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Sit down and get ready for some remarkable stories as we chat about over 16 years of Misty Moon - from gallery to film society, to award winning horror producers. The Misty Moon Film-Society hold unique intimate evenings with actors and actresses from classic and cult TV & Film in the Pheonix Arts Club, while also running a beloved International film festival, and producing prized films like 2023's "Pareidolia" which won dozens of awards across international festivals. Join us as they share some of their stories and details of upcoming films like "Darner" and "Elvises vs Zombies"!
On this episode of Podcast Like It's 1992, Stacy Traub & Hunter Covington join us for a Honeymoon in Vegas!We discuss skydiving Elvises, Nicholas Cage playing Nicholas Cage, and art of the opening credit sequence.Patreon: http://patreon.com/PodcastlikeitsTwitter: http://twitter.com/podcastlikeitsInstagram: http://instagram.com/podcastlikeitsReddit: http://reddit.com/r/podcastlikeits Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Richard is away this week, guest host Daniel Santangeli fills in! Playwright Fleur Murphy explores ordinary acts of bravery and the ethical concerns of witnessing domestic violence in her award-winning play ‘The Fence,' set in Melbourne suburbia; Visual artist and performer Will Huxley captivates audiences with his dynamic photographic works in ‘DisGraceland', following the fantastical narrative of two queer alien Elvises; Visual artist Tai Snaith is back with our visual art segment ‘Art Attack'
Back from the land of the Elvises, the Brown Witches discuss their 25th anniversary trip and your 3 hosts harken back on some history of the City of Sin! And now, Lysa, Darryl, and Shelley!
Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground. The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret". It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them), and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New
Born Francis Albert Sinatra in lovely downtown Hoboken, NJ, Frank so idolized 1930s swing singer and the man they coined the term "crooner" over, Bing Crosby, that he decided not only to emulate his hero, but to effectively BECOME him in the eyes of the American public. And for all intents and purposes, he succeeded. Possessed of a lighter, more lyric tenor with an amazing degree of breath control, Sinatra, even before becoming a stylist par excellence (to this day, mostly unparalleled) matched his predecessor in wooing temporary wartime widows and proto-bobby soxers alike, and may in fact have topped his idol in building a tremendous following of mostly female fans. They were the Elvises or Beatles of their day, only Frank, unlike the others, improved his craft throughout the 50s, becoming an American icon. But his success wasn't limited to the world of music - like Elvis (who we also did a show on,) he further found himself drawn into the world of filmmaking, holding his own against some of the greats of his era and even producing and directing a few along the way. So join us as we delve into the life and career of the epitome of swingin' style, the one and only Frank Sinatra! Weird Scenes Week 93 (3/23/23): Come Fly With The Chairman of the Bored - The Films of Frank Sinatra https://weirdscenes1.wordpress.com/ https://www.facebook.com/WeirdScenes1 https://twitter.com/WeirdScenes1 (@weirdscenes1) https://thirdeyecinema.podbean.com/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/third-eye-cinema-weird-scenes-inside-the-goldmine-podcast/id553402044 https:// (open.spotify.com) /show/4s8QkoE6PnAfh65C5on5ZS?nd=1 https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/09456286-8956-4b80-a158-f750f525f246/Third-Eye-Cinema-Weird-Scenes-Inside-the-Goldmine-podcast
Theo and Leona of the World Bugle (Team E-O to you) return for another scoop. (they originally appeared in Cultists Stole My Baby!) Written and produced by Julie Hoverson Cast List Theo - Henry Marks Leona - Robyn Keyes Chief - Julie Hoverson Larry - Dave Fontenot Baby Dali1 - Julie Hoverson Baby Dali2 - Risa Torres Baby Dali3 - Danar Hoverson Waitress - Sirena Raine Melody - Tanja Milojevic Harmony - Cailean Evedus Other Dalis - Marleigh Norton, Kat Pryde, Gwendolyn Gieseke-Woodard, Kimberly Gianopoulos, Kimberly Poole, Brittney Cruz Music by Josh Woodward Dali Song - Music by Reju (used under creative commons license), words by Arthur O'Shaugnessy, Sung by Julie Hoverson Editing and Sound: Julie Hoverson Cover Design: Julie Hoverson "What kind of a place is it? Why it's an infamous newsroom, can't you tell?" **************************************************************************** Whatever Happened to Baby Dali? Cast: [Opening credits - Olivia] Chief Theo "Smoothie" Walsh Leona Pope Dali 1 Other Dalis Melody Harmony Waitress Larry Four Reporters OLIVIA Did you have any trouble finding it? What do you mean, what kind of a place is it? Why, it's a notorious Newsroom, can't you tell? MUSIC SCENE 1 SOUND bullpen REPORTER 1 So your sister said - oh, not YOUR sister, a NUN named SISTER. REPORTER 2 Drinking the vinegar counteracts the toxins in the system due to-- REPORTER 3 Fourteen people just vanished? Were you on any mind-altering substances? REPORTER 4 Yes, if you spell it backwards it certainly does make the word-- SOUND DOOR CLOSES THEO Chief? I - uh-- [breaks off in horror] SOUND RUSTLE OF TAFFETA CHIEF Whaddaya think? THEO [freaked out] Are you... getting married? [squeak] In white? LEONA [quiet] Are you really asking? THEO Uh-- CHIEF Nah - scared ya didn't I? THEO Uh-- CHIEF Don't worry. I'm still eligible. THEO Uh--? LEONA Back away. Don't take your eyes off her. CHIEF Whaddaya think? It's a little tight in the gut. Gonna have to cut some of them carbs. THEO [trying] Yeah. That would do it. CHIEF At least I got the shoulders to pull off strapless. Hey, where you going? THEO Uh--! LEONA Eager to get to work. You know these young pups. CHIEF Good attitude. Interview room 3. THEO Oh, good! LEONA [side of her mouth] Quick. SCENE 2 SOUND DOOR SHUTS THEO what was that? LEONA It's June. THEO And? LEONA Happens about this time every year. THEO Why? LEONA Bridal feature pull-out? I don't know! [hissed] I don't ask! [commanding] Room 3. THEO Oh, right. SOUND DOOR OPENS LEONA You go first. THEO Right. [a beat] Holy cow! It's her! LEONA Chief doesn't move that fast. Especially in a train. THEO No, I mean - I mean - It IS you, isn't it? DALI 1 Is it safe here? THEO Why does everyone ask that? LEONA Who does he think you are? DALI 1 I'm - I'm Baby Dali. THEO I knew it! I love your music. LEONA We don't do publicity stunts. C'mon, Smoothie. SOUND HUSTLES HIM OUT OF ROOM, DOOR SHUTS THEO We don't? LEONA Of course we do. When we arrange them. Part of our job - your job - is to protect the Bugle from being used for anyone ELSE's cheap publicity. THEO Oh. But Baby Dali's been missing for fourteen days! LEONA Probably in rehab. THEO No! No one knows where she's been! If we could break the story-- SCENE 3 LARRY Hey! You'll never guess who I just took a call from! THEO Ratboy? LEONA State mental health board? LARRY [gloating] Baby Dali. She's ready to come home, and called US to break the story! THEO Wait, but she-- SOUND SLAP LEONA [covering] When did she call? LARRY Just now. THEO Where did she say she was? LARRY Hah! No way. This is MY scoop! [running away, laughing] My ticket out of the bullpen! [stops, turns back] Hah! THEO That's ... sad. LEONA Yeah. Send a stripper. Come on. THEO Where are we going? LEONA [exasperated] Room 3? THEO Aha! SCENE 4 SOUND DOOR OPENS LEONA Sorry about that. Had to do some quick fact checking. THEO Yeah! Make sure you're really.... [melting] Really her. DALI 1 Precisely the problem! Proving I'm her! I mean me. LEONA [muttered prompt] Oh? THEO [gasp] Oh? DALI 1 I'm plagued with posers! LEONA [sigh] Aren't the solid black sunglasses and white fright wig a bit of a giveaway? THEO [infatuated] I knew who you were the moment I saw you. DALI 1 You have a nice face. THEO I do? LEONA My colleague will now take notes. SOUND PEN, PAPER, SLAPPED DOWN THEO Yeah.... MUSIC SCENE 5 SOUND IN CAR THEO Where are we going? LEONA Following Larry. THEO Who? LEONA [disgusted sigh] THEO [getting it] Oh, him! How do we find him again? LEONA He hasn't left yet. THEO How do you know? LEONA I ordered donuts. DALI 1 Oh! LEONA Shh. You're not here, remember? DALI 1 [singing] I swear! THEO Why is she hiding in the back seat under your gym bag? LEONA One - so she won't be seen, since she won't take off that wig. DALI 1 It is my own hair! LEONA Like hell. I saw it shift. DALI 1 It is a wig - but it IS my own hair. LEONA [shudder] uhhhhh. THEO And two? LEONA Two what? THEO You said that was reason one. What's two? LEONA