A bolt from the blue.
“This one has to be drawn out carefully as if you’re relaying a fable as old as time that carries a weighty life lesson; a real tortoise-and-hare situation. Or like that story about the mouse who fell into the bucket of cream and struggled but never stopped trying to escape, and wound up whipping the cream into stiff peaks that eventually provided a way out. So, what’s the fable of Peepo and Pomo? That’s up to you, as it is entirely of your own devising. But you must include the following inventory in your parable: a tiny wig, greed, one sack of fruits, fire, and the narrative device of constantly mentioning the names Peepo and Pomo as the fable unfolds.” -Dan Kennedy
Marco here. Here’s the recording of last night’s Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA), ready for you to re-enjoy:
…
Meanwhile, thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which always provides about an hour of each of these Friday night shows’ most locally relevant material, going back decades. And consider tiny bravely struggling KNYO. Find KNYO’s donation heart and help the station out.
What I put on just before the show this time was /Operation Cue/, audio of a short government film about testing survivability after nuclear war by building a whole town in the desert, furnishing it, populating it with plaster mannequin shop-window men, women and children, blowing it up with an atomic bomb, and serving a crowd of volunteers with stew made of canned goods dug out of the peripheral wreckage. The model radio station survived handily in its concrete block bunker. They just had to put the jostled equipment back on the table; it’s all made with vacuum tubes, which literally laugh at radiation, unlike their offspring the fragile snowflake transistor, which has advantages for size and cheapness, but how does that help you once it’s bricked and brained by an EMP?
Let’s see… the show, the show… A bit about Sinead O’Connor and Biff Rose, who (separately) left us this week, and some of their music (see below in this column for some more); an expanded local announcement/news/editorial section, poetry by Notty Bumbo, Ezekiel, John Donne, Hugh Blumenfeld, and Mazie Malone. Mitch Clogg’s latest wry report on the train wreck of old age, Harper’s Review, Wikipedia on The Erfurt Latrine Disaster of the year 1184, Giulia Poerio on the curse of daydreaming, Caitlin Johnstone on the one-two punch at us all of bipartisan politics, Louis Bedrock’s translation of Manuel Vicent on Andy Warhol, petitions for this and that, jokes by Dobby Sommer, /Lois/ by David Herstle Jones, /Lost Animals/ by Geoff Manaugh, Part 2 of the revised /Requiem for a Pasha/ by Eleanor Cooney, Juan Cole on slavery and what slaves knew, Philip Marks on the rights we all have under the Constitution whether we’re citizens or not, masturbation for prostate health, a Brazilian music theme cab trip with Erik S. McMahon; Warren Hinckle, Kent Wallace /The Blind Steal/ Chapter 10, /The Peyote Seekers/ by Paul Modic, how to tell if your neighbor is secretly a serial killer (this could come in handy), Ezekiel again about dogs Flaco and Lucky and the perils and sheer staggering weight of his street-person frenemy’s rechargeable electronics, Lauren Geall on how to quit self-sabotaging (also good to know), and it all wraps up with the Deadikase project’s episode of dozens of great musicians’ anecdotes about their experience of Frank Zappa, and then Zappa’s quirky live-recorded /Stairway To Heaven/.
I’m happy to read your writing on the radio. Just email it to me. Or include it in a reply to this post. Or send me a link to your writing project and I’ll take it from there.
BESIDES ALL THAT, here are some fresh not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set aside for you while gathering MOTA together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right.
Kris Kristofferson – Sister Sinead. I meant to play this on the show but misplaced it somehow. Here it is on the web.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2023/07/sister-sinead-kris-kristofferson.html
Here’s a pretty good, concise obit. It includes video of the significant moment in the Saturday Night Live archive, that they’ve since edited out of that SNL show and replaced with rehearsal footage, even though she was well vindicated when the church sex abuse secrets came out in a big way. Were people sorry they called her a dumb broad and the face of hate? No. People move on and forgive themselves.
