'Best of TBH Politoons'
Baron Dave Romm
The Great Luke Ski
By Baron Dave Romm
This is an edited rerun of a review from nearly two years ago, right after I met Luke at Marscon 2003. He was Music Guest of Honor at Marscon 2005, and has more CDs available. I'll review the CDs from Worm Quartet, Tony Goldmark, etc when I recover from the con.
For years, I've been waiting for rap to work for me. Lots of people like it, presumably because their parents don't, and that's fine. I was hoping that rap would bring back good lyric writing and storytelling in song, so lacking in recent years. But alas, rap is known for hating women and loving guns.
Who'd a thunk that rap would have found its justification in... filk.
Oh sure, there have been other rap parodies, notably Two Live Jews. But it took the great Luke Ski to bring science fiction fandom to this art form, breathing new life into ringing ear drums and introducing a new musical genre marketing category: Rap Dementia. A tribute, of course, on Dr. Demento, who has his own song on the album. Luke has been doing this for many years, mostly on the con circuit, and his act is polished, the CDs professional and his web site is easy to use.
Featuring an astonishing range of song stylings and voices, Luke Ski is a staggering amount of fun. His latest CD (and the only one I have) is Uber Geek (or, more properly but harder for search engines to find, Über Geek.) While mostly rap variants, there are parodies of Willie Nelson and Billy Joel with spoken bits that range from rap CD outtakes to parodies of Monty Python bits. Equally adept at rapping in the voice of Ed O'Neill, The Swedish Chef or Keanu Reeves, Luke is one drive-by shooting away from being notorious.
To catch all the references that Luke makes, you have to watch too much tv. He's not kidding about the Uber Geek title. Heck, I get most of the references, but probably miss a few. They go by quickly. I don't even play Pokemon or watch Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, but the parodies are dead on target, and the rap lyrics give the references a thick viscosity. You don't need to get all the jokes to appreciate the songs, but it helps. He's fast and furious, bold and beautiful, Barnes and Barnes. He works his way up to Shockwave dense by surrounding a great song about the Buffy spin-off Angel, I Am A Vamp of Constant Sorrow (to the traditional folk tune), with Monty Python references. Sheesh.
I must admit, what did it for me, watching him live, was It's A Fanboy Christmas. With fanboy enthusiasm, he shares nearly ten minutes of Christmas song parodies, science fiction tv references, bad jokes that go by quickly and almost anything else. I'm a sucker for stuff like:
(To the tune of The Little Drummer Boy)
Danger, danger young Will Robinson
For Dr. Smith is coming Will Robinson
I know you have been searching for Babylon
You're hungry have some fish heads eat them up yum, eat them up yum, eat them up yum
Linoleum
yeah!
Plug: Luke was a Shockwave Rider for Let's Play Doctor, the Opening Ceremonies at Marscon 2004, CDs available.
Baron Dave Romm is a conceptual artist and a noble of Ladonia with a radio show, a very weird CD collection and an ever growing list of political links. Dave Romm reviews things at random for obscure web sites. You can read all his music recommendations from Bartcop-E , and you can hear the last two Shockwave broadcasts in Real Audio (scroll down to Shockwave). Thanks to everyone who has sent me music to play on the air.
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Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Jarrett Murphy: The End of Gonzo (Village Voice)
A savage journey in search of the legacy of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Bruce's Video Recommendation: Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter version; Slant Movie Review by Ed Gonzalez)
100 Essential Films (Slant)
Roger Ebert Gets Plagiarized
(Scroll to bottom question.)
Lou Bendrick: Queer Eye for the Green Guy (Grist)
If environmentalism is dead, then that ratty sweater has to go, too.
Sail Away (Village Voice)
X-Girl goes nautical for spring
Nina Lalli: Women: Building a Wardrobe (Video from about.com)
Another Rant
Avery Ant
DATING CIRCUS FREAKS
SHAMELESS MERCH GIVEAWAY!
EVERY 50TH VOTER WILL WIN A
FREE AVERY ANT T-SHIRT. IT'S TRUE!
AND ALL FOR SIMPLY CASTING
YOUR VOTE FOR AVERY ANT FOR POPE.
SO VOTE NOW -- AND VOTE OFTEN!
Reader Suggestion
Patriot Boy
(Republican Jesus)
You've no doubt seen this one before but it's new to me... LOL
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Breezy & sunny.
As the kid feels better my crankiness lessens.
Short List for World Bank?
Bono
Treasury Secretary John Snow on Sunday would not rule out the idea of Irish singer Bono, an activist on debt relief and AIDS, making the short list of potential candidates to lead the World Bank even though an American is expected to get the job.
"Most people know him as a rock star. He's in a way a rock star of the development world, too. He understands the give-and-take of development. He's a very pragmatic, effective and idealistic person," Snow said.
Snow is part of the Bush administration team working on finding a successor to James Wolfensohn, who is stepping down as head of the development bank on June 1.
Bono
MS Awareness Event
Teri Garr
Popular American actress Teri Garr is lending her celebrity status to raise awareness about multiple sclerosis in Canada.
The Oscar-nominated movie star - most recently known for playing Phoebe's mom in the hit TV show Friends - shared her own experience living with the disease Saturday at a public awareness event.
Canada has one of the highest rates of the common neurological disease in the world, with between 35,000 and 50,000 Canadians affected.
Garr announced publicly she had MS in 2002. Since then she has attended hundreds of seminars -60 alone last year.
