Thursday, January 24, 2008

leave britney a loan?

Coming up on this weekend's show:

  • I have no idea really
  • Much Much More?

I had this thought. I've been hearing an awful lot about Britney Spears even though I really try to avoid the kinds of "news" sources that would tell me about her various exploits. Unfortunately, she's so ubiquitous even I know about her "problem".

What is her problem you might ask? The media. The girl cannot steer clear of the media. I know, you thought I was going to say drugs or try to psychoanalyze her or some other kind of typical bullshit but lets face it, her problem is the media. Her records, make money. People like them. All that other stuff isn't any of our damned business.

I think I've figured out an ingenious way that she, or any other hounded celebrity, can stay out of the media though. She needs to start her own 24 hour full access reality show/channel. She needs to have a camera on her at all times, when she's taking a shit, when she's sleeping, when she's watching tv, always.

That way, anybody else who wants to photograph or record her in any way without her consent is stealing her channel's intellectual property. As a person, you don't have any real right to privacy in public but as the product of a corporate entity, they have every right to keep you from ripping off their product which in this case would be electronic images of Ms. Spears.

All she has to do then, is decide how much a subscription to BTV is worth. I might set it at a million dollars a month if I didn't want anyone to watch. She might set it lower or higher depending on which meant more to her, the money or her life.

Of course a less extravagant approach would be to wear disguises and not act like an ass in public but that kind of lifestyle clearly isn't for everyone.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Duality (recap)

Ladies and Gentlemen,

the only way I can recap this show is by internal time line which, unfortunately, corresponds in no way to the way things were pieced together on the show. It reminds me of this puzzle I had when I was a very small boy where each piece was it's own character and the pieces fit together not only geometrically but logically because each piece had it's own little story. It was a crazy conceptual thing and that's kind of how this episode fell together.

This is your dong - is the thing that's been kicking around in my head the longest. This was not my idea but came from Robert Jeffrey Gross and may not have been his idea either. Rob was the keyboard player in the original Black Tie Martini Club. Like many keyboard players and classic rock fanatics, he was very fond of Elton John. We, and when I say "we" I mostly mean "I" used to write parody lyrics and often very rude parody lyrics of our own songs. I mean you rehearse and rehearse and rehearse and at some point you can't help but make fun of them. One day Rob starts singing, "And you can tell everybody, this is your dong. It may be kind of skinny but at least it's long".

I was amazed at such filth! I'd never thought to make fun of that song in that way. I know I asked about it at the time but I don't remember if it's something he had actually worked out the lyrics to in a previous band or with a school chum or if it was just something that popped out of his head that moment but the thought that there could be a complete version of that parody has stuck with me for over a decade now.

Kevin Whitehead of the FCC - this idea has been in my head and notebook for almost a year now. I wrote it down while watching either the documentary "FUCK" or the documentary "This Film is Not Yet Rated". I saw them both around the same time and somewhere in there, probably in "FUCK" they had examples of really prurient media being made under the auspice of being a warning. I'd seen a couple drive in type films from the 60's done the same way. Proto-porn disguised as anti-drug movies. So I had the notion of doing something really raunchy as an FCC warning for a long time but had no clue as to what the content would be.

Commercial Break - Then some time last week I was struck by the odd notion that if the FCC didn't keep sex off of TV that you might have porn interrupted by a commercial break. Bookending that with the FCC thing only made sense. Transitioning through a couple of scenes from that is a blatant ripoff from Firesign Theatre but my birthday is in August so I am a fire sign though not a Firesign.

American Idol - If one was going to show the world as it would be without the FCC, then it only made sense to include the Your Dong parody in an American Idol kind of context. Throwing hitler in on the end... I think I stole that from Monty Python. Anyway it gave me a nice out.

Cartoon intro and outro - That just came about because I had this idea of doing a whole episode scored with cartoon cues when I picked up a CD's worth of Carl Stalling music. I still may attempt it but there are so many individual cues in the 15 or so tracks , it could be a full time job cataloging them all into submission.

Note This Podcast has an Implicit tag - is an obvious ripoff of the great Guy David's Night Guy intro www.guydavid.com I was thinking about asking him to record a truly explicit version of his explicit tag warning as I thought this show's filth content needed a little heads up at the beginning. But eventually I decided that it was better to make the warning more surreal than risqué because I've already done warnings like that and because Guy is always asking, "Is the world surreal enough"

Irony Man - came as a reaction to the Implicit warning and the fact that they're making or have made an Iron Man movie. Weird. Seems like if you were going to make a movie out of any Sabbath hit you'd go with War Pigs.

The Intro/Outro is just pure Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. It seemed like a fitting outro since I hadn't had the normal intro, plus I just watched their 40th anniversary DVD and was in a Doo Dah mood.

