Celebrating Entropy

Listening to M83’s Before the Dawn Heals Us and I am struck by the overpowering evocation of longing and despair the album has. Seriously. I’m sitting here at work and all I want to do is sigh and maybe let loose with inexplicable sobbing. Haven’t felt like this since my at-the-time spouse seemed to be purposefully incinerating our marriage and all I could do was watch. I want to say the music personifies reckless waste for the sake of dystopia. Not so much reckless I guess, because it’s as if there’s a compelling need to bring about destruction just for the sake of destroying something.

Celebrating entropy maybe…

I think this mood has been prevalent lately because the slow-mo incinerating marriage is also finally approaching its terminus. That, and the fan blades gained their fecal coating about this time of year two years ago. The judgment is final on the 9th and this completes the cycle that began June 18th, 1993. From then on, she becomes no more than any other person I might run across on the street and I am protected from having to clean up anymore of the messes that have been spawned in the past two years. The dissolution has been exceptionally drawn out for reasons beyond my control and for the past two years it has been to my emotional well being what smog is to Los Angeles.

Oddly, we’ve been forced to correspond a bit over the past month and change because she insists on soaking up every last bit of support she technically has coming to her. I’ve changed jobs and this means a change in insurance and the like. So, anyway, a rash of email back and forth. I was somewhat struck by the apology she issued in her last communique but, ultimately, I’ve just got to file it away with everything else. Sometimes a wholesale paper shredding policy is best. At any rate, I have a great thing going with Elz and I’d have to say that I’m better off now than I have been in the past 20 some odd years.

Anyway, M83 reminds me a lot of Sigur Rós which, oddly enough, I listened the heck out of almost two years ago. Time to find me some juju right quick so I can reverse this emotional trainwreck. King Sunny Ade is completely antithetical to depression which is what is called for at the moment.

Our Cornucopia Overfloweth

Another entry in the Millionaire’s Holiday rebroadcast series. This one come from November 20, 2005. The good? There’s music. The bad? There’s no voice over. Or did I get the good/bad mixed up?

At any rate, here’s what I had to say about this broadcast back then:

Gal Friday joins me in studio for the second consecutive week. Many interesting finds are played. Gal Friday runs the board for half an hour or so. Oh, and someone turned off the tuner that was hooked in to my soundcard before we left for the show, so no live podcast. As a supplicatory gift, I did convert most of the raw files to mp3 and created a pseudo podcast for you enjoyment [ Podcast | Direct MP3 Link ]. You get to miss my velvet fog voice and the brilliant weather analysis of Gal Friday, but, on the other hand, you will get to hear the Erotic Aerobics track.

Continue reading “Our Cornucopia Overfloweth”

Wendy Comes To Visit

It’s and oldie, but at least it is something, right? Here’s a rebroadcast of the holiday from November 6, 2005. The show marks my one and only encounter with the National Emergency Broadcast System. Some freak storm came barreling up from Kentucky way and blew the heck out of an otherwise normally freaky Saturday night in Flowertown.

But that’s enough for me. Grab it via the podcast or download the file directly off the Holiday desk-side server. Either way, enjoy yourself and the others with whom you elect to bring in to your proximity.

Harmonic Heroics

Update: 200801231133

Turns out that I cannae read or I cannae type and have propagated this error across my archive, and now to the Internet at large… Eddy Munson is actually Eddy Manson. The album is still Harmonica and Ping Pong Percussion. You’ll have to change the spelling in your metadata for each file. I’m leaving well enough alone for now because recreating all of the symlinks after changing the file structure of my archive will suck.


Thing have been quiet on the Millionaire’s Holiday front. For Festivus, I received a USB-enabled turntable which has me rabbiting most of my allotted music time digitizing the vast library of schlock I’ve accumulated. This leaves little time for mixing and matching. On the other hand, the quantities of digital music I find myself surrounded in can only lead to good fun, no? In the meantime, I thought I’d share a little goofiness. Despite the album liner notes indicating the legendary prowess of Eddy Munson Manson, there is nothing I’ve been able to find on the Internet to link to. Google and Wikipedia both try to direct me to Eddie Munson. While understandably more famous, if not more talented, that’s not the Eddy we’re looking for.

