'Best of TBH Politoons'
Baron Dave Romm
Power Salad part II
By Baron Dave Romm
Shockwave Radio Theater podcasts
Read the review, hear the music! Shockwave Radio Theater interview with Power Salad
A further Introduction
I have the great Luke Ski to thank for bringing Power Salad to Marscon and therefore giving me the chance to see Chris Mezzolesta on stage. I'd heard a few of his songs scattered amid various compilation CDs. Last week, I reviewed the first three Power Salad CDs. What comes around goes around: Today I'll be talking about a Power Salad CD recorded at Marscon 2007 and the most recent original album by the great Luke Ski.
Warts and All
Power Salad Live: Warts 'N' All is a live album, and it helps a great deal to have been in the audience. Which I was. Chris Mezzolesta gives great performances, as he maniacally bops all over the stage, morphing into characters by facial expression more than the minimal costume changes and different instruments he picks up.
The really fun parts of a Power Salad concert are impossible to capture in an audio recording -- indeed, hard to capture in a video -- and Warts 'N' All doesn't try. The CD faithfully captures Chris' vocals, but you don't get the energy from the audience or the physical presence of any of Chris' characters. The photo montage on the back of the CD brings you a little closer to his worlds, but only a little.
The great Luke Ski gets to introduce the set, and Chris Mezzolesta introduces many of the songs. Chris is a professional voice actor, among other weird things to be, and his vocals are all top notch. The Marscon engineering isn't perfect and live performances are always subject to the vicissitudes of chance (hence "warts and all"). From a purely audio perspective, all the songs are done better on the studio CDs. He does good version of many favorites: Co-Dependency (the reason I got my first Power Salad CD), My Cat Is Afraid Of The Vacuum Cleaner, Katie's Dream and others.
The reason to get the CD if you weren't there is to catch the concert banter, and and the one song which isn't on any CD: the untitled final cut. Chris, more than most Dementia Music Artists, is an historian and connoisseur of novelty songs from the pre-Cr. Demento era. "Wild Man" Fischer is the subject of the documentary Derailroaded and Chris honors him with a raw version of Merry Go Round.
Power Salad Live: Warts 'N' All is a good collection, but not the first Power Salad CD to get unless you prefer live albums. Recommended for fans and for collectors of Marscon Merch.
Cinnamony Sea Anemone
Cinnamony Sea Anemone wasreleased at Marscon 2008, and Chris Mezzolesta performed several of the songs. As usual, Power Salad songs are a great mix of musical styles and odd subject matter. Most of the songs are original, with a cover and a few filk-like parodies.
Time becomes unravelled to a reggae beat in It's Tuesday But It Feels Like A Monday. Chris channels Ken Nordine's Word Jazz to lead a focus group questionnaire of a TV program called Mr. McPoodle. Modern communications are interrupted during the power ballad Hello I've Got To Take This. A Tom Petty song is used to comment on Barbie and similar dolls for which a father can't say no to his daughter in She Wants An American Girl.
Chris' appreciation of obscure pre-Dr. Demento music surfaces with his cover of Elephant Boy, on one of his favorite albums The Cheerful Insanity of Giles Giles and Fripp. (We talk about this in the podcast.) The CD stomps its way through German techno, David Bowie, power politics and tv dinners.
Cinnamony Sea Anemone is another great album from Power Salad, and is highly recommended. Heck, it even has the song length in the track listings! If you've never heard Power Salad and want to get your feet wet, I recommend either this one, his latest, and work your way backwards when (not if) you find you like it... or start with his first, Force Doesn't Work On A Crustacean and work your way forward.
BACONspiracy
Even when the great Luke Ski panders to his audience, he comes up with a worthy CD.
BACONspiracy (hereafter simply Baconspiracy) is the most recent full-length original CD from the great Luke Ski. To satisfy ever-hungrier fans, he has several compilation/reissues/live performance CDs since this one was issued last summer. I may get to those eventually, but for the moment I'm going to stick with this one.