https://jezebel.com/sinead-oconnor-irish-icon-and-troubled-soul-is-dead-a-1850679284
Here’s Biff Rose singing /Molly/, a true story, in 1969.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9SMfF8fNI0
And here’s the entire Biff Rose catalog, all in one place. Every note he noted, every quip he quipped…
https://biffrose.bandcamp.com
…including one of the times Biff came to my show in KMFB’s glory days of the Bob Woelfel-managed era, where Biff played and sang for about 40 minutes. Of this instance, Late Night Liz wrote: “Marco had better luck than I did [with Biff]. As my Wild Hair Radio interviewee, Biff backed up against the shelves of LPs, made faces and totally clammed up. Cut to cued-up LP…” One time, when the broadcast booth was still out at the transmitter site by the Caspar Dump, Biff came to the station, and we were talking, and I don’t remember what it was that I said, but it triggered him to jump up and pull his pants off. One time he brought a large, attractive young black woman, who he called Round Brown. Peeved at something she said, he reached over and sank his teeth into her bare shoulder. I have a recording somewhere of her singing /You Drive Me Ape, You Big Gorilla/. I never knew her real name, so I can’t find more of her work, and the only version of that song widely available seems to be by The Dickies, so. Wow, I am a digression machine these days, huh? Here, Biff Rose on KMFB in 2006:
https://biffrose.bandcamp.com/album/the-rocky-road
Meow Meow – Ne Me Quitte Pas. The snide Eliza Doolittle accent just kills me, especially in the French parts. And the directed hands-on assistance with the act. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. (via MyOneBeautifulThing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoE0mh4bHcE
Home. Several short, gentle films about home, each next story told by a person in a later stage of life. (15 min.)
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2023/07/home.html
Home. In space. (45 min.)
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2023/07/jwst-update.html
Joanne Shenandoah – I May Want A Man. They used part of this to great haunting effect at the end of Episode 12 of Season 5 of /Northern Exposure/.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2tTJnYiRIc
Rerun: Dave Carter and Tracy Grammar – Gentle Arms of Eden.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlYJ-3T_S2M
A nice, live version of the above, with Jim Henry not Dave Carter, in a small venue. Everyone in the audience knows the words. This is so warm and sweet. I’m crying all the way through this. There are several Yiddish words for different flavors of that, like the hundreds of words for snow they used to say Eskimos had.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQOZRuP8ejM
Again, Operation Cue, revised in 1964.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_earqmj6yAc
The Cosmic Man, starring John Carradine. (full film, 73 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjSAUzPH_kU
Rhiannon Giddens – Wayfaring Stranger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1Z4PAZX9Bs
The Motor Cycle Magazine covers. “Motor Cycle of the century: The Famous James Comet.” “From the Bantam to the Golden Flash, BSA makes the Show.” “The Greatest of them all for Jet Age acceleration: The Ariel 1,000cc Square Four.” Etc.
https://www.vintag.es/2023/07/the-motor-cycle-magazine-covers.html
“Okay,” he says, “So after spending a whole day of my life making that, I have to say, it sucks. Like, that is a bad video. And I don’t just mean it sucks because Midjourney is bad at group shots and some of the faces are kinda fucked up. Like, if that’s your argument against A.I. you are missing the forest for the trees, because the truth is, this A.I. stuff is rapidly improving, and those issues will be fixed soon.” He’s talking about his example A.I.-generated trailer for /X-Men if made by Wes Anderson/… I don’t think that sucks, at all. The only thing that stuck out jagged for me was the robot narrator’s mispronouncing names. Siorse is SUR-shuh, not see-YOR-say but, as he says, errors of that type, like the tangled fingers mess –if they are errors and not on purpose– are being corrected as we speak. Okay, In 19-uh-89, I think, I sent away a check for $15 for a hardware text-to-speech card to plug into my open-air IBM-XT. All names came out wrong. Mendocino came out men-dok-in-oh, for example. Commas were seen as musical rests, so you could realisticize a paragraph by salting it with strings of commas of different lengths and then speed things back up again by pressing the Turbo button, which set the CPU clock speed at 10Mhz rather than 5Mhz. (You couldn’t leave it on Turbo all the time because lots of programs wouldn’t work right.) And you could kind of fix the pronunciation problems by typing words phonetically into a dictionary file. But the phonetics were also weird. Poconos = Poh!-kuh-nohz. You’d just give up and let it say pok-on-oss.)