So you can focus, dumbass. THEO Oh. LEONA There he goes! Keep your eyes on the green Camaro. THEO Camaro? LEONA [growl] Green car. Coming out of the parking garage! THEO Gotcha. MUSIC SCENE 6 AMB PARK LARRY [giving a code phrase] The dog flies in the springtime. DALI 2 [squeaky] Yellow is the color of my true love's eyes. LARRY You sound... different. DALI 2 I use a voice modulator on stage. LARRY Ah. So. The world is listening. Tell me your story. DALI 2 Listening? Aren't you from the print media? LARRY Oh. Yeah. I was speaking figuratively. DALI 2 I see. Anyway... I have a really big story, but I have to be certain it will see print! LARRY Of course! SOUND FOOTSTEPS STORM UP DALI 1 Imposter! DALI 2 Imposter! LEONA [off, whispered] I thought you were watching her! THEO [vague] Uh-huh. LEONA Go get the story dumbass. THEO But you? LEONA I can take photos from here. THEO [vague] Okay. SOUND SLAP LEONA Did I mention I'm not giving warnings any more? LARRY [angry] You? No way! The tale of two Dalis is all mine! THEO I - we - brought one of them. LARRY Then dance with the Dali you came with! It's only fair! DALI 1 She's a fake! DALI 2 She's a fake! THEO Waitaminute. You don't even sound like-- BOTH DALIS Autotune!! DALI 3 [chiming in] Autotune. THEO Oh. Huh? Three? MUSIC SCENE 7 WAITRESS All, righty then - that will be 3 orders of waffles, three fruit cups- ALL DALIS It's the only thing vegan on the menu. WAITRESS And two pots of coffee. Comin right up! SOUND DOOR OPENS SOUND DINER NOISES SOUND DOOR SHUTS, CUTTING OUT THE SOUND LEONA [prompting] Ok, this isn't going to last forever - someone will say something, eventually, and then these three won't be an exclusive any more! LARRY Exclusive to all three of us. I get my credit, too. THEO Of course! Fair is fair. LEONA [muttered] I got your credit right here. DALI 1 Can we get on with this? DALI 2 I have a recording session in two hours. DALI 3 No, I do. DALI 1 How can they be so much like me? LEONA Ask them some questions - figure out which is the real one. THEO Right. Ok. Which of you is the real Baby Dali? ALL DALIS I am. DALI 3 Or should I say [singing] I am me and no one else is. LARRY Sounds convincing to me. LEONA I think that one's a guy. THEO That doesn't help... there's been "speculation" about Dali. LEONA [disgusted noise] Ugh! At least let me get some snaps while you think. SOUND TAKING PHOTOS THEO Gee, they even pose alike. LARRY I guess it will all come down to DNA. THEO I don't think so. Dali is a notorious germophobe, and a compulsive clean freak. [nervously over explaining] According to her official web page, which I only browsed for informational newspaper business reasons. LARRY Yeah, me too, but I didn't read much. Those costumes are pretty skimpy. THEO Don't be so creepy, not right in front of her - uh, them. SCENE 8 SOUND DOOR KICKED IN THEO Whoa! LARRY [faints] Uhhh... LEONA I'll be in the... uh... Corner. THEO Stop right there! MELODY You're not giving orders here! HARMONY Yeah. Get those hands up where we can see them. LEONA Keep them talking, this is great. THEO Talking? LEONA Find out what they want. THEO They're dressed like ninjas. MELODY What did you say? THEO Nothing! MELODY I heard you, and I have perfect pitch. THEO oh. Nothing ... uh... uncomplimentary. MELODY [getting closer] Do you know who we are? LEONA Say no. THEO Uh, no? and - and I don't want to, because that way I can never identify you or even report you for robbing a waffle house! MELODY [scoffing] Waffle house! HARMONY We care nothing for your waffles. THEO Uh, ok. ALL DALIS We're having the fruit cup. MELODY No. No fruit cup today. You are coming with us. Just you three. LEONA You can't just leave us here. We might-- [prompting] might--? THEO Uh, what? LEONA We might [prompting] do something? Ugh! THEO We might tell [heavy import] THEM. MELODY [horrified] How do you know about THEM? LEONA I'm actually impressed. THEO oh... Everyone knows about THEM. But only a select few know how to reach THEM. LEONA Smoothie. MELODY [grim] right. You will come with us as well. HARMONY What about the sleeping one? Does he know THEM? LEONA Oh, him? He doesn't know anyone. MUSIC SCENE 9 SOUND WALKING, ECHOEY MELODY Stop! THEO Can we take off the blindfolds now? MELODY Harmony! Take off the blindfolds. And search them. We don't want any messages getting to THEM. SOUND RUSTLING ALL DALIS [general interjections of annoyance like Hey! Stop! Ouch! Ooh!] HARMONY Give me your phone. LEONA Here. SOUND ZIP HARMONY What's this, in your bag? [confused, examining a camera] It has a lens like a phone, but it's awfully big. And it doesn't even have a keypad. LEONA Hmph. It's an antique. Keepsake. I keep meaning to have it mounted on a keychain. HARMONY It's big for a keychain. LEONA [exasperated] I'll never lose my keys. Besides, I still use the flash... uh - flashlight function sometimes. See? SOUND CAMERA SNAPS HARMONY Oh. Ok then. And you. THEO Be gentle. LEONA [sarcastic aside] Be careful. At least she left on the ninja mask. [up, to Theo] find out what's going on. THEO Harmony, is it? A codename, I'm sure, since you and your partner there are clearly too smart to use your real names in front of your victims - I mean in front of civilians. HARMONY [noncommittal grunt] Hmph. THEO All right. I'm not asking for me, but what do you plan to do with the Baby Dalis? I worry that something bad is going to happen. HARMONY Nothing bad. To them. THEO That's a lower case "them," right? Not a THEM them? MELODY Enough chit-chat! You probably know why we brought you here-- LEONA Not a clue. THEO No. MELODY We are the Secret Protectorate Aligned to Reduce or Control Leaching of Entertainers. THEO Leaching? Huh? MELODY We needed an "L". LEONA Sparcle? [snort of almost laughter] THEO Tell me more. I'm a good listener. MELODY You don't know it, friend, but there's a celebrity crisis happening every 20 minutes, and no one else is trying to help! THEO No? Really? MELODY That - those three - are proof of the latest perfidy the government has in the works. ALL DALIS We are? MELODY [definite] Cloning. THEO Wow. ALL DALIS Uh... DALI 3 [panicked] I need to use the bathroom. MUSIC SCENE 10 [Whispered conversation] DALI 1 Yes, my disappearance was a publicity stunt, and yes I am the real Baby Dali. LEONA Heh heh - just like To Tell The Truth. DALI 2 What? LEONA God I feel old. THEO And the other two - you and ... her? DALI 2 Professional Dali impersonator. I was just taking advantage of the vacuum left by her-- SOUND DOOR OPENS, FEET ENTER DALI 3 [crying and running in] MELODY Do not worry, Baby Dalis, we are only here to liberate you and facilitate your re-entry into society. LEONA Like a celebrity dogpound. THEO Wait! MELODY What? THEO Uh-- LEONA Better make it truly, monumentally good. DALI 2 Way to take the pressure off. THEO Uh, what if I were to tell you I'm a reporter for the Weekly World Bugle? MELODY I would be forced to kill you. HARMONY We're not yet ready to reveal our manifesto to the world. THEO Ah. Good thing that would have been a ruse, then, eh? LEONA We're gonna die. THEO But you have to ask yourself, then, how DO I know about THEM? Moment of silence MELODY [cold] I don't have to ask anything. HARMONY [shocked] Melody! You know that we can't do that! [cut off] MELODY Shh!!! How do I even know that you know about THEM, eh? LEONA I do not want to die at the hands of bimbos named after the bugaloos. THEO [ominous but vague] Do you know about the government connection? MELODY [shocked] You know? THEO But it's not who you think it is. They want us to believe it's this department, or that [hinting] bureau, when ultimately... [trails off suggestively] HARMONY He does know! THEO The officials in question might just find themselves a little less able to sleep at night, if they knew that you knew that I know that THEY know just what's behind it all. MELODY Do you know the countersign? THEO Like that incident last month. [breaking his train] The what? LEONA [muttered] Bugaloos. THEO What? MELODY [suspicious] It almost sounds like you're one of us. Do you know the countersign? LEONA [muttered] Benita Bizarre? THEO Uh... Josie and the Pussycats? LEONA [exasperated] Damn! MELODY Welcome brother! LEONA [impressed] Damn! MUSIC SCENE 11 AMB DIFFERENT ROOM SOUND STEPS MELODY Don't speak yet. SOUND MUSIC TURNED ON MELODY It jams any listening device. THEO I love this song. MELODY It seemed fitting. [suddenly brisk] So. What do you know about the cloning project? THEO Uh... nothing specific. We've had our eye on suspicious activity for quite some time. MELODY Damn. I was hoping. THEO But-- MELODY What? THEO Well... I don't think they can be actual "clones". Don't they take years to grow? And Baby Dali only really got famous with her song "Treehouse victim" last