Nonetheless, Eddy Munson Manson’s Harmonica and Ping Pong Percussion is an album that is chock-a-block with easy listening melody. There is some interesting scoring in a few tracks and this is what makes the album funkular enough for posting.

You can follow the links below to acquire your very own copy of this fine musical offering. Files are encoded in Apple’s “lossless” compression so getting them to work on your machine could prove adventuresome without iTunes installed. If there is hue and cry I’ll transcribe to .wav or something. It’s the file format I’ve settled on for my music archive and it’s easier to symlink into that than manage and store two sets of files if you catch my drift…

Eddy Munson Manson, Harmonica and Ping Pong Percussion

  1. Wish You Were Here
  2. Slaughter on 10th Avenue Theme
  3. I Love You
  4. In the Still of the Night
  5. Ciribiribin
  6. Jumping Jack
  7. Old Devil Moon
  8. September Song
  9. La Paloma
  10. Yellow Rose of Texas
  11. Cheyenne
  12. Nellie Bly
  13. Enjoy!

Holiday Sucktacular

Certainly ranking in the top five shows ever, the Holiday Sucktacular was a really fun one for me. I’m not the biggest fan of Christmas and especially Christmas with the families. Everyone expects you to be at their celebration and if you travel home for the holidays you end up running yourself ragged just to say hi to everyone. Add in the heavy consumerist tones that reverberate through every single media vector and it the holidays become one giant suck.

So taking the piss, as it were, I tried to get a slight handle on things. The show is completely silly and irreverent. There’s a noticeable lack of technical glitches and I was able to drag out some tunes I’d been sitting on for nearly a year.

Here’s what I had to say about things at the time:

Fezboy! is on a mission to take the holiday season back from the commercial interests and bring it home to the silly, goofy, festive folks who make the season bright. To that end I bring you intriguing recorded oddities for your holiday listening pleasure. I hesitate to call it good, but I will call it interesting tossed in with a bit of fun.

As most of this was procurred from on-line sources, I offer links with this playlist. You can download your own copies, download the audio file of this show, or load up the podcast in your favorite podcasting application.

Playlist after the jump… Continue reading “Holiday Sucktacular”

De-evolution

I’ve always loved Devo. Even when they, or what they’ve since become, strike an odd chord I knew what they were after. It’s always better to reach and fail than to not play at all. I’ve also annoyed friends and family and co-workers by pointing out Mothersbaugh or Devo bits that get injected into the sea of pop culture in which we try to keep our sanity afloat.

They came at the mainstream from a revolutionary angle. When the mainstream co-opted their position (as the mainstream always will when an angle attracts a following) they appeared to fold. I hate to use Iraq as an analogy, but it is apt here. Hussien’s power structure meekly folded in the face of obviously overwhelming force. The dispersal wasn’t a show of weakness however. It was a paradigm shift. The conflict moved to an asymetrical, insurgent / gorilla phase.

I think Devo pulled a similar maneuver whether consciously or not. By fading into the fabric of pop culture they are able to comment on and manipulate it in ways that are unavailable to someone on the outside. Mothersbaugh, in particular, seemed visionary in his creation of Mutata Muzika. De-evolutionary influence pervades all aspects of media these days. By ‘selling out’ Devo actually went all in. And it looks like they’re way ahead in this game.

Don’t believe me, read this article in the LA Weekly. The in-depth look at Mothersbaugh post-Devo and what that group of people have accomplished belies the treatment the band gets as a one-hit wonder.

Oh, and if you’re suitably impressed, there’s an appropriately de-evolutionary fan club that offers fun and gifts and the opportunity to ironically commercialize art through mass consumption of crafted oddities. I’m proud member 1221.