https://boingboing.net/2023/07/27/how-to-make-your-own-wes-anderson-movie-trailer-with-ai-and-why-you-shouldnt.html
A twenty minute film of travel photographs of the Eastern Mediterranean all taken in 1842, in a format that, look, lasts hundreds of years. (via Fark)
https://www.fark.com/vidplayer/12938794
Rerun: “There are some things money can’t buy. But for everything else, there’s MasterCard.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zte6lG9gkxs
How we get tennis balls. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://twitter.com/HowThingsWork_/status/1653829855773859862
Goodbye, krill world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Runa3neb0
The two bombs: an animated and narrated timeline. (22 min.)
https://laughingsquid.com/atomic-bombs-hiroshima-nagasaki/
Luna Lee – Do It Again.
https://laughingsquid.com/steely-dan-do-it-again-gayageum/
Astor Piazzola – Tango Suite for Two Guitars, with score. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuJTItA7TfI
Flex dancer.
https://theawesomer.com/hittesh-patel-master-of-flex/692902/
Fields of Gold – Eva Cassady version by Cornelia Patzlsperger. Say that five times, fast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS8AjAwrRb8
Japanese Pachelbel punk. Her poor throat. All the screechers ever’s poor throats. I remember reading a newspaper article about how Janis Joplin would be vocally crippled by the time she was thirty. And then, soon after I read it, it turned out she didn’t have to worry about that after all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRijUISkB74
Vern Gosdin – Chiseled In Stone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTrPJvEzmwQ
Amazing cheap new supposedly great speaker design. It’s not fair to judge how they sound through the maker’s headset mic. The drivers are only $30 apiece. It’s worth a try. You don’t have to buy the amplifier he recommends; you can use your own.
https://theawesomer.com/making-flat-speakers-from-foam-board/624464/
Last week’s Tacky Raccoons Saturday music matinee.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2023/07/22/saturday-matinee-bluesbeaten-redshaw-dave-hole-rufs-blues-caravan/
Robert Adams, Summer Night, Walking.
https://thisisnthappiness.com/post/690326126897266688/summer-night-walking-robert-adams
“You’ve been entertained by drag your whole life. Don’t pretend it’s a problem now.” And it’s not like there’s only one kind of drag. There’s gun-nut camo drag, Pope-and-priest-bathrobes and Sunday-go-to-meetin’ drag, business drag, droopy-pants drag, self-mutilation drag… Drag. What does that even mean anymore.
https://twitter.com/DragStoryHourUK/status/1635353263360069633
Not real, this car. But– is it just me, or is everything starting to look like a funny A.I.-generated Wes Anderson thing? Is it just the colors? The simplicity? (via Fark).
https://s1.cdn.autoevolution.com/images/news/citroen-hydropneumatic-suspension-explained-49954_1.jpg
Creatures of the night. The real deep end of the real gene pool. Scroll down and down. The Colossal Squid lives 7,000 feet deep. (via PerfectForRoquefortCheese)
https://boingboing.net/2023/07/22/explore-the-deep-sea-and-its-creatures-level-by-level.html
Speaking of which, rerun: Jonathan Coulton – I Crush Everything, a song from the point of view of a lonely self-loathing giant squid. “My body’s strong, my will is weak. I’ve got pretty nice arms but I hate my beak.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RFEzpUsUBk
The Hand of Satan on the Sea of Darkness, and The Flooded Crypt of San Zaccaria. (via This Isn’t Happiness)
https://www.superpunch.net/2023/07/the-hand-of-satan-on-sea-of-darkness.html
Set me as a seal.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2023/07/music-for-sunday-morning.html
Seal Rescue Ireland. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.tiktok.com/@sealrescueireland/
Drone light show. This also reminds me of that 1980s IBM-XT and its built-in monochrome green-and-black 8-or-9-inch CRT monitor. I had a program that I got on a floppy disk from a computer fair for $15 (everything always seemed to be exactly $15) that let you define points in a 3D grid by typing the coordinates for each one into a text file, load the file, and then move, roll and twist the resulting structure of lights using arrow keys, or set it slowly spinning. I think it might have been called Galaxy. One of the demo coordinate text files it came with made a spiral galaxy of 500 points. Another made a house-shaped house. Everything was orthogonal; there was no perspective, so if something was spinning you could decide by blinking your eyes whether it was going clockwise or counterclockwise. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0KNhSejkOI
Art. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://www.instagram.com/toonjoosen/
Art. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://twitter.com/TheFigen_/status/1682417896390025216
Eggerson Keaveney. (I’m sorry, I lost who pointed me to this. I thought it was b3ta, but no.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Xu6Bc_A4E
Go forth.