year. MELODY You underestimate the cloning process. The technology is there. THEO Oh. But they're not... perfect copies...? MELODY That is the trickiest part. They are clearly mixing DNA. THEO Clearly? MELODY Yes. The squeaky one is probably mixed with that creepy chick from Poultergeist. THEO Ri-i-ight. And the other? MELODY [definite] Morgan Freeman. THEO Uh, yeah. SOUND DOOR FLUNG OPEN HARMONY (breathless) We've found more! There must have been a breach at the Baby Dali containment center! THEO Containment Center? MELODY They had to breed them some place. THEO Tell me, do you guys see a lot of Elvises? MELODY How many? THEO Thousands. MELODY No, I mean how many Babys have we found? HARMONY Four more, and another 8 possible sightings. THEO That's a lot of Dalis. MUSIC SCENE 12 SOUND DOOR OPENS, SCUFFLE SUDDENLY STOPS SOUND FEET, DOOR SHUTS THEO What are you doing? DALI 2 I want to take this all off and get them to let me go! But they won't let me! LEONA Naked? That'll be a photo op. DALI 2 Just the makeup and wig! DALI 1 Never tarnish the illusion. THEO Don't! Their belief in this clone thing might be the only thing keeping us all alive. DALI 3 Besides, I can't take it off - I've had surgery. THEO [creeped out] Oh? DALI 3 For my FACE. Not down there. That's probably what started all the rumors. DALI 1 I love the rumors. DALI 3 [starstruck] You do? Really? LEONA Shh! SOUND SILENCE, DOOR OPENS HARMONY Get in there! SOUND SEVERAL PAIRS OF FEET LEONA More? THEO Oh, yeah. They've been finding more of them. SOUND DOOR SLAMS, LOCKS DALI 4 They took me right off the stage! DALI 5 I was on a date. DALI 7 Busking in the subway. DALI 8 [bad asian accent] I Baby Dorry. DALI 6 I was working a party. THEO And no one tried to stop them from taking you? DALI 6 What could 6-year olds do? THEO Oh. [gets it] Ohhh. DALI 9 I like your glasses. Are those Couture? DALI 10 Knockoffs, but they're good aren't they? I'll give you the url. LEONA Even if one of them does get naked, I don't think it will stop them. [up] Haven't you - no I mean you - already done that on stage? ALL DALIS I am a SPECTACLE! LEONA She's done just about everything on stage except light her farts. THEO That's it! ALL DALIS We're vegan. LEONA Don't look at me. THEO I don't mean [hinting] lighting gas... LEONA You lost me. THEO Have you ever seen the movie Gaslight? MUSIC SCENE 13 THEO Hey! You better get in here! SOUND LOCK UNLOCKING LEONA One more shot. SOUND SNAPSHOT SOUND DOOR OPENS HARMONY [horrified] What happened? Where's their hair? MELODY Is she - uh, that one - dead? THEO [strange voice] She is dying of captivity. ALL DALIS [chanting together] We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams. MELODY But she's still talking. THEO Mechanical convictions. HARMONY I love that song. MELODY Brother Theo, what happened? THEO There is more at work here than you can comprehend. I like you. LEONA Straight from Gaslight to Star Trek. Smooth. MELODY What? THEO But I hate you. HARMONY You're mean! SOUND SHE GOES RUNNING OFF, CRYING ALL DALIS [CHANTING ALONG] World-losers and world forsakers, on who the pale moon gleams. THEO Oh! Uh-- LEONA Don't back off. THEO Right. [trying to match the Dali tone] We are the Music Makers and We are the Dreamers of Dreams. LEONA You do realize she didn't write that, don't you? MELODY [confused] Why are you just speaking it like that, why aren't you singing? THEO [creepy whisper] Because - we have no melody! MELODY [disturbed] But-but I'm Melody! THEO Are you? Are you even here? MELODY I - I am! And I still have the gun - uh... [horrified] My gun?! LEONA Plan B. SOUND GUN COCKS LEONA [commanding] Time to go. THEO Ok, we-- LEONA Quick, before they decide on an encore. MUSIC SCENE 14 CHIEF Good thing you got them all moving. LEONA We got pictures of them both with and without the wigs, and of them leaving to get on a special charter bus. THEO They painted the name on the side really fast. LEONA No, that's actually a company that only gives tours to Dali impersonators. THEO Go figure. Do they have an Elvis bus too? LEONA Yeah. But they get fewer drag performers. CHIEF [reminiscent] Yeah. They serve deep fried bananas, and spin a wheel to see which color outfit gets to sit shotgun. [breaking out] Uh, uh - I mean, I hear they do. LEONA [quick, changing the subject] Right. We've got at least four stories out of this. THEO And something for Larry. LEONA [annoyed and horrified] What? THEO He was in on it, too. [sheepish] at the beginning. CHIEF Larry? Larry who? LEONA From the switchboard. CHIEF Look kid. Being nice ain't how news gets made. It's just a fact o' life. THEO Well... If we don't give him something, he might take what he DOES have and go to another paper. LEONA You want to give him a story? THEO [weakly] He could have the waffle house kidnapping. LEONA [long suffering sigh] I guess. As long as he leaves our names out of it. You just volunteered to edit it. THEO Okay. CHIEF So what else do you have for me? THEO Mass migration of dalis. LEONA [snickering] SPARCLE. THEO The sublimation of and abrogation of self in the gestalt identity of celebrity. LEONA Seriously? THEO I can spin it. CHIEF Nice. Big words make people believe crap like that. Whatever it is. THEO I meant an article on how people try and be like famous people. CHIEF Keep the big words. It sounds better. THEO I'll find some experts. LEONA [another idea] There's also that thing about whether she is a he. Theo found out-- THEO Uh, no. CHIEF What do you mean? THEO The real one wouldn't confirm or deny. LEONA Even when she kissed you? THEO Yeah, well... [shrugs] A Dali is a Dali. CHIEF You could do something with that, you know. On the puzzles page. Get three of them and one fake impersonator. LEONA [chuckles] CHIEF Put pictures of them all in a four box grid and stick some clues in as to which is which. Run a little contest. Think about it. [commanding] In your office. I have to call someone about flowers. THEO [thinking back to the wedding thing] Flowers? For? CHIEF Truman at the Guardian when he drops dead seeing our headlines. THEO Ohhh. Good. LEONA Come on. CHIEF Eh. Maybe I should just send that stripper. SOUND DOOR SHUTS SOUND THEY LEAVE - THIS FADES ACROSS THE BULLPEN LEONA I like the puzzle idea, though we should make it 9-up, like the brady bunch. THEO Who? LEONA [angry growl] Nostalgia. Look it up. THEO Who will be the fake impersonator? LEONA She did say you have a nice face. THEO NO way! LEONA I have to take the picture. REPORTER 4 We actually already have all the Dalis we can use. REPORTER 3 No, thanks, but if you have an MJ sighting? No? REPORTER 2 Anything else? Photo of the prez stepping into a spaceship? REPORTER 1 Yes, yes I'll ask - can we use anything from Ringo Starr? He's on the line and-- ALL REPORTERS Naaaaaaaah. FADE TO END
WCW and ECW have both closed their doors leaving many talented wrestlers without a place to work. Jeff Jarrett, Jerry Jarrett & Bob Ryder were on a boat and had an idea for the creation of the NWA Total Nonstop Action. Many TV networks did not want to take a chance on pro wrestling, so the only logical thing was PPV. They would do things a bit different by offering weekly NWA TNA PPVs for $9.99. In the first ever NWA TNA PPV we get an NWA Champion crowned. There is a giant Gauntlet For The Gold match that saw Ron Killings vs Ken Shamrock facing off in a one on one match in the main event. Ken Shamrock becomes the very first NWA Champion in the Total Nonstop Action Era. They open the show with a showcase of the brand new X-Division. The Flying Elvises take on AJ Styles, Jerry Lynn, and Low Ki in a match that is still talked about to this day. Toby Keith has a musical performance that was interrupted by Jeff Jarrett which eventually leads to Toby Keith giving Double J a suplex! Also, The Johnsons make their debut! Deadlock Discord: https://discord.gg/E4BvR4W Deadlock Shop: https://shop.deadlockpw.com Deadlock Patreon: https://patreon.com/deadlockpw Deadlock Twitter: https://twitter.com/deadlockpw Deadlock Instagram: https://instagram.com/deadlockwrestling Deadlock Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/deadlockpw Deadlock Pro Wrestling: http://deadlockpro.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today we introduce a NEW co HOST! Cullen has been a legend talked about in days of yore, and has decided to come join the fun, as Jacob regains a little bit of his time back to actually PLAY games instead of talk about them so much. Cullen and I talk about an Andy Warhol piece with Elvis ALL over it. We hope you enjoy our reparte. From here on out, we will either have episodes with just Cullen and I, or all 3 of us! Contact us at: amusingmeeples@gmail.com Follow and Hit that Smash button on Twitter and Instagram at: @amusingmeeples.