Finally, Martin Luther King Jr's I have a dream speech. The last time I heard this was on the radio in Austin Texas a couple of years ago. I was out of work and home in the middle of the day and this guy has this show called Eklektikos where he just plays whatever the hell he wants to and it's awesome. On Martin Luther King Jr. day, he just was playing the whole speeches. I almost did this last year but I wasn't feeling either as gutsy or possibly as schmaltzy. Anyway, it's argued to be the greatest oration of the 20th century and one of the greatest of our nation's history. If I told you you could hear the actual Gettysburg address, or hear mozart conducting his own symphony or see Shakespeare performing at the globe, you'd drop everything you could for that experience. The I Have a Dream speech is up there with those, only because we can listen to it whenever we want, we don't feel as much urgency to actually do so.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

solving the immigration AND the unemployment issues

Coming up on this weekend's show
  • Brilliant Idea(s)
  • Sci Fi Parodies
  • Fun with economics
  • Much much more?

There are approximately 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States right now most of whom are working and productive non-citizens. There are also approximately 15 million legal citizens out of work right now.

Some people want to get rid of all the illegal immigrants thinking that then we'd only have 3 million people out of work. But you'll never catch them and that's punishing people who have done everything they could to get here and work hard.

Why don't we just get rid of the unemployed instead? These people aren't putting out nearly the effort that the illegal immigrants have. I mean there are whole economies built on screwing people who want to come up through Mexico to the border and across. If you can make it through that kind of hardship, you're exactly who we want as citizens. Meanwhile we have this equal number of natural born citizens who can't even beat illegal immigrants out of jobs.

You can't just ship them to Mexico though, that just fucks with the Mexican economy and encourages more of them to come over the border. What we need to do is drop off our homeless into the countries who are beating us economically. We need to unload some of our riffraff on Ireland, Germany, Japan and the like to bring them down to our level. And you know our unemployed are a lot easier to catch than the illegal immigrants, we're fatter and lazier by a long shot.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Pure Imagination is a Powerful Deciever (recap)

Songs heard on this show:
  • Cats are Cunts - Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (with Conan O'Brien)
  • Hey Bulldog - The Beatles
  • Pure Imagination - Caleb Bullen (with apologies to Anthony Newly)

Intro - First of all let me apologize for the technical quality on tonight's show, the input level on my microphone got jacked up and it took me almost to the end of the show to realize that that was why it sounded a little distorted. I'm an idiot. Get it, Drawn Randomly as opposed to drawn cubist or impressionistically? I probably think of David Koresh every time I hear the word Kresh. I had to pimp the Black Tie Martini Club Players google group here in the intro too because I cut a segment of the show where I pimped it and my notions about recess for adults, siesta in America, and the war. I cut those because they were all things I've mentioned before

CIA Reenactment Theatre - See it's all about the Punchlines. get it? PUNCH lines? Also not to reveal too much about my subversive liberal agenda you'll notice that the person being tortured actually gets all the punchlines wrong and the CIA goes along with the bad intelligence anyway, which is what tends to happen with torture. It's not that it's morally wrong (it is) but it wastes more time than it saves overall.

The Farm Story - I really never thought about it until this week but now I wonder if Space did go to a farm or fell victim to some unfortunate happening. For the record the person whose tragedy inspired this notion wasn't especially taken with the idea of self delusion. Still, I think I would be and part of me thinks more people are open to self delusion than they think. Maybe they're a little deluded about their ability to be deluded?

Hey Bulldog - I just have to tell a wacky little story about the original Black Tie Martini Club which was a band I was in back in Chicago in the 90's. We were working on adding the Pink Floyd song Lucifer Sam, a song about a cat, into our act when we had a cat break into our 4th floor practice space. Then we were working on Hey Bulldog when a pit bull broke in and wanted to play with us. The only other animal we ever did songs about after that were elephants and I don't mind telling you, I was a little nervous about adding it to the set considering our past history with animals.

Phil Johnson - this came from listening to last week's show. I had this idea of playing with memory but never was able to finish it. Fun Fact: a prevailing theory about deja vu is that it is the same phenomena as described in this sketch. You store the experience as you experience it, in your memory with old memories so you accidentally remember it as you are living through it, hence Deja Vu. The wacky ending isn't as wacky as I would've hoped. I think you'll be seeing more Pythonesque sketches interrupted by other sketches as 2008 continues.

Pure Imagination - I was going to play the Harry Connick Jr. version of this song but as I was looking for it, I was singing it and thought maybe I could just perform it myself. Whaddya think? Should I have left the music to the professionals?

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Be the Media

Coming up on this weekend's show: more about memory (if I remember my notes correctly)
  • A Brilliant Idea for your pets
  • A very bad memory
  • Doesn't anyone remember there's a war?
  • Much Much More?

I know that you all know I'm often kind of lost in my own little world, really the whole show stems from that curious quirk, but I've had reason to question if I'm not a little too far off the beaten path lately.

It started with a political email about the sexism inherent in the coverage of Hilary Clinton crying. I hadn't actually heard about her crying but I wrote back a slightly snarky response that I'm sure if any of the other candidates resorted to crying we'd be making fun of them as well. We still make fun of a few sports figures who cried in press conferences and not because of their gender.

But when I mentioned this to a friend she pointed out that A. Hilary Clinton actually hadn't cried so much as was a little choked up and B. it was being covered EVERYWHERE that she was a big crybaby. This friend also mentioned that she thought Willard Mitt Romney had actually cried in the campaign and no big deal was made of it.