https://www.marriedtothesea.com/index.php?date=072623
I talked to my mother on the phone Sunday; she said she just saw Maiya Sykes at the Music Festival tent in Mendocino and Maiya blew the audience away. I remember she was in some of the Pomplamoose pandemic-time-band recordings. This song is slightly pre-that-time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP3nskD7ebU
To boot.
https://www.vintag.es/2023/07/elton-john-pinball-wizard-boots.html
Rerun: Sally Cruikshank’s animation. (via WeirdUniverse)
https://www.cartoonbrew.com/know-your-indie-filmmaker/know-your-indie-filmmaker-sally-cruikshank-230197.html
Ina. If she’s still alive, she’d be 90 now.
https://www.vintag.es/2023/07/1950s-young-lady.html
All about a man-made lake. Lots of pictures. (via MissCellania)
https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a5701/lake-berryessa-dorothea-lange/
Restoring a rusty antique sewing machine. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMNgIfLHfjk
“Its creators began by searching the NASA Public Archives and wrote a story to match the source footage.”
https://theawesomer.com/solus-a-short-film-made-from-nasa-footage/711626/
Juanita and I worked for awhile in the middle-late 1980s in a Creole restaurant in the Old Coast Hotel, run by Carol Hall (of Carol Hall’s Jams and Jellies) and Dick Haymes’ daughter Joanne. I cooked. Juanita was a hostess/waitress. That was during the time I taught at the Albion Whale School, and we were still doing the Radio *Free Earth Teevee Show on the public access channel from the back room of the pink house, and there were sound effects jobs for local theater shows, one of which I think was what got me fired from the restaurant, when I left during dinner for twenty minutes –well, half an hour– to race across town to fix the sound system for Gloriana Opera Company’s full-length /Wizard of Oz/. (The sound-deadening blanket on the clunky reel-to-reel tape deck had got sucked into the back and it stopped the motor right in the middle of a show, and the sound operator, Eileen, who looked a lot like, I realized years later, once I’d seen /Deep Space Nine/, Ezri Dax, phoned the restaurant from the payphone at the theater.) Busy time. Dick Haymes’ giant piano filled the restaurant side-door lobby so you had to sidle around it to get to the bathrooms or the banquet room. He’d been dead maybe five or six years by then. His daughter Joanne looked very like his young self about the face. She was a sharp doll, about five-foot-two, with long blonde hair in a pony tail. Her husband Bob, a wise-seeming man with bushy eyebrows, rode a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and spent a fair amount of time sitting, dressed neatly and well, quietly talking with guests in the bar. It was a ritzy place, the fanciest restaurant I ever cooked in. Now it’s a homeless-serving facility. They have some beds in the back and upstairs, and a contract with the city and county. For awhile they used the kitchen to teach homeless people to be chefs, but I don’t think they’re doing that anymore. Once, after closing, I was cleaning the convection oven parts with the special chemical bath you used for that and I got my face too close; the vapor from the chemicals stopped my breath, it just locked my diaphragm like slamming a door. I went outside and sat down so I wouldn’t fall down and gradually could breathe again. I’d forgotten all about that. Something like that happened to me in chemistry lab back in high school, too. Anyway, Dick Haymes, Harry-James-era jazz crooner, expressive baritone, handsome guy:
https://www.vintag.es/2023/07/dick-haymes.html
How to write all the things.
https://getpocket.com/collections/how-to-write-almost-anything-from-a-great-joke-to-a-killer-cover-letter
How the rhythm section swings.
https://laughingsquid.com/wynton-marsalis-rhythm-section/
How magic works.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/magic-stage-illusions-and-scientific-diversions-including-trick-photography-1897/
How television benefits your children.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/how_television_benefits_your_children
How to shoe a horse. You might have to click the sound on. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://highlandvalley.tumblr.com/post/723447846537396224#notes
Ze Frank’s latest. Elephants.