When you think of impressionists, you might picture the impresarios on SNL, or the wide array of Elvises with a Vegas residency. But have you ever wondered about who laid the groundwork for those performers to make their living lampooning celebrities? If you have, then you're in luck - because if a couple of guys made a podcast about one of the very first nationally celebrated impressionists, it would probably sound a little something like this… Rob teaches Ray about Rich Little's long career, from his humble beginnings as a kid with a love for doing voices to his one-time stint as host of the White House Correspondents' Dinner; why it's probably a bad idea to make a sex tape and then give it to your mother-in-law; how to play one-sided Charades; and why even established celebrities should probably pivot if they want to maintain their relevance. If you like what we are doing, please support us on Patreon. TEAM Ray Hebel Robert W Schneider Mark Schroeder Billy Recce Daniel Schwartzberg Gabe Crawford Natalie DeSavia ARTICLES AUDIO/VISUAL Episode Clips Rich Little Interview 1985 Rich Little on Judy Garland Show Rich Little Impersonates Jimmy Stewart on Dean Martin Variety Roast Rich Little Impersonates Jack Benny and George Burns on Dean Martin Variety Roast Rich Little Impersonates Johnny Carson on Dean Martin Variety Roast Rich Little Impersonates Richard Nixon Rich Little's “A Christmas Carol” Rich Little Impersonates Reagan on Huckabee Johnny Carson Interview Excerpt with Martin Short Rich Little's VCR Charades Rich Little at the White House Correspondents' Dinner Rich Little Impersonates Joe Biden on Huckabee Rich Little Impersonates Donald Trump Music & Sound Effects “The Macarena” by Los Del Rios (Karaoke Version) “Peppy Pepe” and “Basic Implosion” (Kevin MacLeod, www.incompetech.com, Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
#FantasyFootball - Tito Talks Less, Elvises Fly Through #NFL #Week10 Presented by BetUS.com - Bet with the 3-Decade leader, BetUS! Join now for a 125% bonus or a 200% bonus with crypto. Use promo code DSP125 for bonus or DSP200 for crypto, and bet sports, casinos, horses, pop culture, & more at BetUS.com. You bet, you win, you get paid. BetUS.com - https://bit.ly/DSPMediaBetUS
Flying Elvises #FantasyFootball Show - Week 9 Preview - #AaronRodgers, #DerrickHenry, and Adam's Fondness of Houston QBs Presented by BetUS.com - Bet with the 3-Decade leader, BetUS! Join now for a 125% bonus or a 200% bonus with crypto. Use promo code DSP125 for bonus or DSP200 for crypto, and bet sports, casinos, horses, pop culture, & more at BetUS.com. You bet, you win, you get paid. BetUS.com - https://bit.ly/DSPMediaBetUS
Certainly, none of our podcast listeners would be guilty of making unreasonable requests, but let's talk about some of the unreasonable requests we hear from others in the financial world. We'll explore what makes them unreasonable and what proper expectations look like instead. Important Links Website: http://www.yourplanningpros.com Call: 844-707-7381 ----more---- Transcript Of Today's Show: Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. Welcome in to Plan With the Tax Man with Tony Mauro from Tax Doctor, Inc. hanging out with me once again to talk investing, finance, and retirement here on the podcast. Of course, don't forget to subscribe to us if you enjoy the content or would like to get some more episodes as they come out. You can do that at Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart, Stitcher, all that fun stuff. Any of those platforms that you like to use. Most of those are already pre-installed on your phone. So feel free, excuse me, to subscribe to the podcast, Plan With the Tax Man. Speaker 1: And we're going to talk about handling some unreasonable requests. Tony, certainly none of our podcast listeners would ever be guilty of making unreasonable requests. But that's what we're going to talk about this week. Tony Mauro: Yes. Speaker 1: How're you doing, buddy? Tony Mauro: That sounds good. I'm doing good. Speaker 1: Yeah? Tony Mauro: I'm getting ready for the holidays. Speaker 1: Yeah. We're into November now, yeah. Tony Mauro: Into of November. Speaker 1: Yeah. This is our early November episode. I kind of like this time of the year quite a bit. Except for the massive weather swings because then you get a little, I don't know, a little early cold or something. That's no fun. But other than that. Tony Mauro: Right, exactly. Speaker 1: The 40 degree weather swings are a little bit frustrating, right? You start the morning, and it's like, 37. And then by the afternoon it's like, 70, and you're like, okay, wait. How am I dressing today? [Crosstalk 00:01:17]. Tony Mauro: Yeah, I know. Speaker 1: But it is what it is. That's okay. And it might be Mother Nature being a bit unreasonable, but rather than the white stuff, which we're not ready for yet, we'll take it. Speaker 1: So let's do some of these unreasonable requests. I've got a couple here. Basically, these are statements and comments that we've heard people make through the years. I talk with advisors all over the country. And basically, just kind of give me a breakdown on understanding it, but at the same time, what kind of makes it unreasonable, okay? Tony Mauro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Speaker 1: All right. So the first one, and we're all guilty of this. I want bigger returns with no risk. Well, that sounds great, right? I mean, everybody would like to get... We want to get as much as we can without sacrificing very much. Tony Mauro: Exactly. Speaker 1: But it's not really reasonable. Tony Mauro: It's really not reasonable. And yes, everybody talks about it, especially when the market itself is doing fairly well, has been for a while now. Speaker 1: Right. It doesn't help the argument, does it? Tony Mauro: No, it doesn't help the argument. And we've talked about it before with news coming out so fast and you see people on TV, and we'll use Bitcoin and some of that virtual currency stuff. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Tony Mauro: GameStop, things. And everybody wants a piece of that. And so everybody's looking for that larger return, but then they say, "Well, I don't really want any more risk." Well, there has to be something that gives there, if you want bigger returns. Obviously, we try to educate them that you're probably going to have to take more risks. There's probably going to be a lot more fluctuations. And we try to go into, with them, about the bigger picture, because it's inevitable that ... they're chasing something and they just heard. Tony Mauro: In fact, I just had an email from one of my biggest accounting clients last night. And he's asking me, "What do you think of this stock?" Speaker 1: Okay, right. Tony Mauro: And it's like, well, my first response always is, "Where did you get this? I mean, did you just hear it on TV? Did you hear it from your barber? I mean, what brings this up?" And it's kind of out of left field for him, but probably just thinking like everybody does, "Hey, I want big returns." Tony Mauro: And so a lot of people, when you do that ... well, when they ask me questions like that. I mean, they look at us advisors like we are the accountant on the inside. And they want us to sometimes go out and research this and that. And sometimes you can find companies that are undervalued, as far as that goes, but they don't really have any interest in that. They just want to know, "Hey, should I buy this?" Speaker 1: Right. Tony Mauro: So it gets back to that, "Hey, I just want a big return." So we try to slow them down a little bit. I think it's unreasonable to assume a bigger return for little risk. I mean, at the end of the day, that's not possible. Speaker 1: Well, and again, this market doesn't help, because we're going on 12 years here of this basic bull run. There's been no prolonged downturn in 12 years, which I'm not sure if that's a record, but it might be. Tony Mauro: Yeah. Speaker 1: So typically it doesn't go this long. And you could get into the argument, we could go down into the weeds, Tony, of this whole thing. Is it propped up on toothpicks? Because it seems to be the case. Tony Mauro: Yeah. Talk a lot about it. Yeah. Speaker 1: There's a lot of conversation out there back and forth about, well, one of the reasons that they're keeping the interest rate so low is because, obviously, the debt ceiling is so high. If we raise interest rates, the money we pay on the 30 trillion we owe, is higher. Right? Tony Mauro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Speaker 1: So there's all these kind of factors in this weird spot we're in working against and for and against each other. So it's understandable. We all want to get as much as we can get, but you got to realize that if you keep risking as much as you want thinking that this market's going to go on and, hey, you know what, we could be totally wrong and it might continue on for 10 more years. Tony Mauro: Yeah. Love it. Speaker 1: The second that it doesn't and you risk too much, then you're going to be upset that you've lost everything. So you got to take the good with the bad, so. Tony Mauro: Yeah. Speaker 1: It's like a Facts of Life episode, take the good, take the bad. Tony Mauro: Got to do it. Speaker 1: All right. So let's go to another unreasonable request. Can you reduce your fees for me? I got a lot of advisors. We talk about this, we'll hear somebody comes in and says, "Well, what are you charging?" Because we see these big commercials from these big box places. Tony Mauro: Sure. Speaker 1: And they're like, we're not charging anything or whatever. Is it reasonable to ask someone to reduce their fees? Tony Mauro: I'd say, off the cuff, I jack around with people and say no, because I kind of put it back to them. And I say, well, let me ask you this. I ask them where they work. They tell me, I ask them, roughly what you make. I said, well, let me ask you if I were your employer, I came to you and said, well, will you take less and do the same thing? What do you think you're going to tell them? Speaker 1: Right. Tony Mauro: To shut up. Speaker 1: I'm not happy with that, sure. Tony Mauro: Yeah. You're not happy with that. Right? So, at the same time though, I guess it's not totally unreasonable because I think you need to know as a client, as an investor, what fees you're paying and are they worthwhile and are they reasonable, type of thing. And if they're a little high, it doesn't hurt to ask. But at the same time- Speaker 1: Sure. And I think maybe what we're talking about is value, right? Because- Tony Mauro: That is the value that you're bringing. Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, because yes. If there's always going to be the market's always going to be out there, and I mean by the market, I mean the business marketplace, to say, "Oh, I can do this for less," right? Tony Mauro: Yes. Speaker 1: That's kind of the nature of the beast in just about any industry, but at some point, are you scraping the bottom of the barrel because you're trying to get the lowest fee? Tony Mauro: Yeah. Speaker 1: And sacrificing service. Tony Mauro: And it really comes down to the service. Do you feel like you're getting value for what you're paying for and it's taking you to your goal and you have regular updates and really our relationships, I don't want to say performance is not important because it is, but at the same time we try to keep our clients grounded enough to say, "Look, we're still on plan. We're going to hit our goals. And for the risk you want to take, that's what we're shooting for." Speaker 1: Yeah. Tony Mauro: And as long as they get there you kind of get their mind off that, which we're just talking about. I want the greatest return with no risk. Speaker 1: Right. Tony Mauro: Then they find a lot of value in that. But I do think too, that it's like anything else, most of the time you get what you pay for. And so if you're generally down there at the low end, you're really not getting a lot of service. If you are, you've got a great deal, but generally that's not possible. Speaker 1: Very true. I mean, right now, obviously we know prices are getting out of control on a lot of things, but you can easily use just the McDonald's analogy. You can pop into a McDonald's and get a fairly cheap cheeseburger, but that's what it is, right? It's fairly cheap. Tony Mauro: It is. Speaker 1: So if you go to a nicer hamburger place or a fancier type of place and you're going to pay more for a bigger, juicy house burger type thing. So value. Value for what you're paying. You got to bear that in mind. Tony Mauro: It really is. Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. Tony Mauro: Yeah. Speaker 1: Unreasonable request number three, Tony, how can I get out of paying taxes on that money in my IRA or my 401k? I want to get out of it. That's probably unreasonable. You can't get out of. Tony Mauro: That is unreasonable. Yeah. I say sure. I always, again, I like to joke around a lot. So, you know, yeah, you can get out of it. Here's what you got to do. You got to break some laws cheat on your taxes. Speaker 1: Right. Tony Mauro: And hope you don't get caught. I said, illegally, no, you can't get out of that. And you could do some Roth conversions and you could do some things to plan around it, defer taxes and things. And I think that's where you need to plan it, but to avoid it? Speaker 1: Yeah. We could get more efficient, right? Tony Mauro: Yeah, get more efficient, yeah. Speaker 1: We just can't avoid. Tony Mauro: Yeah. But to totally avoid it, no. It's very, very difficult unless you have, again, the Roths, but there are some rules there that kind of limit that a bit. We do get that a lot. Especially during tax season, they want to get out of it. In fact, I, again, take an example, I had a discovery call the other day with some young businessmen and they just started business. And about the second thing out of their mouth was, "Well, we really don't want to pay any taxes, but we're starting to make money." Well, guys, that's impossible. I said, "There's some things you can do to be more efficient to keep your taxes low," but- Speaker 1: Right, right. Tony Mauro: You're asking for the impossible there, so. Speaker 1: To your point, I mean, I guess you can do it, but A, I'm not the person to do it for you, right? Tony Mauro: No. Nope. Speaker 1: And B, do you really want the headache that comes with it? Tony Mauro: Yes. Speaker 1: Because that is, yeah. And that's always going to be an argument. Look, we want to stay as low as we can stay. We want to pay as little as possible. That's a given, but just realize that you're going to have to do it. And so when it comes to this money and we talk about it often that's sitting there in this IRA or 401k growing over the years, that's what they're waiting on. They're waiting on that big money that you owe them. So let's talk about ways we can be more efficient and reduce the taxes. Now, maybe that's paying some of that. Maybe that's doing some conversions that you mentioned, Tony, paying some of the tax now. At this rate, let's say it's 22% just for hypothetical, versus later on when maybe it's 32, right? Whatever the case might be. Tony Mauro: Right, yeah. It's difficult to say to do. The main thing is just try to keep them as low as you can. That again comes back to the old takes some planning, and a little bit work. Speaker 1: Takes some planning, yeah. Got to have a little bit of a strategy other than just, "I don't want to." Tony Mauro: Yeah. Right. Speaker 1: That's not a good strategy. Okay. Now, how about the kind of along that line, a little bit of that, "I don't want to deal with it." Look, we do podcasts. You do marketing, you do advertising because you're a business, you're trying to get clients in business. And sometimes you come across people who are just like, "Look, I'm finally talking to an advisor. I'm terrified of this stuff. I don't know what I'm doing. Just do it for me." And so, on one hand you kind of go, well how is that unreasonable? But Tony, there are some people who think, "Hey, let me just hand you all my stuff. And then you just fix it all for me. And I don't have to have any further kind of input from there." And I think that's the unreasonable part. You've got to still be involved. Tony Mauro: You definitely have to be involved because, for one thing, what I kid them about too is I said, "You know, we do it for you. It's going to be my plan." And my plan's going to involve this, this and this. And do you want that? And they all say, no, gosh, I don't want to do all that. I said, well then, my point is, it's got to be your plan. You got to participate. Yes, it's a little bit of work, but it should be fun work. I mean, we're not going to give you anything that you can't handle. But part of the [crosstalk 00:11:42]. Speaker 1: Yeah. You're doing the heavy lifting, of course, but you- Tony Mauro: Yeah. We're doing the lifting. Speaker 1: Yeah. Tony Mauro: But I think part of the value though, is... and we will not do it. When we get done kidding around, we say, "No, we will not do it for you." Part of the value we bring is we do a full financial plan with everybody here or at least a minimal one. We're not just going to come in and throw and pick some things off of a piece of paper because I want to know, and I want to have it down as to what your goals are, what you have now, what you're trying to do. Speaker 1: Right, yeah. Tony Mauro: So that we can work towards something. So, it doesn't take a ton of work for them. Most advisors these days have most of this automated and online where they can go in and start filling some of this out rather than having it. Used to be on paper, you get this big packet from your advisor and that petrifies them and now they can just kind of go in and pick it off and save it as they go. But they do have to, with us anyway, have to go through that step. Yes, so important. Speaker 1: Yeah. And to your point a minute ago about, it'd be your plan. Even if it's not your thing, right? The math or the figuring out the best optimal time for this and alpha that and beta this. Sure, we understand it. That's not your thing, but you've got to be able to talk about what it is that you want out of retirement. What kind of lifestyle you're hoping to maintain? Is it heavy travel? Is it a lot of charitable giving. Tony Mauro: Right? Speaker 1: Whatever the case might be, that's where you come in, right? So that's where a lot of the... Hopefully those are fun conversations to your point. Tony Mauro: Yeah. They're fun. Yeah. If you get it down to that level and where we're not talking about all that technical stuff, people start to open up about that kind of thing. Speaker 1: Yeah. Tony Mauro: And you know, some of that stuff they've been wanting to do all their lives and if they can have a chance to do that, then all of a sudden they're sitting up in their chair a little bit saying, "Well, yeah, maybe I can do this." Speaker 1: Exactly. I mean, that's when at that point you've decided you wanted to fulfill your lifelong dream of making tiny marshmallow Elvises in your garage and selling them at Halloween or something, I don't know. Tony Mauro: Right? Speaker 1: Whatever crazy idea that you've got, the retirement could be the fun time to do that. And then you got to fund it with, the plan, the strategy to get it all done. And I don't know where that crazy little Elvis thing came from, but that's the point, right? You're like, "Yeah, I like that too." So that's kind of the crazy point of retirement is that it's hopefully this opportunity that we get to do some things we've always wanted to do, but also maintain that safety and security and that structure that we're all looking for as we're aging, which kind of comes back to the big returns with little risk, we want to chase the big money, but we don't want to risk anything. Speaker 1: Well, you got to have a good strategy so that you can protect what you need to protect. But then also maybe take a few chances here and there, but that all comes back to having a plan and a good strategy. And hopefully that helps you out along the way. As we talk about this stuff on the podcast with Tony. So if you've got some questions, reach out to him, get on his calendar and chit chat about these things at 8 4 4 7 0 7 7 3 8 1. If you've got some questions before you take any action, always check with a qualified professional, like Tony. He is EA and a CFP, a certified financial planner of 20 plus years here to help you in the area. So give him a jingle 8 4 4 7 0 7 7 3 8 1. Speaker 1: And as I mentioned earlier, don't forget, you can subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you like using for your podcasting needs, and you can find it all at yourplanningpros.com. That's yourplanningpros.com. Tony, thanks for hanging out with me and my friend. I hope you have a great week. I'll talk to you in a couple of weeks just before Thanksgiving. Tony Mauro: All right. Sounds good. Speaker 1: All right. Well, have a good have a good week folks. We'll see you next time here on Plan with the Tax Man with Tony Mauro. Disclaimer: Member FINRA, S.I.P.C. Investment advisory services offered through Avantax Advisory Services. Insurance services offered through an Avantax affiliated insurance agency.
