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Broadcast

Any of you bastards heard of them?  Someone put me onto them last night.  They were active from late 90’s to around 2011, when their singer passed away after catching H1N1 on tour.  This song’s from their first album, The Noise Made By People, which is good.  If you took Forever Changes, removed the Hispanic influence, added some delightfully creepy synths, and brought in a fifteen-year-old Nico to sing, then you might have something like this album.  Or not.

Update from the rabbit hole: this one, from second album, sounds like Silver Apples, but with a far better singer.

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We Can all be Olympians

I don’t know if y’all are watching the Olympics this year. I am. Sort of. Here’s some lesser know global competition that we could all participate, and I would probably watch more closely than curling…

 

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George & Martha

Something reminded me of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, which in turn reminded me of this parody.  Benny Hill’s Richard Burton is spot-on.

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The Perfect Crime

From Defector:

The Justice Department announced today they’d arrested the two people behind the 2016 Bitfinex hack and recovered 94,636 of the 119,754 bitcoins stolen in the heist. That haul is currently valued at more than $3.6 billion, making it the largest financial seizure in United States history.

One of the actual crimes the pair of alleged masterminds are accused of committing is money laundering, which is somewhat redundant given, again, that we are dealing with cryptocurrency. In this case, the feds say Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan successfully laundered 21 percent of their bitcoin plunder through a number of labyrinthine pathways, including setting up fake accounts, swapping BTC for gold, and buying a bunch of PlayStation and WalMart gift cards. The feds found the unlaundered 79 percent just, uh, sitting in Lichtenstein’s cloud storage account, which they pretty easily recovered after getting a search warrant.

Morgan bills herself as a “Surrealist Artist, Rapper” and “Forbes writer” performing under the stage name Razzlekhan. 

“Just like her fearless entrepreneurial spirit and hacker mindset, Razz shamelessly explores new frontiers of art, pushing the limit of what’s possible. Whether that leads to something wonderful or terrible is unclear; the only thing that’s certain is it won’t be boring or mediocre.”

Um… right. The interwebs are having a field day with her terrible rapping. You were warned.

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Great Fight Scene (SPOILERISH)

Anybody seen Nobody? I feel like we’ve talked about this one.

Hutch is a nobody. As an overlooked and underestimated father and husband, he takes life’s indignities on the chin and never rocks the boat. But when his daughter loses her beloved kittycat bracelet in a robbery, Hutch hits a boiling point no one knew he had. What happens when a pushover finally pushes back? Hutch flips from regular dad to fearless fighter by taking his enemies on a wild ride of explosive revenge. The writer of John Wick showcases Emmy® winner Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul) as fans have never seen him before: an average family man who becomes a lethal vigilante unlike any ordinary action hero.

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Speaking o’ Memphis

Here’s a radio show of some 60’s-70’s rarities.  I love the ones by the Breakers and Flash and the Memphis Casuals.  I bet they kicked ass live (I’m not old enough to have seen them, although I did see about half of the others on this list).  Unlisted after the Tommy Hoehn song is a pretty terrible cover of “I Walk the Line” by a band called Hot Dogs, who had some good songs;  why on earth was that chosen?  I find Chris Bell’s acoustic version of “I Am The Cosmos” too slow, sludgy, and depressing–which I guess makes sense, as he was chronically depressed.   It’s the sound of Quaalude abuse.  The official single version moves along better, although there’s still about as much sludge as I can endure.

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Hit Factory

I always forget they’re Californian, as it seems like they could have spewed forth from Appalachia, or anywhere.

Fogerty’s ’68-’70 run was nuts:

  • I Put A Spell On You
  • Proud Mary
  • Bad Moon Rising
  • Green River
  • Down On The Corner
  • Fortunate Son
  • Travelin’ Band
  • Who’ll Stop the Rain
  • Lookin’ Out My Back Door
  • Long As I Can See The Light

Been reading more about them, their implosion, all the record label nonsense.

I was alone when I made that [CCR] music. I was alone when I made the arrangements, I was alone when I added background vocals, guitars and some other stuff. I was alone when I produced and mixed the albums. The other guys showed up only for rehearsals and the days we made the actual recordings. For me Creedence was like sitting on a time bomb. We’d had decent successes with our cover of “Susie Q” and with the first album when we went into the studio to cut “Proud Mary.” It was the first time we were in a real Hollywood studio, RCA’s Los Angeles studio, and the problems started immediately. The other guys in the band insisted on writing songs for the new album, they had opinions on the arrangements, they wanted to sing. They went as far as adding background vocals to “Proud Mary,” and it sounded awful.