The great Luke Ski has few peers at promoting Dementia Music while tirelessly promoting himself. He, and a few others, have taken novelty songs from the parodies of Weird Al Yankovic into the 21st Century, using rap and hip-hop to skewer popular culture. Baconspiracy is chock full of original songs, guest artists, comedy routines with music beds and banter between some very strange people. The songs are largely rap that I'm not familiar with; it's always strange to hear something on the radio and realize the lyrics aren't nearly as funny as the version I'm used to...
He has several songs about himself and his place in music history. the great Luke Ski is described in the liner notes (which you're not supposed to read before listening to the CD; sorry) as "An original rap song, in which the artist satirizes himself." Meanwhile, Dementia Revolution pictures from Marscon 2008 start here) is "An original rap song about the history of novelty music" which, annoyingly, doesn't mention Shockwave Radio. Humph. Not like I haven't been writing audio comedy, playing strange music and promoting many of these artists for thirty years... but I digress.
Several of the songs were on previous mini-releases, and were played on Dr. Demento even before the CD came out, and have been about in the Dementia Music community for many months. For the rest of us, having all the new hits on one CD, in CD-quality sound, is a relief. I Love You, TiVo is a nice doo-wop song about a technology that didn't exist just a few years ago. You Don't Know Jack, about Jack Sparrow of Pirates of the Caribbean fame. MC Freberg, "a tribute to Stan Freberg... satirizing many well known rap artists" is fun but missed just a little. Perhaps it's because it's hard to imagine a Stan Freberg song longer than 10 minutes (he was mostly out on 45s), and perhaps it's because I don't know the rap stuff. If you're coming from the other direction -- into rap but unfamiliar with Freberg -- you might like it more. Similarly, I'm not a big fan of The Family Guy so you might like Gettin' gittity Wit It, a parody of a Will Smith song, more than me.
Luke takes another turn at one of my favorite of his songs: It's A Fanboy Christmas II: The Wrath of Claus. Nearly 12 minutes of parody snippets from recent Christmas movie to traditional X-Mas songs.
It's a fanboy Christmas
Through Narnia's Grand Canyon
The Doctor and Mal Reynolds are snuggling their Companions
And who's that dressed as Santa
It's merry Mr. Worf (Ho Ho!)
He don't need no Elton Gree (?)
'Cause he's got a Red Dwarf
Sorry that I can't figure out the words to whatever Worf is doing, but I needed to point out the delicious double-take on entirely different "companions" that slips by so fast, and rhyming "Worf" with "Dwarf" that mushes together entirely different science fiction tv series. Not all the references fit into the lyrics so tightly, but like the first version, it all slips by so quickly that if you don't get one reference you'll chuckle at the next. Weird Al does this with polkas; Luke Ski does it with Christmas music. Parts are brilliant, and I'll leave it to the listener to decide which parts.
There are five spoken bits, recorded at a con room party. These mainly work if you know the people involved (as you should, if you're listening) and get caught up in their banter. Non-bantering guest artists include The Gothsicles (who do an energetic if short version of House Party At Arkham Asylum) and Carrie Dahlby (who helps out with UR and on One Night In Quark's Bar). Another rap song gets morphed to It Takes Who, about the aforementioned The Doctor and companions.
In case you were confused as to why the Fat Boys got fat, or you just want a song about your favorite food, then Luke sizzles up some BACON! for you. And just in case you were confused as to his place in history, Luke ends with My Name Is Not Merv Griffin.
Baconspiracyis highly recommended, especially for fans of the great Luke Ski. He is entirely too modest about his own efforts, and there is dissonance between the egomaniacal persona of his stage identity and the shy self-effacing nice guy behind the music. We can but sit back and enjoy. If the rhymes seem forced and the interstitials seem largely in-jokes, there's still no one you'd rather sling pop references or clown with other Dementia Music artists. For the latest in parody music this side of downloads from The FuMP, you should be grabbing anything produced by Luke, including and beyond BACONspiracy.
Baron Dave Romm is a conceptual artist and a noble of Ladonia who produces Shockwave Radio Theater, writes in a Live Journal demi-blog, plays with 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. Podcasts of Shockwave Radio Theater. Permanent archive. More radio programs, interviews and science fiction humor plays can be accessed on the Shockwave Radio audio page.
Thanks to everyone who has sent me music to play on the air.