Flying Elvises Fantasy Football Show - #NFL Week 8 #FantasyFootball Preview ? STRAIGHT DOPE. NO BULLSH. ? Check out the Flying Elvises Fantasy Football Podcast at https://www.DSPMediaOnline.com Week 8 - Tito and Conn preview EVERY NFL Week 8 game, even the really crappy ones... Get all the up-to-date roster and injury news right here, each week. Follow the show on Twitter at @ElvisFFS and follow the hosts at @ThitHappens and @AJConn95. #FantasyFootball #Podcast #Week8 Presented by BetUS.com - Bet with the 3-Decade leader, BetUS! Join now for a 125% bonus or a 200% bonus with crypto. Use promo code DSP125 for bonus or DSP200 for crypto, and bet sports, casinos, horses, pop culture, & more at BetUS.com. You bet, you win, you get paid. BetUS.com - https://bit.ly/DSPMediaBetUS
The Flying Elvises Fantasy Football Show - 10/21/21 - "That Guy's Dead ... Then We'll Cross Him Off The List" - NFL Week 7 Tito and Adam discuss NFL Week 7 and what fantasy football lineups and rosters would work best for you! Presented by BetUS.com - Bet with the 3-Decade leader, BetUS! Join now for a 125% bonus or a 200% bonus with crypto. Use promo code DSP125 for bonus or DSP200 for crypto, and bet sports, casinos, horses, pop culture, & more at BetUS.com. You bet, you win, you get paid. BetUS.com - https://bit.ly/DSPMediaBetUS
The Flying Elvises Fantasy Football Show - Baby, Bye Bye Bye Weeks - Week 6 Preview Presented by BetUS.com - Bet with the 3-Decade leader, BetUS! Join now for a 125% bonus or a 200% bonus with crypto. Use promo code DSP125 for bonus or DSP200 for crypto, and bet sports, casinos, horses, pop culture, & more at BetUS.com. You bet, you win, you get paid. BetUS.com - https://bit.ly/DSPMediaBetUS
Flying Elvises Fantasy Football Show - 10/7/21 - Where Else Can You Get A Christian Okoye Reference? Presented by BetUS.com - Bet with the 3-Decade leader, BetUS! Join now for a 125% bonus or a 200% bonus with crypto. Use promo code DSP125 for bonus or DSP200 for crypto, and bet sports, casinos, horses, pop culture, & more at BetUS.com. You bet, you win, you get paid. BetUS.com - https://bit.ly/DSPMediaBetUS
The Flying Elvises Fantasy Football Show - 'Hurts' So Good! | Week 4 Preview Tito and Adam discuss the upcoming NFL Week 4 schedule and which quarterbacks and running backs might be good choices. Presented by BetUS.com - Bet with the 3-Decade leader, BetUS! Join now for a 125% bonus or a 200% bonus with crypto. Use promo code DSP125 for bonus or DSP200 for crypto, and bet sports, casinos, horses, pop culture, & more at BetUS.com. You bet, you win, you get paid. BetUS.com - https://bit.ly/DSPMediaBetUS A DSP Media, LLC Production
The Flying Elvises Fantasy Football Show - 9/23/21 - Week 2 Preview; One Of Us Loves Justin Fields, The Other One Is Adam... Presented by BetUS.com - Bet with the 3-Decade leader, BetUS! Join now for a 125% bonus or a 200% bonus with crypto. Use promo code DSP125 for bonus or DSP200 for crypto, and bet sports, casinos, horses, pop culture, & more at BetUS.com. You bet, you win, you get paid. BetUS.com - https://bit.ly/DSPMediaBetUS
Tito and Adam breakdown the week 2 matchups and the waiver wire, and what's up with all the Ravens' injuries?? Presented by BetUS.com - Bet with the 3-Decade leader, BetUS! Join now for a 125% bonus or a 200% bonus with crypto. Use promo code DSP125 for bonus or DSP200 for crypto, and bet sports, casinos, horses, pop culture, & more at BetUS.com. You bet, you win, you get paid. BetUS.com - https://bit.ly/DSPMediaBetUS
Join Tito and Conn as they introduce their show and themselves, as well as talk some fantasy football before the 2021 NFL regular season kicks off. Presented by BetUS.com - Bet with the 3-Decade leader, BetUS! Join now for a 125% bonus or a 200% bonus with crypto. Use promo code DSP125 for bonus or DSP200 for crypto, and bet sports, casino, horses, pop culture, & more at BetUS.com. You bet, you win, you get paid. BetUS.com.
Patrick and Adam are competing Elvises and pick the worst Kurt Russell movie. Download this episode here. (33.5 MB)Listen to F This Movie! on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts.Also discussed this episode: City of Lies (2021), Mortal Kombat (2021), Together Together (2021), Without Remorse (2021), The Replacement Killers (1998), Into the Blue (2005), The Grudge (2020), WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Million Unicorn (2021), Guilty of Romance (2011), Death Wish (2018)
Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! Después de casi un mes aquí tenemos una nueva entrega de Viajo en Moto, el podcast dedicado a los viajes en motocicleta. Ha salido un poco musical pero, habida cuenta de que nuestros oyentes nos han felicitado por la selección musical, hemos decidido complacerlos y traer lo más granado de la escena “indie” . red Elvises, The Fratellis, Kasabian... el arte tiene cabida en nuestro programa y os marca el camino para una buena selección para escuchar en moto. Y de contenidos... ¿cómo andamos? Con alta calidad y bajo precio. Los componentes de la Aurora Borealis, una de las expediciones invernales a Cabo Norte, nos cuentan, desde el Círculo Polar, como les va la cosa. La Guardia Civil de Tráfico desde la agrupación de Mallorca ha venido al programa a contarnos cosas de la ITV.¿Es legal llevar maletas enormes? ¿Esa pantalla que nos tapa todo el aire de cara, nos la quitarán en la inspección técnica? ¿Qué pasa con los auriculares del casco? Todo esto y más nos lo aclara Fernando Álvarez, motorista de la Guardia Civil de Tráfico. y los que estabais ansiosos por escuchar aventuras con mayúscula, viajes épicos de gente singular, tenéis con Javier Cordero “Havivi”, una sección deliciosa donde damos a conocer a los más intrépido, los más locos, los más overlanders de la escena motorista mundial. Para finalizar, Esteisi ha leído “La Fuga del Náufrago” y nos cuenta lo que le ha parecido el libro. Es el contenido extra de este mes. La música que se puede escuchar en este programa, por orden de aparición es: Red Elvises. Winter reggae The Fratellis. Chelsea dragger Kasabian. Fire The Shins. New song We are FM. My world Vampere Weeckend. Mansard roof Waste. Foster the people Algunos enlaces para ilustrar este podcast: http://www.club14.es/auroraborealis/ Aurora Borealis http://www.thetimelessride.com Hubert Kriegel Globetrott Zentrale Bernd Tesch http://2globereporters.free.fr Le Monde en Scooters http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR3jrq7gKfI El vídeo de Lucassen http://www.davebarr.com Dave Barr Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals
Grab a pew for Craig's Sunday service, in which he starts by falling down a bullfighting rabbit hole before going on to celebrate the record-holder with too much (paper) baggage, the first use of a step-tacular form of criminal forensic investigation, a costly example of puppy love, and the largest gathering of Elvi (or is it Elvises?).