I still haven't heard anyone make fun of her for doing anything she didn't do. I'm not saying that they aren't making fun of her in an unfair or sexist way, they probably are, all I'm saying is I never saw it.

Another friend (this does get to a point eventually if you'll just bear with me a moment longer) posted on a blog a mean entry about 2008 predictions and how all the people making them are just pulling them out of their ass and that's about how much they're worth. I had the same response to that as I had the Clinton thing, I hadn't seen anything like that.

And then it struck me, I'm not what most people would call uninformed I don't think, especially about politics and the campaign and yet somehow I'm missing an awful lot of the "mainstream" coverage. For a moment I doubted my own connection to reality but after thinking a bit I think the very fact that I'm ignorant of these media moments is a good thing and in fact indicative of an ethos I have that serves me well and perhaps could you.

Rather than rail against "the media" for covering politics in a skewed and biased way, I apparently just don't watch or listen to that kind of media. I don't think I can change the media. I don't think that letter writing or blogging or complaining is going to make a damned bit of difference and even if it could, it's asking someone else to change to suit my tastes.

If you don't like "the media" don't take it in. Change your own habits. There are plenty of ways to keep yourself informed, plenty of media outlets (albeit mostly new media) that aren't doing these things that are apparently so egregious. It's much easier to do that than to make others change. Of course if everyone did as I do, the mainstream would change because the other way wouldn't be marketable.

Yes, I did essentially just make an Adam Smith's Invisible Hand kind of analogy to media and life in general but it really works out pretty well. Don't buy from people who put out a product you don't like hoping they'll change for you. Buy the product you really do like. If it doesn't exist, make it. If others feel as you do, they'll buy your product instead of the other thing.

I guess that's where the Oddcast comes from; the need to make the kind of show I'd like to listen to.

Monday, January 07, 2008

The Persistence of Bliss (recap)

Heard on this show were:

  • Memories Can't Wait - Talking Heads
  • How to be Dumb - Elvis Costello
  • Casiotone Nation - Soul Coughing
2008 - This came from the idea of creating an audioscape of the open canvas of the new year. I was initially going to come up with a scenario where 2007 would try to usurp 2008's place but that's awfully similar to another sketch I have half written. I also wanted to let people know about the new group and the big plan for the upcoming year of doing 12 old time radio scripts, one a month this year. Speaking of which, that group can be found at http://groups.google.com/group/black-tie-martini-club-players

Celebrate Ignorance Come to Church - I've just had that sitting around in my notebook for a while.

You Are a Work of Fiction - this comes in large part from my listening to Guy David's early Night Guy podcasts www.guydavid.com In the first one he talks about how his memory works and that got me thinking about how my memory works et cetera. This is just the logical conclusion from all that noodling.

Brilliant Idea Dangerous World - I wanted to both rant about Huckabee and tha absurdity of making the world too safe. I wanted to throw in a bit about how when there are warnings on everything it encourages people to tune out and stop thinking, to become more passive, more easily led. But since I don't write these things out ahead of time, I just forgot to hit that point. So much for diligence eh?

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Do we need Israel?

Coming up on this weekend's show:

  • Welcome to the New Year!
  • Welcome to the New Season!
  • A Brilliant Idea!
  • Much Much More?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm not just trying to get a rise out of you when I say this but... do we really need Israel?

I'm not saying anything against the Israeli people or Jews in general but how much simpler would world politics in general and the "war on terror" be if there was no Israel? I'm not saying it's right or fair but just what if?

The Islamic Extremists would have no more beef with the U.S. right? They'd still need someone to attack though right? Their power base is dependent on an enemy, who would they attack? That's right, the other sects of Islam. Wahabis would be killing Suunis would be killing Shia would be killing Wahabis. Iranians would fight Iraqis would fight Saudis would fight Lebanon etc.

Once they were done, we could put Israel back there, we could put up Jesus Camp, we could put up the greatest Disney world or strip club or bouncy castle or whatever.

Maybe the key to Israel's survival is not to fight but to disband temporarily?

On a parallel line of thinking, if we believe that the majority rules to some degree, aren't they in the minority? Why are they so special? Sure there's that whole bit where they really are an ally unlike our other 'allies' in the region. People will say it's to avoid another holocaust but who are they kidding? The rest of the world does not care if there is another holocaust of the Jews. They could've prevented the one that happened, nobody thought it was politically viable to intervene because it was Jews who Hitler went after. If he'd gone after another group that way first, Europe and the States would've tried a lot harder to stop him but they and their populations didn't like the Jews any more than the Germans did. Hell Truman's wife wouldn't let them in her house. If you ask me, the only reason Israel exists at all is as a ghetto because the rest of the world don't want us there.

I know, that's a little rambly and disjointed but in this day and age I really can't think of a logical reason why we need to have an Israel any more. Judaism is on it's way out, we're not breeding as fast as the other major religions and lord help us it won't be that much longer before religion is dead anyway. Why hold on?

That isn't rhetorical. I'm really curious to know. Why shouldn't Israel be disbanded, assuming it could be done without harming Israelis?