so he spoke with a fakey British accent & used obscure British words like "woofter" & "dosh." I don't remember either of their names.

What I do remember is the anglophile had a T Rex tape which had "Jeepster" on it (& since I liked Bowie, I already owned Electric Warrior), but also tons of other stuff that sounded nothing like the T Rex Bang A Gong rocker I knew. Later I'd find this stuff was by "Tyrranosaurus Rex," but it charmed me immensely. I stole the tape. I needed a reference point for what I'd be looking for. Anglophile suspected but had no proof.

That's when I fell in love with Marc Bolan, that tape, with songs about wizards & cats & child stars & abyssinia & apple girls & finding a little wood & having a little sleep. The tape's gone, & I haven't thought about my friend's roommates in many years. My friend is happily married with two kids.

I'm not sorry I stole the tape, though. I am sorry I lied to my friend about stealing the tape. I wonder if he even likes T Rex?

If I Wore A Weapon Like My Dear Old Dad

What did he wear? You mean, under the apron?

I am very sleepy because of the new life in our house, whose name is Winston, & who looks like this:



He's only three months old. He likes to play.

If you like to play old Self Help Radio shows, you may listen to last Friday's show over at selfhelpradio.net. Remember, KOOP is still having a pledge drive, so there'll be some beggin' within. I hope it makes you give my favorite radio station lots of money!.

I'm sorry I dozed off. I am sleepy. But if I wore a weapon, like my dear old dad...

Why There's Flossing In This Cruel World

Manservant Ripple finds his way through the echoing, gigantic house. Sentences flow sweetly from his collapsable lungs. The master smiles to himself - he remembers why he hired Manservant Ripple; & it is still a bargain.

In the basement, Manservent Ripple conspires. The beaujolais is eminently flammable. How many more must die for the bloodlust they call capitalism to leave this vale of tears? But his is not to reason why.

In the bedroom, the mistress dreams dream of Manservant Ripple. She is ashamed of her sad lust, but she has always wanted to touch a hunchback's hump. She cries tears of perserverance.

Did you know he was married? asks the farmer. Yes, his wife lives in the hovel on the corner, next to the hovel once owned by Orson Welles, it's true. She doesn't work, no. She's a shut-in.

But is there - be honest! - is there a difference between mental illness & a love of the fine arts? A difference between a political solution to a problem & the eating of uncooked flesh? Between religion & mockery?

How he wishes he could have wounded with words, does Manservant Ripple. His wife stares at the hovel next door greedily. If they lived anywhere near the mansion, they might see the fire yet rage. But they do not.

Manservant Ripple will apply now for another job.

Whither A Tribute To Tony Wilson?

One of the students I supervise at work asked me one day how I discovered so much music in my life. She correctly observed that commercial radio is repetitive, predictable & dull, & her main response was to keep listening to the same crap she's always been listening to (which seems to be mainly "classic rock"). I thought about it & told her that there are four main ways I set about discovering music (not including listening to some kind of radio, which of course is always a crap shoot &, the older you get, the less reliable unless you find a program you really really dig):

1) Find an artist you like. Find artists he/she/they have worked with, & look for their solo/other stuff.
2) With your artist as a reference, find musicians who have emulated or are otherwise influenced by the artist you like.
3) If it's a scene, start at the epicenter & work outward.
4) Look at other music on the label that the artist you like is on.

Number 4 isn't always a good strategy (Sire Records in the 80's come immediately to mind), but there are labels, then & now, whose output for the most part is controlled by & chosen by someone with really, really good taste. The Beatles had a pretty mundane taste in music, as the other artists on Apple Records showed; but Tony Wilson, one of the founders of Factory Records, obviously knew his shit.

He was there for three main trends in British independent rock: the postpunk of Joy Division, the dance-pop of New Order, & the Madchester sound of Happy Mondays. & certainly all three sounds continue to reverberate & influence music today & will doubtless do so for the rest of our lives. I wish I could say that decisions I made about musicians had such deep & lasting effects in the world of recorded sound.

Tony Wilson's death this year at 57 from cancer was a sadness. I want to celebrate his life on Self Help Radio this Friday. I'll do it by playing a sample of the music he chose to promote & share with the world.

Preface To The Tony Wilson/Factory Records Tribute: It's So Fun Up Here At The Death Camp

Two people have played Tony Wilson in a movie - Steve Coogan in "24 Party People" & Craig Parkinson in "Control" - & that doesn't count movies that Tony Wilson himself was in. You can see that here. Not that it means anything. Just sayin'.

I know he didn't start Factory Records all on his own, but he seems most visible & his recent, tragic demise (he wasn't even 58 years old) seems to say it's time to play lots of great music from his old record label.

He possesses one of those names (you know, the ones with four syllables) in which I can sing a made-up stanza to the tune of "Frere Jacques." I do this with my animals all the time. When you read this, though, you can pretend I am singing in tune:

Tony Wilson, Tony Wilson,
We miss you, we miss you
At the hacienda, at the hacienda
Boo hoo hoo, boo hoo hoo.

I could do that shit all night long. Provided you have a four syllable name. I myself (Ga-ry Dick-er-son) & especially my girlfriend (Mag-da Much-lin-ski) are out. My animals, though, survive by a combination trick:

George & Ringo, George & Ringo
You smell bad, you smell bad
Don't be eating dog poop, don't be eating dog poop
Like your dad, like your dad.

In heaven, you know, they don't allow this sort of doggerel. So we must make use of it here.