https://laughingsquid.com/true-facts-elephants/
Kwoon – /Swan/. I like this as much as their /I Lived On the Moon/.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOOcDxZpWr4
Game dance.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2023/07/tweet-of-day_02041485838.html
Metal fashion.
https://theawesomer.com/making-a-steel-puffer-coat-with-hydroforming/711675/
Rerun: 1942 car of the future.
https://www.vintag.es/2023/07/the-electric-egg.html
Socrates’ trial in today’s language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id0Kkq4VHDo
Wonderf of the invifible world. Type was expensive, effs and esses were considered interchangeable, as were tee-aitch and the letter Y. (Ye-thee. You-thou.)
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28513/28513-h/28513-h.htm
“Seen that one already.”
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/508
A trendy toxoplasma gondii bar. Like the guinea pig cafe in Fleabag.
https://static.nieuwsblad.be/Assets/Images_Upload/2011/07/13/PHOTONEWS_10322645-008.jpg
Judgment. The blue-eyed one is the boss. She has the final say. Play to her, not the beefy one on the right.
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=eFzdcv
“Before we bought the ranch,” Murphy says, “we didn’t have any place of our own to hunt pheasants.”
https://www.shorpy.com/node/27176
Mazie – Everyone Is Dumb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kBxCGr_xy0
A soothingly matter-of-fact model train ride with oddly surreal under-the-world sections, during which I faintly smell the caulking compound and styrofoam and tickly-throat-inducing shelf-wood sawdust. You too?
https://theawesomer.com/model-railroad-pov/605083/
Latest crane fire and collapse. Scroll down for video from several angles. Funny sound from this or that source: a single horn honk, a videographer reacting: “Oh– eeep!” Also, if you keep watching past the end, it’s followed by other videos of collapsing cranes and crane-like objects. This must be going on all the time, all over the world.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12339843/Hudson-Yards-construction-crane-catches-fire-COLLAPSES-NYC.html
…Or not. Space colony art from the 1970s. We can have pyramids and dams and a million giant office buildings and freeways for billions of cars, and oceans teeming with aircraft carriers and cruise ships that hold thousands of people each and go everywhere for no constructive purpose at all except to not be bored, but we can’t have even a single little city in space?
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/space-colony-art-from-the-1970s/
80 years of national park photos. If you don’t subscribe to the Washington Post, you can only look at something there once a month, so enjoy it now. Scroll down and down.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/interactive/2023/national-park-photos-memories/
Proof. The proof. Get this to that government hearing they’re having. They can’t sweep /this/ under the rug. “That was no crazed Sterno bum. That was a respected law enforcement officer: Sheriff Luger Axehandle of Heater County, Nevada.”
https://thisisnthappiness.com/post/633314380942016512/the-truth-is-out-there-mark-bryan
“Foot-see, yeah. Foot-see give it ta me!” Repeat, repeat, repeat. The moving part of the toy looks like a giant cervical cap, maybe one for a manatee. It was probably a plumbing part some entrepreneur ended up with a garage full of, and they’re sitting around the shiny metal and pastel-green formica Wes-Anderson-kitchen table in 1962, wondering what to do, how to move these things, and the guy’s wife says, “I know what. Look–” She takes one out, puts a string on it, ties it around her ankle, stands hip-shot, jazz-hands out, smirks triumphantly at him. The guy’s jaw drops and he says, ‘Honey, you’re a genius!”
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/footsee_song_and_toy
The baroque Beatles album. (36 min.)
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_baroque_beatles_book
Is it possible to shred on the lute? For sufficiently classical values of shred, sure, apparently.
https://laughingsquid.com/shredding-on-lute/
Rerun: The guy from the prophecy. (via b3ta)
https://youtu.be/pXczROnP9sk
And a lovely River Of Life mural project that wouldn’t last one night in the U.S. without being spray-scribbled all over with schizophrenic typographical hieroglyphics. Good thing it’s in Malaysia.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2023/07/mural-at-river-of-life-masjid-jamek.html
Memo Of The Air 
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