--////
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Jim Hightower: Checks for $600 Won't Fix Our Economy (Hightower Lowdown; Posted onalternet.org)
America can't shop its way to greatness, and this one-time, government-funded shopping spree won't lead us to a sound economy.
Jessica Wakeman: My Pet Bimbo (Huffington Post; Posted on alternet.org)
Is the latest misogynist online game brilliant satire or just another dangerous message to young girls?
'Nobody ever did want me' (books.guardian.co.uk)
The story of an orphaned, talkative, red-headed 11-year-old sent to a remote farm by mistake, "Anne of Green Gables" was an instant success in 1908 and, a century later, is still loved by girls from Canada to Japan. Margaret Atwood salutes a childhood classic.
Love and loss (books.guardian.co.uk)
An award-winning poet, Robin Robertson finds inspiration in the ancient classics and has just translated Medea. Interview by Nicholas Wroe.
Kerrie Mills: "Bob & Ray: The Two and Only" (popmatters.com)
Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, the two and only. You either get them or you don't - and I am very, very glad I do.
Interview by Sarah Kinson: Markus Zusak (books.guardian.co.uk)
The author of "The Book Thief" explains why failure is his best friend, and why all writers tend to be loners.
Jim Beckerman: "Great balls of fire: Jerry Lee Lewis is still kickin'" (The Record; Posted on popmatters.com)
Last man standing? Anyone following the career of Jerry Lee Lewis, the great wild man of early rock `n' roll, the guy who out-partied, out-fought and out-gunned (literally) such contemporaries as Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison, wouldn't have put money on it.
IAN SANDS: ROUGH POWER (thephoenix.com)
Bill Gage has Down syndrome.And his band rocks.
Bruce Dancis: "These songs are our songs: Country Joe McDonald's tribute to Woody Guthrie" (McClatchy Newspapers; Posted on popmatters.com)
It seems like a natural fit: Country Joe McDonald, the radical and irreverent rock star of the 1960s, famous for his bitingly anti-war "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag" and the notorious "Fish Cheer," performing the songs of Woody Guthrie, the radical and irreverent folk musician of the 1930s and `40s, famous for his topical songs about Dust Bowl refugees, labor organizing and the chasm between rich and poor in a land of plenty.
Robert Crampton: Hugh Laurie on "House," fame and LA (entertainment.timesonline.co.uk)
As the brilliant doctor in "House" and in his own ruthless self-criticism, Hugh Laurie has turned angst into an art form.
Colin Covert: With 'Fatboy' and 'Star Trek,' Simon Pegg is playing it straight for a change (Star Tribune; Posted on popmatters.com)
Already an established comedy star in Britain with the hit TV series "Spaced," Simon Pegg made a strong trans-Atlantic impression with the films "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz." Now he's pushing further into the mainstream as the lead in the romantic comedy "Run Fatboy Run" opposite Thandie Newton, and beaming up into the role of "Scotty," chief engineer of the starship Enterprise, in the upcoming "Star Trek" movie.
Commentoon: Hilary and Obama Supporters
Sylvia
Hubert's Poetry Corner
South Haven Lady at Enchanted Rock
Whatever happened to?
responded:
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Very overcast early, sunny and cool afternoon.
Last night's festivities wrapped up around 3:30am.
Could kinda figure out it was gonna be a long night - about 2 hours into it, a city truck deposited a porta potty for the police officer's convenience.
Other than 'an armed suspect" on the loose, don't know what was going on.
Happened too late for today's local fish wrap - they haven't updated the local news on their website since Friday.
But then, what do I expect from a proud-to-be-republican organization based in Torrance.
Rift Derails Unified Labor Talks
Hollywood Unions
A unified front by Hollywood's two actors' unions engaged in labor talks with movie studios has dissolved in acrimony, leaving them to negotiate separate deals before a strike deadline.
The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or AFTRA, told the Screen Actors Guild, or SAG, late on Saturday that it was terminating a joint negotiation agreement, accusing the more-powerful SAG of trying to undermine it.
AFTRA President Roberta Reardon said AFTRA aimed to negotiate a contract as soon as possible for its 70,000 members, who include actors, singers, dancers, announcers and other broadcast performers.