One of the things we’ve learned about Travolta and Cage during this project is that they’re both, in their own way, Elvis figures: they’re handsome, song-and-dance men who occupy a kind of irresistible masculinity and cultural supremacy in their prime. Never is that clearer than this week’s doozy of a double-feature, as film and TV critic Odie Henderson (RogerEbert.com, Vulture) helps us break down Look Who’s Talking Too and Honeymoon in Vegas! The podcast’s very first sequel, Look Who’s Talking Too sees young Travolta and Kirstie Alley juggling work and young parenthood as their first baby, Mikey (Bruce Willis, talking for the baby long after he develops speech of his own), grows up just in time to welcome his little sister Julie (a grating Roseanne Barr) into the world. Get ready for baby genitalia jokes and Elias Koteas as a Reaganite Travis Bickle type, and for an 80-minute movie to feel like three hours. Thankfully, we’ve got the deceptively lo-fi charms of Honeymoon in Vegas to contend with, as Nic Cage tries to overcome his mother’s deathbed promise never to marry by getting hitched in Sin City with his longtime girlfriend (Sarah Jessica Parker), only to get roped into a “Dangerous Liaisons” situation with high-stakes gambler James Caan that’ll take Cage to Hawaii and back (thanks to a plane full of flying Elvises). Which film’s our good luck charm, and which goes down in a hunka-hunka-burning flames? Listen and find out! Pledge to our Patreon at patreon.com/travoltacage Follow us on Twitter @travoltacage Email us questions at travoltacagepod@gmail.com Podcast theme by Jon Biegen Podcast logo by Felipe Sobreiro
Episode Notes On the first episode of I'll Find Myself When I'm Dead, we welcome our former MFA student, Zoe Bossiere, to discuss her matchup with Elena in the finals of March Badness, the annual essay tournament hosted by Megan Campbell and Ander Monson - http://marchxness.com/#/badness-final/ - as well as why we like the tournament format, the essay form, her promotional strategy, velvet Elvises, why we're making a podcast, and more.
Blurb: This week the word is utopia. The nerds talk at length about the utopian ideals of Star Trek, and how replicators, transporters, and holodecks really would change everything. Other topics include MUDs, gender-swapping technology, and the value of real estate in a cashless society. They talk about work stuff for a bit, then they lower the spoiler curtain to talk about the second episode of Star Trek: Picard.SPOILER WARNING: contains spoilers.
This part has more musings and interviews with ETA David Z, and punk band Dead End Lane. Plus a group imitation of Elvis on a roller coaster- you probably need to hear this.
We attended Night of 100 Elvises, and it was awesome. This episode: Our thoughts from the first night, and an interview with Elvis Tribute Artist, Steve Benden.
Innovation Inside LaunchStreet: Leading Innovators | Business Growth | Improve Your Innovation Game
You’ve probably had the experience of working in a team where everyone’s energy made the task at hand feel fun and easy. On the flip side, you might have encountered working with people who just exude negative energy, and that makes everything a challenge. The truth is, energy has a lot to do with your business success. Chris Barez-Brown joins me to dive into how you can get your energy right, so you can get your extraordinary on. Chris is the author of several books including Free! Love Your Work Love Your Life, Wake Up!, and Shine, and is the founder of Upping Your Elvis, a company dedicated to helping organizations become more energetic and collaborative to bring their extraordinary talents to life. Modern business and human beings clash. Chris explains why he believes humans aren’t designed for business, and why businesses need more Elvises (high energy mavericks that break the rules and get things done). He shares some indicators that you have the right level of energy in the room, and some real-world tactics to change energy physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and to create engaged energy — energy that's sustainable to allow people to do proper work. We also break down how to deal with people with negative energy, why being in nature can help elevate your energetic state, and the importance of trust and vulnerability in solving problems. If you are ready to: get buy-in from key decision makers on your next big idea be a high-impact, high-value member that ignites change foster a culture of innovation where everyone on your team is bringing innovative ideas that tackle challenges and seize opportunities… Join us on LaunchStreet — gotolaunchstreet.com Mentioned in This Episode: IQE Pro Facilitator's Guide and Toolkit Chris Barez-Brown Upping Your Elvis Books by Chris Barez-Brown Switch, by Dan and Chip Heath
Ever wondered what goes into record promotion? In this episode of Thinkin’ & Drinkin’, Rob Dalton dives into the nitty-gritty of record promotion. He tells stories of promotion parties, launching some of country music’s top artist and how the business has changed over the last 30 years. In this episode, you’ll hearRob talks about how he worked his way up from the mailroom to Vice President of a major record companyBart & Rob talk about The Kinley’s duo and the flying ElvisesCheck out today’s sponsor, Paul Reed Smith GuitarsFor the full show notes visit >> HERE Screenshot the show, share it on INSTAGRAM and tag us! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
It's the classic tale of boy meets girl, boy loses girl to James Caan, boy dresses up as Elvis and jumps out of plane, but this one has Nicolas Cage and Sarah Jessica Parker! Elvises, light your fires! We're covering Honeymoon in Vegas!
Hyperbole, cliché and a brilliant photo, Elvises at Porthcawl parkrun, your arbitraries and thingy things, Elliott and Danny's stats including the Finish Position Wilson Index, Nicola was at Nostell parkrun and Danny was having fun at Somerdale Pavilion parkrun.
Elvis Presley. The very name conjures a host of associations, both general and particular to the individual. The young trucker with a golden voice, making his way through the tough Southern rockabilly circuit before emerging as the posterboy for everything rock n' roll - the positive liberation of an emergent youth culture and the first musician to truly "cross the color line" of the era, the negative associations of stiff necked traditionalists and conservative fearmongers, damning everything from rock n' roll to comic books for their children's nascent rebellion from conformity. The clean cut army brat with the whirlwind (and presumably chaste) romance with a teenaged Priscilla Beaulieu. The surprisingly adept actor and musician, contract bound into a decade worth of million dollar a picture films, seemingly unaffected and siloed away from a rapidly and dramatically changing world. The high overlord of Las Vegas, one of its biggest draws and chronicle of his ongoing downfall, a spiral of cheesy balladeering, noticeable weight gain and increasing wackiness, from karate and UFO obsessions to meetings with the controversial Richard Nixon and using an honorary law enforcement badge to pull over random strangers and give them a cadillac, all eventually culminating in an ignominious demise consuming truckloads of drugs while, as the coroner's report notes, "straining at stool" in his lavishly appointed bathroom. There are at least three distinct Elvises, each with its own gaggle of posthumous impersonators (who can marry you in a quickie Vegas wedding!) and fans - a figure of bizarrely literal worship to some (many of whom eagerly devour Weekly World News 'sightings' and entertaining conspiracy theories that he may actually still be alive...), a figure of camp to others, but a versatile performer to all. Tonight, we celebrate perhaps the strangest element of Elvis' life and career: his films. A cinema that occupies its own bizarre, detached universe, as different from pale imitators like the Frankie and Annette beach party films or the many JD films of the 50's and early 60's as they are from traditional musicals or cinema proper; neither television-style sitcom or hard edged "rebel without a cause" teenaged outsider film, but standing somewhere crossing all of those, and coming off far superior in terms of budget, supporting casts and general quality of entertainment than any of its putative rivals. Join us as we share an appropriately balanced mix of both well deserved laughs and due respect to these unique bits of Americana, only here on Weird Scenes! Week 56: The King died on the throne: the weird world of the Elvis movie https://weirdscenes1.wordpress.com/https://www.facebook.com/WeirdScenes1https://twitter.com/WeirdScenes1 (@weirdscenes1)https://thirdeyecinema.podbean.com/
Join Fr. Scott Mansfield, Pastor of St. John Vianney and Tony Wilimitis, Director of Formation, as they give an in depth review of the Gospel from the Feast of the Epiphany of the Lord: We Three Elvises. Remember to subscribe in iTunes/Google Play/your favorite podcast app, and to leave us a review. Contact the crew at...