Teri Garr
Budapest Metro Exhibit
'Maus'
The Budapest subway opened an exhibition of the work of New York-based artist Art Spiegelman who has translated the horror of the Holocaust into a comic book novel.
Pictures from Spiegelman's "Maus," in which he depicts Jews as mice and Germans as cats in a black-and-white interpretation of his own parents' survival of the Auschwitz death camp, have gone on display on two subway lines.
The pictures will be shown for one month in the capital's 46 metro cars.
'Maus'
Civil Rights-Era Figures Mark
Selma March
Aging civil rights-era figures and a bipartisan congressional delegation walked across an Alabama bridge with a throng of thousands Sunday to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Selma voting rights marches that opened ballot boxes to blacks across the South.
Among those participating was Coretta Scott King, whose husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., led a 1965 march to the state Capitol after participants in an earlier march were turned back by law enforcement.
Others on hand to commemorate the marches across the bridge included singer Harry Belafonte, who also took part in the demonstration 40 years ago, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Lynda Johnson Robb, whose father, President Lyndon Johnson, signed the Voting Rights Act into law in 1965.
Selma March
Rejects Talk of Retirement
James Brown
Legendary soul singer James Brown on Sunday shrugged off talk of retirement and said his work is the root of much of today's music.
The 71-year-old "Godfather of Soul" said in a telephone interview that he can still spread love, tolerance and understanding through his songs.
"Retire for what? What would I do? I made my name as a person that is helping. I'm like Moses in the music business," he said.
James Brown
Focus on Policy
Blog-Related Firings
Flight attendant Ellen Simonetti and former Google employee Mark Jen have more in common than their love of blogging: They both got fired over it.
Simonetti had posted suggestive photographs of herself in uniform, while Jen speculated online about his employer's finances. In neither case were their bosses happy when they found out.
Though many companies have Internet guidelines that prohibit visiting porn sites or forwarding racist jokes, few of the policies directly cover blogs, or Web journals, particularly those written outside of work hours.
The First Amendment only restricts government control of speech. So private employers are free to fire at will in most states, as long as it's not discriminatory or in retaliation for whistle-blowing or union organizing, labor experts say.
For a lot more, Blog-Related Firings
Fears Realized
Recording Studios
For several years, as various factors conspired to engender a severe music industry recession, studio owners and managers, engineers, technicians and producers have voiced increasing fears about the future. Recording budgets shrank; rosters were trimmed. All the while, the tools and methods of recording were undergoing dramatic transformation.
Wolf Stephenson, an owner of recently shuttered Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Ala., spoke for many industry professionals when he said last month, "When computer and hard-disk recording really got cheap and better at the same time, it just knocked the socks off a lot of studios, (Muscle Shoals) included."
But large facilities will not disappear entirely: An orchestra cannot be recorded in an apartment, nor can any self-respecting jazz or rock combo. "There may be some work going away because of the home studios," says engineer Al Schmitt, speaking from Avatar Studios in New York. "But (for) the rhythm-section stuff, brass and orchestra things, it's still the good studios with the good consoles.
Recording Studios
Seeks To Limit Fallout
Rome
Italy's centre-right government on Sunday scrambled to contain the damage to itself and to US-Italian relations after US troops in Iraq killed an Italian secret service agent and wounded an Italian hostage just set free from her captors.
As anger and shock spread across the nation, thousands of Italians flocked to the Victor Emmanuel II marble monument in central Rome where the body of Nicola Calipari, the dead agent, lay in state.
The shooting triggered a diplomatic and political emergency for Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister, who defied public opinion by sending Italian troops in support of the US occupation of Iraq after the 2003 war, and whose ruling coalition faces important regional elections next month.
Rome
Ride Giant Board Into Record Books
Surfers
More than 40 surfers cruised into the record books Saturday when they successfully rode a giant surfboard off an Australian beach, breaking the previous world record set by an English team of 14 people in 2003.
More than 5,000 people gathered Saturday to watch riders conquer the 40-foot-long, 10-foot-wide board, newspapers reported. The board, created by board shaper Nev Hyman, arrived by semitrailer. More than 20 people carried it to the surf.
The riders at the Queensland state tourist city, Gold Coast, where the Quiksilver and Roxy Pro surf competitions were held, included pro surfers Chris Ward of California and Australian champion Danny Wills.
Surfers
In Memory
Trude Rittmann
Trude Rittmann, dance and vocal arranger for such Broadway giants as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Irving Berlin, Jule Styne, Jerome Robbins and Agnes de Mille, has died of respiratory failure. She was 96.
During her career, she was entrusted by composers and choreographers to create dance and/or vocal arrangements for such legendary musicals as "Carousel," "South Pacific," "The King and I," "My Fair Lady," "Brigadoon," "Finian's Rainbow," "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," "Peter Pan," "Camelot" and "The Sound of Music."
Born in Mannheim, Germany in 1908, Rittmann immigrated to the United States in 1937, where she was hired by Lincoln Kirstein as a concert accompanist and pianist for George Balanchine's American Ballet Caravan, the precursor to New York City Ballet.
As musical director for the troupe, she worked with such composers as Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein and Marc Blitzstein.
In 1941, Rittmann became a concert accompanist for de Mille, who invited her to be dance arranger for the 1943 Kurt Weill musical "One Touch of Venus," which de Mille choreographed.
Rittmann also composed music for television programs as well as several original ballets.
Trude Rittmann