The 120,000-strong SAG called AFTRA's move "calculated" and "cynical" and said it did not serve members' interests.
Hollywood Unions
Wins Pritzker
Jean Nouvel
Jean Nouvel, the French architect whose hyper-modern buildings have been acclaimed for their eclectic nature and departure from tradition, has won the 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize, it was announced Sunday.
Nouvel joins Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando and I.M. Pei in receiving the top honour in the field in recognition of his high-rises, museums and performance halls around the world.
A formal ceremony will be held in June at the Library of Congress in Washington. Nouvel will receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion.
Jean Nouvel
May Be world's First
French Recording
At first listen, the grainy high-pitched warble doesn't sound like much, but scientists say the French recording from 1860 is the oldest known recorded human voice
The 10-second clip of a woman singing "Au Clair de la Lune," taken from a so-called phonautogram, was recently discovered by audio historian David Giovannoni. The recording predates Thomas Edison's "Mary had a little lamb" - previously credited as the oldest recorded voice - by 17 years.
The tune was captured using a phonautograph, a device created by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville that created visual recordings of sound waves.
Using a needle that moved in response to sound, the phonautograph etched sound waves into paper coated with soot from an oil lamp.
Giovannoni and his research partner, Patrick Feaster, began looking for phonautograms last year and in December discovered two of Scott's - from 1857 and 1859 - in France's patent office. Using high-resolution optical scanning equipment, Giovannoni collected images of the phonautograms that he brought back to the United States.
French Recording
Premiere Passes Peacefully
'Satanic Verses'
The first ever stage play based on Salman Rushdie's book "The Satanic Verses" passed off without incident in Germany on Sunday with police in attendance in case of disturbances.
There had been no specific threats but there was a moderate police presence inside and outside the venue "as a preventative measure" after complaints from some Muslim groups, the police spokesman said.
Iran's late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa -- or religious decree -- in 1989 calling on Muslims to kill Rushdie for what the leader said were insults to Islam in his book. Officially the fatwa still stands.
There had been fears that Sunday's play might become another flashpoint in tensions between Europe and the Muslim world.
'Satanic Verses'
Asks Haitians To Give Up Crime
Wyclef Jean
In a radio ad sponsored by the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti, Grammy Award-winning musician Wyclef Jean is asking his fellow citizens to give up crime and work to improve the country.
"If you love Wyclef, that means you love Haiti. So you should not be raping women, kidnapping people and children, because there can be no excuse for doing so," Jean said in Creole in a short ad run several times a day by local stations in Haiti.
"I reject these evil practices," said the 35-year-old Jean, who also urged Haitian men to respect and protect women's rights.
Haitian police and U.N. authorities have noted a rise in crime over the past several weeks and are trying to counter a wave of kidnappings and crimes perpetrated by gangs in the capital and some provincial areas.
Wyclef Jean
Wave Cresting?
Celebrity Gossip
Is our appetite for celebrity gossip waning, spurred on by the mystifying fame of cookie-cutter reality stars and a preponderance of speculative stories that rarely come to pass?
Some are suggesting that a 10-year tidal wave of Hollywood celebrity news has crested and is beginning to recede - though others counter that, in fact, the unfiltered gossip found on blogs and websites is pulling readers away from more traditional sources of dirt.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations in the United States says sales of four popular celebrity gossip magazines - Life and Style, In Touch, Star and People - flattened or declined in the second half of 2007. Only US Weekly and OK! were continuing to attract new readers.
Even the New York Post's Liz Smith, the grande dame of Hollywood dirt, wrote recently that the golden age of celebrity gossip had long passed and celebrity watchers were rapidly losing interest.
Celebrity Gossip
Plans Shows For Scammed Bars
Tone Loc
Tone Loc plans to play shows at two bars in the Detroit area that were swindled by a man posing as the rapper's manager.
Tone Loc will play April 11 at the Red Dog Saloon in Milford and April 12 at Bumpers in Westland, The Detroit Free Press reports.
Red Dog owner Patty McMillan gave about $400 last summer to a man posing as Tone Loc's manager who promised his client would perform at her bar. Authorities say the man also scammed Bumpers out of $1,000.