Amy discusses the case of Alan Conway, a British conman who impersonated a well known filmmaker. Rachael dives into the case of Zebb Quinn, which seems to have many twists and turns The duo offer advise for a dumb criminal who really missed an opportunity for the perfect robbery. Contact: digitalcauldronproductions@gmail.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/digitalcauldronproductions Merch: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/digitalcauldron Twitters: @SpreePodcast, @RL_Reynolds, @TheGingerbolt
This podcast just got a whole lot sexier! Nathan and Brendan welcome returning guests Steve & Izzy from the "Everything I Learned from Movies" podcast to talk about Paul Verhoeven's insane exposé of Las Vegas in the classic film, "Showgirls." They discuss everything including Elizabeth Berkley's breathtakingly awful acting choices coupled with her character's severe behavioural problems, some of the worst dialogue ever written for the silver screen, two different kinds of Elvises, strip club comedians and so much more. Plus: Does "Showgirls" pass the Bechtel Test? The answer may surprise you! Also: no clue this week because Listeners Choice Month is coming up in May! The first drawing will take place Tuesday, May 1st on our Twitter account! You can find us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/wwttpodcast), Twitter (www.twitter.com/wwttpodcast) & Instagram (www.instagram.com/wwttpodcast) Our theme song was recorded by Taylor Sheasgreen. You can check out him and his band the Motorleague on Facebook (www.facebook.com/themotorleague) Our logo was designed by Mariah Lirette. You can follow her on Instagram (www.instagram.com/mariahhx) You can also follow Montrose Monkington the Third on Facebook and Twitter (www.twitter.com/montrosethe3rd). He is a delightfully British monkey puppet that discusses all forms of pop culture. What Were They Thinking is sponsored by GameItAll.com, HostGator (use the coupon code 'schlock' for 25% off your first purchase) and WrestlingNewsWorld.com
We are very excited to be a member of the Podcast Collective! Check out PodcastCollective.com to find a collection of some of the best podcasts you'll ever hear! Frank Turner discography Listed below are all the songs and albums we discussed. Million Dead - A Song to Ruin (2003) "I Am the Party" Sleep Is For The Week (2007) "The Real Damage" "Worse Things Happen At Sea" "The Ballad of Me & My Friends" Love Ire & Song (2008) "Photosynthesis" "Long Live the Queen" Poetry of the Deed (2009) "Live Fast Die Old" "Dan's Song" "The Fastest Way Home" Rock & Roll - EP (2010) "I Still Believe" "Pass It Along" England Keep My Bones (2011) "Peggy Sang the Blues" "I Am Disappeared" "One Foot Before the Other" "Song For Eva Mae" Tape Deck Heart (2013) "Recovery" "Plain Sailing Weather" "Polaroid Picture" "Broken Piano" "Tattoos" Positive Songs for Negative People (2015) "Get Better" "The Next Storm" "Glorious You" "Demons" Songbook (2017) Be More Kind (upcoming 2018) "1933" "Be More Kind" Additional bands and songs discussed Red Elvises - "Boogie On The Beach" - Grooving To The Moscow Beat Red Elvises - "Closet Disco Dancer" - Better Than Sex Voodoo Glow Skulls - "Shoot the Moon" - Firme Playlists Check out our Spotify playlist here. Check out our Google Play Music playlist here. Credits Album art photo By Henry W. Laurisch - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41328547 Intro song: Titus Andronicus "Titus Andronicus" Live at Monty Hall, 9/8/2016 Outro song: Joshua James Hunt "On My Mind" Just Let Go
Andrew Goldfarb is a multi-mediumistic artist of the fanciful and macabre. He performs as the Slow Poisoner one man band, draws a comic strip called Ogner Stump, writes an advice column for PORK magazine, and paints laughing hyenas and zombified Elvises on black velvet. He's also written five Bizarro book for Eraserhead Press, the latest being "Midnight Earwig Buffet."
In this episode, we take a look at the King of Rock & Roll, one Elvis Presley - or that's what they want you to think? Was Elvis secretly his twin? Or a lizard? Or just one of many multi-dimensional Elvises dancing to Chrononaut Colonel Tom Parker's infernal flute?
Adam and Moose talk to a famous purveyor of fine antiquities as well as an impersonator of many different Elvises who struggles with a dark past.
Once in a Blue Moon we get an idea for an episode that gets us All Shook Up. That's the case this week as It's Now Or Never for us to take a look at Fake Elvises (Elvii?) - whether they are impersonators, fictional portrayals or something else entirely. Elvis is pop culture and the different types of faux Elvises amplify the many different ways he can be viewed. Jeff, as always, is the King of this episode, as he chooses from Richard and Michael's picks. So Don't Be Cruel - give this episode a listen. Michael's Choices Andy Kaufman as the Foreign Man as Elvis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r59AWfhwpPg El Vez My LA to Z: El Vez - Los Angeles Magazine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knin4CLq4us Elvis Trooper Elvis Has Left the Death Star - SWBookZone.com Elvis Herselvis The Weirdest Elvis Impersonator: All Hail the Drag King... - Elvis Presley Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5JVIliB5AI Richard's Choices Thai Elvis Best Thai Elvis - LA Weekly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uUmR_7A6Nk Bruce Campbell in "Bubba Ho-Tep" Bubba Ho-Tep Review - Roger Ebert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa9331xmvhg The Red Elvises The Soviet Surf Punk of Igor and the Red Elvises - Phoenix New Times https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3spW3kn7L4 Val Kilmer in "True Romance" 18 So Cool Facts About "True Romance" - Mental Floss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYvQMDLZZk
It's a Hanumass miracle! Join us for a deep dive into middle school Spanish class, love on roller skates, fair use of informants, and an array of Elvises. (Elvi? Elvēs?) All this and more, in Episode Double Cinco! Content warning: This episode includes discussion of rape and how the show handles it (that is, poorly).
Kevin Lawrence is a strategic advisor and coach to CEOs and executive teams all over the globe. Today, Kevin and I talk about keeping it together as a leader and ways not to meltdown as you try to grow your company. How do leaders keep themselves together while under the enormous pressure of running a company? In his 20 years of experience, Kevin is always fascinated by how some people can do it and have fantastic personal lives, while others are just miserable throughout their entire leadership journey. When Kevin dug further into this, there are some very famous people like Kurt Cobain and Elvis, who at the peak of their careers, had it all and then somewhere along the line, they imploded in their success. This same sort of timeline applies to successful executives, too. After working with a number of very high-performing individuals, Kevin dubbed this imploding timeline as the ‘The Dark Secret of The Boardroom.’ We all have our own Elvises and Kurt Cobains inside of us. So, Kevin’s job is to help executives find their high-performing sweet spot without all the darkness associated with it. Kevin hosted a private 2-day event with Jim Collins, the guru of business leadership and 'keeping it together.' Jim says that when we are under massive amounts of stress, we pay a 30% tax with our health. Although Jim hasn’t written about this yet, he calls this the ‘Stress and Drudgery Tax’. Steve Jobs even admitted to Jim that when he went back to Apple and still continued his work with Pixar, he paid more than that 30% tax on his health. Steve Jobs believed that those were the days where the seeds of his cancer were planted. High-performing individuals deeply care about their work, but often that’s exactly what leads to their downfall. In the mental health world, experts say that we’re only one or two life events away from a notable mental health issue. This is why when executives are going through major life-changing events, they should seek help either from a coach or therapist. Interview Links: Coach Kevin The Working Mind Summary More Resources: ScalingUpBusiness.com: Learn about how growth coaching can help you and and your business see big results. Scaling Up Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Bill on YouTube: Short videos to keep you Scaling Up. Did you enjoy today's episode? If so then head over to iTunes and leave a review. It helps other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. __ Scaling Up is the best-selling book, by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher and I'm a certified Gazelles business coach. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).
In this week's episode, I share some ideas for strengthening family bonds I tell a few stories about our recent holiday to the Blue Mountains I describe some of the interesting places we visited and share a little bit of (hopefully accurate!) Australian history I reveal how silly the Elvises are and talk about why silly is good The audio quality is a bit poor in places due to computer problems. I'm sorry about that. I hope you'll listen anyway! I plan to share a few resources associated with this podcast on my blog, Stories of an Unschooling Family. If you're interested, please watch out for the post! 60's Quiz Show by Podington Bear, (CC BY-NC 3.0)
When the Devil's in disguise, it takes a powerful messanger to show power of burning love. So, three Elvises walk into a bar... "Burning Love" was written by Dennis Linde. It was performed by Elvis Presley Listen to J's Indie/Rock Mayhem at qfsmayhem.blogspot.com/ and at www.myspace.com/qfsmayhem. Download Aliens You Will Meet at aliensyouwillmeet.libsyn.com. You know you wanna. The VoFPX theme was written and performed by Russel Collins of www.clockworkaudio.net