The scam artist hasn't been caught.
Tone Loc
Halting Passenger Service
Aloha Airlines
Aloha Airlines said Sunday it will halt all passenger service after Monday, signaling the end of an airline that has served Hawaii for more than 60 years.
Aloha, which filed for bankruptcy for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 21, was a casualty of fierce competition and rising fuel prices. The airline said it will stop taking reservations for flights after Monday.
"We simply ran out of time to find a qualified buyer or secure continued financing for our passenger business," said Aloha President David Banmiller in a statement. "We had no choice but to take this action."
Aloha Airlines was founded in 1946.
Aloha Airlines
Life Was Tough
Ancient Egyptians
New evidence of a sick, deprived population working under harsh conditions contradicts earlier images of wealth and abundance from the art records of the ancient Egyptian city of Tell el-Amarna, a study has found.
Tell el-Amarna was briefly the capital of ancient Egypt during the reign of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who abandoned most of Egypt's old gods in favor of the Aten sun disk and brought in a new and more expressive style of art.
Akhenaten, who ruled Egypt between 1379 and 1362 BC, built and lived in Tell el-Amarna in central Egypt for 15 years. The city was largely abandoned shortly after his death and the ascendance of the famous boy king Tutankhamun to the throne.
Studies on the remains of ordinary ancient Egyptians in a cemetery in Tell el-Amarna showed that many of them suffered from anemia, fractured bones, stunted growth and high juvenile mortality rates, according to professors Barry Kemp and Jerome Rose, who led the research.
Ancient Egyptians
Another Texan Treat
Snake Vodka
A Texas man is facing charges for selling liquor without a license after he was found peddling bottles of vodka containing dead baby rattlesnakes.
Bob Popplewell, who runs "Bayou Bob's Brazos River Rattlesnake Ranch" tourist attraction west of Fort Worth, was believed to be selling the vodka in the Asian community, where snakes are seen having aphrodisiac properties, state authorities said.
Popplewell faces misdemeanor charges for not having a liquor license but will not be charged over the 10-inch (25-cm) baby snakes in the bottles.
Authorities confiscated 411 bottles of the vodka, which Popplewell was selling for $23 each.
Snake Vodka
Weekend Box Office
'21'
Movie-goers laid their money down on "21," a gambling romp that was the weekend's box-office high roller with a $23.7 million debut, according to studio estimates Sunday.
"Horton Hears a Who," distributed by 20th Century Fox, slipped to second place with $17.4 million, raising its total to $117.3 million. It is the first movie this year to pass the $100 million mark.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Media By Numbers LLC. Final figures will be released Monday.
1. "21," $23.7 million.
2. "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!", $17.4 million.
3. "Superhero Movie," $9.5 million.
4. "Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns," $7.8 million.
5. "Drillbit Taylor," $5.8 million.
6. "Shutter," $5.3 million.
7. "10,000 B.C.", $4.9 million.
8. "Stop-Loss," $4.5 million.
9. "College Road Trip," $3.5 million.
10. "The Bank Job," $2.8 million.
'21'
In Memory
Dith Pran
Photojournalist Dith Pran, whose harrowing survival of genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was dramatized in the film "The Killing Fields," died on Sunday at the age of 65.
Dith, who used his fame to draw attention to his country's plight, spent the last weeks of his life in the hospital surrounded by family and friends. Among them was Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sydney Schanberg, who worked with him for The Times during the Cambodian civil war and recalled him as a dogged journalist who was "always doing good deeds for people in the Buddhist tradition."
Best known for his depiction in the 1984 film "The Killing Fields," Dith worked in Cambodia as a translator and journalist assisting Schanberg, who credits Dith with saving his life when they were arrested by the Khmer Rouge.
He also dedicated himself to speaking out against the Cambodian genocide and ran the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project to educate U.S. students about Cambodia's dark period. He was appointed a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in 1985.
He lived in New Jersey and worked for The Times until he fell ill late last year. The newspaper said he is survived by his companion, Bette Parslow, a daughter and three sons.
Dith was portrayed in "The Killing Fields" by Dr. Haing S. Ngor, another survivor of Cambodia's genocide, who won an Academy Award for his role.
Dith Pran
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